Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (3 page)

Someone saw them run me off the road! Now what do I tell him? I am not trying to mess up anyone’s day or cause any trouble; I am just trying to get the hell out of Dodge. If I make any kind of stink with the cops, I will surely get declared a suppressive by Scientology and they will make my life miserable.

“Oh, yeah, a few of the people that I work with were trying to get me to stay. I am going to visit my dad for a few weeks and they just needed to get some numbers from me where I could be reached.”

“That is why you have the bags?” he deduces.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s right,” I sigh.

“So you are fine?” he asks, knowing full well there is more to this than I am letting on.

“Oh, yeah, I’m good. Just heading into town and I will be fine.”

He gives me back my license and is about to walk away when up rolls Muriel, the Public Relations Officer at Golden Era Productions. She rolls up right next to both of us on the side of the road in the Port Captain Office Honda.

“What’s the matter with Marc?” she asks the officer through her passenger window as she continues to roll it down.

“You know this gentleman, ma’am?” he asks back.

“Oh, yeah, he works at Golden Era Productions,” Muriel says, connecting the dots to his puzzle in one single sentence. The PR person irrevocably messes up the PR. Wouldn’t you know it. Here I am, keeping this totally out of the realm of “Bad PR” for Golden Era Productions, and in one short sentence, Muriel sinks that ship without even coming to a complete stop in her vehicle!

“Nothing is wrong, ma’am, just a routine traffic stop. Move along,” he says to her as he motions her to get back on the road. I can see his whole demeanor change right then as he processes this new information.

He watches as she drives off, turns to me and says in the matter of fact “no more crap” voice, “Where you trying to get to, dude?”

“U-Haul in town,” I reply, knowing that he thinks something is up and I might as well just do what I need to do to get out of here.

“Another squad car is on the way; we will escort you and make sure you get there okay.”

“Cool,” I say as I go for my helmet. I put it on as if we are done with the conversation part of the traffic stop, assuming that I am not going to get a ticket. Correct in that assumption, he heads back to the shelter of his car. A light sprinkle is still falling, and as soon as I put the helmet back on, the visor fogs right back up. I lift the visor just in time to see the second car coming down the road towards us.

He pulls up behind the first car and they both get out and talk for a second.

They get back into their cars and the first cop rolls in front of me while the second one pulls up behind me. I start up the bike, bump it into gear and we are off.

I think, is this good? It could be good. It could be really bad. Are the guys at the base going to flip out when they find out from Muriel that the cops are escorting me into town?

So much for a quick, quiet escape. I had never heard of anyone using the local police to get away. Seems like that works rather well.

It is January 5th, 2005. It is now about noon. My life has just restarted. It is at this exact moment I realize I am blown for good.

My parents moved to Los Angeles in the winter of 1979.

We had been living in Kansas City, Missouri. My father was working at the Kansas City Municipal Bus company as a mechanic. My mother was working at a restaurant. I was 6 years old and in first grade. My sister, Stephanie, had just turned 5.

One of my father’s college band buddies, Steve Smuck, had moved out to Los Angeles and was trying to get the band back together so that they could make it “big” in LA.

So we packed up all our stuff into a large moving truck and made the drive. We had a VW Beetle that we towed behind the truck. I remember the trip like it was yesterday. My uncle, who was also my dad’s good friend, made the trip with us. My younger sister and I would switch off riding in his car while the other would ride in the truck cab with mom and dad.

There was a stretch in the Colorado Rockies where we were separated and I really thought I would never see my parents again. After several hours of being separated, Uncle Chris decided to park at a gas station rest stop and let them catch up with us. Sure enough, a few hours later they came around the bend and we were reunited! I remember the feeling. It was one of those moments when the elation is immeasurable, but the exact feeling, the view of the truck coming down the road; everything is burned into your memory forever.

When we arrived in LA, it was culture shock for us. Here we were, a small family from Kansas City, and the cost of everything in LA was at least double what we were used to paying back home. We had spent pretty much all of our money on gas for the truck on the way over. We were broke. I was only 6 years old, but I knew it.

When we were living in Kansas City, we had a house. We did not own it, but we lived in a house. We had a front yard, a back yard, we even had a garden. We would play in the street with other kids on the block. It was a good time.

When we got to Los Angeles, we stayed with my dad’s friend Steve and his girlfriend at a house they were renting off of Franklin Avenue in Hollywood. My sister and I slept in the living room on the couch. “This is temporary until we get our own house,” our parents told us.

Christmas came and reality set in that we were no longer in Kansas City. I was used to getting cool stuff for Christmas. This Christmas would taint my view of Christmas for years to come. I got a baseball glove and a pile of unsalted peanuts (in shell) wrapped in a brown bandana. I did not play baseball nor did I particularly enjoy the game. My favorite color was blue, while the color I hated most was brown, and I had never worn a bandana, nor planned to. After opening these super presents, I was kind of like okay; now let’s hope I get some good ones to balance these out, because otherwise I might have to move back to Kansas City on my own. There were no other presents—that was it! No more.

Even though this is the first Christmas that I can recall, I knew that this Christmas did not measure up to past ones. I could have gotten a broomstick and a dustpan the year before. At least it had been logged as a good Christmas in my mind. So this is really the first memory that I associated with our newfound city. Los Angeles sucks! With the little information I had obtained, I was able to determine this at a very young age.

A short while later, we moved to a house in Echo Park, a “good deal” my parents had found. My sister and I were pretty excited. Our own house again! The excitement was short lived. We moved and it was a nightmare.

The house itself was pretty decent in terms of size. It had at least three stories and was on a hill. But the front door had no knob. It had a padlock that you had to unlock to get in and then you had to take the lock and move it to the inside to lock the door. This seemed odd to me, not like most doors I had seen up until this point.

There were a lot of things in the house that were odd. Plumbing, carpets, closets, smells, sinks, all had oddness about them. It was like someone had lived there before us, but not really.

The hill we lived on was more like the local neighborhood dump. There was literally 50 dump trucks’ worth of trash over a small dirt hill adjacent to our house. I would occasionally see people bring their garbage down the street and just toss it onto the hill.

Apparently no one had lived in our house for a long while. Officially, that is. The house was apparently overrun by transients and squatters. They certainly had not been doing a lot of household repairs or complaining about the garbage being dumped on the hill next door.

My parents did, however, attempt to make it as nice as possible while we lived there, which was only for a few weeks. They were getting a divorce. I don’t really think I understood what this meant at the time, but I knew that it would mean that my mom and dad would be living in different places. That seemed okay to me and not that big a deal.

My dad ended up moving to an apartment on Tamarind Street back in Hollywood. It was across the street from a huge castle. I thought this was pretty cool. My mom ended up living with a new friend of hers on Carlos Ave, right next to Hollywood Blvd. In fact if you looked out the window at the back of the house, you could see Hollywood Blvd!

The arrangement was that my sister and I would stay with my mom for most of the week and spend the weekend with my dad. We liked going to our dad’s place because he had cable TV. My mom did not like TV and did not have one. My dad would also take us out to eat at restaurants while mom had been converted to a “health food nut.” She rarely had edible food in the house during the week, so that weekly restaurant run was a lifesaver.

My mom had a new boyfriend every few months. A lot of times she would end up moving in with her boyfriends and that meant we would have to move too. My dad, however, lived in three places the entire time he was in LA. I once made a list of all of the places we lived in the first ten years in LA and figured out that I had moved an average of twice a year for 10 years!

At first, I went to public school right off Franklin Ave in Hollywood, Cheremoya Avenue School. I went there because it was free and near where we lived. I was fine with the school. I was learning things and got into the occasional fight, so it was just your normal everyday school.

After the second year of school my mom wanted me to go to a private school in Los Feliz. It was called Apple School. My dad’s friend Steve was into this organization called Scientology and they had a school in Los Feliz. I remember going there and seeing they had football fields, grass and all sorts of cool stuff, so I was okay with going to school there.

The way the schooling was done was different than what I was used to. Each person was allowed to do his or her own thing and you would not have to do what the rest of the class was doing, but could instead study on your own. We had these things called checksheets, and when you did a step on the course, you had to check it off. I had to do a special course on how to study that was created by L. Ron Hubbard. It was called the
Basic Study Manual
. We had to look up lots of words in dictionaries and make little clay people to demonstrate what we were learning.

I had made some good friends at my new school. John Peeler lived right up the street from me in Hollywood and we were good friends. Since it was Hollywood, a lot of kids were child actors or children of famous people. Another friend who lived next door to the school was a movie star. His name was Barrett Oliver. He was on a bunch of TV shows like
The Incredible Hulk
and
Knight Rider
. Knight Rider
was my favorite show, so I thought he was pretty cool.

One day after being at the school for a year or so, my mom told me that I was going to go to a different school. Supposedly, the people that ran the school did not want to have it be a Scientology school anymore and because of this I HAD to go to a different school. I liked the school and could have cared less about the Scientology part of it. My mom said that we did not have a choice. If Scientology said the school was bad, then we had to leave and go to a different school. If I did not leave the school, my mom would get kicked out of Scientology.

This was my first taste of how Scientology would change my life and how no matter what I did, I had no say in the matter. What could I do anyway? I was just a kid. No one really cared what I wanted. I just did what I was told and went along with the new school idea.

I ended up going back to public school. The only good thing was I did not have to make any more clay people and was not having to look up words in dictionaries. I did miss my friends but ended up making new ones.

Whenever I would live with my dad, I would hang out at the apartment building where he lived. There were a lot of cool kids there and some of them had famous parents. One girl that I liked and used to hang out with, Brandy, her dad was an actor. He was in some movie with Clint Eastwood – Geoffrey Lewis was his name. Sometimes Brandy’s sister, Juliette, used to come and hang out as well. Their mom, Glennis, lived in the apartment building, so I would see them a lot when they came to stay with her. Their step dad, Craig, worked for my dad at a roofing company, so we all knew each other. Brandy had a little sister, Dree, who I used to babysit when she was about 2 years old.

One of the people I talked to a lot was the mother of an actor. Her name was Elaine, and her son was a guy named Michael D. Roberts. He was in the movie
Space Pirates
and he had been on a bunch of other TV shows. His mom, Elaine, was cool. She would give me advice about stuff and was like a grandmother to me.

There was this huge castle across the street from my apartment building called The Manor. It was owned by Scientology and I had a few friends who lived there, too. One guy, Sky Dayton, lived there and we went to his apartment all the time to make candles. Another friend was Channing whose dad was some big composer guy named David Campbell. I never really saw his dad, but Channing’s brother, Beck, was around sometimes and seemed to be real cool. They used to shoot movies at the Manor all the time, it was Hollywood after all. They shot a movie there with Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte called
48 Hours.
They actually shot this movie on the 7th floor and in the lobby. It was quite exciting as they shot tons of bullets into the reception desk and the hallways on the 7th floor. They also shot a movie with Billy Crystal and Danny DeVito called
Throw Momma from the Train
.

A few months went by and my mom told me that a new school was opening up and most of my friends from Apple School would be going there. I had to take a bunch of tests, and if I passed, I could go to this new school. Mom took me to this place on Wilshire Blvd called Applied Scholastics. I did the tests and it was looking good. Applied Scholastics was filled with Scientology books and stuff and I could tell that the guy giving me the tests was a Scientologist because he used all the lingo. He told me this new school was going to be a very “upstat” school and if “my ethics were in” I would be able to attend. Total Scientology lingo. “Upstat” meant
up statistics
,
which means you produced more than you did the week before. For kids, “upstat” meant being good, not throwing tantrums or upsetting your parents too badly. “Downstat” was bad and if you were downstat, you did not get any ice cream or treats. No one wants to be downstat, now do they?