by Sands Hall
For the first time in my relationship with Skye, I was leading the way. I felt a jolt, a surge of energy: This is me! I shared my research, introduced him to places I’d read about—and I could put up a tent! It helped a lot toward the wish I had to knock his socks off.
We stayed for a few days in Grand Junction with Tracy and David. Tad was still in Squaw Valley, cleaning up after the Conference. He’d return in a few weeks and would then head to Chicago to join Robin, who’d finalized a job. At one point, as Tracy showed me the writing hut he’d built out of cinderblocks, I tearfully confessed to the doubts that plagued me.
“Well, you’re welcome here any time. If you ever, you know—” she spoke with care, respectful as she always was of my choices “—want to take a break.”
Borrowing their bikes, Skye and I headed to the Canyonlands. We took in Moab, Durango, Santa Fe. Mostly we camped; now and again we booked hotel rooms that I don’t know how we paid for. Skye must have used a credit card. One of those was the Rocking Horse Inn, in Taos, where our lovemaking was so lush that I was sure I’d be pregnant. I told Skye so, and that I wanted to live here with that baby, walk barefoot on terra-cotta tile, plant trees I’d see grow to maturity.
Which is when Skye said, “And what am I supposed to do, muffin, bag groceries?” And added, “You don’t want what I want. You want a whole different life.”
I saw what he meant. But unhappy as I was in the life we led in Los Angeles, I could not imagine leaving him, could not imagine life without him. I appeared to have handed over every bit of will to him, and to the Church.
And so we made our way back to LA. I picked up my duties again at the Center. I checked in with beloved friends. In my datebook, for each weekday morning, I printed in block letters, write. And many mornings I did sit at my desk. But my stories seemed obviously and stupidly autobiographical. The novel, started back in New York, was stalled. While I didn’t want everyone to die—alcohol, drugs, accidents—any other ending seemed saccharine. Graduate school seemed most unlikely; how would I ever get accepted? There was the screenplay, but Vano had other things to think about. He’d undergone a kidney transplant, with pain so monumental that all he remembered was screaming for someone to please, please kill him, now. He spent three evenings a week on dialysis. Sometimes I drove the hour to see him and sat through a few of the eight hours it took his blood to cycle through one of those stainless steel machines, but we seldom talked about writing. Once he said to me that I should turn the screenplay into a novel.
“I mean it,” he said. “Except for the name Driver, it’s pretty much all yours anyway.”
I was aware of a vast hollow in my psyche. It wasn’t fair to blame Scientology, yet there was no way to get around the fact that it had a lot to do with where and how I was spinning out the days of my life. I was desperately unhappy.
But wanting to leave just meant I had overts. I was so tired of looking for them—and always, always finding them.
and it was about that time, one October evening, that into the course room Ed brought the young man who looked like he spent his days on a surfboard. Skip started Success Through Communication, but there were those complications of sitting opposite him drilling the Training Routines, which student after student couldn’t maintain, his talk of the firewalk, those looming funhouse-mirror faces when I attempted TR0 with him myself. Ed taking him into his office. My attempts to find out where he might have landed.
The way the whole episode shook my faith in everything I wanted to believe Scientology represented. How it opened up a reason to leave—thoughts I hid from myself as soon as I had them.
Tracy telling me I was welcome any time.
The meeting with Jessica regarding my need to be a zealot.
The death of LRH. The ascension of David Miscavige.
The increasingly rah-rah nature of Scientology rallies. The growing sense that we “should” attend them all. The rumors of havoc in the Church’s upper echelons.
The conversation with my father regarding “wills and things.” Even if I could have mustered up the energy to leave, I didn’t know how I possibly could, if the leaving would be construed as being attached to my parent’s money.
And so, winter of 1987 trudged into spring of 1988. Skye and I remained stalled on what I’d taken to calling “the marriage and kid thing.” Sunday afternoons, finished at the Center, I’d race off to write in my journal. Into that three-hour slot before the twenty-four-hour rule kicked in, I squeezed a glass or two of wine. I loved those hours of writing, the world I entered as I indulged in them: sunlight chattering through leaves in an outdoor café, murmured conversations from the tables nearby, and the scribble scribble scribble of pen against good paper.
Vano was still on dialysis. The prognosis was bad.
One June afternoon, Sunny and I met for lunch. She was now OT III and her singing career was on the move; she was engaged to a man named Ron and was moving to Michigan to be with him. I stared at her in wonder. She managed, she always had, to incorporate the benefits of Scientology into her life without it taking over her life. How did she do that?
Sunny heard me out, eyes full of sympathy.
“Well, sweetie,” she said, “I mean, look at it! You don’t have an acting career, which is what you came to LA to do. You’re not writing songs, or singing, which you love. You’re estranged from your family. You don’t like living here. Skye’s a sweetheart, but he doesn’t want to get married or have a child—”
“He might,” I said, “but I’m so wishy-washy about Scientology.”
“My darling Ron isn’t a Scientologist, and I’m marrying him. Just look at it! All your stats have crashed! You need to solve this!”
That evening, I told Skye I was going to go stay with Tracy.
Just for a month or two, I promised. At the end of the summer, after the Conference. I’d work as a waitress. I’d work on my new novel. I wasn’t leaving . . .
He was cautiously supportive, but the news came at a bad time for Jessica. She’d discovered that Ed had been enjoying not only drinks and dinner with potential recruits to the Center, but, in a misguided attempt to create affinity and reality, he’d been snorting cocaine with them.
“He’s off-post, needless to say.” Jessica’s lovely face was disgusted and sad. “There are a lot of overts to pull. He thinks he’s in Enemy, but it’s probably Confusion. He’s got a lot of work to do before he’s allowed back on-post.”
I couldn’t imagine his being back at all. “I’m so sorry, Jessica.”
“It won’t be fun finding your replacement. I hope the time will be well spent.” But she looked wary. Going to Colorado to work on my novel could hardly be considered zealous.
Max, who lived nearby, called with an idea for the summer’s Follies, and dropped by a copy of what he had in mind: a medley recorded by Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter that included “The Wild Side of Life,” a man lamenting that his woman had left him, and a riposte, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels.” I listened as I packed.
I was packing a lot of things for what was going to be, supposedly, just a few weeks.
The Conference was its usual jumble of literary fun. And Max and I, making eyes at one another as we sang, skated terrifically close to what the lyrics of “The Wild Side of Life” outlined. We hiked. We talked. I wanted to believe we were well suited. I thought it nothing but fortuitous that my Colorado foray to stay with Tracy was in place. Before us a future began to shimmer. But our lips did not meet. Our hands barely touched. I convinced myself I was committing no overts. He was married. I was with Skye. We’d eventually let these good people know our plans.
Feeling virtuous, I returned to LA to finish packing. I was taking so much stuff to Colorado that I needed a roof rack. As I watched Skye attach it to the top of my Honda, I thought what a good man he was. But I was not deterred.
The day bef
ore I was due to leave, Max and I met in Santa Monica for a walk on the beach. We still did not touch, but more vague promises were tendered. That evening, I walked in the door to find Skye in his study tuning his guitar. I took in the mass of black ringlets that framed his face, hair that he dyed, in his guise as the ever-young Stryder, to cover the gray. All that pretense! So unlike Max’s genuinely balding pate!
I knew this was a critical thought. I knew I was finding a “motivator” for having walked along the beach with Max.
“Good day?” Skye asked.
“Good,” I said, noting critically—and noting that I was noting critically—the psoriasis that sometimes plagued him. “A walk with a friend.”
Skye tightened a string, plinked it, plinked it again. “That sounds nice,” he said, smiling at me with affection.
And with that smile, he missed the withhold: The “friend” was someone with whom I was pretty much imagining a whole new life.
In a sudden swirl of anger I dropped my purse next to my half-packed suitcase and went to the kitchen to make dinner. As I banged around pots and pans, I wondered how I could be such an awful person, at the same time noting the dirty coffee maker, which was always dirty because Skye never cleaned it, eyeing the broken cup rack that Skye still hadn’t fixed. Even as I assured myself that my critical thoughts were justified, I noted that I was doing exactly what Hubbard points out that we do when we’ve committed an overt.
To hell with Scientology! I was in love!
That night I lay as far on my side of the bed as possible, actually placing one bare foot on the floor to keep from tumbling out. I listened to Skye breathe, appalled at myself. I was leaving for Grand Junction the very next morning. This was an overt! I had a withhold! Could it be I was blowing?
I had all the motivators, the ways to justify my actions. Nevertheless, I wondered if it might be possible to tell him what I was doing—cough up the overt and the withhold—and still do it.
the next morning, Skye helped me cover the load on the roof with a tarp and bungee cords, which, like the roof rack, he’d purchased. I was in anguish. I poured us coffee and took a deep breath and said, “That walk yesterday? With that friend? His name is Max?”
Skye looked up. “Is there something more you want to say?”
I began to cry. “I don’t know. I just don’t like this life! I love you so much—”
“What?! What are you talking about?”
“—but Max just offers this whole other way of living. In the country. Playing music together.” I wailed, “There’s nothing to tell! I swear! We haven’t done anything.”
“Who the hell is Max? You haven’t done anything? Except imagine your life with someone else!” Skye lurched out of his chair and picked up the phone. “I don’t want to hear about it. But you’re going into session with Paloma. Today, if she can do it. I don’t care if you’re leaving for Colorado! You’re not leaving for Colorado with a bunch of overts on your head. You know about blowing. You’ll never be back!”
But that’s exactly what I want, I didn’t say. I didn’t know what I wanted. Except: no overts.
Paloma moved her day around to take me into session. We’d been auditing in the Advanced Org, and as we walked down the dilapidated hall (oops, there went another critical thought, but really, why not just a coat of paint? Where did all the money go?), she carried my auditing folder and the case that held her e-meter. Skye had outlined what was up, but she evinced no attitude. This, after all, was exactly why one drilled those TRs.
She set up the meter on the other side of the board that hid the motions of her hands from me but over which I could see her face and she mine. She attached the wires to the cans with the little alligator clips that seemed so makeshift. (Why hadn’t Hubbard designed some aesthetic way to connect cans to meter!)
Another critical thought.
I rubbed Intensive Care into my hands. I forced my thoughts away from memories of my brother in the ICU, all those tubes running into and out of his body.
As always, Paloma was firm, practiced, and authoritative. She began to pull the overts and withholds. Time, place, form, event. I offered up every last smidgen of what I’d done or even thought about doing.
But I still wanted to go to Colorado.
My needle floated.
Skye didn’t ask what had gone on in session. He strapped the last of the bungee cords into place. We hugged for a long moment.
“I love you so much,” I told him. “I’ll be back,” I said, wondering if I was lying.
He gave me a sealed envelope, watched as I opened and read it.
Play this one with infinite care. There is much at stake.
Typically, his caution was not about the future of our love, but that of my soul.
Jaw set, he stepped back. I rolled down the driveway, waving. He stood still, one arm held up in farewell. I waved and waved until I’d turned the corner. I was crying.
“But,” I whispered in tortured triumph, “I’ve done it.”
binding back
That last-minute auditing with Paloma made me pause, though, in my rush to Max’s arms and what I felt that would solve. I asked him not to be in touch for a month.
Tracy and David folded me into their house and into their lives. They had room; Tad was now in Chicago with Robin. This brought a little pinch of memory, how often I had followed where my brother led. And now, in accepting this sanctuary, I was doing so again.
I loved every aspect of the house and the children, the air and the space, and, even though Grand Junction was definitely a city, the sense of a small town it offered. I wrote in the mornings and waitressed most afternoons and evenings. The writing went in spurts and starts, but I was doing it most days, from which huge satisfaction emanated. I took pleasure in hanging out the laundry on the crisscrossing lines in back of the house, standing in the autumn sun, pinching the pins over Nico’s shirts, Emma’s diapers. Whenever I had a few days without work, I headed south to the Four Corners, where I tromped around doing research for my novel.
It was my novel now. I wrote Vano a letter, thanking him for that encouragement, giving him updates on what was now happening with Driver and Eva. I did not hear back. He was dying, although at the time I didn’t know it.
Arranging to meet friends of friends of friends—whites following the way of the People, Native Americans willing to talk to a white woman—I drove deep into Navajo territory, carrying the requisite gift of a carton of Marlboros. Sometimes I spent nights with a friend in Durango and took day trips. On longer pilgrimages, I pitched a tent and slept with the flaps open so I could see the stars. These treks to Canyon de Chelly, Mesa Verde, Chaco, gave me a feeling of adventure and personal power that I began to realize I’d dropped from my life and which were essential to my sense of self.
Chaco Canyon, which could be reached only by driving endless slow miles over rain-rutted roads, was the most mysterious and compelling of all the Anasazi sites. It had once been a vast city. But many rooms in the numerous buildings, of which only rubbled walls remained, appeared to have been used not as living quarters, but for storage. In them, archeologists had discovered pots full of corn and beans. Wide roads led in like spokes on a wheel to this central place. Elsewhere, kivas were sized to hold a dozen people, but Chaco’s kivas were vast. A hundred people would have been able to congregate in just one of those circles of stone.
I began to wonder if Chaco had once been a gathering place, like Teotihuacan, near Mexico City. Perhaps that was the reason for the wide roads, the stored food, the huge kivas: to accommodate pilgrims who trekked from all over the Southwest. Prowling around, I noticed troughs running alongside several of the kivas, wide and deep enough to accommodate a doubled-over person. These tunnels—which they could have once been, before the covering rocks fell away—ended in the place known as the sipapu, in the Pueblo culture known as “the pl
ace of emerging.” I imagined how someone dressed as something magical, something other, could have scuttled through the tunnel and then—emerged!
I’m a theater artist. I know how stage magic can be created. Could such an “apparition” be designed to force or sustain belief? Persuade to some idea? I hated that I would wonder such a thing. I wanted the Anasazi to be perfect, wise, their intentions clear as running water. I felt my mind flip to my own religion. I flipped it right back.
And yet. What was with those huge, corporate-style meetings? Or the “purges” rumored to be going on in the upper echelons of the Church?
Hot and dusty, I clambered around the ruins in Chaco Canyon, thinking of a shocked, whispered discussion I’d overheard between two longtime Scientologists, about the changes being implemented by Miscavige. In addition to his decision to edit and republish LRH’s books, there was what he was doing to people who’d been close to Hubbard, some of whom had lived with Hubbard.
Pat and Annie Broeker, for instance. During Hubbard’s final years, the Broekers had been his caretakers. I’d gathered that Annie had been pretty much the conduit from “the old man” to her husband, and Pat the conduit to the Church offices. Hubbard had dubbed them Loyal Officers #1 and #2. Indeed, there was so much trust in them that the expectation was that Church leadership would naturally be bequeathed to Pat Broeker.86
But following Hubbard’s death, both of the Broekers were declared SPs.