Straight Life - Art Pepper [248]
The trip would last for seventy-two hours. You went to the club in the late afternoon and took off your clothes. You put on a white cotton robe with pockets in the front. You weren't allowed any adornments, no jewelry. The women couldn't wear makeup. They wanted you just as you were. You could wear sandals or go barefoot; no shoes. You got one four-hour nap in the seventy-two-hour session. You went through game situations, you went for walks, you played charades, always together with your little game group or with the trip group as a whole.
There was a large room upstairs in the club where we all met after we'd put on our robes. The Woodshed was used for dances, rock-and-roll for the kids, but for the trip it was completely transformed with Oriental carpets on the floor and hangings covering the walls and the windows. The guides were dressed just like we were, but they had orange sashes around their necks and medallions. Tom Reeves, our trip conductor, wore a purple sash. Tom talked to us and to the guides. They played some music to get us into the right frame of mind, and then we went to our separate game rooms, where we would spend the greater part of the next three days.
The first game went on and on and on. I think there were ten or twelve people in my group. Some were very closed off. Some were very open. The game was played gently at first, then more and more forcefully. Tom went from one game to another. He and the guide would pick a certain person and work on him, rank him something awful, beat him to death.
On the second day, without any sleep, people got kind of dingy. Things started to happen. The first guy that "broke" was this Puerto Rican from New York. He told how as a kid he and the other kids would find cats and dogs and torture them and throw them off the roofs. He felt so bad about this. He cried. That was the thing that most bugged him in his life, and the idea was to get these things out of people. There was a girl, Valerie, a square who'd moved into Synanon with her husband. When the game got on her she said she was afraid of people and thought that no one cared for her. She said she was unable to give of herself, to give love, because she was afraid of being rejected. I identified so strongly with her and felt such compassion, I couldn't find it in my heart to berate her. Frankie finally asked her, "Of all the people in this room, who is the one you're most afraid of but would want to have love you and be your friend?" She looked around the room. She said, "Art Pepper." And she turned her head away. She couldn't look me in the eye. Frank asked me what I thought of her. I said I thought she was a very sweet girl, and I would love to be her friend. I said, "I don't understand why you're afraid of me." She said, "You're so different from me. Your background ... you've had such a hard life. I just feel that you hate people like me."
Frankie made us stand up in the middle of the room. He said to her, "Go to him. Put your arms around him." She couldn't do it. She cried and cried. I walked over to her and put my arms around her, and all of a sudden she completely broke down. She threw her arms around me and cried hysterically, and everybody in the room got up, and they surrounded us, and they were all crying, and they were all hugging