Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [14]
When we got home from school, Jesse’s dad told us he had some news. “We are all going to go to Flag and the Freewinds over the summer!” he told us.
So they cleaned him out! From the Flag Registrar he bought his whole damn Bridge services for him AND his wife up to Operating Thetan (OT) Level VIII, which is as high as you can currently go in the Scientology world. From the Freewinds registrar, he bought a bunch of courses for himself, Jesse and me as well as accommodations for a few weeks. And from the International Association of Scientologists, he gave 40K and became a Patron! I estimated he dropped a cool 600K for all that, if not more.
Somehow, I am now going to Clearwater, Florida and the Freewinds. The ship part I could enjoy, but Flag would be a drag no matter which way you sliced it.
To sell us on the Flag idea, Jesse’s dad already had a plan: we were going to bring the jet skis and make a road trip to Florida. We would go jet skiing at all the lakes on the way from LA to Clearwater. That would work.
The summer came and we made the trip. We ended up going jet skiing a lot and took a very scenic route to Clearwater. When we arrived it was just as we thought it would be, it was awful.
Flag is called “Flag” because when L. Ron Hubbard founded the Sea Organization in the 1960’s, he did so at sea. There were several ships that eventually made up the flotilla of vessels that the Sea Org operated from. The ship in which Hubbard worked was known as the Flag ship and he was referred to as the Commodore of the fleet. When the Sea Organization moved ashore in the 1970’s, they moved their operations to Clearwater and never changed the name. The Flag ship Apollo operations transferred to the Flag Land Base, otherwise referred to as FLB or just Flag.
In 1988, Flag was staffed by hundreds of Sea Org members. They had several buildings and all were filled with Sea Org members dressed in navy like uniforms. They even went so far as to have rank insignia and Sea Org officers wore shoulder boards and gold braid lanyards.
Jesse and I signed up for the Pro TRs Course. This was the Professional Training Routines Course. On the first part of the course, you read a ton of background information on how Scientology came to be, what it is and how it was still around. Then you have to listen to some more 1960s lectures with LRH rambling on about stuff that has nothing to do with the price of rice in China, much less Florida in the late 1980s. We had a pretty cushy schedule and hoped to drag out the course so we could mess around most of the time and get back to LA after summer. We were scheduled to be on course in the morning until lunch and then until 3:30 in the afternoon. From 3:30 until the end of the night, we went to the beach or went swimming in the pool at the Fort Harrison Hotel.
This was working out just fine until one of our supervisors spotted us in the pool at the Fort Harrison Hotel one night. The next day she pulled us aside and told us that we were being dilettantes and that we were off-purpose. We were 15 years old! She told us that it was unacceptable that we were on such a light schedule when we were just doing nothing but what we wanted the rest of the time. This was considered “chasing butterflies,” something that L. Ron Hubbard mentioned in the most important Scientology policy, entitled Keeping Scientology Working. I remember thinking at the time that she probably wished she could go swimming in the pool but Sea Org members were not allowed. I also thought that going off and having someone take pictures of us literally chasing butterflies and then showing them to her would probably not help the situation.
We were in a tight spot and did not want to make any trouble and get into a bunch of ethics trouble, so we said that we would go on course for more time. Instead of ending at 3:30 p.m., we now ended at 5:30 p.m. Two more hours. Wow. We figured that if we went to course a little bit more during the day, we would finish the course faster and have more DAYS off to screw around!