Beyond Belief (43 page)

Of course, I knew nothing about this at the time. I was simply relieved that they weren’t coming to my wedding; it was only after I left the Church that I heard the story from my mother.

“So,” Mr. Wilhere asked sardonically, “are you going to get married tomorrow?” I could tell how annoyed he was that I was about to get everything I wanted and had even gotten Dallas to be posted at the base.

“Pretty much,” I answered unapologetically.

“Well, good luck,” he said, mumbling some obligatory advice on how to have a good marriage. I barely heard what he said. I was going to be married.

Early the next morning, Dallas and I drove to the courthouse to get our marriage license. We were too nervous and excited to notice that the car was almost out of gas, and had to coast down a hill to get to the gas station. Dallas’s gas cap had to be opened with a key; he was shaking so much that it broke off in the keyhole when he tried to open it. He borrowed pliers from the gas station attendant and fished out the broken part, which took almost an hour. We prayed that it would work when we put it into the ignition, cheering ecstatically when it did. We paid with the five dollars’ worth of change we had saved from our pay. I could only imagine what the attendant thought when we handed her the pile of mostly dimes and nickels. We still had to coast a lot of the way to the courthouse, because the gas wasn’t necessarily going to get us as far as we needed to go. When we finally arrived, we had to leave the car unlocked because the key was still stuck in the ignition, but we got our marriage license.

Dallas’s dad was a Scientology minister as well as a jeweler, and had agreed to come to Los Angeles to perform a quick ceremony. The plan was to meet him at the Celebrity Centre at midnight, as that was when we got off work.

To my surprise, Dallas’s mother; his sister and her boyfriend; and his brother, wife, and baby girl were all there, too. The only one who was not a public Scientologist was his sister’s boyfriend. Two of my friends, Phil and Clare, were my chosen witnesses. There was no Bitty and Ronnie Miscavige, no Uncle Dave or Aunt Shelly, and no Uncle Larry. I got pretty emotional that Dallas’s family was there to make it special. Even though I didn’t know them well, they had obviously cared enough about us to make the two-hour drive from San Diego.

It wasn’t exactly the wedding of my dreams. Dallas and I were both in our uniforms. I hadn’t even touched up my makeup, and my shoes were caked with spray glue from that day’s design boards. The ceremony was five minutes long, no flowers, no fancy food, no champagne or music, but none of that mattered. We were married now.

I still cherish the moment that Dallas placed the ring on my finger. I promised myself that, no matter what it took, I would protect him and take care of him, and I would never be separated from him again. I knew that it was wrong to make him more important to me than the Church, but I didn’t care. We had finally done it. On September 20, 2002, I became Jenna Hill.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-N
INE

AUSTRALIA

D
ALLAS AND
I
WERE GIVEN NO TIME TO ENJOY OUR SPECIAL
moment. I had to return to work immediately, where I stayed up all night finishing design boards. In the morning, we had breakfast on the down low at Denny’s with Dallas’s parents. We weren’t supposed to eat out like this when it wasn’t a Sunday morning, but we did it anyway. That day, I proudly told anyone who would listen that Dallas and I were married, and that I was now Jenna Hill. I was delighted to distance myself from the Miscavige name, but even though my name was different, it didn’t change the fact that sooner or later Dallas would have to meet my family.

In December 2002, Dallas and I were given permission to celebrate our first Christmas together, with a trip to San Diego to spend the holiday with Dallas’s family, followed by a trip to Clearwater to see Grandma Loretta and Aunt Denise, then to see my parents in Virginia. Everyone in Dallas’s family was incredibly nice, possibly the nicest people I had ever met. His parents’ house was a log home, as cozy as they come, with a stone fireplace. The flannel sheets on all the beds and the soft lighting made everything warm and inviting. The feeling of home hung in the air; the familial setting was so contrary to the communal upbringing I had experienced.

After San Diego, Dallas and I flew to Clearwater, followed by Virginia, where we arrived on a gorgeous snowy day. It was really odd to see my parents in their little house, with a fire crackling in the fireplace, just like at Dallas’s parents’ house. My mother had even cooked a meal for us, which really surprised me. It was foreign yet familiar at the same time; being there made me feel as though I perhaps did have a place to come home to, at least for the holidays.

Over the next couple of days, Mom and Dad showed us around their community and told us about their lives. They seemed to be doing really well. I had anticipated that being with them would be really strained, but it wasn’t. My mom loved decorating her new house, and made it sound like a lot of fun. Strangely, my father’s Christmas present to us was a television and a VCR/DVD player, which was awesome, but against Church rules. We would just have to keep it well hidden. By the time we left, I felt almost like I had a family with parents who were truly there for me, that maybe it wasn’t just Dallas and me after all. For the first time since I was little, I felt as though I really did have a mother and father whom I could turn to in time of need.

When we got back to California, our little room on the base looked drearier than ever, but at least it was our own place. One of the perks of being married was that Dallas and I got our own room, small as it was. With our own space, I now felt like I had a family of my own, even if it was just the two of us. Together, we had a place to go that was ours. We could also eat together, and, in the unlikely event we ever had time off, we could spend it together. We received a couple of Christmas presents that made it look homier, which helped. Aunt Denise had given us some curtains, and my grandma had given us a quilt. I was given permission to talk to my parents on the phone, which was huge, having been forbidden to speak to them for more than two years.

Being married felt like a huge sigh of relief, and while it didn’t make any of my issues with the Church disappear, it encouraged them to stay dormant for longer periods of time, long enough to settle into a routine as best we could. I couldn’t forget the past, but I didn’t have to confront it every day.

Dallas and I had been married a little over a year when my senior at the Landlord Office told me I had been selected to go on a mission to Canberra, Australia. There was a small, failing Scientology Church there, and I was to go on a mission to find a new building for it and raise the funds to buy the building.

When I heard that this mission was going to be at least six months long, I freaked out a little. I didn’t want to be away from Dallas for so long. From my own experience, I knew how common it was for husbands and wives to be split up by their jobs in the church. In addition to my parents and other people I’d known over the years who’d been in a similar situation, there was a woman in the Landlord Office who had been separated from her husband for nine years. I had two friends who had been posted away from their spouses for two years and were now both divorced.

Dallas and I were going to do whatever we could to make sure this didn’t happen to us. So I proposed that Dallas go on this mission with me. I sent a telex to the Int Landlord with Dallas’s qualifications, and the next thing I heard was that he had been approved for the mission as well. It was odd that they had agreed so easily, but I wasn’t going to complain.

Neither Dallas nor I had ever been on a mission before, which made the whole thing even more odd. In addition, our pre-mission clearance process was strange. People going on these long-term assignments were supposed to get opportunity checks, when they were questioned as to their motives to go on a particular mission. Dallas and I did not get one. We were also supposed to be issued full Mission Orders with comprehensive targets, approved by RTC; read by us; star-rate checked out for our full understanding of them; and, finally, each target demonstrated by us in clay. None of this happened. We were given mission orders that appeared to have been written two minutes before we departed for the airport. Even these were hastily constructed, copied, and pasted on top of somebody else’s earlier orders. Our mission orders still read, “Find a Building in Kentucky.”

The whole thing was extremely peculiar. Why this mission, and why us? It seemed as though it was some sort of plan to take us “offlines,” or out of sight. Neither of us had any idea what was behind this, but we didn’t ask too many questions. We were just grateful to be going to Australia together.

I
N
J
ANUARY 2004, WE BOARDED OUR PLANE FOR THE EIGHTEEN-HOUR
flight to Sydney, Australia, and from the moment we stepped off the airplane, it was clear that Australia was going to be quite an experience.

From the start, we had a lot more freedom in Canberra. We could walk to wherever we were going. We even bought ourselves bikes to get around, as renting a car was too expensive. This was the first time I really had to navigate the real world on my own in any way. Clearwater had had far more Scientologists; in Canberra, there were only a handful of them. Everywhere around us there were Wogs. At first I was a little worried, but as I met more of them, I became more comfortable.

The Church covered our living expenses, paying for our apartment and our food, although it was often a struggle to get this money on time. I had to learn how to cook, as my whole life I had been fed by a galley; not having a mess hall was a strange adjustment. It made me feel like we were constantly dealing with food throughout the day, whether it was grocery shopping or actually cooking. At first I was afraid of the stove, so Dallas did most of the cooking. We’d also eat out once in a while. Eventually I tried following recipes and had fun with it, but the meals almost always turned out disastrously. Everything I made was disgusting.

Learning how to cook was just the tip of the iceberg. Probably our biggest challenge was the job itself. We were supposed to find a new Scientology Church building in Canberra, raise the funds to buy it, purchase the building, and have it renovated. Because Scientology was in the process of trying to standardize the layouts for all their new churches, the building itself had to be a minimum of 25,000 square feet or it wouldn’t be approved. In addition, it had to be on a busy street, not too industrial, preferably something more traditional and decorative so it had the look of a church. As we did our research, it quickly became clear that a building fitting all those specifics would have cost several million Australian dollars.

And there was the problem. In all of Canberra, there were only about fifteen to twenty practicing Scientologists. The whole operation in Canberra was quite different from what our mission orders had described. In fact, the whole organization in Canberra was composed of ten people who only delivered Intro courses. There was not even auditing, the primary service of any Scientology organization. Not only that, but they were being kicked out of their premises, as they had not paid the rent for six months.

The Church’s lists for potential donors included anyone who had ever given their name to the Church for a course, stress test, or any other purpose, the majority of whom had never come back. Complicating things was that Dallas and I had never raised a dime in our lives. The third person on our three-person team had some fund-raising experience and had been on many other missions, but she was quickly recalled home, leaving us there on our own. Still, we were given an impossible task. The idea of raising several million dollars from a group of approximately fifteen public Scientologists, none of whom earned more than $80,000, was ridiculous. Additionally, many of those Scientologists had already paid for services that the Canberra church wasn’t able to deliver, so asking them for money seemed wrong. We brought up these observations in our daily reports, but we were nonetheless pushed to get them to donate. In addition, we were not allowed to raise funds from other Australian orgs, as they were doing their own fund-raising. We ended up raising $75,000, the result of a lot of promotion and small fund-raising events like raffles, games, and shows.

Looking back, this was pretty good for people who had never raised a dime in their lives. It was largely possible because of a few friends we made there who knew a lot of people and helped us make connections and raise the money. Still, we were told this amount was not acceptable, and eventually Dallas and I started running out of ways to raise more. Unless they changed the mission plans or the specs of the building we were supposed to purchase, we had done everything we could. We had asked to come home several times, but it wasn’t allowed.

Still, Dallas and I struggled to keep asking the same people for money. I could see these people’s lives and I knew that they really couldn’t afford to donate. This was not something that either of us had ever encountered, and we were in disagreement with the Church about what we were being asked to do. The focus was not on building a Church to deliver Scientology by which to make money; it seemed more about making money and having a nice-looking building. They wanted the new buildings to be filled with gimmicks and high-tech video displays, but all this seemed to trump the delivery of Scientology itself. It felt as though the focus was on the material aspects, instead of Scientology, which was why we were there. Asking for money from these people in return for nothing, especially when they had already given so much, seemed greedy.

The more we pushed to make money, the more we ran into the general public, not always with good results. In one fundraising effort, we made promotional pieces and sent them to the public Scientologists on our list. Sometimes we would get them back with rude things written on them. I remember one person said that L. Ron Hubbard was a fraud and that we were all idiots. I was surprised, especially when we received ten or so others with similar sentiments. Based on everything that we heard from Uncle Dave and the senior members of the Church my whole life, I had been under the impression that everyone loved L. Ron Hubbard, and that Scientology was flourishing and expanding all over the world. However, it seemed like most people in Australia did not even know what it was, and those who did often were skeptical.