Flunk. Start.

by Sands Hall

  All that summer, morning and afternoon, I sat cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom turning that mantra over and over like a stone in a pocket. I liked knowing that elsewhere in the house my father was also sitting, though probably not cross-legged. There was no discussion of meditation attached to spiritual matters; rather, arms folded behind his head, sipping his Jim Beam, Dad talked of its beneficial effects on memory, and how he hoped it would keep him from smoking. He laughed at how much he’d obsess over the bourbon he’d get to have when he was finished with the afternoon’s twenty minutes.

  “I guess that’s one of the purposes of the thing,” he said. “You think you can’t wait to have whatever it is you can’t wait to have, but then your mind moves on to something else, and you realize you can wait, but then you realize you’re thinking about the Jim Beam again, and you sneak a look at your watch and not even a minute’s gone by. Don’t know how you do it, Sands, but then you’ve always been attracted to this sort of thing.”

  He was talking about having to haul me off my knees in that Cathedral all those years before. How I liked pretending to be a Delphic priestess. My affection for the vast mythic landscapes of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and, too, the fantasy provided by my beloved, derided romance novels. But I think it was also a kind of a warning: he perceived (perhaps even recognized, as I think in this we were similar) that I had a pilgrim soul, that I was attracted to spiritual matters—and, troublingly, to the trappings that might come with them.

  by 1969, hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, launched by Joseph Papp’s New York Public Theater, was being produced in cities around the world. The story of a counterculture hippie commune—replete with draft dodging, dope smoking, and nudity—permeated even our distant High Sierra kingdom. Articles about it filled the magazines that flowed through the house, its music was all over the airwaves, and Dad bought the album. He already owned the Who’s Tommy; he loved that the band used rock ’n’ roll to create an opera.

  I was intrigued by the lyric that addressed the approach of the Age of Aquarius. I did feel something was dawning, that something vast was about to change. Fairy tales and the worlds of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis had certainly predisposed me to a yearning to find a magic ring, walnut, skates, cape, to walk through a coat closet and find an enchanted land. Still, I was convinced that a very real power, based on love and a final, and finally effective, push for world peace, was at work all over the planet. The terrible deaths in Vietnam, the protests against war, the sit-ins on college campuses, the students’ deaths in Paris, were all about to accomplish their goals. I believed, fervently, that something remarkable was about to happen, lifting us out of one reality and into another. This certainty might have been described as a hope for the Second Coming, or the Rapture. But I didn’t know to think in these terms. I just felt keenly and deeply that life as we knew it was about to change.

  But then Martin Luther King was assassinated. And Bobby Kennedy. And one day, while vacuuming and thinking about the work they’d been doing, now halted by their tragic deaths, I became aware that this, vacuuming, was just a moment in my life. It was a moment attached to another moment that, once lived, was gone. The roar of the vacuum cleaner engulfed me. If you filmed a person’s life, I thought, just trained a camera on every minute of it, the moments of vacuuming, emptying the dishwasher, reading, would be boring. You wouldn’t need or want to see the moments on the toilet or the hours spent sleeping. And yet life was made up of nothing but moments, frame after frame, like the celluloid strip that in those days made up a movie.

  Standing there in the midst of the vacuum’s noise that created its own immense quiet, I felt as if I were remembering something I’d once been told, that had once made sense. And I also suddenly and completely grasped: This is life. Nothing more. This, moment by moment by moment, is it.

  And, I understood, there would be no change. The benevolent force that had been heading toward us had decided to veer away. We weren’t worthy. We as a planet hadn’t produced enough love to deserve the glowing consummation. No. Life was going to have such things as vacuuming in it—forever. Moment after moment was all it was ever going to be.

  Moving the wand of the vacuum back and forth across the carpet, I thought of the cathedrals in Europe we’d visited, Dad carrying Brett on his shoulders. The shuffling and murmuring; people kneeling, foreheads pressed to clasped hands; the certainty (were they certain? was that part of their prayers?) that because—if?—there were something beyond life, there had to be something, then, meaningful about living. Displayed in those cathedrals had always been a writhing body on a cross, blood dripping from palms and feet, eyes cast up. Was Jesus asking God a question? Pleading for a sign? Seeing transformation, a vast beam of sunlight through clouds, heading toward him? I did not know, then, that Jesus’ final words were My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? But even so, I’d long wondered if the depictions of his pain were intended as a mirror for the average suffering of this life—while also offering a promise of a reward to come. Jesus had endured it; he’d endured far worse! And you could too. Having faith (if you had faith) in what was waiting for you after death gave you the strength to endure living.

  I turned off the vacuum. In contrast, I thought, as I coiled the electric cord, this moment-by-moment thing kind of made you appreciate this moment, now. You didn’t wait for the end of life for solace and meaning but made sure you took care of it in this one.

  Although that was kind of sad. And scary.

  And, once you realized it, then what?

  No wonder people turned to religion.

  edmund, a friend of my brother’s, was studying photography at San Francisco’s Art Institute. During the summers, he and Tad painted houses to earn money; in their spare time, they climbed rocks and, eventually, mountains. When they returned from these adventures, I cooked them dinner. Night after night, that summer of my eighteenth year, I waited on them, in my long dress and my long hair, acting out a medieval fantasy: lady to my knights. And in his rented room in the house down the hill, Edmund built a double bed; when he was finished, I joined him there. My parents made much of the metaphor.

  When he and Tad and some other friends went on a three-week climbing trip to Canada, Dad told me to stop acting as if Edmund were a banished Romeo and I Juliet.

  “You need to know something,” he said. “There’s a reason Shakespeare has Romeo in love with Rosalind as that play begins. Shakespeare’s pointing out that Romeo is fickle—he’ll move his affections on to the next someone who captures his attention.”

  I looked up, shocked. This was not the romance of Romeo & Juliet that I knew. Was he telling me that Edmund would move on to someone else?

  “The only thing that turns Romeo & Juliet into a tragedy is that their parents don’t want them to be together.” Dad shook his head, amazed at the stupidity of the Capulets and the Montagues. “If their parents weren’t so bullheaded, if they just let the thing play out, Romeo would eventually tire of Juliet, just as he did of Rosalind, and move on to the next pretty face. The parents would have gotten what they wanted.”

  “Are you saying . . . ?” But I couldn’t articulate what I thought he was saying.

  “Stop moping! You haven’t lost Edmund, he’s not banished. He’s gone climbing. And your parents happen to approve of him. Stop being a character in a play you’re imagining.”

  Edmund and Tad returned safely. They regaled the family with pitches dangerous and summits mastered. But, sliding dishes into the dishwasher, I was aware that once you had a happy ending—bed built, virginity gone—what next? I find it odd, now, that I didn’t think of marriage, and certainly not of children. Those must have seemed like sentimental, obvious choices, not interesting, artistic ones.

  guilt is good

  As we drove home from the rally at the Sheraton, Skye sighed. “All that money.”

  He didn’t add anything more. I didn’t either
. Criticism—“nattering”—usually meant you’d done something to the person or thing you were criticizing.26 So even though we knew each other well enough to be aware we had a lot to say, silence settled over us as we sped along the freeway.

  I cracked open the window. Leaning back with my eyes closed, I let the breeze flutter along my forehead and thought about our recent trip to the Southwest. I’d loved traipsing in and out of the Anasazi ruins with him, loved the colors, the landscape, and the idea that, living there, I’d be closer to Tracy. I wanted to be pregnant in Santa Fe, to raise our child there, and one night, in our ultra-funky Taos hotel room, I’d told him so.

  He’d gone still. “And what am I supposed to do, muffin, bag groceries?”

  He’d drawn on his cigarette and blown smoke, hard, into the air above our heads. “I need to be in a city, sweetheart,” he said. “There’s my music, but there’s the Bridge, too. There isn’t an Org within a hundred miles of Santa Fe. This is when I get really concerned about us, Sands. You don’t want what I want. You want a whole different life.”

  That was true. It often cropped up. Yet there we were, rattling along an LA freeway, on our way back from a Scientology event. And I anchored myself yet again: I reached over the gearshift to put a hand on his thigh, and said, “I love you.”

  He lifted my hand to his lips, then replaced it on his thigh, keeping hold.

  I did love him. I just didn’t love our life. Yet I kept making our life happen. I kept living in Los Angeles. I kept being a Scientologist. Why?

  Skye sped up our driveway and parked. Since leaving Universal City, all we’d said was his “All that money” and my “I love you.” We trudged into the house, changed out of our fancy clothes, brushed our teeth, slid beneath the sheets, turned to one another, and held on.

  We kept silent because of an insidious aspect of Hubbard’s ideas regarding the overt, the “motivator”: When you’ve done something bad to someone or something (or feel that you have, or convince yourself that you have), you can come to believe that it was “motivated” by something that someone or something did to you.27 This allows you to justify other overts, as well as why you want or need to leave. Sometimes you do leave. But (and this is Hubbard’s point), you are not looking at your own culpability in the matter.

  A classic example: A married man is attracted to and flirts with another woman. The overt is in the flirting, acting on the attraction. The man begins to find reasons to justify his actions: he “natters,” telling the woman and others how hard his wife is to live with, what a shrew she is; he finds reasons for and eventually manufactures a fight. He finds a “motivator” for his own actions. And due to that original flirtation, he may end up leaving his wife: he “blows.”

  A few years before, while attending American Conservatory Theater’s advanced training program in San Francisco, a fellow student and I had rented a flat together. Bonny and I got along well. But one day, when my own razor was dull, I used hers to shave my legs. I didn’t tell her. I now had what Hubbard dubs a “withhold” (which follows an overt). Soon I became “motivated” to find reasons to criticize her, including how selfish and thoughtless she was. (Hubbard points out that we often accuse others of the things that we, ourselves, are guilty of. While he’s not alone in this observable truth, this sort of “wisdom” made it hard to figure out when he was being, well, wise, and when Machiavellian.) Even though Bonny and I’d talked of living together the following semester, I decided I had to find a different living situation. It wasn’t until I studied the overt/withhold/motivator sequence, and the often resultant “blow,” that this behavior made some sense.

  Knowledge of this sequence (and what is implied if you find yourself “nattering”) means that Scientologists are aware when they find themselves critical of someone or something, and especially if they find they want to leave a place or a person. They tend to inspect what they might have done that they feel they shouldn’t have done.

  As often as not, this does lead to some useful realizations. However, it’s also one of the biggest reasons it’s hard to leave Scientology. When I was tempted to call it quits, as I often was, I went looking for the nefarious motive that underlay why I’d want to. And I could usually find something I’d done/said or not done/not said that was the real reason I wanted to “escape.” If Skye or I mocked or criticized the glittering event we’d attended, the extravagant décor, the beribboned speakers, the many dollars squandered in mounting it—and especially Miscavige’s troubling announcement and the outrageous amount of money good Scientologists were going to have to spend on new books—it must mean we’d committed a transgression against the group. So we stayed quiet.

  This terror—that I’d be “blowing” because of some bad thing I’d done—is what kept me glued to Scientology for years. I think the fear was widely shared. When the urge came to get out, we’d been indoctrinated into the idea that we just needed to inspect what we might have done that would make us feel that way. There was always something. You’d write it up, have a “win,” and stay on. And on.

  So lying there, my head on Skye’s chest, feeling his heartbeat beneath my cheek, I examined my behavior. Of course I was guilty of an overt: Lack of action as action. I hadn’t participated. I hadn’t cheered. I’d clapped perfunctorily, I’d averted my eyes from the photos of Hubbard, I’d refused to join the rah-rah nature of the event.

  And perhaps Skye had committed a transgression when he’d made those “couple of calls”: that little “lie” could certainly be seen as an overt.

  And I’d laughed; I’d even hugged him! Chalk another one up for me.

  And then there was Skip. What I could have done, hadn’t done, might have done.

  He’d come to us looking for help. And we’d failed him. I had. Ed had. Scientology had. If he’d managed to get in a car and find his way to the Advanced Org, he’d taken one look at those big blue buildings and turned right around to go drive off a cliff.

  Oops. There went another critical thought.

  I didn’t speak them aloud, but I had plenty of them in seething silence. More overts.

  “Guilt is good,” Dad often said. I think he meant that the fear of feeling guilty makes you do the right thing. Or, not wanting to feel that you didn’t do the thing you should have done, you do the thing you should do. Scientology’s emphasis on ethics seemed like an extension of this idea. Most people want to be good, decent, ethical. I certainly did. Even as I was able, occasionally, to see this for the trap it was, I couldn’t figure out how to wriggle out of it.

  i’m me, i’m me, i’m me

  After we returned from the family trip to Europe, I often woke in the night to hear Mother, sleepless, pacing the house. In hushed voices, she and Dad talked about something called a “double mortgage”; both tone and attitude made me think someone had died. When Dad was tapped for the position of Writer in Residence at the University of California, Irvine, there were similar dire-sounding conversations; it took me years to understand how hard it must have been for him to face that he was no longer supporting his family on his writing alone.

  He accepted the position, as he accepted the subsequent request to found and run Irvine’s Master of Fine Arts program in Fiction. Except for Tracy, still in school in Colorado, the entire family now spent the academic year in Newport Beach, returning to Squaw for summers. Brett attended grade school, I a local high school. Tad, accepted into UCI, changed his name to Oak and made his way directly to the drama department, where he became a star—a pugnacious, outrageous, cocky, handsome star. His affection for loud, raucous music grew even more pronounced, and like that music, he lived hard. He smoked anything smokeable, drank anything drinkable, slept with anybody remotely sleepable-withable. He had run-ins with police. He and Dana were still sweethearts, but his dazzling sexual appetite included trysts with some of my parents’ friends (we didn’t know this for decades).

  Between his
first and second years at UCI, Tad-Oak-Tad (which was what tumbled out of my mouth when I addressed him) attended a summer training “congress” at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. Housed with fellow actors, he invited me to visit. We spent an evening perched on the apartment’s fire escape, as they smoked and dissected what made good theater; the next day I sweated my way through African Dance class with them, and ran behind them up the stairs to a class on Shakespeare.

  And it was in that room, a studio several floors above busy Geary Street, directly across from ACT’s Geary Theater, that I had an inkling of what I might want to do with my life. I watched what would become familiar and beloved: an empty, battered space slowly filling with bodies that dropped themselves and their bags to the floor with exquisite ease. Cups of coffee suddenly littering every surface. People stretching, leg lifted to ear, forehead dropped to knee, upper body twisted until a vertebra cracked. Scripts to hand, being memorized. The quick roll of a head, the saying of muh, muh muh, the muttering of Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. I loved it. I wanted to be an endless part of it.

  This was Scansion and Dynamics, a class usually taught by a member of the company. But that day, Bill Ball, ACT’s innovative founder and artistic director, gave a lecture. A short, balding man, he commanded fierce attention. He spoke as if each word were a delectable piece of fruit. He began by reminding us about a few elements of verse—the iamb, the trochee, the spondee—which somehow morphed into a description of how honey is made, which led to a discussion of architecture as “frozen music,” which somehow connected to the value of a well-trained voice, which led to a discussion of King Lear. I was rapt. I remember holding my clasped hands to my chest as he spoke, as if I could hold there, forever, what he was revealing.