Ruthless (8 page)

So, after another 15 months in England, that was it. The deal was off. We returned home to the States. Years later, David acknowledged that the whole family had really let me down.

Ten

Leaving Home

In August 1975, we rented a house in Broomall, Pennsylvania, a suburb west of Philadelphia. The kids were back in school except for Ronnie, who had moved out and was working for the Scientology mission in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Scientology's policy is that when you train to become an auditor, you have to become ordained as a Scientology minister. David, now 15 years old and an auditor, also became an ordained minister. Once ordained, a minister could legally perform marriages, funerals, christenings and so on. One day my sister Marcia, the only one of my three sisters and one brother who became interested in Scientology, came to the house and asked David if he would perform the marriage ceremony for her and her fiancé, Carroll. Marcia and Carroll, who was African American, had applied for a license some time before, and the license was about to expire so they needed to get married immediately. I was out selling and called home to check up on things. David answered and said, “Dad, you've got to get home fast. Marcia wants me to marry her and Carroll. When the papers find out, can you imagine the headlines? ‘White Girl Marries Black Man in Scientology Ceremony Performed by a Kid'?” As I've said before, he always had a good sense of humor and was well aware of Scientology's outsider status. They eventually did get married, but I performed the ceremony since I was also a minister.

David and Denise attended Marple Newtown High School and continued to do well academically. Additionally, David was on the wrestling team and winning his matches. As far as his mother and I were aware, things were going well for him, which left us completely unprepared for the bombshell that was about to drop the following spring.

One day I came home to find him lying on his bed and looking none too chipper. Teenagers can get like that, and he was nearing his sixteenth birthday. Still, it was pretty unusual for him.

Maybe he'd had a rough day at school. Maybe a girl had turned him down. I figured I'd talk to him a bit and we'd straighten out whatever was eating at him. “What's up?” I asked.

“Dad, I can't take it anymore,” he said.

“How do you mean?”

“Lookit: all the kids around me take drugs. That's the way it is. I don't want to do this anymore. I want to go help L. Ron Hubbard.”

I certainly was not expecting that. What he was telling me, in essence, was that he wanted to drop out of school and move away from home, away from his parents and his brother and sisters, to join an organization that expected total allegiance and dedication to Scientology for the rest of his life and, as I would later learn, far longer. He didn't even have a driver's license, and here he was telling me he was ready to jump straight into adulthood.

I looked at him. Now he was sitting upright. His tone was emphatic. I could understand the frustrations he must have been feeling in school. High school sophomores are not the most settled bunch. Their vision of the future may not extend past their plans for the weekend. David, meanwhile, had progressed far along Scientology's strict regimen of courses and training. He was an accomplished auditor. He had jumped through the hoops and won the admiration not only of his family but of many Scientologists in England. I had always supported my children, and it was clear to me that David felt prepared to take the next step in his young life. The idea of leaving behind the burgeoning drug scene and turmoil of teenage years for something he felt would be worthwhile must have been irresistible.

“Okay, Dave,” I said. “Okay. I'll help you in whatever way I can.”

“Thanks. I want to join the Sea Org,” he said.

“All right. I'll help you.”

He told his mother and she was not in favor of it at all. She became apoplectic and rejected it outright. “I don't believe you're going to do this,” she clamored. “I can't believe it!” Loretta's dream was for everyone to stay together and to open a Scientology center as a family. The last thing she expected was for one of her children to move 1,000 miles away and join the Sea Organization. She and David did not fight over it because Loretta remained in disbelief from the first moment he mentioned his plan. She and I never fought about it because it was David's doing, not mine. In fact, we hadn't fought since before I was introduced to Scientology several years earlier. While we still argued, the marriage had attained a tolerable equilibrium, so I don't think that he was desperate to get away from his mother and me. At any rate, I pledged to support him, while Loretta remained incredulous.

In those days, I was fully supportive of Scientology and the Sea Org. People who joined the Sea Org were dedicating their lives to helping humanity, I thought, looking through my
rose-colored
glasses. I knew that David was a good auditor and I thought he would go far. Ronnie, Denise and Lori were proud of their brother, much like an Italian family was when a sibling joined the priesthood.

The Sea Org is comprised of the most dedicated Scientologists. They sign a symbolic contract upon joining in which they pledge themselves for a billion years of service to the Aims of Scientology, which are basically to create a world without war, crime or insanity. That is what David wanted to do. In 1967, Hubbard had left St. Hill, where he had been for nearly ten years, and had gone to sea. Ostensibly, it was to be able to continue his research, but I have read there were legal reasons as well. In 1968, Britain instituted its ban on foreign Scientologists, and this would have included Hubbard. He began buying and renovating ships to suit his needs. He invited longtime Scientologists to join what at first was called the Sea Project but by the end of 1967 had become formalized as the Sea Organization. By the
mid-1970s
Hubbard and the Sea Org had moved back to land in Clearwater, Florida; many of the
quasi-naval
traditions established in its formative years were carried on at the new land base, however. Sea Org members wore uniforms somewhat similar to those of office workers in the U.S. Navy. The organization's hierarchy more or less followed naval ranks, with Hubbard holding the rank of commodore. Musters were held regularly to account for all hands and provide general briefings. Ranks and ratings ceremonies were held yearly, and deserving members received promotions. Campaign ribbons were awarded for participation in successful projects, which were worn on more formal occasions when people were in their Class A uniforms.

I wasn't totally certain how things would turn out for David in the Sea Org, but I had always viewed Scientology as an adventure, and all my kids had done well during our two trips to England. I had gotten so much out of Scientology and had seen David helping others with it, so I thought it would be a terrific career for him. I wanted him to be happy, and I saw how happy he was in England when he was auditing. He was bright and I thought he would be successful. I felt I had done my best to raise him to be responsible and pursue what he wanted in life. If he was ready to make the quantum leap into a new adventure, who was I to stand in his way? After all, I was not that much older when I joined the Marines, and I was fairly certain that, unlike me at Parris Island, David would not be punched in the head on his first day in the Sea Org.

I said I would help him and I did. I bought him a bunch of clothes and gave him some money. On his sixteenth birthday, April 30, 1976, David dropped out of high school, and Loretta and I drove him to the Philadelphia airport. We had his bicycle packed up in a big box along with his suitcases. Loretta still could not accept it. “I can't believe this is happening. I can't believe you are going to do it,” she said over and over.

But happen it did. He got on the plane and flew to Tampa to join the Sea Org. My relationship with him did not change after that, but David himself began to change. We exchanged letters a time or two every month. In his letters he seemed to be thriving in his new life. Occasionally we would talk on the phone and he always sounded upbeat.

There is a generalization about Scientologists who join the Sea Organization that I personally observed to be true: they were people who sincerely wanted to help others and make a better world. The impulse to help is strong in most people, and I think it exists in the greater part of humanity, but there are also a relative few among humankind who would use people's kind hearts and good intentions for selfish ends. You could even say that good people are flawed because they have a hard time conceiving that others are not also basically good and therefore can be deceived.

That is the general environment that David entered when he went to Scientology's
then-worldwide
headquarters in Clearwater, Florida, in May 1976. Anyone who has left home and gone away to college knows what freshman year is like with parents no longer around. I am sure that David felt that same sense of liberation too.

The year before, the church had bought a decaying but
well-known
Clearwater landmark, the Fort Harrison Hotel, plus another local building and set up shop. Scientologists began going to Clearwater for auditing or courses, a far more convenient arrangement than going to the
Apollo,
which was always moving about the Caribbean, having crossed the Atlantic a year or so earlier. They stayed in the hotel's rooms and did their courses or auditing in repurposed cabanas or in the
tenth-floor
ballroom, which had been converted into a course room.

The new facility became known as the Flag Land Base.
Flag
refers to the eight years when L. Ron Hubbard lived aboard ships in the Mediterranean and Caribbean, and the
Apollo,
his home, was the flagship of the Sea Organization. The base in Clearwater became the new center of Scientology activities, even though by the next year Hubbard had moved out to California, two and a half hours east of Los Angeles near Palm Springs.

Every six months or so, I went down to Flag from Philly, and David and I always met and spent time together. Our relationship was the same as it had always been. Each time I was in town, he made a point of coming to see me, and I could tell that he was happy and doing fine. It made me proud. The only change I noticed was that he was very dedicated to his job. He would have to run off somewhere and, since Sea Org members did not make a habit of sharing all the details of their jobs, I did not know much about what he was doing. The Sea Org tended to operate on a
need-to
-know
basis, meaning Sea Org members did not share details about ongoing projects and upcoming plans. But I knew he worked in the part of the organization called the Commodore's Messenger Organization (CMO). The unit got its name from Hubbard's rank of commodore and derived from a communications system he established while at sea. Aboard the
Apollo
were several children whose parents were members of the Sea Org and served aboard the ship. Hubbard began using these youngsters, preteens or young teenagers, to carry messages for him to various parts of the ship. In time they became an official adjunct to his office and gained status because of their closeness to Hubbard himself.

In Clearwater, the CMO retained its status as the senior administrative arm of the base. Although David was never on the
Apollo
and had not yet met or worked with Hubbard, he was a bright, energetic young man and became a natural fit with the CMO. He adapted easily to the Sea Org. His dedication to whatever task he was assigned made him popular with others, though I have been told that he was more focused on his work than on socializing with the other messengers. Still, he fit in well, and for a while he had a girlfriend who also was a messenger. He was friendly with his roommates in his dorm and shared their interests in music and sports. Often, he and his friends would skip lunch and instead go swimming in the hotel pool, then change and be ready for the afternoon roll call.

In the
mid-1970s
, CB radios were popular and the messengers had CB handles. David's was Puppy Breath. This is evidently because his older brother Ronnie had the CB handle Dog Breath back in Philly.

So, early in his career, David acquired status as a messenger. He also acquired a taste for power. Messengers already had a certain amount of altitude and therefore power, quite a bit actually; they even had authority over longtime Scientologists, many of whom had been in Scientology for decades and had reached its highest levels of auditor training, executive status, and auditing advancement. This was probably a big mistake on Hubbard's part, since it meant that young people without a lot of Scientology experience were making important decisions based on their position as Commodore's Messengers but not a lot of personal experience with Scientology, its technology or administrative policy. The value of status over experience was a lesson David absorbed early on, and it became encoded in his DNA. Looking back on it now, I am sure that this is when he began to change.

Someone who was there at the time related a story to me that illustrates the point. At the time, David shared a room with two other young staff members who were around his age. One evening, they were in their room on the ninth floor of the hotel during the dinner hour. It was time to head downstairs to the
after-dinner
roll call, which David presided over. The elevators were crowded and slow, and David worried about being late, which would not look good since he was responsible for taking the roll. So he bolted down the stairs, nine flights to the mezzanine where the muster was held. His roommate checked his watch and figured he still had time to take the elevator. And, sure enough, when he got off the elevator, he still had time to spare. David, however, had already begun taking roll and chewed out his roommate, with whom he was quite friendly, for being late, when clearly he was not.

Authority agreed with David, and his ambition was to climb as high as he could in the organization and ultimately work with L. Ron Hubbard himself.