Flunk. Start.

by Sands Hall

  I stared in shock. Never had I equated my bouts of weeping with an empty stomach. I wanted (weepingly) to protest, but I was too hungry. I ate them. We had a good evening. The connection had been made.

  Where food was concerned, it was the beginning of a long climb back to sanity. However, this effort to perfect, as I saw it, my body, was about to be replaced by a new possibility: perfection of spirit.

  brett and i discovered why the rent on our bungalow was so cheap. The whole lovely warren was slated to be demolished to make way for another Westwood high-rise. As Brett searched for an apartment with friends near UCLA, I looked at options in Beachwood Canyon, an area nestled beneath the hills that hold those huge letters spelling out hollywood. At the foot of the canyon stood a marvelous if dilapidated building that took up an entire block. The hidden nature of its grounds—it was surrounded by a high stone wall twined with ivy—reminded me of a favorite childhood book, The Secret Garden. It was not just the sense of an elegant manor with grounds; it was also the hint of something waiting there, something that could be found only by dint of applying tender loving care.

  One day, as we were driving by, I said as much to Roger.

  “Are you kidding?” He practically choked. “That’s Celebrity Center. It’s owned by the Church of Scientology.”

  I twisted in my seat to stare up at its high, mysterious profile. On the sidewalk in front of it, a woman stood with a clipboard trying to engage passersby in conversation. I recognized what she was doing. While attending the acting program in San Francisco, I’d walked down Mason to get to the studios on Geary, and there must have been a Scientology headquarters nearby, as the corner was usually full of smiling people carrying clipboards with surveys that posed the question, are you really happy? Even then I understood that their purpose was to get you to talk about yourself, to find what you felt was missing in your life (later I’d find this was called a “ruin”), and tell you that Scientology would solve it. “Are you really happy?” Even as I veered away and shook my head—and then quickly nodded (of course I was happy!)—I pondered the “hook” that question provided. Was I?

  Was anyone, ever, really happy?

  What did “really” mean?

  I thought it a very clever question.

  Again I twisted in my seat, looking back at the building known as Celebrity Center. “What do they do in there?”

  Roger shrugged. “Scientology, I guess. But only if you’re a Scientologist—and a celebrity. John Travolta. Mimi Rogers. Karen Black. Chick Corea. Lots of people in Milton’s class do things there. You could ask them.”

  “Too bad!” I said. “It’s such a pretty building.”

  i can’t help but wonder, now, why I chose that particular canyon, when there are so many lovely ones in Los Angeles. But by the summer of 1980, I’d found a place nestled in those hills above Celebrity Center. Around this same time, Roger moved out from his wife and kids. Scared this would mean we were committed to each other, I broke up with him. I had one last evening with cocaine. While the experience ensured I’d never touch it again, it also offered insight into a potentially greedy aspect of my nature that appalled me. I kept the waitress job in Westwood. Now and then I dropped in to see my agent. This always created a brief flurry of auditions, and I often got called back, but I landed little actual work. I had no idea what I was doing with my life. I saw Brett rarely. I seldom talked to Tracy. Not to Mom and Dad, nor to Oak, who was living in Squaw Valley with Mary and O4. I remember feeling like a flea-bitten dog, scratching at something that tickled, bit, ached in an unreachable, unassuageable place.

  Parked in Beachwood Canyon, I often found flyers tucked under my windshield wipers. Ubiquitous and irritating, they often advertised Scientology’s free personality test. Others offered various goods and services; only later did I find out that they were almost all businesses owned by Scientologists, and that such flyers represent an essential part of LRH’s expansion advice: “Outflow equals inflow.”

  One day, a coupon read, Buy dinner and get a glass of wine, free! The restaurant, Two Dollar Bill’s, was located at the bottom of the canyon, on the opposite side of the street from Celebrity Center. Feeling both lonely and broke, I tucked coupon and journal into my purse. Having no idea how much this would change my life, I headed down the hill.

  hope springs eternal

  The atmosphere of Two Dollar Bill’s was funky but cozy. There seemed to be just one waitress. When she finally got to me, I ordered a spinach salad and, handing her the coupon, my free glass of wine. I opened my journal, but instead of writing, I stared out the window at the building across the street. Partially hidden behind walls and trees, bristling with crenellated bits of roofing, Celebrity Center looked like a cross between a fairy tale and a set for a horror film. Karen Black might be there. John Travolta. Actors who gave the Church credence. Milton could tell me what went on there. I could even head across the street and ask. Except there was no way I’d ever walk into that place.

  The restaurant was nice enough, but the service was terrible. A sign in the window said help wanted. Tired of driving to the Westwood café, I asked for an application. I didn’t need to fill it out. The waitress—also acting as hostess and manager—asked about my restaurant experience.

  “Great!” she said. “Come at ten tomorrow morning. We’ll get you started.”

  By the time I was halfway through my first shift, it was clear that Two Dollar Bill’s was run by Scientologists and that its organization was based on Scientology principles. These appeared to be about giving good service while also selling as many items and/or the most expensive items possible. In the world of restaurants, these ideas are not novel. As I scooped spinach into bowls and tucked parsley on the sides of burgers, my fellow waitresses told me how I was “already” so much like a Scientologist.

  “Are you Clear?” I was asked.

  I wanted to ask, “Clear about what?” but didn’t, as I wanted to be whatever Clear was. Clearly it was a good thing. I gathered I was cheerful and organized (at least well-trained by previous waitress jobs). I wondered if one had to be a Scientologist to be Clear. Was it possible to find that state—whatever it happened to be—on one’s own?

  I paced the restaurant, smiling, carrying baskets of rolls and carafes of coffee, bolstered by the idea that I was perceived as Clear. But outside of that restaurant, peering down the purposeless road of my life, I felt most definitely unclear. Again and again I tried to get back to meditating. On my bookshelves, The Gnostic Gospels slanted against The Dancing Wu Li Masters; Robert Graves’s White Goddess was piled atop paperbacks about chakras and yoga and meditation. I often dipped into these books, yearning for the knowledge between their covers, answers that might illuminate a way to believe, act, live, be happy.

  My fellow waitresses suggested that I read a book by L. Ron Hubbard. “You can’t judge Scientology by what you’ve heard!” they said, when I shook my head. “You need to find out for yourself, and the best way to do that is to read one of his books. Or take a course! Success Through Communication! It’s a great way to begin!”

  “No, thanks!” I said gaily, heading off to refill a coffee mug.

  On Friday and Saturday nights the restaurant featured live music, often jazz. One night the combo on stage was a jazz trio. A blond, very handsome man wearing loose white clothes played a blazing solo on the upright bass. When the applause died down, the pianist and leader of the band told us his name: Jamie Faunt.

  I’d never particularly listened to jazz before. After fetching customers tea and wine, I stood off in a corner, entranced by the music and falling in love with it. I also fell just a bit in love with the man making it, whose full lips worked as his fingers raced up and down the strings of the bass.

  It also turned out that Jamie fell a bit in love with me. Or whatever it was made him lean across his bass during a break between songs and say to the pianist, “That�
��s the girl I’m going to marry.”

  my fellow waitresses let me know that the members of the jazz trio were celebrities. They studied at Celebrity Center! Jamie played bass with people like Chick Corea (who’d been a Scientologist for years!) and Al Jarreau (who’d signed up for a course!).

  Which must mean that Jamie was a Scientologist.

  So when Jamie asked if I’d like to have a cup of tea, I was wary.

  Over our steaming mugs he told me he’d recently been doing his services at AO. When I looked mystified, he translated. He’d been getting auditing at Scientology’s Advanced Organization. Those blue buildings further down Fountain? Topped by an eight-armed cross?

  “I just finished a major intensive.” He was clearly proud of this achievement. Under a short-sleeved shirt, a bicep pulsed. His skin was luminous, pale and smooth as marble.

  “An intensive?”

  “A bunch of auditing,” he said. “Scientology’s form of counseling.”

  I looked around the café, wishing he’d whisper. I didn’t want anyone to hear me talking to someone who used the word “Scientology” so readily.

  “I’m OT III,” he said.

  I nodded, as if I knew what he was talking about. Clearly, being OT III was a big deal. His eyes were the color of the ocean in cruise advertisements. He was a brilliant musician. He ran a music school. I could not help but imagine those well-manicured fingers playing me as they did his bass. But there was no way I would have a relationship with a Scientologist!

  A week or so later, when the trio again played Two Dollar Bill’s, Jamie asked if I’d like to have another cup of tea. I said I didn’t think he was the one.

  “‘The one’?” Jamie said, smiling. “Do you really think there’s such a thing?”

  I’d been teased for my belief in this, as I’d been for my certainty that it was possible to be perfect. I shrugged. “I just don’t think we’re . . .”

  He smiled again. “Maybe not yet.”

  i auditioned for a lead in a CBS movie of the week, was called back a number of times, even met Ron Howard, who’d be starring. But my agent called to say it had gone to someone else.

  “I’m sorry, Sands,” she said. “It would have been a breakout role for you.”

  I knew the capricious nature of the career I’d decided to pursue, but the disappointment churned up by this news felt connected to larger losses, inchoate and mysterious. I wept far more than was appropriate. It was hard to return to filling creamers and rolling paper napkins around a knife and fork.

  A few mornings later, the phone rang in my little Beachwood apartment. “Good morning, Sands.”

  “Good morning, Bernard.”

  I was still in bed, thinking about the Peace Corps. I’d recently sent for an application. I lay back, phone to an ear. Bernard was a San Francisco lawyer about fifteen years older than I, whose attentions I wanted to appreciate. He was intelligent and generous and kind. However, even though he was in his mid-forties, he looked and moved as if he were seventy.

  “Is it a good morning? You sound a bit sad.”

  “Well, it’s a beautiful morning, anyway.”

  A breeze moved the leaves of the tree outside the window, causing sunlight to flicker on the bedspread. Birds wheedled. Later that day I’d be waitressing, for which focus and activity I was grateful.

  “You don’t sound as if you think it’s a beautiful morning, either.”

  “I want it to be.” I gave a little laugh. “Hope springs eternal . . .”

  “. . . in the human breast,” Bernard finished the phrase. He made a curious huffing noise. “Do you know the origin of that phrase?”

  I wiped my eyes with a corner of a sheet. “No.”

  “It’s Alexander Pope. You know that, of course.”

  I didn’t but didn’t say so.

  “Here’s the rest of that couplet, Sands: Man never is, but always to be, blest.”

  An anguished wail began to twine around my heart. “Say it again?”

  “Not that this is such a great thing to ponder, especially on a morning you’re not feeling particularly happy. But I find it irritating that people repeat that phrase with no sense of what Pope is actually saying! ‘Man never is, but always to be, blest.’”

  The impact of this phrase was enormous. The notion that we keep ourselves afloat by imagining that any day now things will make sense, that we’ll be “blessed,” and yet we never will be, shifted my sense of life, of living. It was Sisyphus, hoping that this time he’ll finally manage to push the stone all the way up the hill—but of course it always slips from him and rolls back to the bottom and he has to start again.

  And if Sisyphus does get the rock to the top of, even over, the hill, what then?

  All that day, Pope’s words hovered: man never is—and as I served salads and burgers that night—but always to be blest—the jazz trio once again worked its magic. Between sets Jamie found me. We flirted gently. At the end of my shift I found that my car had been boxed in. It was 2:00 a.m. The drivers were not in the café. The band was though; they were packing up their instruments. Jamie held out a hand for my keys. Backing and filling, he succeeded in edging my car into the street. As he slid out of the driver’s seat, I allowed myself to adore that strong jaw, those blue eyes, the fingers that ran up and down the frets of his upright bass with such grace, such strength, such facility.

  “I think I might have been a bit hasty,” I said.

  He gave a little courtly bow. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  much about jamie was entrancing: full lips, blue eyes, skin smooth as marble but warm. He was rock-star handsome, with a fey, elfin quality—he usually wore black Chinese slippers, which caused him to glide more than step—and he could play any instrument put before him. A wizard on bass, known in the business as an extraordinary session player, he’d contributed to the albums of major jazz artists, including Chick Corea. But as a result of that recent “intensive” of auditing, when he’d attained OT III, his epiphany was that he no longer wanted to make a living as a performer. His calling was to create a music school. He was now hard at work standardizing his courses and training teachers.

  He worked really hard at this, often, I gathered, staying up all night. One day he invited me to brunch with friends. He arrived very late to pick me up, clearly having just awoken, and we joined the group long after they’d finished their eggs. I thought it terribly rude, but they seemed to find it unremarkable. I remember Stanley Clarke was there, and Al Jarreau, as well as other musicians celebrated in jazz circles but—except for Chick Corea—unknown to me.

  In homage to those lost New York Sunday brunches, I ordered a Bloody Mary. By the time the waitress delivered it, I realized that no one else at the table was drinking alcohol and was tempted to pour it into a nearby potted shrub. However, except for that grave lapse, the people around the table seemed perfectly normal. Chick Corea and his sparkling-eyed wife, Gayle Moran, were lovely, smart, and accomplished. There was chat about a recent tour, and laughter about Gayle’s affection for Valentine’s Day.

  “Wait until you hear Gayle sing ‘My Funny Valentine’ to Chick,” a woman next to me said. “The sweetest!”

  My fears began to feel ridiculous, based on negative press, misunderstandings of Scientology’s intentions. Because, as the comfortable buzz of talk around the table began to rotate largely around Scientology, what they explained made sense.28

  “Each of us has a body, and each of us has a mind.” Jamie was talking to Al Jarreau as much as to me. “But each of us is a spirit—you can think of the body as a container.”

  In spite of an intense interest in matters spiritual, in spite of years of meditating, this idea, which of course is not novel, struck me forcibly. Before this, I don’t think I’d particularly thought of those entities as separate from one another.

  Jamie went on to
explain that there are two kinds of minds: “The Analytical Mind is where we store things we’re clear about. And then there’s the Reactive Mind.”

  One of Jamie’s friends added that the Reactive Mind is full of “charge,” and explained, “Charge is all those unexamined memories and misunderstoods that make us behave in erratic and misemotional ways.” He made a loony face. Everyone laughed.

  The ideas made sense, but the language seemed peculiar: Misunderstoods? Misemotional?

  “That’s what’s covered in Book One, Dianetics,” a woman named Barb said.

  Jamie nodded and said that Hubbard found that what he covered in Dianetics hadn’t gone far enough. He realized there had to be something that looks at those images. “So LRH named the thing that does the looking, what other religions call the spirit or the soul, the thetan.”

  “Thetan,” I repeated. The word sounded as if someone with a lisp said “Satan.”

  “See,” someone said, “the thetan is aware of being aware.”

  Aware of being aware. I liked that very much. It tied in with my meditating efforts.

  “The thetan activates the body,” Barb said. She was tall and graceful and didn’t look the least bit odd. None of them did. They seemed intelligent and kind.

  It made me think of a painting I’d seen in a Madrid museum during that long-ago family trip to Europe. In it, people have gathered around a man whose chalky white body is naked except for a cloth draped across his loins. One pale leg dangles off the bed. He’s clearly dead. His face is peaceful, but the people surrounding his body are grieving. High in the right-hand corner of the painting the artist had painted a wraith, a little white gauzy coil. Dad, holding my hand, had pointed to it.

  “See that? That’s the spirit, rising from the body.”

  Clutching Dad’s big hand, I’d nodded, vaguely grasping that our bodies are activated by something. Scientology appeared to agree with that idea.

  “I understand how the soul activates the body,” I said, “but where do those two kinds of minds fit in?” I’d always figured that mind and soul were pretty much the same.