Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (4 page)

I remember thinking that going back to a Scientology school could be a drag. I had gotten used to not having to do all of the Scientology study stuff and now I would most certainly have to do it again if I got into the new school. Well, all my old friends would be there, so maybe it was worth it.

Months went by and the new school finally opened. It was called the Delphi School and it was awful. All the things we had to do at Apple School were nothing compared to this new place. EVERYTHING we did was Scientology-based. Every subject we did was written by Scientologists and had checksheets. We had to do another course on how to use Scientology Study Technology: The Learning Book Course. After we finished a course we had to do an exam and hold what looked like soup cans and be asked questions on a Scientology E-Meter. We started school at 8:30
 a.m.
and went until 5:30
 p.m.
every day. We even had to clean the school classrooms and do work for the school as part of our schooling.

All the teachers were Scientologists, and some, it seemed, had been in Scientology forever. The school’s headmaster, Henning Heldt, was a certifiable prick. I remember him talking and everything out of his mouth was “Out-Ethics,” “Misunderstood Words,” “Off-Purpose,” “Overts,” “Withholds”. It was as though this guy did not know any words besides Scientology ones. I never liked him and it felt like his job was to make sure the students were miserable.

Most of the other teachers were not much different. It was weird, because most of them seemed to know each other real well, but they hadn’t worked at a school before and had not been teachers. They were hardcore Scientologists.

Delphi also had an “org board” just like at any other Scientology organization. The school had a lot of the same post titles you would find on a Scientology Organizing Board. It was on a huge blue Formica chart with tons of Dymo tape labels giving the post titles and names of the people that held them. I had seen the exact same type of boards at the local Scientology orgs in Los Angeles.

In 1985, my parents could no longer afford to send both my sister and I to Delphi. One of us had to go back to public school. Guess who the lucky one was? Me, of course!

By this time, my mom was living with a boyfriend in a house out by the beach in Venice. We had to drive 90 minutes each morning to get to Delphi by 8:30 and I was not going to be missing that!

I would be attending the local public school in our district in Venice. Turns out that we lived right on the district border and if we had lived one block further north, I would have ended up at a better school. Well, that wasn’t the case, so I ended up going to Westminster Avenue Elementary School. I had to walk through a pretty bad section of town to go to school and back, but other than that it all seemed to be pretty cool.

On my first day I was not well received. The school was HUGE. The last public school I went to was dwarfed by this place. There were at least 1500 students. As I remember it, I was the ONLY Caucasian kid in my class. There was actually one other girl who was Caucasian, but she was physically handicapped. I was not particularly bothered by this fact, but some of my classmates were. I only went to the school for a few months, but for those few months, I was in a lot of fights that I surprisingly didn’t win.

After a few months, I was done. I decided that I would no longer be going to school. I had grown physically while attending this school, mostly due to the need to survive! I did not want to spend every day looking over my shoulder. For a few weeks, I would leave in the morning just as I always did, but instead of going to school, I would go to the beach. This worked until the school contacted my mom.

When she confronted me on it, I told her about the fights and told her that I would not go, period. I told her that once we had enough money for both my sister and I to go to Delphi, I would attend school again. She was optimistic that this would be only a few months away, so she agreed.

My routine was pretty good. I went to the beach every morning, and spent the entire day at the beach, on the boardwalk, Muscle Beach or about town. I then headed back to the house to do some chores. I had it easy. I was hanging out with street performers, lifeguards, local surfers, people who had money but no jobs, people who had jobs but no money, you name it. I rode my bike everywhere and just hung out with people. It was a wild mix of people and cultures. During that year I learned more than my entire previous years of school. I also learned how to fend for myself and was not afraid of other people at all.

At last, after a yearlong vacation from school and anything structured, my parents had enough money to put me back into Delphi. When I first went back it was a bit of a shock because I had really been on the streets for the past year, and now I was going back to the sheltered white bread kids who had not been exposed to life yet and were still worried about who liked who and what the current favorite band was on KIIS FM.

I almost got expelled my first week back. I was getting into a lot of fights and this time, I was not losing. These kids were weak and non-violent. I was accustomed to an environment where, if you did some trash talking, you had to back it up with physical fighting. These kids did the trash talking but as soon as you punched them out, they ran off to the teachers! After adjusting to the rules, and realizing that I had nothing to prove to these people, I was able to blend in and get back in the groove.

I had a few friends that I liked at the school. Vonnie Ribisi was cool. Also, I liked his sister, Marissa, a lot. She was actually my very first girlfriend. If we did more than kiss a few times, I considered that really lucky. I hung out at their house a lot and since Vonnie and I were friends, I also got to see his sister a lot. My sister also hung out with Marissa and Vonnie’s other sister, Gina, a bit. I went out with Marissa for about three months. We broke up on Valentine’s day; I was unhappy with not doing much more than holding hands and needed to move on.

I also had to play the Scientology game because now, if you were not progressing with your Scientology studies in addition to your school studies, you were considered “off-purpose” and would get in trouble with your parents. Most kids attending Delphi lived in the LA area, so going to the local Scientology center at night to study was doable. Luckily, we lived way out in Venice and did not get home until 8:00
 p.m.
so I had no worries in this department and never did any courses or further Scientology studies.

Then my mom broke up with her boyfriend and we moved back to Hollywood. I no longer had an excuse not to study after school at the big blue buildings, “The Complex,” in Hollywood.

In 1988, I did the Student Hat. I was 15 years old. I thought this would be a piece of cake as I had already done two other courses on how to study the Scientology way. This course, though, was way more than I thought it would be. In addition to reading all of the L Ron Hubbard teachings on how to study, I also had to listen to 15 hours of L Ron Hubbard’s public lectures given in the 1960s. What’s more, I was quizzed daily on what I had studied and asked definitions of words and to explain concepts. This was not much different than what was done at Delphi, but most of the stuff we were studying there had some practical application and was useful everyday stuff that made some sense. Now I had to really bend my mind to see how the stuff Hubbard was talking about had anything to do with what I was studying. Sometimes he just appeared to be rambling and, because someone was recording it, you got stuck with it. Also, if you did not pass your quizzes and routinely flunked exams, you would get in trouble. It was not like school; these people were pissed at you for not taking this stuff seriously.

My friend and I decided to go to the movies one night instead of to course, and the next time we showed up for course, we were told that we were going to go to Ethics. Ethics was where you got your punishment assignment for doing something wrong from a Scientology viewpoint. The Ethics Officer told us that we had to do a “Danger Condition” and get back to course.

“Conditions” are about a dozen different formulas L. Ron Hubbard wrote up, and someone applies the steps of the formulas to their life to change how they are doing. The worse you are doing, the lower the condition you have to apply. But in reality, they are mostly used to punish people. Usually, when you are in the higher conditions, people are not around chasing you up for conditions write-ups. You had to write up what you did for each step of the condition and get it checked by someone to make sure that it was okay. As soon as you are in trouble the first thing you get asked is “What condition do you think you are in?” or “You are assigned a condition of Confusion!” Conditions are also used as an incentive. For example: “You can’t have time off until you are out of your Doubt Condition!” They were used as a threat, such as “If you don’t get this work done, you are assigned a Liability Condition!”

I never liked this because it was usually up to the person approving or assigning conditions to decide what condition formula you did. It was completely arbitrary and widely abused by one and all. Hubbard originally developed the conditions for staff and they grew into an entire subject, which became much broader and open to negative interpretation.

After several months on course, I completed the Student Hat and passed the final exam. After completing this course, the first thing I had to do was go see a guy at the organization whose job was to sign me up for my next course. I was ready for a break and not planning to do any more courses right away. Since my mom paid for the course and I had no money, I did not sign up.

After a few months my best friend, Jesse and I went on to do the E-Meter Course. This seemed easy enough and would get our parents off our backs for a few months about doing more courses.

The E-Meter Course was a course on the manual for the E-Meter and some exercises that taught you how to operate the thing. In Scientology, the E-meter is a tool pretty similar to a lie detector. It is used in all counseling and is said to detect areas that need to be addressed. It is also used by ethics officers to find people with withholds (crimes) and who have done things they don’t want found out about. So the E-meter is central to many activities in Scientology and it was considered important to learn how to use it. After we completed this, we stopped going to course.

Over the next few months, I spent more and more time with Jesse. I stayed at his house a few times a week and since we went to the same school, it worked out great for me. My mom was starting to preach the Scientology stuff all the time. She had moved in with her latest boyfriend and he was a dedicated Scientologist. To make matters worse, he lived one block away from the huge Scientology complex right off Sunset. Living this close to Scientology was too close for comfort.

My mom’s boyfriend, Dan, was on his Operating Thetan (OT) levels and went to the Complex daily. Operating Thetan levels are the upper and confidential levels of Scientology. You don’t ever find out what is on them until you do them. It turns out that Dan’s software company did a lot of computer database programming for Scientology and he was very dependent on them for his weekly income, so he did whatever they wanted. I did not like Dan at first. Until then, I had never seen an apartment as messy and disgusting as his. There was literally crap everywhere. He not only had the one apartment for his living quarters, but two more right next door and across the hall where he had his businesses.

In these “offices” it was wall-to-wall computers and filing cabinets. Now before you think “under the desk computers”, let me tell you what kind of computers these were. They were VAX/VMS systems. They had large tape drives and were about as big as refrigerators. He had about twenty of these things, along with tape drives, stacks of tapes and cables. Add to that a never ending snake of wires going every which direction and double stacked filing cabinets piled high with papers, trash and junk and you had Dan’s offices.

His living quarters were not much different. Clothes, trash and odd furniture items piled with random junk all over the place. It was a one-bedroom apartment and we would be moving in immediately. The idea was that my sister and I would have our bedroom in the dining/living room, which was about eight square feet. My mom was going to get us a bunk bed so we could have some space for a dresser. Oh, did I mention that this would still also be the living room and we would have a table there for eating?

My mom somehow thought that this was living in the lap of luxury. She brought up how this place was better than the apartment we were living in a few months back. We previously had a bachelor apartment that was one room with a small bathroom. Anything would be an upgrade from that! Dan’s apartment was not my idea of home.

At least I had Jesse’s place where I could crash. Jesse had just moved into a HUGE house in Tujunga. It was minutes from where we went to school and Jesse had his own room. Jesse had two sisters, one who was about eight years old and the other who was a baby. Jesse’s mom was pretty cool. She and my mom knew each other, but were not really close friends. The only thing they had in common was the Scientology stuff.

Jesse’s dad was very similar to my dad in that he was not really pushing Scientology and just wanted to live life and have some fun. His dad had bought jet skis, water rafting equipment, bikes, guns, etc. My dad regularly took us to the movies, restaurants and the beach and was generally cool with whatever we did. Jesse’s dad seemed more interested in fitness and vitamins than Scientology.

One day I was talking to Jesse about going to live with my dad. This meant that I would have to quit school because my dad lived about 2 hours away and the tuition was too high. I could not stand living with my mom anymore and between her and her new boyfriend, I was being pushed to the edge. Jesse said that maybe I could stay with his family and was going to talk to his parents about it.

Turns out that I could not have picked a better time. Jesse’s mom was planning to move to Clearwater, Florida, with the baby so that she could work full time on getting up the “Bridge” — the Scientology metaphor for spiritual progress. Clearwater is where the Flag Land Base was. This was the biggest organization in all Scientology, and if you were in Scientology and you were going to Flag, it might as well have been Disneyland for Scientologists. They even had a slogan: “The Friendliest Place on Earth - Flag.” The only thing better than Flag was the
Freewinds
. The
Freewinds
was a cruise ship owned by Scientology that sailed around the Caribbean delivering services to the highest level Scientologists.