Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [43]
"You don't know what you're talking about," he said. "It's about living up to your full potential."
It was also, he and many other sixties converts believed, on a mission to save the world. Not only did Scientology promise to get rid of war, but it had a written program to do so: "All we had to do was clear people of their reactive minds and they would become rational and ethical and sane, and see that war and violence were wrong," Jeff said. "To me, it sounded plausible. I couldn't just sit by and do nothing while the world went to hell."
If Dixie couldn't get behind that, then maybe the fault lay within her. One aspect of Scientology, which was not promoted until a person actually became a member, was the core belief that there were certain people in the world known as Suppressive Persons, or SPs. These were people who openly opposed Scientology—journalists, judges, politicians, tax collectors, psychiatrists—but they could also be hostile parents, or skeptical girlfriends. Maybe Dixie was one of them, several Scientologists suggested to Jeff; maybe she just didn't want him to get any better. Maybe she didn't want the world to get better. Maybe she was an SP.
Ultimately, Dixie gave Jeff an ultimatum: it was either her, she said in frustration, or Scientology. Jeff chose the latter. "It was just too important," he said.
By the early summer of 1968, many of the hippies in the Sierra Madre Canyon were into Scientology. Either that, or they were into hard drugs. It was a fractured, confusing, disheartening time: in April, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, followed two months later by Robert Kennedy. Riots had erupted in Watts, and then at the Chicago Democratic Convention. The anti-war protests, bloody and embattled, now seemed futile. Increasingly, many young searchers who'd drifted to the Canyon, particularly those just back from Vietnam, were using heroin. Shady characters followed them, hanging around on the fringes, dealing drugs. The scene in the Canyon became increasingly tense. After one young man was killed in a gunfight near his house, Jeff Hawkins decided it was time to move on.
But where should he go? The Vietnam War loomed. Jeff had already received a letter from his draft board, ordering him in for a pre-induction physical. He'd managed to get himself a psychiatric interview, and posing as "crazy"—something that only half-worked, he thought—was given a temporary deferment. But it was only temporary. He knew the army would eventually come for him.
To avoid this fate, one option was to become a Scientology minister and thus get a ministerial deferment. It was a bit of a ruse: being a Scientologist minister only meant that you could audit and perform Hubbard-approved birth and marriage ceremonies; actually doing ministerial duties was wholly voluntary. But the Scientology minister's course, which cost only around $15, was being sold to hundreds, if not thousands, of young men as a way to avoid the draft. Should he be ordained? Jeff considered it.
Then an even better option came along. Jeff was offered the chance to work for the Church of Scientology and leave the country entirely. The church published a number of magazines that Jeff thought were poorly designed. One day he approached a staff member at the Los Angeles Org and asked for a job. "I said something like 'Listen, I'm a graphic artist, do you need some help? Because I get your magazine and frankly it's a piece of shit.'"
The staffer, who seemed eager to have him join the team, took him into the back room and showed him a stack of amateurish-looking layouts. "These are all done at Saint Hill," he said. "We just fill in the information."
"I looked at them and thought, I could do better than this," Jeff said. But to do so, he'd have to move to England. "So I began to think about it." He'd decided to go ahead and get his minister's certificate—even if he left the country, it didn't