Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [12]
My mom’s boyfriend, Dan, was on his Operating Thetan (OT) levels and went to the Complex daily. Operating Thetan levels are the upper and confidential levels of Scientology. You don’t ever find out what is on them until you do them. It turns out that Dan’s software company did a lot of computer database programming for Scientology and he was very dependent on them for his weekly income, so he did whatever they wanted. I did not like Dan at first. Until then, I had never seen an apartment as messy and disgusting as his. There was literally crap everywhere. He not only had the one apartment for his living quarters, but two more right next door and across the hall where he had his businesses.
In these “offices” it was wall-to-wall computers and filing cabinets. Now before you think “under the desk computers”, let me tell you what kind of computers these were. They were VAX/VMS systems. They had large tape drives and were about as big as refrigerators. He had about twenty of these things, along with tape drives, stacks of tapes and cables. Add to that a never ending snake of wires going every which direction and double stacked filing cabinets piled high with papers, trash and junk and you had Dan’s offices.
His living quarters were not much different. Clothes, trash and odd furniture items piled with random junk all over the place. It was a one-bedroom apartment and we would be moving in immediately. The idea was that my sister and I would have our bedroom in the dining/living room, which was about eight square feet. My mom was going to get us a bunk bed so we could have some space for a dresser. Oh, did I mention that this would still also be the living room and we would have a table there for eating?
My mom somehow thought that this was living in the lap of luxury. She brought up how this place was better than the apartment we were living in a few months back. We previously had a bachelor apartment that was one room with a small bathroom. Anything would be an upgrade from that! Dan’s apartment was not my idea of home.
At least I had Jesse’s place where I could crash. Jesse had just moved into a HUGE house in Tujunga. It was minutes from where we went to school and Jesse had his own room. Jesse had two sisters, one who was about eight years old and the other who was a baby. Jesse’s mom was pretty cool. She and my mom knew each other, but were not really close friends. The only thing they had in common was the Scientology stuff.
Jesse’s dad was very similar to my dad in that he was not really pushing Scientology and just wanted to live life and have some fun. His dad had bought jet skis, water rafting equipment, bikes, guns, etc. My dad regularly took us to the movies, restaurants and the beach and was generally cool with whatever we did. Jesse’s dad seemed more interested in fitness and vitamins than Scientology.
One day I was talking to Jesse about going to live with my dad. This meant that I would have to quit school because my dad lived about 2 hours away and the tuition was too high. I could not stand living with my mom anymore and between her and her new boyfriend, I was being pushed to the edge. Jesse said that maybe I could stay with his family and was going to talk to his parents about it.
Turns out that I could not have picked a better time. Jesse’s mom was planning to move to Clearwater, Florida, with the baby so that she could work full time on getting up the “Bridge” — the Scientology metaphor for spiritual progress. Clearwater is where the Flag Land Base was. This was the biggest organization in all Scientology, and if you were in Scientology and you were going to Flag, it might