Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology (5 page)

Mike kept trying to get me to say “Yes, sir.” But I couldn’t do it.

Then he picked me up and before I even realized what was happening, he threw me overboard.

The shock of the moment and the freezing water took my breath away, and for an instant I thought I was going to drown. But I sputtered and began frantically dog-paddling.

“Yes, sir!” Mike shouted.

I couldn’t do it. The words just wouldn’t come out. Once I
gathered myself, I became calm. The waves were choppy but I was okay, I could swim. I began to tread water. This had become a battle as far as I was concerned. Although I wasn’t sure if I would win.

Mike, who was following a policy practiced by LRH called overboarding, which entails throwing a crew member overboard as a form of reprimand, picked me up by my shirt again, but this time it was to pull me back into the boat. We returned to the marina in silence. I was soaking wet and humiliated at what had happened, but there was a part of me that thought that deep down, Mike Curley might just respect me for not backing down.

A
FEW WEEKS AFTER WE
moved to Flag, we went back up to New York to see my father.

Shortly after we arrived, as we were sitting around the kitchen table, he asked, “What are you doing there in Florida?”

“I’m a housekeeper,” I said.

“Your mother moved you to the cult to be a housekeeper?”

“Well, yeah. We clean hotel rooms that people pay money to stay in.”

“You’re learning to clean hotel rooms? That’s what you’re learning?”

“Well, yeah, but we just got there. It’s part of basic training.”

I started getting flushed. I felt the need to defend my position and what we were doing to help clear the planet, but I was not able to present it to him the right way and ended up ultimately doing the work a disservice.

“How much are you making?” he asked.

“Fifteen dollars a week.”

“Donna,” he yelled to my stepmom, “get me the Help Wanted section from the paper.”

He found an ad and showed it to me. “You see this? A hundred twenty-five dollars a week for a housekeeper. And you’re making a lousy fifteen bucks.”

“Well, Dad, they’re giving us room and board,” I said, once again trying to defend it. But ultimately it was no use. He was convinced that he was right and he felt the need to belittle me and what I believed in to prove it. Little did he know that by attacking Scientology, he ended up simply pushing me back into its arms.
Them
against
us
. I thought, this guy has no idea that I am fighting for
his
eternity.

We returned to Florida, and I have to admit, Dad pointing out that I was making only fifteen dollars a week along with all of the hard labor was starting to bother me a little. I was here to do important work and be sent on vital missions. And more important, to wear heels, stockings, and a uniform with a cap, Navy style. I imagined myself clicking around the organization in my heels and yelling at people to clear the planet. But that just wasn’t happening.

It was right about then that I noticed that one of the kids from my Sandcastle crew was wearing a uniform and was “on post,” meaning that he had a real Sea Org job that definitely was not cleaning toilets.

“How the fuck did you get off the EPF?” I asked him.

“You have to complete the courses and show up to study time,” he replied.

Nic and I had been taking the opportunity of study time to hide in the bathroom and take a nap in the tub or take the hotel shuttle buses back and forth from the Fort Harrison to the Sandcastle, enjoying a break and some air-conditioning. Up until this point I was under the impression that my bad attitude was what was holding me back from moving on from the EPF. That once I had a more positive mindset, I would be magically rewarded, promoted, and assigned a uniform and, of course, the all-important heels.

Nic and I quickly changed our ways and got on course. We wanted off of the EPF, and soon.

While I was making progress and heading in the right direction with my training, there was one thing I couldn’t come to terms with. I thought a lot about my infant sister, Shannon, a sweet little blond, blue-eyed thing. Whenever I could, I went to visit her in the nursery,
where she stayed during the day while my mom was working. “Nursery” was a charitable term for the motel room in the Quality Inn filled with cribs of crying, neglected babies, flies, and the smell of dirty diapers. The only ventilation came from a huge fan by the window.

This was where Sea Org members and staff dropped off their babies at seven in the morning and then picked them up at ten in the evening when their workday was over. We had an hour for lunch, but the shuttle took half an hour to go from Flag back to the Quality Inn, so even if parents wanted to visit their children, they would have to turn around practically as soon as they arrived.

I took advantage of any opportunity to sneak away and check in on Shannon. The first time I went to the nursery I was devastated by what I found. The person in charge was a kid like me, just some random teenage Sea Org member on post, who was hardly qualified to be taking care of children. Shannon was crying and soaked with urine in her crib. Before changing her and returning to my post, I vowed I wouldn’t let her grow up this way. The neglect was overwhelming. I would immediately demand that the person on post clean up and change the babies. I would sometimes leave my post for a while to take Shannon out of there. I complained to my mother about it, and she complained to her seniors, who threatened that she would be taken off her job and demoted. She continued to voice her concerns about it and they told her to write it up in a report, but nothing was ever done. It really weighed on me. Though I was buying into the program, it raised a question inside me: While I didn’t care so much about me, I wondered if we were doing right by this baby.

It was at this time that my mother revealed that we had no home to return to. Dennis wasn’t coming to join us after all. At first he’d made excuses that he could accumulate more money by staying behind, but ultimately he had found someone else, gotten rid of the apartment, and moved on. He and Mom weren’t together anymore. They were getting a divorce. Dennis, the man who claimed he would
never do anything to harm us, who made us change our whole lives and live within the world of Scientology, who cheated on our mom while she was pregnant, had now left us. We were heartbroken. This hit us like a punch in the stomach.

I knew even then that moving in with my dad and stepmother was not an alternative. The Sea Org and its practices may have been hard on us, but at my dad’s house my sisters and I would be called cunts, ingrates, and selfish assholes for crimes like pulling the laundry out before it was completely dry. Dad would tell Nicole and me over and over again throughout our childhood that he wasn’t even sure if we were his real children because our mother was a slut. And on top of this, during the brief time we did spend with my dad, we lived in fear of his violent episodes. To us, the thought of living with him was worse than joining a “cult.”

We realized now, more than ever, that we didn’t have a choice but to stay in Florida. We had nowhere else to go. We couldn’t leave our mom there to raise a baby on her own. Being in the Sea Org was what our mother wanted for us, and so though we worked long hours and lived in a filthy dorm, we were committed to staying by her side.

“I promise you girls,” Mom said, “it will get better.”

N
ICOLE AND
I
WERE NOW
put on posts with the rest of the Sea Org. Like the adults, we worked fourteen-hour days and picked up the wonderful adult habits of drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

One habit we didn’t pick up was going to school regularly. LRH had deep disdain for the conventional educational system. Scientology abided by the idea that as long as you were on course, getting an education in Scientology, going to traditional school was not all that important. Your education in Scientology—the main goal of which was to teach you how to learn Scientology—was the imperative. We were taught that getting a Scientology education was the equivalent of getting a doctorate in the real world. Who cares about calculus when you’re clearing the planet? So because attending school wasn’t enforced, the motel room at Flag that was designated “Schoolroom” was usually empty, and although I was still technically in eighth grade, I hardly ever went.

At Flag we did find moments to act like regular kids. Sherry and I played stupid pranks on the Sea Org boys, like putting shaving cream and Vaseline on the door handles in their dorm. We made
them over and attempted to turn them into break-dancers in the lobby of the motel. We’d find little victories by using the hotel loudspeaker to page people at the Fort Harrison: “Mrs. Dickington, please come to Reception” and then doubling over with laughter. During “libs”—a few hours off or, if you were lucky, a whole day off once every two weeks—we would take the bus with some of the other kids to the mall to walk around, even though we had no money to buy anything.

During this time, Sherry and I would stay up late in our bunks and share our life stories. Sherry had grown up in the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C., where her mother and stepfather had been full-time staff members. Just a child herself, she was frequently left in charge of the babies and children in the day care, often going on walks where she pushed two strollers at a time.

Her brother, Stefan, had already joined the Sea Org, a year earlier, and was at Flag when recruiters from the New York Org came to D.C. to find new candidates for the Sea Org. With her parents’ approval, the recruiters agreed to be Sherry’s guardians. So at the age of eleven she was shipped to New York.

All alone in a big, strange city, she was left to fend for herself. The recruiters were her guardians legally, but they did nothing to care for her. “No one made sure I brushed my teeth or had a winter coat,” she said. She had been there only a week when an executive screamed at her. Sherry called her mom to ask if she could go home, but her mother said she needed to stick it out.

This type of thinking becomes a parent’s reality. Everything is about the church, the bigger picture. Parents refer back to policy for major and minor decisions, looking to the phrase “What does LRH say?” to advise them. All this is part of “doing something big here.”

After that, Sherry barely had any contact with her family. Phone calls and letters were rare, and she visited her mother and stepfather for only one week every other year.

Her stepdad had taught her all these folk songs that she would sing for me at night. I fell asleep to “Where Have All the Flowers
Gone?” or “You Are My Sunshine” as I sucked on two fingers and held a blanket.

Even though we were treated the same as adults, we were really just little girls.

A
FTER B
EING AT
F
LAG FOR
a number of months, we had really gotten into the Sea Org rhythm. We got on the bus at eight in the morning, were on post for the next fourteen hours, smoked and drank coffee throughout, and developed systems for pretty much everything. I even had a system for dealing with our roach-infested dorm room (turn on the lights and wait for them to scatter before you jump into your bed). Despite the long workdays and specific procedurals, I found openings and made the system work for me.

One of my tasks on post was to deduct bills from guest accounts—including their food tickets. We staffers were Sea Org members, but the guests were all regular parishioners who had come to participate in auditing and training. Sea Org members and regular parishioners—or the public, as we called them—ate different food in different places. We ate rice and beans night and day or liquid eggs; they ate steak, lobster, roasted chicken, anything you could get in a normal hotel. We weren’t supposed to fraternize with the public in the first place, but with our salary of fifteen dollars a week, we didn’t have the money to eat at the hotel’s restaurants anyway.

My epiphany was that I was the person taking the tickets! That meant I could easily go into the Lemon Tree and the Hourglass, the public restaurants, or the canteen where they served snack food, and order a chicken sandwich or a piece of chocolate cake under a phony account name. Then in a couple of days, when my tickets came into the office, I could take them to my room, burn them, and flush the ashes down the toilet. And that’s exactly what I started doing.

I didn’t tell a soul what I was up to and I never got caught for my food scam. My attitude during this time was like “I gotta eat. I’m a Sea Org member, part of an elite group, and I’m clearing the planet, so get out of my way.” I was being trained to make the impossible
happen. Rising above my own mental and physical limitations. I was feeling fierce. Having said that, I still had to live and operate within the very strict constraints of the Sea Org.

Scientology is based on thousands of policies that leave no room for interpretation. Your actions are either “on policy” or “off policy.” One of the challenges Nicole and I had was keeping track of these many policies. There were so many and they were so hard to keep straight that we didn’t always know when we were breaking a rule. That’s what happened one day when the two of us were walking through the building while on post. A girl around our age, walking in front of us, stopped when she got to a door, paused in front of it, and told us to open it for her.

“Are your arms broken?” Nicole said. “Open your own fucking door.”

“I am a Messenger.”

“What are you delivering?”

We had no idea that she was a member of the Commodore’s Messenger Org (CMO), or even what that was. Well, we found out soon enough when we were routed to the Department of Inspections and Reports, otherwise known as Ethics, the department that deals with enforcing policy.

Waiting for us in his office was a Master-at-Arms (MAA), essentially the person you were sent to when you were in trouble. Sort of like the strict parent. There are Ethics Officers throughout Scientology, and their job is to apply ethics technology to Scientologists at all levels.

The MAA waiting for us walked around carrying a wooden stick, and his office was decorated with a picture of LRH and the Bridge, like pretty much every other room. There he showed us an organizational board with all twenty-one departments that made up Scientology. At the very top, of course, was “L. Ron Hubbard.”

“So when you’re talking to a Messenger, you are talking to LRH,” the MAA said. “And when you’re disrespectful to a Messenger, you’re being disrespectful to LRH.”

He showed us all these policies about Messengers and said that
from now on we were to address all CMOs as “Sir” or “Mr.” no matter what their gender.

My takeaway from the MAA’s speech was that being a CMO was the shit. On our way back to our berthing, I told Nicole that I was going to be a Messenger.

“You’re an asshole.”

“I might be an asshole, but you’re still going to be calling me ‘Sir’ in about a minute.”

I made an appointment with the Messenger recruitment office. The recruiter, reviewing my Ethics folder, which contained reports on all my “crimes,” had a different take. My record showed that I had a “problem with authority” and flirted too much with boys. “If you are pristine for six months, I will reevaluate you,” he said. I accepted his review and vowed that he would see me again and that I would get in.

A few days after the Messenger incident, Nicole, my mom, and I were summoned to the Ethics office, in the CMO building. The Ethics Officer told me that he had a Knowledge Report that a friend of mine had written up about me. Knowledge Reports are a system of Scientologists reporting on one another, basically setting up the idea that
not
telling on your friends bars their freedom as well as makes you an accessory to the crime. It’s like systematic tattling. The report he had on me stated that Danny Burns (my first boyfriend, whom I claimed as soon as he arrived at Flag and kissed a lot) had touched my boobs over my blouse. Sex before marriage was forbidden for members of the Sea Org, as was heavy petting—but kissing was okay. In his office, the MAA told me what Danny and I had done was “heavy petting and against policy.”

“But he did it lightly,” I said, confused.

That only seemed to make the Ethics Officer even angrier. He told me to look at the reference in the policy and find the definition of “heavy petting,” which he made me recite back to him.

Unbeknownst to me, the same friend had written a Knowledge Report about Nicole and her boyfriend that said they were having
sex, which was even more serious than Danny touching my boobs. It also wasn’t true. Nicole was like a nun about that stuff, and we were both still virgins.

The MAA was sufficiently alarmed and called a code red. Two highly trained security officers of the church (a pair of fifteen-year-olds) launched an investigation into our so-called sexual perversions. They burst into our dorm room, riffled through our drawers, and found a pair of my underwear with a hint of lace, probably from Hanes Her Way, and a baby doll pajama top that belonged to Nicole. This was considered the evidence that my sister and I were sexually aberrated (a Scientology term that means “wrong behavior or a departure from what’s rational and a straight line”).

The Ethics Officer told my mother that he had no other choice but to send us both to the RPF. Nicole had been mouthing off to the MAA earlier and was being accused of upsetting him with her “hostile communication.” I guess “Fuck you” could be interpreted that way.

The mention of the RPF, the Rehabilitation Project Force, sent a chill down my spine. I knew what that was from seeing the RPF members in their musters, which were the formations we all had to assemble in at any Sea Org gathering. Beginning of day, end of meals, group announcements—you name it, we got in our proper musters for it. The RPF mustered separately from the rest of us, so they were easy to identify. In 110-degree Florida heat and humidity, these men, women, and even children were forced to wear all black from head to toe as they did heavy MEST work (MEST is an acronym for matter, energy, space, and time) like cleaning grease traps in the kitchen or scrubbing dumpsters. And that wasn’t all they had to do for their “spiritual rehabilitation.” They also had to run everywhere they went—to the bathroom, to the galley, anywhere. They had virtually no liberties. As long as they were in the RPF they worked pretty much seven days a week, 365 days a year, and that’s not including all the time spent doing security checks for their transgressions. No matter how high they had been in the organization
before, once they landed in the RPF, they had to call everyone—even EPFers, the lowest form of Sea Org—“Sir,” and they were not allowed to speak unless spoken to. The RPF was the ultimate form of punishment and your time there could last for months or even years during which you basically weren’t even considered a person.

“Absolutely not,” Mom said. “My girls aren’t going to the RPF.”

The MAA stared at my mother, and she stared right back with her green eyes that could be childlike or very, very hard. In that moment she reverted from her acquiescent Scientologist self back to the Brooklyn survivor. My sister and I were frozen as we watched the silent standoff between the two adults to see who was going to win.

My mother requested a fitness board, referring to a council that could determine our fitness as members of the Sea Org. We had heard this was a way to get out of the Sea Org without too many repercussions. The council would eventually ask the question “Are you here on your own determinism?” and you would respond “No,” and be told to leave.