Flunk. Start.

by Sands Hall

  I think it was about this time that I came to understand that David Mayo, L. Ron Hubbard’s personal auditor, had been “declared”: he’d been formally labeled a Suppressive Person and forbidden any future association with Scientology; if other Scientologists were in touch with him, they risked being declared themselves. This information rocked even my protected little lagoon. Even I’d heard of David Mayo. How could the man who audited Hubbard be an SP? But so it seemed to be.

  And he’d left the Church!

  And not only had he “blown” (was that really what had happened?), he’d used his vast experience with the Tech to start a splinter organization. He was a squirrel! Could that be true?

  Further rumors: Mayo was so highly respected, and the charges seemed so trumped up, that when he left the Church, a huge chunk of other Scientologists left too.74 Really?

  There was nowhere to go with these questions. No one to ask. Asking would probably lead to having to see the Ethics Officer. I turned eyes and mind away. What is true for you is true for you. Whatistrueforyouistrueforyou.

  And so it was, that in spite of knowing that where there was so much smoke there must be fire, in spite of dire warnings and terrible estrangements from those I loved most, I continued to persuade myself that a belief system so based on words, and the truth to be found within them, must be, at its no-matter-how-controversial center, good. I was so attracted to the study of the religion that even the understanding that I was, thus, binding myself to it, more and more tightly, did not deter me. Delving into words in this intimate way made me feel as if I was doing with my life exactly what I should be doing.

  And in this way I became a convert to Scientology, words that, like religion, I defined again and again, to assure myself of their meaning.

  Convert: To change to another form, to persuade to adopt a religion, from words meaning “to turn around.”

  Scientology: The study of knowledge, knowing how to know.

  In spite of the often-seething doubt, I came back to this again and again: I was turning around. I was learning to know how to know.

  he has simply moved on to his next level

  Skye and I laughed. We kissed. We talked. We sat outdoors in Malibu with glasses of wine, watching sun dip below waves, shivering deliciously in the breeze off the water. We held hands. We peeled shrimp and licked the grease from our fingers. We drove, listening to his songs. We sat cross-legged on his bed, knees touching, and talked some more. We found new levels of lovemaking. We farted, and howled with laughter.

  All these things require bodies. Why would we not want them?

  But bodies, so I understood, were what kept us trapped on this Earth. Bodies got in the way of being OT. In Scientology 8-8008, Hubbard writes that an Operating Thetan is “completely rehabilitated and can do everything a thetan should do, such as move MEST and control others from a distance, or create his own universe.” “Rehabilitated” implies a fall from some previous grace/ability—probably that stuff to do with psychiatrists and volcanoes that I wasn’t supposed to know. But: “create one’s own universe”?

  Skye explained that it didn’t mean, say, starting a Big Bang of one’s own—“although it could,” he said, “if you were powerful enough. Look at it this way. Jamie’s ‘creating a universe’ with his music school—do you see that? And I am, with my dreams for Stryder. And you’ve got various universes: your songwriting, acting, your novel. And we have one, in being together. It doesn’t have to be a space opera, ‘creating a universe.’”

  He made it seem both romantic and sensible.

  But in what may have been a reflection of the collision between his transcendent dreams for Stryder and the reality of creating a relationship, over the next two years we lived in six different places. I did not apprise my parents of these shifting addresses. The few times we visited, they put up a fence that was barbed and fierce. When Skye was out of the room, Dad might say, “He’s awfully enthusiastic about the Dodgers, isn’t he?” and I’d be reminded that only peons like such sports—why couldn’t he be enthusiastic about tennis? As comments flew about a particular novel, Skye would look mulish, underscoring the fact that he hadn’t read the book under discussion. Always, I came away from these visits doubting my love. And was he really that great a songwriter? Why wasn’t he more successful? Etc.

  In Scientology, this phenomenon—when someone else’s perspective makes you feel that what or who you respect or love is perhaps neither respectable nor lovable—is known as “Third Party.”75

  It can be subtle: You’re telling a friend about a trip you took with your husband, and how he refolded the map every time he consulted it. This had amused you; you’d found it endearing. But your friend shakes her head and says, “Golly! He sure does have to control every little thing, doesn’t he!” and laughs. You do, too—but your pleasure in what you saw as a quirk begins to shift. You notice that while he was kind enough to empty the dishwasher, he’s arranged the cups on the shelf with their handles pointing the same direction, which makes you think about that “control” thing. Later that night, when he asks, not for the first time, that you please screw the cap back on the toothpaste, you find yourself saying, “What’s with all the controlling behavior?” And then you lie side by side in bed fuming or even fighting. Usually also at work here, if you subscribe to Hubbard’s system, is the overt/withhold/motivator phenomenon.

  For Skye and me, the Third Party comprised my parents. Yet I could see through their eyes. And through their eyes, I saw that Skye was in his late thirties without a career; instead, he’d devoted a decade of his life to a cult Scientology. And there were other matters, things my parents didn’t know, as I didn’t tell them: he dyed his hair, covering the gray to look younger for his Stryder persona; he’d not yet sold or published a single song; he didn’t have a band—if he didn’t perform live, how was he ever going to become a rock star? But I seldom let myself think these things, as they were critical, and meant I had overts. I loved Skye, but—like Scientology—I could not see there was a way to leave him/it without it meaning that I was a bad person.

  What an insidious and invidious way to keep people in thrall.

  eventually, once we’d finally rented a house together, Skye began to figure out ways to get me the auditing that would move me up the Bridge, and supposedly solve my chronic sorrow. (The narcissistic nature of these investigations makes me roll my eyes now. Also, and obviously, focusing on what was wrong simply made things seem more wrong.) For a while, he audited me. As long as a Case Supervisor was in place—and through Skye’s work at the Advanced Org, we had one—couples could do this: in Scientology, just as stats could be “up” and ethics might be “out,” in this case the exchange would be “in.”

  But what was that exchange? How could I possibly repay someone who was helping me with what I was increasingly convinced was my immortal—lifetime after lifetime!—soul?

  Also, even though Skye was a trained auditor with excellent TRs, it was hard to share with him what he could see “reading” on the meter, which included aspects of my past and, especially, my parents’ opinions. So he and our friend Paloma, who was also highly trained, arranged an exchange: she’d audit me, he’d audit her, and I’d do . . . something. I’d no idea what, but was assured the right thing would show up.

  Which didn’t help the feeling of “out-exchange,” as Scientologists term it. I labored with a sense of diminishment: I was a lesser citizen of the spiritual world. My acting career wasn’t one—I just got work now and then. I worked haphazardly on a novel. When I had extra cash, I headed into Martin and Sallie’s studio to record a song. Yet here, too—I think because I’d swallowed Jamie’s notion that folk wasn’t really music—I deprecated my efforts, especially in comparison to what I saw as Skye’s brilliant lyrics.

  One night I said to him, longingly, “I just wish I could knock your socks off. About something!”

  A l
ittle later, the table cleared, the contented hum of the dishwasher launched, I snuggled in beside him on the couch to watch Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers talk about myth. At one point I offered up some comment about the program. Suddenly, he pulled up both feet, yanked off his socks, and threw them across the room.

  “Look at that!” he said, with a gesture of wonderment. “You just knocked ’em right off.”

  Our laughter was a saving grace. And much else was wonderful: his kindness, our loving hours in the dark. But I also wept, too often, about that sense of inadequacy, my chronic doubts about what I was doing with my life.

  Clearly I was depressed. I think, now, that the loss of my brother exacerbated a pre-existing tendency, and, as I never processed any of the grief attached to losing him, I settled ever more deeply into that depression. Yet I’ve no recollection of thinking or talking about it. Not even when I started those auditing sessions with Paloma.

  I’d fixated on the idea that Scientology would solve not only an existential miasma, Scientology would solve everything. Just by being in it, you were supposed to be happy (whatever that was). I had yet to comprehend that it is possible to take control of one’s own thoughts, that it isn’t just a lyric that encourages us to “look on the sunny side of life.” Instead, I see now, I simply waited, quite passively, for Scientology to “fix” me.

  and then, late January 1986, L. Ron Hubbard died. Rumors circulated. Not so much about his death, which within twenty-four hours was widely known, but about the future of Scientology. A hundred of us gathered in the courtyard of Celebrity Center, thousands more assembled in the Hollywood Palladium, to watch a televised event.

  The camera held steady on an expanse of stage. An enormous O glowed from a screen behind the podium. In the middle of it, an equally large T spread its wings. A sweeping bridge, white and gold, started from a physical foot in the middle of the stage and then—tromp l’oeil—joined the screen and disappeared into a gauzy pink-gold distance. I’d become accustomed to (and able to be dismissive of) the corny seventies-style publicity used by the Church. This was a new and rather impressive advertising elegance. There at Celebrity Center, all around me, a sigh of satisfaction rose into the nighttime air. That angelic OT symbol, that tangible yet gauzy bridge, served as both reminder and nudge: Even with its founder’s death, Scientology would keep on. And we, its practitioners, must also.

  I felt a guilty disappointment. I kind of hoped the Church would just, well, close.

  Someone introduced someone who introduced someone who told us that the new leader of the church, granted that post by L. Ron Hubbard himself, was David Miscavige!

  Greeted by minutes of applause, a short, fit, very tanned man strode to the podium. Although I’d heard his name, this was the first time I’d seen him. He looked impossibly young to be the new leader of the Church.

  As the applause died away, Miscavige looked down at his notes. Gravely, he told us that L. Ron Hubbard had completed the work he’d set out to do and had moved on to “his next level of OT research.”76

  “This level is beyond anything any of us have ever imagined,” Miscavige said. “This level is in fact done in an exterior state, meaning that it is done completely exterior from the body. At this level the body is nothing more than an impediment, an encumbrance to any further gain as an OT.”

  The idea that one can be outside one’s own body looking at oneself—“exterior”—is a known phenomenon; I’d even experienced it myself from time to time.77 But I wondered what kind of “cause” over his death LRH could possibly have had. I understood he’d been ill for years, living in a trailer, hiding from government probes, while some trusted minions ran the organization on the principles he’d so carefully laid out. Had he demanded, Beam me up, Scotty–like, “Die, body”?

  Our heads were cocked back, mouths slightly open, to take in the screen. Around us people murmured, several wept. “Thus at two thousand hours Friday the twenty-fourth of January, A.D. 36,” Miscavige intoned, “L. Ron Hubbard discarded the body he had used in this lifetime for seventy-four years, ten months, and eleven days.”

  I couldn’t help the smallest shake of my head. This was certainly a transition, as Hubbard “discarded” his body, but had he really “moved on to his next level”? Would he, in fact, do it in an “exterior state”? Was this a level others should aspire to attain?

  I also wanted to protest Miscavige’s use of “A.D. 36.” That didn’t mean Anno Domini. No. Those initials stood for After Dianetics.78 I thought Hubbard’s grandiosity in equating the publication of Dianetics as a date to restart time, likening it to the birth of Christ, was ridiculous—and appalling. Standing there, listening to a woman behind me weeping, to the vast stretches of applause that greeted Miscavige’s statements, I felt like a fraud.

  Miscavige was quoting the Technical Dictionary’s definition of body:

  . . . an identifying form or non-identifying form to facilitate the control of, the communication of and with, and the havingness of the thetan in his existence in the MEST universe.79

  Miscavige looked at his audience, which meant he was looking at the camera, which meant he appeared to be looking directly at me. He laid out another of Hubbard’s definitions with special import: “The body is a physical object; it is not the being himself,” and added: “The being we knew as L. Ron Hubbard still exists; however, the body he had could no longer serve his purposes. His decision was one made at complete cause by L. Ron Hubbard.”

  His decision was one made at complete cause by L. Ron Hubbard. What did that mean? Why was it parsed that way?

  I wondered who’d found Hubbard’s body. Had Hubbard been solo-auditing, as those on their OT levels do, and had he gone “flying” in some way? Had he been peaceful? Restless, haunted by transgressions committed in the name of his Church? Had he died believing in his life’s work? Had he died a charlatan?

  Why was I wondering that?

  “He has simply moved on to his next level,” Miscavige said.

  His expression, while solemn, looked to me as if he’d eaten something delicious.

  A photograph of Hubbard filled the screen and faded away, followed by another, and another. More applause, minutes of it. Someone else arrived at the podium to tell us that the Tech was still the Tech. New levels were to be released, ones LRH had been working on, the ones that had allowed him to let go of “this lifetime’s body,” levels that would take us all the way to OT XII! (Applause.) In the meantime, we were to be assured that the Tech would continue to be delivered in the most Standard of ways.

  In spite of these assurances, I felt a curious excitement. Maybe the religion might just shutter its windows, like a business that had run its course. Perhaps I could then persuade Skye to live somewhere other than Los Angeles, a life uncomplicated by the demands of our religion. We could be—this is how I thought of it—free.

  But that isn’t what happened. And once I realized that Scientology was going to continue to continue, I continued too. Sometimes I thought of the Chekov play Three Sisters, in which we hear the continual cry, voiced by one and then another of the sisters, that everything will be solved if only they could get to Moscow; we watch as years pass and they never ever do. And while I still thought of Samuel Beckett’s “fail again, fail better,” more often I recalled his play Waiting for Godot, in which two characters have the same exchange of dialogue numerous times, accompanied by a never-changing stage direction:

  vladimir: Shall we go?

  estragon: Yes, let’s go.

  They do not move.80

  i wasn’t currently on course, but I was getting auditing with Paloma. As I zipped around freeways as a story editor, transcribed tapes, taught acting classes, worked on stories and on the screenplay with Vano, I was aware of troubling rumors floating down from the upper echelons of the Church about people who’d held powerful positions being suddenly demoted. But none of it seemed to hav
e anything to do with our lives.

  During this time, my journals reflect an increasing engagement with the act of writing. An ecstasy rises from those pages. Perhaps part of it was that I wrote in cafés while sipping a cappuccino or a glass of my beloved chardonnay—the oaky, old-fashioned California kind, sunlight in a glass—and “sketched”: about Skye, about Scn (as I abbreviated it), my parents, conversations with friends and their children, observations of the world around me, and about the miracle of word following word, of a sentence making sense out of itself even in the writing of it. I was in a chronic state of wonder at the process.

  Still, a magazine cover from the time summed up my attitude toward the work I was doing with Vano: two chimpanzees hammer away on a typewriter over the caption, Is Anyone in L.A. Not Writing a Screenplay? So far we’d come up with Driver, the owner/operator of his own semi, and Eva, on the run from a bad relationship. She’d be hitchhiking; he’d pick her up. In a lonely stretch of countryside, the semi would crash and . . . something would happen.

  Vano often had to cancel our meetings. Not only did he have pressures at work; his health was deteriorating. A mutual friend told me it had to do with his kidneys—he’d been an alcoholic for a dangerously long time. We were nowhere close to finishing, much less selling whatever it was we were concocting, and I was often in a low-grade panic about finances. So in the fall of 1986, when a woman who was planning to open a Scientology mission not far from Rodeo Drive asked to meet with me, I was ready to hear what she had to offer.

  because, you know, you did just turn thirty-six

  Jessica was serenity itself. Her clothes were simple and elegant, taupe and black. As we toured what would be the mission’s quarters, she explained why the Bel Air/Beverly Hills area was an ideal place to launch such an endeavor. Its clientele would include those who were educated, well-heeled, secure in their jobs—and perhaps beginning to wonder if there might be more to life. It would be a “feeder” to the larger Orgs, but she would not use the word “mission”; she planned to call it a “Center,” a word less fraught with religious overtones. And she asked if I would come on board as Course Supervisor.