Beyond Belief (18 page)

The story was horrifying. I had never heard anything like it in such detail. Back at the Ranch, I’d known some kids who had one parent who caused problems, so they never saw that parent, but I never paid too much attention to those stories. Still, Valeska’s story sounded believable. If her mother hadn’t wanted to join the Sea Org but the father did, there was no way they could be together. However, the thought that this had happened to someone I felt so close to was upsetting, so much so that when my mother came home that night, I told her about it. She said offhandedly that it couldn’t be true. I wasn’t sure she had really been listening, but I was wrong. The next night before I went to bed, she said, “Okay, no more sad stories tonight.”

Talking about difficult things was not something we did often. Mom and I were in the kitchen at her office one day when, out of the blue, she told me sad news.

“Just so you know, your grandma Janna dropped her body,” she said, somewhat dejectedly.

I hadn’t even known my grandma was sick, but I also hadn’t seen her since I was five. A couple of months earlier, I had tried sending her a Christmas card, but I must have had the wrong address, because it was returned to me.

“Oh, shoot,” I said, not knowing how else to respond. In Scientology, there was no specific ritual we practiced when a person died. A lot of people chose to get cremated because that was what LRH had done. Usually, a very sentimental announcement was sent out saying all of the good things the person had done. If he had been a Sea Org member, the announcement usually said that he was being granted a twenty-year leave from his billion-year contract, so that he would have time to find a new body and then return. Typically, there was a memorial service. I had never attended one. A part of me felt bad that Grandma Janna had died, but I tried to remember that she would get another body.

For her part, Mom didn’t seem too broken up. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m sad,” she replied. “But your grandma and I haven’t spent much time together in years, so I’m kind of used to not having her around. I’ll get an auditing session on it.”

It may sound strange, but Grandma Janna’s death had little impact on me. Though she had been the person responsible for getting my mother into the Church, I hadn’t spent much time with her, and Mom seemed to be handling her death okay.

L
IVING IN
M
OM’S APARTMENT,
I
QUICKLY SETTLED INTO A ROUTINE
that I thrived in. Having Valeska take care of me was also a huge help. More than just a Scientology role model, Valeska was my classmate, and our friendship became incredibly important to me.

My main focus was the Key to Life course—I didn’t have any academic studies to think about, only my Scientology course work. In what seemed like no time, I wrapped up Key to Life and moved on to LOC, the course I’d originally taken with Justin as my twin but never completed. This time, LOC didn’t bother me because it meant that I got to stay at Flag for even longer.

Because I was living with Mom, I also began to see Uncle Dave more. He had a lot of business at Flag, so he came to Clearwater often. Sometimes, he’d stay for long periods of time. My mom directed me not to come around the office when he was in town and to eat lunch at the Lemon Tree. She told me to go home with Valeska after the course, rather than look for her at the WB.

I was at the office, anyway, one afternoon despite her instructions. I was writing a letter to Justin, back at the Ranch, and I wasn’t quite finished when I heard my uncle coming down the hall. I ran across the room to hide, but I was too late. Uncle Dave, Aunt Shelly, and Mom all saw me crouching behind the bookshelf when they opened the office door. Uncle Dave looked confused.

“Why are you hiding from us, Jenny?” he asked.

I stupidly explained it was because Mom had told me not to be in the office when he was there. Uncle Dave looked at my mom, who put on a baffled face.

“I never said that,” she said. She had told me only a few days earlier, so I was confused as to why she would deny it now.

“Were you doing something you shouldn’t have been?” Aunt Shelly wanted to know.

Before I could answer, Uncle Dave cut in. “You don’t have to run away from me,” he said reassuringly. He gave me an awkward hug and said they had to run now, but that he would see me tonight. He and his entourage then headed down the hall to the elevator. I wasn’t sure what he meant by “seeing me that night,” but I went back to course.

As it turned out, I ran into him in the elevator a couple of times that day. “I see you!” he’d joke, with a big smile. That night, Mom, who had seemingly forgotten about the incident earlier that day, told me to put on my pajamas because we were going upstairs to Uncle Dave’s.

“Jenny!” he greeted, as we walked in. “Come sit on the couch!” My mom seemed proud that I was getting so much attention from him. “Do you want some popcorn?” he asked.

Before I could even answer, he turned to his steward, Georgiana, and commanded, “George, get her some popcorn.”

I sat down on one of the leather couches. The room was filled with top Scientology executives, including Norman Starkey, who was the trustee of LRH’s estate. We were all going to watch
Star Wars
, but, first, a couple of people had to fix something with the tape.

Uncle Dave was chatting with someone about plans for everyone to see
Apollo 13
in a few days when it came to the Clearwater movie theater. “Do you want to see that movie, Jenny?” he asked me.

I said I did, but that I really wanted to see
Batman Forever
.

“Aha! Of course!” Uncle Dave responded. “Who do you like in that movie?”

“Jim Carrey, and it has Nicole Kidman, too.”

Uncle Dave turned away from me and proceeded to engage in gossip about some of the celebrities in the film with the others in the room.

They all seemed interested, but still he turned back to me. “Jenny, when we adults are having a conversation, do you feel like you can understand it yet?”

“Um, sometimes, not always,” I replied.

He beamed at me, and with the video fixed, we all watched the movie.

In the next weeks, we finished all three parts of the
Star Wars
trilogy, once watching one in Mom’s apartment. Uncle Dave and Aunt Shelly thought my bedroom was beautiful. Uncle Dave even borrowed my CD collection. I thought it was pretty cool that he liked my music enough to borrow it. He returned it a few days later.

My father would sometimes fly to Flag for big events. One evening, when we were hanging out together in the greenroom, I overheard Uncle Dave discussing a sound system glitch that had happened during that evening’s event. A few minutes later, he gruffly summoned the three sound techs, who had flown all the way from Int to produce the show. They looked very sheepish as they entered the room, as if they dreaded what was coming. I knew they were most likely about to get a Severe Reality Adjustment, which meant they were going to be acerbically yelled at.

My dad took me down the hall to keep me away from the action. I told him I knew what was going to happen. My father didn’t really know what to say. Clearly, he wasn’t aware of how much yelling went on at the Ranch. I had never seen Uncle Dave chewing anyone out, but I imagined it would be pretty severe. A few minutes later, someone from the room came into the hall to tell us we could come back. The three men were no longer there, and Uncle Dave greeted me as though nothing at all had happened.

It was hard for me to reconcile the impressions that people had of Uncle Dave and Aunt Shelly with the way they treated me. To me, they both seemed kind, even loving. I enjoyed being around them, because it made me feel more like I was spending time with family. I could tell that people seemed to fear both Uncle Dave and Aunt Shelly, and that they wielded so much authority that they were probably intimidating to most people. Sensing all this, I was always careful what I said and did when they were around.How they acted toward me was kindly, so I didn’t really understand the full extent of why people were so cautious around them.

When Uncle Dave and Aunt Shelly were in town, they usually spent leisure time with Mom and me. We’d play mini-golf or go to a hockey game. I would get ready with Aunt Shelly; she would put on her makeup and I asked what purpose her lip liner served, and she told me that when you were old like she was, the lines of your lips disappeared and lip liner defined them again. She said I was young and pretty and didn’t need makeup.

Another time, when I was at their apartment, Tom was there to look into a problem with the phones. She was telling Tom to make sure the phone lines in their condo got fixed. She told him that several times now, she had been on the phone with Kelly Preston or John Travolta, and could hear another phone conversation going on at the same time. Kelly had even noticed the other conversation and asked what it was, thinking it was “out-security,” a term for a security breach.

This wasn’t the first security breach that I’d heard of. In my LOC course, I’d met an ex–Sea Org member, now a public Scientologist, who told me that he had gotten in serious trouble over a celebrity leak. He said he had been accused of being the one who had let the media know that Tom Cruise was a Scientologist. He told me he had known about Cruise’s Church connection, but the only person he had told was a close family member; the story had made headlines shortly after that, and he got the blame.

Although Mom and Tom still worked closely together, Don seemed to be in the picture more. She and Don got along very well. Not only did they both have a dry sense of humor, they seemed like kindred spirits, because they had had similar upbringings and saw things the same way. They were becoming better and better friends. Because Mom thought so favorably of Don, I wanted to like him, too. He was a nice guy and liked to joke around, but sometimes he was slightly intimidating, but it may have been more because of the way my mother talked about him so reverently, I felt the need to impress him.

As Don and Mom started getting closer, she and I were growing more distant. I used to wait up for her to come home at night, but now she said I shouldn’t do that anymore, because I needed to get enough sleep.

There was an edge to her that hadn’t been there before—at times that edge could become downright rude. One day, I was standing with a group of people when she handed me a paper bag that contained deodorant. I had never used deodorant, and I didn’t understand why she was handing it to me now.

“Why are you giving this to me?” I asked, with a bit of confusion.

“Because you stink,” she said, and she started laughing. A few other people in the office laughed, too, but I could tell that they felt a bit bad for me.

The longer I stayed at Flag, the more I could feel her drifting away. Finally, in the fall of 1995, when I was getting toward the end of LOC, Mom told everyone in the office her news: Uncle Dave had offered her a position in RTC, the Religious Technology Center, at the Int Base. The RTC was the highest governing body of the Church, and was responsible for policing ethics violators and upholding the proper application and use of Scientology materials and technology. Not only was this a huge honor, it meant that she would be back home on the West Coast with Dad, Justin, Sterling, and me. She seemed hesitant, saying she really didn’t want to be in RTC, as she liked her current job. But she acknowledged that since Uncle Dave had made the offer, she couldn’t say no.

Everybody showered her with gifts at her going-away party. The staff at Flag really seemed to love her, and gave her a whole living room set, including an ornate white couch, an antique trunk, a hutch, and a few other items. That week, I planned to add my own celebration for Mom as well. Some Fridays, after the graduation ceremonies, I’d put on some kind of show for Mom and the various Scientology executives that she entertained at her apartment. My performances were kind of ridiculous. One Friday, I did an out-of-fashion fashion show, where I put on mom’s clothes and paraded around. Another time, I did a tap-dance show, even though I had no clue as to how to tap dance. And so, in celebration for Mom’s move back to Int, I plotted my biggest show ever for the Friday night postgraduation crowd at Mom’s.

I made a whole cardboard structure and sewed an outfit for myself out of kitchen rags. I painted Valeska’s and my faces and was just about ready to clean things up when Mom came home early. She was furious that the house was filthy and that people were coming over, and she started yelling at me. She said that I was dressed with nothing more than a kitchen rag, that there was trash everywhere, that I had a CMO staff member getting cardboard for me when he should have been on post, and that I was spoiled. She turned on Valeska next. “And you,” she barked, “grow up!”

Valeska clearly felt ridiculous with her face painted and a silly hat on her head and almost burst into tears. Mom signaled to her to leave, and she did.

I had never yelled at my mother before, but I couldn’t stand to see her treat Valeska like that, or me. I told her that I was not afraid of her like other people were. I even cussed at her several times, telling her we were just trying to put on a show for her benefit, and that we had been about to clean up when she burst in. She screamed back at me not to cuss at her, and I shouted at her not to yell at me.

After some vicious back-and-forth that brought us both to tears, she finally turned to me with a heavy sigh.

“I’m sorry, Jenna,” she said. “Give me a hug; I really am sorry.”

Emotional and exhausted, I looked at her. We’d never had a fight like this, so we’d never had to make up like this, either. Reluctantly, I gave her a hug.

That night, her friends still came over as planned, and Mom acted as though nothing had happened. A few days later, we boarded a plane bound for the West Coast, Int, and the Ranch.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

THE GOLDEN AGE OF TECHNOLOGY