Straight Life - Art Pepper [247]
This was going on in every dorm. After they went through all our stuff somebody got the bright idea of taking the entire population of the Clump out to the swimming pool. They gathered us around the pool at three in the morning. It was cold. I saw these young girls-they'd never been into anything, maybe they'd run away from home-they were standing around in their nightclothes shivering, scared to death. The elders were standing around the edges of the crowd or on this L-shaped stairway that led to offices above the coffee shop. They were using the angle of this stairway as a podium or a stage. Joe Gianelli, an animal dopefiend from New York, got up there and started screaming insults at us, raving and shaking his fists. They took turns berating us and threatening us: "Alright! Who has done what? I know you've been out there shooting dope! I know you've been stealing!" And they wanted to know who had too much-too many things. They didn't want you to get pleasure out of owning anything. We were sup posed to live on a more spiritual plane. Everybody knew that the elders owned all kinds of stuff: silk underwear, color TVs, cameras, stereos. But they demanded that people cop out on each other and on themselves, and these terrified young girls would raise their hands, "I saw So-and-so take two soaps from the Store instead of one!" "So-and-so has a record player and he's only been here ten months."
After a whole night of this they made us go back to the club in buses and jitneys and cars, and they divided us into groups to play games. In each game, they put one or two of these elders to get us to cop out on each other. "I saw him take two mouthwashes!" In the warehouse where I worked they had hundreds of thousands of cases of mouthwash which had been donated. After one of these glut raids I saw them fill several huge trucks with TV sets, beautiful stereo equipment, cameras, lamps, chairs, clothes, an upright piano-I had been trying to get access to a piano to write music on and they'd told me, "You can't have that"-they took this piano and thousands and thousands of dollars' worth of stuff, loaded it onto these trucks, and, I was told, took it to the city dump, and threw it away. And this happened more than once.
After the games they brought us down to the ballroom, where they had all these people sitting on the stage: guys with their heads shaved, girls in stocking caps. They berated us some more, and then they took us back to the Clump and paraded us around. One of the main attractions was right upstairs from where I lived. They had these five girls in stocking caps stand around while we all marched through their dorm. Each girl had a TV and a record player; shelves full of perfume, jewelry; closets stuffed with clothes from I. Magnin and Saks Fifth Avenue; hats; silk bedspreads, curtains; books, pictures. There wasn't a bare spot in the place. It looked like a Persian harem. After we finished with the tour we went to work, and then that night, when we thought it was all over, we were yanked from our beds again and taken to the club for a "general meeting" and more games.
In the end they drew up a list of allowable items. Each girl could have two dresses, three pairs of pants. Each guy was allowed two pairs of shoes. That was Synanon. That was really the way it was.
Everyone in Synanon would get a chance to go on a "trip," and I was thinking that if someone outside advertised, you know, "Take a trip! It only costs ..." There would be no way to set a price on it.
First they would