Ruthless (4 page)

What their mother and I instilled in them was the idea that you had to earn your keep. You can't just live life and expect people to give you something for nothing. In a family, you do whatever you can to help support it. I explained it to them like this: “Listen, I have a job to support us, your mother cooks for you, you have a nice house to live in, everybody in the family has a job, so here's what your job is . . . ,” and they accepted that that was the way it worked. By the ages of three or four or five, they understood how things worked and they agreed.

One day Ronnie said to me, “Dad, I want to learn how to ride a
two-wheeler
bike.”

“Okay, I'll help you, but I'll tell you right now, you aren't going to stop until you can pedal that bike by yourself.”

We went out on a hot summer day, and I'd push the bike, then let go and the bike would fall over or he'd fall off. We kept at it and kept at it, and when how to do it kicked in, he was beaming with pride that he'd learned how to ride a bike.

The next summer, he was out front and David said, “Ronnie, I want to learn how to ride a
two-wheeler
.”

“Okay,” Ronnie said, “I'll teach you but remember this: we're not going to stop until you learn how to ride, no matter what.”

Ronnie and Dave were always close, but in the future their roles would reverse, with David delivering the stipulations of how things would be.

When I peered into the future, I saw my kids growing up happy and healthy, following whatever passions they had found, one day marrying and starting families of their own, and me becoming a grandfather who could dote on my grandkids. If you had told me then that one day my son David would effectively cut me off from my own daughters and their children and
their
children, I'd have laughed in your face. Today I'd be dining on crow because that is what has happened. The Church of Scientology actively tears families apart, separating parents from their children, turning children against their parents, all the while claiming that forced disconnection does not exist. I'm telling you that it does exist, and my family is just one of many that have been victimized.

Five

A Marriage Made in Hell

Back in the 1960s, you'd have thought I was the happiest guy in the world. I wasn't, although that had nothing to do with my four bright, happy children.

Contrary to Loretta's prediction about how the relationship would improve after we were married, things only got worse. Honestly, it was a house of horrors for me and for Loretta too. Arguments were a daily occurrence. They became such a regular part of my life that when I look back, they blur.

On some occasions, however, things went beyond words. Both Loretta and I were products of the Pennsylvania coal region of the 1940s and 1950s. It was a
blue-collar
area with
blue-collar
mores. The upside is that people were hardworking, for the most part honest and good neighbors. The downside is that many were alcoholics, and domestic disputes were often settled with violence. I remember being up in my
third-story
bedroom as a kid and hearing a woman on the street below saying to her
coal-miner
boyfriend, “I love you, I love you,” even as I could hear his fists punching her body.

It pains me to admit it now, and I regret ever doing it, but there were times when I punched Loretta. I never slapped or hit her in the face but, still, sometimes I did strike her. I might punch her in the arm or push her away when she was getting on me. She threw things at
me—pots
, pans, a pot of boiling coffee once. After a fight I would think, Jesus Christ, this is no way to live.

For the most part, though, we just fought with words. Loretta passed away several years ago, so she cannot provide her perspective. I can say only that I would bring up something and nearly always she would oppose it. I would say something like, “I'm going to clean out the garage this weekend.” Her response would be, “Oh, no, you don't want to do that. I need you to do
such-and
-such
,” and it would escalate from there. I felt nagged because she would get on me about totally unrelated things. Our voices would rise, and I would become more and more upset. Many, many times, too many to count, I wound up feeling utterly deflated. I would sink down in my chair with my head in my hands thinking, This is ruining my life. Why do I let this happen?

At those moments, the strangest thing would happen. Loretta would calm down, too, and say, “Here, Ron, let me make you a cup of coffee. Here's a piece of pie.” It was as if she had won the argument. And she had, because many times I felt exhausted and defeated. We would be out in public, and she would just snap and start yelling at me, which was embarrassing as hell.

The default state of our marriage was strife. I do not bring that up to paint myself as the henpecked husband or a victim. Were Loretta still alive, she undoubtedly could fill in the other side of the story. Suffice it to say, it takes two to tango and we both contributed mightily.

It boils down
to—and
I think this occurs in many relationships—an inability to tolerate the way the other person is. One person is holding an attitude about the other of “I think you should be this way, I think you shouldn't be that way, I think you should do this, I think you shouldn't do that,” a list of attributes that don't exist in the other person but should, in the other person's opinion. The second person holds a similar attitude about the first, and so they enter an arena of combativeness that has no reason to exist except for an unwillingness to tolerate the person who is right there. Yet, if one could overcome that unwillingness, one might find that those intolerable things in the other person might fade away. That is actually what happened in my marriage to Loretta in later years.

An important detail of a larger point of the story is that we did not hide these spats from the children. They were witness to them, and I know they were scared. Just as I was when my mother and father used to fight back in Mount Carmel. My mother might get on my father about something and he would erupt. He never struck her, but sometimes he picked up a dish towel to lash her with. They would be screaming at each other, and witnessing their fights was traumatic for
me—I
depended on my parents for survival. Today I regret that Loretta and I exposed our children to those fights. Anyone who has known our son David as an adult can recognize some of the elements from those battles: the volatile temper, the refusal to let go of things and the tendency to try to dominate through nullification. Yet who can say for certain whether these tendencies were part of David's makeup from birth or they were learned? Because none of my other children expresses these traits, I am inclined to think that they were latent in him from the beginning. While I believe that Loretta and I shaped the lives of our children to a degree, each of our children makes their own decisions. Ronnie, for instance, is the most considerate and thoughtful person you would ever want to meet; yet he was exposed to as many of our fights as the
others—more
even, because he is the oldest. I guess every child processes what happens in the home in their own way since they turn out so differently.

The truth, however, is that Loretta's antagonism was really directed only at me. She was great with the kids. She cooked their food and made sure they were dressed well for school. She demanded that they do well in class and get good grades. She was nice to the neighbors. She was a good cook and homemaker; her lasagna was tremendous, really, really good. Only I drew her ire. This is no way to have a marriage, and as miserable as it was for me, it was just as frustrating and unsatisfying for Loretta, too, I am sure. How could it not have been? For some bizarre reason we brought out the worst in each other. The strangest thing of all was that after we divorced in the
mid-1980s
, we got along fine. We no longer argued. Whenever we met, it was cordial and it was genuine. We caught each other up on news about the kids and the extended family and actually had a decent relationship.

I once got an insight into how we tended to be polar opposites. Someone who knew both of us said to me, “Loretta's game is to be contrary to you in any and all matters.” He then said that if I remarked, “Gee, it's a nice day,” Loretta would immediately jump in with, “Now, Ron, it's not that nice and you know it.”

Then he instructed me in how to see this dynamic for myself. Sometime later, Loretta and I were talking and I brought up a point about something, an opinion that I don't remember now. Loretta immediately took an opposing stance. We continued talking, and about ten minutes later I brought up the subject again, this time taking the perspective that Loretta had taken the first time. She immediately countered it by taking up and asserting my original point. That sums up our nearly 30 years of marriage. Perhaps the bottom line is that we both wanted different things out of life.

The strife between us never seemed to interfere with our relationships with our kids, however. Both of us loved them equally for the individuals they were. All the kids were active, Denise and Lori with their dancing and Ronnie and Dave with sports. Despite his small size, David was strong. I used to lift him up so he could grab hold of the molding atop a doorway, and he could hang there by his fingers, even as a toddler.

When Dave was young, he was a good kid around the house. He had a great sense of humor and we pulled a lot of pranks together. One time, I got him up on the garage; he was wearing a pair of my red Speedo swim trunks with newspaper stuffed in them so they'd stay up, hiking boots, one of Loretta's wigs and a kite that looked like a Batman cape, and he was holding a toilet plunger pointed toward the sky. We took a photograph of him and gave it a caption of “Super Geek.” He loved doing goofy stuff like that and went along eagerly. In addition, he was a very smart kid in school and a good talker, extroverted and willing to state his viewpoint.

At home David was subject to the discipline of his mother and me. In school, however, things were different. There he was a wiseass who had the habit of taking verbal potshots at the other kids. Eventually, the other kid would tire of the abuse and try to put a stop to it, which apparently resulted in what David wanted all
along—a
fight. Ordinarily, the smaller kids are the ones who are bullied. In David's case, that was not always so. Often, he came home with tales of a scrape he had been in that day. Another negative trait that he seemed to possess early on was a habit of denigrating other people. He would come home from school complaining about other kids. It became almost a regular occurrence. He'd walk in the door and begin griping about something a kid had done or someone he had a problem with. Though I had no idea at the time, this would become his signature style when he took charge of Scientology many years later.

As a father, though, I supported all my kids unconditionally and was invariably protective of them. That is probably why I never bothered to look too deeply into that red flag waving wildly during David's childhood. It is a characteristic I became all too familiar with later on. Ronnie told me that he has been in four fistfights in his entire life, and three of them involved protecting his little brother from situations that Dave had instigated.

Six

David's Miracle

Growing up, all my kids except David were healthy. His cross to bear was a bad case of asthma, and this plagued him all through his early years. The affliction became apparent when he was an infant, just months old. He couldn't exhale, and the attacks became fairly common. Asthma sufferers can get the air into their lungs but can't force it out, and it is unsettling to see someone having an attack, especially a child of your own.

His pediatrician administered shots of adrenaline to relieve his gasping. I didn't want to keep taking him in for shots because I had heard this was not too good for a kid, so I was always on the lookout for other ways to deal with it. Not to mention that he screamed like a banshee when jabbed with the needles.

Asthma made him miserable. It really ruined his life for several years. In the beginning he might have an episode every six months, but they became more frequent as he got a little older. He'd have attacks at night and would be up, unable to breathe and crying. It was heartbreaking to see because he was an otherwise happy kid.

It got so bad that one time in the middle of an attack, he started turning blue. He couldn't breathe out, and Loretta and her sister, both of whom were nurses, stood there saying, “Oh, my god!” but doing nothing. Finally, I smacked him on the ass and he cried, which forced him to exhale and that stopped the attack. Afterward they criticized me for being cruel, which really ticked me off because they were just standing there. I would have done anything to help him breathe normally again.

When he was about five years old, one attack was so bad that he wound up in the hospital in an oxygen tent. I felt helpless as I watched him lying there, his chest heaving as he struggled to breathe. He was there for a couple days, and I bought him a stuffed monkey so he would have a companion to share his isolation.

Later, in the middle of winter, another attack came on. His mouth was open, but he literally could not breathe out. Again, he began turning blue. This was serious. I had an idea. I grabbed him in my arms and ran upstairs to the bathroom. I stripped off his clothes and turned on the shower. It wasn't going to be pleasant, but I had to do something. I took off my clothes, too, grabbed David in my arms and stepped into the shower. I didn't want him to think he was being punished by what was about to happen, so I went in with him.

“Listen,” I said, “I know this is going to be horrible, but I've got to do something to help you.”

I was holding him in my arms as the warm water washed over us both. Suddenly, I slammed off the hot water and we were both instantly shocked by a blast of
ice-cold
water. David's gasp reflex kicked in and he began panting uncontrollably. So did I, believe me. It was painful for both of us, but the attack was over. I got a big Turkish towel and dried him off. I could feel his racing heart return to normal, and the goose bumps receded. My own fears ebbed as I saw that my little boy was going to be all right. I gave him a kiss, and he was okay after that.

I knew these measures were only temporary and that he would suffer another attack, so I was always looking for ways to get at the cause of it. I was only dealing with the symptoms as best I could. The doctor who gave him the adrenaline shots was only treating symptoms too. I wanted to find out what the hell was causing these attacks that were messing up his life so much.

I found out about a specialist and took David to see him. The specialist said that skin tests had to be done. We took off David's shirt and he stood between my knees facing me. The nurse took a board about a foot square that had more than 30 needles on it and pressed it against his back until each needle drew blood. I witnessed this and thought, You bastards, this had better result in something positive. Then she took a tray with a large number of bottles and, in order, daubed a bit of solution from each bottle onto each of the breaks in his skin. The doctor came in, inspected the reactions and told us to come back in a couple weeks for the test results.

Two weeks later we went back, and the doctor's diagnosis did not fill me with confidence. He said that David was allergic to the bacteria in his throat, which made no sense to me at all. From the rather fumbling way the specialist explained it, I got the distinct impression he was grasping at straws. Why were the asthma attacks intermittent and random if the bacteria were in his throat all the time? This specialist did help in one way, though: his diagnosis validated an idea I had been considering, which was that David's asthma attacks were in some way psychosomatic.

Sometimes, when I saw that an attack was coming on, I took him out to the garage and made him lift weights. Often, it would stave off the attack. The idea came to me one day as I thought back to something that had happened to me in the Marine Corps.

I had gone to the base dentist for some work on my teeth. A week later, my face began to hurt every afternoon at 4:30. It felt like my face was in an iron mask. Each afternoon this pain would murder me. I went back to the dentist and he said, “Oh, yeah, that's facial neuralgia.” He gave me some aspirin and sent me away. He could name it, but he couldn't solve it.

The next day at 4:30 my face started killing me again. I knew I had to do something, so I put on my fatigues and walked out to the air station gym. I figured that instead of moping around, feeling pity for myself, I would go take a workout. There was another guy in there and I said, “You want to lift weights? We can spot each other.”

We began lifting. He spotted me on a set of bench presses. Then I spotted him. Then he spotted me. Then I spotted him. Then . . . wait a minute, I thought. My face no longer hurt. The pain had gone away. I just sat there on the bench trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. I came up with a theory: pain must need your attention to exist. If you can direct your attention away from the pain, it can't continue to exist. Something threatening me like that barbell, which would crush my chest if I dropped it, forced my attention away from the pain and that caused it to go away. That was the end of the facial neuralgia. I never got it again. Amazing!

Years later something similar happened when I had a bad cold and a fever, and a buddy forced me to go skiing with him. After my third time down the mountain, my cold symptoms vanished entirely. Somehow, I theorized, if you can force your attention away from what is bothering you, it no longer has life, and this reinforced the earlier experience.

So, when David had an asthma attack coming on, if I caught it early enough, taking him out to the garage and making him lift weights often relieved the attack. Sometimes it would be 32 degrees out there in the garage. I would bundle him up, take him out there and spot him on the bench press, until he'd say, “I'm okay now, Dad. I feel better.” And he would be better. Temporarily.

Around that time, in 1968, I had a friend named Nelson Sandy who sold cookware with me. One day he said, “Hey, Ron, how would you like to make an extra $100,000 a year? There's something I'm getting involved in and you should too. It's called Holiday Magic.” In the 1960s, $100,000 was a fortune.

He invited me to a meeting to learn more about it. I got the pitch (it was a cosmetics marketing business) and my immediate reaction was, “This is bullshit,” because all they were doing was selling distributorships, with no thought of getting products out to the consumers. Holiday Magic was one of the early pyramid schemes and went bust several years later, thanks to the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission.

After the meeting, Nelson and I went to a bar for a couple drinks. He told me more about it, and the next thing I knew, I had become intensely curious. I said to myself, “You know, this just could work.”

So I got involved. For a $5,000 investment, I became what was known as a master distributor. Here is the way the scheme worked: The more product you bought, the bigger the discount you got. The idea was to sell product to distributors under you and pocket the difference between your price and what you charged them. You would keep recruiting distributors under distributors and making income off the difference. There is really nothing wrong with the
concept—except
that everybody knows these schemes never work, though that conclusion did not dawn on me until later.

Later on, in 1969, three other distributors and I formed a
so-called
Holiday Magic corporate team. We were all good talkers and good at convincing others to buy into Holiday Magic. One evening, we were holding an “opportunity meeting” at the Mallard Inn to recruit other distributors. A member of our team was talking to a guy named Mike Hess, while I stood a couple steps away talking to someone else.

At one point Mike said, “Yeah, I want to get involved in this because I am a Scientologist and we believe in experiencing everything.”

I overheard his remark and turned to him. “What did you just say? What is a Scientologist?”

I pinned him down and made him talk to me about it for maybe 30 minutes. The word itself interested me. I had never heard it before. He told me that Scientology was about helping people become more able in life. There were other good philosophies, he said, but the difference with Scientology was that it offered practical things you could do to help yourself.

One of the things, he told me, was that “if you become a Scientologist, you never have to take another aspirin again.”

That really piqued my curiosity. “What do you mean by that?”

“Well,” he continued, “if you get a headache, the way you get rid of it is look at yourself in the mirror and give the headache to the person in the mirror.”

Wild idea, right? You meet some people in life, and their invariable response will be to scoff, “Nah, that's never going to work.” But I have never been a
close-minded
individual. I have always been open to new ways of thinking or of viewing or experiencing life.

The other thing Mike told me that day was, “If you don't have a mirror handy, do this: create a mental picture of yourself looking at yourself in a mirror, and give the headache to the guy in the mirror.”

Sometime later I was driving in South Jersey and realized that I did have a headache. I thought to myself, I'm going to try this. I checked around me to make sure there was no traffic nearby, and then I made a mental picture of myself looking at myself in a mirror. I gave the headache to the guy in the mirror. Lo and behold, my headache went away! Hang on a second, I said to myself. I need to check this out. This is no bullshit. This is something different. This is unlike anything I have ever experienced in my life. Therein lies the rub.

A person who is a Scientologist or who has some familiarity with the subject will understand what occurred at that moment. A person who is not a Scientologist will be absolutely convinced that I was swayed by a coincidence or talked myself into it. Regardless of anyone's interpretation, that actually did happen to me.

I had Mike's phone number, so I called and told him, “I would like to find out more about this.” He sent me down to a place in Woodbury, New Jersey, Ogle's Cafeteria. A guy named Frank Ogle owned the cafeteria, and every Tuesday evening people came to his place and sat around discussing Scientology. Frank basically lectured about various aspects of life and Scientology's perspective on them.

For example, ten or twelve people would be sitting around a table, and Frank would ask the first person, “Okay, now tell me, what do you think about sex?” The person would answer, and Frank would go around the table and have each person tell him what she or he thought about sex. One person might say, “Well, sex is okay, but I only want to have sex with my husband.” Another might answer, “I worry about it a little because I might pick up a disease.” Someone else might say, “I'm shy in a relationship.”

Then he would take something handy, like salt and pepper shakers and a coffee cup, and say, “Okay, this is you,” placing the salt shaker on the table, “and this is what you think about sex,” placing the pepper shaker in front of the salt shaker, “and this is sex itself,” moving the coffee cup in front of the pepper shaker. “What you
think
about sex is your case”—in other words, all the person's mental reactions, attitudes, and so on about sex. Then he would say, “Sex just
is.
”

That made sense to me. People's thoughts about life are not the same as looking at life directly. The next week Frank would take up another subject. After he was through talking, we would do different exercises to improve our ability to look at life and improve our communication. In Scientology these are called training routines, or TRs for short. We would sit in front of another person and just look at them until we were comfortable facing another person without feeling the need to say something. If you've ever tried this, it can take some doing. Or we might practice how to say something clearly to another person so the message really arrives. Frank might teach us how to answer a person's question or acknowledge something they had said. It was all basic stuff about how to communicate better. As I would learn later, good communication is an important fundamental of Scientology, and these exercises were my introduction to the idea.

After about four trips to Frank's Tuesday evening classes, I figured I had learned what there was to learn and I kind of drifted away. My realization was this: Everybody is trying to
create
an effect in life. Nobody wants to
be
an effect in life. So, if somebody says something to you, such as a criticism, and you give them a good acknowledgment, you can avoid becoming an effect of their criticism.

I began to use that technique to advantage in my life. Somebody would say, “Such and such,” and I'd say, “Yeah, okay,” and that would be the end of it. Rather than get into a long
drawn-out
discussion or an argument, I'd give them a good acknowledgment and shift the conversation to something I was more interested in. And it proved effective. So then I figured that if the Scientology mirror technique had gotten rid of my headache, maybe Frank could do something for David's asthma, because he was still getting attacks. Anything I had tried, including inhalers, brought him only temporary relief, and one thing I give myself credit for is that, if something is not working, I look for something else.