Perfectly Clear

by Michelle LeClair

  “Oh, that enturbulating.”

  On and on it went. She was “hatting” (training) for a job. She wanted to improve her “beingness” (self). She “cognated” (realized) that I was upset. I couldn’t keep track of the glossary of terms. There were too many words and they were too weird. Whatever strange new world my mother was living in, neither Steve nor I understood what was happening. Not until the day she came home with a pamphlet about a marriage course she wanted Steve to take at the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood. Mom told him she’d learned about the counseling through her company. She said if he didn’t go with her, she’d divorce him.

  Steve looked over the booklet. “This is Scientology!” he said, waving the pamphlet in the air.

  I’d never heard of Scientology, but from his tone of voice, I knew it had to be bad.

  He voiced his suspicions. “This is a cult!” he said. “I’m not going there! Are you out of your mind? You’re not sucking me into this!”

  Was this the kind of thing she was learning at work? Steve asked. What was going on at that place anyway?

  What was going on was that Sterling Management was run by Scientologists and it was the top recruiter for the church. My mother had no idea when she took the job, but not even six months later she was speaking the language and drinking the Kool-Aid. I hardly recognized her anymore. She said she finally had a purpose, and it was bigger than being a wife to Steve or a mother to me—she was joining the fight to save humanity! The church’s mission, L. Ron Hubbard wrote in 1954, was to fashion “a civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights and where Man is free to rise to greater heights.”

  “Who wouldn’t be drawn to such ideals?” Mom asked with wide-eyed wonder after she read me this passage over dinner one night.

  I didn’t think my mother’s transformation would last. This was just another phase, I thought. She had dabbled in other spiritual practices in a never-ending quest for enlightenment—Buddhism, Taoism, psychotherapy, yoga, you name it—but nothing lasted. It was the same with her marriages. She dove into relationships, tied the knot, got restless and bored, and moved on to the next man, hoping he would provide the missing piece to her quest for nirvana. This, too, shall pass, I told myself.

  Steve didn’t wait. He walked out. After that, Mom fell deeper and deeper into the church. Alone again, I quickly learned that, to survive in my new world, I would have to conform. My life became all about appearances and possessions. I quickly morphed into a person I hated. With no one at home to give me direction, I’d gone off course. Instead of the sure-footed girl I had aspired to be, I was suddenly lost and searching.

  Rather than go home to an empty house every day, I spent more time with my friends. I was most comfortable with girls. I had plenty of opportunities to date boys, but the ones who liked me were usually the macho jock types, and I wasn’t attracted to them. I was more intrigued by the butch girl in our class everyone was afraid of. She was interesting.

  After months of quietly admiring this girl, I confessed my fascination to my best friend, Lacey, a sweet but wild soul who loved to party and would try just about anything. Not long after, Lacey and I were at her house drinking, which led to some kissing and a little fooling around, nothing very serious. I didn’t think much of it. I figured most teenage girls experimented that way, and I knew Lacey had been with guys. I was sure I would be too. I was just a late bloomer.

  * * *

  In June 1989, I graduated from high school with honors and an acceptance letter to attend the American University of Paris in the fall. Mom got me a summer job at Sterling so I could save up for my studies abroad. My title was “Hostess,” and I helped the doctors and dentists taking management training at our Glendale headquarters with their travel and accommodations. I was only seventeen, but I was such a go-getter that in just a few weeks I was promoted to sales.

  Sterling was a privately held company owned by Scientologists. It was built on, and licensed to sell, L. Ron Hubbard’s blueprint for running a successful business, which he had developed more than a decade after founding the Church of Scientology in 1953. Hubbard’s management training curriculum emphasized blanket marketing, high productivity and rigid ethical rules for employee conduct. It was one of three milestones in Hubbard’s career that made a name (and a fortune) for him. The first, a self-help book published in 1950 entitled Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, was a runaway bestseller and transformed him from science fiction writer into pop psychology icon. Hubbard then morphed the book into a prescription for “a clear and scientific way to spiritual reality,” which became the foundation for the church he founded three years later. And third, he came up with his blueprint for business success. This was the program we were selling, one based on Scientology principles, but with all references to the church deleted from our sales pitch and the course material.

  I found I had a real knack for selling. My job was to follow up with medical professionals who had already spent thousands of dollars for the weeklong training program at our headquarters and convince them to buy the “Booster Program,” or blocks of $250-an-hour personal consulting time, or perhaps the $1,500 set of Organization Executive Course (OEC) encyclopedias, which we called our “Green Volumes,” seven books consisting of Hubbard’s business “technology.”

  I had at my fingertips a three-ring binder called “The Hard Sell Pack,” consisting of pages and pages of L. Ron Hubbard quotes to be used to counter obstacles I might face in the selling process. I was taught that the hard sell meant caring enough to get potential buyers to push past their “personal stops and barriers” and buy, because every sale was for the greater good. Accepting an excuse meant I didn’t care deeply enough about the client or the future of humanity.

  Most days at Sterling ran anywhere from twelve to fourteen hours. I rarely left the office before ten or eleven at night, and my supervisors were constantly applauding me for my job performance and my work ethic. At the time, of course, I had no idea that Sterling was a recruitment factory for the church and that I was one of its prime targets, or that dispensing praise was a key component of Scientology’s methodology for luring new members. They build you up to hook you, then tear you down in order to take control of your life and convince you that you need the church in order to excel and achieve what the church calls “true spiritual enlightenment and freedom.”

  Every day that summer, I was pressured to postpone my plans for Paris and stay with the company, at least for a while. Instead of pursuing a college education, my supervisors asked, why not a career education at Sterling? All the education I needed was right there. I was young, they said. I could take their “real-life” courses, establish a career and study abroad later if I still wanted to. If I decided to stay, I would have a title out of reach of people twice my age and earn enough to be able to afford the Mustang convertible I’d dreamed of owning—white with matching leather interior. That car was a powerful incentive for a teenager.

  Despite the daily flattery and cajoling, I was conflicted about what to do. If I’m being honest, the thought of flying alone to a foreign country and navigating a new city, language and culture was frightening. It would be easier to stay. At the same time, I wasn’t completely convinced I could achieve my purpose in the cloistered world of Sterling.

  To my sincere regret, after weeks of persuasion—the Scientology “hard sell”—I began seeing things their way. “Okay,” I said as the end of summer loomed. “I’ll stay.” No one was happier about my decision than my mother. I was doing the right thing, she said. I was right where I belonged.

  It was the first of many big choices the church would coerce me to make over the next twenty years. These would be life-altering decisions about my career, finances, marriage, children . . . even who I should and shouldn’t love.

  * * *

  Later that fall, I was driving
to work, panicked about being late. The time had gotten away from me that morning and I was a few minutes behind schedule. I’d heard stories about what happened to employees who missed roll call at the start of “morning muster.” They were labeled “enemies of the group” and forced to submit to a series of steps called “Conditions” in order to be accepted back into it. Apparently it was a grueling and humiliating process, and I didn’t want to go through it. This may sound ridiculous to anyone with a regular job, but for all I knew this was the way corporate America worked. I didn’t question the rules; I just abided by them.

  As I jumped on Interstate 5 for the drive to work, my skin prickled with worry and my mind raced with thoughts about the office. I can’t be late. I can’t be late. If I’m late there will be hell to pay. I gunned the engine and shot over to the far left lane, ready to roll. But luck was not on my side. Oh no! Please! I thought as the logjam of rush-hour traffic slowed to a crawl in front of me. “C’mon! Move!” I cried. “I have to get to work. I have to be there for roll call!”

  Looking over my shoulder, I saw an opening and quickly veered right into the next lane. I don’t know what distracted me—whether I was looking down at my radio or glancing at my rearview mirror—but it wasn’t until the last second that I looked up and saw the car in front of me stopped dead. As I slammed on my brakes, the back of the Mustang fishtailed wildly, lurching and spinning, first right, then left, then back again. I was swerving all over the highway. No matter what I did, I couldn’t regain control.

  All I could think about was saving my new car. Mom is going to kill me if I crash it, I thought. I couldn’t remember whether to turn into the skid or away from it. Semis were bearing down on me—I heard air brakes spitting and the sickening screech of tires skidding on the roadway. All I could do was surrender, duck down as far as I could in the seat and brace for the impact. Please don’t let this hurt, I prayed.

  Shattering glass pelted my body like hailstones from a tornado cloud, and a fierce, hot wind swept over my face. Then it was quiet and I felt like I was floating in slow motion until suddenly everything stopped. I didn’t know where I was. I could have jumped the guardrail, I might be badly injured, I might be dead. I stayed curled in my little ball, feeling numb and detached from my body.

  A few minutes passed and I heard a voice.

  “Honey, I’m a doctor. Help is on the way. Don’t try to move.”

  The man’s kindly manner gave me the courage to open my eyes. I was hurt all right, trapped down in my seat with my knees tangled under the steering wheel, but at least I was alive. I allowed myself a breath of relief. Then I looked up. The menacing undercarriage of a semitruck teetered over me, all its wires and springs and rusting pipes. I realized I was trapped in a cocoon of tangled metal.

  Police cars, fire trucks and ambulances arrived, red lights flashing, sirens howling. For more than an hour, a team of rescuers, using the Jaws of Life, worked to extricate me from the wreckage. I would later hear the gory details of the crash, as told to my mom by the responders. The first semitruck ran over the rear of my car, propelling it under another tractor trailer ahead of me, where it got trapped. The only part of the car that wasn’t crushed was the spot where I’d been sitting. Miraculously, I escaped without life-threatening injuries.

  A few moments after I was admitted to the hospital with a cracked rib and badly bruised knees, my mother arrived. She came with a man I didn’t know, a funky-looking little man with an angular face, a long nose and eyes that looked surprised. He wore an ill-fitting toupee, a disheveled crow-black mess I feared might slip down over his forehead at any minute. I remember thinking it odd that he wore white tennis shoes with his crumpled brown business suit.

  I burst into tears when I saw my mother. I could see the fear in her eyes. I knew what she was thinking. What if the accident had been worse? What if I hadn’t survived? What would she have done without me, her stability, her confidante, her best friend?

  “Michelle!” she cried, rushing to my side. “What in the world happened? Thank goodness you’re okay!”

  I looked from my mother to her companion.

  “This is Larry,” she said. “He is a Scientology minister. He came because I was too upset to drive.”

  He sat down next to my bed and placed a reassuring hand on mine.

  “Would you like to talk?” he asked.

  I hesitated, not at all sure that I had anything to say to this stranger at my bedside. But Larry’s voice was soft, on the effeminate side, which somehow made him seem safe.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t die,” I said, surprising myself with my words.

  Larry smiled knowingly.

  I had survived for a reason, he said. “I very much believe that accidents don’t happen by chance,” he said, pointing a long, thin index finger my way. “They happen because there is someone suppressing you or stopping you from being who you truly want to be or can be. And when you’re feeling better, I’d like you to come and see me.”

  I couldn’t explain why I took this stranger up on his offer, but he was kind to me and I was bursting to talk about my experience. I now understand this was a defining moment in my life.

  I didn’t grow up in a particular church. My parents dabbled in different faiths, but religion was never a mainstay in our lives. When I was three or four, Mom taught Sunday school at a local Methodist church. We attended services as a family on Christmas and Easter, and I enjoyed the holiday traditions. I was seven or so when they decided to explore alternative religions, some of which were quite bizarre. I remember going to a tiny metaphysical church, hidden in the woods, where people claimed to be healing each other with touch. At one of these out-of-the-way places, a woman asked me to apologize to a piece of furniture I bumped, “because everything in this world has feelings.” Another time, I came home from school and a group of total strangers was chanting with my parents in their bedroom. These early experiences left me leery about religion. I’d always felt like a spiritual being, but I didn’t know exactly what that meant or how to apply it.

  My car accident was the first time I felt what I truly believed to be a higher power. I can only describe the experience as otherworldly. As my Mustang careened out of control toward what should have been my death, I was filled with the certainty that it wasn’t my time.

  The accident was a kind of spiritual awakening. Everyone said it was a miracle I didn’t die. I was spared for a reason and I needed to figure out what it was. Larry’s words about not allowing others to suppress me and taking control of my own destiny resonated with me. I longed to know who or what was holding me back from finding my purpose on this earth and I believed he could lead me in the right direction.

  Two weeks later, I sat in a tiny, dusty office behind Larry’s house in West Hollywood. The room was disordered and cluttered with furniture, papers strewn over the desk, and L. Ron Hubbard books stacked in lopsided piles on bookshelves. I knew little about Scientology except what I’d gleaned from my mother—that it was based on the concept that practitioners gained self-knowledge and spiritual fulfillment through graded courses and training fashioned after Hubbard’s Dianetics self-help book.

  Larry was a lapsed Jew from Brooklyn who’d converted to Scientology while he was in college and, shortly afterward, moved to California after his parents disowned him. He told me that he was what the church called a “field auditor.” His job was assessing the spiritual and emotional level of people who were new to Scientology or thinking about joining, and keeping them on track in their psychic journey until they were ready to enter the church. He explained that he did this by means of a process called “auditing,” which was similar to psychological counseling, except that it required the aid of a Scientology device called an Electropsychometer (or E-meter), which worked sort of like a lie detector. By reading the results of the E-meter, he said, trained auditors were able to help separate truth from fiction and help pe
ople retrieve buried memories from this and past lives—all for the higher purpose of reaching the next level of spiritual clarity and, ultimately, total spiritual enlightenment.

  He reiterated his belief that negative events, such as illnesses and accidents, happened to us because toxic people or inner conflicts were holding us back from living our best lives—“the phenomenon of suppression,” he called it. Once I was able to identify those psychic blocks through auditing, I could begin taking the necessary steps to become my best self. Only then would my true purpose be revealed.

  What Larry wanted me to know was that even though humans, by nature, tended to deceive themselves rather than face hard truths, there was no fooling the E-meter. If I lied or tried to suppress feelings or memories, the meter would catch it. That was the key to uncovering past traumas we didn’t necessarily want to acknowledge, Larry said, all in an effort to save not just ourselves but the universe.

  Each person saved brought us a step closer to the perfect civilization we strived for. Only Scientologists—as evolved, superior beings—could save the planet. I finally understood what my mother had meant when she talked about having a “higher purpose.” It now made sense to me.

  * * *

  During these weekly auditing sessions, Larry taught me the basics of the church curriculum and led me to embrace the belief system I would come to adopt as my new “faith.” I had been right in thinking that Scientology was more a lifestyle than a traditional religion. The basic idea was that we were immortal beings—or “thetans,” Hubbard’s word for souls with bodies and minds—with emotional baggage from each of our past incarnations, which kept us from becoming our higher selves. Through a series of courses and the regular counseling sessions of “auditing,” we could identify and address those issues and achieve a superior state of self-awareness and spiritual enlightenment. At the highest level of training, it was even possible to achieve superhuman powers and control over what L. Ron Hubbard called MEST: Matter, Energy, Space and Time.