by Sands Hall
Weekdays, we attended classes. Weekends, the Peugeot stuffed with picnic supplies and camping gear, we headed out to the palm and five fingers of the Peloponnese. Sometimes I pulled a shawl over my head and, handing one to Tracy, paced the hills behind our tents. Tracy followed, chanting the long slow syllables I’d taught her that sounded to me ancient and religious. We were ancient Delphic priestesses. I was entranced by mystery and ritual, the focus and activity that being a priestess, a goddess, a martyr might involve.
“Stop it!” Mother said. “It’s too much like the real thing. You’re scaring me.”
I stopped. But, out of earshot, I went back to treading the smoky-green hillsides, chanting away.
On one of these trips, as we returned from visiting a ruin, a shepherd greeted us, waving his arms wildly.
“Kennedy bang!” he shouted, aiming a forefinger like a gun. “Jackie kaput!”
I had no idea what this meant. But from the look my parents gave each other, the world might have come to an end.
“Are you sure?” My father’s voice was high and tight.
“Kennedy bang!”
That night Mom and Dad took rooms in a hotel and left us there, sleeping, while they sat in a taverna and listened to the radio. Sipping sour retsina, they heard that Kennedy had indeed been assassinated, that his assassin had been assassinated, and that Johnson was now president. Jackie was not kaput, but her dress, covered in blood, had created a rumor that, in faraway Greece, was hard to disprove.
We’d never seen our mother cry. But that week, driving along Embassy Row, where flags of all nations had been lowered so far that their vast hems swept the earth, my mother wore dark glasses I didn’t know she owned, lenses so big they covered half her cheeks, which shone with wet. We were on our way to an Athens cathedral, where Tracy and I, part of Saint Catherine’s choir, were to sing carols we’d been practicing for a month.
“The holly and the ivy, when they are both full grown,” we cheerily caroled, while at the back of the cathedral my mother, wearing those huge and unfamiliar dark glasses, sat stunned with a grief that I didn’t understand was not for a man, but for a nation, for a forever-vanished direction of culture and history.
In December we headed to Crete. On Christmas morning, in our whitewashed hotel rooms, we each woke to find, tied to the iron bedsteads, red woolen Cretan bags absolutely stuffed with paperbacks: Penguins, Puffins, Peacocks, history, romance, fantasy—titles we’d chosen months before. December 25, 1963, found us in a Cretan cove, reading, while our parents napped, the Aegean lapping at their ankles.
he was kind of a nutcase
The next evening, when Skip wasn’t in the course room, I figured he and Ed were tackling his demons. But he didn’t show up the next night, or the next. It was a week later that Jessica called me into her office. While she hadn’t mentioned Skip, I couldn’t help but wonder if her concerns about my being “too gentle,” about my lack of zealotry, were connected to him. So after that evening’s stint in the course room, I stopped by Ed’s office.
He sat at his desk amid piles of folders. Ed was not only Executive Director, he was also Ethics Officer, Registrar, Case Supervisor (the person who reviews auditing sessions), and, as needed, auditor. As the Center became more successful, others would be hired to fill these positions, but for now, Ed covered a lot of posts.
The thick legal-sized folders piled on his large desk would hold notes taken during auditing sessions, as well as write-ups regarding Ethics Handlings. According to Hubbard’s ideas about ethics, “When one is ethical it is something he does by himself by his own choice.”23 So it’s not necessarily about wrongdoing (although, often enough in Scientology, it very much is); Ethics Handlings may have to do with solving chronic fights with a husband, a crisis at work, a parent virulently against Scientology—for that latter reason alone, I’d sat in the office of many an Ethics Officer.
“It’s about Skip,” I said. Even thinking about him made my forehead clammy. “He hasn’t been on course for a week. Not since that night you took him here to talk.”
“Okay. And your concern is?”
“Three students, students who’ve passed their Training Routines, couldn’t get through TR0 with him. You couldn’t!”
Ed nodded, looking weary. I forged on. I was feeling, I realized, kind of zealous. “That facing-your-fears seminar he did clearly traumatized him. Doing the TR with him, I got a good sense of what it might be like inside his mind. I don’t see how he’s even walking! Isn’t this the sort of thing the Tech is supposed to handle?”
“He was kind of a nutcase,” Ed said. I must have looked dismayed. “Oh, don’t be naïve, Sands! We’re a mission. We can’t deal with the kind of case he was evidencing. I think we routed him to the Advanced Org.”
“Oh, no,” I said. At Ed’s surprised face, I scrambled to clarify: “Of course, the AO is great, but I think he came to us, to the Center, because we make Scientology approachable. AO is so vast—I mean, it takes weeks to get used to all the corridors and floors—and everyone is so efficient. I’m afraid he might get lost. Did anyone take him there?”
“Sands, we don’t have time to escort people hither and yon.”
Ashamed of my silence, I stayed silent. We both knew Ed went to great lengths to have drinks with, dinner with, and certainly to “escort” anywhere they wanted to go those who were interested in services at the Center—if they had money. But, I realized, Skip must not have been rich enough, or important enough, to warrant that kind of care.
“Will you check into it? Please?”
“I’ll do that, Sands.” He clicked his pen and scribbled a note.
I knew he wouldn’t.
The new-carpet smell still lingered in the hallway, and I held my breath against it as I descended the stairs. I was eager to get home, to talk to Skye about it. As I unlocked the car door, a huge truck lumbered by. I had to wonder: Where was Skip? Had he made it to the Advanced Org? Would his desperation force him into that big blue building?
I doubted it.
I thought about Ed saying I was naïve for thinking that auditing might solve Skip’s problem. But what about Having the correct technology. Knowing the technology. Knowing it is correct . . .
Was he saying that in Skip’s case, it wasn’t going to work?
Yet what else had he said? There is no “in this case”!
What if I—what if Scientology—actually made Skip’s situation worse?
I’d end up having this internal argument many times over the next two years. But I knew that if I headed down the well-worn trough that was me doubting Scientology, things got messy. I’d no desire to land in yet another meeting with an Ethics Officer, going over and over and over how if I’d just face the fact that my parents were Suppressive Persons, and if I would just “disconnect” from them, I’d finally have real gains.
As I turned the key in the ignition of my car, I imagined Skip in his, hose laced from exhaust pipe through duct-taped window, engine running.
nothing better to be
During those months in Europe, Mother took hundreds of photographs, but there’s one moment she didn’t capture.
Dad has decided that the tents need washing. We’re camped by a lake, and he instructs Tad and me to pull them out to a distant float—the idea is that the movement through the water, there and back, after which Dad will spread them on the grass to dry, will clean them. Tad and I shove and push and drag the first of the tents out to the float. It’s the tent my parents sleep in, made of yellow canvas. As I hang from the platform, admiring the tent’s strange goldenness, Tad hoists himself up onto the float and, with a wild banshee cry, launches himself into the middle of the vast yardage spread out on the surface of the water. The canvas billows up around him, taking him in like a kind of shroud.
He is going to drown. I see it as clearly as I see the sun in the sky.
There’s no way he’s going to be able to fight his way out of that tangle of heavy golden cloth.
But he’s kept his arms outstretched as he jumped, and the fist of one stays above all those soggy layers. With that one hand he somehow—it seems to take hours, I don’t know what to do to help—bats his way out of the swirling fabric. Looking terrified, he pulls his chest onto the float and hangs there, gasping.
“You could have died!” I say, uselessly.
“I know.” Panting, he scrabbles all the way onto the float and flops over on his back. Mom and Dad have no idea what’s happened. They’re sitting at a little table on the shore, having wine. At their feet, Tracy and Brett splash in shallow water.
My brother’s eyes are closed, his chest heaves. Droplets scattered across his skin glitter in the sun; his hair is a mass of Dionysian curls. He seems to me absolutely immortal.
in the summer of 1964, while we were all living in a flat in London, my parents put Tad on a ship bound across the Atlantic. He’d be picked up in Boston by a friend of a friend none of us had ever met, who would drive him to Phillips Academy, Andover, where he’d enroll in a school neither he nor his parents had ever even visited. He was fourteen.
I understood even then that the high school Tad would have otherwise attended, in the small town of Truckee, ten miles away from Squaw Valley, was, as Dad put it, “lousy.” There’d been some talk of boarding schools, which seemed to me a combination of a Dickensian orphanage and a jolly sleepover. Still, it’s difficult to comprehend what prompted Mom and Dad to send their teenage son across the ocean alone. Precocious though Tad had already proven himself to be, he’d been brought up in a forest, playing in a creek that meandered through a meadow. He’d seldom worn a blazer, much less a tie.
But his IQ was extraordinarily high (which he’d been told); he was cocky and confident. At fourteen he’d not only flirted with the maid in Athens, he may even have joined her in her bed. These had to be among the things that allowed Mom and Dad to walk off the gangplank and wave goodbye from the dock. The decision was no doubt prompted by the time period, as well as literary examples: in many novels, children are sent to boarding school. But I’ve come to believe it’s an example of how our parents thought of marriage. Marriage was the priority. Children were to be cherished, given opportunities, encouraged in the direction of their ambitions and dreams, but what mattered most was the unit that was husband and wife.
However Mother may have felt about watching Tad sail away, I do know that a few weeks later, as we were camped beside the River Shannon and she was combing a kerosene-like substance called Seta-Seta through her daughters’ hair to get rid of the lice we’d contracted by playing with kids on the beach in Spain, she said it was time to go home. Within a few weeks, the Peugeot, covered with tarps, was lashed to the deck of a steamer bound for America, and we trundled onboard with our luggage.
By the time that car was back across the country and we were ensconced again in the A-frame family temple, I’d become aware that ours was an unusual family. Whatever we’d been before that eighteen-month journey, we were more of it now. My parents were extraordinary people and had an exceptional marriage. My brother was precocious, brilliant, destined to go far. I was, too, of course: I was a Hall!
I did not see this as a burden. It was a mantle, a crown. It took me a long time to realize how this led me to perceive others as lesser beings. (It took me even longer to realize that many families think that they and their children are unique and extraordinary.) I just wandered through life deeply conscious that, simply because of my surname, I was to accomplish something significant.
one evening the Porters arrived bearing their own bottle of Tanqueray, making no secret of the fact they couldn’t bear to drink the Lucky brand gin supplied by my father. This led to a discussion I found fascinating: how to order more than one gin and tonic. One doesn’t ask for “three gin and tonics” but, rather, “three gins and tonic.”
At the end of the evening, as they departed, Mr. Porter lifted the green bottle from the counter, saying, “We’re not wasting our Tanqueray on people who don’t care about the quality of their gin!”
The next morning I was told they were Republicans. Along with being racist and always taking the side of business over the individual, I understood that Republicans were greedy and cared about unimportant things like designer clothes and fancy houses.
“Imagine spending so much money on a bottle of booze!” Dad said.
Other parental perspectives were increasingly clear, including the idea that “natural is best.” One should wear only cotton, especially for underwear; other fabrics, made of petroleum products, make you sweat and smell. Hair should be worn long and not styled. Makeup was for loose women and to be avoided. One did not get sick. Television was a waste of time; books provided all needed entertainment. Movies didn’t slot into our growing-up years, probably because the sorts of films that came to Squaw Valley were of the popular variety, rather than the art-house sort. Theater was an excellent source of culture, and now and again our parents took us to San Francisco, four hours away, to see some plays (these were precious excursions), but musicals were for underachievers. Tennis was a terrific game, but only morons watched football; they also drank beer. Wine, on the other hand, was for artists.
I shoved my whole being into these notions, donning them like the most fashionable and well-fitting of jackets. It didn’t occur to me to wonder what my parents’ friends, Republican or otherwise, might think of those crosses draped around my mother’s unreligious neck. Of her long skirts and bare feet. Of the politics reflected by the voices of Odetta and Lead Belly, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, which Dad blasted from the speakers. Halls were artists, Halls were bohemian, Halls were exceptional.
There was nothing better to be than a Hall.
she went clear last lifetime!
Skye would be wondering why I was late getting home. Even so, I went out of my way to drive by the Advanced Org, a huge set of buildings off Fountain Avenue, painted, inexplicably, a deep blue. As vast as the complex was (it had been a hospital before being purchased in the 1960s by the Church), everything at the Advanced Org was run on the same “standard” schedule as the Center. Which meant that even if I did act on my vague plan of heading inside to see if Skip had ever checked in, there’d be no one on post to ask. The staff, most of whom were members of the Sea Org, would be sleeping.
At the time, my knowledge of the Sea Org was vague, a lack of curiosity that appalls me now. I knew that it involved signing a contract that committed you to work for the Church for very little money, and to do so for a billion years. A billion years!
I drove slowly up L. Ron Hubbard Way, taking in the vast sprawl of blue buildings and pondering, not for the first time, that if you engaged with a religion where you understood, immediately, that there were members who’d agreed to join for a billion years, you were indoctrinated into that belief system: you’d lived before, and you’d live again.
Now, now, I scolded myself—as “indoctrination” sounded like a criticism, and criticism meant you had hidden transgressions against the person or thing you were criticizing. Other religions indoctrinate their believers: Hindus are raised with the understanding that what they did in previous lifetimes dictates who they are in this one. Catholics grow up with the idea of original sin and the comfort of heaven. American Indians know the earth is to be cherished. So why, where Scientology was concerned, did it seem so manipulative? As if, once the idea of a million lifetimes was implanted in our psyches, we’d be open to and easily swallow other ideas.
For instance (a thought I had, and pushed away, often), what if the Sea Org was just a way for the Church to get a lot of worker bees? While they might be in their “berthings” now, they’d soon be back on post. By 9:00 a.m., the course room would be full of students studying and Course Supervisors supervising; auditors would be auditing and Case Supervisors supervisin
g those sessions; Ethics Officers doing Ethics Handlings, Registrars registering (or, as it was called, regging), and, I supposed, janitors janitoring. Perhaps Hubbard’s intention here, as people insisted was true elsewhere in his Church, was altruistic: to give purpose to those who otherwise might toil away in this world, day after day, without hope or purpose or meaning. Scientology did offer purpose, and it did diminish hopelessness—you were saving the planet. That is, if you believed that Hubbard’s version of “saving” was real, and achievable. Which clearly some did—enough to sign on for a billion years of such an effort. And which I seemed to, as well; hadn’t I signed on to work nights and, increasingly, weekends, at a Scientology mission?
Was this how they pulled you in? Would I wind up joining the Sea Org?
I shuddered. Never, ever, ever. I could imagine a few hours a day, for maybe a few years, devoted to the Church, but twelve-plus hours a day for not only this lifetime, but for millions of them? If you signed that contract, you not only gave up all worldly possessions; you gave them up to Scientology. Your saving accounts, your house—even, to some degree, your family. If your spouse or parents didn’t approve of your joining, you had to get them to either join or accept that you had, or agree not to see them: to “disconnect.”
Sea Org members lived simply. Hubbard’s word is “monastic.” When I imagined where they slept, what came to mind was a dreadful combination of catacombs and a college dorm. When people joined, they accepted, along with everything else, that their weekly salary would be based on their Org’s overall stats, which meant that they might not be paid at all. Although hadn’t I joined the Center under a similar financial arrangement? Jessica had been persuasive: We were near Rodeo Drive! We’d attract upstats! The stats would eventually be up too, and so would my salary.
As I gazed up and down L. Ron Hubbard Way, fretting about Skip, I thought about an encounter a few weeks previous, when Skye and I were out to dinner at a nearby Mexican restaurant. As we were being led to our booth, we passed a couple sitting very close together at a small table. Before them was a single wide-rimmed margarita glass with two straws. Also before them was a paperback. They recognized Skye, and as he paused to speak with them, I realized they were sharing that margarita. They turned the book over as we chatted; on its lurid and shiny cover, a humanoid held two blasting lasers. It was Battlefield Earth, the first volume of Hubbard’s sci-fi series. I’d been told that in these volumes LRH outlined the history of the planet according to him, that they hinted at the confidential materials one could learn only at the upper levels of the Bridge (something about past lives and intergalactic wars that led to humans being imprisoned on the penal colony known as Earth). I hadn’t read the book. I had no interest in reading it. One didn’t waste time on sci-fi; it wasn’t literary. Also I didn’t want to know about the supposed history of the religion—which I wondered, even then, if Hubbard had simply invented, as an author does a story.