Up From Down

"I don't know how to cure a dope fiend. I never did.”

The drug treatment program my parole agent chose was a long-term program at a psychiatric hospital in Tarzana, California. It was one of the many programs in the early 1970’s based on Synanon, sometimes referred to as “Synanon clone” programs. It was called “The Family.” I was in for a rude awakening.
My first view of The Family was in the cafeteria as they stood in a jagged line for lunch. They most closely resembled a colorful line of carnival sideshow freaks. I had never seen anything like it in my life. The men all had shaved heads and wore dresses! The women were all wearing men’s clothing; one was wearing a worn tuxedo. Some were wearing paper bags over their heads with slits for their eyes, nose, and mouth. All were wearing sandwich cardboard signs with strange crayon-marked messages on them.
It was a weird menagerie of bizarre design. I was shocked and speechless at what I saw. It was like a forced landing on a distant planet inhabited by gaudy aliens. I got a very uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Something very weird was definitely going on.
I went for screening before Family members. It was a small screening committee with two “elders” and several lower-phase people. The elders were not paid staff but were the oldest residents at the facility. They were in positions of authority and ran the day-to-day operations under the supervision of the paid staff. The longer a resident stayed at the facility, the more responsibility he was given. The two elders sat in chairs at one end of the room and the three lower-phase people formed a semi-circle. Their faces were all serious, looking at me intently. I sat in a chair facing them.
One elder, an older white man with a mustache, asked me, “How do you feel about being here?”
I looked up and said, “I’m a little apprehensive.”
“A little apprehensive?” the elder questioned.
My fear turned to anger and I felt my face twist into a semi snarl. “Okay, I’m afraid!” I blurted out with an attitude. I was getting defensive and hostile.
The elder nodded his head and said, “Fear of the unknown.”
They asked me if I had a girlfriend.
“I had one but I don’t see her anymore. I loved her,” I said.
One of the other elders, a black man, stared at me. “How could you love her when you don’t love yourself?”
I hadn’t expected that. “I don’t know.”
They asked me about my drug use and I told them about my “runs.” Then they told me I was going to have to have a lot of “blind faith” that the program worked. After the interview, they sent me to the candidacy phase of the program.
The candidacy was the phase where they observed you to determine if you were suitable for the program. It’s difficult to describe what Tarzana what like. It was a combination of modern boot camp, Synanon, and maybe a prisoner-of-war brainwashing camp. Etta James, the famous blues singer (and my phase leader), described it as the “marines of rehab” in her autobiography Rage to Survive. She described the basic training as “hell.” It was.
My first night at The Family, all the candidates were rudely awakened at two a.m. by a bald phase leader screaming, “Creep, creep, creep.” As I was about to find out, a “creep” meant we were being awakened in the middle of the night as “therapy.” Imagine someone walked into your bedroom at night and screaming “creep” without any warning. The shock and surprise were complete.
It is truly amazing what can be done to human beings in the name of therapy. The first “therapy” I was exposed to was “standing on the wall,” which was a big part of The Family program. If you ever stood in the corner for punishment as a child, then you have a sense of what standing on the wall is like. The candidates (eight to ten of us) were forced to stand in a line with our noses and toes on the wall. Usually it was from ten to thirty minutes. However, there were times when we stood on the wall for as long as twenty hours or even more. It was incredible cruelty to be forced to stand immovable against the wall for these lengths of time. It was cruelty without lasting physical harm, though – it is amazing what you can get used to.
When the long periods of wall time came, it got to the point of becoming physically unbearable. The ache of gravity on the soles of my feet resulted in a dull, persistent throbbing; a low intensity ache. Sometimes staff would put us on the wall and then walk off to another room, leaving us there to slowly suffer while they sat in comfortable chairs. Although staff was not there, I still had to stay on the wall. If I left the wall, one of my “peers” would report me to staff. Later I would receive discipline, which was handed out once a week and could include wearing a dress for the next week with a sign that said “I violate the rules” or perhaps some individual wall time. After a while I realized the best course was just to stand on the wall and take the dull ache.
If the pain became too much, I would ask to go to the bathroom, the only time we were allowed to come off the wall. For a few minutes I could get relief for my aching feet by sitting on the toilet. I would walk as slowly as I could to the lavatory at the end of the hall, go into the toilet, sit, and take off my shoes. Then I would rub and massage my poor painful feet in their socks, trying to make the dull ache go away. I would stay in the toilet as long as I could to give my feet a rest. If I stayed too long, I knew I would be in trouble. Then it was back to the wall. As soon as I got back on the wall the dull ache in my feet would start again.
Sometimes we were forced down on our knees with our elbows on the wall in uncomfortable stress positions. Then the staff would verbally indict us (scream out our shortcomings, real and imagined) as we stood or kneeled in these awkward positions. This, of course, is cruelty and not therapy but that’s what they did. In the beginning I was not told anything except that I would have to have a lot of blind faith and that the program worked. I acknowledge that the staff, who were graduates of a similar facility at Camarillo State Hospital, meant well but the methods were barbaric. They didn’t know any different – it was what they had been taught and what had been done to them. Surely men like Ronald Reagan (California’s governor at the time) didn’t know what was really going on behind the scenes. I found out later (in Etta James’ book Rage to Survive) that the staff concealed from the Los Angeles County Supervisors the harsh confrontational attack “therapy” that occurred during the so-called “Synanon Game.”
I didn’t realize it at the time but programs like this one in Tarzana were an attempt by the mental health community to mimic the “success” of the Synanon program. These Synanon clone programs were less well known, however. When I was in The Family in 1974, Synanon clone programs were still popular, but were mostly replaced by 12-step programs. The Family still exists and hosts 12-step programs at their facility. I do not know how their current program is run.