The last part of the story
So what’s to tell about the RPF. It was pretty dingy and I was pretty grossed out, on one hand, but on the other hand, I felt freer than when I was on post. I made a dramatic attempt at leaving and was almost successful. I was determined to go and because of this had to do endless conditions until finally I came up with a conclusion that was acceptable. (That was, stay.) We had to audit anywhere and everywhere in the Fort Harrison dungeons and I became an expert at just lifting my feet off the floor as the mice ran around but never taking my eyes off the meter/PC. Real Laplaine got me reprieved after three endless months. He was in PAC and was starting up something called the Central Marketing Unit and I was to head it up. So off I went.
PAC was a wild ride for me. I spent a few months building up this marketing bureau and I thought I did well. However, last year I finally opened up the box of letters I had been carting around with me for 30 years and started reading. I felt so sad for my former self, the young woman who was me in 1982. David Michel, who was D/ED Estab Int (and had been in the SO five minutes) read out a telex from LRH that said I (a) had crashed the book income through a pricing change at Pubs (when I never went on such a mission), (b) was spreading entheta around Flag (when I had not even been there for six months), and (c) was the “who” of ANZO. I like this last one best and still brag about it.
I was pretty disaffected by now. As a fairly low-level insignificant creature, I didn’t really know what was going on other than there was widespread paranoia. David Miscavige was just coming into prominence and we heard secretly that Messengers were tumbling out of WDC. There was some kind of huge mystery going on about LRH, but no-one really knew what. I didn’t know anyone at PAC so didn’t really have anyone to discuss all of this with.
Anyway, back I went to the RPF. The PAC RPF was scary as hell to me. I was a young single woman who knew no-one in LA or PAC, and it was a tough gig. My daily assignment was to sweep the carpark at the far end of the complex. I was almost always alone with no-one around for hundreds of yards, and was stopped and leered at and propositioned by every weirdo on the Boulevard. I could have disappeared and no-one would notice or care. It was almost as bad as being monstered by Phyll Stevens!
Eventually a Messenger came and got me to go to the CMO HQ for some kind of special sec check. I don’t remember much about it but once again, I was done with dissembling and pretending to be a good soldier, so I just answered the questions as frankly as I could. I really wanted to get in their face and snarl a little. There was nothing left to lose. This is a good feeling as it makes you reckless and fearless. Reckless I surely was.
***
Next thing, I was told to pack a few things as I was going to Int (though they never said this). So I packed a toothbrush and a few clothes and was driven off into the wide blue yonder. I left my suitcases and passport at PAC in my dorm. How trusting. I was totally clueless – had no idea really of what LA connected with, where Int was, what was happening or why. I just got in the car like a lamb. I didn’t think to make a phone call to my mother in Australia, nothing. Even at that low time, I still trusted Scientology and Scientologists to take care of me.
We got there late one afternoon late in 1982. What I remember so vividly was how blue the sky was, and how strong the scent of eucalypts in the dry heat. Just like Australia. I was suddenly homesick.
I fetched up with a roomful of people. Kerry Gleeson, Bess Sullivan, Allen Buchanan, Roger Barnes, Pat Hunter, Emile Gilbert, Chris Stevens (CHRIS STEVENS!!! OMG!!!!), John Nelson, David Mayo, Julie Gillespie, Peter Warren, several others. Cautiously, we whispered among ourselves – why were we there? What was happening? What was the connection between us? (I hadn’t even met some of these guys, though of course some were known to me.) No-one knew.
Eventually I was taken to an MAA who gave me a charge list to read. You can see it at
http://www.tr-l.org/mott0096.htm. What I remember was there was an airplane overhead, up high, and I could hear its drone as it flew into the horizon. Ever the musician, I remember a drone slowly descending and diminishing. It was a powerful metaphor. This is it for me, I thought. It’s all over now. This is the end of the line.
The Bill of Particulars or whatever the hell it’s called was a total mystery to me. I – and the others – were being charged with “insubordination”, treason, mutiny, conspiracy, theft, and things I didn’t even understand such as “neglect of fiduciary duties”. (I’d agree about the insubordination, though.)
****
We spent a month or two at the Massacre Canyon site, amazed and disgusted by the ship in the desert and by the wealth around us, especially in the CMO. We did heavy MEST work: dug sewers, weeded the orchards, scraped paint, painted walls, washed dishes endlessly. I don’t remember much about the Comm Ev though it must have been held. I do remember being woken up several times in the middle of the night and being marched down to the mess hall where we were harangued by lawyers and Messengers, and told over and over again that we were “going to be put in the pokey”. Even then, desperate as I was, I was contemptuous about use of that term and immediately knew it was an LRH-ism, cute and coy and disagreeable. I also knew by then we could not be jailed for things we had not done. In some ways I welcomed the potential for “wog” justice which surely could not be as evil as the Scientology version. We were told we had to write confessions and if we did, we might be let off lightly. I had nothing left to confess after two RPF trips in one year.
The weather got colder and I think the Comm Ev reported no findings, and I believe the Chair was punished and another Comm Ev convened. I never did see a copy of the findings. Meanwhile, we were increasingly an embarrassment at Int so we were shifted one night to Happy Valley. Bess and I immediately volunteered to be cooks, and Pat was our kitchen girl. Everyone else was put onto MEST work although it was increasingly desultory.
Bess and I used to talk about Coober Pedy, an opal mining town in the outback, and somehow that became Petey Cougar, hence the name.
During the nights, the men started melting away. We’d wake up one morning and there’d be one, two, three less for breakfast. I guess they walked up the dirt road to the main road and hitch-hiked out of there. As for me, I didn’t really have a clear idea of where I was except “a few hours out of LA”. I had no money and few clothes with me. My passport was back at PAC. I had no-one to go to in the USA, and no way to get there. I was up shit creek.
Peter Warren got beaten up by David Miscavige. David Mayo’s car brakes were seriously tampered with when he was leaving. John Nelson got heavied several times. Most of us were either gone or too insignificant to bother with.
One of my so-called “co-conspirators” saved me. (I won’t say who, but you know who you are, and I am eternally in your debt.) He somehow managed to negotiate his own release and, with it, mine. One day in late December we were both driven to the Int base. He slipped me $5 as he left the car, along with his brother’s phone number. I waited in the car and got driven back to Happy Valley. But he promised me he was going to shake me loose, and I trusted him. I had no other option. One evening, an SO mail van came up and got me, and drove me to PAC. The driver did not want to wait for me but wanted to take me straight to the airport, but I said I had to call Australia to get a ticket to fly home. And if he didn’t wait, I said, I would go to the first police officer I could find and tell them I had been imprisoned by the Scientologists and how would he like to be responsible for that? So he waited while I called home. It was Christmas Eve in Australia, and I was lucky to get my mother, and she was lucky to get me a ticket before everything shut up tight for the week. I grabbed my suitcase and passport and off we went. On the way, I tore off my disgustingly filthy, worn jeans in the van and hurled them onto the road. I think I might have yelled “Fuck you, Scientology!” out the window. The driver dumped me at LAX at 7pm on the 22nd of December, with $5 in my pocket, a phone number, two suitcases and several boxes.
I went to the Qantas counter and got my ticket. I put my stuff in a locker and called my friend. I didn’t have enough for anything to eat so I just wandered round the airport sitting close to groups of people at departure gates, for safety. I kept expecting Rick Aznaran or some security guy to come charging up shouting “Oh no you don’t!” My earlier fearlessness and recklessness had dissolved into the acute realisation that if my friend didn’t come for me, I would be alone in a deserted airport all night.
My buddy eventually came by quite late, and boy was I glad to see him. My plane didn’t leave until the next day so we went to his brother’s place. In the end, we were both so exhausted that we slept in and I missed the flight. He took me back to meet the next plane and lent me another $60 to cover the excess baggage costs. By this time my nerves were absolutely shredded.
The first time I felt safe was when the plane door shut and the Aussie steward welcomed us aboard. I was on my way home. It was Christmas 1982.
****
After I escaped in 1982, I was manic and crazy and didn’t know how to deal with my experience. I knew only a few people who had left Scn, and none of them had been to Flag, but I found them and talked until my tongue fell off. There was no other way back then to work through my confusion, grief, shame, horror, blame, sorrow, craziness. Like many others who leave, I was ashamed that we had been taught to think of kind, generous, helpful strangers as “wogs”. My friends and family were patient and gentle with me and offered me shelter and did not judge. I went around in a furious, crazy world till early February 1983, when a miracle happened. On the same day, the government changed, the drought broke, and I started to cry. I wept for weeks, it seems. Eventually I found my way out of it and restarted my life.
In the years since then, I’ve rebuilt my life. The point came when I had been out of Scientology as long as I’d been in it, and now those years seem like a distant nightmare. A lot of the emotion has drained away. I learned a few things. For example, you can’t change what’s true by denying it. I know how to spot – and stand up to – a bully from a thousand paces.
I have kept my Scientology past a secret except to close friends and family. I’ve been out so much longer now than I was in. But since the Xenophon call for an inquiry, my views have changed. I want to make myself known, and I want to be able to help others the way people helped me when I was broken and lost. I want the world to know what Scientology really is.
But I also want to remember, and cherish, the friends I had in the SO, the many people like me who were there to make a difference. That we were taken for an almighty ride makes no difference to our pure intentions.
I wrote this in a song:
Though the memories still wake me in the night,
they’re dimmer with the light
And while it may be slow, it’s not as bad as when I had to go
But trees still stand determined and alive – their roots go very deep
And somewhere down the line I will survive – I’ll dream of rain before I go to sleep
Hearts survive
Dreamers never die
And through the years no tears have reached my eye
Tears like rain, they come to me again
And bring a bloom to everything I see
Tears like rain, wash away the pain
And roll away my sorrows out to sea.
Thank you for reading this.