Beyond Belief (37 page)

“Court of Ethics, Dallas T. Hill,” this one began.

“Are you kidding me?” someone in the office blurted out. “This guy got them to put the ‘T’ of his middle name in his Court of Ethics!” Everyone laughed, including me. They rarely used middle initials on these announcements; the fact that he wanted to make sure his full name was on his punishment; who did that? I assumed by the formality of his name, Dallas T. Hill, that he would be a really old man.

When I learned he was actually the cute guy with whom I had been exchanging smiles in the fifth-floor hallway, I was shocked. He seemed like such a clean-cut guy. I was reluctant to read any further. Much as I knew these were often gross distortions of the truth, I worried that reading it would make me think less of him. In his case, though, it turned out the Goldenrod wasn’t about anything personal or sexual. In Dallas’s case, he had gotten in trouble for not doing his post properly, because he hadn’t answered some telexes, which were communications between management and lower Scientology churches. The crime wasn’t so bad, but the punishment, that he would get a Court of Ethics for it, was a little ridiculous, but I guessed he had neglected it to the point of it being problematic.

I didn’t have much time to feel bad about Dallas’s situation, though. That same week, I had become embroiled in a drama of my own. I was now defending myself against an allegation that I had been flirting with a married Italian guy in CMO. We were friends and enjoyed each other’s company. He was someone who had seen me enter the conference room my very first day here, when I was meeting with Mr. Rathbun and Mr. Rinder about my parents. He had seen me again the following day, when I was going into the ethics interview room with Mr. Rathbun. We bonded over the fact that he knew something, although he had nothing specific. Nevertheless, I certainly wasn’t flirting with him, and I was a little bit grossed out, to be honest, that I was accused of it.

Of course, I denied it, but once an accusation was reported, it was assumed to be true, and nothing less than a full confession by me would be acceptable. I knew how it worked, no matter how tired of it I was. If it hadn’t been for Mr. H’s short but sweet apologetic speech, disguised between her best attempts at trying to sound authoritative and formidable. I wouldn’t have even done it, but would have just taken one for the team instead. Basically, she told me she knew I was a person who was friendly and outgoing with both sexes, and it was possible that something I had done had been taken the wrong way. However, she was still asking me to please confess and get it over with, for both our sakes or take responsibility for the “effect” I had created. I was always resistant to misrepresenting what had happened, but their procedures always allowed them to have the last word, and I knew that even if I didn’t actually confess, they would end up phrasing it in a way that would be the same thing as a confession. In the end, I got it over with, confessed, and never again spoke another word to my Italian friend. Upset as I was about it, having received so many sec-checks during which both the auditor and I
knew
that half of what I was saying wasn’t true, ending a session with a false confession was nothing new.

Things got better temporarily with the arrival of my friend Molly, whom I’d known since I was about five years old, when she and I were both living at the Ranch. Later, when the kids from the Ranch were sent to Flag, she wound up in CMO with me. Down-to-earth, very smart, and a bookworm extraordinaire, she had always been my friend, but we were never as close as we were now. Not only did Molly know everything about me, but she had also been at Flag and was on the EPF with Martino, Cece, and all my other friends, and had been friends with them, too.

In no time, I felt comfortable enough to tell her everything that had happened with my parents. It was risky. I knew I wasn’t supposed to confide in anyone, but I felt Molly would understand. She had her own issues with her father. She hadn’t seen him in three years. She hadn’t seen her mother in years, either. Molly knew what it was like to feel alone in the world and to know that friends meant everything. She also knew the importance of keeping a secret. For the first time since coming to L.A. I told someone the story of my parents’ departure. I knew that I was forbidden to speak of it, but it was such a relief to share my feelings and finally have someone else who knew.

Molly’s arrival was a welcome change and, for the first time in a while, I felt like I was establishing my life again. Then, one day, Mr. H dragged me into her office and began yelling at me. She had found out that I had told Molly about my parents being out of the Sea Org. What made her even angrier was the fact that Molly had lied to protect me, and Mr. H had to trick her by saying that I had already confessed, in order to get her to admit to this. Though the tactic was incredibly underhanded, it was to be expected. I was just upset I’d gotten caught.

Even though Molly and I would both be in trouble for my secret, I was touched by her loyalty. Real friendship wasn’t something you came by frequently in the Sea Org. When you got into trouble, people who were your friends previously often shunned you, and rejected any association with you in order to save themselves. Your loyalty was always supposed to be to the group, not to any individual, which was part of the reason why we were all encouraged to be suspicious of each other: so that we would never trust each other and always put the groups’ well-being first. On top of that, lying or disrespecting an RTC Rep was probably the worst infraction there was. Being insubordinate to any superior was out ethics, but disrespecting people from the highest governing body of the Church was practically treasonous. They had the power to send you to RPF, no questions asked.

Molly’s heroic effort to keep my secret was not lost on me. It was something only a true friend would do, but still it caused a mess. We both had to do amends for weeks on end, then had to ask each member of the group to accept us back. For better or worse, accepting us back was what they did.

In the aftermath, Molly was transferred to the PAC base, which, although it was only a fifteen-minute drive from where I was, might as well have been a thousand miles. Being at PAC meant that, from now on, I would see her only a few times a year. Yet another friend had been taken away from me.

W
ITH MY PUNISHMENT BEHIND ME, MY ROUTINE BEGAN TO
settle again. I still missed Flag, and I wasn’t as happy as I’d been there. In addition to my friends at Flag, the environment there was just different. I’d had more freedom, and it was hard not to look back on that with a bit of longing.

At the same time, I was seeing Dallas more often and I kinda had a thing for him. To my surprise and dismay, my friend Suzy told me she had a crush on him, which was a bummer. I didn’t know much about him, just that he was from San Diego, was pretty laid-back, and was good friends with a mildly creepy Italian guy he worked with. He also hadn’t grown up in the Sea Org, which was refreshing. The more Suzy talked about him, the more I liked him.

As the girl talk went on, I learned that Dallas had asked out another girl named Katie, although that had been a couple of months earlier. Katie was quite a guy magnet, a tall blond model-actress who had all of the boys chasing after her, even though her reputation was for turning them down. She had recently joined the Sea Org after a brief acting career with small roles in big-screen movies such as
American Pie
and
Never Been Kissed
. Her parents, who had won awards for their valiant efforts to disseminate Scientology, were also big money donors. Needless to say, her glamorous life of perfection represented everything I wasn’t. Here I was, a parentless lousy student, a dispensable Sea Org member, and a teenager with a crush on a boy I probably wasn’t good enough for. As it turned out, Katie also turned down Dallas.

For the next few months, I tried talking to him whenever I saw him. He noticed me now and even seemed slightly interested, but I could never tell for sure. One late night in September 2001, a friend and I were in the laundry room, waiting for one of the seven washer/dryers for the two hundred staff to free up. We were all supposed to use the machines on the designated laundry day, which meant we had to stay up half the night waiting for our chance. We were there only a few minutes when a huge cockroach made its appearance on the laundry room floor. We ran across the room screaming, only to encounter Dallas just walking in with his dirty clothes. Laughing, he chased it down and saved us. I liked that he was a little shy, but I felt awkward and slightly embarrassed knowing that one of our friends in CMO who was dating Dallas’s roomate, had told him about my crush on him.

The excitement of my late-night encounter with Dallas in the laundry room was completely overshadowed the next evening by a strange request from a supervisor to report to Mr. H’s office at once. I had barely knocked when her door flew open. “Follow me,” Mr. H ordered, already making her way to the stairs. We went to a conference room and, minutes later, in walked Mr. Rathbun and Mr. Rinder.

Mr. Rathbun did the talking. “We’ve only got a few minutes here,” he began. “Here are some letters that have come in for you over the last few months from Ronnie and Bitty. Why don’t you go ahead and read them?” He slid a stack of six or seven letters across the conference table. It had been nearly a year since I had told them I would not be joining them in Mexico.

My parents’ handwriting was unmistakable. I had assumed that she and Dad would know not to send letters, aware that they wouldn’t get through. Seeing them gave me a moment of nostalgia. But then I immediately started worrying that them contacting me might be getting me in trouble again.

“Should I read them now?” I asked, knowing full well that the two men were aware of their content.

“Yes,” Mr. Rathbun replied, gesturing to me that he and Mr. Rinder were waiting.

It was somewhat awkward reading the letters in front of them. I skimmed them quickly, looking for something major that might cause me trouble. Dad wrote about what he and Mom were doing for work, which I didn’t really understand, something about selling time-shares something I had never heard of; there was talk about visiting my grandmother in Clearwater. Mom said they got a car that they would eventually give me (I didn’t even have a driver’s license) and that they were moving to the United States and wanted to see me. I knew at that moment that their wanting to see me was going to be the problem.

“Okay,” I said, to let Mr. Rathbun and Mr. Rinder know I had finished reading.

“Do you have any questions?” Mr. Rinder asked as he took the letters from me.

“No, not really.”

“Okay, well, they will be arriving at the airport tomorrow, and we would like you to spend the day with them. Is that okay?”

I hadn’t expected that. I wondered if Uncle Dave knew they wanted to see me. He never talked to me anymore aside from a Christmas card and a small gift. I hadn’t had a conversation with Aunt Shelly in quite a while, either. I could never understand why my uncle didn’t talk to me about family business himself. I assumed everything was church business to him; after all, family wasn’t real. It was just a distraction to those people who were clearing the planet. Plus, as the head of Scientology, he had to be protected against any kind of suppression at all costs.

I seriously hadn’t known if I would ever speak to my parents again, and here I was being asked to spend a full day with them with no Scientology or work responsibilities. I hadn’t done that since I was seven years old, and they both had the day off, aside from Christmas and Sea Org Day, which I had last celebrated with them when I was eleven.

I was so conflicted. On the one hand, I would not have to work if I was with them, which was always a great thing, and being off the base might be exciting. On the other hand, I was not really looking forward to the awkwardness that would undoubtedly occur. Not only had I not spent time with them in years, but they had basically been declared SPs, as Mr. Rathbun had made clear to me on my first day in L.A. I was suspicious this was some kind of test. If I went and didn’t argue with them about their antisocial, personality-induced decision to leave, I would be a bad Sea Org member. If I went and did argue, I’d be miserable.

“Um, yeah, I guess I’ll go,” I stammered.

As if reading my mind, Mr. Rinder said, “Look, we don’t want any trouble for the Church, so I would like it if you could just play it cool. Just fair roads, fair weather. I don’t think they will try to pull anything. Okay?”

“Yes, sir,” I said with great relief. All I had to do was spend time with them. I had no idea what was happening or why.

It was extraordinary that my parents, out of the Sea Org, out of the country, and out of my life, wanted to see me, and I was being allowed. Actually, even being subtly encouraged to do it. The “trouble for the church” Mr. Rathbun was referring to was something I was completely unaware of at the time. I didn’t learn the details until much later, but my father had let Uncle Dave know that he and my mother were going to be on vacation in the L.A. area, and they wanted to see me. There was some back-and-forth on it, but finally it got to the point where they said either the Church had to present me, or they were going to come and get me, even if it required legal action.

When they got to L.A., they were told by Uncle Dave to meet him and Aunt Shelly at their hotel, which was by the airport. Years later, Mom told me that by the time she and Dad arrived, their frustration was peaking. The first thing Uncle Dave did when they walked through the door was try to calm them down.

“You are going to see Jenna,” he assured them. “It was never my intention to keep you from her.”

The meeting was all about PR and appeasement. He told them how Marty and Mike were messing up handling them, and that he was going to take charge of the situation himself. They could even have his hotel room for a couple of days. He was basically appeasing them in any way he could, even giving my father some of his back pay. He added that there would no longer be a restriction on their communication with me.