Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (6 page)

After this, things took on a serious tone. Both our girlfriends had come out to Florida around this time. We were spending a lot of time with them and they lived at the Sandcastle so we were around Flag a lot more. One day Jesse met with some Sea Org members and I thought that they were probably trying to recruit him. Being at Delphi and being around LA, we got used to Sea Org recruiters. They were always trying to get the young kids into the Sea Org. In fact most of the LA organizations had kids as young as 12 working in them. Sea Org members were everywhere at Flag, though. The whole place was run by the Sea Org; so much so, they probably numbered in the hundreds, at least. There were a lot of them.

Jesse did not come back that night. I saw him the next morning at the Sandcastle. “I am joining the Sea Org,” he told me.

“What the hell?” I said. “What about all the stuff we were going to do?”

“Ali joined too!” he said.

Ali was his girlfriend. She was best friends with my girlfriend, Star. We all went to Delphi in LA and we had been dating these girls off and on for months. It was not like we were anything more than girlfriend and boyfriend or had done any more than held hands and fooled around a bit. It sure was not the kind of relationship that you follow into a billion year contract!

“Oh, so this is about getting some action now?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it.

“What about Star? Did she join too? I can tell you right now that I ain’t joining even if Star did. That is crazy talk, I can’t believe you joined!”

“Well I did. I’m going to pack up my stuff today and start tomorrow. I start right away,” he said decidedly.

“So, wait a minute. You didn’t even join up for LA? You are going to stay here? That is lame. Florida sucks, dude! How the hell could you join, but to then join up for the Sea Org down here? Oh man, they must have told you some crazy stuff for you to do that.” I was pissed. I walked off to go find Star and find out her version of this crazy story.

I found Star in her room crying. She asked me if I heard.

“Yeah, what the hell?”

Apparently, Ali and Jesse ended up meeting with the recruiters. Ali got signed up first and then helped them team up on Jesse. That is what they did. They got one friend in and then they used that friend to get the rest of the friends in. I had seen it happen so many times before. Jesse and I usually just blew them off. In LA they would come up to us and we would just say, “LSD.” You can’t be in the Sea Org if you have taken LSD, so if you said, “LSD” that was the end of the conversation before it even started. We used to tell them we had large debts, too many kids, a brother that worked at the LA Times, whatever we could think of that would give us a good laugh and blow them off instantly.

“What are you going to do?” Star asked me.

“Well, I sure as hell aint joining the Sea Org in Florida!” I answered back, hoping that she was in the same frame of mind.

“Yeah, but where are you gonna live? If Jesse stays here, where are you gonna go?”

Dumbfounded, I realized she was right. “Damn, I hadn’t thought of that!”

Where the hell am I gonna go? Good damn question. I am screwed. I have to go back and live with my mom. This is turning out to be a really crappy day. Maybe I can watch the house when I get back! Maybe there is a way to work this out. There has to be a way. What the hell is Jesse’s family going to think? Jesse is going to be in the Sea Org and I am going to be there for what reason? I am just a fifth wheel at this point, no use in keeping me around at all.

When I got back to the apartment where I was staying with Jesse and his family, Jesse’s dad asked if I had heard the news. Oh yeah, I had. He then asked what my plan was. He was really cool about it. I just said that I was still trying to figure that out. He said that he was going to sell his house in Los Angeles. Great. There goes 99% of my plan.

I had to call my dad. I ended up going back to LA, staying with my mom and hoping things worked out for the best.

No sooner than I arrived back, I realized that this would never work. My sister was working for my mom’s boyfriend’s company doing data entry. They wanted me to work for him as well. As long as I could make some extra bucks, I was cool with working. Then they explained to me how the “making some money” part works. The data entry they want me to do is of all of the sales leads that they have gathered up at conventions, sales meetings and so forth. They have hundreds of these cards with people’s information on them that they wanted us to enter into the computer systems for the sales team. If the sales team called one of these people and made a sale, only then do we get a commission. I told my mom and her boyfriend that I was born on the weekend, but not last weekend! Screw that! I could work for them for one hundred hours entering this junk into the computer and maybe, if I am lucky, three months from now, you are going to cut me a check for 15 bucks?

“What about your exchange with us?” my mom asks.

Oh, great. Here we go. As soon as she asked the question, she headed for the bookshelf and pulled out one of many large green volumes by LRH that has every single policy letter on exchange and anything else I had no interest in hearing about at the moment. She started going on about exchange and the fact that I needed to give back to her boyfriend in exchange for him letting me stay in his apartment. In Scientology, the subject of exchange covers the fact that nobody gets anything free. There is a balance that has to occur in all parts of your life. Just as you have to pay when you buy something at the store, same applies to everything in your life. If my mother’s boyfriend provided a place for me to live, I had to work for him instead of paying rent. As I had been being supported by her all my life, I owed her for the last 15 years of rent and food.

I need to find a place to live, I thought to myself while giving my mom a blank stare as she recited L. Ron Hubbard straight from the pages of one of the large green books from the shelf.

It took me about a week to work something up, but I made a deal with one of my friends at Delphi. Her sister was away at the Delphi campus in Oregon and they had an empty room in their house where I could stay. I was free! I could get out of here and start living on my own.

I told my mom that I was not interested in her exchange system as the apartment they were providing sucked and was a wreck so I was trading up to something better and she would not have to provide anything for me. So between us, we decided that it would be best if I moved out.

I moved in with Lorin and her family. Lorin was this exceptionally tall, slender girl who had freckles and was really funny. Her mom and step-dad both worked for Scientology in some capacity but did not preach the Scientology gospel. Living with them was pretty simple.

One day on the way back from school, Lorin’s mom dropped the bomb on me. “Jim (Lorin’s step dad) and I are selling our house! We are going to get an apartment in Glendale and use the money from the house to pay off our debts so we can join the Sea Org. We are joining the Sea Org.”

Everyone looked at me all happy expecting that I was going to be overjoyed to find that yet another temporary residence of mine was being pulled out from under me for some reason related to the damn Sea Org!

Are these guys trying to mess with me? I thought. This is insane. First Jesse, now Lorin’s parents.

“Wow, that’s great!” I exclaim, wondering how the hell I was going to get out of this pickle.

That night I had to decide how I was going to sort this out. Going back to my mom’s was not an option. My dad lived too far away for me to stay in school. I did not know of anyone else that had an extra place for me to stay. Suddenly it came to me. There was a guy at the school who worked for half the day at the school, and the other half of the day he did his studies. The school not only paid for his education, but he got some cash as well. They called it a work/study program. It was for the less affluent students that had parents that could not afford to pay for tuition. If I did that program, I could use the money I made from the school to pay rent and survive while still going to school. The next day I went over this idea with the school administrators. They liked the idea. The school staff even suggested that I rent a room from one of the other teachers at the school that had an extra room and that would solve my living arrangements!

My supervisor (teacher), Eve Darling, was who I worked for at the beginning. Eve was cool. She had been my teacher since I first started at Delphi. I did assistant type functions for her and filed student tests and paperwork. Eve was more like one of the older kids than our Supervisor. She had graduated from Delphi Oregon, and after that she worked at Delphi LA as a Course Supervisor.

It all worked out rather nicely. I moved into a house right up the road from where Lorin lived, in Tujunga. I became the lower school students’ soccer coach, paper-filing guy and eventually took over staff training at the school. I studied my school materials in the morning and all afternoon I worked. I loved it. Also, shortly after I started working at Delphi, my dad ended up moving back to Nebraska. So I was really on my own at this point. I was making money, supporting myself and relied on nobody but myself. I was 15 years old and officially living on my own. I did not have a lot of money, but at the same time I did not have that many expenses. I ate a lot of Ramen noodles and ham sandwiches.

This lasted for several months before it happened. The Sea Org recruiters came to the Delphi campus. They were interviewing all the staff, but not students. There had been some stink about recruiters stealing students from the school and the school, even though it was very low on the Scientology hierarchy chart, still had balls enough to keep them from talking to students on the school campus. Also these recruiters had come from ABLE, so the school was forced to let them do what they wanted. ABLE stands for Association for Better Living and Education and was over Applied Scholastics which was itself over Delphi and to whom they paid licensing fees for using the L. Ron Hubbard materials. Since I was still a “student,” I would be off limits.

Two people from ABLE were interviewing staff one at a time. They were there for days. Every day, they cycled through staff members and some people wanted to join, but did not qualify for some reason or other. The recruiters gave these unqualified people “Project Prepares”, which were essentially a list of actions that if done made them eligible for the Sea Org. After they had been there for a few days, I realized that my current landlord, Linda, had previously mentioned that she was unqualified for the Sea Org and had thought about joining before. Sure enough, when I got home that night, she was all excited. I knew it was coming. It was like the force that I could never get away from. I was going to have to warn people that if they let me live with them, that they would automatically be joining the Sea Org within the next few months. Sure enough, the words came out of her mouth.

“I have a new “Project Prepare.” I will be able to join the Sea Org in a couple of months!” Linda exclaimed happily.

“That’s great!” I said, thinking that I could one day sell my “living services” to Sea Org Recruiters all around the world. I could be on a contract and just live with people they wanted to get in. They would support me and in turn, I would send people to them every few months. It would be the same as what I was already doing, but I would get compensated for it. I thought that this was a great idea although it did not solve the issue at hand. I was back to having no place to live. I could always find another place to shack up, but then I might need a car, it might be further away. Not that many staff lived close to the school. I was at my wits’ end. I had moved every few months and it was beginning to take its toll on me. I was broke already. My list of friends was getting smaller and smaller as I lost the ability and funds to go out and have fun like everyone else. I was 15 years old. The only things I should have been thinking about was how I was going to clear up my acne and get laid. And here I was trying to figure out how to make next month’s rent, eat and then maybe, if I was lucky and still had some money left, somehow get laid.

The next day when I got done with my morning study session, my boss told me that the recruiters were waiting to see me.

My boss was Rona Bowles. She seemed very nice. I liked her a lot. She seemed to be doing well for herself. Her husband was Tim Bowles. He was a partner at this local law firm Bowles & Moxon. They did all sorts of cases for Scientology and they had money. The other partner at the firm, Ken Moxon was married and his wife worked at Delphi too, Carla Moxon. Their daughter, Stacey, and their son went to Delphi, too.

“I thought I was off limits to them!” I told Rona.

“Just go talk to them for a few minutes,” she said.

I went. They were using an empty office at the school that had a VCR and TV in it and were showing videos to people. I walked in and said that I only had a few minutes. It was a woman and her husband, Martha and Boris Levitsky. They were different than other recruiters I had run into. They were not like the Sea Org recruiters at all. They did not wear Sea Org uniforms. They were on a “Project” from ABLE. They told me that the Association for Better Living and Education was different than other Sea Org units. As our meeting progressed, I got more and more interested in what they were talking about. I had seen Sea Org members for years and hated that they had no money, no time to themselves and lived with fifty other people in filthy rooms that were overcrowded. I wanted nothing to do with that. ABLE staff got minimum wage, they did not live with other Sea Org members at the Complex. They lived in normal apartments nearby. They also did not work in “Orgs”, they worked in schools and Narconon Drug Rehabilitation Centers and other places just like I was working at Delphi. They also said that ABLE staff did not have to wear Sea Org uniforms like other LA Sea Org members. They showed me a video of Narconon Chilocco. It was this huge Indian Reservation in the middle of Oklahoma. They said that if I wanted to, I could work at Chilocco. I would have my room and board taken care of, I would get paid a few hundred bucks per week and I could do whatever I liked and would still be helping people.