Flunk. Start.

by Sands Hall

  “Oh, I miss you! I miss us!” she said, with the wonderful slide of tone, throaty and fluty, that is directly connected to her singing ability. She was talking about being on course, drilling TRs, clearing words, those times of laughter and epiphany.

  “Solipsism,” I read. “It’s a philosophical term: ‘the theory that the self is the only thing that has reality or can be known.’”

  “That doesn’t sound like it means ‘selfish,’” Sunny said. “It sounds as if you can’t really know anything except what you, yourself, perceive. What’s its derivation?”

  “. . . solus, ‘alone.’ Plus ipse, ‘self’ . . . ‘alone self/self alone.’” My voice was blocked with tears. “I do feel terribly alone, Sunny. Terribly. But mostly responsible. All the time, for everything. But how can that be? It feels disgustingly self-involved. Selfish, selfish, selfish!”

  “Don’t do that!” Sunny almost shouted. “I don’t know how this shit about being selfish got imprinted on your brain, but get it out of there! It’s not true. It was never true.”

  The wind slid along the house. The sky was a gray ceiling—it would be freezing out there. Times like this I wanted to go back so badly, to have the certainty, and the fun.

  I hated saying goodbye. “We’ll talk again, soon!” she said.

  I think we both knew we wouldn’t. For an hour we’d managed to create an oasis around ourselves, but the conversation might come up in her next session. Since she was on her OT levels at Flag, she’d be “sec checked”—security checked—each time she started a new round of auditing. Sec Check: that phrase, with its hissing s, and harsh ks, reflects the nature of what it is. Security checking pokes and prods, queries and grills everything a person might have done, said, thought since their previous auditing. If Sunny’s needle so much as flickered—and it might, because she’d said things like “Not that one has to be a Scientologist to have those abilities,” and had sounded so weary with “I know exactly what you mean”—she’d have to cough up this talk with me. She might be assigned a low Ethics Condition, have to write up our wonderful talk as an overt. She’d done me a big favor by staying on the phone with me as long as she had.

  that image of the ship settled at the bottom of the sea made me 99.8 percent certain I’d never return to Scientology. But the .02 percent scared me. I’d found reasons to return so many times—what might make me do so again? Also, that I’d gotten involved with the Church in the first place, the life-dreams I felt I’d mangled by staying as long as I had, and the loss of dear friends—an entire community—by leaving, settled me into a depression so vast I’d no idea I was in one. It was just what life looked like. I watched people laugh and thought them pathetic: They had no clue how sad life really was.

  When a man I’d met in the Workshop invited me to live with him in Vermont, I leapt across the country, hoping he and his lovely daughter would provide the family and purpose for which I so yearned. When that proved untenable, after a few more zigzags I wound up in a town nestled in the Sierra Foothills of Northern California. I began to put together a life that involved Vipassana meditation, African dance, creating theater, writing, freelance editing, and teaching. I told almost no one about Scientology, trying to pretend those years had never been.

  But a profound shift was under way, a result of that moment on the freeway and the subsequent conversation with Sunny.90 I found myself, more and more purposefully, working to rid myself of the “I” trained into me by Scientology, itself an echo of the four-year-old me prancing about looking for approbation. I began, with increasing consciousness, to think and to speak in terms of “we,” “us”—a larger compass. Although it took a while for the spectrum of these ideas to radiate into place (and I’m still learning), I felt I’d stumbled on some essential truth, an understanding vital to being on Earth, part of humanity, living this life.

  the loss of nameless things

  Eventually Brett and her family moved to that same small town in the Sierra, as did, for a while, our sister Tracy. So did my brother. He and Robin had decided to go their separate ways, although they remained good friends. Tad (I slalom still between calling him Tad, in the family, and Oak, when talking of his work in theater or his writing) met a wonderful poet, Molly Fisk, and they moved in together. He was at work on a book called Alf & Me: The Autobiography of Alfred Jarry. The title made me laugh: the autobiography of a writer who’d died a century earlier. The project was perfectly absurd, totally Jarry, totally Oak. The manuscript was a mess, but I thought I could see a way to make it work.

  Once a week, after accepting a cup of coffee, he’d sit cross-legged on the floor of my study to read what I’d worked on since our previous meeting. It often occurred to me that, at least where writing was concerned, that damaged brain of his was in pretty good shape. He knew every word of his manuscript, and the order in which they appeared. Sometimes he’d read over a suggested change and nod, but just as often he’d look up and with a smile say, “Let’s leave it the way it was.”

  For the first time since the accident, I was able to see him as he now was. And I loved that person. He was witty, incredibly droll, wise and compassionate. We laughed a lot. He was fully cognizant of what had happened to him: Alf & Me was not only Jarry talking about his life, but Oak talking about his. Working together on his book felt magical, certain, right, precious. I felt I was doing some of the most important work of my life. Even as he sat on the floor, his back against the couch, and I sat at my desk, I imagined our actual locations in space were reversed: He sat cross-legged on some celestial pillow and I was prostrate before him, face down, arms wide, pleading for forgiveness. He never indicated in any way that there was need for such a thing, but I prayed that he’d understand and forgive that for the previous fifteen years I’d practically denied his existence.

  in 2000, i finished the novel, the Anasazi still well represented but no longer central. Catching Heaven received a generous advance from Ballantine and lovely reviews. I’d become an affiliate artist with a local theater company, where I acted and directed and for which I wrote two plays. I met a wonderful man and we purchased a house together. I did a lot of freelance editing. I taught in the English department of American River College in Sacramento; and creative writing through extension programs at UC Davis, various conferences and festivals, and around my own dining room table. I began to pick up my guitar sometimes and now and again even wrote a song. I never, ever talked about Scientology.

  They were good years. They were also very busy ones: an effort, I think, to “start”—certainly to make up for—the massive, irretrievable flunk that was, I felt, the years I’d devoted to, squandered on, the Church. Years when people build careers, create marriages, have children. I did my very best not to think of it, and, although it took a long time, succeeded. And so I spent a decade of my life pretending a decade of my life hadn’t happened.

  During those years, except for meditating, I avoided anything that even hinted at religiosity, declining invitations to fire circles, to Celtic gatherings (I was fascinated by anything to do with the Goddess, especially the Black Madonna, but rituals of any kind made me nervous), even to exploring the enneagram, which felt vaguely cultish. I could not listen to music. Of any genre. It moved me too much. In the car it was NPR, all the time, or silence. I wadded up my pilgrim soul in a bunch of old newspapers and shoved her deep away.

  and then, one day in 2004 I Googled myself to check if my bio was yet loaded onto the website of a writer’s conference where I was scheduled to teach. And with horror I watched the first link that loaded onto the screen, even before the link to my own website:

  Scientology Courses taken by Sands Hall

  Aghast, heart pounding, I clicked. There they were: the names of the courses I’d taken in the seven years I’d tried to pretend had never been.

  A surge of hot, prickly shame consumed me as I realized that anyone who might go online looking for me or
my website would find this information.

  But to my utter surprise, this was followed by vast relief: I don’t have to hide it anymore.

  In fact, it isn’t that big a deal! Why had I thought it was such a big deal?

  I closed my eyes as what felt like the clearest, most aromatic and refreshing of winds blew past. It was a “blowdown”—I recognized it even as I didn’t want to use Scientology’s language to describe it: that rush that follows an enormous realization pulled out of the garbage that’s been piled on top of it.

  I poked around the website, gingerly, as if something might leap out and seize my wrist and haul me into its workings. To my surprise, it wasn’t full of gushing accolades; it wasn’t promoting Scientology. Rather, it was pointing out how many people who took a Scientology course, or got some auditing, didn’t stay. The Church’s supposedly million-strong membership actually comprised, the website claimed, those who’d made brief forays into and out of the religion. Enrollment was not, as the Church claimed (as it had always claimed), increasing, but decreasing. Graphs and stats supported these observations.

  One of the stats had to do with the percentage of those who’d left the Church not long after achieving the state of Clear. There was no attempt to explain the statistic, but it was tacit. I thought of the promises Hubbard made regarding Clear (“has no vicious Reactive Mind and operates at total mental capacity”) and then those regarding being OT (“willing and knowing cause over life, thought, matter, energy, space and time”). First, you were going to achieve that state when Clear. Then when OT III. Then OT VIII. Now OT XII. No doubt some, turning Clear and then finding there was still “case,” and then examining the long and very expensive Bridge that lay ahead, might begin to wonder if it actually led anywhere.

  The website offered links to blogs of those who’d left Scientology, and this was the first time I glimpsed that a massive exodus from the Church was in process. Links to newspaper articles describing the insidious actions of David Miscavige. Links to YouTube videos of Sea Org members discussing their decisions to abandon their billion-year contracts. Links to interviews with some of the highest officials in the Church, who, after being “declared” as Suppressive Persons and exiled from the Church, decided to tell their tales. Links to the official website of Scientology. Links to the works of L. Ron Hubbard. The entire Tech Dictionary was a PDF one could download. In the anonymous world of the Internet, it was impossible to stop people from scanning and posting anything they might have in their possession. Which meant that Scientology—the Tech—was available to anyone! The thing I’d always wished were the case, and which Hubbard had tried in so many ways to keep from happening. Now people could read about Scientology—not just its outrages, not just LRH’s published books, but its private “scripture”—as easily as they could read about Hinduism or the tenets of the Lutheranism. I had to laugh. The Church would no doubt be finding ways to pull down those posts as quickly as people put them up, but they must be furious.

  Suddenly, I was astounded that I’d managed to leave when I did, that I’d managed to leave at all. I’d spent seven years banging against the walls of a mental prison that I, myself, had constructed—ten, if I counted the hell I’d flung myself into upon leaving. But some of those telling their stories had handed over most of their lives: twenty, thirty years. They’d abandoned parents when they joined, and lost husbands and wives, sometimes children and always friends, when they left. Some, born into the Church, had lost entire childhoods to Scientology.

  I let the cursor hover over one of those YouTube links, tempted.

  But I still wasn’t ready. I closed the website, and closed my computer.

  my silence regarding Scientology included my parents. On the one hand, they’d been right, hadn’t they? And, mulishly, I didn’t want to have that conversation. But the silence was also internal. I couldn’t bring myself to scrutinize why I might have been drawn to the Church in the first place. I couldn’t, yet, examine that if it hadn’t been Scientology, something else might have bumped me off the course of my supposed goals. It was convenient to blame what I saw as my lacks and losses—career, husband, children—on Scientology.

  And then Philip Sneed, artistic director of the theater company that had produced my plays, opted to produce one of my brother’s, finished just before his accident in 1978: Grinder’s Stand, about the mysterious death of Meriwether Lewis. In the sort of brilliant insight that Brett often has, she suggested that a friend, filmmaker Bill Rose, might take an interest in Oak’s story, with the production of this play as a starting point.

  Bill Rose did. His quest to tell it eventually took him east, to Lexington, where members of the original company met with him as he filmed the theaters, the hotel, and of course the bridge. He spoke with those who’d known Oak then and those who’d come to know him since. He walked a tricky tightrope as he edited his way through hundreds of hours of memories, anecdotes, interpretations. And he chose to make a film not about the burdens of expectation placed on a seeming prodigy, nor about a son battling the ghosts of a successful father, nor about parents and a sister who’d basically abandoned son and brother. Even as the film touched on these issues, Bill let the statements of family and peers speak for themselves, leaving the viewers to establish their own perspective. It was deft, kind, and brave to choose such a nuanced perspective. The Loss of Nameless Things went on to dazzle a number of film festival audiences and to win an array of awards.91

  And it was during my own interview for that film that I began, for the first time, to examine the vertigo that twenty years before had swirled in around the loss of mentor, colleague, friend, brother. As the camera whirred, as I responded to Bill’s thoughtful questions, a different version of that leap to Los Angeles began to unfold. Was this part of what had caused me to abandon all I’d created in New York City? The sudden deep indulgence in alcohol, the cocaine, the sleeping with married men? And the draw of a religion that offered so much order? For the first time, I glimpsed what I might have been looking for, and why I’d gone searching.

  in 2003, with friends gathered from everywhere, Mom and Dad celebrated sixty years of marriage. A few weeks later, Mom suffered a stroke. In the hospital, the left half of her face slack, barely intelligible, she mumbled her way through a sentence in which she told me that the stroke had been a result of hubris.

  “Hubris?”

  “That big sixtieth anniversary party. I knew we should never have celebrated our happy marriage so openly. We made the gods jealous. They had to punish us.”

  This made ancient, complete Hall sense. A stroke is a metaphor. There is always a way to make catastrophe one’s own fault. As Dad would say, “Guilt is good.”

  Guilt. Like other Old and Middle English words whose spellings have changed but whose meanings have not—words such as sword (sweord), blood (blõd), mud (mudde)—gylt means what it always has: “being responsible for an offense or wrongdoing” and “remorseful awareness of having done something wrong.”

  Hubris, on the other hand, comes to us from the Greek: “overbearing pride, arrogance.” From which attitude must come, of course, a fall.

  Fall, too, comes to us from Middle English: fallen, fell, descending from Old English. If we examine the phoneme phoi-, we see the word comes not only from fall, but from befall, indicating the idea that a fall “happens” to one.

  Like spit.

  But along with my mother’s milk, I’d swallowed that a flat tire, a stroke, a fall from a bridge doesn’t just happen. You create it. Call it egoism, narcissism, solipsism, hubris, guilt, Potential Trouble Source: You are responsible. In this fertile ground, no wonder the vines of Scientology had taken such fierce hold. No wonder it was so hard to yank them out.

  mom recovered fairly well from her stroke, but Dad’s health began to fail. They moved to a house in the Sierra foothills, close to Brett and me, and we transferred their medical records to local doctors.
I accompanied Dad on those office visits.

  Cardiologist: “someone whose study is the heart.” I mused, wondering if, without Scientology, I’d ever have made those connections, or cared so deeply that they were there to make.

  Urologist: “one who studies the body’s nether tracts.” Nephrologist: “one whose study is the function and diseases of the kidney.” The task of an epidemiologist I had to look up when I got home: “the study of what is upon people.” Other things that were upon Dad included high blood pressure and cholesterol. His systems were simply, one by one, failing.

  During these outings, Dad often expressed his gratitude. I told him I was deeply glad to be able to help. I believe we were having a much deeper conversation than that dialogue might indicate, and that a lot of forgiving was going on, in both directions. Sometimes I thought I should tackle, straight on, why I might have been attracted to Scientology—beyond the spiritual order that for a while it really did provide—and if we might even be able to laugh at how his “wills and things” lecture had backfired. I thought about bringing up that phone call when he’d told me “that spiritual stuff does matter.” I tried to conjure the future: Would I be sorry, when he died, that we hadn’t had the conversation, and could never have it? But I loved the peace we’d come to, and I chose not to disrupt it.

  Eventually, we landed in the office of an oncologist. I hadn’t known, before I looked it up, that onco is blood, and its doctor one who studies what might be in the blood: cancer, named after the crab whose scuttling movement the illness emulates.

  And one afternoon, during a visit to his GP, we were told that hospice needed to be called. Dad looked as shocked as I felt.

  “You mean it’s come?” He shook his head. “It’s been a good life,” he said. “A very good life.”