Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [18]
I need to find a place to live, I thought to myself while giving my mom a blank stare as she recited L. Ron Hubbard straight from the pages of one of the large green books from the shelf.
It took me about a week to work something up, but I made a deal with one of my friends at Delphi. Her sister was away at the Delphi campus in Oregon and they had an empty room in their house where I could stay. I was free! I could get out of here and start living on my own.
I told my mom that I was not interested in her exchange system as the apartment they were providing sucked and was a wreck so I was trading up to something better and she would not have to provide anything for me. So between us, we decided that it would be best if I moved out.
I moved in with Lorin and her family. Lorin was this exceptionally tall, slender girl who had freckles and was really funny. Her mom and step-dad both worked for Scientology in some capacity but did not preach the Scientology gospel. Living with them was pretty simple.
One day on the way back from school, Lorin’s mom dropped the bomb on me. “Jim (Lorin’s step dad) and I are selling our house! We are going to get an apartment in Glendale and use the money from the house to pay off our debts so we can join the Sea Org. We are joining the Sea Org.”
Everyone looked at me all happy expecting that I was going to be overjoyed to find that yet another temporary residence of mine was being pulled out from under me for some reason related to the damn Sea Org!
Are these guys trying to mess with me? I thought. This is insane. First Jesse, now Lorin’s parents.
“Wow, that’s great!” I exclaim, wondering how the hell I was going to get out of this pickle.
That night I had to decide how I was going to sort this out. Going back to my mom’s was not an option. My dad lived too far away for me to stay in school. I did not know of anyone else that had an extra place for me to stay. Suddenly it came to me. There was a guy at the school who worked for half the day at the school, and the other half of the day he did his studies. The school not only paid for his education, but he got some cash as well. They called it a work/study program. It was for the less affluent students that had parents that could not afford to pay for tuition. If I did that program, I could use the money I made from the school to pay rent and survive while still going to school. The next day I went over this idea with the school administrators. They liked the idea. The school staff even suggested that I rent a room from one of the other teachers at the school that had an extra room and that would solve my living arrangements!
My supervisor (teacher), Eve Darling, was who I worked for at the beginning. Eve was cool. She had been my teacher since I first started at Delphi. I did assistant type functions for her and filed student tests and paperwork. Eve was more like one of the older kids than our Supervisor. She had graduated from Delphi Oregon, and after that she worked at Delphi LA as a Course Supervisor.
It all worked out rather nicely. I moved into a house right up the road from where Lorin lived, in Tujunga. I became the lower school students’ soccer coach, paper-filing guy and eventually took over staff training at the school. I studied my school materials in the morning and all afternoon I worked. I loved it. Also, shortly after I started working at Delphi, my dad ended up moving back to Nebraska. So I was really on my own at this point. I was making money, supporting myself