Hall of Mirrors

Nobody thinks they’re joining a cult. Certainly not the children who are born into it. When, over time, Mikel learns the truths about his childhood, a whole world of information can finally crystalize.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. It happened all
at once. My brother and I are sitting naked in
the bath, playing with our toy boats, listening to the
music and the sound of muffled voices from the next room.
We are swallowed in red and green wool blankets and
ready for sleep. Storytime pajamas, the rubbing of tired eyes.

(00:23):
Good night canyon, good night mountain, good night building, good
night stars. Crans are put away, cubbies, clean teeth, brush.
I drift to sleep, and I'm rattled awake, surprised to
see my mother's face with her shaved head, her hazel
green eyes, her round Dutch cheeks, and crooked yellow, coffee
stained teeth.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
I go wake up. We have to leave. It's not
safe here.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
That's mikel Joli, musician, frontman of the indie rock band
Airborne Toxic Event and author of the recent memoir Hollywood Park.
Michel's is a story about trauma and real resilience, the
scars that remain and the ones healed by time, hard work,
and an extraordinary human spirit determined to survive, thrive, and

(01:10):
grow strong against all odds. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we

(01:31):
keep from ourselves.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
I was born in a place called Synanon, which was
what I understood as a child. I was told it
was a commune. We now understand it was cult. I
was born inside the orphanage that existed in that cult.
It's funny because I'm like, we talked about family secrets here, right,
and like one of the secrets of my family was
that this was abusive and not something that was ever

(02:01):
explained to us because we were told we were put
into this school. And what happened was the leader of
the cult decided that rather than be the children of
your parents, everyone would be the children.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Of the society.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
So there was like a six month period you were
kind of like you were born, and then you could
be with your mom and breastfeed and all that kind
of stuff in a place called the hatchery. There's these
wonderful nineteen seventies, sixties or welling in terms.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
So you went from the hatchery to the school.

Speaker 1 (02:30):
And then in the school you were raised apart from
your parents and not like day to day like I
mean you see your parents for a couple hours, maybe
every few weeks, once a month.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Some kids went years.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
And it was a tough place to grow up because
essentially what they created, and I don't think they chose
to create this on purpose, but they created, you know,
an orphanage. We were raised by people we didn't know.
We were handed off from different people months years of
our lives where we don't really know who raised us.
And Sinadam was a place we went to get clean

(03:00):
off of heroin or alcoholism, I guess to some extent,
but mostly heroin. And so people were like two three
weeks off kicking heroin and suddenly thrust into the school
in some role or another.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
How many kids more or less were in the school
during the time that you were there, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
I think all told, there was maybe four hundred kids
that came through, and at any given moment, I think
at its height, maybe one hundred, one hundred and fifty
were with the most.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
Ever, at one time.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
We were raised just to believe that the society was
our parent, and I think that the thinking was in
this kind of like backwards culting nineteen seventies kind of
way of thinking, was that like, well, this way the
parents won't pass off, you know, their cycles of violence
and trauma and addiction to their kids.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
But of course it just meant we were orphans.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
Just meant that we didn't have basic people who loved
us and took care of us. I mean there was
no birthday celebrations, there was no Christmas or hunting or
anything like that.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
Certainly no extended family.

Speaker 3 (03:59):
And you're brother, Tony was also, Yeah, he's three years older.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
I was in the lower school, he was in the
upper school.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
I think the upper school was a lot rougher than
the lower school. I think that's where they were particularly
lax about who interacts with the kids and what the
interaction and supervision of the children were. And I mean
every kid was abused, every kid was beaten, every kid
was humiliated.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Just about every kid was molested. I mean, you name it.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
So we escaped when I was very young, and we
did have to escape, and this woman showed up. So
we're in this like world of everyone shaved heads and
overalls and boots, and you know, one day, this woman
shows up who we understand is our mom. But the
term doesn't have much particular meaning to us because we
don't really know what a mom.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
Is, right, Do you understand each other to be brothers?

Speaker 1 (04:50):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (04:50):
I think we did, but we didn't really know what
it meant.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
You know, we just knew we were brothers, and I
think it was just kind of this vague term, just
like mom was or dad was. We didn't really know
what any terms meant because there was no sort of
traditional family structure. So one as she shows up and
she says, all right, it's not safe here and we
have to leave because the place had started to practice violence,
which you know, it started as a non violent place.

Speaker 2 (05:11):
And we left. We kind of escaped in.

Speaker 1 (05:13):
The early morning into a car where my grandfather was waiting.
From there, you know, it was just so so odd.
We'd never seen a skyscraper before, we'd never been in
a restaurant before.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
We didn't know what, you know.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
We went from there, we were in Marine County, went
from there to Oakland, well San Jose, and then at
Berkeley and Oakland, and just like we had never seen
any of these things before, and it was it was
just such a bizarre world to the world just seems
so big. We've been on this dirt road leading to
the compound and we'd gone into town before. I guess
there's a town in Tamas Bay nearby the compound where

(05:49):
we were, and.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
That was about that was the big city for us.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
It was like a main street with one stop with
one stop light, and then all the kids, all of
us were just you know, with shaved heads and overalls
and all the towny kids stay or not is because
I think we probably looked like weird CULTI kids, which
I suppose we were.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
But you know, it wasn't our choice, it was our parents' choice.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
So I think it was always just kind of confusing
for us.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
Mckel ends up living with his grandmother and grandfather, people
he had never met before.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
They were very well off.

Speaker 1 (06:21):
My mom had been raised in the Hague in Holland
and you know, raised by nannies, and my grandfather owned
a shipping company and they were well to do family.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
And she was like, you know, the.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
Hippie that sort of defied all expectations and rebelled against
the society that they'd raised her among.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
I think she was kind of angry and a bit
of a utopian.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
I'm probably just kind of a damaged kid because also
my grandmother was just a raging drunk just I don't
know if I'd ever seen or sober in my whole life.
She was always drunk by like eleven Am, and of
course resented that her daughter had become, you know, this hip.
She had been a free speech activist at Berkeley and
that eventually ended up in this utopian cult. So there
was a lot of tension over that. And you know,

(07:03):
at the time also we were living on the run.
We were told that the men, the bad men from
Synonam were coming to get us. The society thought that
she had kidnapped us because we weren't her kids. We
were Synanon's kids, and so we were always on the
lookout and we were never allowed to play outside because
who knew if these bad men were going to come and.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
Take us away.

Speaker 3 (07:24):
Michel's family is not alone in their escape from Synanon.
His mom's friend, Phil Ritter, a free speech activist and
anti nuclear activist, has also escaped, and after a short
while staying with his grandparents, Mickel, his mom, and brother
relocate to live with Phil in his apartment in East Oakland.
One day, the apartment is broken into. They're not sure

(07:45):
if it was the bad men of Synanon who did it,
but they are scared, and they decide to move together
to a house in Berkeley.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
Phil he had a daughter that lived with us as well,
and we all moved into this house. Again, we weren't
allowed to go outside, and he built a little playroom
for us in the garage. And I wouldn't say it
was quite a father figure, but he was. He was
a good guy, you know. He was kind to the
kids and a nice human being and just like the

(08:13):
gentlest soul you'd ever meet. We'd spent a lot of
time playing indoors and listening for the kids on the
street as they played, which is kind of heartbreaking.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
We knew who the kids.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
Were by like the sound of their bikes or what
game they were playing. And meanwhile, we're like locked in
this garage. So one day I guess my brother rebellious,
like I'm gonna go outside no matter what, and he was.
He was playing with the kids across the street. It's
like one of the rare days. He actually got out
and I was on the porch and Phil had gone
to get some groceries in his van. He had a
VW bus like any good hippie, and he came back

(08:44):
and I was on the porch and he closed the
door to his van and there was these two kind
of shadowy figures that came up behind him, and they
were these two men and they had these like flesh
colored masks on, you know, like nylon, like the way
bank robbers have over their faces. And it all happened
so quickly. I was just like, who are those guys?
And it was almost like is it Halloween? Are they playing?

(09:05):
Address up? I think it might have been my first
lovege thing. And one of them hit him over the
back and he fell on the ground, and then they
just started beating them. They had these two they had
clubs in their hands. They weren't like baseball bats. They
were like police clubs, batons kind of things, maybe a
little bit bigger. And we started screaming and bleeding, and

(09:26):
I hid behind the column on the porch and they
just wailed on them in the driveway and they straightened
up and said, you know, wor's McKell and Tony. And
then Tony was with all the kids because all the neighborhood
kids had sort of come to watch, and he was
across the street. But none of the kids knew our
name because we were just always hiding in the garage,

(09:46):
so nobody said anything, and eventually, you know, a neighbor
lady came out and told her told him to leave,
that she'd called the police, and they left, and then
the ambulance came and they took Phil away and he
was in a coma.

Speaker 2 (09:58):
For about a month. And it was weird. I remember
just like catching like eyes with him.

Speaker 1 (10:03):
He had this real sort of kind face and before
he passed out, like I was kind of peering out
from behind this column and I could see his eyes
and they were looking at me. And I remember the
expression on his face because there was there was like
a stillness to it after he sort of stopped screaming
and just kind of resigned to it, I guess. And
he told me later that all he was thinking about
at the time was that this is too much for

(10:24):
a kid Michael's age to witness.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
Like what a good guy, right, I mean, the.

Speaker 1 (10:27):
Thing that he was concerned about was was because he's
being beaten nearly to death, was he didn't want me
to have to see all this violence.

Speaker 3 (10:36):
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that really strikes
me about your story is that this group of adults
in your life that includes both your parents and the
various people who came in and out of your life.
I mean, there were some doozies, but it also had
some very kind people who probably are a large part

(10:59):
of why we're even having this conversation. And you know
why you ended up in one piece.

Speaker 1 (11:05):
Yeah, if I saw a tweet the other day somebody
said I'd never join a cult, and I wanted to
write in back, like, no shit, nobody thinks they're joining.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
Nobody.

Speaker 1 (11:16):
People in cults don't know they're in cults. And my
parents thought they were in a nonviolent drug rehabilitation society,
which is kind of how it started. It was just
trying to get addicts clean and it did a pretty
good job of doing that, saved a lot of people's
lives first, and then you know, but then you isolate
people and you start getting groups think going, and then
there's kind of like this quirk of human psychology that

(11:37):
they tend to line up behind very often a narcissistic
and abusive man or whatever. And that's what happened in
our case. And it's not as if these people are
all trying.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
To do mean things.

Speaker 1 (11:48):
And definitely, you know, a difficult relationship with my mom
she you know, some ways in which I think she
maybe wasn't prepared to be a mother. But I don't
think she meant any harm to us, and she in
her heart wanted was best for us, and certainly my
dad did you know they meant well for us. They
just didn't know, you know, And looking back with hindsight,
it's very easy to pinpoint mistakes. I don't think they

(12:10):
were trying to do anything bad, particularly to the kids.

Speaker 3 (12:15):
After the incident of Phil's beating, Michel's mom decides to
move her kids from this environment too. Once again they're
on the run. She gets a job at the state
mental hospital in Salem, Oregon, so that's where they'll sleep
and hide next.

Speaker 1 (12:32):
I remember when we left and we packed up the
old white Vega that she'd gotten from my grandfather, and
we packed and head to Oregon.

Speaker 2 (12:39):
I remember it was a rainy day and it was
just this.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
Feeling in the air, like Man, we lost, Like I
knew it, even at that age.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
I knew like Man.

Speaker 1 (12:46):
Reagan was president, who was like the old nemesis for
my mom's free speech days at University of California, And
like Man, the.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
Hippies just lost.

Speaker 1 (12:54):
The cult hat devolved into violence, and then we would
fill again beaten, and everything has just kind of fallen apart.
It's like we went to Salem, Oregon to hide.

Speaker 2 (13:02):
That was the feeling. I knew it. Then. We were
going to hide.

Speaker 1 (13:04):
We're going to get on the other side of the mountains,
to this other part of the world, and we're going
to be safe from all this madness.

Speaker 3 (13:12):
It's a pretty hard scrabble existence for the family in Salem.
Mckel and Tony are left on their own a lot
and there's never enough to eat. On the morning of
Michel's sixth birthday, when he wakes up, his dad is
sitting on the edge of his bed.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
So I'd always been told about my dad that, you know,
he was he left us for a tramp.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
That was the line I'd always heard my mom.

Speaker 1 (13:34):
Dad left us for a tramp, because I guess he'd
remarried fairly quickly after he and my mom got divorced.
And you know, I'd always been told what a selfish
person he was, or how he wasn't there for us,
or how he'd left us, which is never how I
felt about him. You know, we would see him when
we were in Cinna, and he was just the warmest
guy and the kindest guy, and just this one of
these guys that when you're around him, you just feel good.

(13:55):
And you know, we were last key kids with a
single mom in Salem, Oregon, and it's tough to be
a single mom anyway.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
But we were broke.

Speaker 1 (14:01):
I mean, we were living on powdered eggs and government
cheese and we would wait in the food line at
the church, at the food bank. We were on food
stamps and just just had no no money or anything.
And then you know, when you're the child of a
single mom, particularly you're a boy, you live in this
like hall of mirrors where there's like everyone says, well,
you're the man of the house, as if it's this
good thing, and you're like six, you know.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
You're like, oh cool, I'm not ready for that at all.
Thanks thanks for letting me know.

Speaker 1 (14:27):
And I think there's this like maternal fantasy of like
who you're going to become?

Speaker 2 (14:31):
Like are you going to become one of these bad
men who leave? Or are you going to become like
one of these good men who are going to stick around?

Speaker 1 (14:38):
And I always remember getting that up so much. It
was kind of heavy for my mom, it's.

Speaker 2 (14:42):
Probably more than you know. It was really appropriate.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
But you know, we were always around women, so we
knew the world of women really well. We could hear
my mom talking to her friends about like she's just
trying to date someone, just trying to find a good man,
just trying to have a man around. Just hope this
one works out, hope this guy is good. And then
of course my father, who left, was the love.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
Of her life. And we knew the world.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
Of tears and vulnerability and trying to make ends meet.
And every son, daughter or two of a single mother
knows this world, right, and that's where we were.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
And then here comes our dad.

Speaker 1 (15:12):
And our dad is like the most masculine, funny guy,
and he'd flown up from Los Angeles for one day
for my sixth birthday, and it.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
Was just like magic.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
It was like, oh my god, here's this tall guy.
I could walk down the street next to him and
he just felt like having your own private God.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
Like it was just like.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
I've got a Zeus and it's a it's a dad.
And there was a lot of single mothers and a
lot of last key kids on our street, and it
was just like the kids that would like bully us
and make fun of us.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
Whatever.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
Was sort of like like slink down a little bit,
like hello, sir, because we had a dad and he
could like throw a baseball across the entire you know,
baseball field, or he could eat a whole pizza or whatever, and.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
He could swear, and he was so good at swearing
and didn't care about swearing in front of us.

Speaker 1 (15:53):
And this was just like mind blowing to us because
we just never we'd never been around men. We just
knew the world of women, and you know, you as
a boy, like, am I going to become one of
those things?

Speaker 2 (16:03):
Is that what I'm going to be? And which kind
of am I going to become?

Speaker 3 (16:08):
Yeah, it was very touching the way that you write
about studying him, trying to memorize him, trying to memorize
his mustache and memorize his you know, like the width
of his shoulders.

Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah, he had a walk, he had like a dip
to his wak.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
You know, he was kind of a beat nick. He
wasn't quite a hippie, a littler than that, you know,
but he'd been in jail and out of jail. I'm
being a professional criminal for a while. But he could dance,
you know what I mean. You know, he had a
swagger to him, and I had never seen anything like
this before. And he'd sit down and he'd say these words,
and he'd be like that asshole Reagan, like he I
never heard of Reagan refer to anything other than that asshole.

(16:48):
Like I thought Reagan's first name was that asshole. So
I was like twelve years old, like it was just
always that asshole Reagan, that son of a bitch Nixon,
that fucking carburetor. Like I remember him talking about his
old truck and I didn't even know what a carburetor was.
I just would nod my head, be like, that's right, Dad,
it's the fucking carburetor.

Speaker 3 (17:02):
That's you, and that's the word. And then suddenly that's
the word for carburetor, right right.

Speaker 1 (17:07):
And I would make it up because you know, you're
just trying to make up the man you think you're
going to become at that age. So i'd you'd be like, yeah, listen, mom,
something's wrong on my skateboard. I think it's the fucking carburetor.
But you know, you're just inventing. It's trying to imagine
the men we're going to become as we kind of
invent them from pieces of the men we have around us.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
And that first, the first visit from your dad was
it was twenty four hours and then he was gone.
You woke up the next morning and he was gone,
and you knew he was going to be gone, so
you were you were trying to almost sort of imprint,
you know, like a duckling imprints, you know, sort of
as much of him on you as you possibly could well.

Speaker 1 (17:41):
Also the other piece of it, he was a warm,
sunny guy. It's fun to be around, you know. His
whole life is warm guy, quick with a joke, quick
with a smile, very empathetic, listens, understands. And my mom
not a bad person or anything, but just like crippling depression.
And so she was always in her room. She was
always reading, she was always sad, she was always crying.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
It was always like we.

Speaker 1 (18:00):
Had to take care and with my dad we could
just be kids.

Speaker 3 (18:07):
We'll be right back. Later that year, Michel's father calls
him with a surprise. A woman gets on the phone

(18:29):
and says, hi, son. Michael recognizes the voice. He recognizes
being called son. This was someone he knew. This was Bonnie,
a woman who had been his primary caretaker back at
the Synanon orphanage in that otherwise dickenziean situation. Bonnie had
shown Michel love. She would call him son, and he

(18:52):
had thought of her as his mother more than his
actual mother. So when his dad calls and Bonnie is
there with him, Michel happy to hear her voice, but
he's also very confused as to why she and his
dad are together.

Speaker 2 (19:06):
It was wild.

Speaker 1 (19:06):
I mean I first of all, the way she says,
she said hellos thun and that happened to a fair
mountain Cinna. Onwards, some you know, one or another of
the kids would become really close with one of the
or another of the caretakers because he's just, you know,
a bunch of little orphans performing for their dinner.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
You know, orphans are cute.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
They don't have anybody, and so they try to win
people over to being their person. That's kind of a
natural childish instinct. And you know, we could get into
the psychology of it and how damaging it all this
there's a reason we always end up as performers. And
I was close with her, and yeah, so when my
dad was like, someone here wants to talk to you.
I just I knew her as well as I knew
you know, my own voice, and it was Bonnie, and

(19:50):
I was like, what the hell. So it turned out
they had started dating and he had moved into with
her in Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 (19:56):
After this phone call, Michael's father becomes more of a
fixture in his and Tony's life. The boys begin to
take trips to visit their dad and Bonnie in LA,
where their life drastically differs from their life back home
in Salem, Oregon.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
I mean, it couldn't have been more different. Part of
the issue in Oregons you just didn't have any food.
My mom wasn't great at sort of material things, and
the house was often kind of messy and dirty, and
we didn't have heat some nights in the winter and
we would have to chop the wood, and if we
ran out of wood, there would just be no fire,
no heat, and we'd be under blankets and you could
see your breath inside the house.

Speaker 2 (20:32):
And the house wasn't even.

Speaker 1 (20:34):
Insulated when we move in, as I recall, and then
we you know, my mom's boyfriend, Sky Paul, who was
a great guy but just an absolute drunk, started raising
rabbits for food, and that's what we ate.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
We ate rabbit meat. Paul. It's like a woodsman.

Speaker 1 (20:51):
But so he yeah, he just he sat us down.
He's like, all right, we're going to teach you how
to slaughter. And he taught us how to the step
by step process of slaughtering rabbits. You know, would breed
the rabbits and then a big bunch of litters would
be born, and then you try to time them so
they're all born around the same time, and then you
let them grow to a certain age, and then it's
slaughtering day, and then you slaughter all the rabbits. Then
you keep them in the fridge, and then you live
off those rabbits for however many months until the next round.

(21:14):
And the rough parts were when he would disappear. He
would go on one of these drinking binges and it
would be like there's no food, eat, and there was
nothing to do but slaughter rabbits. And I would be
like seven years old with a hunting knife, you know,
cutting the heads off rabbits and pulling the skins off
and doing all the things you do to feel dress
to animal.

Speaker 2 (21:35):
And I have all these cuts to this day. I
have all these scars on.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
My hand on my left hand from where I cut
into it with the hunting knife because I wasn't that
adept at it. My mom, who's just God bless her,
not a very good cook, would try to make The
worst was like rabbit stew, and she just had no
idea how to do it. And then the worst part
was like night two of rabbit stew. It'd be like
this gamey smell, this gamey smoky smell nows and it

(21:58):
would have this like thing layer on top. They have
to skim off, and then night three and then night
four and we would just have to eat the stew
until it was gone because we were poor. We didn't
have any other food. Sometimes I tell these stories and
like my wife will be like, were you born in
the twenties, Like what the hell was going on? Like
I was just something that happened like in the eighties.

(22:19):
And then when we get to la, I mean, it
was just like modern day childhood. Like there were you know,
I don't know, microwave burritos, you know, and celery with
peanut butter, and I don't know, salami ice cream after
dinner every night, and then they would take us places.
On weekends, we'd go to Disneyland or go to some

(22:41):
theme park, or we'd always go on the weekends and
play baseball with my dad, and then we were all
together at night. You know, my dad would like to
watch Dodger games or Laker games, and he'd sit there
and drink and smoke and just bitch about the Dodgers.
And we'd sit there and bitch too, and we didn't
know what we were talking about. Again, we're just kind
of making it up. But it was just like there
were there's dis abundance, there's this sense of sort of

(23:02):
joy and wonder and this feeling like we were safe.
We weren't just in the middle of somebody else's crisis,
but we were just kind of taken care.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
Of and it was fine.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
But things continue to be not fine. Back in Oregon,
McKell and his brother continue to be hungry, their mom
continues to be depressed. Paul continues to disappear. The boys
are going to school, to a real regular school for
the first time, but they feel generally disconnected from their classmates,
who have no idea what they're going through at home.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
We'd go from these incredibly emotionally tense situations, and then
to go to school and just be expected to do
math was weird. And then also just being hungry, which
I think a lot of kids, unfortunately in the MONOWORLK
can relate to trying to go to school while hungry.
We definitely were hungry at school. Hearing about how my
peers went through their lives. I guess it was different
because my days were just different from theirs. But at

(23:57):
the time, I don't know. I think we just thought.
I just knew there was this sad woman. It was
my job to take care of her, and because she
always told me that was my job, of boys.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
Job to take care of her mother. And my brother
was just angry.

Speaker 1 (24:07):
He was one of these like kind of lost kids
that hated all adults, and probably for a good reason
because he had been hurt by a lot of adults.
And I was a very capable kid, I guess, and
took on the role of a super child. You know,
different families under stress take on these predictable roles, and
there's like the scapegoat child and the super child and
the mascot child or whatever. And I was just the

(24:28):
one that was trying to I would chop the wood
in the back and slaughter the rabbits and try to
get my mom, you know, feeling okay about her life,
and then fill in for whatever my stepdad wasn't doing,
and then try to calm my brother down so it
wasn't too pissed to go to school and just try
to take it all on and make sure everyone was okay, which,
in retrospect, probably my brother's way of handling it might

(24:49):
have been more healthy.

Speaker 2 (24:51):
He was just understandably pissed.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
In addition to all this stuff, there was this kind
of sense that my mom knew our lives better than
we and would tell us and I would say something like, Mom,
I'm sad, and she'd say, no, you're not, You're happier
with your mother. And this happened with when the men
from Senning On came and beat Phil up and I
had nightmares. I wet the bed after that, as kids
often do after traumatic experiences, and had a bunch of nightmares,

(25:18):
and that every sign in modern world, you'd be like,
this kid is PTSD, like I know it now. At
the time, we never saw a counselor. I didn't No
one ever thought like how what our experience was like?
We were just kind of these ancillary things to our parents' stories. Really,
that's how it felt. And you know when when Phil
got beat up and I would tell her I was
scared because the bad men were going to come, and
she would say, well, you weren't even there, and I'd say, yeah,

(25:41):
I was there. I watched from the porch. She screamed,
we caught eyes. It was I was in She say, no,
you weren't, and it was almost like she couldn't, she
couldn't piece it together. And I didn't know what to
do with this. As a kid, there was like mom's reality,
and there was reality, and then there was synonyms reality,
then there was the reality of the world.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
And I was like this precocious kid just.

Speaker 1 (25:59):
Being told by her constantly what reality was and it
didn't match my experience. But I knew enough to tell
her she was.

Speaker 3 (26:06):
Right, because you needed to do that to survive.

Speaker 2 (26:09):
I had to have a caretaker, right, Yeah, I was
a kid. Kids are trying to get their needs met.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
You know, we have the emotional makeup of orphans, and
we certainly lived that way for our first five years.
And so it's like you just learned to perform. You're
just you're not enough. Nothing you do is enough. You're
not loved because you're loved. You're loved because you're special
in some way, and you have to prove constantly that
you're special to everyone, because that's what you're taught at
a young age is the only way you're ever going
to get any of your needs met.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
And that's how I responded to her.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
As Michel's sense of reality is constantly being questioned by
his mom, there's also the ongoing drama of his mom's
relationship with Paul. Paul goes out on benders, then they
break up, then they get back together, over and over again.
They get married, and this rhythm continues and somehow lending
a fragile sense of support to all This is the

(27:01):
language of twelve step recovery. The Serenity prayer is on
the wall. Phrases like let go and let God are
in regular rotation. Mickel absorbs some of this and even
tries comforting his mother by saying things like it's the
disease talking or one day at a time. Then Paul disappears,

(27:22):
and this time he doesn't return. Michel's mother informs him
in a very matter of fact, almost casual way that
Paul has died, but then she back pedals and says
she thinks Paul is dead. This is extremely sad and
perplexing to Michel, not only the news of the loss,

(27:43):
but the mixed messages and the manner in which the
news is delivered.

Speaker 1 (27:49):
She just kind of mentioned in passing, like he's dead,
and I was like, what, wait, can we Paul? And
then it was like past the potatoes, Like it was
just like the next line, you know, there was no
there was no acknowledgment.

Speaker 2 (27:59):
There was though, like are we gonna grieve him somehow?

Speaker 1 (28:02):
We're gonna have this be a sit down. It's just
gonna at least be a big talk. It wasn't even that.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
It was just this passing thing. And then when I
was like, well, should we go look for him?

Speaker 1 (28:10):
Should we find it because she had said he disappeared
while drinking and everyone thinks he's probably dead or maybe
he isn't you know, she backtracked a little and made
it kind of age and I was just like, let's
go figure this out. This is my guy, you know,
we gotta find him. And she said why you guys
were never close, and it was like she just invented wholesale,
this new reality on the spot on the spot, and

(28:31):
it was so confusing because I knew in my heart
like I was crushed by this news, and I was
so sad. Paul was just he'd watch cartoons with us,
and he'd take us fishing, and he'd make jokes with us,
and he would talk to me about problems. You know,
if I got in a fight with a friend, he'd say, well,
there's your buddy, and you got to resolve it in
this way, and you got any He listened to us,
you know. And my mom, despite all of her very

(28:54):
very intelligent woman and thousands of books about psychology whatnot.
I mean, we never got to bedtime story once ever
in our lives. We never had any sense that our
sort of day and any kind of schedule to it.
There was no rhythm, there was no boundaries, there was
no you know, all the things that in the modern
world we say like this is what constitutes good parenting, right, and.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
He actually had some of that stuff down.

Speaker 1 (29:16):
He was empathetic and he listened, he was warm, and
he was this broken guy, but he just loved us
and he was good with us in that way, just
kind of like I almost saw him as like a
really nice older brother, uncle or something. I don't know
if I ever saw him particularly as a father, but
I definitely loved him. I would find myself one to
go down to the banks over the West Saland Bridge
over the Willamette River, because that's where he would take
us fishing, and I'd go looking for him because I

(29:37):
knew he'd go drinking down there. Sometimes I never found him,
you know, he was just gone. I never I never
saw him again. And He's a guy wh'd live with us,
and I'd seen him, you know, every day since I
was six years old, when I was in Oregon, and
then one day he's just gone, and that was that.

Speaker 3 (29:53):
By the time Mickel is eleven, he's living alone with
his mom. Of course, Paul is gone, and now his
brother Tony, he has gone too. Tony's anger has spiraled
out of control and he's become unruly, so the family
decides his father might be able to straighten him out
in la This leaves Michel to do what he's always done,

(30:13):
but on hyperdrive. He is, for better or worse, the
proverbial man of the house. After all, he's been told
again and again that a boy's job is to take
care of his mother, you know.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
And I did three hours of chores before school, two
hours of chores after school every day, taking care of
rabbits and chopping wood and taking care of the house
in all these different ways.

Speaker 2 (30:36):
In some ways it.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
Probably taught me a work ethic that has served me
really well. In other ways, it was probably a little much.

Speaker 3 (30:43):
Then your mother starts dating again and this man named
Doug enters the picture.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
Doug was no Paul like Paul was funny.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
He watched cartoons in his underwear and it was just
this like weird dude that we could get down with them.
My dad hilarious, you know, had done time in prison,
you know, ex heroinautic, charismatic is all shit.

Speaker 2 (31:04):
And he was. He was clean, sober, you.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
Know, for the most part at that point, and a
really good guy and of good dad.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
But he had soul, you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (31:11):
He liked music, and he liked and he could like
people from all walks of life, and in walks this
guy Doug, who's just like, Wow, your mother and I
are having a very important talk with you now, and
we want to have this talk with you that to
make sure that you understand the rules in this house.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
And I was like, who the fuck is this dude?

Speaker 1 (31:27):
Who's this guy that suddenly shows up in my house
and is telling me how to live and what to do?

Speaker 2 (31:32):
And he was weird.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
He was like a really odd cadence to his speech.
He always wanted you to kind of like agree with him.
You take these pauses, these really long pauses as he
answered questions for you, like and then he'd say trust
and he'd go off and some other tangent and you know,
he'd he'd go to a restaurant order like oatmeal with raisins.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
It was just weird, like and then he was also
just abusive. He was just he would he would like disappear.
My mom would come home and he just he'd be gone.

Speaker 1 (31:58):
He like moved out all of his stuff, Like he'd
move in and then.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
He'd move out, and he moved in. He moved in
and moved out.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
Like four different times in the span of I want
to say, like a year and a half. And it
was just all very confusing and strange. There had been
a while where he, you know, he always wanted to
make sure I knew he was bigger than me, and
he would you know, hit my dog. I remember him,
like my dog pooped on the stairs or something. We
had this dog, this great labrador that we need more,

(32:26):
and we never.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
Hit the dog. We just kind of told them to
stop pooping places or whatever.

Speaker 1 (32:31):
He'd tower over me when I would talk back to
my mom, sort of like trying to physically intimidate me.
And also they just didn't care about my life. Like
I was going to school and doing all these chores
and working and stuff. And then I was on the
relay team of the track team for my elementary school.
I had a little relay thing, and they never came
to anything. They just kind of had their own lives
and it was like they were just kind of checked out.

(32:53):
And then one day my mom says something about sports
and I was like, sports are cool, mom, and she's like, no,
they're not.

Speaker 2 (32:58):
It's just you know alpha.

Speaker 1 (33:00):
I was trying to prove alpha they are and I
was like, oh, that's stupid. It's how hard you work,
and it's the camaraderie and it's I like sports mom.
And then she said something and was I think I
called her a bitch. I was like, don't be a
bitch or something, and then he got got up. He
was really mad, like don't you call your mother a bitch?
And he pinned me down and just like knocked me
one across the mouth. Had never had anything like that

(33:20):
happened to me. And he put his finger in my face,
and I can remember, like literally the spit in his
mouth is.

Speaker 2 (33:25):
He's like, don't you ever touch your mother that way?
Not in my house or something like that.

Speaker 1 (33:29):
It was all this kind of like control stuff, like
he was the man I was supposed to listen to him,
and I was like, ashole, you moved out four times,
like what arem I.

Speaker 2 (33:35):
Supposed to listen to you? Of course my reaction. I
think he thought I would sort of cower away and
be intimidated by him or something. Instead, I just like
stood up and I was like.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
My Dad's gonna beat the shit out of you. I
was so mad and just so certain that like this
guy wasn't worth, wasn't worth anything, and just trifling.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
So I got on my bike and I ran away.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
It was like nighttime, and I just went and stood
on the on the bridge over in the Willamotte River,
and I just felt such a sense of aloneness. And
I went down to the banks and I was looking
for my step dad who had been dead, and I
wish I could call or talk to or be around
my dad and Bonnie, and you know, it just felt

(34:23):
like I just had no people, you know, that feeling
like there's just no one in the world that gives
a shit about me at all. And the synanon, you know,
was bad in its own way, and then in a
lot of ways, this was worse. My story has like
a lot of you know, there's prison and drug addicts
and people dying and all these cults, and there's all

(34:44):
this stuff that's really you know, kind of like sounds
really sexy and big, but like what's hard about being
a kid is being alone. And that's that's true for
a lot of kids, to just feel like you don't
have people that are that are on your side. You know.
He eventually apologized, but I at that point I was
just o it, you know, it just didn't want to
be wrong. So then I went to Los Angeles for

(35:04):
the summer, and at the end of the summer got
to talking with them about staying and going to school.
We had sort of made the decision, my dad and
Bonnie and I that I was going to stay there.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
And that we had to go and call my mom.
It was like I knew I was breaking a rule.

Speaker 1 (35:21):
I knew that telling her that I'm going to go
live in this other place was an absolute apostacy that
went against everything I was ever ever been told about
what I was supposed to do with my life, which
was to take care of her. And it's almost like
I surprised her. And again, these things were never said
out loud. It was just kind of something I.

Speaker 3 (35:38):
Knew, and she basically said to you, one year.

Speaker 2 (35:42):
Yeah, it was one year.

Speaker 1 (35:44):
I think the rationale was I needed I was becoming
a teenager and I needed to get to know my dad,
and so we were going to spend one year in
Los Angeles, you know, getting to know my dad.

Speaker 3 (35:57):
Will be back in a moment with more family seeks.
Michel starts a new life in a new school. He's
a talented runner and he gets on the track team.
He's at a true inflection point, one of those moments

(36:19):
in life where things can go in any number of
different directions. His time with his dad is vitally important
to him. He's a jolay Man, part of a lineage
of Joe Laymen, and he's trying to figure out for
himself what this means.

Speaker 1 (36:35):
My dad was big on betting the ponies, and he
would like to take us to Hollywood Park. I learned
fractions at Hollywood Park by learning betting on at a
young agent, and so we would go there sometimes and
have these big talks.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
And I'd fallen in with these kids.

Speaker 1 (36:48):
And we were sneaking out at night and doing drugs
and drinking and ditching school. And I was getting really
bad grades. And my brother was doing at this point
already cocaine, p CP acid. He was drinking every single night,
and a bunch of stuff had gone down with him
where he'd been arrested and cops were after him and

(37:09):
he left the house. And then we found out he'd
missed school for six months straight and eventually he got
shipped off to rehab. And it all kind of scared me,
and I didn't want to go down that path. And
I saw that my brother was going down this path,
and I was I was going down that path. That
was part of this little, you know, skate gang. You know,
we'd hit up on walls and egg buses and just
be little shitty skaters that weren't really going anywhere, just

(37:32):
kind of burnout. So we thought we were cool, but
we knew we weren't really going anywhere, and that.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
Was kind of the point.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
And I saw this thing happening and my brother, and
I was just like, I want out of this, and
I didn't know what to do. So my dad took
me to Hollywood Park and were sitting up in the
stands and I told him all about it, and I
was like, Dad, I just want to get out of this.
I don't know what to do. He turned to me
and he was just like, you know, you're a smart kid.
You don't you don't have to do any of this
stuff that I did. He would tell these charming stories
about prison. You know, they were kind of fun. He

(38:00):
was never shy by it, but he kind of leveled
with me and he was like, listen, I tell you
all these stories are kind of funny, but it's terrible.
Being an addict is terrible. Going to jail is terrible. Like,
I wish I could have done what you have the
opportunity to do. I wish I had your chance. And
he said, don't do what I did. Go do something better,
Go make something of your life. You're a smart kid.

(38:21):
And you can go do anything you want. And I
wish somebody had told me that at your age. But
you know, he never knew his dad. He's like, there
wasn't anyone to tell me. I mean, I guess he
knew him, but I didn't know him well. So I
took it to heart. And you know, Bonnie was involved
in this as well, and I.

Speaker 2 (38:37):
Just started trying in school.

Speaker 1 (38:39):
It was weird, like I'd never tried before, and I
just started trying and lo and behold what was good
at it? And I liked it. Like I literally didn't
know what it meant to study. No one told me
what how to study. No one pulled me aside and like,
read your book and take notes on it. What does
that even mean?

Speaker 2 (38:54):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (38:55):
Someone taught me how to do it. One day I
was like, oh, so just this and memorize these facts,
like yeah, So I started doing that and found out
I really took to it. It was something I really
enjoyed and I was good at it, and I was surprised.
It was like the biggest shock of my life to
realize that I liked school.

Speaker 3 (39:14):
Mckel is so good in school that he's accepted to
Stanford University, one of the best institutions of higher learning
in the country. It's a beautiful campus, a place of
privilege and opportunity, But mckel doesn't feel exactly at home there.
He's on scholarship, and while he's no longer the child
skinning rabbits in the backyard, he knows he was that child,

(39:37):
and knows that his classmates were not those familiar feelings
of a loneeness and attachment creep back in.

Speaker 1 (39:46):
I think I didn't feel it as much in high school,
this sense of alienation I felt in college because I
went to this LA public school and a lot of
the kids that I was really good friends with, they
were trying to do what I was trying to do.
They were trying to get out, you know, And there
was you know, we certainly had different experiences because of race,
and like, you know, I have white privilege, that had
white privilege still have it that they didn't have, and

(40:08):
all that. But in so far as like a dad
who had been in prison, no one ever made it
past eighth grade.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
Let's study hard and get the fuck out of this place.

Speaker 1 (40:15):
That was That was a shared feeling among a lot
of my peers, most of them were black, and there
was a lot of white kids too, but they kind
of had a more suburban experience at the school, I
would say. And so getting to college it was wild
because I think I was just I'd never been around
like rich people. I remember there was like orientation week,
and there was like the Black Student Union lunch, and
the Native American lunch, and the Meta lunch and the

(40:37):
Asian Pacific Islander lunch, and then there.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
Was just lunch.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
Like I just went to lunch and like lunch mayor,
but I was been called like white lunch, So I
went to white lunch, and because that's how all that
was left. And I'd sit like across from a kid
from like New Hampshire Prep school and like a game
hat and just had like nothing in common with these kids.
What was bizarre to me was I think in their eyes,
I came up lacking that, like I didn't know the language,

(41:04):
and some of it was I later learned was kind
of like the language of wealth. I's like, why aren't
my jokes landing? And I think they kind of looked
down at me a little bit.

Speaker 3 (41:11):
You also learned to leave really significant parts of your
history and your story and your family out.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
Yeah, and for many years at that point, stopped telling
any of the stories about sennin On and any stories
about my early childhood and cause you just you get
sick of like people looking at you funny. You know,
I still don't like it. I still don't love being introduced,
even like if I'm doing a piece of media or
something and someone's like, well, Michael Julai was born in

(41:39):
a cule called cinema, and I want to feel like
that was my parents' decision.

Speaker 2 (41:43):
I feel immediately kind.

Speaker 1 (41:44):
Of defensive, like I don't want to be branded as
some like someone who's had some like experience that nobody
can relate to, and therefore I'm going to be strange
and broken in some way, which ultimately I probably am
strange and broken in some ways, but just maybe not
in the ways people expect, you know, and spent a
lot of years trying to not be strange and broken
and trying to have more empathy. I mean some ways,
I think these really hard things that happened to you

(42:06):
they sort of like create a crack where you're able
to have more empathy than others and maybe see things
others can't because you've just been through some really really
awful shit, and especially as an artist, it creates an
empathy and an eye and an ability to connect that
maybe other people don't have. But you know, at nineteen
years old at Stanford University, I didn't understand any of that.
I just felt alienated and I knew I was not

(42:27):
bringing up, you know, the cult I was born. And
I knew I wasn't bringing up my dad had been
in prison. I knew I wasn't bringing up like my
mentally ill mom, or my stepfather had died, or people
have been beaten in front of me, or my drug
addic brother, any of that stuff. I just knew, you know,
stick to like, you know, what your college essay was about,
and what are you majoring in? And what bands do
you like? And you know, with sports do you like whatever,

(42:49):
just and eventually learn to just create a very highly
curated mask for the world. We've all learned to do
that to some extent. And I think for me at
that point that I was too scared to show any
other part of who I was to the world.

Speaker 3 (43:09):
As Michel navigates his way through college, he takes psychology
courses which end up educating and even enlightening him. About
his own life. In one of his textbooks, he comes
across Synanon. Up until this point, he hadn't understood that
this cult was famous. He recognizes his mother in some

(43:29):
of the psychology books too. He'd always known she struggled
with her mental health, but it isn't until now that
he realizes the scope of it all. She's not just
a troubled woman with a tenuous grasp on reality. No,
she has what's called NPD and BPD, narcissistic personality disorder

(43:50):
and borderline personality disorder, very real afflictions that are difficult
to treat and have led her to behave in the
ways she has. She has, of course left her mark
upon Mckel. A ripple effect of their shared history. Michel
suffers from an inability to connect with others, to really
let them in. That's when he discovers that he has

(44:12):
a disorder of his own, attachment disorder. Unlocking this language
and knowledge is pivotal in Michel's journey toward understanding his
relationship with his mother and with himself.

Speaker 1 (44:25):
I think part of the problem, I think is that
we don't really as society have a language for narcissistic personality. Disorder,
like we have language for depression and schizophrenia and addiction
and anxiety and ADHD, and we're just now starting, like
in the last few years, to have a language around
MPD and borderline personality disorder, which are closely related and

(44:48):
they're fairly common, and they create relationships without love, without empathy,
but we don't really talk about it, and so.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
I didn't really understand what it was.

Speaker 1 (44:56):
All I knew was my mother constantly cross boundaries, knew
get a difficult grasp on reality, and I was uncomfortable
in her presence, which was enough for me to kind
of cut off contact with her. Around like nineteen twenty
years old. I stopped talking to her because I was
just suddenly so mad at her, and I couldn't even explain.

Speaker 2 (45:18):
I couldn't even tell you why.

Speaker 1 (45:19):
At the time that happened, I went to visit her
at this treatment center where she had checked herself into,
and someone had mentioned emotional abuse and the emotional abuse
of children, and I realized that they were talking about
her and how she cheated us, and it just kind
of hit me so hard that this was true, and
I was so incredibly angry about it, you know, And
then over time, you sustain these wounds yourself. You realize

(45:43):
eventually that you whatever damage was done to you as
a kid, it's if you want to live your own life,
you have to try to fix it yourself, right, even
if it's not your fault, it's your responsibility, I guess.
And so, you know, I noticed as I got older,
I was having a real hard time with relationships that
I just I just couldn't I you know, things would

(46:04):
fizzle out or I would always have like one foot
out the door.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
And I was noticing friends, you know, as I got older, like.

Speaker 1 (46:10):
Getting married and moving on, and a lot of stories,
you know, people who write about their lives end with
like and then it all worked out, And I really
wanted to get into like, here's the wreckage. I really
wanted to speak honestly about the wreckage in my life.
And the recage was I knew I had an attachment disorder.
I knew it was because I'd been an orphan, and

(46:31):
I knew it took a really long time to get
out of that. And I knew my mother was mentally
ill and have all the things that to talk about publicly,
that's probably the hardest one being born and cult. All right,
you feel a little weird, but it's still kind of like, WHOA,
what happened there? The alcoholism or the drug addiction that
runs in my family. Being able to really not be
part of that, that's almost a credit to me. There's

(46:52):
this other feeling talking about, wow, I couldn't really be
in a relationship that feels more like shame and harassmith
maybe like fear that something's fundamentally wrong with me that
it took me a long time to really come to
terms with, to feel like, you know, not so defensive
about because you feel like you have to guard it

(47:13):
the way like a boxer will guard a broken rib
and a fight or something like this is your vulnerability point.
But like what I know now, You know, having gone
through work with like a really good therapist five years
on the couch twice a week, we got through all
this stuff and spend a lot of time kind of
leaning into the discomfort that you just kind of have
to go into that discomfort and you have to learn

(47:35):
to be okay with it, and then it starts to
not have so much control over you, and you very
slowly start to learn how to make new choices and
to see situations in different ways and eventually get to
the other side of it and feel like you're a
person who can love and be loved and have a real.

Speaker 2 (47:53):
Relationship in your life.

Speaker 1 (47:54):
And it's ironic because it's like the thing you don't
want to do is acknowledge that you're sort of fundamentally
flawed some way, and you feel defensive about it and
defensive and like you don't want to talk about it
or think about it. But it's that very thing that
you don't want to talk about that is the key
to having it and not control your life.

Speaker 3 (48:10):
I'm so glad you said that. I mean, that's so
exactly right. One of the most moving and triumphant parts
of Michel's story is that he has become a person
who can have real and loving relationships. He's happily married,
he's a dad to two kids. He has a robust
career as a musician and writer, which allows so many

(48:33):
to love and celebrate him too.

Speaker 1 (48:36):
I have been with my wife ten years next year,
and we have two beautiful children who I love more
than life itself. And I'm really happy to say we
have a happy little house, a.

Speaker 2 (48:49):
Happy little home.

Speaker 1 (48:51):
I'm my first job in the world is to be
a husband and father, and I take that job very seriously.
It's also my favorite job and kind of everything starts
from there these days for me. That that's that's always
my first priority in the primary in my mind is
making sure that we're our relationships are.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
Strong, and our kids are taken care of.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
And when my son was born, I remember at six
months old thinking like, wow, this is the age we
were given to strangers. And it's like it didn't quite
cross my mind as a kid how monstrous that was.
I didn't know, But as a parent, I just was
appalled by, like this horrific thing that. So I'm going
to take this child that all I think about is

(49:33):
how he's not going to I don't want him to
bump his head, you know.

Speaker 2 (49:35):
I don't want him to.

Speaker 1 (49:35):
Grab a knife. I don't want him to fall over,
you know. I just want to protect him and love him,
make sure he's safe. And we're going to give him
to a stranger now, and I'm not going to see
him for years. I'm not going to know who he's
with and what he's doing. Like I can't imagine doing
that for an afternoon, let alone for weeks, months, years,
at a time, and so it occurred to me like
the real violence of Synanon. There was some violent acts,
but you know, as cults goo, it wasn't like Waco

(49:57):
or something. It wasn't you know, Branch Davidians, wasn't People's Temple.
There's some very violent cults out there where people fully died.
That didn't really happen in center On's case. It was
like an emotional violence. And I would say the victims,
the prime victims of that emotional violence were the children.
And it's sort of like the big ugly secret of
center On is that the children were all turned into

(50:19):
these people with these attachment disorders and murky relationships and
a lifetime of trying to figure out why they feel.

Speaker 2 (50:27):
So alienated from the world.

Speaker 1 (50:28):
And then in my career, yeah, so a writer, I
was on NPR for a while, I was editor of
a music magazine called Filters, editor at large Ment health magazine.
I met a drummer and I decided to start a
rock band.

Speaker 2 (50:43):
You know, music was a big part.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
Of my life growing up and making me feel like
the weirdness and alienation I felt wasn't something that only
I felt. And I'd spent a lot of time listening
to things like The Cure and the Smiths and feeling
like there were other people out there who had gone
through similar journey and that meant everything to me at
that age. And I grew up with that feeling, relating

(51:05):
to music so hard, and then eventually he was writing
songs in my spare time, and then eventually decided I
wanted to make it my purpose in life to be
a songwriter and document my journey through the world and
a spiritual, emotional, psychological journey through the world through songs.
So I've been doing that with the band for about
fifteen years, and it's.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
Been wicked fun.

Speaker 1 (51:27):
It's been great touring the world and playing big concerts
and having these big, overwhelming celebrations, which is what a
concert is all the time.

Speaker 3 (51:41):
Here's Michel reading one last passage from his powerful memoir
Hollywood Park.

Speaker 1 (51:50):
Eventually the landscape begins to make sense, and I learned
where the pitfalls are. Here's a mountain of fear over
there as a river of regret down there is a
swamp of shame next to it, metow of hope.

Speaker 2 (52:01):
Travel with care.

Speaker 1 (52:02):
It takes time, but I learned to laugh at myself,
to tolerate discomfort, to accept these things that were once
so hard to accept. It's not easy. I get depressed,
I get anxious about it. I learned to just sit
with it. That the thing Dad always told me about
acceptance and heartache was true. Sometimes you just have to
sit on your hands and hurt. What can I say?

(52:22):
It was uncomfortable, and it took years, and it was
the only way to change.

Speaker 3 (52:44):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also

(53:05):
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

(53:41):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.