Beyond Belief (31 page)

I’d wake in the morning totally discouraged, no end in sight, with a dark cloud hanging over my head. I was told that Cece, Martino, and Tyler and the others were only my friends because of my name, and not because I had anything likable about me. I wasn’t allowed to speak to them. I had no life and nothing to look forward to. I had to gather all my strength to get up each morning and do what was expected of me to get out of this mess. All this was exactly the reaction they wanted. In many ways, this was how I felt when I’d first come to Flag at age twelve; only this time it was much, much worse.

Mayra was assigned to watching me and had to keep me in sight at all times. Even in the bathroom, she had to wait outside my stall. I was forbidden to use the phone to call anyone, including my parents. Our laundry chores were downgraded, as we were now not trustworthy enough to do the laundry for the executives. Instead, we had to do it for the CMO staff.

My daily schedule revolved around Mr. Rathbun’s security-checking me. I was beginning to realize that any niceness she had ever shown me had been a façade, because she clearly hated me. Now that I was on the outs with Uncle Dave and Aunt Shelly, she wasn’t compelled to be nice to me because of my family ties. She was now liberated to tell me just how big a piece of shit I was. She told me continually that I belonged on the RPF and was lucky I was saved. Sometimes I was bold enough to tell her she should just do it, instead of wasting her precious time on me. “Maybe I will,” she’d snapped in response, but she never did.

Our sessions were ridiculous. They all went the same way.

“Have you used your name inappropriately to get what you wanted?” she’d ask, then look at me expectantly, as if the meter had indicated that I had.

“No,” I’d respond, and she’d turn red and tighten her lips, while seemingly exercising the utmost restraint not to slap me across the face, for not bursting with answers to her question.

Twenty minutes would go by with her asking the same question, and, finally, I’d make something up.

“Okay,” I’d begin, and continue with something like, “the other day the crew steward came to our table and asked us if we needed anything. I asked if he could please get some butter. He did so really quickly, and I think he did it so fast because he knew who my uncle was, and I felt guilty about that.”

Inevitably my answer would cause Mr. Rathbun to spin it into something even more evil. “Okay, did your request cause him to not serve the others as well as he could have?” followed by “How many others did he not serve because he was busy tending to
your
needs?”

The meter thought the correct answer was fifteen, so I just agreed. This was how security checks went. If you didn’t have anything to confess, you needed to be clever enough to fluidly make stuff up to get you out of there.

When I wasn’t cleaning/doing laundry or in session with Mr. Rathbun, I was at the staff college listening to the “State of Man Congress Lectures” by LRH. In true LRH style, the lectures took you through topics ranging from various Greek philosophers to the story of ancient Rome and how its downfall was because of out 2Ds, to all of L. Ron Hubbard’s purported past lives along the way. They were essentially about how honesty and clean hands were important. Anyone who didn’t like Scientology or spoke badly about another person or matter, regardless of how right they might be, was saying those things only because they had done something harmful that they were hiding.

In other words, if you ever disagreed with anything and spoke up, you were told that
you
had something to hide. And if you had nothing to hide in the present, then your transgression must have stretched into a past life. I never knew if I felt this way because I had the worst hidden crimes of anyone in the world, crimes so bad they were hidden deep inside. If I had hidden crimes, as everyone kept telling me, what were they?

O
NE AFTERNOON, IN THE MIDDLE OF ANOTHER MONOTONOUS
day, I was in the staff college, listening to my tapes, when a girl whose face I knew walked in. It was Kiri, followed by about twenty other kids from the Ranch, including B. J. I was shocked. I couldn’t imagine what they were doing here. They all saw me and smiled and waved excitedly, but when they tried to approach, the supervisor told them to move along, as this was strictly forbidden in the course room.

Ever mindful that Mayra was always watching me, I was also aware that she wasn’t obligated to follow me into the bathroom when we were both on course. I just hoped that Kiri would use the same strategy. Sure enough, about twenty minutes later, Kiri and my friend Caitlin gave me a silent signal stare and walked into the bathroom.

I waited at least forty-five seconds, then got up myself. “Where are you going?” the supervisor wanted to know. I told her I needed to go to the bathroom, and she allowed it on the condition that I’d be meter-checked afterward.
Give me ten meter checks
, I thought. I didn’t care; I just wanted to see my friends.

They were waiting for me there. I gave them huge hugs and was so excited to see them. I asked what they were doing there.

“We’re on the EPF,” Kiri said. “We’re going to be posted at Flag.” I was shocked.

“What about the Ranch?” I asked.

“Your mom and dad have been on some special project at the Ranch to find guardians for all of us and send everyone to Flag, or if they were unqualified for Flag, to PAC. There is nobody at the Ranch anymore.”

I was speechless. It was hard to believe that the Ranch was empty of kids. No one knew for sure why it had closed. But, years later, my mom mentioned how Uncle Dave had told her that the Ranch was not only a waste of money, it was a distraction to the parents at the Int Base. The kids needed to learn Scientology and learn a real job.

Shocked as I was, I could barely contain my excitement that they were in Clearwater, but I could see the fear on their faces. They had all just been sent three thousand miles away from their parents, who were at Int. At least they came together. When I made the trip three years earlier, I was all of twelve and all alone. I hugged them again and told them it was going to be okay, that they would like it here. They could see from my CMO EPF uniform that I was in some kind of trouble, and I briefly told them what had happened.

Just then, Mayra walked into the bathroom, obviously knowing what was going on but not being in a ratting mood, thank goodness. She seemed to be willing to keep our bathroom rendezvous secret, but she did give us an “Okay, wrap it up” look. Kiri, Caitlin, and I grasped hands, then went back to study.

For the next few days, the highlight of my day was when they would all walk into the course room and smile and wave. I would always try to get a seat facing the door, even though it wasn’t always possible. Another time that week, I went to their course room under the pretense of cleaning up. Kiri was in tears, telling me how scared she was to be so far away from her parents. I tried to reassure her, telling her how I’d be there for her.

Later that day, I decided to try to advocate for my friends, who were definitely struggling. Since my own experience had been very similar, I was in the perfect position to help. I wrote a letter to my CO, telling her that some of the transferred Cadets might be upset or distressed because they weren’t going to be seeing their parents anymore. I told her that Kiri was downhearted, and maybe there was something we could do, like give them a session to make them feel better. I even offered to meet them and give them a pep talk.

My plan backfired. The next day my CO pulled me aside and screamed at me. “The kids from the Ranch haven’t even been here a week, and you are already poisoning them!” she yelled. “I spoke to Kiri, and she is totally fine!” With that, she told me I was forbidden to speak to or see them again.

I felt my face flush with anger, but one more backflash and I was off to RPF. Julia was already on my last nerve, with her frequent and purposeful personal attacks. Not only was she the ultimate tattletale, but she now hated me, which was a lethal combination. She would be excruciatingly sweet and kind when any execs were nearby, then look at me with disgust the moment they left. She started getting more and more in favor with the execs, mostly by kissing butt and putting others down. On the contrary, I was told to take different routes into and out of the WB so that I would never have to cross paths with Uncle Dave and Aunt Shelly, as I would just enturbulate them.

It was hard enduring weeks of hearing all the negative labels being attributed to me by Julia, my CO and Mr. Anne Rathbun, who would launch personal attacks on me after every session, calling me “out ethics,” a “criminal,” and finally an “SP.” All of these instances of people telling me how bad and evil I was forced me to look at myself and examine my feelings, intentions and what I really knew to be true. As a result, I underwent a mental shift. I came to see that all of these people telling me that I was bad were just a bunch of hypocrites. They claimed to care about other people but, in reality, their selfishness was quite transparent. All you had to do was look for it and trust yourself. I knew I’d done things wrong, but I also knew that my transgressions, despite what people around me were saying, were not evil.

Suddenly, I wasn’t afraid to call things what they were or trust my own judgment about other people, as well as myself. Previously, I’d compare my actual feelings to whatever Scientology said I was supposed to feel. If I felt anything else, then surely the problem was with me. As a result, I doubted myself constantly. I doubted whether I was a good person; I doubted whether the people around me were good people; I doubted whether my emotions were appropriate—all because Scientology made me feel that
I
was the problem.

Now, for the first time, I was able to see myself for what I was: Someone who made mistakes and was trying to make up for them. I might not have made great decisions, but that didn’t make me bad and it certainly didn’t make me evil. “Evil” was where they made their mistake—I might have had doubts, but I came to recognize that I was not evil. If there was one thing I was certain of, it’s that I cared about other people. I cared about my friends tremendously and would have put them before myself at any moment. I knew I was not an SP, because SPs did not feel that way. I knew without a doubt that I was a good person, and, no matter what anyone else thought or said about me, no matter who they were or how important, I didn’t care. When I realized this, down to the moment, the clouds opened up.

This realization was the beginning of personal integrity, when, instead of dismissing my feelings or my intuition, I found myself following them, even if they led me to a place that Scientology said was wrong.

It was amazing. Now, when I got yelled at, I would just say, “Yes, sir” so flatly, unconvincingly, and meaninglessly that I was starting to piss people off. I wouldn’t let them get to me. I would even smile a little bit, because I knew that I wasn’t listening and they were getting so worked up. At staff meetings, I would get called on in front of the whole group to tell them my “flap,” which was stuff that had come up in my sessions. Maybe it was that I had smiled at my friend, which was the same as not concentrating on my studies. Or I might have chatted for one minute with Mayra instead of working like a slave. Anything I did wrong had to come up in my sessions.

“Jenna, do you have a flap?” the CO would demand from me in front of everybody.

“No, not other than the one that everyone already knows about, and that I already announced last week,” I’d offer.

This would undoubtedly be an opening for an attack on me. “Oh, real smart, Jenna! Be a smart-ass to your CO in front of everybody! Change your attitude, or you will go straight to cleaning pots and pans in the galley!” She used me as an example for the entire group of how
not
to act.

Tom’s wife, Jenny, was at Flag now and was holding my mom’s old post in the Watchdog Committee. I still had fond memories of the time I had spent with her when I had come for my Key to Life course. She asked to speak to me alone, hoping to get me to see things differently. She told me that she had been in trouble a few times and didn’t always agree with what she had to do as a result, but she had pushed through it by reciting LRH’s two rules for happy living: one, “be able to experience anything,” and two, “Cause only those things which others are able to experience easily.”

I wasn’t sure I totally got her point, but I thought she was on my side. But the next day, in front of everyone, she directly told me that I had been given so much, and I needed to be grateful and show compassion.

I was dumbfounded. “Compassion?” I asked. “Are you serious?”

The reason I was in trouble wasn’t that I needed to show compassion, it was that I’d shown too much compassion. I had befriended people that they considered too far below them to be worth befriending. I couldn’t help but think how contradictory and pompous a respected authority was sounding.

All I had done was try to make Kiri feel safe, because I had once been scared in the same way that she was. I was trying to advocate for the greater good and, instead, I was made to feel like a selfish, entitled brat. At the moment, I wasn’t under the impression that the CMO was all about serving mankind. It seemed like it was more about tightening the clamps.

Jenny just dismissed my outburst with a laugh, “That was so Jenna.” I had no idea what she meant by that, but at least I didn’t get in trouble for backflashing.

After a couple of months, Mr. Rathbun turned my sec-check sessions over to Jelena, a CMO auditor. In our sessions, Jelena would wear a headset and a mic. Many times, I could hear people yelling directions at her through the headset, telling her questions to ask me, which resulted in many eight-hour sessions. The only way I got through it was by answering as quickly as I could and by trying to float the needle by thinking happy thoughts—a task that, of late, had gotten increasingly difficult.

O
NE DAY, AFTER A COUPLE OF MONTHS ON THE
EPF, I
WAS FINALLY
allowed to go to school on a Sunday with everyone else; it was there that I saw Martino. For the day, I was now under the watch of Steven, a little CMO boy, as Mayra was too old to go to school. I saw that Martino, who was doing MEST work, was under watch, too. One time, when Steven was lagging behind, I ducked into the room that I knew Martino was in.