by Sands Hall
As I negotiated the curves back to their house, he said, “I’m not going to fight this any longer.” He meant it.
That afternoon, he was able to recite to the hospice nurse each of his medications and their dosages. Four days later, he was dead.
The nurses tried to warn Mother, encouraging her to say goodbye. She angrily dismissed them; they were being “morbid.” Her husband would never leave her.
And when he died, in their bed, she did not cry. That night, she brushed her teeth. Her white hair a tangle around her face, feet bare beneath a long flannel nightgown, she climbed in beside him, pulled the sheets up over their shoulders, and curved herself around his chilling body for one last night.
pilgrimage season
Spring of 2008, a few months before Dad died, I’d landed a position as a one-year visiting professor of creative writing at Franklin & Marshall, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. When I told him—and I’m so glad he was still alive when the news came—he held up both arms in a beautiful gesture of shared triumph. As I headed east that fall, so did my brother: moving to Albany to live with a sweet woman named Hadiya, whom he’d met during a screening of The Loss of Nameless Things. Brett and Louis built a cottage for Mother on their property. Tracy, remarried, was living in Arizona.
I’d taught creative writing for years, but seldom in an academic setting. As I constructed my syllabi—taking great satisfaction in conceiving what I wanted students to take away from each course, and into the world—I knew that I was employing Hubbard’s Study Tech, especially the balance of theory with practice. For years, in my teaching, I’d used my experience as Course Supervisor, my knowledge of the Barriers to Study, but as I plunged into those intense semesters I was very aware of it: employing chalk, eraser, water bottle to make the abstract visible. Staying alert for the yawn, or the sudden lack of interest, that might signal a misunderstood word.
Halfway through the fall, the college invited me to stay another year, and, eventually, for many more. On one of my breaks, I headed to Albany to visit Tad and Hadiya. Their apartment was above a Laundromat; they received a reduction in rent for making sure the floor was clean, the vending machines stocked. They both had tales about the lowlifes encountered there.
“He’s a lot kinder to them than I am,” Hadiya said.
Tad took a deep drag and blinked, smiling, through wreaths of cigarette smoke.
“He’s a bodhisattva,” Hadiya said.
I knew what she meant: He was happy. Nonjudgmental. He served as an example to those who came in touch with him and were willing to learn. He had flunked, massively—“ruining” the brilliant writing career he seemed destined for—but had accepted it. And here he was, living with a wonderful woman, taking joy in his life, working on a novel. Start.
A few years before, I’d contacted a good friend, Steve Susoyev, writer and publisher, about taking on his book, Jarry & Me. I now sent him the most recent draft.
one spring morning in 2010, as I was wrapping up the semester, Sunny called. We were still in touch—a few years before, we’d even met up in Chicago for a couple of days. At that time, I’d expressed my concern that she might get in trouble for seeing me.
“I don’t let the Church dictate who my friends are!” she’d said, and once again I’d been impressed by the way she was able to balance Scientology, in a rational way, with the rest of her life.
But this day, her voice on the phone, usually so full of light and bounce, was flat: “I’m leaving the Church, Sands.”
The story she told was horrifying. The previous month, she’d flown to Los Angeles for some auditing. She was OT IV, and she felt like an Operating Thetan: she had a happy marriage, a thriving family, a terrific job at the university, and her singing career was soaring. But she was plagued by physical problems: two frozen shoulders and a rebuilt knee, the result of a skiing accident.
“I was OT!” she said. “I was supposed to be immune to physical injury! But it never entered my mind to question the validity of the Tech—if there’s even such a thing as OT. Of course I didn’t! There was simply something wrong with me.”
So, feeling great about her life, certain the Tech would handle her physical problems, she flew from Michigan to California. Upon arrival, she was regged to buy $5,000 more auditing, although she already had hours “on account.” She was also persuaded to “donate” a further $5,000 to the International Association of Scientologists.
All in all, in just twelve days, she spent $23,000, putting it on a credit card that the Registrar persuaded her to open—behind her husband’s back.
“I allowed the Reg to convince me that it wasn’t an overt because it was about getting up the Bridge,” Sunny said. “You know, the ‘greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics!’ What was I thinking! I don’t have secrets from my husband!”
For the next two weeks, she spent 9:00 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. each day in the Org, in and out of session. She wasn’t sleeping well, due to worries about that secret from her husband, not to mention fretting about how she’d pay back that money; nevertheless, the auditor took her into session again and again. By the time she climbed back on the plane to head home, she was hallucinating, limping, almost unable to see. It would take her almost a year to recover.
“It’s a pile of bullshit, Sands,” she said. “It’s all, all about money. That’s all they care about. I owe so much on those cards! But I am out of there. I am done.”
“Oh, Sunny,” I said, fielding a combination of emotions. Perhaps oddly, I wanted Scientology to work, at least for some. Wasn’t that possible? But the fears I’d had, the reasons I’d left, felt completely validated.
“I’ll tell you something,” she said. “Once you start looking online, there’s so much information! So many people have horrible stories! Stories much worse than mine. And there’s such a support system! How did you do it? When you left, the Internet didn’t exist! You had to go through it all by yourself!”
I shook my head, remembering those endless awful nights.
“I’m taking all my LRH books to the dump,” Sunny said. “Did you know I had to buy all my books, all over again? Everything. Because they were ‘new and improved’! Miscavige’s so-called Golden Age of Tech.”
I remembered that meeting at the Sheraton, many years before, when Skye’s face had gone so still at the idea that he’d have to buy all of his many Hubbard books again.
“The sales pitches came in from everywhere,” Sunny was saying, “from Orgs and missions all over the country. I finally bought them in self-defense—they hammered me into submission. I thought the hounding would stop, but no—they insisted I buy back-up sets! They were relentless. Anyway. I’m driving to the dump with those books and I am personally throwing them in.”
It was easy to imagine this, her tall body and long arms hurling book after book over a fence, and I smiled. But a silence hummed down the line. I didn’t say, Don’t do something you’ll regret. I didn’t ask, What if you get pulled back in and have to spend thousands of dollars to buy all those books again?
But she answered: “I’m done, Sands.”
“Are you?”
“I am. I so am. And I can’t tell you what a relief it is! To just live my life! Remember when we had that talk about solipsism? Being self-involved? Well, that’s Scientology! Get up the Bridge! Which is all, endlessly about me—me me me me. Always something else to do, or something you’ve done, or didn’t do, or should have done, or need to do, something more to be, to have, to buy—always more. I’m so excited to just be in my life, without worrying about my next step! I’m determined to wring that bullshit out of my brain.”
And she did. Sunny read everything she could find by those who’d left the Church. She emailed me links to blogs, videos, articles, by ex-Scientologists. At first I deleted them. I wasn’t interested in rehashing the anguish. But certain things began to catch my
interest, especially the mystery surrounding Hubbard’s death and David Miscavige’s meteoric rise.92, 93 Ironically, considering how often Scientologists throw the term around, Miscavige appeared to be a bona fide Suppressive Person. Yelling and punching were the least of it. His violence was both overt and insidious: He put people in command of an area, then questioned every step they took, wouldn’t sign off on things they’d accomplished, and when the assigned tasks were not completed, meted out blame and punishment. Miscavige and the Church deny these accusations, but they’ve been well documented.94
Because of Miscavige and his policies, many of which flout Hubbard’s, and many of which alter Standard Tech, thousands have left the Church. But they’ve taken the Tech with them, forming something called the Free Zone, as well as a group known as the Independent Movement. The Indies label the Church “Corporate Scientology” (or $cientology Inc.). They call themselves Scientologists but study and audit outside of official Orgs. Can Standard Tech be standard if delivered outside the fortress Hubbard set up to safeguard it? Indeed, it seems as if one can proceed up the Bridge paying the kind of rates charged by an excellent therapist. As far as I could tell, there seemed to be no hard “regging,” no vast sums of money demanded for future services, and above all—was it possible?—no blind mindset. Where the Free Zone and the Indies are concerned, Scientology appeared to be not remotely cultish. I found myself glad that the good things Hubbard developed could now be found and studied the way one might take a seminar in a subject one found interesting, or attend a weeklong retreat.
Night after night, a single light shining over my desk, I scrolled through blogs and links and articles and videos, putting together my own history in relation to what I found there. Only then did I realize that while I’d been troubled by aspects of the Church for years, it had been soon after Miscavige’s sudden ascent to power that I’d decided, finally, I had to leave. And part of what made me get out had been observing that increasingly corporate mindset, and the way people seemed willing to follow Miscavige’s changes so blindly. This is ironic, of course, considering the authoritarian mentality of the Church under Hubbard, but most of those years I managed to stay unaware; under Miscavige, I found it impossible. A further irony is the ease with which those within the Church seem to accept Miscavige’s changes to the Tech. I can’t help but wonder what happened to Keeping Scientology Working.
The blogs, reactions to the blogs, and reactions to the reactions, written by heartbroken parishioners, sturdy Hubbard-ophiles, angry ex-Scientologists, as well as current Scientologists (it was always clear when one of these weighed in), revealed not only why they’d left but the reason they’d stayed so long: all they’d loved, all they’d believed in. As I read, I felt a loosening around my heart. I began to unpack my pilgrim soul out of the box I’d put her in, blew the dust off her wings. I held her in the palm of my hand, loving her, until she warmed back to movement. I hadn’t realized that I’d kind of killed her, in the decade following my departure from Scientology, resisting any form of spirituality besides the most austere forms of Buddhism. I had a series of blowdowns, those moments when charge releases and the spirit is ecstatic to let it go.
It’s been a pilgrimage season, I heard, and picked up my guitar. We have been finding our way.
who never left her brother for dead
My students, encouraged to examine the roots of words, know that essay comes from the French “to try,” from the Latin “to weigh out,” ultimately from “to set in motion.” I tell them, as in individual conferences we discuss their essay topics, that the idea of trying is reason enough to begin. To attempt. To set in motion and see what one might discover as word begins to follow word.
For years, teaching my Myth & Fairy Tale course, even as my students and I discussed how we must all, as do Hansel and Gretel and Snow White, go “into the woods,” and there learn a lesson, I did not apply this to my own situation. Nor, as we moved into mythic territory, as we explored Joseph Campbell’s ideas of the hero’s journey (especially how, as heroes of our own lives, we must at some point traverse an underworld), did I view my own journey in this light.95 Among other essays, I assign Campbell’s “The Self as Hero,” in which he writes, “a good life is one hero journey after another.”96
“This will be useful,” I told my students. “Remember it as you endure difficult times. Hold on to the knowledge that a trek through these dreary landscapes—be they woods or underworld—can lead to insights and understanding!” So I spoke, fervently, but still I could not see how to apply this to my years in Scientology. Even as I lectured how the insights gained in such a dark, unhappy place can be the elixir, the boon with which one can return from darkness, I could hardly glimpse how that might be true for me. “Simply holding in our minds that there are lessons to learn while we’re in the underworld,” I’d say, feeling like a fraud, “can lead us to find them.”
I spoke with enthusiasm and with certainty, but, regarding my own Scientological trek, I’d think: That’s different. Those were just wasted years. Still, perhaps because I lived with those ideas for semester after semester, I finally allowed myself to imagine that Campbell’s steps on the hero’s journey might be applicable to my own pilgrimage, begun so many years before: The Call to Adventure. The Refusal of the Call. The Crossing of the Threshold. The Tests, the Ordeal. The Road Back (which took so long). The Return to the ordinary world. The Transformation. And—was it possible?—the resultant awareness, that which could be considered the Boon, with which I may have returned.
Which led me, finally, to my own attempt, my own “essaying,” my own “weighing out.” I jotted notes: That moment when I Googled myself and found myself “outed” as a Scientologist. The questions Bill Rose asked, and the insights they unfolded, as he made his documentary about my brother. I backtracked, oh so gingerly, to Los Angeles: Jamie, Skye, Jessica’s talk about being a zealot, Skip’s firewalk and my increasing sense that the Church had abandoned him, Dad’s “wills and things”; circling, in the midst of it, to childhood in Squaw Valley, camping in Europe, Tad’s jump into the shroud of golden fabric—all of which led to New York, and eventually to that July 1978 phone call regarding my brother’s fall.
I weighed. I essayed. I set in motion. I started writing.
late fall of 2010, I received a padded envelope, the return address Tad’s in Albany, my F&M address scribbled in his hasty, almost unreadable handwriting. Inside I found a volume, slim and beautiful:
Jarry & Me
The Autobiography of Alfred Jarry
by Oakley Hall III
Our dear friend, writer and publisher Steve Susoyev, did a beautiful job producing the book, including its cover: the classic photograph of Jarry on a bicycle. On the dedication page I found, as I expected to find, as for years she’d been Oak’s staunch and loving companion:
For Hadiya.
But there were two other dedications as well.
Dedicated to Oakley Hall,
Oakley Hall III’s father.
He died,
After living well.
Bless him.
And, completely unexpected:
With gratitude to Sands Hall,
Oakley Hall III’s sister,
who never left her brother for dead
even when he looked and acted the part,
and whose enthusiasm inspired him
to finish this book.
Yet I had left my brother for dead. For almost fifteen years. That he could think this, that he could forgive, made me sink into a chair and weep.
Three months later, on a freezing Sunday morning in February, my cell phone rang: Hadiya’s name on the screen. Deeply into my work, I almost didn’t pick up. I was writing so much about Oak/Tad that it felt as if we were talking every day, but I realized we actually hadn’t spoken in some time.
“Hadiya!” I said.
There was a long pa
use. “Sands,” she said. “He’s gone.”
I stood up from the table.
“A heart attack, they think.”
No.
Hadiya had been visiting her son Sharif and her granddaughters for the weekend. She did this regularly, and when she did, she and Tad talked often. He hadn’t called on Saturday, or she hadn’t received the call, which worried her, but cell reception at Sharif’s house was spotty. Sunday morning, when Sharif drove her back to the apartment, they found Tad lying in the mudroom. Their cat Homer was dozing beside him. Hadiya thought Tad, too, was napping, and wondered why he’d chosen to do so on the mudroom floor.
But then she saw that his outstretched hand had a bluish tint to it, and she knew.
“He was dedicated,” the coroner told me. In the pockets of Tad’s tweed jacket he’d found three lighters and two and a half packs of Camel nonfilters.
That weekend I took the train up to Albany and went with Hadiya to pick up Tad’s ashes. His eyeglasses and a pile of books—he always had several going at a time—were still on the armrest of the couch. We left them there, and placed the pot of ashes in the spot where he would have been sitting, reading, looking at us now and then over the tops of his glasses. Now and again, Hadiya bent over at the waist and keened. The cat dozed in the mudroom, on the spot where Tad had fallen. Sometimes the wind rattled the windows. From time to time one of them, shockingly, fell out of its casement.
“Hello, Tad,” Hadiya said, as she replaced it.
That night, friends arrived, bearing food and wine and comfort.
My own grief took me as I drove from Albany up to Saratoga to stay a night with Kate Kelly and her husband Bruce Bouchard, old friends from Lexington Conservatory Theatre days. That drive, under a flat gray winter sky, was one long wail.
We held a memorial in Nevada City. Friends and family gathered in a small theater; we placed the box containing Dad’s ashes under Mother’s chair so he could be with us. We held another memorial in Upstate New York, on what had been the campus of the Lexington Conservatory Theatre. Amid the boarded-up theaters and the old hotel, company members gathered to tell stories of those precious years. The sun was setting as we scattered some of Oak’s ashes, and the heavy particles glistened as they floated into the grass, the flowers, the water of the Catskills.