A Spy Is Born

The Full text of the “Smersh” installment posted on Tony’s site.

The entry level course in Scientology is the Communications Course. The minute you start Scientology’s very first course, you are told they are going to teach you to be a master communicator. The promo states:

“In this course you will learn what good communication consists of and how to recognize the bad, what the component parts of communication are and how to utilize them, and why more communication, not less, brings the individual greater freedom.”

What an irony it is that the biggest lesson you learn in Scientology is how to keep secrets, how not to communicate.

Within weeks after I started Scientology at Salt Lake Mission, I was with a group of staff talking about something that happened when I was younger. I don’t remember what I said, nothing particularly traumatic just something in my past. The whole group went silent. One guy said, “that’s the kind of stuff you bring up in session.” The indoctrination runs so deep on not discussing your case that you aren’t allowed to get to know someone on a level which would allow you to develop a friendship, much less a bond.

Most of what happened in your past is also never brought up in session. Scientology is dead set on not allowing anyone, including you, to know anything about you. Unless you go to the ethics officer, then be prepared to spill your deepest darkest secrets all under the guise of making you a better person.

The longer I was in, the less I shared about my past or how I felt about things that were happening in my life.

Hubbard has “tech” on how to treat people antagonistic to Scientology. You only tell them “good roads, fair weather.” The same unspoken principle is applied in Scientology even to those closest to you. You learn to only speak in “present time” and don’t discuss your feelings. You don’t even discuss your courses with other students because study is structured so each person is independent from all others.

My entire tenure at ASHO was October 1975-July 1976. By mid-July I was in the GO.

I don’t remember most days at ASHO, they were a blur of busywork. If I wasn’t supervising a course, I would be keeping up with my quota of letters out. Yes, all of us were responsible for that statistic. I didn’t mind writing letters. Most of the files I was given were people who had paid for some of their BC were supposed to be my students in the future, so I introduced myself and got a decent response rate because of my targets.

There were dozens of other busywork paper pushing jobs. We weren’t given the time to wonder if we were in the wrong place. We also didn’t get much of a chance to form close friendships. My closest friendships were with briefing course students, and a couple of staff members. I am still close friends with one of my students. He is a dear man. He is happily married and long out of Scientology.

While at ASHO, I received no training after what was required to get me supervising the Briefing Course, no auditing at all, and the only ethics action I ever had while there the day I was “beached.” I wouldn’t have been able to have an auditing session or have gone on course had it been offered because the whole time I was there I didn’t get enough sleep or enough food.

I was not alone, and because students brought me food occasionally, I ate better than most of my cohorts. Back then, we had most Saturdays off, and we usually spent at least half of that doing some sort of work around Hollywood Inn. Sundays were spent prepping the org for the massive onslaught of students Monday morning because the course room was always overcrowded with every table jam packed shoulder to shoulder and students out in the hallway as well.

Mike Rinder said this about it in a 2019 blog post:

“When I first went to ASHO on Mission in 1975 when it was still located on Temple St students would show up 30 minutes early to be sure they could get a seat in the course room rather than in the hallway. Roll call sounded like a disclaimer at the end of a radio ad — so fast you had to pay careful attention or you would miss you name and be marked absent — and it still took what seemed like an eternity.”

Unlike any job anyone has in the real world, in Scientology, you are expected to find and train your own replacement before you take even a day off, much less a vacation (all of which are unpaid as well), and you had better have your replacement “fully hatted” before you leave any post or woe be unto you. Unless, of course they make you leave the post.

Although it was through no fault of my own that I left ASHO and my students, that didn’t stop me from feeling guilty that I hadn’t replaced myself. It wasn’t until I started writing this that I realized that the guilt instilled in me way back  then has carried forward all these years. I’ve struggled with not having a fully trained replacement in place before I leave a job, although them not giving me someone to train is not my fault.

But putting that aside, here I was in the GO. The first few months with the GO were kind of like my first few months in SO with some glaring exceptions:

I had a place to live the minute I got there. Sure it was a studio apartment at 1811 Tamarind, not the classiest place in the world, or even in the neighborhood, but it was a big step up from the Hollywood Inn. We had an on premises laundry room, a swimming pool and hot tub, the heat worked, and I had a whole room with an en suite bathroom and a mini fridge and hot plate all to myself! I could lay in bed and read after I got home.

Room and board was free, like in Sea Org, I ate in the cafeteria at the Manor, where the food was better, and I got a breathtaking $25/week, most of which I had nowhere to spend.  I covered most of my needs for $10.00/month back then, and even if I bought a bit of food to keep in my mini fridge, I had enough to start padding my savings account. After taxes I think I took home about $23/week, so my savings started to grow at about 75/month.

I treated myself to a used blue 1975 Mazda RX-3 with a rotary engine which set me back $500. What freedom! It also worked out well for the GO, as I was able to run errands for them, and when I got my “job” I had transportation without them having to worry about .That ate up another $10-15 or so a month for gas and oil, those old rotaries burned oil. Occasionally someone who sent me on an errand would throw me a few bucks, but it wasn’t really at the top of anyone’s list of things to do. I didn’t consider asking.

The Manor was in a rehabilitation stage at that point, Celebrity Centre had moved from 8th Street to 1551 LaBrea in an overnighter the night of November 7, 1975 and was open for business in the new location the next morning, but was nowhere near moving permanently into the Manor.

I spent most of my time training, learning how to be what LRH considered to be a world class spy. Mary Sue was concerned about our mental health and insisted we get auditing as well. Because a post had to be created for me, I had lots of time to train and audit. I had only minimal auditing under my belt. For the first time in my Scientology career, I spent time in session.

Whether on staff or public, the con was to keep us all so busy we didn’t have time to consider how we felt. Going into session didn’t change that. For anyone still laboring under the misconception that Scientology auditing will address how you feel about anything, it doesn’t. Every person is asked the same rote questions which don’t address much of anything that ever happened in your life, and certainly not things of any relevance.

My auditing was really frustrating to me because I actually expected something of it. The questions asked, right from the very start, were just inane. Grade 0 claims to give any preclear the “Ability to Communicate With Anyone Freely on Any Subject.”  How in the world do repetitive questions like those I was asked improve my communication? Hint, they don’t. Auditing was not doing it for me because I was told I should see mental pictures and describe them. I struggled with that.

My initial training got more interesting. It consisted of TRL (training routine lie) and all sorts of espionage techniques. It felt like I was training for some special job. Hubbard had learned just enough about the espionage community to be dangerous, and he managed to convince us that the espionage community was after Scientology and it was our job to protect ourselves from the big bad government (SMERSH).

Wikipedia says SMERSH was created in 1943 to combine 3 secret Nazi police units assigned to the Russian Red Army that watched closely for signs of dissent or defeatism, created during World War II. Western intelligence agencies claim the acronym meant “Sme(rt) Sh(pionam),” or “Death to Spies.”Kirill Khenkin, in his book Hunter Upside Down, says it meant “Spetsial Nie Metodi Razoblachenia Schpinov,” which means “Special Methods for Exposing Spies.” My guess is Hubbard took the name from the fictional SMERSH James Bond fought before he switched to SPECTRE. When LRH talked about SMERSH, he was referring to the World Federation of Mental Health and the National Association of Mental Health networks, and what he claimed were their nefarious links with intelligence and government agencies, or any other amalgam of people he perceived to be the bad guys at the time.

This is who the GO and then OSA were intent on obliterating. Not just WFMA, and NAMH, but of course the organizations with which they were allegedly linked which grew, at his whim, to include not only the psychiatric community but the medical community as a whole and the entire government, not just the US Government, with whom they were collaborating and those nefarious journalists as well. According to LRH, we had to use their own methodology to attack them. Methodology which he claimed to have meticulously researched.

We studied The Brainwashing Manual, Published by LRH, a composite of other people’s writings, but the end page tellingly says it was published as a public Service by The Hubbard College of Scientology Saint Hill Manor.  The people who most needed to read this manual didn’t get that this was about them.

Included in our studies were Confidential Policies titled “Attacks on Scientology”, “Battle Tactics”, “Counter Attack Tactics” and “Intelligence Principles”. We were taught that we were constantly beleaguered and that we were the only good guys. We had to defend ourselves on all fronts at all times. These policies went far beyond “fair game”. For example HCOPL 16 Feb 1969 “Battle Tactics” has these paragraphs right in the middle of 3 pages pages of incendiary material:

“A good general expends the maximum of enemy troops and the minimum of his own. He makes the war costly to the enemy, not to himself.

One cuts off enemy communications, funds, connections. He deprives the enemy of political advantages, connections and power. He takes over enemy territory. He raids and harasses. All on a thought plane – press, public opinion, governments, etc.

Seeing it as a battle, one can apply battle tactics to thought actions.”

And the same policy has these words near the end:

“Wars are composed of many battles. Never treat a war like a skirmish. Treat all skirmishes like wars.”

The GO and now OSA are KSW on steroids. With a huge dose of paranoia thrown in for good measure. Members are trained to believe that every government official, journalist, person in the psychiatric field, physician, and probably most people just walking down the street have it out for Scientology and it was our duty as to band together to save those people from themselves.

And, yes, for those of you who say, but you were GO, there is no GO now, every single one of these policies we studied are included in the OSA Network Orders Pack.

I need to state that I think that Mary Sue truly believed her husband’s lies. I am certainshe thought he was a well-educated, a decorated naval officer, and I know she trusted that “the tech” worked. She felt it her duty to further his work and protect him from harm. Mary Sue was a very smart woman. She was also a good 1950’s style wife, leaving out the fact that she was already pregnant with Diana when she married LRH.

All of us believed that he knew what he was talking about, so we trained diligently in the LRH approved espionage methods. We were taught that the government and journalists were the enemy, and we were to be diligent in our battle against them. We were also highly compartmentalized. The level of secrecy even among each of us was elaborate. I didn’t know which of us were or weren’t GO. I t was a don’t ask don’t tell culture. I knew Diana was there. I know she gave me instructions. Unlike Sea Org, we did not have an Org Board posted. We knew who our seniors were and we knew which few people we could communicate to.

It was during this time that I woke up one morning realizing what a fine line there was between the truth and what was represented to you as truth. I thought I should leave, then decided I was in too deep, and walked across the street and continued my training.

Everything was on a need to know basis. And when we were given mission orders, we were to simply comply. After I was told for about three months “just keep your damn mouth and don’t say anything about anything to anyone,” I was taken out if the basement of the Manor and put in the public course room where I did some other courses which were not so soooooper seeekrit.

Looking back, I see that LRH trained up his own troops to protect him on the front line while he cowered in the background.

My BC students had been told I was declared, but here I was, working shoulder to shoulder with MSH. My contact with Heber and Yvonne was cut way back. We were on two different paths. I did see them a few times a month, but it was in passing. Our dinners were a thing of the past. Yvonne was nicely ensconced in her office at LaBrea, Heber was off doing PR missions most times.

I had very few friends and some acquaintances. I talked to a few of the residents of Tamarind, a couple of people at the Manor, but I was living such a double life that I didn’t dare say much to anyone for fear of letting something slip. I did become friends with a feisty Puerto Rican single mom Trudy and her 6-year-old daughter, Tracey. Such good friends that Trudy asked me to be Tracey’s godmother.

Geoffrey Lewis lived in Tamarind the same time as I did for a short time. He was fun to talk to. He was always down to earth. Shortly after I moved in, he and Glenis divorced, so it was just Glenis and Juliette, still in saggy diapers at 2 and bratty and loud. Glenis and I were not friends.

I knew a few others like Skip Press in passing, and of course, we all knew Art, the landlord. But they were not friends, just acquaintances. I made small talk to people in the course room to the regulars, but once again, it was superficial.

Scientology and Scientologists are transient by nature, more so back in the late 1970s before Miscavige decimated the mission network, because that is how Hubbard had set it up. No one went into an advanced org to do a beginning course. There were missions, Cl IV Orgs, Advanced Orgs, St. Hill Orgs, Celebrity Centres. You worked your way up the hierarchy, most times having to go to a different town for the next level. If you had known someone in one town, it wasn’t a surprise to see them in another town.

Scientologists had money making schemes, not jobs, and places to stay, not homes.

The Manor, when it was purchased by Scientology in 1973 for $1.5 million, was a derelict building, slated for demolition. In 1977, with renovations barely starting, CC was in the embryonic stages of migrating to the new building. A few classes were held at the Manor, but the large majority were still at the LaBrea building. Once I finished my Spy training, I started on my CLIV internship there.

In November, 1976, a group of Scientologists arrived in the Manor course room from the Salt Lake mission. What course they were studying or why at the Manor long before the Manor became CCLA escapes me, and I knew by then it was not my place to ask. However, I knew one of the students, Paul. I knew him well; he had twinned with me on several courses in SLC and he had talked endlessly about “the one who got away” to me. And there he was! Twinning with me on my CLIV internship like nothing had happened.

After course, Paul invited me to go out to coffee with his friends Steve and Roger and their 2Ds. I could afford to pay for my own! And by that time I was even carrying a purse and wearing clothes that fit. I had “splurged” and spent about $150 on a new wardrobe, a fortune in my eyes. I also spent $15 on a Mickey Mouse watch, which I wore for the next 10 years, switching wrists daily, don’t know why. I still cut my own hair back then. As a group, we agreed to get together for Thanksgiving and play Monopoly.

Thanksgiving was fun, and we decided to do fondue and Monopoly and maybe even play cards for Christmas. By that time, Roger and Steve’s sister Charlene had come on course and Paul was renting a room from her in an apartment she had with her 10-year-olddaughter Cami. They also invited a guy named Mark M. to that get together. He was a couple of years younger than me and looked like he’d just fallen off a turnip truck. Steve and Roger worked on construction projects, and Paul was the Chandler of the group. I’m pretty sure no one can tell you what he did for a living. He never had a lot of money, but he never had no money. He did something with numbers or something.

Scientology circles are closed, you don’t associate with people outside your insular group. Steve was with Shari, Roger was with JoAnne. That left Charlene, Paul, Mark and me. Charlene was about 10 years older, and Paul was Paul. He was just “there” to me, part of the scenery.

Our get-togethers became a regular thing. Steve, Shari, Roger, JoAnne, me, Mark, Paul, Charlene and Cami. We got together for New Years and then any weekend whenever all or most of us could. I had most Saturday evenings free. I usually went to the laundry room in the hour between course and dinner and auditing at night and got a load of laundry out of the way every couple of days, so I didn’t have to wait around for a free machine on Saturday afternoons. MSH did her best to give us at least a few free hours on Saturday and we had most of Sunday free. Trudy did not come to those get togethers, she was on course weekends.

When I first met Mark M., he was employed selling office supplies at a Scientologist owned business over the phone. He was proud of what he did. It was shady. He explained that he would sell someone a dozen pens, for example. A couple of weeks later, he would call them and let them know their back order for a gross of pens had come in and ask how they wanted to pay for it. A high percentage of the people bit. I was still in a moral enough frame of mind at that point to be appalled by him telling me that, but kept my mouth shut. About a week after we met, the office supply operation was raided by the LAPD and shut down.

I was getting audited in the evenings during this period. And I hated it. I fought my way through Grade 0. The way it would go is the auditor would ask a question I would get upset, that would read on the meter, the auditor would say “what is that,” I’d make up a pablum answer and we would “run” that until I got a floating needle.

By the time through Grade 1, I was over it. The auditor asked the first question and when he said, “what’s that” I said, “that’s me getting upset.” “I can’t see pictures in my head, I never have.” The auditor said, “end of session” and took me to the examiner where my needle floated,and I was told that was the clear cognition. So, there you have it. I was Clear. What a fraud I felt like. Clears couldn’t possibly feel like I did. But what did I know?

I doing courses in the day, and started my OT levels at night. Based on Scientology beliefs, the “non-interference zone.” Until I reached OTIII, I was to be treated with kid gloves. Yet no one, me included, saw any issue with me training to be a spy during the day and doing OT levels at night.

At one of those get togethers, Steve, who worked on cars as well, had spent the last 2 days trying to figure out why his own car wouldn’t start. All 4 guys were jammed together at the front of the car with their heads under the hood being all manly and stuff.  The girls were talking together. I happened to glance under the hood from the side view and saw a wire sticking up. I said, “where does this wire go?” Steve looked shocked, everyone stood back. Steve reconnected the wire and his car started. They were all just dumbfounded at my amazing OT powers. I kept my mouth shut.

One word Hubbard coined which is not a bad one is “obnosis” - observation of the obvious, although he never got it right in his writings. The deal is, sometimes people are looking so hard for something beneath the surface that they don’t take time to see what’s in front of their face. If any of those men had stopped beating their chests and just looked at the engine from a different angle, it was right there.

And if only I had looked at my life from the viewpoint of anyone else, I would have seen just how bad it had become.

But that’s not how my story goes.

There were 5 Saturdays in April 1977. On the 4th Saturday of that month, I was married to Mark M. in a wedding dress sewn by my mother, him in a suit he borrowed from his big brother, with a baby due the first of November.

Our very scientology marriage ceremony, read directly from the “Ceremonies of The Founding Church of Scientology” book was officiated by his brother, Darryl.

We were moved out of the studio apartment at 1811 Tamarind to a 2-bedroom apartment on the 3rd floor-327, where we would stay until we left LA. Mark had no idea what my job was, he thought I was a full-time student.

In case you hadn’t guessed, no, I didn’t know Mark when I married him. We had gone on a few dates and spent a total of possibly 20 hours together before getting married. Paul told me (on my wedding day) “I always thought I’d be marrying you.” Ummm, we never even dated, but okay.

Us walking up to get married at Antoine’s Restaurant Hollywood CA

I had the opportunity to leave the day after we got married and stayed. We woke up together for the first time the morning after my wedding. We were getting ready to go to Disneyland with my family before they went back home. He said something and I reached up and laughingly ruffled his hair.  He started yelling at the top of his lungs about me never touching his hair. I just stood there. I said softly “this whole thing was a mistake. I’m leaving now.”

He started ridiculing me, telling me “You’re pregnant, how are you going to do this alone, you’ll never make it in your own.” By then I had enough scientology programming that I just decided he was right. He wasn’t violent with me that day. Just loud and made sure to put me in my place. I stood there “with my TRs in” and took it. Then I turned around and walked into the bedroom to get dressed for the day. My illusion of freedom was gone. I was trapped.

I caved that easily, although to the best of Mark’s knowledge, I had money in savings and that’s how the rent was getting paid. (I did have money in savings, not as much as he thought, and that’s now how the rent was being paid). I was, however, buying the groceries and paying for the prenatal care out of my savings. So, how was I not going to make it on my own? It theoretically would have been easier, one less mouth to feed. I came home that night throwing up with a migraine. My mother tried to get me to take some of her migraine pills. I, of course, refused. There was nothing I could do for it except drink 7-up because … Scientology.

On the outside when you see an abusive relationship, people think “run, run, run” but that’s the deal with abuse, both in Scientology and abusive relationships. The abuser doesn’t abuse you physically until long after they’ve broken you mentally. By the time physical abuse starts, the mind is so broken that you don’t realize you can run. Mark didn’t hit me once until he had me totally convinced that I deserved to be hit.

A lot of what I’m telling here is because I did something most people in my position didn’t do. I never stopped writing letters home. My parents never stopped answering. My mother saved all those letters. I didn’t tell them most of what I’m saying here, but those letters with their “acceptable truths” and the photos I sent home allow me to get myself back in the headspace I was in back then. Let’s just say I’m able to “read between mylies.” Otherwise, I’d not remember most of this.

Mark got a small check every month from Shell Oil Company. His grandparents had homesteaded oil rich land which they leased to Shell, the royalties were large enough that they, and their children lived well off them. The grandchildren got a bit of money every month. His mother and father had divorced sometime in the mid-1960s and his father had remarried but had died by suicide shortly after his 45th birthday in 1971. His mother Betty paid for Scientology for any family member who wanted to take courses with her money for quite some time. This stopped in the mid-1980s. Betty’s oldest daughter was never in Scientology. The rest of her children did some Scientology, some of them did a lot. Most of her children, including Mark, did not graduate high school.

After the office supply place was raided, Mark worked sporadically as a carpenter with Steve and Roger and always had a place to spend every penny he earned. Steve was a General Contractor and had burn scars over a large portion of his body from when a heater tipped over while he was laying tiles. He was quite skilled and always able to hunt down some work. We were eating through my couple of thousand in savings rapidly even without me paying the rent.

Fortunately, we had a real kitchen in the new place and I started baking bread at dawn Sunday and baked til dusk. With people stopping by to buy a loaf or two all day, and after earning back my initial investment for supplies, I earned $15 a week or so on bread. Some weeks when I was particularly industrious, I would make sugar cookies, snickerdoodles and chocolate chip cookies while the bread rose and use Trudy’s oven to cook them. She and Tracey got free bread and cookies for the help. Tracey loved helping me bake.

I still didn’t have official duties with the GO, although they had plenty of one off spy-type missions for me to do in the interim. Twice I had to go to several areas gather up all the newspapers the minute they hit the stands because something bad was going to be in it about Scientology. What? I don’t know. It was my job to get the papers, not to read them. A few times, I just went to a restaurant and sat near a group of people eating while “reading a book” and reported back on what they were saying. It was all so James Bond.

Because I was not specifically assigned and because I couldn’t tell anyone what I was doing, the last week of April 1977, Mary Sue let me go to Long Island for a week to see Mark, Roger and Steve. They packed up and left the Monday after our wedding to do a month-long carpentry job there. We called that our honeymoon. Coincidentally, Paul had gotten a new girlfriend on Long Island, so Paul and I drove there together.

A week later, Paul and I drove back from Long Island in his little gold VW while Mark, Steve and Roger stayed there to work for a few more weeks. Paul was unimpressed with his new girlfriend, still pining over “the one who got away” and wondering why the two of us hadn’t gotten married.

We came back to LA. Paul dropped me off. He was staying close by Tamarind in an apartment rented by Charlene. About 1/2 hour later, he came over to see if I wanted to go to dinner with him. My goddaughter Trudy and Tracey were there. I could hear the violins play as Paul and Trudy fell head over heels in love right there in my living room. They lasted a couple of years.

I got right back in the saddle. I spent the first three days of the next week helping Heber and Yvonne set up a checklist regarding CC events which had every step allowing them to go off without a hitch, including food prep, etc. One of those days, Paul helped me do a photo shoot for a promo piece for CC that never materialized. When I left CC on May 4, 1977, I did not realize it would be the last time I would see my friend Yvonne. She was transferred to the new PR Org in June 1977.

Me with Paul, showing him paperwork in one of the photos from the promo piece that didn’t happen.

The left parking lot at LaBrea CC had a driveway with a concrete ramp on it that went slightly uphill. John Travolta was appearing in Kotter at the time and had purchased a used Mercedes. On one of my trips to the LaBrea location in May, 1977, I, 4 months pregnant, helped John push his stalled Mercedes up the ramp of the parking lot. The first photo is a screenshot from google earth. The left entrance hasn’t changed. The second photo shows CC with the whole building occupied by Celebrity Centre back then.

I sat down at a typewriter at the end of the day May 4, 1977 to type up my “mission report” and Diana walked by, stopped and said “oh, you type!” I just shrugged my shoulders and said “yes”. We had typewriters in our home from when I was born, starting with my dad’s old Underwood which put him through college and which I learned to type on. I was hunting and pecking at 3, using touch type method by the time I was in Junior High. My dad treated my mom to an electric early on and upgraded to a Selectric for the family shortly after they came out because we all typed too fast and jammed the keys on my dad’s old machine and even the new electric occasionally.

So yes, I typed around 100 wpm. So, my “hat” was discovered. They had been looking for someone to plant at the FBI, but FBI hired temps through Kelly Services and the temps had to type more than 75 wpm and be trained on a Mag Card II typewriter. That was state of the art back then, a typewriter with a magnetic storage card that could record up to 2 1/2 pages of information, which you could read back into the typewriter line by line and make corrections to a previous document. I know it sounds archaic now, but back then it was quite amazing.

Because only the highest tech offices had these machines, the FBI would foot the bill for Kelly Services to train a competent prescreened person on the machine. And since I was obviously superior, being a Scientologist and all (insert snark font), I was the one for the job! I was told to go to Kelly Services the next morning and started my training immediately (at $3.50/hour!). GO still paid me and I was taking home over $125/week with Kelly while training. I finished my training in 4 days, on May 10, and was scheduled to start at 8:00 am May 16, 1977.

In the meantime, Kelly Services offered me the chance to make some more money while waiting for the other job to start. I jumped at the chance. On May 11-13, I stood on street corners handing out full packs of American Lights cigarettes as an advertising campaign. It was amazing how many people took them! Some would ask “are they good?” I would say “I don’t know, I don’t smoke.” Yep, a pregnant nonsmoker on a downtown LA street corner handing out free cigarettes.

We were allowed to take home a carton a day. Mark smoked Camel non filters, so he turned his nose up at them, but Roger, JoAnne, Steve and Shari were thrilled to get free ciggies. I have never smoked and, when pregnant, threw up if I entered a room with cigarette smoke, so it was kind of an odd thing for me to be doing, but hey, it was money!

Me in my striped blue coveralls, red shirt (and earth shoes!) wearing an American Lights Banner handing out packs of free cigarettes to people on a street corner in downtown LA

I took the checks I was earning while training and while handing out cigarettes, and like a dutiful little wife, opened a joint checking account in the Bank of America which had a branch right next to Kelly Services where I could collect my weekly check and deposit it there. I kept my savings account secret. I took $15 out of it and put it in the joint checking account and opened a savings account with Bank of America with another $15. Mark thought that was all that was left in my savings account by then.

I kept my secret savings account for the remainder of our marriage. It was not a big amount, the most money I ever had in it after splurging on the Mazda was $982, but I used my parents address as the mailing address to mail the statements, they didn’t forward them to me at my request. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I believed I had just enough money hidden from Mark that I could cut and run if it every got bad enough. But just how bad was I going to let it get before I decided it was bad enough?

I was given one more lifeline that last day on the American Lights job. One of the other guys, I don’t remember his name, about my age, who was working the campaign always had a corner near mine. We joked during our morning briefing, we chatted briefly when we went back to refill our bags with more cigarettes (they went fast!) and we usually sat and talked for a few minutes after we finished for the day. I felt like I looked like an elephant, but my pregnancy didn’t really show much to others, I guess. When you’re 5’10” tall and weigh 120 lbs., the belly has a way to go before you look pregnant.

Anyway, the last day of the job, he asked me out to dinner afterwards. I was surprised, because just like Paul, I didn’t see him that way, he was just another person to talk to. I said “oh” he kind of backpedaled. I said, “no, in a different time or place, I’d jump at the chance, but I’m married and pregnant.” Yes, I was wearing my wedding ring, he hadn’t even looked until then. His mouth sort of dropped open and he left the room.

I sat there for a minute by myself. He was my age, maybe even a year or two older, but in that moment, I felt at least 40 years older than him and like I had just kicked a cute little kid. Then I squared my shoulders and walked out of the room, dropped off my weekly timecard and headed for home, savoring the last time I would be wearing coveralls and earth shoes to work.

Monday I was going to be dressed up in a skirt and heels making $4.30 an hour in my quest to help LRH take down the FBI and save the world.