Flunk. Start.

by Sands Hall

  Marty moved his concerned eyes to meet mine. “Who’s invalidating you? Who doesn’t want you to thrive?”

  “Her parents!” Jamie said.

  Marty held up a hand. “She’s got to have this cognition for herself, Jamie.”

  Jamie sat back, fuming. “Someone who is PTS,” he said, and quoted LRH (he’d showed me this bulletin a number of times): “‘is connected with an SP who is invalidating him, his beingness, his processing, his life.’48 Her parents are Suppressive!”

  Marty took a sip from a Styrofoam cup. “What do you think, Sands?”

  “Her mother, especially,” Jamie said. “She’s a complete SP.”

  I closed my eyes. “She. Is. Not.”

  “Well, you’re definitely PTS,” Jamie said. “Who else is the SP?”

  “I’m not PTS,” I said. “I’m just not sure about this marriage.” What I wanted to say was, What if the SP is you, Jamie? What if the suppressive thing is Scientology?

  “But if that were the case,” Marty’s voice was full of understanding, “you’d be able to work through the Doubt formula and determine that you don’t want to be with Jamie.”

  “It’s not a matter of moving a few clothes to another closet! I want to make our marriage work! If we can. Anyway, I don’t even have my own closet anymore!”

  “Let’s examine the rollercoastering,” Marty said. “You feel good about things and then you don’t, right?” He flipped through a packet on his desk. “This is from a 1972 bulletin,” he said, and read: “PTS ‘means someone connected to a person or group opposed to Scientology. It is a technical thing. It results in illness and roller-coaster.’” He looked at me. “Are your parents opposed to Scientology?”

  “They hate it,” Jamie said.

  “Sands?”

  “They hate it,” I said. “They hate that I have anything to do with it.”

  “Well!” Marty closed the packet. “That’s a classic origin of the trouble that makes one PTS: You’re a potential source of trouble—do you see that? Has Jamie told you about our policy?”

  I didn’t answer. Well aware that I was mangling the comm cycle, I avoided Marty’s eyes. Instead, I looked over his shoulder, where a spider plant, badly in need of watering, hung from a hook in a macramé cradle. Beside it was a window that looked onto an airshaft. I was aware of the dead end these things represented, the dead end of this marriage, the dead end I felt sitting in this crazy place being asked to look at this crazy idea: that my parents were in any way, shape, or form “suppressive.” Why was I trying to work through a marriage with a man whom, most of the time, I didn’t want to be with, and who, it was clear, didn’t much want to be with me? Why was I in this stupid office at all, with someone called an Ethics Officer?

  “You need to cut comm with your parents, Sands,” Marty said, and he said it gently enough that I met his eyes. “Disconnect. How can you decide if you want to be with Jamie if you’re connected to people who don’t like that you’re Scientologists?”

  “I’m not a Scientologist!”

  A long pause quivered within those walls that needed a coat of paint.

  “Well, now,” Marty said. “A Scientologist is essentially one who betters the conditions of himself and the conditions of others by using Scientology technology.”

  Jamie nodded.

  “And here we are,” Marty said, “using the Tech to try and solve this problem.”

  “My parents are not not NOT Suppressive People!”

  “Let’s put it a different way,” Marty said. “Someone who climbs in and out of Doubt is connected to someone who’s against their survival.”

  “My parents want nothing more than my survival—they want my happiness!”

  I shoved away the thought that whether I was happy seemed to have a lot to do with whether they were happy—with me.

  “Perhaps they don’t want you to thrive?”

  “Of course they want me to thrive! They love me! They are wonderful, amazing, artistic, smart, loving parents. They just don’t like Scientology!”

  “Scientology is the only way to thrive!” For the first time, Marty was vehement. “Why don’t you just tell them good things about it?”

  “They won’t listen! They don’t believe it!”

  Marty had his eyes firmly locked on mine. The smile was still there but something implacable too. He spread his hands wide. “Then you must stop talking to them. You must stop listening to them. You must have nothing to do with them.”

  “I am not going to do that.”

  Marty swallowed whatever was left in the Styrofoam cup and tossed it into a trash can heaped full with them. “I’ve got people waiting. Got to keep the stats up. Here’s what you do, Sands. You go downstairs to the Registrar and sign up for the PTS/SP course. Right now. Start this afternoon. Take her to the Reg, Jamie.”

  i didn’t start that afternoon. In a small act of insurrection—what I see, now, was a last-ditch effort to keep hold of some semblance of myself—I refused to start until . . . the next day. But we did head to the Registrar, me plodding silent and resentful behind Jamie. We again crossed the lobby with its sparkling chandeliers, and entered her office, which was handsomely furnished: deep blue wall-to-wall carpet, large comfortable armchairs, a meeting table in addition to a vast, gleaming desk. Of course, I thought. This grand office, on the first floor, would be the place people came to offer up their money. Here, at the “entrance” to Scientology, things had to look as if the religion was thriving—“upstat.” On the second floor, once they’d gotten you, they didn’t need to have a coat of paint or clean windows.

  But there went another critical thought! I must have committed a transgression!

  The overt seemed to be having critical thoughts. Was that it? Why?

  The Möbius strip of this logic took up a lot of energy.

  The Reg, Katey, wore a captain’s cap, a white dress shirt and navy blue skirt, and a blazer full of bars. She was delighted to meet the wife of Jamie—Jamie the celebrity, right there in Celebrity Center! Even as I wanted to sulk, I was deeply impressed by the powerful intentions at play, and found myself being weirdly polite. Jamie offered to pay for the course, but as part of my Doubt formula—“announcing the decision to both sides”—Katey recommended that I, not he, write that check.

  “You have to commit to a standard schedule,” Katey said, cheerfully. “You’ll need to be on course at least fifteen hours a week, although lots of people study many more hours than that. You can do it in two eight-hour chunks over the weekend if you like, but the best choice is five days a week. Which time slot would you like?” She listed these off like ice cream flavors: “In the morning, you’ve got 9:00 to 12:00. In the afternoon, there’s 1:00 to 3:15 or 3:30 to 6:00, or you can do the entire afternoon, 1:00 to 6:00—lots of people do. Or there’s the evening slot, 7:00 to 10:00. Which would you like?”

  I don’t want to do any of it! But her cheer and resolve were completely Scientological. Even as I felt forced toward an action I didn’t want to take, I admitted to a reluctant admiration that they could just do this. I agreed to the 3:30 to 6:00 slot, and Katey took me upstairs to introduce me to the Course Supervisor, Tim, a harried man of about forty, who pulled out a ledger and wrote my name and the time I’d agreed to show up.

  “See you tomorrow,” Tim said, and to Katey, “Be sure you cover the drugs and alcohol policy.”

  I knew it. No drugs, period, ever, not even aspirin, and no alcohol within twenty-four hours of being on course.

  The next day, in a bitter, subdued fury, and purposefully late—another minuscule act of insurrection—I walked through the doors of Celebrity Center and trudged up the stairs to the course room.

  Tim was busy helping a student when I arrived. As I waited for him to finish, I gazed around this place where I was going to have to spend five days a week.

 
Through floor-to-ceiling windows, light poured onto long wooden tables where people of all ages and types sat reading, surrounded by dictionaries and manuals and books. I thought of monks bent over their blessed work in a scriptorium. In spite of walls whose paint was peeling and ceilings blotched with water stains, it was a beautiful environment.

  And, most unexpectedly, I took to it like a kitten to milk.

  every sorrow in this world comes down to a misunderstood word

  The Course Supervisor finished up with the student he’d been helping and headed toward me.

  “Hello there,” Tim said. “You’re late. Let me show you around.”

  The course room appeared to in fact be three rooms. In one, people studied quietly at tables. In another, students sat opposite each other. Some had their eyes open, some closed. “This is the practical course room, where you apply what it is you’re studying,” Tim said. “Those students are doing what are called the TRs: Training Routines.”

  I nodded, proud I could indicate that I knew what those were.

  At a nearby table, a student was using an e-meter while asking questions of a student opposite, who, moving the limbs of a large doll that he held in his lap, answered using a doll-like voice.

  “Those two are getting ready to audit each other on Method One,” Tim said, and gestured to a man and a woman sitting at another table, an open course pack between them. “And Fran is doing what’s called a ‘spot-check,’ making sure Rob understands a bulletin.”

  We paused to watch. The woman pointed to a word, and Rob seemed to answer to her satisfaction. She asked something that made him spill the contents of a little basket onto the table: pennies, a ChapStick, an empty spool, a matchbook.

  “That’s a demo kit,” Tim said.

  Again I nodded, to let him know that I was already savvy about demos. Which is exactly how this noose of practice—the vocabulary (nomenclature), the drills, the sense of being one of the elect—is designed: to tighten slowly but surely around you.

  “One of Hubbard’s three barriers to study,” Tim was saying, as we watched Rob manipulate a cork and a paperclip, “is what he calls ‘lack of mass.’ Demos allow us to add ‘mass’ to what can sometimes be abstract ideas. Let me show you the Clay Table Room.”

  I followed him through the busy, productive-seeming place, and paused on the threshold of a third, smaller room. Tables ran along three of its four walls. On the tables was clay. Bricks and chunks of it, which students rolled between their palms and shaped with their fingers, creating all kinds of little clay figures, gesticulating with little clay arms.

  “Wow,” I said.

  Tim nodded. “When you have to build a concept out of clay, it becomes really clear really fast whether you understand it.”

  A student turned in her chair. “Could you check this out, Tim? I’m demoing ‘motivator.’”

  “This is Joann,” Tim said as she stood. “Joann is on HQS, the Hubbard Qualified Scientologist course.”

  I offered a quick smile, wondering how anyone could or would sign up for a course with that name. What did it mean to become a “qualified” Scientologist? I almost shuddered.

  Tim slid into the chair Joann had vacated. “Sands is starting the PTS/SP course.”

  “I did that one,” Joann said. “It’s very useful.”

  Leaning in, Tim began to study the array of clay figures that took up half of one of the long tables. “I see a mother carrying a little boy. He’s hugging her. And now she’s put him down and they’re holding hands. They’re smiling.”

  I bent to look. Joann had created a three-dimensional storyboard. First, the woman—long clay strands of hair—carried a little boy. Then they were walking, holding hands, smiling. The mother carried a huge purse.

  Joann stayed quiet, chin pulled in. I gathered she wasn’t to comment, but just let Tim tell the story he saw in what she’d created.

  “Uh-oh,” Tim said. “The little boy is reaching into the purse!”

  The mother appeared to be waving at someone. Her son was taking advantage by slipping a hand into her purse. Next he held behind his back a little clay rectangle marked $$.

  “Ah,” Tim said, “now they’re no longer holding hands.”

  “Their Affinity is down,” I said. Tim shot me a glance. “Sorry,” I said.

  “Well, that’s right. But until you’re checked out on your own clay table work, you can’t check out the work of others. Best thing is to take the Student Hat course, then HQS, then Method One. After that, you’re fast flow. Really speeds things up.”

  He peered again at the clay figures. “All right, the overt’s clear. So far so good. Now, let’s see how you handle the withhold.”

  He pulled his chair to the right and leaned in to study the next scenarios. “They’re looking at—are these teddy bears? And the boy is angry with his mother. Yes, that’s a manifestation that often follows an overt. Good.”

  Indeed, the mother was pointing at a row of what could have been little bears. The boy, his mouth open and jagged (a nearby toothpick indicated how these details were accomplished), tugged at her hand and pointed to another.

  “And now,” Tim said, “the mother has opened her purse to pay for the teddy bear. But the boy is on the ground. He’s having a tantrum!”

  Joann had carved a big crying hole in the little boy’s face. He was, in a kind of clay-y way, flinging around his arms and legs. The mother held hands to her ears.

  “He stole the money!” Tim said. “But he’s making his mother wrong because she won’t buy him the toy he wants—he’s ‘motivating’ his behavior.”

  In the next frame, the woman had her purse turned upside down, to show there was no money in it. A teardrop-shaped bit of clay was pasted to her cheek. The little boy was now facedown, hammering the floor with his fists.

  “Pass.” Tim held out a hand for Joann’s course pack and signed his initials in the space allotted for it on the check sheet. Another student called him over, and as he checked out that demo, I watched Joann squish all those scenarios into one huge ball of clay that she dumped into a container full of other balls and bricks. She covered it with a plastic sheet and went to wash her hands.

  “You just got a good demo of demoing,” Tim said, cheerfully. “Now, let’s get you started.”

  by the time I settled in at one of the tables, I wasn’t feeling quite as grumpy. Even as I knew I was about to grapple with information I didn’t particularly want to know—why I was considered a Potential Trouble Source, how my parents could be considered Suppressive Persons—I was intrigued; even, I had to admit, a bit excited.

  The Hollywood bungalow where I’d completed the comm course, Success Through Communication, was, I’d come to understand, a Scientology mission. Small though it was, it established the norm: When you started a course, you were handed a packet of bulletins written by LRH. The cost of the course included the use of that packet, the services of the Course Supervisor, and a check sheet.

  The first bulletin in the PTS/SP course pack would probably have been “Keeping Scientology Working”; the next covered the Barriers to Study.49 According to Hubbard, there are three such barriers, and in his usual technical way, he identifies them, including the accompanying physical manifestations, and offers solutions. As Tim had already mentioned, one of these barriers is “lack of mass.” The study subjects, particularly philosophy and religion, means grappling with abstractions. There’s a reason Justice is represented as a blindfolded lady holding a set of scales; it allows us to picture the concept of “blind justice.” But, as Hubbard points out, even a concrete thing, if it’s never been seen or held, needs “mass.” One can’t learn to drive a tractor from pictures alone.

  How obvious, I thought. Isn’t that why encyclopedias provide images in their margins, why manuals have diagrams, and why you learn to cook using a skillet and a stove? I decided to ski
p all that and go directly to what Hubbard had to say about the Suppressive Person.50 I flipped forward a few pages in the course pack.

  He or she speaks only in very broad generalities.

  Not.

  Such a person deals mainly in bad news, critical or hostile remarks, invalidation and general suppression.

  Nope. Well, my dad might talk about the Evil Empire. He’d certainly been tough on me as a writer from time to time, but it was he who purchased a Martin guitar for me, surprised me with a round-trip plane ticket to Paris, paid for schooling of all kinds.

  In any case, the word “mainly” didn’t in any way describe his “hostile remarks”—except in regards to Scientology.

  Maybe I needed to put “mass” to this idea. I pulled a few items from the little basket full of them on the table and fiddled with them as I read that surrounding such a person are “cowed or ill associates or friends, who, when not driven actually insane, are yet behaving in a crippled manner in life, failing, not succeeding.”

  I stared at my demo—the battery that was the Suppressive Person surrounded by a safety pin stuck sideways into a cork, broken crayons piled in a sad heap, a miniature Gumby with its limbs twisted into a tortured position—and thought of the dozens of students my father had ushered into their careers, who years later still sent him news of their successes and called for his advice. I thought of the Community of Writers he’d helped create, out of which so many authors and poets launched fine careers.

  I crossed the room and, whispering fiercely, told Tim there was no way any of this could apply to my parents.

  “Wait, wait,” he said. “Did you get checked out on ‘Barriers to Study’?”

  I shook my head.

  “Study that first bulletin and get checked out on it. Follow the check sheet.”

  “I understand the barriers to study,” I said. “But my parents are not suppressive.”

  “What are they?”

  “They are thoughtful, intelligent, loving people.”