Authors: Jenna Miscavige Hill
Beyond Belief (24 page)
What made all this particularly arduous was not just the invasive nature of the questions, but how relentless the people asking them always were. They wouldn’t ask you a question once and be done with it; they’d ask the same questions over and over, your fear mounting each time that the meter would contradict your words. They were like detectives investigating a murder, and once the meter gave them the reading they were looking for, you were guilty.
While this questioning itself was stressful, the real impact was something much more deeply psychological and unsettling: the repeated nature of the questions made you doubt yourself in ways that were hard to describe, especially when the E-Meter indicated that you did have an answer to the question. At first, you would know the answer, but, as they asked the same question over and over again, with increasing levels of intensity, suddenly you’d start to doubt yourself. These were confessions for things that you knew for a fact had never happened, and yet after hearing the same question for long enough, you’d start to think that maybe your answer was wrong. Maybe you had done this in some alternate universe and somehow didn’t know about it. Maybe you were withholding something.
Every question was a conflict of interest—if you admitted to doing something wrong you would be punished, but if you told the truth and the meter questioned your answer, you’d get asked the question over and over again, until you gave the answer that they were looking for. So many times I’d end a session not having done any of the things I’d admitted to, just because it was the only way to make it end. Mostly, though, I just prayed for my needle to float.
When Mr. Wilson was finally finished, he wrote up a “Knowledge Report” of anything that had come up in my sessions. He turned this over to “Ethics,” and I had to address each transgression and prove that I was now taking responsibility for it by correcting it or making the necessary amends. Once that was completed, Mr. Gentry informed me that I would be starting the Sea Org EPF the next day.
Everybody did the EPF at his or her own pace. Some people took two or three weeks; others could be on the program for months. It all depended on how long it took people to get through their life history, various security checks, and required courses. The required courses all had to do with the history, structure, and attitude of a Sea Org member. They included such courses as “Welcome to the Sea Org,” “Introduction to Scientology Ethics,” “Personal Grooming,” and “Basic Sea Org Member Hat.” We also listened to various LRH tapes and learned our code and purpose: “The basic purpose of the Sea Org is to get ‘in-ethics’ on this planet and universe.”
For EPF, I was moved into a different dorm in the Hacienda with twelve other girls, who were also just joining the Sea Org. Every morning we woke up early, donned blue shorts, blue T-shirts, and boots, and did military close-order drills. None of these bothered me, because I was already accustomed to them from the Ranch.
Next, we took the bus into the Flag base, where we were assigned to clean the various restaurants and hotel rooms in Fort Harrison and the Hubbard Guidance Center, where the public Scientologists received their auditing. We had fifteen minutes for breakfast; then we had to bus and clean the entire dining room after hundreds of staff and public had eaten there before us. After this was completed, we had study time followed by cleaning everything from stairwells to galley floors to any public spaces that needed attention.
There were about twenty people on the EPF with me, and nobody was over the age of eighteen. One small boy was only nine. He had come with his mother to Flag to take services. He wound up being recruited into the Sea Org, much like everybody else on the EPF. There was always a huge recruitment drive, and there was always at least one person recruited each week.
Our taskmaster, Dave Englehart, played the roll of drill sergeant. He was a longtime Sea Org member who had worked with LRH. He had a reputation for being tough and ruthless with a touch of crazy, and he lived up to every word. He would take us out on a sailboat to give us the whole Sea Org experience, but, while he was supposed to be teaching us to sail, instead he’d just shout out random commands at the top of his lungs, then get angry that we didn’t know how to sail a boat. At uniform inspections, he would sniff the air and say, “Someone here stinks!” We would all look dumbfounded, but he’d scream out in a rage, “What is that smell?” One time, he dove down to the ground and pulled a Russian guy’s foot, causing him to fall over. “It’s you, you fucking pig!” he fumed. “Go wash your goddamn feet, and don’t you ever, ever come to one of my musters smelling like shit again!”
Even though I was only thirteen, I had to fill out a “Life History,” a form that asked a lot of personal questions, many of them very adult oriented. I was asked to provide my name, birthplace, Social Security number, other ID numbers, credit cards, and bank accounts, as well as their numbers and expiration dates. I also had to fill in the names of all my relatives and how they felt about Scientology, and if I had ever been connected to someone who was critical of the church. There was a space for me to list what Scientology courses I had done, as well as any auditing I had received; whether I had ever committed a crime or been in jail; or if I had been part of the government or any type of intelligence organization. I was also supposed to detail every single sexual experience, including masturbating, that I had ever had; if I had ever engaged in anything homosexual in nature; any and all medications I had ever taken; any hospitalizations; illegal or abused drugs; and the dates.
I knew I had to do it, but it was hard to understand why the Church needed this information. The theory of confessionals made sense to me, but this was not standard confessional procedure, and what did my relatives’ names have to do with my eligibility? I was too young to have a credit card, but why would they need that info? Even though I had nothing to hide, I felt like the Church was asking me for information just for the sake of having it, almost asking for material they might blackmail me with that served no Scientologic purpose. I felt like I was handing over a piece of myself. I did it anyway, of course, rationalizing that, if I had nothing to hide, I shouldn’t have a problem with it.
Once I’d completed EPF for the Sea Org, I had to do the EPF that was just for CMO. The uniform I was given was a pair of dark blue pants paired with a white polo shirt. My day started off with an early morning bus to the WB to clean the executive offices. We had to follow the Basic Sequence for Cleaning a Room, as laid out by LRH, a very thorough cleaning indeed. Our morning studies included a lot of basic courses, including “Keys to Competence,” “Basic Cleaning,” “Basic Computer,” and “Basic Messenger Hat.”
This EPF had a lot of cleaning. We would clean the berthings of the CMO executives and RTC Reps, and had to do it perfectly. We also made their beds, turned down their sheets, and left snacks, usually fruit, cheese, and crackers. We would even clean their cars if they asked us to. When all that was done, we did their laundry, following a very precise procedure. We had to iron their clothes using starch, and could not leave train tracks along the seams. We had to steam their pants and polish their shoes and put them away, so that they were ready to wear. Any items that went in drawers were folded impeccably before we stacked them. To complete our CMO EPF, we had to pass our cleaning as well as laundry skills. The execs received vote sheets and graded each of us for our services in housekeeping and laundry.
The laundry room had about twenty washers and dryers for the thousand-plus crew at Flag. Two washers and dryers were dedicated to executives and were not to be used by anyone else, even if those machines were idle. The crew could only do their laundry on Friday night and Saturday morning, which meant there were always huge lines, many people staying up past four in the morning to use a machine at all. The execs could get shirts whenever they needed them, but general crew members only had one or two shirts, which meant they had to hand wash and iron theirs daily.
My friend Luisa and I were often on assignment with our little friend Charlie, the nine-year-old boy who was now on the CMO EPF with us. Charlie was an impish troublemaker who needed constant monitoring. He had an uncanny ability to intend to clean a berthing, and then turn what was already relatively clean into a disaster. One time, we all got in trouble because instead of doing the dishes like he was supposed to, he had shoved them all into the oven, where they sat for several days before an executive found them. Even though our nine-year-old wild card was the one who had hidden the dishes, we all got yelled at.
Though he was a nuisance, it’s only in retrospect that I can see Charlie for what he was: a neglected young boy. He was often lost in whatever he was doing. His hair was always unbrushed. He never washed his clothes and probably didn’t even know how, so he had giant stains all over his uniform. Once, when he was ordered to go clean his shirt by an executive, we found him five minutes later in the bathroom, trying to clean his shirt in the toilet.
Lost as he may have been, it was easy to get annoyed with him for his unusual behavior; after all, Luisa and I were punished because of it. However, for me, he was as much a curiosity as a source of annoyance. I didn’t realize it then, but he was the first child I’d encountered who actually acted like a child. At the Ranch we didn’t have kids like him; kids at the Ranch were too busy being little adults. In Charlie, I was witnessing how a kid was supposed to behave at this age. He seemed totally foreign, as though his brain was wired in a way that I’d never encountered, with an absence of logic and unique ignorance of instructions. Never before had I met a child this impulsive, and only now can I see that
I
, not he, was the strange one for expecting him to follow orders.
W
ITHIN A COUPLE OF MONTHS,
I
HAD FINISHED BOTH MY
EPFs and was back to studying five hours and working the rest of the day with Olivia and Julia, but, just as I was starting to get comfortable back in the CMO, problems with my family threatened to complicate things once more.
It started with my brother. One day, at lunch, my friend Jessica, who had briefly been with me in my early days at the Ranch, told me she had just seen my brother at the Hacienda. I told her this was impossible, because Justin was in California at the Int Base, so she must have mistaken someone else for him. She said she was sure it was him, and that he was on RPF; like my mother, it seemed he had broken the rules and received the worst punishment in the Church.
The RPF lived, ate, and worked separately from other staff, but we still saw them every now and then when they were doing projects around the base, and, of course, they were always running everywhere they went. They lived at the Hacienda, in separate quarters.
I couldn’t believe that Justin was on the RPF. I hadn’t seen him since I left California for Flag in June 1996 and had no idea that he had even been in trouble. Why hadn’t anyone told me? Later that afternoon, Mr. Wilson came into my office and closed the door, as he had been told I was asking questions about Justin.
“So, you heard about your brother?” he asked. “Well, yes, he is on the RPF, and there is not much more I can say.”
My eyes started tearing up. The fact that I now had two family members on RPF was almost too much to take. In the Church’s eyes, we were probably becoming a family of criminals, but all I could think was that my family was coming apart at the seams.
“Why are you crying?” Mr. Wilson asked. I tried to find a reason that was not purely emotional, but I couldn’t figure out a logical, excusable justification for my emotional display. “This is the Sea Org, and that is just the way things are,” Mr. Wilson continued unsympathetically. “I haven’t seen my own sister in years. She was an RTC trainee. Now I have no idea where she is. It is nothing to cry about. I haven’t even seen my wife in a year and have no idea what is going on with her.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, trying to contain my emotions. The next day, I received a letter from Aunt Shelly, explaining that Justin was being sent to Flag to do the RPF, and apologizing in advance if I found out before her letter reached me. She seemed sorry to have to be the one to tell me that Justin had supposedly gone out 2D with my friend Eva. He had also “blown,” which meant he had taken off from the Int base without permission. Aunt Shelly asked that I not be hard on him, as he had already been through enough.
Once I knew Justin was at Flag on his RPF, I started to see him in passing. On occasion, I was able to give him a hug and talk to him briefly. He would sometimes send me a list of anything he needed, like shampoo, and I would do my best to get it for him. He was only being paid fifteen dollars per week, which made it hard for him to afford the Aveda shampoo he liked, so I’d use some of my twenty-five-dollar weekly pay to cover the difference. Money was tight for me, too, though. There were no meals after five in the afternoon and, by ten-thirty, when I got home, I would be starving, so I always bought myself Frosted Flakes at the canteen, an expense that added up.
I heard through the grapevine that my brother was doing his Purification Rundown while on the RPF. The idea of the Purification Rundown, or “Purif,” was that a person could get rid of residual toxins and poisons from chemicals or drugs in his body by intense sauna treatments. The basic routine was to ingest a bunch of minerals and vitamins, run for thirty minutes, then sit in a sauna set at 160 degrees for five hours a day, with occasional breaks. The point was the first step on LRH’s Bridge to Total Freedom.
People had supposedly seen Justin in the Purif area in the early morning, and my plan to see him more was to do the Purif, too, even though I had already done it at the Int Base when I was nine. When I’d done it back then, we had to take several thousand milligrams of niacin, an extremely high dose, which was supposed to help dislodge the toxins. Next were the handfuls of vitamins and minerals to replace those lost in sweating. At nine years old, I naturally didn’t like swallowing pills, so I’d fake it and hide them in my bag. Then we had to drink a quarter cup of vegetable oil, as this helped to put in the good fat, which then pushed out the bad fat, where the toxins usually resided. This was absolutely vile, and I would gag trying to get it down. Finally, we drank cal mag, but I was used to that.
