Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology by Leah Remini, Rebecca Paley Read Free Book Online Page A

like regular kids. Sherry and I played stupid pranks on the Sea Org boys, like putting shaving cream and Vaseline on the door handles in their dorm. We madethem over and attempted to turn them into break-dancers in the lobby of the motel. We’d find little victories by using the hotel loudspeaker to page people at the Fort Harrison: “Mrs. Dickington, please come to Reception” and then doubling over with laughter. During “libs”—a few hours off or, if you were lucky, a whole day off once every two weeks—we would take the bus with some of the other kids to the mall to walk around, even though we had no money to buy anything.
    During this time, Sherry and I would stay up late in our bunks and share our life stories. Sherry had grown up in the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C., where her mother and stepfather had been full-time staff members. Just a child herself, she was frequently left in charge of the babies and children in the day care, often going on walks where she pushed two strollers at a time.
    Her brother, Stefan, had already joined the Sea Org, a year earlier, and was at Flag when recruiters from the New York Org came to D.C. to find new candidates for the Sea Org. With her parents’ approval, the recruiters agreed to be Sherry’s guardians. So at the age of eleven she was shipped to New York.
    All alone in a big, strange city, she was left to fend for herself. The recruiters were her guardians legally, but they did nothing to care for her. “No one made sure I brushed my teeth or had a winter coat,” she said. She had been there only a week when an executive screamed at her. Sherry called her mom to ask if she could go home, but her mother said she needed to stick it out.
    This type of thinking becomes a parent’s reality. Everything is about the church, the bigger picture. Parents refer back to policy for major and minor decisions, looking to the phrase “What does LRH say?” to advise them. All this is part of “doing something big here.”
    After that, Sherry barely had any contact with her family. Phone calls and letters were rare, and she visited her mother and stepfather for only one week every other year.
    Her stepdad had taught her all these folk songs that she would sing for me at night. I fell asleep to “Where Have All the FlowersGone?” or “You Are My Sunshine” as I sucked on two fingers and held a blanket.
    Even though we were treated the same as adults, we were really just little girls.
    —
    A FTER B EING AT F LAG FOR a number of months, we had really gotten into the Sea Org rhythm. We got on the bus at eight in the morning, were on post for the next fourteen hours, smoked and drank coffee throughout, and developed systems for pretty much everything. I even had a system for dealing with our roach-infested dorm room (turn on the lights and wait for them to scatter before you jump into your bed). Despite the long workdays and specific procedurals, I found openings and made the system work for me.
    One of my tasks on post was to deduct bills from guest accounts—including their food tickets. We staffers were Sea Org members, but the guests were all regular parishioners who had come to participate in auditing and training. Sea Org members and regular parishioners—or the public, as we called them—ate different food in different places. We ate rice and beans night and day or liquid eggs; they ate steak, lobster, roasted chicken, anything you could get in a normal hotel. We weren’t supposed to fraternize with the public in the first place, but with our salary of fifteen dollars a week, we didn’t have the money to eat at the hotel’s restaurants anyway.
    My epiphany was that I was the person taking the tickets! That meant I could easily go into the Lemon Tree and the Hourglass, the public restaurants, or the canteen where they served snack food, and order a chicken sandwich or a piece of chocolate cake under a phony account name. Then in a couple of days, when