For You, The Stars
Chapter Four: Sweet Child o’ Mine
Installment 4
Simone wasn’t the only one who gave me a hard time about dumping her for Cecilia. The other Gomers had all liked Simone and Belinda was outspoken about how I had dumped an intellectual for a party girl and how shallow I was to do it. This pissed me off. Who was she to police my feelings?
Part of it was Belinda’s crunchy-granola feminism. She didn’t like that Cecilia dressed so provocatively. She figured that was proof enough that I had chosen a partner for the wrong reasons. Cecilia tried to be friendly but we stopped going over to the other house together after a few cold receptions.
Meanwhile, Simone continued to express her displeasure toward me. Back in the office on Monday, I picked up the phone at my cubicle and before I could say “hello” or identify myself I was greeted by Simone screaming in my ear: “Stay out of my fucking neighborhood!” Then she slammed down her receiver.
I told the architects what was going on and they found it kind of amusing but I was a little worried that she was becoming deranged. I asked the receptionist not to put any calls through to me but to just take messages.
I even went over to the half-empty part of the office to make a long-distance call to my mom. She and I would never openly discuss sex but I did tell her that Simone had been in love with me and that I hadn’t reciprocated the feelings. My mom spoke euphemistically, saying, “Well, sometimes, when a woman gets intimate with a man, it can be difficult to let go.” It was kind of obvious but I felt like I was running out people who were willing to take my side and your mother is always on your side.
A few days after the second phone call I got a letter in the mail written in Simone’s childlike hand. Inside was a folded piece of paper from a notepad. Out of it fell the torn up pieces of a picture of the two of us together from the previous summer. In case I didn’t fully understand the message of a torn up photo, she had also scrawled a one-word message on piece of yellow paper:
SCUM!
Cecilia and I were still spending a few hours on the phone every day, some during the day while I was at the office pretending to work on spreadsheets and some at night as I sat on the stairs till I was too tired to keep my eyes open. We did that stupid “You hang up first” thing, or we’d ask each other, “Are you still awake.”
We agreed that I would come up and spend the next weekend at her sister’s place. I hadn’t met her sister or brother-in-law yet, nor her neice, of course. To get up to her neck of the woods I had to take the N-Judah downtown and then catch a bus to San Rafael that left once an hour. I could have brought my bag of clothes to work on Friday and left directly from there but I figured I’d get an early start Saturday and that would be just as good.
In the morning I was downtown by 9 am but I missed the bus by minutes. I thought about going to the Psychedelic show, which was nearby, and maybe pick up a box of whippets and a dispenser, when a moderately attractive woman approached me and asked if I’d like to take a personality test.
I’d seen these people hanging around this area before. They were scientologists from the nearby temple or clubhouse or whatever they called it. I was bored, so I said, sure. I’ve always been a sucker for quizzes and puzzles.
She took me to their building and sat me down in a waiting room before mumbling something and running off. I picked up a comic book that turned out to be about how we’re all traumatized in the womb when our parents have sex during our mother’s pregancies. It had a strangely clinical, graphica cartooning style, almost like a coloring book. The whole place seemed funny. The cute girl came back with a sheaf of paper and a pencil and told me to take the multiple-choice quiz. She’d be back in 10 minutes.
It took much less time than that to finish the quiz. Most of it sounded like vague psychobabble. “Do you ever worry” kind of stuff. I tried to answer it honestly because I was curious about what the results would be. It was tempting to game the test and try to figure out what they were gunning for, but even though I didn’t have any faith in their system, which I considered a cult, I did have in the back of my mind a desire to diagnose myself and look for answers and solutions to thing like anxiety and why life was sometimes harder for me than I thought it ought to be.
After finishing the quiz I sat for another three or four minutes until my recruiter came back. She sat down with a key and “scored” my answer sheet. Then she looked at a table and plotted some points on a grid that was supposed to show me how I stacked up in a number of mental and personality areas. The grid was set up with a normal median axis in the middle and you could score higher or lower than that average point in about five or six different categories.
Wonder of wonders but I was in real trouble! Turned out I was barely normal at all. I only skirted the break-even point in two categories and I was well into the negative in the rest. This almost made me laugh out loud at their audacity. With an egotistical neurotic like me they could easily have convinced me that their system was accurate by suggesting that I was seriously deficient in two or even three categories as long as they were willing to score me high or at least neutral in the rest, but they had way overplayed their hand.
The next step was a sales pitch. With my dangerous levels of negativity or whatever they called it, I should start immediately by taking one of their introductory courses, for a fee naturally, and consider buying some strange electrical contraption that would help me become “clear,” I think was the term. She outlined a whole curriculum I’d need to pursue to get my head on straight. At this point I was looking at my watch because I didn’t want to miss the next bus too.
I thanked the girl for letting me take the test and said I wanted some time to think about it but she was strangely reluctant to show me the way out. She asked me if I would speak with someone else. I still had nearly half an hour and I didn’t want to make a scene so I said sure.
I was ushered into another room where a pimply guy about my age wearing an ill-fitting outfit that looked a bit like a navy dress-white uniform sat me down to talk. He began by flattering me. Instead of dwelling on my troublesome scores, he admitted that I was a higher calibre person than they usually came across and that I might be cut out for their elite leadership organization.
“Would I get a sailor suit too?” I asked him, but he didn’t seem to get the joke. In fact, most of the people I’d met in the center had a kind of glazed lack of affect. They didn’t pick up on my sarcasm at all, and sarcasm was my primary mode of expression back then. “Yes,” he said, pointing proudly at the gold braid on his too-short sleeve cuff and the bars on his too-loose collar. He showed me photos of a yacht or cruiser that the organization apparently owned and told me how their founder, whom he called Dr. Hubbard, had modeled the eliter organization after the U.S. Navy.
At this point I was getting somewhat creeped out. I started making excuses about having to catch my bus. “There’ll be another bus,” he interrupted me, sounding like an automaton. “I don’t want to be any later,” I said.
In the end they asked for a phone number where they could follow up and, feeling flustered, instead of just writing down a false one I wrote the number of the larger Gomer house, figuring I wouldn’t be hanging out there much.
When I got back to the bus stop in the tenderloin the bus was idling and after I got on and paid my fare it closed its doors and immediately pulled away from the curb. I felt like I had just escaped by the skin of my teeth. I kept shuddering about the weird feeling those people had given me, preaching that their system would resolve my personal problems and make me feel whole and productive with apparently zero awareness of how creepy and unappealing it was making them.