Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [41]
As Ray was explaining to me what we were going to do on the New Arrival Routing Form, we walked down the hall to see the uniforms officer. As we knocked on the door, we could hear someone screaming loudly in the office next door. The door opened and it was the tall guy with officer bars from the muster.
He was at least six foot-something tall. His hair was slicked back perfectly and not one hair was out of place. His uniform shirt was perfect. There was not one crease in the wrong place. I could have sworn it had been ironed while he was wearing it because just putting the shirt on would have caused a wrinkle somewhere. There must have been a full can of starch on his sleeves alone.
“Hello, Sir,” Ray McKay said instantly as the tall guy appeared.
“Both of you get in here now!” he barked at us. “This is Ray Reiser; he will show you what to do. When all the films are out, you can go back to your routing form.”
“Yes, Sir,” McKay and I said in unison as the tall guy walked out of the office.
Ray Reiser was a small, frazzled, slightly crooked thin man with salt and pepper hair. He was running around stacking boxes and trying to figure out what we were going to do. In the background, he had a funky contraption of several film projectors that were simultaneously playing films on a giant white screen on the wall. All around us there were stacks of film reels, boxes, rolls of sticky labels and shelves that had projectors, empty reels, trash and anything else you could think of crammed onto them. The room also had a peculiar smell to it. It was a mix of chemicals with a bit of a funky twist to it.
“Okay, these have all been checked,” Reiser pointed out. “Match the film reel up with the right film binder and then put them into a cardboard box.”
“Who is the tall guy?” I asked McKay.
“That is the Commanding Officer Gold, Wendell Reynolds,” McKay said. “We would be smart to hang out here until 2:00 p.m. It would not be smart to piss him off on your first day.”
Ray and I looked around and tried to make sense of what Reiser had told us. There were piles of junk all over the office and after 30 minutes or so, we figured out what we needed to do and started making a pile of the boxed up films. As we did this, Reiser sat watching the films on the wall and switched the audio between them that was playing out of the 4 foot tall speaker in the corner of the room.
When I did Scientology training at Flag, I had seen a few of these films made by Golden Era Productions. I had never imagined that some tiny guy in a room full of junk was the one cranking them out.
“Do you have more packing tape?” I yelled out to Reiser loud enough to overpower the din of noise coming from the projectors and the large speaker blaring in the corner.
“Yeah,” he yelled back. “On the bottom shelf by the bubble wrap.”
I made my way between the metal shelves and looked on the bottom shelf. It was surprisingly empty in comparison to the rest of the office. Behind a bunch of laid out bubble wrap, which also had a sleeping bag on it, I saw a few rolls of tape that were unused.
“There is a sleeping bag down there!” I told McKay as I came back over to our makeshift packing station.
“Yeah, I would guess that Reiser has been here for a few days at least,” McKay answered back.
The packing station we had set up was on a table that had film rewinds on it. There were motorized poles that the film reels went on. Underneath there was a light table that was turned on. Just then I noticed an open bottle that had paper tape on it that said “MEK” on it. There was another one right next to it that said “PERC.” They looked like the bottles you have in chemistry class that are blood colored and have the little black plastic top.
“What is PERC?” I asked McKay.
“Film cleaner,” McKay answered.
“Perchloroethylene,” Reiser said as he walked over. He had gotten up from his Rube Goldberg projector contraption and