Flunk. Start.
Page 3
Mother put a hand on my head. “Do you remember any of that?” she asked. “The church? Lupe? How Lupe used to carry you everywhere?”
I shook my head. But I could imagine it, from details provided when my parents told these stories. Bolstered by photographs taken at the time, I knew that several years before, in the mid-fifties, as my father set to work on a new novel, my parents rented a house in Chapala, Mexico, and Mother hired a local woman, Lupe, to help take care of Tad and me. Lupe carried me everywhere, my legs and feet, in shoes that she re-whited every morning, dangling from her arms. My mother was afraid I’d forget how to walk, because Lupe never put me down. I was with her as she haggled over tortillas and avocados, as she stood on street corners gossiping with friends, and—as soon became clear—as she attended daily mass.
At some point during their time in Chapala, Mom and Dad headed to Mexico City. Dad was enraptured with the history of Mexico; he’d end up writing almost a dozen novels incorporating it. Our trip included a visit to the Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary, seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Mexico, and—these were the kinds of connections that fascinated my father, as they would come to fascinate me—built on land that had been sacred to the Aztecs. Cortez accomplished this desecration/construction in 1591, commanding that the Aztec temple be destroyed and its stones used to build his church.
None of this did I know at the time, of course. Nor do I remember being in the church, or shuffling toward the altar, or even my father jerking me vigorously from my knees. But Dad told this story often, and I understood there was a lesson here: I’d been jerked to my senses, as well as jerked to my feet.
“You did the right thing,” Mr. Porter was saying. He turned his florid, round face to look down at me. I pressed my cheek against one of Mother’s calves. “All religions are full of claptrap. Especially organized ones.”
I was expected to nod, and I did.
Dad nodded too. “But those religions have also given the world a great deal of culture. We can’t forget that.”
“So much beautiful art,” Mother said. “Paintings, sculpture—”
“Music,” Dad said. “Especially music. ‘The Hallelujah Chorus’!”
I knew this was on a record that he played loudly on Christmas mornings.
“And ideas,” Mother said. “Many great ideas.”
Dad nodded. “A conundrum, to be sure.”
“What’s a conundrum?” I asked.
But they began to talk about the great shot Mother had slammed down the alley that finished their tennis game. I headed outside to see what my brother might be up to.
two photographs of that year spent in Chapala have fluttered with the family through the years. One is of my brother. He was given the birth name Oakley Hall III but, so as not to be confused with his father, was nicknamed Tad. In the photograph, he’s dressed as a caballero: loose white pants and a wide-brimmed sombrero. He stands in four-year-old glee at the part he’s playing, his feet, sheathed in heeled boots, wide apart. He grins at the camera, even then his dark eyes intense and roguish.
In the other photograph, I’m sitting on my mother’s lap, holding a book. She appears to have been reading to me, and has paused: she’s leaning back on tanned arms. I was a towheaded child, and a section of white-blond hair is pulled atop my head. On my feet are lace-up baby shoes, probably whited by Lupe just that morning. Even though Mother’s face is angled away from the camera, it’s clear she’s smiling. She wears a skirt that comes just over her knees, a belt emphasizes her slim figure, and both calves are tucked back in a pose both feminine and easy. On her feet are espadrilles, laces twined above her ankles. She carries this bohemian loveliness with grace and style, without looking the least bit “stylish.”
It’s a quality she’s had all her life. Long before ethnic clothes became fashionable, Mother was using her Singer sewing machine to rig intriguing tops out of a bit of white cotton and a yoke of exquisitely embroidered Guatemalan cloth purchased in one of the Mexican markets she loved to frequent. She used a wicker basket to carry her babies and had no problem, even in the uptight fifties, breastfeeding her children in company; she simply draped one of many colorful rebozos over a shoulder. At a time when women were still wearing girdles and nylons, she built tiered skirts that fell to the tops of her bare feet, constructing four-inch waistbands that set off her small waist. She loved silver jewelry, especially Mexican silver, and over the years purchased all sizes and kinds of crosses. Along with enormous cooking pots, a recipe for pozole, yards of colored fabric, and embroidered huipils, she and Dad carried this silver home. Five or six crosses at a time, attached to long chains, dangled from her neck. They were never a statement of religiosity. They were beautiful artifacts, collected the same way she and Dad acquired pieces of pre-Columbian art.
In her fifties, she began to explore photography, attending the Art Institute in San Francisco, then journeying to Nepal and India, taking striking black-and-white photographs of Nepalese women and Tibetan monks. She also brought back Tibetan dorgies, which look like small silver handweights and are used for prayer, and a Tibetan spirit house, which she filled with amulets and Mexican milagros and Zuni fetishes. Both my parents sought such items—when traveling, in flea markets, in hole-in-the-wall antique stores—and they were often mutually decided-upon gifts: an image of the Black Madonna painted on tin; a small wooden crucifix, Christ’s spear wound red and gaping; a Virgin Mary made of black Oaxacan clay whose outstretched arms ended in palms that could each hold a candle.
Even as the walls and shelves of the family home in Squaw Valley, as well as the second house they eventually purchased in San Francisco, filled with religious totems, my parents made it clear that while they respected what these things represented, there was nothing there in which one actually believed.
Which meant that in our family, one did not “go to” church, although we did enter a lot of them. One “visited,” as a tourist, to appreciate important cultural contributions.
And yet, on Christmas mornings, Dad dropped Handel’s Messiah onto the record player and turned the volume knob to ten.
“The kingdom of this world,” he’d sing, softly, “is become . . .”
Then, raising his voice along with the thunderous choir, he’d roar, “The kingdom of his Christ, and of his Christ! And he shall reign for-ever and e-e-ver!”
It was possible to revere the products of religion, I understood, while disdaining the practice of them.
enthusiastic devotion to a cause
A student, Julie, had arrived ten minutes early so she could claim her favorite spot near the window. I greeted her but didn’t meet her eyes, certain she’d see the doubt flaring there. As she settled in, I moved about the course room, aware of the melancholy night pulsing beyond the window, and far beyond, the Anasazi ruins, the Southwest’s mesas and sunsets, my sister’s Colorado home, to which I yearned to return. I straightened chairs that were already straight, tidied the tidy piles of objects on the tables known as “demo kits.” I usually enjoyed these minutes, quiet and settled before the three-hour bustle of the evening began, preparing for work that now and again I thought of as sacred, although Hubbard eschews the use of words that other religions have imbued with meaning. But this night I wished I could just leave—“blow,” Hubbard’s word for a “sudden, unexplained departure.”10
It had never occurred to me, in the five years I’d become more and more involved in Scientology, that what was needed was for me to be a zealot. No matter how enthralled I’d been while reading Hubbard’s materials or even following an insightful session with an auditor or other Scientology counselors, I’d been unable to believe, not deep down, that Scientology had all the answers. Well, Hubbard wouldn’t want one to say it that way; he would simply say he’d developed a “workable system.” But you were also supposed to believe it was the only workable system. How could that possibly be true?
And the squishy place included what had happened to Skip. Had I been as zealous as I could have been? Was there something else I could have done, should have done? He’d come to us terribly disturbed by whatever had gone on in that “conquering your fears” seminar. After just a few hours in his company, it had seemed to me that an introductory Scientology course wasn’t going to help him. I’d also wondered—a betrayal of everything I was supposed to believe—whether Scientology could help him at all.
Yet there was no room for that possibility. If the Tech didn’t work, it was the fault of its practitioner: Skip, or me. The Tech itself could not be lacking. To think otherwise would be being “reasonable.”11 It certainly would not be Keeping Scientology Working.
I crossed to the bookcase, which contained various manuals and dictionaries and many books by Hubbard. I pulled out the American Heritage. The thing I loved most about Scientology, the thing that had done much to convince me that Hubbard was not a charlatan, was what was known as Study Tech, especially Hubbard’s insistence that you define any word you don’t understand. You even define words you think you understand.
Julie was reading. The rest of the students had yet to arrive. I flipped to the back of the dictionary.
zealot: 1) One who is zealous, excessively so.
Irritating, when a definition uses a version of the word to define the word.
zealous: Filled or motivated by zeal, fervent.
Of course zeal would be part of zealot.
zeal: 1) Enthusiastic devotion to a cause, ideal, or goal, and tireless diligence in its furtherance.
Put like that, being a zealot didn’t seem so bad. What was wrong with “enthusiastic devotion”? How could one have a problem with “tireless diligence”? That’s what it took to be an effective actor, an effective guitarist, singer, writer—an effective anything.
For Hubbard, “clearing” a word includes examining its derivation, essential to full comprehension. The roots of zeal move from Middle English to Old French to Late Latin to the Greek, zelos. I moved my finger back to zealot and its second definition:
2) A fanatically committed person.
This definition began to close in on my emotional response, as did #3, spelled with a capital letter, Zealot:
3) A member of a Jewish movement in the first century a.d. that fought against Roman rule in Palestine as incompatible with strict monotheism.
So there was a religious aspect to it. That hadn’t been my imagination.
I thought I understood fanatical but just to be sure leafed to the page and ran a finger down that column, pausing to confirm that the innocuous-sounding “fan” descends from fanatic. I scanned the derivation:
faniticus, meaning of a temple, inspired by a god, mad.
I tapped my finger against the page. Interesting connections:
inspired by a god, mad
As if one necessarily leads to the other.
I could see that. The previous summer, as Skye and I had traipsed around the ruins of kivas in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon—that mysterious, compelling place—I couldn’t help but imagine the strange and even violent uses to which the Anasazi might have put those vast stone circles. Or how about Greek priestesses eating laurel and spinning prophecies, or Pentecostals speaking in tongues? Just the other night Skye and I’d watched, aghast yet amused, as Jerry Falwell preached and his followers screamed and writhed.
From the Latin fanum, temple
So, “fanatical” had some connection to being in a temple. Becoming inspired by a god to such a degree that one became mad. Which could lead to zealotry. Yes, I could see that.
And here I was, a Course Supervisor in what could be seen (although not by most Scientologists) as a temple: rooms where people studied the scriptures of L. Ron Hubbard.
And to some degree I was being told I needed to become “mad.” In order to be zealous.
“May I use that dictionary?” Julie stood nearby. “It’s my favorite.”
I closed and gave it to her. She held it to her chest. “Not just because it’s the one LRH says has the best derivations. It’s just clearer than Webster’s.” I watched as she returned to her seat and opened her course pack, a thick packet filled, as all course packs used in Scientology course rooms are, with materials written only by L. Ron Hubbard.
Looking at her bowed, zealous-looking head, I thought of a story she’d told me about recent Scientology counseling. Julie was among those taking courses at the Center who were also receiving auditing. Auditing usually involves uncovering “chains” of incidents: recalling events that are earlier, and similar, until you reach the original one that has caused the pain/grief/confusion.12
Toward the end of one session, Julie couldn’t seem to find an earlier incident, but Jessica kept asking, “Is there anything else?” and Julie finally found it.
When she was eight, she’d peed in a swimming pool!
Her face had reddened as she told me this transgression—in Scientology, called an “overt”—and the vast relief that flowed through her once she’d gotten it off her chest.13 “It was such a terrible overt! I was too embarrassed to even say it!”
I’d stared. I understood how it was an overt: “an intentionally committed harmful act committed in an effort to solve a problem” is one of Hubbard’s definitions, as is “that thing which you do which you aren’t willing to have happen to you.”14, 15 But a “terrible” one? I thought about having slept with not just one married man, but two of them, when I’d first landed in Los Angeles seven years before. I thought about staying in my parents’ San Francisco apartment, telling them, lying to them, that I was visiting friends, when in fact I was there to attend a Church rally, which they would have hated.
A few days after Julie had shared her “huge” overt with me, I mentioned it to Jessica, chuckling at how awful Julie thought it was to have peed in a pool. “I can think of a lot worse things,” I said—thinking, for instance, of my chronic doubt regarding Scientology.
Jessica shook her head and, almost, rolled her eyes. “That’s not the incident that’s at the bottom of that chain,” she said. “Julie just can’t confront the magnitude of what it really is. Not yet. But we’ll get there.”
This had shaken me. I’d liked the idea that, for some, peeing in a swimming pool might be as bad as one could get. But by now I was used to the idea that overts were pretty much at the bottom of everything; if you looked hard enough, you’d always find the bad or negative thing you’d done to create the bad/negative place you were in—or the reason that you wanted to leave the place you thought might be bad for you: such as Scientology.
As other students began to arrive and settle in with their course packs, I picked up the binder containing the roll call sheets and other student information, hoping, although I knew it was pointless, that Skip would be among those coming through the door.
He wasn’t. I called roll. I assigned students to do drills. I touched a shoulder here, leaned over a table to help with a question there. But I was barely in that room. I was a helium balloon in a high corner, jerking against the paint and plaster, wanting out.
But what would I do, where would I go? I couldn’t go to my parents. It wasn’t just that I was in my mid-thirties. They were virulently against my involvement in the Church. Sometimes I totally agreed with them, but time and again managed to let myself be persuaded that they simply didn’t want what was best for me. The shame of creeping home to them was unimaginable. Also, there wasn’t just this life to worry about. What would happen to the immo
rtal soul I’d always believed—and now, due to Scientology, was increasingly convinced—I had? The soul that would keep coming back, having to relearn and relive all the sad, violent, stupid, karmic lessons, lifetime after lifetime? Wasn’t I going to find the way out, through Scientology? How could I turn my back on all this certainty?
And what if I did just up and leave? Everyone knew that a “sudden departure” meant that the person had done something terribly wrong. If I blew, it could only be because I’d committed an overt, something so insidious and awful that, like Julie, I simply couldn’t examine it.
I actually groaned aloud. A student looked up at me. I did my best to smile.
if god exists, why is he such a bastard?
My father was raised Episcopalian, my mother Christian Scientist—words that meant nothing to me when I was young, and which were uttered in a tone of voice that indicated how unimportant this background was. I’m not sure how much churchgoing went on in Dad’s childhood, but the Bible was definitely part of Mother’s, as even a brief inspection of Mary Baker Eddy’s teachings indicates: As adherents of Truth, we take the inspired word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal life. Nevertheless, by the time my parents met, in 1944 at the University of California, Berkeley, neither seemed to have much use, other than the literary, for what might be found on the pages of the Old and New Testaments.
And yet there was the deep pleasure Dad took in Handel’s Messiah, and the collecting of religious images. So perhaps a residual Episcopalianism wavered in and out, as did some Christian Science. Well into her seventies, Mom told me that during sleepless, troubled nights she’d summon the Mary Baker Eddy creed she’d memorized as a child: There is no life, truth, intelligence, in matter. All is infinite Mind and infinite manifestation, for God is all-in-all. Spirit is immortal truth; matter is mortal error . . .
One morning when I was about eight, I told her I was sick and couldn’t possibly go to school. She sat on the edge of my bed and asked, “What happened yesterday?” She didn’t ask if something happened. She knew something had. I burst into tears: I’d been teased on the playground.