Authors: Jenna Miscavige Hill
Beyond Belief (33 page)
“Look, Jenna,” he said, catching my eye but then looking down at his feet, “I’m—I’m at the point where I’m not sure I even care about the trouble we might get into.”
And, with that, he pulled me close and kissed me.
T
HAT NIGHT,
I
WENT HOME AND TOLD ALL THE GIRLS IN MY DORM
that Martino had kissed me. I was so happy; I couldn’t stop myself. Despite the risks, Martino and I began to see more of each other. Because he was no longer a Cadet, technically we were allowed to see each other; however, from the reprimands Aunt Shelly and Mr. Rathbun had given me, I knew that they forbade the two of us from being together. During the week, we would talk, but always had to hide. Someone would inevitably walk in, so we would just have enough time to quickly grasp hands before I slinked away.
By the end of September, I was in a better place than ever before. I loved my job. I had a ton of friends both inside and outside the CMO, even if it were on the down low, and all my childhood friends from the Ranch were now at Flag. Best of all, I was finally going to be with Martino. I should have known it was all too good. More important, I should have listened to my friend’s when he warned me that Martino and I should be careful, as it was the same time of year we had gotten in trouble the first time.
A few days later, Mr. Rathbun called me into her office. She said we were going to do a metered interview. She had all sorts of weird questions, some about my parents’ old coin collection and others about a bunch of photographs, and if I had seen them before. Mr. Rathbun said the photos were on a roll of film that I had sent to my dad. One was a photo of my roommate, Mayra, which I’d taken without realizing she was in her underwear with a shirt on. Over the course of several months, I’d taken a bunch of other photos and sent the whole roll to my dad so that he could have them developed. I was a bit confused as to how she’d gotten hold of the photos, but odd as the questions were, I was more focused on the fact that she had yet to ask me about Martino. I figured I’d cooperate in any way I could so that I wouldn’t draw her attention to him.
Still, the interview went uncharacteristically smoothly, and Mr. Rathbun said she would let me know if she had any other questions. Perhaps best of all had been the fact that she hadn’t asked a single question about Martino.
Unfortunately, the next day, she called me in again. This time, she started asking more personal questions and if I was hiding anything, exactly the questions I’d been thankful to escape the previous day. She didn’t seem to know anything that was happening with Martino, but she was also asking questions about my parents. I tried to sidestep her questions, but she wouldn’t have it, and, apparently, neither would the E-Meter.
“I am going to find out what you’re hiding,” she said, in an ominous tone.
Finally, after several hours of intense questioning, I broke down. I told her the truth about kissing Martino. First, she wanted to know why I felt the need to hide it, which I thought was a really stupid question. Then, she made me tell her every single detail, from how close we were to each other when we kissed, to how long it lasted, to what my intentions were, to what led up to it, to every minuscule thought and action. Revealing all those details about such a private moment was excruciating. They were the kinds of personal details that should have been insignificant to everybody but me. Not to mention that, had it not been for Aunt Shelly and Mr. Rathbun’s stance against Martino, he and I would have been allowed to kiss. Out 2Ds only applied to heavy petting and sex, so I wasn’t sure why I was being subjected to this detailed interrogation.
When it was over, I was sure I was in serious trouble, but instead, Mr. Rathbun said I could return to post. Unsure of what to prepare for, I told Martino about the session, and he seemed worried for me but also acted as though he didn’t care what she thought. In his opinion, we weren’t doing anything wrong, so there was no reason to be afraid. Two days went by, making me think I was in the clear, until I was summoned again. This time, Mr. Rathbun informed me that I was getting another security check, which, again, would last several weeks.
The first withhold I gave up for this sec-check was my confession that I had gotten my belly button pierced a few weeks back, during my first libs day in months. I had it done for my sixteenth birthday in the company of my cousins, some of their friends, and Aunt Denise, who signed the consent form as my mother. My grandmother had warned me that it would get me in trouble, but I had done it anyway.
Bizarrely, Mr. Rathbun seemed to be cool with it, but her news about Martino was even better.
“Just put things on hold with him for a bit, Jenna,” she told me. “Just while this security check is going on. After that, you guys can pick up where you left off.”
I couldn’t believe she’d actually said those words. Painful as it would be not to see him for a bit, if it meant that, in a few weeks, Martino and I would no longer have to sneak around, it would be worth it. The next time I saw Martino, I told him the news. He was bummed and annoyed that we had to wait, but I told him that I would get through it quickly. He wasn’t thrilled but decided to trust me.
A few days later, I saw him when he was with his mother, a boisterous Italian woman with a huge personality, who I liked in her own right regardless that she was Martino’s mother. She leaned toward me to whisper that I should be strong and not feel bad, because bad people only pick on the good people. She gave me a hug, and Martino grabbed my hand, smiled sadly, told me to hurry and get through this, and walked away. It was the last time I ever saw him.
T
HAT AFTERNOON,
M
R.
R
ATHBUN HAD A SURPRISE FOR ME.
I
N
her office were my two superiors, my CO and the Ops Chief. In the same fashion as Aunt Shelly, she castigated me, saying I was grossly out ethics and that I belonged on the RPF. I couldn’t understand what had changed since my last session. She was totally hurtful. She told me in no uncertain terms that my so-called friends only liked me because of my name, and that I was a Rock Slammer at heart; I just hadn’t Rock Slammed yet. She was so completely different than she had been the last time we met. I felt betrayed.
Immediately, Mr. Rathbun ordered that I be put under full-time watch and back into a CMO EPF uniform—though I wasn’t actually on EPF. I had to clean the bathrooms and stairwells endlessly. The new head of our department had to stay with me. He would stand around in the stairwell or the bathrooms for several hours while I cleaned. She was pulled from her duty and replaced, however, when word got out that she had warmed up to me and was even telling me Harry Potter stories to help pass the time.
Upset as I was about this, I found myself much more in control of my emotions than I had been after I’d submitted the petition to Aunt Shelly to rejoin the Cadet Org. In part, because I’d been so happy with how my life was going, I was interested in simply fulfilling my tasks and getting things back to normal. I simply did what I had to do, so that sooner or later they would let me go back to Martino and my life.
Different as my reaction was this time, something still bothered me about my punishment: I wasn’t sure what I’d done to deserve it. Sure, I’d been hiding things with Martino, but, again, it was a situation where the punishment didn’t fit the crime. I hadn’t broken a Scientology law; all I did was go against what Aunt Shelly and Mr. Rathbun had said. I honestly had no idea why I was punished to this degree. Yes, I had been with Martino, and yes, I got my belly button pierced, but those weren’t against policy. Sometimes I slacked off a few times when I should have been working, but no more so than anyone else. Other offenders didn’t have RTC waiting to sec-check them anytime they looked sideways. Why was this the case for me?
When I wasn’t cleaning, I was going through grueling security checks with Mr. Rathbun. They were laden with questions tailor-made just for me: Have you used your name inappropriately to get your way? Do you have an evil intention against your uncle? Security checks were the Church’s ultimate control mechanism and the sessions were all videotaped. In most cases, they used security checks to keep you cleaned up to get you back onto the Bridge. However, in my case, they were used to keep me in line. I got sec-checks because I nattered, disagreed, was difficult, or because I was frequently upset, which was considered “ARC Breaky.” Between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I had at least eight security checks. No other staff member that I was aware of had this many in such a short period of time, unless, of course, they were on the RPF. I hated the security checks and never understood why I had so many.
Anytime someone was upset or disagreed with something in the organization, the Church said it was because you had withholds. Any criticism you had, anything you didn’t agree with, essentially any dissent you had, was because you had done something bad. That was how they shut people up. In addition to looking at my life in search of withholds, I was encouraged and expected to look into my past lives to find answers about earlier, similar withholds that had caused me to act out.
I wasn’t allowed to jump right into past lives. I had to get there slowly, answering all my auditor’s questions as they were presented. If my E-Meter indicated I was on an earlier similar path, I was encouraged to continue. This emphasis on past lives always made me feel as though I were making up answers, but it also made things easier. When I couldn’t come up with any real withholds, which was more often than not, it helped to be able to delve into a fantastical world of past lives where anything was possible. Sometimes I would feel better, but it could have just been because I was getting off the subject of my current life withholds and was able to talk about some imaginary life, which was easier and a huge relief. As long as the auditor said the E-Meter showed that I was on the right track, there wasn’t any skepticism about what I was saying. Nobody was verifying any of my stories with actual science.
Many people would make up all kinds of exaggerated stories. They would come up with overts, in which they would confess to blowing up planets with bombs and outlandish things like that. They would come up with elaborate plots and detailed characters that were often hard to believe. I was more restrained. I never created fully realized characters or in-depth stories; I wasn’t bold enough to act as though I knew it all for sure. I used my past life memories strategically, when I thought they would help move a session along.
Often my past lives were some alternate version of myself. Usually, I was just some girl in a scene, a piece of a larger past life that I would never see. I would supposedly remember being a girl hundreds of years ago, who was poor and had to steal something. Another time, I remembered being a girl being chased down the street by an evil, scary man, and I wound up killing him. At the time, I imagined that this bad man was an image from a past life and was the reason I was scared at night, or anxious and paranoid that I was being followed. Often, it was something taken straight out of a movie I had seen or a book I had read, but I made it my own. My needle would always float at the end, so I wasn’t about to argue with that. I was never fully convinced that the needle had to do with my story’s accuracy. I was always told that as I moved up the Bridge, my recall of past lives would improve greatly.
Faking my way through the past lives didn’t make me skeptical about the whole practice, though. I’d known about past lives my whole life, and while I felt like a bit of a fraud for not experiencing them fully, I sometimes managed to convince myself that they were indeed past lives, especially if convincing myself meant that I could get out of session more quickly.
Past lives aside, the sessions themselves were miserable, lasting upwards of six hours. Several times, I seriously considered throwing the E-Meter out the window. Mr. Rathbun was constantly putting words in my mouth and forcing me to confess to things that I hadn’t done, just to give her any answer to her questions. If my needle wasn’t responsive enough, she’d make me eat, whether I was hungry or not, likely because the E-Meter is supposed to respond better when you are well fed.
What I found weird was that sometimes, during session breaks, Mr. Rathbun would talk to me like a friend. I got the sense that she thought my biggest problem was entitlement; that because I was from Int and my family name was Miscavige, I thought those things allowed me special treatment. Nothing was further from the truth. In my mind, my family wasn’t the Miscaviges; it was my friends in the Sea Org. I was also home here, at Flag.
A
FTER A FEW WEEKS OF SEC-CHECKS,
M
R.
R
ATHBUN GOT TIRED
of the whole charade, telling me, in her most hostile voice, that I had so many withholds that our time would be better served if I just wrote them on the computer. That way, she could print them and send them to whoever it was that got them. It was much easier to confess to a computer than it was to her. At least, I could write things that actually happened without being hounded and harrassed. However, I would have to get meter checks along the way. When the printer wouldn’t print fast enough, she would have a giant fit and scream at how much of her time I was wasting. Before long, the sec-checks resumed without the computer.
Besides sec-checks, I had to listen again to the dreaded “State of Man Congress Lectures” or scrub the toilets and the tile grout in the bathrooms with a toothbrush. If Uncle Dave or Aunt Shelly were in the building I was cleaning, I was directed to eat my meals in the bathroom so they wouldn’t run into me in the hallway, because I might enturbulate them and thus hinder Scientology.
Everything about my life made me feel trapped. I was confined to the bathroom in the WB, unless I was in the auditing room with Mr. Rathbun or in another office listening to LRH tapes. I was not allowed to take the bus home, instead being driven home in a car to keep me from my friends. I was allowed a five-minute shower, then had to go to bed. Most nights, I couldn’t sleep, but I couldn’t go anywhere—someone was always posted outside my door. Even the letters I received from my friends were confiscated.