that’s source!

Jamie’s absolute faith in what he called the “Tech” troubled me. Yet his explanations of Scientology notions were compelling. And doubts got swept under the rug when we kissed.

One afternoon, as we were having tea at the round wooden table in his kitchen, he said, “It’s very important that you understand the whole overt/withhold phenomenon.” He placed the emphasis on the first syllable: overt.

“Do you mean overt, like something that’s really obvious?”

“Nope. Not an adjective. A noun.” (This kind of clarity of language, common to Scientologists, I found very appealing.) He fetched a thick red book. On the cover, its title was embossed in gold: Dianetics and Scientology Technical Dictionary. “I shouldn’t be explaining these things to you,” he said. “That can lead to misunderstoods, and even to squirreling.”

“Squirreling?”

He flipped pages. “Squirrel,” he read. “‘Those who engage in actions altering Scientology, and offbeat practices.’30 Because the Tech is so powerful, and people see that it is, it’s possible to take pieces of it and use them for your own purposes. Werner Erhard, for example. He took a few Scientology courses, read a ton of Hubbard’s books, and squirreled all that into those self-help seminars he runs, ‘est.’ Because it’s the Tech, it works, but because it’s not the whole Tech, it can be damaging. That’s squirreling. The way to keep that from happening, the way to keep Scientology working, is to always go to Source.”

“Source?”

“What Hubbard says. He’s Source.” He placed the open volume before me, and leafed to the page that held the words overt act.

Overt act 1. An overt act isn’t just injuring someone or something; an overt act is an act of omission or commission which does the least good for the least number of dynamics or the most harm to the greatest number of dynamics. (HCOPL 1 Nov 1970 III) 2. An intentionally committed harmful act committed in an effort to solve a problem. (SH Spec 44, 6410C27) 3. That thing which you do that you aren’t willing to have happen to you. (ISH AAA 10, 6009C14)

Jamie pointed. “If you want to find the policy letter or bulletin or tape these quotes are taken from, inside these parentheses is the information you need. For instance, ‘HCOPL’ means the Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter you can refer to. ‘SH Spec’ are the tapes he recorded at Saint Hill, the big Org in England, and the numbers are where in the tape you can find that quote.”

I stared. “This must have taken so much work!”

He nodded. “If you aren’t able to define words—LRH covers this in the Study Tech materials—you have misunderstoods, and those can lead to overts and even blowing. This way, see, if you define a word, and it’s still not clear, you can go to where Hubbard used it and read it in context. You can always go to Source.” He pushed away from the table and headed up the stairs. “Let me show you something. Come on.”

After a moment, I followed. Source! It sounded so totalitarian! Or so ultra-religious. Weird, in any case. My stomach churned.

The second floor, in addition to the living room and bedroom, held his study. One shelf was loaded with a row of huge red books. Another shelf held a row of equally large green ones. There were at least a dozen volumes in each set, beautifully bound.

“The red ones are the Tech vols,” Jamie said, reaching for one. “Everything LRH wrote about auditing. Also Study Tech, lots of stuff.” The pages were legal-sized, which meant the volume was long as well as thick. “See, it’s all HCOPLs or HCOBs—policy letters or bulletins. That’s Source!”

I didn’t want to touch it. The whole thing was so unsettling—and so intriguing.

But they looked really well bound. “They must cost the earth,” I said.

He nodded, running a finger along the spines of the green books. “These vols have everything to do with admin, about starting and running an organization—I mean, look how Scientology is thriving and expanding all over the planet! So these are essential as I build my music school. I just bought them. And yes,” he said proudly. “They cost a lot.”

I followed him back down the stairs.

“So,” he said, “overts! We don’t want those coming between us. Because that creates what’s called a withhold.” He read from the Tech Dictionary: “A withhold is ‘an unspoken, unannounced transgression against a moral code by which the person was bound.’31 See,” he said, “a withhold makes you pull away. Where there was high affinity, there’s now going to be zilch, or sudden unexplained resentment.”

I nodded. “You think you can’t tell the person what you’ve done. And maybe that leads to even more transgressions—I mean, overts?”

“Well done!” He looked pleased. “Then things go downhill. You feel you can’t talk to him anymore, you begin to justify the original overt, you even feel it’s his fault. That’s called a ‘motivator’—you come up with a ‘reason’ you ‘had’ to commit that overt. It can even lead to blowing—you feel so much guilt, you just leave! So it’s always important to examine, when you feel like you need to get out of something—a relationship, a job, whatever—what you might have done to create that feeling.”

My head was spinning. “Wow,” I said.

“It’s all about ethics. Ethics is very, very important.”

indeed, i began to realize that ethics, and ethical behavior, were an enormous aspect of Church doctrine. Even as I appreciated the order it imposed, I found it worrisome how often people in Scientology were “out-ethics.” One morning I watched as Jamie dressed entirely in black, down to shiny and uncomfortable leather shoes.

“Do you have a business meeting or something?” I asked, incredulous. I’d never seen him out of his Chinese cloth shoes, much less in a suit.

As he perched a foot on the edge of a chair to tie the laces, he told me that one of his teachers in his music school had gone “out-ethics.”

“What did he do?”

“You don’t need to know.” He rustled around in a drawer for a tie. A tie! “Since right now it’s only me running my Org, I hold every post. Today I have to be the Ethics Officer. Dave has committed some overts, and he’s got some motivators going. My dressing all in black will get my attitude about it across, don’t you think?”

I did think.

As I also saw that one could go “out-ethics” easily. Transgressions abounded. But not just transgressions. If something went wrong—you broke a favorite bowl, you snapped a string on your guitar, you cracked your car’s engine block—you’d done something to “create” it. If you looked deeply enough, what that was could be found.

This was familiar territory. I’d been brought up with this idea. You just had to look for the metaphor. A few months earlier—prior to meeting Jamie or hearing anything about Scientology—I’d still been seeing Roger from time to time, and one day I lost the key to my house. As I phoned a locksmith, I knew exactly what it meant: I needed to “change my locks,” to be resolute about breaking things off with him. The cracked engine block came about because I’d allowed my parents to loan me a car when I should have purchased one for myself. I broke the bowl because I shouldn’t have had ice cream. The snapped string was more complicated, but I managed to figure it out: I was working on a song I’d written about Roger even though I was now seeing Jamie; the shocking twang of that string was a warning.

So Scientology’s notions landed on well-tilled soil. But I couldn’t fathom Jamie’s certainty that it was “the only way.” One morning, as he was extolling this aspect of Hubbard’s accomplishments, I laughed.

He rolled out of the sheets and sat on the edge of the bed, his back to me.

“Jamie,” I said. “Religions always say theirs is the ‘only way.’ It’s a ridiculous claim.”

He turned, his face marred with fury. “L. Ron Hubbard has It. All. Figured. Out.” His movements fierce, he stood, shoved his legs into his pants, buttoned and zipped.

“I’m sorry, Jamie. I didn’t mean to insult you, if that’s what I did. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t get it. Just wait until you’re OT. Then you’ll see the mess this planet’s in! And how Hubbard’s the only one, with the only way, to get us out of here.”

He left the bedroom. I heard the jingle of keys and the thud of the front door. He’d rented an office for his music school, and I knew that’s where he was headed.

I wrote an irate note and headed home. I was done. Forget it! He was loony-tooney.

But as I started my car, music from a cassette he’d given me, a beautiful melody he’d composed on the piano, soared through the speakers. As I drove home, lyrics began to form.

She’s

free from her cocoon

changing with the moon

shining like the sun

Finally

you’ve found her

the one

but don’t hold on

don’t crush her wings

Butterfly

Perfect! “Butterfly” would be my way of telling him we were done. Butterfly/Goodbye!

But even as I worked on lyrics about “letting go,” I thought about how we could do this. We could be a songwriting team!

I called him. His surliness abated under my barrage of apologies. Later that week, I sang him the song. It was clear he’d no idea the lyrics were intended to be about us. As we worked on fitting the words more precisely to the music, the attraction was heartily there again.

“You know,” Jamie said, “we should get married.”

I kept my eyes lowered. But as we kept working, strengthening a word, adjusting the length of a note, our life unrolled before me. With my words and his music, we’d compose award-winning songs. We’d perform together. We’d have a band—we’d tour the world! We’d change the world! We’d sing for peace and . . . well, all kinds of good things. We’d have a marriage full of creativity and friends and wine and travel and candlelight and love!

I took in the curve of his jaw, the fingers that had learned to play me well. About half an hour later, I said, “Maybe we should do that thing you mentioned.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

i’m not sure how I broke it to my parents that I planned to marry a Scientologist. I imagine I presented Jamie’s bona fides: He’s a jazz musician! He’s friends with Chick Corea! He runs a music school, he owns a home in the Hollywood Hills . . . I do remember that I tried a diversionary tactic by bringing in Dianetics.

“Dianetics?” Mother’s voice had risen a full octave by the last syllable. “Sands, in the fifties, that book was a cocktail party joke!”

Oh, ummm.

“People sat around and did that silly exercise of asking for an ‘earlier, similar incident.’ ‘Earlier, sillier,’ is more like it. We howled with laughter at the things that got invented.”

“Well . . .”

“Now don’t go making a big mistake. You have a whole life ahead of you.”

“But I love him, Mom.”

“I just don’t know how we could have a Scientologist to dinner.”

I not only understood her concern, I shared it. Nevertheless, I held on to my intention to marry Jamie as if it were a bucking horse and I the most determined of riders. I would not be unseated in spite of knowing I could—should—let go, fall to the ground, dust myself off, and get the hell out of the corral. As often as I felt this, however, I also felt the opposite: This was destiny. He was the perfect man for me. Finally, the love I’d thought and talked and sung about for so long had arrived. The curve of his capable forearm, the blond hairs glinting there, allowed me to shrug away the incessant smell of cigarettes, the ubiquitous black cloth shoes, the religion that swirled through every aspect of his life.

But we fought, a lot. I obsessively watched other couples, wondering if they argued as much as we did. Did they have issues to “confront”? Did they stay up all night and “handle” (with some piece of Hubbard’s Tech) whatever had cropped up between them?

The pages of my journals during this time vacillate between grave doubts, grateful musings that we’d found each other, and wondering if (as I scribbled on one page) “I’m going to have to look into Scientology.” Yet I continued to have a problem with Jamie’s assertion that it was the “only workable system.”

I asked what he meant by “workable.”

“I’ve told you about the Dynamics, I’ve told you about ethics, I’ve told you about Admin Tech,” he said. “These are just a fraction of the ways Hubbard has ordered life into parts that anyone can understand—and he offers ways to fix things when they go wrong. No other religion does that. They rely on vague things like prayer, meditation. Do those things work? Maybe sometimes, but not always. Scientology is a system. It works. Always.”

Around this we circled and circled, at the kitchen table after breakfast, in his car driving home from a gathering of his friends, on a beach watching happy people (were they really happy?) tossing a ball. I see, now, that I was arguing with the idea that I was going to have to dive in.

“You talk about the chaos, Sands, it ends the chaos.”

I remembered the predawn moment in my New York apartment after I’d heard that my brother had fallen from a bridge and mashed his skull, when I’d put my forehead to the floor, praying to something. Ending the chaos was very appealing.

we set the wedding for October. I wanted to use the Squaw Valley house, as Tracy had when she got married. I wanted to wear Mother’s satin wedding dress, as Tracy had also done.

Why the rush? Mother wanted to know. Why not wait until spring, when the wedding could be held outdoors? Tracy and David’s wedding had been a magnificent party. Why not do the same?

But Jamie and I were both in a strange hurry.

That summer, 1982, we headed to Oregon to visit his family and friends. We spent almost a month on that trip, and sometimes I wondered lazily if all this time away from my own friends and family, and with so much talk about Scientology, was a kind of indoctrination. Perhaps because we did some camping, it reminded me of those eighteen months in Europe so long ago, when it was just family, for months and months, and how it had solidified us as a family.

One afternoon, as Jamie and I pitched our tent near a lake, a terrible headache took hold. It stretched from my lower back, up my spine, and across the crown of my head—ganglia of outrageous pain. Jamie, like all Scientologists, didn’t approve of aspirin or ibuprofen, and I seldom used them either—ancient family injunction—except to relieve cramps when I got my period. But I’d never had such a headache. I knew it had to do with Scientology, the pervasive thing it was becoming as we headed toward marriage. Jamie and I talked about that as well. He was so understanding, so very kind as we (in a journal I refer to it as that fucking Scn phrase) “handled” it.

We also visited his parents, who lived in a double-wide. They’d once had a lovely house, Jamie explained, but when he and his brothers moved out, his parents downsized. I fretted: My in-laws-to-be lived in a trailer? What would my parents say!

One morning, as I was helping with dishes, his mother confided, “Jamie’s been a Scientologist for almost ten years. We so hope you’ll pull him away, but we fear it will be the other way around.”

As Jamie and I drove up the Oregon coast to visit musician friends, I pressed myself against the passenger door, wishing I could slide out and hitchhike back to Los Angeles. But I’d given up my apartment. I’d moved in with Jamie the month before.

“What is it?” Jamie said, several times. “What is going on?”

“Nothing. Stop asking! Nothing!”

He grew quite stern. “You’re acting like you have a withhold, Sands. Your affinity for me is way down. Do you need to tell me something?”

The implication, of course, was that I’d committed an overt, because a withhold is what manifests after you’ve done something wrong. As the sour day went by, I realized what it was: His mother had criticized something he held dear. And I hadn’t defended him!

I didn’t want to have a withhold. I wanted to be good. So I coughed up what she’d said.

“Flunk!” he said, furious. “Major flunk!” He asked for details, “wearing his auditor’s hat,” as he termed it, meaning he did not interrupt or challenge or contradict. I understood this was what happened in an auditing session: getting every little bit of the overt expressed so that nothing was left to fester. It made sense. Kind of like irradiating cancer cells so they could creep no further.

That night our “affinity” was back. We laughed with his friends, crawled happily into the bed they provided, made delicious love.

“You see how getting off that withhold made things okay between us again?” Jamie whispered. “That’s Tech. It works!”

I saw that it “worked.” But soon after, we tangled again. And again. Back at his parents’, I searched for what I might have done this time. All I could come up with was that I was nervous about Scientology. In fact, it terrified me.

“That’s your parents speaking, not you,” Jamie said sternly. “You care too much about what they think. It’s your life!”

I utterly saw his point. And yet. What if I had the same thoughts as my parents, but they were still my thoughts? Wasn’t that possible? That my concerns might be valid even if my concerns were also theirs? It was exhausting to think about.

I allowed as how their life seemed kind of lovely; what might be wrong about emulating it? Books and dinner parties and friends and laughter and wine and music . . .

“That’s all surface stuff,” Jamie said. “There’s a lot more to life, to really living.”

It seems like good surface stuff, I didn’t say. Yet I knew what he meant: it was that Sisyphean, existential nightmarish possibility: Man always is, but never to be, blest.

“But Scientology costs so much. Where’s the money go? What if there’s something, ummm, not so good about that part of it?”

“Those are lies,” he whispered, fiercely (his parents were asleep down the hall). “Your mom and dad are feeding you these rumors, this terrible, evil, black PR. It’s not a greedy, moneymaking enterprise! Hubbard is trying to make this planet a better place for everyone!”

He’d gone on in this vein. I tried not to listen. I’d decided. As soon as we got back to Los Angeles, I was calling off the wedding.