“He was the greatest science fiction author of the twentieth century. A sea captain and explorer to rival Magellan. A barnstorming aviator, celebrated photographer, and world-renowned academic curriculum creator. His geological survey of Puerto Rico still influences mineralogy there today.”
This high praise, from the woman pitching me a free ticket to the museum behind her, on the corner of Hollywood and Ivar, was dedicated to a man unknown to me, but she promised that his story would change my life. And changing my life is exactly what I came to do. Fresh from the flyover states, I had still grown up with television, newspapers and a library. I watched the LA Olympics and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and knew all about partying like it was 1999, which it was. But why had I never heard of the incomparable L. Ron Hubbard?
Beneath my feet, the sidewalk-stars were studded with a parade of names, to me unknown, who had nonetheless made their mark on the boulevard of dreams: Laura Laplante, Madge Bellamy, Rod La Rocque, Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, Elena Verdugo, Jinx Falkenburg, Katina Paxinou, Nanette Fabray. All one-time movie stars manufactured by the studio system, now destined to live on in obscurity underneath grungy sneakers and sandals and the piss of the homeless. I didn’t know much, but I shared dreams of fame and fortune with the Pola Negris and Piere Cossetts, the Willard Watermans and Bonita Granvilles. Just blocks away, a circus of real-life Luke Skywalkers, Batmans, and Marilyn Monroes were vying to take a picture with me, but I wasn’t “that tourist.” I was an aspiring fixture in the cinema firmament. I didn’t need to be a fan, because one day I would be in the movies. I could be whoever I wanted to be, and today that would be a sophisticated museum-goer, in love with the art and not the celebrity of the City of Angels. And with that, I entered the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibit.
Ron did live life with a capital “L.” He wrote pulp science fiction stories, churning out new worlds and big adventures in a prolific flurry, as if a direct channel through which creative inspiration could not help but flow. He lived those adventures in real time, too, trading his school books for a Panama hat as he traveled to the far East to study under an ancient Tibetan royal magician when he was a teenager. That followed a childhood friendship with a tribal medicine man from the indigenous Blackfeet Indians in his hometown, and private tutelage about the burgeoning science of Freudian psychology when he was a mere twelve years old. No wonder his imagination could supply publishers with reams of new worlds, volumes of plots and plans and quests and otherworldly adventures.
I, too, lived inside my imagination. In the avenues filled with broken palm fronds, I saw a tornado carrying defenseless Toyota Corollas to faraway technicolor lands; the radio reported merely a gust of balmy wind. The old ladies in too much makeup who lived across the street in their sun-bleached Adobe-style fourplex always made me shudder, a quartet of jealous Norma Desmonds. Walking to the Cafe 101 to order a “damn fine cuppa coffee” made me want to break out in a Lindy hop with my bodyguard. In my mind’s eye, I had already completed an education in espionage at Langley and numerous explorations of the Egyptian pyramids in search of mummies. All while being a simple muggle from East London, an out-of-place overachiever at a school of magic. Just sitting down at a New York delicatessen on Fairfax, I became a pickle lover with lots to say on the subject of nothing. And sauntering up to the bar at Musso & Frank’s to ask for a dry martini cemented my future as the new Bond. I took on each identity with the proper mix of accent, courage and doe-eyed innocence as I faked my way through each new day, because darling, that’s what this city is all about. Ask Norma Jean.
So it was only fitting that I should learn about the unparalleled breakthroughs L. Ron Hubbard made in the discipline of psychology, too. At some point in Ron’s life, after bravely commanding ships to Somewhere during Some Important Battle in the Second World War, he was injured in combat and sent to recover with thousands of other soldiers at a hospital in Oakland. It was there he summoned all of his philosophical and scientific and psychological research and engineered an undeniable reality: you can heal anyone with the power of their own mind. So he did. His system of mental therapeutic counseling, Dianetics, was later codified in a book by the same name. And with it, he transformed from explorer-aviator-sailor-soldier-scribe to some kind of god: the founder of Scientology.
As I neared the end of this impressive biography, the exhibition transformed. The walls closed in. The music swelled. Spoken quotes by and about L. Ron’s wisdom tickled my ears: “The further one investigated, the more one came to know that here, in this creature the Homo Sapien, were far too many unknowns.” … “This new science works with the invariability of physical science in the field of the human mind. It will prove to be as revolutionary for humanity as the first caveman’s discovery and utilization of fire.”
And then, before me stood a curtain. Velvet. With a red carpet rolled out underneath it. A small sign on the wall next to it read, We are extending to you the precious gift of freedom and immortality -- factually, honestly. Glamor and eternity impossible to resist, I stepped behind the curtain, and into a new role.
It was a long hallway, bathed in white. There were no windows and no doors, so I just kept following the red carpeted path. Sometimes it turned, or sloped down, or up, but the light continued to call me forward, as if a spotlight glowed on a distant shore, and one day I would finally be under it. I don’t know how long I walked, or where I went, but I knew I was being transformed. Then, abruptly, a door stood before me. I opened it. And walked through. On the other side was a massive study made of stone, with a wooden-crowned ceiling far above and walls of bookshelves all around. Perhaps I had stepped through a magical bookshelf, transporting me somehow to Charles Foster Kane’s 20th century castle on the cliffs of San Simeon. A young man sat behind the desk, clean-shaven and nerdy and pimpled, even though he was older than I. He gestured to a decadent fainting couch. I wanted to sit, but it looked too much like unsturdy set design.
“It’s okay,” he said gently. “I’m your auditor.”
He explained to me that I was made up of engrams, recordings made by my unconscious mind of little pains and major traumas. He could set me free by unlocking and releasing these blockages in my subconscious. Then I would become a Clear, enjoying total recall of every moment of my life, as an immortal, omniscient, omnipotent being: a thetan. All I had to do was let him into the deepest recesses of my mind.
Only, there were none.
He asked me about my past, my darkest secrets, my traumas. He pushed along lines of questioning so intimate, I felt undressed to my bones. At first I answered honestly, prying into the most remote levels of my consciousness, but I could find no pain. Where was the aching, brooding, suffering soul inside of me? I remembered my innocent childhood: the daisy crowns picked from the grass, rocks polished with gloss, buckets of raspberries picked on my grandmother’s farm, hollowed-out tree trunks in the forest that became fortresses of the imagination. I was like that too, a hollow vessel, just waiting to be filled with experiences, dramas, stories, characters.
“This is the resistance of your conscious mind,” he told me.
So I did what any aspiring actor would do: I made shit up.
For hours my auditor probed, not my experience, but the depths of my imagination. I was abandoned in the woods when I was five, barely able to take care of myself. Only by chance, I found a tree to be my home and picked berries from nearby bushes. Bathing in the river and making clothes out of braided leaves and dandelions, I walked myself to town, creating tapestries of grass along the way to exchange for a decent country education and a coveted library card. Moments of attention and affection from anyone I crossed. The depths of betrayal my abandonment revealed drove me to tears - real tears - despite the entirely fictional nature of it. Of course the breakdown was a breakthrough, a true channeling of the L. Ron inside of me, and I emerged triumphant, ready for life on the other side, an over-functioning empath.
I left my audit renewed, refreshed, reborn. Consumed in this new history, I felt at one with my reinvented past. This new version of myself was no longer a flyover-state country bumpkin, but instead an impoverished orphan, clawing my way toward success. I could feel it: I was a star. I thanked my auditor, who led me back to street level through a gift shop, assuring me that this was only the beginning of my transformation. Thetan status was still any number of audits away, so he encouraged me to sign up for more courses, buy more books, attend all the seminars. Listening with my wide eyes and grateful smile, I nodded enthusiastically and promised to follow up on all the pamphlets and brochures with cashier’s checks in the mail.
Back in the grimy glare of the city’s sunlight, I surveyed the dirty side street’s potholes, cratered sidewalks upended by the roots of trees. Across the street, a back door from a hotel opened onto a narrow alley and a campy blonde emerged, partially obscured by trash bins. When I saw her profile view, I realized she was Marilyn, just before she pulled off the wig and stuffed it into a JanSport backpack. Then (s)he grabbed some baby wipes and began scraping the iconic upper lip mole off her face, then the lipstick, then the brows. Shimmying out of a high-necked white dress to reveal a hairy chest, now he found a wrinkled t-shirt and some jeans in the backpack, and slipped them on. The rest of the costume disappeared into the bag, which he slung back over his shoulder as he strolled out of the alley down the side street, back to the obscurity from which he came.