Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [110]
And yet, Hubert said she "did what I was told to do. I did try to impinge upon her by yelling at her a few times; I did tell her with force to knock it off; I did tell her that she was at risk of losing her job if she didn't straighten up ... I am afraid that I might have made this whole thing worse or further upset her and that was not what I wanted to have happen." Then she provided her phone numbers as a contact. "I love Lisa and want to see this get handled," she said. "Please do everything you can for her."
Hubert's concern was genuine. Despite her worry, however, she didn't alert a doctor or take Lisa to the hospital. Instead, she simply typed the letter and delivered it to the church, where she instructed an administrative aide to put the document in Lisa's preclear folder. Whether anyone read her note, Hubert never knew.
The next morning, back in Clearwater, Lisa seemed better. She spent the morning painting sets for Winter Wonderland with her ethics officer Katie Chamberlain, Bennetta Slaughter, and other volunteers at a downtown warehouse. But soon she began to appear "mentally tired [and] stressed," said Chamberlain, and by lunchtime she'd gone home to take a nap. Just before dusk, Lisa got back into her red Jeep Cherokee and headed toward the center of Clearwater. It was rush hour, and the line of cars was moving slower than usual, the result of a motorcycle accident at the corner of South Fort Harrison and Bellevue Boulevards, which had forced traffic into a single lane. As she approached the intersection, Lisa, perhaps distracted by the accident, rear-ended a boat that was fastened to the back of a pickup truck, which had stopped in front of her. "It was just a bump. It was nothing serious," recalled a paramedic named Bonnie Portolano.
Portolano, who had been on the scene of a motorcycle crash, saw the accident and approached the Jeep; in the driver's seat, a pretty young woman, dressed in a loose-fitting white shirt, looked up at her. "I'm ... I'm sorry," Lisa said.
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," she replied, her voice shaking.
The paramedic checked her for scrapes and bruises. "You're sure you didn't hurt yourself?"
"No," Lisa said. "I did not."
There was something off about the woman, Portolano thought. She seemed dazed and her voice was strangely formal, almost programmed. When she was asked a question, she answered with short yes and no answers and, most unnervingly, stared fixedly at Portolano and her partner while doing so. "Can you tell me where you live?" Portolano asked. Lisa couldn't recall. "I could take you there," she offered, "but I don't know what [my address] is."
Portolano didn't know what to do. "I attributed all of this to maybe shock," she said. It was not unusual for victims of even minor collisions to be disoriented immediately afterward. Physically, Lisa didn't have a scratch and assured the paramedics that she didn't need medical treatment. Portolano gave Lisa a release form to sign, then she and her partner, Mark Fabyanic, walked back to their ambulance. They were just about to leave the scene when Fabyanic, the driver, looked in his side-view mirror. "Bonnie, she's taking off her clothes," he said.
"No, she's not."
"I'm not lying."
Lisa walked down the middle of the street, past the ambulance, naked. Portolano jumped out. "Lisa, what are you doing? Why did you take off your clothes?"
Lisa turned. "Well, you see, nobody knows this but I'm an OT," she said. "I don't need a body."
Portolano didn't know what Lisa was talking about. Grabbing her arm, she managed to escort Lisa to the ambulance, where she laid her on a stretcher and covered her with a blanket. "Why did you take off your clothes?" Portolano asked again.
Lisa gave the paramedic a searing look. "I wanted people to think I was crazy because I need help," she said.