Flunk. Start.

by Sands Hall

  The Executive Director, Ed, told me that at first my weekly take-home pay wouldn’t be much; for the time being, the course room would be open only in the evenings and on Saturdays. We’d each be paid a percentage of the mission’s earnings (a substantial tithe appeared to go to the larger organization). But as the Center grew, our salaries would as well. The Center would pay for my Course Supervisor Course, which I’d take at the Advanced Org. I’d be “on post” by January 1987.

  I admired Jessica. She and Ed were persuasive. I believed in Hubbard’s Study Tech. The money would be steady. I’d have time to write.

  These must have been the reasons it seemed like a good idea, and why I said yes.

  as i walked into the big blue buildings of Scientology’s Advanced Org to start the Course Supervisor Course, my heart leapt about like a tethered frog. The secrecy surrounding the upper levels was a palpable force in those shabby corridors and rooms, through which Sea Org members strode with even more force and purpose than those at Celebrity Center. But it wasn’t just the proximity to Operating Thetans and whatever that supposedly mind-bending information might be. It was that by stepping into the Advanced Org, I was plunging into Scientology in a way I’d so far managed to avoid. Terrifying possibilities hovered, including a fear that somehow they’d “get” me, in their implacable, Scientological way, to sign up for the Sea Org.

  I’d also by now heard about a nasty thing called the Rehabilitation Project Force (an Orwellian phrase if there ever was one, though that doesn’t seem to have occurred to me at the time). Scientologists were sent to the RPF when they’d gone—or were perceived to have gone—out-ethics. Members of the Sea Org who tried to leave the Church might wind up in the RPF. A Registrar whose stats crashed several weeks in a row (which could only be an indication of overts) would be assigned to the RPF. Someone who’d had an affair with someone else’s spouse. Someone who’d squirrelled. I was aware that a number of those who’d once been close to LRH were now in the RPF; after Miscavige assumed Church leadership, he’d discovered that all this time, these trusted minions had been committing overts, and they had to be “rehabilitated.” In addition to having to perform menial, even demeaning labor, I understood that those in the RPF were fed rice and beans and given Ethics Handlings to help them confront the reasons they’d landed there. Then they had to scratch their way back up the Conditions: from Treason or Enemy to Liability, “making up damage done” every step of the way. People whispered that this took months, even years. Years!81

  The names of the Conditions, which, when applied to marriage or to one’s career, seemed like useful metaphors, suddenly took on grim implications. I kept my head down, terrified that these OTs, with their advanced states of awareness, would be able to perceive my misgivings. Was the thrum of doubt in the pit of my stomach audible?

  And it was while I was there, working on my Course Supervisor Course, that that twelve-year-old girl picked up my course pack, pointed to a word, and at my “ummm,” said “Flunk.” And the student beside me whispered that she had gone Clear last lifetime, when she had been a Course Supervisor at Saint Hill.

  Saint Hill was the British Org in East Grinstead where, in the sixties and seventies, LRH taught and recorded lectures and wrote hundreds of HCOPLs and HCOBs—basically putting Scientology together. As I watched what appeared to be that big thetan in a little body tour the course room, I did the math. It was possible. If she’d worked there, and then died, she could have come right back; born in the mid-seventies, she’d be about twelve now.

  I leafed through the dictionary to find the flunked word, remembering a long-forgotten encounter. In the summer of 1974, waiting to hear if I’d made it into the second year of the American Conservatory Theater’s acting program (the number of students was whittled from fifty to twenty-five), I’d spent a few months in Europe. I flew into Paris, worked for a few weeks in the bookstore on the Left Bank, Shakespeare & Company, sleeping on a shelf/sofa under the poetry books, before, traveling with a friend, crossing the English channel. On the bus to London, we met a couple whose eyes were bright, faces shining. There was a discussion of past lives, a topic that even then pulled me like metal to magnet. As the bus drew to a stop, they urged us to alight too, to come with them.

  “You’ll love it!” they said, grinning with ease and happiness. “We promise.”

  I’d been very tempted. I thought for months about the choice I’d made to stay in my seat as they swung off the bus. What if I’d gone? What might I have found? Might it have been that yearned-for closet that opened into Narnia?

  Sitting in that course room, watching that wee Course Supervisor spot-checking another student, I wondered if it had been East Grinstead where that bus had stopped, if the couple had been Scientologists, and if they’d been heading to Saint Hill. Staring across the course room at the girl’s gleaming braids, I wondered if she might have been there as a student—even as a Course Supervisor—at that very time.

  Sometimes it felt as if Scientology had been coming at me, or I at it, for a long time. Which made me think of my brother: all those falls over the years, those near-death moments, as if the big one, the one that mashed his brain, had been just lying in wait.

  in the auditing I was doing with Paloma, I was put on various “rundowns.”82 One of these, as I recall, was a series of processes designed to handle how often I felt I was exterior. Although going exterior—when the spirit of you separates from the body of you—can be deemed a good thing, it can also be debilitating. If you’re hovering outside your body and can’t or don’t come back in, it’s hard to be in life.

  Exterior was something I felt I did, or had, or was, however it might be phrased; it seemed part of how I interacted with life. Self-conscious might be another way to put it. I often watched myself, as if I were both camera and subject. I was seldom able to just be. The problem might dissipate over a glass of wine, when (paradoxically) I could be present: laugh, enjoy, be part of things. But sooner or later, I’d feel a terrible tug. I’d mentally move to the outskirts of the gathering, the event, assessing, judging, thinking I should be doing something other than what I was doing. Often, I found reason to leave.

  Paloma and I ran such incidents. There was also an attempt to handle a chronic sense of invalidation. I processed Skye’s disappointment that I wasn’t OT, Jamie’s dismissal of my folky music, how I felt I never measured up to my parents’ expectations, Paloma asking again and again, trying to find the root cause, “Was there an earlier, similar time you were invalidated?”

  One day, as I was going on and on, blah blah endless blah, Paloma pulled a sheet from the portable file box she carried into session. This meant she was going to ask a series of new questions, run a new process. But the question wasn’t about someone invalidating me. It was: “Was there a time you invalidated someone?”

  The way she asked the question made me understand that the process wasn’t always about invalidation. It could be asked about someone hurting you (you hurting someone), or taking something from you (you taking something), or even, in examining previous lifetimes, killing you (you killing someone). Immediately I saw its purpose. If you’d “pulled it in,” you yourself must have done something to create that particular flow coming your way. In a word: karma.83

  But when I’d talked my way through that series of repeated questions, in the process having the (obvious) realization about how my invalidating others had led me to be invalidated, Paloma posed another question: “Was there a time others invalidated others?”

  This question opened up a vast array of options, and more realizations, but it was the fourth question that I found utterly enlightening: “Was there a time you invalidated yourself?”

  I actually started to laugh. In the long run, who else could?

  This is an example of the sort of thing that kept me willing to trust the Tech (I later found out these are called the Quad Flows).84 Perhaps because I already believ
ed that things going awry were the result of something I had or had not done, these questions made sense. But a bigger, more useful truth began to glimmer: Whether I could (or should) take responsibility for everything that happened “to” me, what I could be responsible for, what I might control, is how I feel about it. The perspective took too long to land, and came in a poisonous package, but it’s very useful.

  one auditing session revealed that my father and I had quite a friendship, back in the 1870s. We were cowboys, working cattle up and down the Territories. One night, sitting by the campfire, the cattle spread out over acres of range around us, he took a sip from his tin mug and told me that he was thinking about being a writer.

  I didn’t hear “writer,” I heard “rider.”

  “You already are one,” I told him.

  He said no, he was not, and I said yes, he certainly was.

  He stood up and yelled, “I am not a writer!” and I stood up and yelled, “You sure as hell are too a rider!”

  We got into a ferocious tangle, shouting across the fire at one another, stomping off to sleep, freezing, our bedrolls far from the firepit’s glowing coals rather than be proximate enough to even hear each other snore. It wasn’t until the next morning, after we’d saddled up and were slogging along the edge of a creek, that we realized one of us meant “rider” and the other “writer.” Then we laughed long and loudly, making some of the cows bolt.

  The overreaction we had to each other is what’s known in Scientology as a “wrong indication.” According to Hubbard’s theory, this can cause a person to introvert, and if the wrong indications persist, or are not cleared up, can even cause psychosis.85

  My father and I died together that lifetime. In a duel, a gunfight. I think it was over a woman. We both got off one shot. It was curiously low-key and rather dignified.

  Paloma and I ran a lot of incidents about my dad in those auditing sessions. We’d known each other in a lot of lives, in all kinds of relationships, in which there was often, as in that cowboy friendship, an all-too-obvious competition.

  According to me. I remember being pleased with that writer/rider pun. The cowboy lifetime could have been inspired by my father’s novel Warlock (it takes place in the Old West). I might have been moved to all that Western imagery and action by McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, which I’d recently read. I fretted about this a lot, that what I was “remembering” was my imagination, or a conflation of memories and scenes from books and movies. I mentioned my concern to Skye.

  “I think about that too,” he said. “But here’s what I figure. If the story, invented or real, allows you to get to some truth about yourself, and allows you to figure something out about the way you’ve behaved in the past and the way you want to change that behavior in the future, what’s wrong with that? Maybe that’s all auditing is: a way for us to examine the self we don’t want to be, and invent a better self we can work toward being.”

  He gave me one of his impish smiles. “It’s also possible, of course, that whatever it is you’re remembering is a memory. A real one. There is that possibility.”

  “are you and Skye thinking about a baby?” my sister, Tracy, asked in one of our rare phone calls. “Because, you know, you did just turn thirty-six.”

  I used birth control. But (amazingly) it wasn’t until Tracy asked that question that I became aware that the sand in the hourglass for that particular endeavor was running thin. In our little group, we seldom spoke of children. Perhaps because it would get in the way of the careers we were supposedly building. But I think it was more the idea that Scientologists were not limited by such Matter-Energy-Space-Time concerns. As OTs, one could command a body to do what needed to be done—or something. Delph and Wyatt were still the only parents in our midst, although Paloma, almost fifty, spoke of adopting a child, and eventually did.

  “How are we going to do that, muffin?” Skye said, when I broached the topic. “You can’t stay committed to Scientology for more than a day at a time. How could we bring a child into that confusion?”

  By which he meant, of course, that if we had a child we’d raise him/her as a Scientologist. It was a horrifying idea—and wasn’t that another sign I should get out? But once again I examined the transgressions that would make we want to leave, which led back to that Beckett-ian mantra: Shall we go? Yes, let’s go. They do not move.

  I dropped the subject.

  Even as I worked on the screenplay, stories, a novel, it was increasingly clear how much I simply didn’t know about writing. In a desultory way I sent away for information about graduate programs. I even talked to my father about attending the program he ran at UC Irvine. He told me that my writing was good enough to be accepted into his program.

  “It is?” This stunned me. He’d recently sent a padded envelope containing three paperback romance novels, the 10¢ thrift store stickers still attached, with a note to say that perhaps my style was suited to the genre. I was horrified and ashamed. At the time, I understood that any kind of genre writing meant, simply, bad writing; romance, above all, was “fluff.” I promptly dropped off the books, unread, at another thrift store.

  “Sure. And I’d be happy to have you.”

  I tried to imagine talking about writing with peers, my father looming over the table.

  “Although,” he said, “it’s probably not such a great idea. Might cramp your style.” We both laughed, very hard. “But we’re glad to hear you’re working on your novel.”

  I shrugged. I had yet to tell him I was working at a Scientology mission.

  “Anything to get you out of the clutches of the Evil Empire, right?”

  “That’s right.” More laughter, which faded. “Love you, Dad.”

  “We love you too, Sands.”

  I hung up the phone. I would have to tell Skye I’d talked to my father about the possibility of going to graduate school. Otherwise I’d have a withhold.

  one afternoon not long after that call I stood looking out our large front window. The sun shining on the wood floor warmed the soles of my bare feet. A breeze tossed the leaves of trees lining the cul-de-sac. But I realized I was missing my family. Brett was engaged to a man I’d met just once. Tracy now had a baby daughter, Emma. Oak was living with her and her family in Grand Junction while Robin looked for work in Chicago.

  Standing there, the wood warm beneath my feet, I decided to go to the Conference. In addition to seeing family, the lectures and panels would be good for my writing. And when the week was over, I’d head to the Southwest, spend time with Tracy, and research my screenplay.

  That night I told Skye my plan. I asked if he might be willing to join me.

  And to my surprise and delight, he said yes. Jessica was supportive. I was prepared to quit the Center if she said no, and perhaps she sensed as much. She gave me a month off-post.

  In August I headed to Squaw Valley. The bustle and work of getting things launched was as it ever had been: the family plus many helpers scurrying about: Each year, the office, the workshop spaces, and the stage for panels and lectures have to be erected newly.

  Oak—Tad, again—had already arrived from Grand Junction. He seemed, simply, happy. I didn’t know, had never seen, this side of him. I remembered him as driven, intense, brilliant—never happy. His face still looked as if someone had taken a sledgehammer and slammed it under one side of his chin: One eye sat higher than the other. Yet, however lopsided the grin might be, the mischievous gap between his two front teeth was still there. It was still his grin.

  Among the staff members that 1987 summer was a writer I’ll call Max, who’d just published a well-received first novel. In his long arms, his mandolin looked like a toy, but his fingers flew over the strings, sparkling and twining notes around my voice and guitar. All kinds of attractive possibilities hovered there. But I was with Skye. And Max was married—albeit, I gathered, unhappily. I’d been there, done that, a
nd still felt awful about it. I focused on the music we could make that really was, simply, music.

  As a way to end the intense, supercharged week of the Conference, my father, years before, had come up with the idea of a “talent show” featuring the participants and the august writers who taught them engaging in skits, songs, poetic rewrites and interpretations, and other literary folly. Indeed, Dad dubbed the event “The Follies.” Most years, I organized and emceed, and for more than a decade, it was the only time I played any music: sometimes a tune of my own, and always a song to end the Follies that everyone in the Conference sang together. That year, with Max and the other gathered musicians, it was “Amazing Grace.”

  Afterward, Max gave me a hug, the only time we touched.

  “Next summer,” he said. “We’ll work up a duet for the Follies!”

  I nodded and turned away. Skye was my sweetheart. We were heading to the Southwest; we were going to travel! Together!

  anasazi

  A Pueblo word, Anasazi means “the ancient ones. Ancestors.”

  But it also means “enemies of our ancestors.”

  This discrepancy fascinated me. I felt that in the tension between those two definitions hovered the truth of what had happened to them. Why, having occupied the Southwest for hundreds of years, had the Anasazi moved into hard-to-access cliff dwellings, and then . . . disappeared?

  The mystery was compelling and complete, and Skye found it as intriguing as I did. We clambered into those cliffs. We hiked through sere landscapes to peer at petroglyphs. We meandered through museums, where I scribbled notes that seemed essential to the story I was building. We climbed in and out of kivas, marveling that during the same centuries that Europeans were lofting cathedral spires into the sky to reach the Father, Native Americans were digging deep into Mother earth to honor the Place of Emerging. We kept our tent flaps open so we could gaze at the night sky, thrilled that six hundred years before, the Anasazi had walked this land and lived their lives in relation to those same rotating stars.