Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [17]
“Oh, so this is about getting some action now?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it.
“What about Star? Did she join too? I can tell you right now that I ain’t joining even if Star did. That is crazy talk, I can’t believe you joined!”
“Well I did. I’m going to pack up my stuff today and start tomorrow. I start right away,” he said decidedly.
“So, wait a minute. You didn’t even join up for LA? You are going to stay here? That is lame. Florida sucks, dude! How the hell could you join, but to then join up for the Sea Org down here? Oh man, they must have told you some crazy stuff for you to do that.” I was pissed. I walked off to go find Star and find out her version of this crazy story.
I found Star in her room crying. She asked me if I heard.
“Yeah, what the hell?”
Apparently, Ali and Jesse ended up meeting with the recruiters. Ali got signed up first and then helped them team up on Jesse. That is what they did. They got one friend in and then they used that friend to get the rest of the friends in. I had seen it happen so many times before. Jesse and I usually just blew them off. In LA they would come up to us and we would just say, “LSD.” You can’t be in the Sea Org if you have taken LSD, so if you said, “LSD” that was the end of the conversation before it even started. We used to tell them we had large debts, too many kids, a brother that worked at the LA Times, whatever we could think of that would give us a good laugh and blow them off instantly.
“What are you going to do?” Star asked me.
“Well, I sure as hell aint joining the Sea Org in Florida!” I answered back, hoping that she was in the same frame of mind.
“Yeah, but where are you gonna live? If Jesse stays here, where are you gonna go?”
Dumbfounded, I realized she was right. “Damn, I hadn’t thought of that!”
Where the hell am I gonna go? Good damn question. I am screwed. I have to go back and live with my mom. This is turning out to be a really crappy day. Maybe I can watch the house when I get back! Maybe there is a way to work this out. There has to be a way. What the hell is Jesse’s family going to think? Jesse is going to be in the Sea Org and I am going to be there for what reason? I am just a fifth wheel at this point, no use in keeping me around at all.
When I got back to the apartment where I was staying with Jesse and his family, Jesse’s dad asked if I had heard the news. Oh yeah, I had. He then asked what my plan was. He was really cool about it. I just said that I was still trying to figure that out. He said that he was going to sell his house in Los Angeles. Great. There goes 99% of my plan.
I had to call my dad. I ended up going back to LA, staying with my mom and hoping things worked out for the best.
No sooner than I arrived back, I realized that this would never work. My sister was working for my mom’s boyfriend’s company doing data entry. They wanted me to work for him as well. As long as I could make some extra bucks, I was cool with working. Then they explained to me how the “making some money” part works. The data entry they want me to do is of all of the sales leads that they have gathered up at conventions, sales meetings and so forth. They have hundreds of these cards with people’s information on them that they wanted us to enter into the computer systems for the sales team. If the sales team called one of these people and made a sale, only then do we get a commission. I told my mom and her boyfriend that I was born on the weekend, but not last weekend! Screw that! I could work for them for one hundred hours entering this junk into the computer and maybe, if I am lucky, three months from now, you are going to cut me a check for 15 bucks?
“What about your exchange with us?” my mom asks.
Oh, great. Here we go. As soon as she asked the question, she headed for the bookshelf and pulled out one of many large green volumes by LRH that has every single policy letter on exchange and anything else I had no interest in hearing about at the moment. She started going on about exchange