Ruthless (18 page)

Because staff members were not allowed to have refrigerators, Becky and I would drive across the highway to the music studio, which had a refrigerator, every Sunday at 9:00 a.m. during the weekly period scheduled for cleaning and doing laundry. We would eat some cheese and salami or something. When we drove back to the housing complex area, I handed the guards some of my food, which they always appreciated. Feeding the watchdogs, you might say. It became a Sunday morning ritual as a way of getting them accustomed to what we were doing.

I had a couple of other things going for us as I worked out our plan. I was 76 years old. I was the father of the leader of the church. Nobody would suspect I was trying to escape at my age.

In an ironic turn of events, beginning in January 2012, David began showing up outside MCI around the time of Gold's evening musters. He'd wait until muster was over and then come visit with Becky and me for ten or fifteen minutes. We would shoot the breeze, laugh about stuff and reminisce about funny times. Sometimes he would grab us before muster, and we would be laughing about something while standing around the corner from the muster, and his secretary Laurisse would be trying to hush us so we wouldn't disturb the muster. It had been years since David had visited us like that. All the while, Becky and I knew we would soon be gone.

By late March 2012, I was getting nervous. “What if we get caught? What if the guard doesn't let us out the gate?” I'm not the nervous type, but, yeah, I was really nervous about what lay just ahead. We were going to leave the following Sunday morning, March 25. The day before, I gassed up the car in the motor pool. We had most everything packed up in our apartment. That night after work I began moving stuff out to the car. We had all our shoes in a mesh bag. As luck would have it, one of the security guards happened by on his motorcycle as I going out to the car.

“Hey, Sal, how ya doing?” I said, forcing a cheerful smile and hoping he wouldn't notice the beads of flop sweat that instantly appeared on my forehead.

“Hey, Ronnie. Going good,” he replied. We shot the breeze for a bit before he rode off. That was a close call. He never connected the bag of shoes in my hands to anything suspicious. Sal, a close friend, could not in his wildest dreams imagine that I was loading personal effects into my car in preparation for an escape.

I went back inside, got a bag of clothes and came back out. Norman Starkey was going into the laundry room, which was right in front of my car. Norm was the trustee of L. Ron Hubbard's estate and one of the
longest-serving
and most legendary Sea Org members, since reduced by David's abuse to a shell of his formerly dynamic self.

“Hi, Ron. How's it going?”

“Good, man.” I put the clothes in the car.

By the time I finished, the backseat was filled almost to the top. I had my horns in there. I had my
Exer-Genies
in there. (The
Exer-Genie
is an exercise device I have used for more than 50 years, the best little machine I have ever come across.) We jammed in everything we could.

The next morning we got up at seven. I took my cell phone and put it aside. Same with my pager. Because we were up so early, we had nearly two hours to pace around the room, check and recheck our list of everything we needed to have, and to worry. I had a little notebook with lists of everything we were going to take and what we were going to leave. Our car only held so much, so we had to decide what to sacrifice. I must have checked my list 50 times if I checked it once.

At 8:50 we took a deep breath, closed the door to our room behind us for (we hoped) the final time and walked out to the car. I started the engine, released the parking brake, put the car in reverse and backed out of my spot. Each moment, every action, was in sharp focus as if time had slowed to a standstill. I tried to look calm, but the butterfly effect was beating my insides to a pulp as we prepared to escape.

Only two security guards were on duty on Sunday mornings. One was in the main guard booth and the other in what was called the chase car, for dealing with people coming onto the property who should not be there as well as for chasing staff members who were attempting to escape. I drove slowly past the dining area and saw the chase car parked nearby, so we knew the guard was inside eating breakfast. The other guard was in the main booth. I drove up to the West Gate, which is 200 yards west of the main booth. Here goes nothing, I thought. If he calls me up to the booth, we're sunk. Jesus Christ, what if he doesn't open the gate? He's got to open the gate. Briefly, the rest of my life flashed before my eyes. I firmly believe that, had we been caught, Becky and I would have been locked up in a remote part of the base under
24-hour
guard, and I would have spent the rest of my life like that. I never would have gotten out. Never.

My finger was shaking as I pressed the intercom buzzer to let him think I was going across the highway to the music studio, just as we did every Sunday morning at that time. He didn't even answer, just opened the gate. I inched the car through and out onto the road.

“Becky, we're turning left!”

I punched the gas and we peeled off down the highway, away from the base. I knew the guard would call me on my cell phone, which I had conveniently left in our room. “Hey, Ron, what are you doing? What's up? Hey, Ron! Answer me!” Then he would call the chase car guard from breakfast and say, “Hey, get up here to the booth, pronto!”

Meanwhile, I was hauling ass down the road. I knew that by the time the chase car got to the booth, I would be at an intersection a mile from the base, which meant I could take any of three routes. Turning right would take me to Interstate 10. Going straight led to U.S. Route 60 toward Los Angeles. Turning left would take us toward town. I turned left, figuring that the chase car would think I was headed for a major highway.

I turned right at the first stoplight, which put us out in the boondocks. We followed that road until we came to Interstate 215.

We had made it. We were
free
.

Eighteen

Back in the Real World

We drove
cross-country
for two and a half days until we reached Wisconsin, where Becky's family lived. It was a wonderful, liberating time. I was exhilarated. “Holy smokes, I'm free!” Becky was equally flipped out. We could do whatever we wanted. We could stop anywhere we wanted to eat, and we could eat whatever we felt like having. All those chains that I had allowed Scientology to put on
me—and
that I agreed were going to hold me
down—were
g-o
-
n
-e
! It was a wonderful feeling. It was like being able to breathe again after being suffocated.

It is hard to explain how it feels after more than 26 years of being nullified, told that you and your group are the worst group in the history of
Scientology—and
that L. Ron Hubbard had said so in memo after memo since Gold's
formation—and
that nothing you did could ever be right the first time. Yes, there were some good times mixed
in—don
't think I'm saying that it was all
negative—but
the bad times far outweighed the good.

While I lived at Gold, I had a case of eczema so bad that at times my sheets would be bloody from my violently scratching my legs. It would drive me nuts. I went to a doctor, who asked me if I had been under any stress. “No,” I answered in all honesty. I was so used to the way things were that I sincerely did not believe I had stress in my life. Three months after we left, the eczema went away and never returned.

If you have built a prison for yourself little by little, brick by brick, and you are living in it, you don't know that you're in prison. By agreeing to restrictions and insanities, you are putting up your own barriers. You are building the walls. You are putting the bars in the window. That is how it happened, and that is how I ended up staying there for nearly 27 years.

It is probably how many groups in history have found themselves trapped. People can become trapped by their own thoughts. Let's face it: oppressors are always far fewer in number than the oppressed. Why don't the oppressed simply chop them up with hatchets or just stop listening to them? Because the oppressed have been told by the “authorities” that this is the way it has to be, so they believe it and they begin slowly putting up these barriers in their own minds. Next thing they know, they are living in this shell of a prison. That is the way it happens. There's no other way it can be done. I'm sure of it.

That was the prison I built for myself, and the authority at first was L. Ron Hubbard. Then David Miscavige, his unappointed successor, usurped the authority. David's approach, of keeping people thinking they were incapable and that he had to do everything (his constant refrain), caused people to feel sorry for him since he “had to do everything,” and they listened to him because he was the authority figure. All these
restrictions—you
have to have your mail checked, you cannot go on liberty, you can't go to a store, and many
more—each
is another little bar for your jail cell. You build your own prison and you live in it.

It is fair to ask, why don't people simply leave? Here are some of the reasons: many people at Gold and other Sea Org installations have been in Scientology for 20, 30, 40 years or even longer, and they have zero savings. They live from week to week on their $50 allowance. They don't have a car. They have next to no Social Security. They have no particular skills that will get them a job in the outside world, and many have no place to go. Perhaps their parents have died, or they don't have sisters or brothers. If they left, they would literally be out on the street.

You hear stories about someone who has been in prison for 15 or 20 years, and after a while that's all he knows. He hangs out in the yard, he gets three meals a day, he has a place to sleep, he can watch TV. So eventually he is released, and what does he do? He commits another crime so he can go “home” again.

For the people at the base, these considerations are huge barriers to obtaining their freedom. People become willing to tolerate anything. How do they do it? I'll tell you
how—they
go numb. Their attitude becomes “I don't care what happens to me.” That's how you can tolerate it. I adopted that attitude myself at times. We would be at one of the Saturday night briefings, and Gold would be getting ripped apart with Religious Technology Center staffers standing along the walls and spotting people in the audience who looked sour. I would sit comfortably in my chair thinking, I don't care what happens. That is a terrible state of mind, just terrible, believe me.

Those are just some factors that I think explain how intelligent,
well-meaning
,
good-hearted
people become involved in Scientology and stay in it long after their good sense screams at them to get out. These, however, are negative aspects. I think Scientology also has positive facets that keep people coming back for more.

Hubbard possessed an impressive vocabulary. He was a charismatic speaker, spicing his lectures with entertaining stories and humor, and he came across as an intelligent,
well-meaning
person. He could lecture for 90 minutes with no notes, simply speaking off the cuff. Whether he used his gifts to con people is not the issue here; taken at face value, he was impressive. He came off as learned. These characteristics carry some authority with people. And his public persona was jovial and easy to like. Listen to one of his recorded lectures and you can get a sense of what he was like at his best. Several lectures that he had filmed show him at his most engaging.

More important, his lectures contained principles and concepts that people found useful in their lives, regardless of whether he developed them himself or repackaged what others before him had said. He presented a perspective from which people could understand the factors in their lives more clearly, and he gave them concrete ways to apply his ideas.

After listening to a few more lectures or reading more of Hubbard's writings, a person would begin to develop some confidence in what he was saying. A and B worked, so the person begins to feel that C will also work. At some point along the line, the person continues to believe whatever he said. When faced with a new concept that they may not grasp immediately, this person thinks, Well, he's been right before; I guess he's right here too.

Later on, when this person's experience with more advanced teachings does not deliver the same insights as earlier, or when friction inevitably occurs because of the imperfect workings of the organization, the person resolves the cognitive dissonance that ensues by recalling the experiences that
were
positive and the principles that
did
work. I doubt a single person who has ever been involved with Scientology has not been rubbed the wrong way by the organization. I had my fair share in the nearly 27 years I was in it.

Probably the most degrading thing that happened to me in my whole career in the Sea Org was being “thrown overboard.” This was a disgusting remnant of the days aboard the
Apollo
when Hubbard, in fits of pique, ordered that offending trainees and others be tossed over the side of the ship into the water while the ship's chaplain uttered some stupid incantation about committing one's sins to the deep and hoping that the victim would become a better person. Two crew members would grab the unlucky ones and literally toss them into the water 20 or more feet below. Thankfully, no one ever died as a result, but that is an example of the ruthlessness that Hubbard was capable of.

That little practice was resurrected at Gold during David's tenure. For some
offense—the
reason escapes me
now—I
was ordered to be “overboarded” once. At Gold this was done by marching the person out to the small lake that once was part of the golf course. A stone bridge had been built out to an island in the lake. I stood on the bridge, was allowed to take off only my shoes and wristwatch, the port captain recited the same stupid litany, and I was pushed off the bridge fully clothed into the murky water below. It was a ridiculous but degrading moment and accomplished nothing of any value, except to alienate me even further.

One of the others condemned to the same humiliation was an extremely overweight fellow. I thought to myself, This guy could actually drown. They pushed him off, and down he went. He disappeared below the surface and bobbed up gasping. I was actually relieved to know he would be all right physically, if not psychically.

Being overboarded was extreme, I'll admit. Most of the daily irritations were more minor but happened every day. I used to eat raw garlic or raw onions because they are good for my health. One day I went into the galley and asked a cook for an onion. She gave me one and off I went. At dinner that evening, I was sitting at my table when another cook came out and began lambasting me in front of everybody because I had taken the galley's
last
onion. I hadn't taken the last diamond from the crown jewels or the
Mona Lisa
from the Louvre; another cook had simply given me the last onion from the galley stores! This apparently reflected the stress this cook was under because of having a food budget of only three dollars per person per day, or one buck per meal. Being out of onions apparently stressed this cook to the point that someone needed to hear about it, and that person was me.

Such tension permeated every part of the organization. It was an
ever-present
part of life at Gold and a super effective way to build callouses on your social interactions. People were under extreme pressure to perform on their jobs, and the lack of adequate resources was never an acceptable excuse. Who knows? Maybe onion soup was on the menu for the next day, but with the last onion now gone, the cooks' menu planning was ruined.

Throughout our
cross-country
trip, Becky and I talked and talked and talked. We vented all the things we dared not voice while at the base or that we were too tired to say once we got home at night. Those few days were therapeutic. When we stopped for gas, we paid cash. When we stopped for food, we paid cash. When we booked a motel at night, we paid cash. The church is good at tracing credit card payments and therefore your route. So everything was strictly cash.

When we got to Iowa, Becky called her brother. He was visiting friends when she called, and she could overhear him saying to someone in the background, “Somebody get me a drink! I'm celebrating! Becky's coming home.”

We went to Becky's mother's place in Whitewater, Wisconsin. I figured that was the only safe place we could go. Both of my daughters, Denise and Lori, are Scientologists, and if we had gone to them, the Scientology goons could have found us, and neither of my daughters would have prevented David's stooges from talking to us. Becky's mother is not a Scientologist, so they wouldn't dare barge into her place.

We settled in with her mother, who was happy to have us. We spent a while just enjoying our freedom. I must have gained 15 pounds. I could eat cherry pie any time I wanted to. Back on the base there was a kitchen in the music studio, but if you went in there at any time other than scheduled mealtimes, you would be in trouble if anyone saw you. Even for a drink of water. “What are you doing in here, Ron?” the music manager would say. I guess he thought that David Miscavige was the model executive, so he mimicked David's behavior.

Two weeks after we arrived, I was standing in the kitchen and saw our old friend Marion Pouw walk past the window, snooping. I went outside, and standing there were Marion and Greg Wilhere. As I have mentioned, these are two of David's top henchmen and they had finally tracked us down.

“Hey,” they said cheerily, “I bet you're wondering why we didn't come here sooner.” To them nothing had changed. They acted as if it was just like old times. “Wow, we thought you were going to go to Lori's place. You sure surprised us. Ha ha.” They were laying it on real thick, pretending cheerfulness. “We thought you were going to go to Florida. That's why we weren't here sooner. Ha ha ha.”

I was guarded but somewhat friendly. The conversation quickly turned to our returning to the base.

“I'm not going back. Come on, Greg,” I said, “I escaped.”

“You didn't escape. You blew!” he shot back, and he pulled out a Hubbard policy directive called “Leaving and Leaves,” which describes the protocol to be followed when someone leaves staff. Of course, that policy is never applied when someone asks to leave. It is dragged out only when people from the base are trying to convince someone who has escaped, or blown, as they say, to return.

“Go to hell, man. I'm not reading that. I'm not going to keep living under that goddamn suppression.” I was no longer surrounded by 400 people who were going to jump me if I talked that way. It was only two against one, and I would take those odds any day.

“Listen, guys, it's not okay that you came here, and I'm not going back,” I told them.

“Okay, let's talk,” they countered. I agreed.

The next day I met them in town in a parking lot.

“David wants to talk to you. Give me your cell phone number,” Greg opened.

“Screw you, Greg. I'm not giving you my number. I'm through. You no longer have me!” By this time I was totally willing to use force on him.

“Okay,” he said, “I have a message from Dave for you: ‘Please, please come back! You don't have any idea what you're doing to me. Please come back.'” Greg was playing the part of a whiny Chihuahua to the hilt. One of them also told me that the security guard had to tell David that we had escaped, and the guard literally had to struggle to get the words out of his mouth. David's response to bad news is simply to shoot the messenger. The guard finally told him we had left, and David's response was, “In my wildest dreams this is something I never thought I would see.” Well, in
my
wildest dreams I never thought I could end up living that way. As a prisoner. A virtual prisoner!