Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [115]
THE MORNING AFTER: The crew were rounded up and mustered. Change of plans. NO ONE WAS GOING ANYWHERE! Turns out it was going to cost a fortune to fly all these people all over the place and the logistics were not finalized as to how to ship everybody off to the different continents. Dave had called down late during the night and said that he was not willing to waste one single cent of Scientology’s money dealing with the Int Base SPs. Some people might end up going later in the day, and some might end up going that night providing everything was properly worked out. The day went by painfully slow. No one knew who was doing the logistics workouts and no one was leaving the “SP Room”. It was just more torture, everyone waiting, but nothing they could do.
Days went by and nothing ever happened. Dave Miscavige actually ended up leaving the Int base and going off somewhere for a legal case and the whole thing sort of faded away. Everybody just assumed that whenever the logistics got worked out, they would get shipped off to their Cont and until then they would make the best of it. Later we would find out that NO ONE HAD EVER WORKED OUT ANY FLIGHTS, COSTS, OR ANYTHING. It was all just one big pile of crap. Dave Miscavige never intended for anyone to leave, be offloaded to ANY Conts or wear ridiculous outfits while scrubbing urinals by hand. But he wanted us to all think that we were!
Chapter Twenty-Two – Suffer Well
I was working furiously to get several production targets done as ordered by Dave. I had been, like everyone else on the base, in woeful noncompliance to Dave’s orders and had not gotten several unobtainable objectives completed in the allotted time.
Dave was putting in “too gruesomes” for all those who were in noncompliance with his orders. A “too gruesome” was a punishment that was so gruesome that a person would get the objective done for fear that the gruesome punishment would be enforced if they failed to do so. All of CMO Int had scrubbed the entire galley with toothbrushes for two weeks straight. They cleaned the floors, the walls, even the grease traps, all with tiny toothbrushes.
This was after digging ditches out at the berthing buildings job site. Dave just kept thinking up more and more jobs for them to do. I was even asked if there were any really nasty dirty jobs in Sets & Props that the CMO Int crew could do as a too gruesome punishment assignment.
One day when I was heading over to the castle, I saw a huge cloud of dust over to the Northwest of the Studio, in the direction of the aeration ponds. The aeration ponds were two huge football field-sized ponds that contained all of the sewage that was created on the property. Huge underground pumps moved the sewage from all over the property to the aeration ponds. There was a large fountain in the middle of a small adjacent pond that would aerate the sewage and after many months the solid waste would either evaporate into the air or settle at the bottom and the water would slowly seep back into the water table of the property.
As required by law, the solid waste was supposed to be removed from the ponds every so often. For this, the aeration ponds would be allowed to completely dry out in the hot desert sun and a backhoe or some sort of heavy equipment would come in and empty out the solid waste, after which the pond would then get filled back up with fresh water and the process would start all over again with new waste.
Well it looked like the new too gruesome had been found. All of the Int staff were now out in one of the newly dried aeration ponds and were emptying out all of the solid waste by hand. I could not believe it at first. But I was assured this was correct by some of my crew who had helped set up a few huge work light towers out there so they could work well into the night. I could not imagine how that could even be healthy. I am sure that OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) rules forbid such activity without some sort of breathing apparatus or masks or something.
The same day