Flunk. Start.

by Sands Hall

  Skye said goodbye to the couple. “Sea Org,” he told me, as we slid into a booth. “They’re on ‘family time’—they’ve got just an hour before they have to be back on post. So that’s got to be a virgin margarita, and I bet it and that basket of chips are pretty much all they can afford.”

  I studied them, sipping my own non-virgin margarita, and realized they were reading the novel simultaneously, one waiting for the other to finish the page before turning it. By the time our vast platters of enchiladas arrived—which I wanted to just give to them—they were shaking the last of the chips out of the basket. With a cheerful wave, they headed back to their respective jobs inside the big blue buildings of the Advanced Org.

  Thinking about Skip, and even though I knew that it was too late, in every way, to check on him, I pulled over and, from across the street, studied AO’s sprawling structure. A few windows shined squares of light, but mostly it was dark, hulking—in a word, ominous.

  But there was no reason I should find it ominous. My experiences in the Church, and with Scientologists, had been pleasant enough. So why did I feel, often, that there was something menacing? Why was there such relief when I was away from it all?

  I knew. Where there was so much smoke, how could there not be some fire?

  But I simply did not want to look at that. Not only did I want my actions to have validity, not only did I want my choice to have been a correct one, not only did I not want my parents to be right again, I couldn’t face all I would lose if I left. In addition to years of hoping the wrong thing would turn out to be the right thing (a version of throwing good money after bad), I’d lose dear friendships, the man I loved, and a certainty, much of the time, that I was doing good things in and for the world. A song I’d written ostensibly for Jamie was really about the order I felt I’d found within his religion: What a port to come to, after such a storm. The lyrics addressed how scared and sad and adrift I’d been. My sails lost, the steering gone . . . I didn’t want to be there ever again.

  Directly across the street, two-thirds of the way up the AO’s tall central building, illuminated letters twelve feet high spelled out Scientology. Above the letters, attached to the very top of the structure, the Church’s eight-armed cross, stuffed with a thousand bulbs, spewed kilowatts into the night sky. So far, I’d been able to largely avoid stepping inside that building; I did most of my studying at Celebrity Center. But the previous year, I’d been in the course room for a few weeks, taking the Course Supervisor Course. During those weeks, one of the Course Supervisors had been unbelievably young. At one point, perhaps because I was engaged in studying her instead of my materials, she picked up my course pack and spot-checked the bulletin I was reading. As she stood next to my seat at the table, her eyes were exactly level with my own. A gleaming braid hung over either shoulder. She wore a plaid dress, belted, that made her look as if she’d stepped out of a British boarding school. Her self-possession was absolute. I was so stunned—she was all of twelve—that I stumbled as I started to define the word she had her finger on. “Flunk,” she said, with not a whit of scold and no particular friendliness either. “Start.” She handed me my course pack and walked on.

  My face was hot. I seldom flunked. The student next to me whispered, “She went Clear last lifetime! Her parents are Sea Org, and she knows she was too. She attested to last-lifetime Clear when she was seven!”

  I could hardly take my eyes off the efficient, sturdy little thetan-in-a-body.

  “She was also Course Supervisor last lifetime!” the student whispered, and nodded at my amazed face. “At Saint Hill! She had to take the Course Supervisor Course again, here at AO, but she zipped through it—and here she is!”

  “Here she is,” I’d whispered, impressed, and done the math. By this time I knew that the definitions of Clear include “has no vicious reactive mind and can operate at total mental capacity.”24 She did seem to be operating with a lot of mental capacity. If her spirit had “dropped a body,” as Scientologists put it, before taking up residence in another one more or less twelve years ago, that previous lifetime could have been in the seventies, when Scientology was booming, especially at Saint Hill, the foundational Org in Britain. It was indeed possible, if you believed in past lifetimes—and Dianetics—that she’d been audited to Clear in her previous one.

  with some fury, I started the car, pulled out into the dark, quiet street, and headed home. What if it was a bunch of balderdash? What had Mr. Porter called it, so long ago, when Dad had talked about jerking me to my feet in that Mexico City cathedral? “Claptrap.” Good word, with that sense of being snared.

  As usual, Skye had turned on the lights in the living room in welcome. The front window glowed warmly. I spurred the car up the short driveway.

  “Muffin!” He stood at the top of the steps, arms raised, the golden light from the open door spilling all around him. “You’re late! Everything okay?”

  The first time Skye called me muffin I literally choked. Halls didn’t employ terms of endearment; they were corny, used by jerks and sentimentalists. Sometimes Skye even called me babe, which had the simultaneous effect of making me feel beautifully sexy and as if I were riding pillion on the back of a motorcycle. I’d grown to love the words, the affection that washed over me as he said them. Tonight, however, I winced. If I lived with someone else, not a Scientologist, I wouldn’t have to worry whether “muffin” was a good thing to be called.

  “You don’t have to turn on every light in the entire house,” I said, slamming the car door. “They do the same thing with that huge stupid cross on top of AO. It wastes so much electricity!”

  I trudged up the stairs and brushed past him. I did this all the time, taking out on Skye the anger I felt at myself for feeling out-maneuvered: There were all these reasons I should leave the Church, but I was simply unable to take that step.

  And I’d just called the cross on top of the Advanced Org “stupid.” Criticism = overt. What had I done wrong? There had to be something.

  “Did something happen at the mission tonight? Are you okay?”

  Was it Skip? Not being zealous enough?

  I began to weep. I headed to the kitchen and dragged the dishtowel from the handle of the refrigerator.

  “Sweetheart! You left today all happy. Now we’re back to this again.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing! My life is a mess. I am. How did I come to be here?”

  Sitting next to Skye on the couch, dabbing at my eyes with the dishcloth, I snuffled out my sorrow, or as much of it, at the time, that I could understand, or that I could bring myself to examine. By this time, I’d been in the acting companies of both the Oregon and Colorado Shakespeare Festivals; when I first arrived in Los Angeles, seven years before, I’d landed guest-starring roles on various sitcoms. While living in New York, I’d sung my songs in various venues, been part of a band. Just two years before, I’d had a summer season with Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. What had happened? My agents seemed to have forgotten about me; I never went out on auditions. For months, I hadn’t picked up my guitar.

  “But you’re writing,” Skye said. “Isn’t that what you want to do?”

  But the novel was hopeless. I’d described it to my father, and he’d asked why everyone had to die. But weren’t happy endings corny?

  “Anyway,” I sobbed, “what makes me think I can be a writer? That’s what Dad does. He and Tad. Or at least Tad used to.” Which made me cry even harder. “I don’t know what I’m doing!”

  Even as Skye’s eyes were sympathetic, I knew that he was utterly certain about where he, himself, stood. He’d drilled those TRs hundreds of times, and his were impeccable: He was OT III, and a highly trained, Class VIII auditor. Here was all this wisdom, and all these friends, and if I left, I’d have to leave Skye, and how could I?

  I found a dry spot on the dishtowel and blew my nose. “I appreciate Scientology, and I lov
e you, but I just think this isn’t what I should be doing.”

  “Is it what you feel you shouldn’t be doing? Or is this about your parents?”

  Skye had asked this many times. As he’d also said, more than once, that if we hadn’t met as Jamie and I were divorcing, I’d have drifted away from Scientology. “You think you want it,” he said. “But I think you want it because I want it, or because you think you ‘should’ want it. You have to figure it out for yourself, muffin.”

  It took me years to see how right he was, how I tried to replace my need to do what my parents wanted with a need to do what Jamie and then Skye—and, by powerful extension, Scientology—wanted.

  The phone in his study rang. It was almost midnight, and with a little grunt of surprise, he pulled his arm from around me and crossed into his study to pick it up. I sniffed, listening. It was clear from his end of the conversation that it was Katey, the Registrar at Celebrity Center and a bit of a friend, talking about the big rally at the Sheraton that Saturday, very important that all Scientologists be there. Skye and I knew about it. We’d both received, as part of the ubiquitous, continual Scientology mailings, huge glossy postcards urging us to attend this very important event: Release of Vital New Information!

  It seemed to me that “vital new information” was always being released. It got old. And so many trees died in the making of those endless mailings.

  Oops. Criticism. Overt.

  “Got it, Katey,” Skye was saying. “Yes, I know, but we’ve got other plans. I understand! We’ll be there if we can.”

  “No!” I whispered. I hated those rallies. There’d always been celebrations of things like LRH’s birthday, which Scientologists were encouraged to attend, though Skye and I rarely did. But since Hubbard’s death the previous year, and the ascendancy of someone named David Miscavige, the events had increased in number and glitz and fervency. Staff at various Orgs were pressured into endless “regging.” It didn’t matter if you already had money on account—write another check, take out another credit card, you’d always need more auditing, always another course. Sometimes the Reg called to beg that we get anyone who’d expressed the remotest interest in Scientology to sign up for a course. Someone starting a course would mean a tick upward. Upstat, good. Downstat, very bad.

  In one of Hubbard’s policy letters about management, he writes that when someone’s doing fine on their post, they shouldn’t be hauled off to do work that isn’t in their bailiwick. Yet here were senior members of various Orgs calling late at night with these kinds of messages, to prove something to someone higher up the chain of command. Even in my course room at the Center, I’d begun to feel the pressure: more courses completed, more pages read, more words looked up. The stats had to be up, up, up, every week, or it meant something wasn’t being done standardly. Which meant overts. Out-ethics. If a stat was down, there was a reason: something the person on post had done, or had not done.

  And, for the first time, I’d begun to have a creepy feeling that it was no longer okay to skip these big events.

  Still: “I’m not going!” I whispered urgently to Skye. “I hate those things!”

  He nodded and listened to another burst of talking at the other end of the phone line. “Yes, I can do that,” he said. “Sure. Sure. I can make a couple of calls for you.”

  He hung up, and as he punched some numbers into his phone, said, “It’s Thursday night. Stats are due. Katey’s assigned herself the condition of Emergency, and she’s on Step One of the formula: Promote. She wants to make twenty-five of these calls before midnight and asked me to make a couple for her.”

  As he stopped dialing and held the receiver to his ear, the phone on my own desk rang. Puzzled, I let the machine pick up.

  “Hi, Sands,” Skye said, grinning as his voice simultaneously emerged from my answering machine. “There’s a big rally at the Sheraton on Saturday night. We’ve been urged to put in an appearance. Love you, babe! Cheer up!”

  He hung up the phone in his study and walked across the living room to my desk, picked up my phone, and punched some numbers. His phone rang, and his machine picked up.

  “Hi, Skye,” he said, “this is Skye. Big rally at the Sheraton on Saturday. Hope the music’s going well, and say hi to that sweet muffin of yours!”

  He replaced the receiver and spread his hands in a big shrug. “I said I’d make a couple of calls. A couple of calls I have made.”

  I had to laugh. I stood up and threw my arms around him.

  you do know c. s. lewis was a christian?

  The Church labeled my parents Suppressive Persons because they didn’t want me to be a Scientologist. But what if my parents were simply . . . right? They’d been right about a lot of things. Other families might have cookies or ice cream for dessert; we were encouraged to have an apple and cheddar cheese. We were not allowed to have soda: “It’ll rot your teeth.” Nor were we taken to see Disney’s adaptations of fairy tales.

  “If his silly pictures of those great old stories get in your head, you won’t concoct your own,” Mother said. “That’s what an imagination is for.”

  Even then I saw her point. I usually did. The perspectives and accompanying regulations seemed not only obvious but, simply, correct. Yet not obsessive: The page that held recipes for brownies in our Joy of Cooking was splotched with melted butter and chocolate. The large freezer, which Mother had painted Day-Glo sixties orange, was stocked with fish sticks and chicken potpies for the nights when she and Dad were out. Sometimes there was even ice cream, though mostly we were encouraged to put honey and raisins over the yogurt Mother made from scratch.

  I wanted very much to follow these edicts; I wanted to be as good as possible. My sister Tracy didn’t seem to care—she galloped on her long legs through the Valley, eating and wearing what she wanted (I was pudgy, heading toward fat, and was comfortable in things that looked like caftans). Tad, on the other hand, seemed to court trouble. A top-notch skier and an excellent tennis player, he was also a terrible sport—although throwing a tennis racquet seemed kind of splendid when he did it. He read voraciously, especially intrigued by matters sexual and violent. He didn’t care about our parents’ perspective on what did and did not comprise literature. Comic books may have been the work of the literary devil, but he bought them, and threw in Mad Magazine as well. His first summer home from Andover, he flirted with a friend of mine who was spending the night and managed to coax her—how? a grin, a dark gaze—into his bedroom. Even before he applied for a permit, he drove a car, far too fast. Marijuana was entering the picture, and he inhaled all he could; he tried all drugs, and drink too. My goody-two-shoes abstinence fueled more teasing.

  One afternoon, Mother set up easels in the living room so that Tracy and I could finger-paint. The living room’s windows framed Squaw Peak and the Rockpile. As we swirled paint around on pieces of butcher paper and Mother worked away at some hand-sewing, Tad clambered over the railing of the porch outside the window, yanked open the door, and threw himself on the couch.

  “I could have died!”

  He pointed at the Rockpile, which from that angle filled three-quarters of the window. “I was climbing up this really tricky section and I slipped! If I’d fallen, I’d have tumbled all the way down. Probably broken my neck!”

  We peered out at the massive slope of steep granite and looked back at him, awed.

  “My shirt saved me!” he said. “Look!”

  We clustered around him, examining the tear in the corner of a shirttail, stopped from ripping all the way open by double-stitch binding. “That hooked over this piece of rock. It held me until I got my feet under me. If it had torn all the way . . . !”

  Mother paled. “Don’t you ever—” she began. Tad grinned, and for a moment it seemed she couldn’t help but smile back. But she mastered the impulse. “—ever, ever do such a thing ever again.”

  He pulled my h
air. As I squealed, “Mom, tell him don’t!” he ran out of the room.

  Even though I revered him, it was a relief when he headed back to Andover, although he was also in chronic trouble there: taking illegal trips off campus, refusing to wear the required tie to chapel. When he was called out for this latter offense, it turned out he was wearing a tie, but had arranged it under his sweater and blazer in such a way as to appear as if he was not. He reveled in the resultant fuss.

  He loved rock ’n’ roll, while, predictably, folk music was my métier—the albums I chose to rotate on our turntable included Peter, Paul, and Mary; the Weavers; Joan Baez; and, increasingly, Judy Collins. Dad bought me a Joan Baez songbook, and, for my fourteenth birthday, a Martin guitar (a hard-up UC Berkeley student sold it to him for $175, including its hard case). But while my parents approved of my choice of music they were concerned about my taste in literature. I was still obsessed by Regency romances, and had recently devoured C. S. Lewis’s space trilogy. This made me return to his Narnia series, which I thought of as advanced fairy tales, anthologies of which lined shelves in my bedroom.