Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology (3 page)

Because of my obsession with appearances, I was skeptical at first of my mom’s boyfriend Dennis, whom she brought home when I was seven years old, after she had divorced my dad. In comparison to my dad, Dennis was a bit of a geek, with his glasses, pants belted high up on his waist, and mustache. But he was also very sweet and didn’t make me feel tense when he was around, like my dad did. Dennis immediately put Nic and me at ease when he gave us the speech: “I’m not trying to be your dad. You already have one of those. Look at me as a friend. I love your mother, and I will love you.” My sister and I liked his spirit, but we were going to have to work on his look, starting with getting a little Dippity-do into that hair.

Dennis was easygoing and playful, just like my mom. They would do things like have water fights where they’d run into our room to use Nic and me as human shields while they tried to throw cupfuls of water at each other.

Even though he was Italian, Dennis wasn’t anything like any of
the other guys we knew. He didn’t seem to have man hang-ups or the macho mentality that most of the men I grew up with had. He was a waiter, and a great cook, and he always made us food whenever he was home. “Your mother’s not going to cook a decent meal, ever, for you girls,” he joked, “so you better be nice to me.”

He didn’t dismiss us or try to shoo us away like everyone else in the neighborhood did; instead, he looked us right in the eye and took everything we said seriously, even though we were just kids. Mom said it was because he was a Scientologist. I didn’t know what that meant—some kind of scientist, maybe—and I didn’t really care either. At least, not until my mother started going to the city by herself and not coming back until late at night.

“Where do you go, Ma?” I asked one night over chicken cutlets at the kitchen table when it seemed like it had been forever since she’d been home for dinner.

“I go to this church,” she said.

“But aren’t you Jewish?” I asked.

The only church I knew of was the Catholic one, that we often attended with my grandmother, my father’s mother, who lived in Little Italy.

“This is the Church of Scientology. This church isn’t about God and saints. It is about helping you to live your life better. Like the course I’m doing now. I’m learning that if you do something bad, even if it’s little, if you’re a good person you feel bad about it. And what happens is that in your mind, that little thing becomes a big thing. And that leads you to feel bad about yourself, which then leads to doing more bad things. All these bad things, no matter how small, are called overts. And if you don’t get these overts ‘off,’ you will do worse things.

“But if you tell the truth about what you’ve done,” she continued, “you kind of clear the slate, and then you don’t feel like you have to do more bad things. This is what’s called in Scientology ‘getting off your overts.’ Like confessing your sins, but more practical.”

“That’s why you should tell me anything you girls have done that I don’t know about.”

As soon as my mom said that, I thought about the operation I had come up with to feed my leg warmer addiction. After seeing
Flashdance,
I decided I needed leg warmers in every color (I was always about quantity rather than quality). I told the neighborhood boys I’d give a hickey to anyone who stole leg warmers for me from the Chinese vendors. At that time, hickeys were a big deal. It was a sign that you were up to some stuff. We practiced them on ourselves on our upper arms. (This way you could just pull down your sleeves and nobody would know you’d been practicing on yourself.) When it came to my trading hickeys for leg warmers, I was very specific about just what it was going to take to get me to put my lips on a boy’s neck—we’re talking a minimum of three pairs, preferably purple, purple with glitter, and light purple. It was a brilliant idea, if I do say so myself.

So here I was, at the dinner table, wanting to do what my mom was asking—tell the truth. But if I did that, she was no doubt going to kill me.

“Ma,” I said, “I didn’t personally steal anything…”

“Leah. What did you do?”

“I might have said I would give someone a hickey if they got me leg warmers from the Chinese shop.”

“Ewwwww,” Nicole said.

Normally I would have told Nicole to shut up, but I was steeling myself for the more important reaction from my mom. The reaction of most moms I knew would be a crack on the mouth. Who tells their mother the truth? No one, that’s who! All kids know this. I assumed I’d be punished in some serious way for the leg warmer–hickey racket. This was the test.

“Thank you for telling me,” my mom said.

I waited for the catch, but there was none. Instead, she showed me the precepts about stealing and said, “I know you know the difference between right and wrong, and I just want you to make better decisions for yourself.”

What is this magic happening before me?
I looked at her, looked at my sister, back to my chicken cutlet, back to my mom, back to my
plate, hoping the carrots disappeared, but they didn’t…That was okay. A miracle was still occurring.

It was like the clouds parted and a ray of light came shining down on me. Even for someone as lenient as my mom, this was unheard of. On top of not receiving any kind of punishment for the leg warmer fence, I suddenly felt like I went from being a kid to being someone capable of making my own decisions. The sense of power and superiority was exciting. No, I did not have sugar cereals or arroz con pollo on the stove, but damn it, I had acquired some grown-up power!

“Nicole is making out with boys when you’re not here,” I added.

“I am going to kick your ass,” Nicole yelled at me.

“Well, you’re not giving anything up. You have to be honest. I’m just saying.”

“Okay, Leah,” my mom said, “you don’t need to give up other people’s transgressions. And stop with the bread. Eat your carrots.”

I liked a religion where I didn’t get in trouble for stealing leg warmers, but I didn’t like that my mom was hardly ever home because she was at the church.

“Does that book say anything about kids being home alone? About you leaving early in the morning for the church and not coming home until late?” I said.

“Well,” Mom said, “if you don’t want to be here by yourself, come meet me in the city after school and check out the church.”

She didn’t have to ask my sister and me twice. The next day Nicole and I met at the subway and took the B train into the city for the first time by ourselves. As we walked up the stairs to the elevated subway track, I was fearful. But I was comforted by having my sister at my side.

On the train, I felt less secure. Graffiti was everywhere, and a guy was slumped in the corner. Everything was filthy. We hadn’t even arrived in the city yet, and already it was so different from Bensonhurst. There were no friends here, no Joeys or Frankies. Nobody was looking out for us.

We got off at Times Square, which back then was basically the worst place in the world for two young girls. But we were headed to the New York Org, the main place where people studied and did other activities central to Scientology and where my mom was working on staff. By the time we arrived at the building on Forty-sixth Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues, we had passed so many leering men and XXX-rated places that the big building, which looked like a bank or theater and had a hanging metal awning that read, “Church of Scientology of New York,” really did seem like a church or a refuge.

Despite how freaked out we were about going into the city that first time, Nic and I started going all the time: after school, on weekends, and all summer. We were “on course” at the New York Org, which meant we were doing one of the twenty Scientology Life Improvement Courses that deal with all parts of life, from finance to family. We were told that L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, developed “discoveries of existence,” which give you “the know-how to overcome ups and downs, to know who you can trust, to organize your life, to achieve your goals and much more.”

My sister and I were twinning, which meant we took all our introductory courses together and teamed up for the drills you have to do on the course—and one of our first was a cornerstone of Scientology, the Success Through Communication Course. The point of the course was straightforward enough. It was going to teach us how to talk to people better. I was all for that. My mouth was always getting me in trouble. The drills that we did in a room with other kids and adults on all different courses were called “Training Routines,” or TRs. During the first one, OT TR-0, Operating Thetan Confronting (“thetan” in Scientology means “spirit”), Nic and I had to keep our eyes closed and sit there across from each other. We often used that as a chance to get a nap in, but our supervisor came over and told us that wasn’t the purpose of the drill. When we got good at that (sitting without moving or falling asleep), we moved on to sitting across from each other with our eyes open. If one of us moved our
big toe or looked down for a split second, the other had to say, “Flunk!” Then we’d both start all over again. The goal was to be able to sit and confront another person comfortably without feeling the need to speak or do anything else other than look at the human being in front of you.

Also part of the communication course is a Training Routine called TR-0 Bullbait, where the coach focuses on doing whatever it takes to get a reaction from your “twin,” called “push the other person’s buttons.” The goal of the trainee is to not show any emotion or reaction at all, no matter what is thrown at him or her. If you speak, roll your eyes, cry, laugh, or even blush, you are met with a “Flunk!”

Like most girls, I was always self-conscious about my appearance—whether I had a pimple, if my nails were dirty, you name it. Nicole, being my older sister, knew all this, and there was no one better at getting under my skin.

“What is that on your face?” Nicole said during my Bullbait session. “Are you growing something there?”

I instinctively touched my forehead.

“Flunk!” Nicole said.

Nic did it again and again until it no longer bothered me. Well, until not a trace of emotion showed on my face. It bothered me, but I couldn’t show it if I wanted to pass the drill and move on.

My sister had it a lot tougher when it was her turn. A male supervisor, who was probably in his twenties at the time but seemed about fifty to me, tested her.

“You have big tits for such a young girl,” he said to Nicole to see if she could pass the drill and “get her TRs in.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

“Flunk.”

“You have big tits for a young girl,” he repeated.

“I’m telling my mother.”

“Flunk,” he said. “Learn to confront what’s happening in front of you and be above it. You are not a body, Nicole, you are a spiritual being.”

He didn’t stop until Nicole, too, didn’t react any longer.

Our being on course made Mom, who by this point was working full-time for the church, really happy. After school and on weekends Nic and I would do a course, which would take a minimum of two and a half hours a day and run on average for a week or two, but then we’d have to wait around for about seven hours until Mom was done working. So we spent a lot of time distributing church pamphlets (passersby would sometimes yell things like “You’re too young to be in a fucking cult!”) and running the streets, dodging in and out of random buildings, which sometimes got us in trouble.

We didn’t meet too many kids at the New York Org, although I remember one girl named Sherry, who was my age but appeared a lot older (could have been the cup of coffee she was holding), whom my mom introduced me to in the lobby there. She was in the Sea Org and because of her specific location and duties, she was required to wear a uniform of a white shirt and blue pants. I was no doubt dressed in my tight jeans and a shirt that said “Leah,” and of course I had perfectly feathered hair and gold chains.

I looked at her outfit and asked her, “What are you wearing?”

“I work here and this is my uniform,” she said.

Wait, here was a girl my age who worked at the same place as
my mother.
Here I am, running around like a dopey kid, and here’s this girl with a uniform and a coffee cup. I thought she was super cool.

So after we started taking introductory courses we were encouraged to also start participating in introductory auditing, a form of one-on-one counseling, usually using an E-Meter (an electronic device that claims to measure thought and emotion). A Scientology practitioner asks the person being counseled specific questions, and using readings on the E-Meter, directs them to talk about points of emotional discomfort or upset until they are relieved. Children as young as seven can participate in auditing. Both of those practices of being on course and auditing are the two required paths to move up the Bridge to Total Freedom, which represents various states of spirituality.

Scientology was our life, not just in the New York Org but also back home in Brooklyn, where our mom started adapting the Training Routines to everyday scenarios. If Nic and I got into a physical fight over, let’s say, whether to watch
Solid Gold
or
Fantasy Island,
Mom would shout, “You guys do TR-0,” which meant we had to sit and look at each other until we loved each other again. Sometimes it took a while.

The whole idea of not reacting to other people, no matter what they said, was such a foreign concept where I came from. In our neighborhood, everything was an opportunity to get in someone’s face. Bensonhurst people didn’t hold back. But the fact that Scientology offered a different way of living was exactly the point, according to Mom, who wanted more for us than what Bensonhurst offered.

I understood that Scientology was about following the precepts, laid down in the policy by the leader, L. Ron Hubbard. If you did that, your life would be good. But if you committed overts, or transgressions, and didn’t talk about them, didn’t take Scientology courses and auditing, then you would receive something bad back from the universe. And the only way to really do things right for yourself, and the universe, was to stay connected to the church.