Flunk. Start.

by Sands Hall

  “You do know C. S. Lewis was a Christian,” my father told me one evening.

  “What?!”

  “An Anglican. Those novels of his are all Christian allegories.” He closed the tome he was reading about the history of Mexico and leaned back, arms folded behind his head. “Take that Aslan you love so much—he’s just a stand-in for Jesus.”

  “He is not!” This was outrageous. We didn’t approve of religion! How could it possibly show up in a children’s book my parents sanctioned?

  “Sands. He’s sacrificed on an altar—”

  “It’s a slab of stone!”

  “What do you think an altar is? But all right, a slab of stone. Aslan allows himself to be sacrificed, right? He lets himself be captured and shaved and dragged to that stone?”

  “Daddy!” I could see where he was heading. It was appalling.

  “You see how Christlike that is? Although, frankly—and this is very interesting—there’s lots of argument about the reasons for Jesus’ death. You should read Robert Graves’s King Jesus. There’s no doubt it was political. Anyway, you tell me. What happens after they tie Aslan to the rock and kill him?”

  I had my chin pulled in and down, glaring at him. “The mice nibble the ropes that hold him to the slab and he gets up again.”

  “The Resurrection! You see?”

  “Nooo! I love this book!”

  “I’m just telling you that it’s got a deeper purpose, Sands, and there are many other books that are deep too. Look at all the books in this house! Stop reading fluff!”

  He was right, and I knew he was. Over the years I’ve thought many times of that conversation, which introduced me to the notion of symbols and metaphors, of deeper reading, and to the idea that there are other versions of the life of Jesus than the one gleaned from Christmas carols and Handel’s Messiah.

  Over dinner one night, Mom and Dad discussed the literary merits of the Bible, and told my brother and me that they’d signed us up for a class at a local church. If we memorized the names of the books of the New Testament, we got a free Bible. MatthewMarkLukeJohnTheActs, I can still say, and I remember holding, and intending to someday read, the white leatherette Bible that was the reward.

  “Abridged,” Dad said, sniffing in disapproval.

  the high school in Truckee had not improved, and both my sister Tracy and I, like Tad, enrolled at private ones, leaving Brett the only one at home. But not for long. Winter of his junior year at Andover, Tad dove headfirst out of a third-story dorm window into what he thought was a snow bank but turned out to be a stone bench. I didn’t hear about it until a week later, when I called home from boarding school. Tad answered the phone and told me he’d been expelled.

  “Expelled!”

  Mom took the phone and explained that he’d exacerbated the school’s fear and dudgeon about the accident by sneaking off-campus the following weekend to visit his girlfriend Dana at Foxcroft. As a result, he’d been, as they say in British novels, “sent down.”

  “It was very stupid of him,” Mom said, “diving out of a high window! He bled all over the place! Head wounds. He had to have stitches. He was very silly, and very lucky.”

  that summer, dana, daughter of those friends who’d brought Tanqueray to a dinner party and taken it away again, moved into Tad’s bedroom. My parents had no problem with their sleeping together: sex was a beautiful thing, there was no reason to forbid it. Their room was directly over my head, and their lovemaking enthusiastic. Sometimes I headed out to sleep on the living room couch.

  Blair Fuller, editor of The Paris Review and one of a growing group of San Francisco friends who summered in the Valley, decided to make a movie using his Super 8 camera. He cast eighteen-year-old Tad as Dionysus. The plot largely consists of a naked Dionysus being chased by furies and sylphs, goddesses and nymphs, all played by our parents’ neighbors and friends. Managing to escape their clutches, on he nakedly runs.

  Filming took place in various outdoor venues in the Valley. In the climactic scene, Dionysus skates, barefoot, down a long slide of snow that even in midsummer could be found in a shadowed ravine high on Squaw Peak. At the bottom of that long tongue of ice, he crashes and dies. All the women, dressed in flowing black, file past his corpse, wailing and beating their breasts. In the final moments of the film, the maenads drape a respectful fig leaf over Dionysus’s naked penis.

  I watched Mother triumphantly track down a bottle of grape leaves on her pantry shelves, purchased a few years before when, freshly back from Greece, she intended dolmas to be something she made and served at dinner parties. She carefully unrolled the marinated leaves until she found the largest one, which she handed over to Blair to use in that final scene.

  He was their eldest child. Their only son, my only brother. We adored him.

  imagine a plane

  By Saturday night, both Skye and I’d come around to thinking that it might be best, after all, to attend that rally at the Sheraton. I even wondered aloud if someone might walk around with a clipboard and a list of names checking off who appeared and who didn’t.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Skye said. “Anyway, there are thousands of Scientologists at those things.” But as he turned away, I thought he looked a little concerned.

  This was new: this sense of being observed, assessed, counted. It felt like evidence of the reputation that had always surrounded Scientology—an authoritarian, thought-policing horror—which was why I had resisted engaging with it for so long, even when I was intrigued. But my studies and my friends had brought me to believe that the Church was, at its heart, full of good and kind and sane people. However. Skye and I knew that you could commit an overt by not doing something just as well as by doing something, so there we were, zipping along the freeway, heading toward Universal City, where the Sheraton’s high-rising glass glittered with the gold and pink of sunset.

  We parked and made our way through silver streamers, laminated posters, and drifting metallic balloons to a vast ballroom. Amid all the glitter and fuss, I felt like a country bumpkin. I waved at Jessica, who was there with Ed. I hugged a number of friends. I even looked around in the futile hope that I’d see Skip, loping over to tell me about the great auditing he’d had, how he was feeling so much better, that he’d be back on course soon! Synthesized music swelled, simultaneously ethereal and martial, reflecting the dramatic space operas of previous lifetimes, the possibility of which enthralled many in the Church. People shouted over the music, adding to the noise. Photographs the size of Cadillacs flanked the stage: in one, Hubbard jauntily wore his captain’s cap; in the other, he stared out at the gathering crowd, stern but affectionate.

  “I hate those huge photos,” I muttered to Skye. “Like he’s some kind of guru.”

  Skye didn’t reply. He’d been a Scientologist for more than a decade, had trekked quite some distance along the Bridge to Total Freedom. Maybe LRH was a guru—after all, what was a guru but a spiritual leader who shared and taught a way to be enlightened? That we believed in Hubbard’s way was, presumably, why we were all here. I looked around to see if I could spot anyone sneaking through the crowd with a clipboard, ticking off names. With so many people milling about, it did seem, as Skye had said, unlikely.

  Taking up a great deal of the stage was a set piece made up of a huge O within which squatted a large T. Interlaced, they more or less created the Greek letter theta—θ—a reminder to all of us gathered in that huge room of the lovely meanings Hubbard attached to that word, including “reason, stability, happiness, cheerful emotion, persistence.”25 And, of course, it was there to remind us of a good Scientologist’s ultimate goal: Operating Thetan! OT!

  More music and swells of applause as members of the Sea Org took the stage to speak about how well Scientology was doing worldwide. White blazers sporting rows of medals, faces shining under billed caps, they pointed to graph after graph that slid across
the screen: All stats up! This same event, we were told, was being replicated in a hundred upstat hotels around the world. Pictures of these palaces flashed on the screen, accompanied by waves of applause: Cairo, London, Sydney, New York City, Amsterdam. Soon, David Miscavige, the new leader of the Church, would be speaking at Flag, the “flagship” Org in Florida, and what he had to say would be beamed, live, to every other Org around the entire planet!

  Wild sustained applause!!!!!

  Standing at the back of the room, I clapped without enthusiasm. Skye gestured toward seats, but I shook my head. I might be present, but I wasn’t going to join in.

  A well-known actor took the stage. More applause, which he eventually held out both hands to subdue. He waited until the entire room was quiet. There were a few laughs, silenced. Admiration gathered. Look at those TRs! Look at the way he can control the entire room! He stood for another few moments without speaking or moving. Then he took a breath and leaned to the microphone.

  “Imagine a plane.”

  Instantly, concocted by all of us, planes hovered. For some reason, mine looked like Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose, big and clunky and wonderful (albeit a failure as a plane).

  Then the actor shook his head. “No,” he said. “All wrong. Imagine a plain.”

  And he moved his arms in a wide gesture, showing us how vast the plain was that we were to imagine.

  The planes poofed into nothing.

  There was a little stunned silence, and then the whole room laughed. Look at that Operating Thetan manipulating our minds like that! More applause, and then we did as he asked. We imagined a plain. Mine was an endless golden field, tall plants bobbing in a breeze. All over the room, above the room, hovered thousands of plains.

  Ah, the power of the word! The power of intention!

  Which was what the actor went on to address. The power of the Tech, of the Upper Levels, the mastery they confer: to allow someone to see what and as you want them to see. To allow them to do as you’d like them to do.

  I leaned down to scratch an ankle. No. No. No. I really loved that he’d played the pun on plane/plain. I really loved that he’d worked our imaginations like that. But while I could see the benefits of making people see what and as one wanted them to see, it also sounded like something that could be used in all the wrong ways. It sounded like what I feared most about Scientology, and what I liked least.

  “Can we go?” I whispered to Skye. What I meant was, could we leave all of it?

  “Not yet, sweetheart.”

  “This!” The actor’s trained voice rang with joy. “This is the power of Scientology! This is why we train and audit ourselves and others. This is why we keep our ethics in and our stats up! This is why it’s so important to fill those Orgs all over the world. Their purpose, and ours, is to deliver Scientology! To get each and every one to Clear—and I know many of us in this room are already that!” (Sustained applause.) “As I also know that many of you are already OT!” (Wild cheers.) “And what are we going to do with all the capability in this room, and in rooms just like this one all over the world, full of Operating Thetans? We are going to Clear the planet!”

  Hoots, whistles, applause!

  When I’d first read the phrase “Clear the planet,” I thought Scientologists intended the planet to be cleared of humans the way a hilltop might be cleared of trees—a most disturbing idea. That mental picture had since been replaced by another, the Sherman-Williams Paint logo: a bucket tipping red paint over the entire globe, with the slogan, “Cover the Earth.” That seemed closer to Hubbard’s grandiose ambition.

  “And how do we Clear the planet? By delivering the Tech, Standard Tech, to every single man, woman, and child on the planet!” (Wild cheering.) “And now, to tell us more about how this is going to happen, please welcome the man vested by L. Ron Hubbard himself to take over the Church when he died: the leader of the Church of Scientology, and the Chairman of the Board of Scientology’s Religious Technology Services, David Miscavige!”

  Across the large screen at the back of the stage, images began to stream, including the logos of various arms within Scientology, overlapping, brightening, fading. For the first time, it occurred to me that the new glitz and glamour at these events, and the increasing insistence that all Scientologists attend, had emerged right around the time of Miscavige’s accession. The events, with all the surrounding stuff, had only gotten more—

  —at the time I didn’t have the word to describe what it was they’d gotten to be more of, but I do now: Corporate.

  Corny and funky replaced by efficient and glossy.

  A lot of surface gleam to demonstrate, to persuade of, vast success.

  An emphasis on success, on profit.

  This was all quite different than what had helped pull me to the Church, and had made me willing to hang in. It had seemed—and this had utterly surprised me, given Scientology’s reputation—gentler, kinder, the word might even be folksier. But this new direction was scary.

  Trumpets blared, drums rolled, the screen pulsed, as onto the stage at Flag, in Florida, strode Miscavige: tan, vibrant, gazing out at us from under his captain’s cap.

  It turned out that he, too, had great news for us. He, personally, would be reviewing all of L. Ron Hubbard’s files! He’d also be taking a look at every previously published Scientology volume to make sure that each and every one of Hubbard’s books was absolutely standard, as LRH had originally written them, down to every semicolon, every comma. It meant that every Org and mission, every auditor, every student, every single Scientologist would get to purchase these new books, in which every aspect would be just as Hubbard intended!

  “Hubbard approved those books!” I whispered. “Why do they need changing?”

  Skye’s face had gone very still. Others around us looked equally puzzled. Everyone knew that only Hubbard could rewrite or reissue what he’d written. Decades before, Hubbard himself had overseen publication of the red volumes that cover auditing technology, and the green ones that cover his ideas about administration. What errors were there to be found?

  And we’d all read “Keeping Scientology Working.” Adamant—zealous—as it was, it was also very clear: Don’t mess with the Tech. Hubbard’s Tech. Standard Tech.

  Wasn’t all this being countermanded by Miscavige’s proposed project? Even if all he did was move a single comma? There’s a big difference between Wonderful, Bob! and Wonderful Bob! Or Eat, children! versus Eat children!

  The huge room seemed to fill with a worry that could almost be smelled.

  “Skye,” I whispered. “Doesn’t this mean you’ll have to buy all new books?”

  By the set of his jaw, it was clear he’d thought of this. As an auditor, he was required to own sets of both the Tech and Admin volumes. Over the years, he’d purchased all of LRH’s books. To replace them would cost thousands upon thousands of dollars.

  People kept their eyes lowered. They shuffled their feet. Miscavige was the head of the Church of Scientology. Hubbard had designated him as his replacement. How could anyone have a problem with Miscavige’s plan?

  Once again I peered around to see if I could spot a man with a clipboard, or a woman carrying surveillance equipment. It was an absurd idea. But just in case, I didn’t say anything more. And I certainly wasn’t going to draw attention to myself by leaving early.

  age of aquarius

  Summer 1968, when I was sixteen, the Maharishi came to Squaw Valley. His wrinkled, smiling face had been on the cover of Time and Newsweek as he’d traveled the world extolling the benefits of Transcendental Meditation.

  One afternoon, my father called the family together. “I am going to try this ‘TM,’” he said, in a curiously formal way. “I am going to go through the initiation. I understand it’s a matter of offering the Maharishi a piece of fruit. He gives you a mantra, nothing embarrassing, and you start meditating.
”

  I felt my universe tilt and slide. Wasn’t what the Maharishi did kind of like a religion? Didn’t Halls not do such things?

  Dad cleared his throat. “I hear it helps lower blood pressure. And if any of you are interested, I will pay for you to get a mantra too.”

  Mother smiled, dubious. Tad shrugged. Tracy and Brett looked a bit confused. I said I’d like to do it.

  Early the next morning, Dad and I each selected a piece of fruit from a bowl on the counter, and he drove us down the hill to the hotel in which the Maharishi and his entourage had set up for the weekend. Dad wrote the check for our initiation fees; I remember it being fifteen dollars each. Dad was escorted one direction, I another. After a quiet, candlelit wait, a man wearing a white robe escorted me to a small room where I was taught my mantra, a series of syllables repeated to me until I could clearly repeat them back. While the mantra might not be necessarily unique, I was told, it was mine, something not to be shared with another. I was told what the words meant, but forgot almost immediately. I remember those syllables, however. From time to time, I still use them.

  Eventually we all came back together. There were about thirty of us. The Maharishi, his neck encircled with leis, sat cross-legged on a dais, surrounded by a lot of fruit. In a charming singsong voice, an Indian lilt inside a British accent, he told us to work toward sitting alone, silently repeating the mantra, for at least twenty minutes a day, twice a day. He spoke of the benefits, including world peace.

  “Just imagine,” he said, “if everyone were to do this twice a day. Would there be time for such a thing as war?” His whole body rocked as he laughed and laughed.

  We all meditated together before being released into the afternoon.

  It was a bit like coming out of a matinee: blinking in the surprising light of day when one expects the velvet of nighttime darkness. As I stood getting my bearings in the bright Sierra sun, I wondered if it was my imagination that I felt changed: there was Sands before she received her mantra, and Sands after it.