Flunk. Start.

by Sands Hall

  “Of course it’s a cult!”

  “Some people see it that way.” I kept my voice steady. “But that’s not a fair representation. It’s just Black PR—I mean, negative propaganda—I mean, bad publicity . . . It’s trying to do such theta—good—things on the planet, I mean in the world, it really is . . .”

  They looked at me with disbelief.

  “I’m learning so much. I mean, the funny thing is, it, the Church, the Tec—” I stopped before I actually said the word, all the bits of nomenclature that had become part of my vocabulary rising up and replacing the words that I should use. “The funny thing is, it’s what’s allowed me to understand that marrying Jamie was an error, that choice was . . . Scientology—” (I could hardly say the word out loud, and even then wondered what that meant). “What I’m learning has allowed me to see that, I mean, how you were right . . . about that.”

  “Tell us one thing this church of yours is ‘giving you,’ Sands,” my father said, using quotes. “What are these ‘good things’ it’s doing ‘on the planet’?”

  I told them about dictionaries.

  They stared in stupefied silence.

  “You know about dictionaries!” my mother finally said.

  “No one ever taught me how to look up a word—”

  “Of course we did!”

  “Who needs to be taught how to use a dictionary!”

  “Well, I think we do have to be taught, Dad. I mean, I never really knew about etymologies and—”

  “Of course you knew!”

  “No, I didn’t—”

  My father slammed his hands on the table and stood. “Gah!” He looked as if he had just opened a container to find rotten, stinking beans. “Sands, what have they talked you into! Of course you know how to use a dictionary! Of course you know about etymologies. Of course you know how to study! You graduated magna cum laude. You’re our daughter. What a godawful waste of your life! We’ve got to catch our goddamned plane. Thanks so much for the send-off.”

  “Mom! Dad!” I ran after them down the corridor. I wanted to tell them, I wanted them to see, that a passion for learning and for study and for words, while no doubt genetic, had been unfolded, had been given to me by the religion.

  Mother turned to look at me before they re-boarded. Her face was drawn and sad. She did not wave. Dad did not look back.

  I stood watching them disappear into the tunnel. As far as they were concerned, my brother and I had both lobotomized ourselves.

  imagination?

  A friend of my parents, author/editor Blair Fuller—cofounder of the Community of Writers, the man who years before had filmed that madcap Dionysus and the Maenads—came to town and offered to take me to lunch.

  “There’s a café on Franklin, across from that Scientology center,” he said over the phone, using the word easily. “Shall we meet there?”

  Blair was as close to an uncle as I’d ever had. Even as I wondered if he’d been sent by my parents to “save” me, I was glad to see him, and happy to meet at Two Dollar Bill’s; it was convenient to Celebrity Center, where I’d be on course later that day.

  The waitress led us to the same window table where three years before I’d sat and wondered what went on inside the walls of that lovely, shabby building across the street. And now I knew. Now I referred to it as “CC.”

  As the waitress took our orders, Blair and I were both aware, I think, that if this lunch were to include my parents, a bottle of white for the table would have been de rigueur. But I’d be on course later that day, and Blair was in AA. He told me that he was sorry to hear that Jamie and I were divorcing. I nodded. I was waiting for the lecture, and when he lifted his bag onto his lap and pulled from it books by L. Ron Hubbard, I pressed fingernails into closed hands, readying myself.

  “So,” he said, indicating the books: Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, Science of Survival, and Introduction to Scientology Ethics. “I’ve been reading some of what Hubbard has to say.”

  I took a deep breath, prepared for an onslaught of negativity.

  “He’s got some intriguing notions, absolutely,” he said. “In fact, Dianetics has a lot in common with psychotherapy, which Hubbard seems to understand—he actually appears to think it will replace psychiatry!” He laughed. “And this Tone Scale he outlines in Science of Survival? That’s interesting, makes a lot of sense.”

  He’d actually read the books?

  “However, he holds perspectives that are downright racist: that Japanese war brides are known to have a ‘sweet smell,’ for instance. And it’s disgusting that he thinks a solution to making the planet a better place might be to get rid of those who are ‘low’ on his Tone Scale.” He tapped a hand on the pile of books. “Still, there’s a lot to consider.”

  I was stunned. Blair had not invited me to lunch to scoff. Not to deride. Not to insist I leave, nor to regale me with horrors. No. He’d read some of Hubbard’s books. He’d come prepared to talk about Hubbard’s ideas.

  “Did you know the first version of Dianetics was an article published in a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction? He started as a science fiction writer. But I’m sure you know that.”

  I shrugged, still wary. I’d tucked this into the mental pocket where I put things I didn’t want to consider. (It was getting very full.) In the forties, Astounding Science Fiction, which liked stories that dealt with pseudoscience, had published a lot of Hubbard’s work.

  “His stuff was popular, sold a lot of copies,” Blair was saying. “Hubbard expanded one of those pieces into Dianetics.” He read from the cover of the paperback. “A ‘modern science of mental health.’ Astonishing thing to claim.”

  Blair had “gathered”! He’d researched Hubbard, and Hubbard’s life! It was more than I, or, as far as I knew, many of my Scientology friends, had done.

  The waitress set down our salads. “Oh, Science of Survival!” she said. “That’s the book I’d want on a desert island. You guys must be Scientologists!” I tried not to wince.

  “Hubbard knows his Latin well enough to coin a word,” Blair said, as she left.

  “‘Through the mind,’” I said. “I love that—the derivation stuff.”

  “Good to know one’s Latin!”

  Words tumbled out. How fun it was to get caught up in chains of words and derivations. The idea of knowing how to know. Hubbard’s theories about study.

  “You’ve read Dianetics,” I said, “so you know that the auditor asks, ‘Is there an earlier, similar incident?’”

  “That’s basic psychology. The idea that a current problem might be based on an unexamined previous one. Freud actually posited that there might be what he called ‘chains’ of memories embedded in the subconscious.”

  “He did?”

  “Well, he was speculating. This was back around the turn of the century. He wondered that if one got at the earliest memory, the chain of them would be relieved. But it sounds as if Hubbard codified such a method, and then, with the help of the e-meter, made it easier to get at those memories. However, I’m not clear about how this connects to Scientology. Dianetics is a self-help book. But Scientology calls itself a religion.”

  “Well . . .” I wondered how far to go. “As he says in Dianetics, some of those earlier, similar incidents can be traced back to the womb. People found that ridiculous—”

  “But that was in the fifties!” Blair shook his head. “These days, women don’t drink alcohol if they’re expecting. And I have a friend who every afternoon during her pregnancy played recordings by Mozart with her tummy close to the speakers so her unborn baby might be influenced in some way. Maybe he became a composer.”

  This was the way people around me talked all the time, and not just about what went on in the womb. Recently a friend had described her two-year-old daughter doing pliés while holding on to the edge of the bathtub
, then stretching a leg along it, pointed toe and all—surely she’d been a ballerina in a previous lifetime?

  “All to say,” Blair said, “it’s no longer revolutionary to think that what happens in the womb influences later behavior. But I still don’t see how that’s connected to religion.”

  Outside, on Franklin Avenue, traffic whizzed by. Across the street, the second-floor windows of the course room twinkled. In about an hour I’d be on the other side of those windows, studying. And here I was talking with one of my parents’ friends about the spiritual path I was treading with the kind of interest and ease one might discuss the current exhibit at the Getty.

  “Well,” I said, slowly. “What if the earliest/similar memory isn’t from a few years ago? What if it can’t be found in childhood? What if it can’t be found in the womb? What if it’s found, I don’t know, say, in the trenches of World War I—what’s that?”

  “Imagination?”

  We smiled at each other. His blue eyes were as kind as could be, but it was clear we’d arrived at a Grand Canyon of possibility that he could not and would not leap across.

  I stumbled my way through an explanation of how Hubbard’s “science of mental health” might have become a religion: that the only thing that might traverse lifetimes would be—were one open to the concept—the soul. “So let’s say there’s that memory in the trenches of World War I, and when the auditor asks about an ‘earlier, similar incident,’ what comes up is, I don’t know, something that happened during the Crusades, and before that, something to do with the Hittites?”

  “And before that, something to do with a spaceship.”

  We looked at each other, long and steady.

  “Maybe a spaceship,” I said. “I’m just making this up, okay? I haven’t done a lot of auditing. But maybe the fight with your wife reminds you of the time you blasted a planet to smithereens—the same guilt, the same remorse, times a thousand.”

  He looked startled and then laughed. “Pretty hard to apologize!”

  “Exactly! And so maybe that’s the ‘earliest memory’ on the chain of them. And the person understands that the fight with his wife won’t clear up because he hasn’t been able to confront this horrible time when his ‘blast’ wasn’t just a nasty comment, but killed a million people. And he has to take responsibility, and maybe he sees that the impulsivity that killed all those people comes from the same source as that blast that made his wife cry, and, I don’t know, he decides not do that anymore. It’s about being a better person.”

  “Maybe.” Blair shook his head. “Although it also sounds like a way to make you feel guilty about everything.”

  I nodded. This was undeniable.

  “Also grandiose,” he said. “No doubt a lot of people come up with the ‘fact’ that they were Lincoln. Madame Curie.” He shook his head. “It’s certainly self-involved, yes?”

  Also undeniable. I nodded. “Yes. I do think about that.”

  “You believe this, Sands?”

  “All my life I’ve felt powerful connections to certain time periods: Elizabethan England, ancient Greece. What feel like memories get aroused, vivid ones, with sounds and aromas and dialogue. They feel very real. I’ve wondered about this for years, long before I ever heard of Scientology.”

  “But no doubt you’ve read excellent historical novels about those periods. Good authors persuade us we’re there. That’s what good writing is. Or movies.”

  “Yes. Still, a lot of people on this planet believe in reincarnation.”

  “True,” Blair said.

  I leaned forward. “I fret about what I’m doing. It seems loony when I look at it from my parents’ perspective, and certain things about the organization really bother me. But when I’m doing it, it makes sense. I’ve had so many discoveries, I’ve met people with good minds and hearts and intentions, people I like and admire. So then I wonder, is my doubt my doubt, or is it that Mom and Dad’s opinions seem, I don’t know, better than mine? Their approval matters so much! I worry that I’m seeing through their eyes. What about my eyes?”

  “I think it’s great you’re exploring,” he said, putting the books back into his shoulder bag. “It’s exactly what someone your age should be doing.”

  This comment caused some part of me to zoom upward and hover above the table. The gaze I remember giving us was both fond and rueful. There was Blair, sixty-odd years old, trailing love and kindness and sorrow. He’d had problems with alcohol, he was twice divorced. Opposite him was an eager-to-please thirty-three-year-old who was, from his perspective, “doing what she should be doing” by examining spiritual, even intellectual options before settling into life. How grateful I was, and remain. He took the time to explore things by which I was intrigued, as if, because I found them intriguing, they might indeed be so.

  “How’s your brother?” he asked. “I saw him after the accident, in New York City.”

  This would have been when Oak and Mary were still living in the six-floor walk-up in Manhattan, before he was flown to California, before Mary joined him in Squaw Valley, before she took the kids back east and filed for divorce, before he’d tried to go back to school. How good of Blair, and how typical, to have made an effort to see him.

  “Those hallucinations,” Blair said. “About being shot at, the bugs and spiders he thought were crawling across his back? That was the DTs, you know. Delirium tremens. I mean, imagine drinking so much and then being forced to go cold turkey like that.”

  I’d never considered that, and told him so.

  “Those are classic signs. Where is he now?”

  I caught him up with what details I had. As we left the restaurant, I couldn’t help but wonder what might be different if my parents had read Hubbard’s books and given my choice similar scrutiny, rather than depending on what newspapers and friends had to say. I was aware that, due to the past hour and a half, I was examining, and not in a knee-jerk, defensive way, what Blair had presented: that while there was worth to be found in Hubbard’s writings, there were also claims he made that were ridiculous, unsubstantiated, disgusting, and just plain wrong.

  While it took me too long to act on that understanding, that conversation was part of what helped me eventually do so.

  “You’re looking well,” he said as we hugged goodbye, “except for the grief about your parents. But I don’t worry about you. I’ll let them know.”

  “It won’t make any difference.”

  He nodded. “But I’ll try.”

  what is true for you is true for you

  As Jamie and I began to make arrangements to live apart, a friend, Constance, told me that she and her husband were also dissolving their marriage. In a fortuitous equation, Joel moved in with Jamie for a few months while I moved in with Constance. Eventually, as our respective divorces solidified, she and I rented a house together.

  Constance’s black coils of hair and huge dark eyes made her look like an image slid from a Grecian urn. Quirky and brilliant, one of an increasing number of friends who made it “all right” to be a Scientologist, she introduced me to the smart and kind Skye.

  Like Jamie, Skye had attained OT III. But there the similarities ended. Jamie was blue-eyed and blond; Skye, not much taller than I, had eyes the color of espresso; his hair, tightly coiled ringlets, a deep black. Jamie made a living from his music school; Skye, a highly trained auditor, made some of his income counseling. Jamie was a superb bass player who sometimes composed music along jazzy lines; Skye, a marvelous wordsmith and songwriter, was in the process of creating a rock ’n’ roll persona, Skye Stryder.

  Another important difference: I agreed with Skye’s politics. This was a huge relief. Jamie and many of his friends either opted out of the political process altogether, calling it pointless when there was so much to be done on the spiritual plane, or they were so far to the nutsy, conspiratorial right that their thinking melded
into the nutsy, conspiratorial left.

  Skye was withdrawing from a previous relationship, and although Jamie and I were separated, we had yet to divorce. Highly conscious of the ethics surrounding the situation, Skye and I were careful in our coming together, taking our time. But eventually, and formally, Skye asked me out to dinner. Afterward, we drove all the way to Ventura and back, streaming through the darkness of Highway 101. In his guise as Stryder, he was in the midst of recording some tunes, and the songs soaring out of the tape deck filled the car with sound and image. We could have been in a spaceship en route to another planet, sighting the occasional lights of other ships cruising the universe.

  Part of the spaceship imagery had to do with what I was picking up from my studies, augmented by films that emerged during these years: Star Wars, E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind. While I had no idea what was revealed to those who attested to OT III, I understood there was a Wall of Fire that had to be . . . confronted? permeated? leapt through (like tigers in a circus)? However, all those lifetimes, often on planets other than Earth, seemed to imply travel between universes, as one might fly from San Francisco to Melbourne. This sense of vast space, a teeming darkness filled with possibility, was further influenced by hearing Skye’s plans. Stryder, dark and lithe, was destined to be a world-famous star. And through that rock ’n’ roll medium, Skye, dark and lithe, with the hugest of helping hearts, would manifest his desire to improve the lot of man. He would do this as an Operating Thetan. And once he’d done his work on this planet, this lifetime, he’d head out into the universe, without a body, to continue his heartfelt Scientological labors. In both modes he was heading for the stars. But above all this he yearned—and he yearned with a ferocity I found dazzling and terrifying, foreign and desirable—to connect. Returned from that Ventura spaceship ride, lyrics burbled up onto the pages of my journal:

  There where the highway enters the sky

  where the dusk is just turning to night