by Sands Hall
Letters and notes and emails streamed in, many of them referring to particular moments with Tad, with Oak, many confessing to the cigarette they’d bummed and the important talk that took place as they smoked companionably on a deck, in a backyard, on a theater’s fire escape.
We held yet another memorial during the Squaw Conference. As friends and strangers shared moments of grace experienced in his company (many while smoking a cigarette), it was clear that the lives he touched were everywhere.
after such a storm
Halfway through the following semester, riding the momentum to finish a draft of this manuscript, I cancelled everything except my teaching duties and, one day, knew I was done. It was shaggy, but it was complete.
Late that afternoon, after teaching, I scrolled Facebook’s newsfeed, and a familiar name floated by: Jamie Faunt.
Jamie!
I scrolled back until I found it, a post made by Martin, in whose studio, so long ago, I’d recorded songs: Does anyone know if Jamie Faunt’s memorial service is still on for Sunday?
I stared, shocked.
Memorial service? Jamie—dead?
He’d been on my mind for months, of course; they’d all been, as I’d worked on the book. Skye, certainly, also Martin, who with his studio and musical talent had been so supportive of my music, and his wife Sallie; Delph, who threw such great parties and used butter in her cakes; Roo, with her gorgeous voice; Paloma, who’d seen me through so many hours of auditing. I’d thought, often, of Jamie’s full lips and sculpted cheekbones, the almost clichéd rock-star beauty of him. The way his bicep pulsed as he played his bass. The way he insisted Scientology was the only way; how I laughed at that assertion until I’d been drawn to it, come to agree with it, come to believe it so much that even after we divorced, I stuck with the religion for another five years. Seven years altogether, not to mention the three it took to leave it behind.
Dear Martin, I wrote in a private message. I’d no idea about Jamie. Might you have details?
Happened back in August, he wrote back. Heart attack, I gather.
I returned to Martin’s original post to see if anyone had answered his question.
Sunday at noon. At the Pavilion, Celebrity Center.
A little dazed, I put the computer to sleep and headed home through a late October afternoon, dusk taking its time to fall over Lancaster’s tree-lined streets. I fetched my guitar and a down vest and sat on the porch, working on “Pilgrimage Season.”
We’ve crawled through caverns
We’ve been kneeling down in shrines
The road has been dusty and stunning and long
Suddenly it was as if a huge paw descended onto my shoulder. You must be there for that memorial. It is time to see them, to see them all.
I shook my head. Stared at the guitar in my arms. Then pretty much leapt to fetch my phone. That hand on my shoulder urged me forward: Paloma. Start with Paloma.
In session and out, Paloma had heard me wrestle with my doubts. She was the one who’d listened—TRs in—as I offered up that I’d gone Clear last lifetime. Over the years she’d tried to keep in touch, but I’d stayed distant, afraid of that effort of hers to connect.
But in an old address book I found her name, dialed the number.
And so it was that within twelve hours of reading of Jamie’s death, I was on a plane to Los Angeles. Paloma and her husband offered a lovely arrival dinner; the next morning she and I enjoyed a long walk in which we talked, as we always had, about our work. I shared that I was writing a memoir.
“About Scientology!” she asked, a frown on her lovely face.
“And about my family,” I told her. “Which was, in a way, its own kind of cult.”
I was laughing, but she looked shocked. “What do you mean?” she said, and I told her that both worlds had made me feel as if I were superior to those not in them; both felt special and made me feel special; both had exerted tremendous authority over what I felt I should and should not do with my life; both persuaded me that my own ideas might not have validity unless backed up by theirs; both involved a veneration of sorts; both had created a terrible dependence; and from both it had proven difficult to unyoke myself.
“I’m grateful for a lot,” I said, “including what was learned, although that’s taken a while to sort out. But I had to find my own way.”
She was still frowning.
“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this,” I said. “When you start your next auditing, you’ll have to answer all those security questions. I don’t want to make trouble for you.”
“I don’t let the Church dictate who are and who are not my friends,” she said.
We walked on in silence for a bit. “I’m glad of that, Paloma,” I said.
She nodded. “But maybe don’t mention the memoir to the others.”
We were joining the others for the memorial, meeting Delph and Wyatt at their house, where Roo also joined us (she’d stopped doing Scientology, which I’d only recently discovered). Together we drove to Celebrity Center, where we’d meet Martin and Sallie. Even as I was happy to be with these old friends, the idea that I was purposefully heading back into the belly of the whale that had swallowed and held me for so long made my heart knock.
As we walked toward the building, I looked up at the fifth floor, where Sunny and I had done our Upper TRs, where I’d had that epiphany about beauty. I wanted to linger, to take it all in, but suddenly there were Jamie’s brothers and their wives, down from Portland, exclaiming, “Sands! We can’t believe you’re here! Brooke! Look who’s here!”
A woman with blond hair turns. She looks so much like Jamie, except stunningly beautiful rather than outrageously handsome, that I catch my breath. The high cheekbones. The full, sensual lips. The blue eyes, which fill with tears at the sight of me. It is Jamie’s niece. When she was four, she’d been our flower girl. Now she’s all grown up.
“We’re performing one of your and Jamie’s songs,” one of Jamie’s brothers says. “For the memorial.”
He smiles at my astonished face. Yet working on the memoir has pulled me back to singing and songwriting again. It also seems exactly right.
Friends and family share funny anecdotes and touching ones. A letter is read from Chick Corea. I am invited to speak, and I do, quoting lyrics I’d written about Jamie:
My sails lost, my steering gone
The winds of chance the only form
What blew me to your harbor’s peace
What a port to come to
After such a storm
“Jamie introduced me to Scientology.” I pause to take in that I am actually standing in Celebrity Center, surrounded by Scientologists. “Which,” I say, “only slowly revealed itself as much of the port I felt I’d come to, after such a storm. And Scientology was a port. But then . . .” It’s important to state exactly where I stand. “I chose to float my boat back out into the ocean again.”
There’s a shift in the room, comprehension. I feel it. No one will try to get me back. They know I am done.
A jazz trio plays some of Jamie’s tunes, as well as the song we wrote together, “Butterfly.” His brother reads my lyrics before they launch into it. As he takes a solo on flugelhorn, I smile ruefully. In spite of my hopes that we’d be a world-changing songwriting team, Jamie and I wrote just two songs together, “Butterfly” and “After Such a Storm.” Yet I feel him turning somersaults in the air above us, delighted to have us together again, no matter the circumstances.
In her typical way, Delph has swiftly organized a small gathering, and back at their lovely home, as she and Wyatt serve salmon and roast chicken and cake (with lots of butter), I am stunned by who’s assembled. Roo and I, no longer involved in the Church. Paloma, who, along with Delph and Wyatt, are sturdy Hubbard-ophiles. One friend is redoing the Purification Rundown. Another has just returned fr
om Flag, having completed OT VII.
We’re all together, and the room is full of nothing but love.
The friend who’s just completed OT VII tells me how deeply it’s made him want to invest in helping other musicians create their dreams. As the months go by, I will watch, via Facebook, how he goes about doing exactly that. I think of the long-ago conversation with Skye, about whether memories of other lifetimes (and at that level of the Bridge, the memories of the endless Body Thetans that have attached themselves to you) are “true,” which makes me ponder an aspect of auditing that seems to me quite positive: a person who aspires to goodness will come to useful realizations. In spite of knowing, now, all the excesses and horrors of the management of the Church, the endless demands for money, the seemingly fraudulent uses to which all that money is put, I think: If that’s one of the powers of auditing, well, good for it.
I catch a red-eye back across the country, rolling my suitcase into my office in time to pick up my teaching materials and walk across campus to teach Myth & Fairy Tale.
treasure
My mother is increasingly frail but still full of wit. As I help her out of the car one day, she asks, eyes twinkling, “Where did nimble go?” During the times I’m with her, I often bring my guitar. Among the tunes we sing together is “Pilgrimage Season,” which ends:
Maybe it’s just that the trees have grown
Maybe I’ve finally found my way
I don’t sing the final, implied rhyme, wanting the ambiguity of finding a way, as much as finding a way home, but in her sweet, quavery voice, Mother always sings the final word.
One night, as I am putting her to bed, she asks, as she often does, what I’m currently writing. I tell her again: a memoir, and speak with affection about my years with Skye.
She nods. “He was such a nice man.”
I stare in shock, remembering the fraught conversations, the cold, awful way my parents locked him out. “Yes, he was,” I say.
Another afternoon, she asks again, and I tell her about the conversation in Dad’s office, when he told me I’d be written out of their will if I stayed in Scientology.
“We would never have done such a thing,” she says. “Never!”
I keep going with the story, lightly, describing the drive back up the freeway, and how I’d cried aloud, “How can I leave now!”
“Oh!” She looks stricken. “We never thought of that.”
And we both laugh.
we’re hardwired, i think, to aspire. To want to be better, to have or do more. Success. Love. Health. Wealth. Happiness. In his Bridge to Total Freedom, Hubbard, in all his weird twisted genius, created a way for people to satisfy—or believe they could—that deep-seated human need. If you earnestly believe that a given lesson, experience, process (especially a repetitive one), is going to improve something about you, or allow you to discover something useful, you will usually have such an epiphany. It seems to me that Hubbard built his church around this idea. He also built it around the idea that people are willing to pay a lot for such improvement, willing to pay a lot for a certainty that their lives have meaning. Some are willing to pay by dedicating their lives (starting with this one) to that effort.
Like all religions, Scientology can plug that gaping existential hole that at some point yawns open in most lives. From one view, this seems manipulative, clever and calculating, to exploit our human yearning in this way. From another (and I’m aware this may be greeted with derision), it can be seen as benevolent: to give us what we long for. I had sturdy, life-changing realizations doing Hubbard’s processes. I can finally accept that just because the “win” took place via Scientology practices does not lessen the power of the lesson learned.
But then I think of Skip—his twitching eyes, the nightmare visions that rolled palpably out of his consciousness—and of the Church’s indifference. That stunning lack of compassion is what finally allowed me to comprehend that Upper Management seemed interested only in those who were upstat: those who succeeded, whose successful (celebrity) status could be used to “spread the word”—spreading the word, particularly, to those who are able and willing to pay for services. Scientology offers no scholarships. The very idea, to those steeped in Church dogma, is laughable: If you can’t afford Scientology, you are not in spiritually good enough shape to deserve it. Among the things I often noted but blinked away were how few people in the course rooms—in Los Angeles!—came from any world other than white and middle-class; how my Church didn’t show up, as other religions did, after tornadoes and fires and hurricanes with soup and clothes and succor and materials for rebuilding. No, people who find themselves in the path of a tsunami have brought it on themselves. There is no room in the Church of Scientology for such downstats.
I recall the derision in Hubbard’s books (not, I hasten to say, among my friends) for those who were gay, and for those who chose to marry a member of another race. Skip was an enormous chunk added to that pile of evidence that in my mind had begun to mount against the Church, which I could no longer ignore. I think that’s why those nights sitting opposite him remain so vivid. And why, as I began to sort out my pilgrimage into and out of Scientology, I needed to begin with him. He was, though I did not know it at the time, the galvanizing force that finally not only allowed, but required me to leave. I wish I could thank him. I hope, with all my heart, that he found his way to some kind of serenity.
for years i thought of my time in Scientology, the shame attached to the woods/underworld where I spent so much time, as unique. I was not able to see it as simply a version of a journey taken by most of us at some point in this life.
But as I began to write and, finally, to speak openly about that “squandered” decade, I heard from many who’d taken (or been led into) detours from their own expected lives. Often these were shy, whispered conversations, as they confided their own shame, what they perceived as their own “flunks”: the decade in the terrible marriage, the years lost to Oxycontin, the time in an ashram agreeing to and participating in sexual coercion, the transgender child whose transition tore apart not only the family but a cherished religious community. We’ve all had to take careful, sometimes very difficult inventory to determine how those years and those experiences led to where we are now, and that for better or worse (and it takes time and tinkering and perspective to find that “better”), we wouldn’t be who we are without having had those years and learned those lessons in our particular underworlds. That is, after darkness—because of darkness—we determine how to start again.
My brother and I both flunked. His version was awful; mine, in the end, fairly mundane. He fell off a bridge, damaging his brain; I clambered along one that, for a while, torqued my mind. But we both returned, in our own ways, bearing insights we hoped to pass on. He learned to be content with this moment, now. Once I was able to accept him as his new self, instead of wanting him to be the old one, I saw it all the time: in the way he’d take a drag of his cigarette and give a slow smile. Sometimes it was sad, a dark understanding of his fall, in every sense of the word; it came with a shrug, but it was also wise, and accepting. He knew he’d been racing for extraordinary, and that, arms outstretched, he’d leapt toward that dazzling trapeze—and missed. He missed, and he fell. He came to know all that, and moved on to live the life he did have.
I sidled along Hubbard’s Bridge, whose initial sound structure turned, increasingly, to gossamer nonsense. After I finally managed to leave, I rejected all of it, for years. But as I began to write in earnest—as writing became a practice—I became aware of how the work at those sunlit tables in the course room taught me to love scholarship, how it was there that I first learned the magic that is contained in the roots of words. I am endlessly grateful for the gift of that three-dimensionality, which surrounds what I do, as I write, sing, act, direct, edit, teach. As I sit at my desk, all kinds of volumes to do with words, with spirituality, with history, with
myth and religion—especially books that combine those subjects—are within arm’s reach.
i’ve now read that Hubbard didn’t invent Study Tech, and it’s possible that, like much else comprising his religious technology, he borrowed the ideas, codifying them as his own. Nevertheless, the idea of “knowing how to know” sticks with me. If, in my classrooms, I see someone yawning, I circle back to make sure I’ve defined my terms. I demo concepts. I try not to “skip gradients,” and it’s clear to me when I have. As part of various assignments, students are asked to look at the derivations of words; many find this tedious (and tell me so), but I continue those assignments for the few who write in the semester’s evaluation form, or come to tell me personally, that this sometimes-arduous work has shifted the way they study, and/or their entire relationship to language—even, for some, the understanding of why they are in school at all.
Most religions, and certainly philosophy as a subject, are organized around ethics. Even as I condemn what appear to me to be the Gestapo-ian ways Hubbard’s Ethics Conditions are used by the Church (particularly in the upper echelons of management), I appreciate that, while a Scientologist, I was asked to engage with these ideas so thoroughly. I doubt that I would have done so otherwise. Nor would I have understood how much knowledge and appreciation of ethics may shape our actions.
That the soul is “aware of being aware” continues to be a very useful idea, especially in relation to mind and body. It’s an idea shared by many religions, but I grasped it as a Scientologist. I’m glad that thetans are genderless, that unlike, say, Buddhism’s enlightenment, it’s possible to go Clear (if that is an actual state) in a female body. That said, women in high positions in Scientology are addressed as “sir.” And I am horrified that children as young as six are considered old enough to agree to join the Sea Org. Considered full-fledged thetans in a young body, they are encouraged to sign their entire lives away on a dotted line (not to mention the billion further years the contract mentions).97 This is child abuse, pure and simple, but it is protected by the Church’s religious status. Also deeply disturbing is the Sea Org policy regarding pregnancy.98 I met wonderful people in the Sea Org, and it breaks my heart to imagine what happens to them as they get old or perhaps infirm (what did they do to “pull that in”?) or simply want to retire. For them there is no retirement; there is not even Social Security. The Church raises millions of dollars a year, and due to its status as a religion, it pays not a penny in taxes. (The Church hounded and flummoxed the IRS until the IRS capitulated; the IRS is now reluctant to come after them.99) Instead, they cleverly invest in significant pieces of real estate all over the world.