Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (5 page)

Jesse’s dad thought that if I moved in with them, it would work out well for all involved. Here’s the other good part, Jesse’s little sister Diana, was going to stay behind in LA and Jesse’s dad was going to hire a full time babysitter for her. He promised not to disappoint us.

I told my mom that I was going to live with Jesse. There was not anything she could do about it and I am sure in her mind, it would be easier since I could not stand living with her and her boyfriend and I openly displayed and voiced my views on a regular basis.

Moving in with Jesse took about five minutes. I had moved so many times to so many places that I had cut all my belongings down to clothing items. I had no crap to cart around. After ten or so moves, I tended to lose track or cut loose on the items one normally accumulates over time.

Since I was already at Jesse’s house a few nights a week, living there permanently was not a big change. We rode to school in the morning on our bikes or got a ride from another friend who lived a few blocks away. Oh yeah, the babysitter got hired. She was right out of a frickin’ centerfold, I swear. She was of foreign descent, I think Brazilian. Maybe not, but I could easily imagine her on a beach in Rio… Anyway, she was nice. She cleaned and cooked for us and kept Jesse’s sister out of our hair. But most of all she was easy on the eyes and no matter what she said got a smile out of us.

One Wednesday night, when we came home, there were a bunch of cars in the driveway we had not seen before. We walked in the door and Jesse’s dad was in the living room with a bunch of people from Scientology. We could tell — we knew them from the Advanced Org Los Angeles (AOLA). One of them was from the local Flag Office, one from the local
Freewinds
office and one from IAS. The IAS is the International Association of Scientologists. Mostly, they go around getting rich Scientologists to donate money to support legal battles. This was not a good scene. It is one thing if they are hitting you up for money at their offices. They were in the damn house! The only way you get these people to leave is to give them money, and lots of it. Apparently, there was never enough money to “Clear the Planet,” the Scientology battle cry for saving mankind, as fast as needed. The sad thing was that Jesse’s dad had the money. He had just sold off a company and had a boatload of cash he was sitting on. They probably knew that, which is why they were here. And it was Wednesday! Anyone in Scientology knows that you never go see a Registrar on Wednesdays or Thursday mornings!

In Scientology, the official end of the work week is at 2:00
 p.m.
on Thursday. All of the statistics from everybody working in the organization are added up and tallied and whoever got less done than the week before is “downstat” and everybody else is “upstat” – meaning their statistic is higher than it was the previous week. The staff with up statistics get rewarded and the staff with down statistics get penalized. They are particular about enforcing the penalty part and not so much about the rewards. Registrars, or “Reges” as they are referred to, are the number one priority within the organization. The registrars are the staff members who get people to pay the organization money. If the registrars don’t make money, nobody gets paid. When you are only making $35 a week, getting paid is a huge deal. The registrars have a tremendous amount of pressure applied to them in order to make the money they need. The ones with Jesse’s dad were big time registrars. These guys don’t walk away without at least a few hundred thousand dollars raised between them.

The next morning we got up and, luckily, their shakedown did not last all night long. They were gone. Jesse’s dad was gone. Hopefully, they did not clean him out.

When we got home from school, Jesse’s dad told us he had some news. “We are all going to go to Flag and the
Freewinds
over the summer!” he told us.

So they cleaned him out! From the Flag Registrar he bought his whole damn Bridge services for him AND his wife up to Operating Thetan (OT) Level VIII, which is as high as you can currently go in the Scientology world. From the
Freewinds
registrar, he bought a bunch of courses for himself, Jesse and me as well as accommodations for a few weeks. And from the International Association of Scientologists, he gave 40K and became a Patron! I estimated he dropped a cool 600K for all that, if not more.

Somehow, I am now going to Clearwater, Florida and the
Freewinds
. The ship part I could enjoy, but Flag would be a drag no matter which way you sliced it.

To sell us on the Flag idea, Jesse’s dad already had a plan: we were going to bring the jet skis and make a road trip to Florida. We would go jet skiing at all the lakes on the way from LA to Clearwater. That would work.

The summer came and we made the trip. We ended up going jet skiing a lot and took a very scenic route to Clearwater. When we arrived it was just as we thought it would be, it was awful.

Flag is called “Flag” because when L. Ron Hubbard founded the Sea Organization in the 1960’s, he did so at sea. There were several ships that eventually made up the flotilla of vessels that the Sea Org operated from. The ship in which Hubbard worked was known as the Flag ship and he was referred to as the Commodore of the fleet. When the Sea Organization moved ashore in the 1970’s, they moved their operations to Clearwater and never changed the name. The Flag ship Apollo operations transferred to the Flag Land Base, otherwise referred to as FLB or just Flag.

In 1988, Flag was staffed by hundreds of Sea Org members. They had several buildings and all were filled with Sea Org members dressed in navy like uniforms. They even went so far as to have rank insignia and Sea Org officers wore shoulder boards and gold braid lanyards.

Jesse and I signed up for the Pro TRs Course. This was the Professional Training Routines Course. On the first part of the course, you read a ton of background information on how Scientology came to be, what it is and how it was still around. Then you have to listen to some more 1960s lectures with LRH rambling on about stuff that has nothing to do with the price of rice in China, much less Florida in the late 1980s. We had a pretty cushy schedule and hoped to drag out the course so we could mess around most of the time and get back to LA after summer. We were scheduled to be on course in the morning until lunch and then until 3:30 in the afternoon. From 3:30 until the end of the night, we went to the beach or went swimming in the pool at the Fort Harrison Hotel.

This was working out just fine until one of our supervisors spotted us in the pool at the Fort Harrison Hotel one night. The next day she pulled us aside and told us that we were being dilettantes and that we were off-purpose. We were 15 years old! She told us that it was unacceptable that we were on such a light schedule when we were just doing nothing but what we wanted the rest of the time. This was considered “chasing butterflies,” something that L. Ron Hubbard mentioned in the most important Scientology policy, entitled Keeping Scientology Working. I remember thinking at the time that she probably wished she could go swimming in the pool but Sea Org members were not allowed. I also thought that going off and having someone take pictures of us literally chasing butterflies and then showing them to her would probably not help the situation.

We were in a tight spot and did not want to make any trouble and get into a bunch of ethics trouble, so we said that we would go on course for more time. Instead of ending at 3:30
 p.m.
, we now ended at 5:30
 p.m.
Two more hours. Wow. We figured that if we went to course a little bit more during the day, we would finish the course faster and have more DAYS off to screw around! It was a good deal. We finished the course and screwed off for a good week or two before the trip to the
Freewinds
.

I remember seeing the Course Supervisor at the Sandcastle one day when we were jet skiing in the bay next to the building. I waved at her, knowing that she probably had her blood boiling while believing that the planet, or the entire universe, was busy being flushed down the toilet. In hindsight, a jet ski would have been highly valuable if the world was, in fact, being flushed away. I would have surely outlasted the bulk of the people clinging to soup cans attached to E-Meters or books written by Hubbard.

We went to the
Freewinds
; I did this tiny course that shows you where everything is on the ship and how to get into a lifeboat should the thing sink. I was announced at the “Graduation” that week and had to say something about the course. Everybody does the course. No one wants to do it, but it is a requirement. Sort of like everything in Scientology, you have no choice. And then after you do something you don’t really have a choice in doing, you get to tell everybody how much you loved it. If you don’t come out the end of a course in Scientology with flying colors, you get in big ethics trouble and most often have to pay more money to find out why you are unhappy and then possibly pay even more money to do other remedies that are believed will make you happy again. I went along and said, “I was now happy to know where everything on the ship was.” Everybody clapped and the next guy said something about the course he finished. Yippee!

I then did another course – The Route to Infinity Course. Jesse and I liked the “get through the course fast and then mess around” method. We decided to go from morning until the end of the night and do the course fast. This course consisted of a bunch of LRH lectures from the 1950s. Jesse and I whizzed through the course in three days and partied for the rest of the cruise. We drove around the islands all day on mopeds, jet skied, and scuba dived or just did nothing and hung out on the ship. One night we got in trouble for watching the movie
Robo Cop
on one of the lounge decks that had a TV. We had rented it on the local island and brought it aboard. The Sea Org girl who wanted it turned off said that it was too “enturbulating” for the other passengers and we had to stop playing it. In Scientology, being enturbulated is the worst thing you can experience. It is like being upset and having your “personal space” or “universe” encroached upon. So, we turned the movie off. She left. We turned it back on. All the other “enturbulated” passengers somehow made it to the end without drowning themselves at sea. In fact, I do remember them being a bit angry when the Sea Org girl made it seem like they were not going to find out if
Robo Cop
was going to take down the bad guys or if he was going to meet up with his wife and kid. They did brighten up when we popped the tape back in, though.

Besides having a better set of sea legs and some fun island trips, we were ready to leave the
Freewinds
. We had been there two weeks and it was time to go.

We got back to Flag and realized that we still had one more course that we had to do, The Method One Course. The stated purpose of this course is recovery of your education – hard to do when you haven’t even graduated high school yet. You look up definitions of any words you have ever run into that you didn’t know the meaning of. We decided to do this course since it was the last course we needed to do in order to become Fast Flow. In Scientology, every time you read something, you have to get an exam from another student who has already read the thing you just read. This person quizzes you about what you read and asks you key questions to test your understanding of the materials. If you do not answer any one question correctly, you have to go re-read the document and get another checkout from that person. Then at the end of the course you have to take an exam, if you do not pass the exam with a score over 85%, you have to go back and re-do the entire course from the beginning. Well if you do the Student Hat and Method One, you become Fast Flow, which means you do NOT have to get any checkouts or take any exams at the end of the course. It means you are smarter than the rest of the people in the course room and when you read something, you understand it and don’t need to sit there for hours trying to figure out what the hell Hubbard is talking about. The only way you get in trouble with Fast Flow is if a supervisor thinks you do not understand, he can quiz you on the spot and if you flunk for any reason he can revoke your Fast Flow status.

There is even another level above Fast Flow, which is called Super Literate. To become Super Literate you have to look up in a dictionary every single word that L. Ron Hubbard uses on the Student Hat Course, which includes the typed transcripts of all the lectures Hubbard gave on the subject of study. This is called the Primary Rundown (PRD). And then you do Method One. I think the only difference between the two statuses is that if you are SuperLit or Super Literate, you cannot be challenged whether you understand something or not, they just have to take your word for it that you understand and go from there.

We went full time on this Method One course and spent a month with our heads buried in dictionaries. We did see some folks on the Primary Rundown and they had been on the course for eight months and they were only half way through! We were glad that we were only going to be Fast Flow.

We finished the Method One Course and had a lot of time to mess around. We went to some parties, went jet skiing a lot and were having a great time our last few weeks in Clearwater.

Just when we thought everything was going great, things started happening.

One of the teachers at Delphi was named Adam Hancock. He was our soccer coach, and he was the one watching the LA house while we were in Florida. Evidently he had been down into the basement and borrowed one of Jesse’s dad’s guns for an acting class he had been attending. He was going to do the Mel Gibson scene from
Lethal Weapon
where he shoots himself in the head using a gun with no bullets in it. Well, this would have been fine except for the fact that Adam had put a loaded clip into the gun and then taken it out. One bullet stayed in the chamber and he shot himself for real in the acting class. We got the call from our teacher, Eve Darling. She knew Adam from the Delphi School in Oregon, from which they both graduated. She was devastated. We were devastated. He shot himself with one of our guns! He lived but was on life support and was most likely going to be a paraplegic if he in fact survived. Adam was like a brother. We grew up together and he was our teacher for a long time. We had been to his house, met his wife and hung out. He was a really good guy.