SCIENTOLOGY ATE MY AUNT

My parents both came from Colorado.  There were five members of my mother’s household — my Grandfather and Grandmother, both devout Christian Scientists who didn’t believe in medicine; my mother, the eldest, who since the age of four was permanently welded onto a piano, her sister E., the singer of the family, and their baby brother R., who became my kid uncle.  

When my parents moved four-year-old me from Chico, CA to the houseboats of Sausalito, the rest of her family followed my mother to the Bay Area, where they all set up shop.  My grandparents took up residence in a local trailer park. My mother, who had encountered a lot of side-eye and general shade from the other Chico State University faculty wives for having a rock band  (the posters for which, staple-gunned onto the local telephone poles, featured a tuft of her pubic hair over unzipped short-shorts; the venue information was stuck in Dymo-tape labels around her navel), decided she needed the bigger pond of San Francisco, professionally speaking.  She began playing the electric piano several nights a week at a bar called Zack’s.  

 My uncle, who smoked a lot of weed in his fully shag-carpeted vintage 23-window Volkswagen van, industriously started buying, fixing and flipping houseboats.  

E., the middle sister - a very slight, petite blonde woman -  had never quite found her way in life with any sure footing.  My mother, her older sister, used to bully her mercilessly when she was a child; she once walked up to E. with scissors and cut a thick hank of hair off her head.  E. had been married in the sixties to a dirtbag musician named Fred (cut to a slide show of the two of them singing together with guitars in embroidered hippie vests with waist-long hair and headbands).  From what I could assemble from snatches of adult conversation that I wasn’t supposed to hear, Fred, a male chauvinist pig, had used E. up and spit her out.  

E. moved into a spare room at my mother’s friend Pauline’s house. (Those of you familiar with this Substack may recognize Pauline as the mother of my best childhood friends, the twins that I looked exactly like and was fake triplets with.)  She got a job singing hymns and playing the piano for the local Christian Science church, and drove around in a tiny baby blue Toyota.

E. used to babysit me a lot, since my father was up North, teaching in Chico four days a week and my mother was now curling her hair, painting her eyelids blue and dressing up in black satin clothes (from a boutique called Ruby Begonia) to play piano in bars, almost every night. 

E., perhaps motivated by a lifelong rivalry with my mother,  finally decided to give herself a real push. She got some publicity photos for herself, and got a job in the city singing folk music for some folk-music appreciating dinner crowd. On the poster in the restaurant window, she was standing on a mountainside like Julie Andrews wearing a rust-colored corduroy pant and vest set, playing an acoustic guitar with an embroidered strap, singing wistfully and sincerely into the clouds with her blonde bowl-cut hair falling in thick, open circles from the curlers and her cheekbones slashed with apricot blusher.

Within weeks she met Lance, a man who fell head over heels for her.  Within months they had a hippie wedding in the woods.  Lance came with two sons, 10 and 12, from a previous marriage, who became my instant cousins.  

At this point, I was 11, and extremely devoted to DEVO, whose hazmats suits and robot choreography represented everything I wanted in life.  So for Christmas, I got my 12-year old cousin D. my favorite record, “Duty Now For the Future.”  About 10 days later, my exasperated mother told me that E. had gone to the record store and had a grand-mal meltdown at the clerks, insisting that they give her money back for the record (despite the fact that she had no receipt) because she found the lyrics to the song “Swelling Itching Brain” morally objectionable.  “It’s DISGUSTING,” she had shouted at the clerks, who gave her my Christmas money, probably just to get rid of her.   

It was around this point I started to realize that E. was shrill and judgmental. 

Now, however, she and Lance had decided to become Scientologists after reading Dianetics and having their personalities tested.  E. dove into Scientology with enormous zeal, and with the obnoxious, fevered intentions of the freshly converted tried to sell the whole family on it.  I overheard that when E. hooked my Grandfather, a Christian Science practitioner, up to an E-Meter (a rudimentary kind of Scientology lie detector, dressed up in marbleized bakelite like an accordion) he had said, “Stop, E.  This is pathetic.” I remember seeing a picture on the back of a book, of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard clipping an E-Meter on a tomato plant, to see if it “felt pain.”

As E. And Lance got deeper and deeper into Scientology, we saw less and less of them.  Eventually they moved out of state to become professional Scientologists.  At one point they had a daughter — a first cousin I’ve only met once, who they raised in Scientology schools, and who has never known anything but Scientology.  The daughter apparently had to sign a contract pledging that for the next thousand lifetimes or billion years, she would be a file clerk for a bureaucratic section of the Scientology infrastructure known as “Sea Org.” This cousin got married to another young Scientologist at the age of 17.  From the photos, she looked 14.  My mother was appalled. 

 The teen marriage didn’t last.  We weren’t surprised.  My mother told me that E. And Lance never saw their child — they were ordered by the Scientology bosses to be in different quadrants of the world. 

Decades later, when I was in my thirties, I was writing a column called “The Dregulator: Lowlights of the Yellow Press” in which I covered all of the major tabloids and commented on the more deplorable articles.  Scientology was constantly being pilloried in the press at that point — people who had escaped from it spoke of being imprisoned by the cult.  Naturally, I wrote about these articles. 

Then, one Christmas, E. came home. It had been at least 15 years since I’d seen her last.  She looked like a strange, pale pilgrim, all dressed in oatmeal colors that matched her face and hair and carrying some kind of ritualistic Scientology object with her at all times in a special macrame bag that she never took off, like Mormon underwear.   To my great surprise, she handed me a rather nice gift — a chinchilla muff she had been given in her childhood when my grandfather ran a chinchilla farm.   I thanked her effusively.

“So, look at me,” she said to me, cornering me against the dishwasher.  “I’m not secretly a lizard or anything.  I’m a normal person, right?” 

I hesitantly agreed. 

“So you’re going to stop writing those articles about Scientology now,” she informed me. 

I informed her that I wrote about the tabloids, and if the tabloids were covering Scientology, it was out of my hands. 

This was not the answer she wanted. 

Years later, I was told by other members of the family what happened next.  

Apparently E. had been having her doubts about me for years, ever since she objected to a piece of joke dialogue in a home movie I made with my cousins, in which my 7 year old cousin Abigail, with wild hair, under the spell of a gypsy, says, “I am becoming morally corrupt!  And I like it!” 

E. had apparently decided to take this line at face value.  She argued to all of the members of my family that I was, in fact, morally corrupt, and that the family had to make a choice:  they could either disown me, or she would detach from them entirely. 

I was faintly surprised that my family decided to keep me instead of her, but she hadn’t really been a member of the family in years.  That was the last time I ever saw E. 

When I lived in my vast Brooklyn bachelorette loft, I bought a book by L. Ron Hubbard at a used book store — a hardcover book called “Art,” which had a terrible drawing of a grand piano and a floating artist’s brush and palette on the cover.  

The book was sheer nonsense.  

I used to place it at the foot of my metal door and shoot a small illegal crossbow at it that I bought online.  It was a wildly potent little weapon.  I got the arrows to go through almost half the book.   It was quite filled with holes, the last time I saw it. 

My middle name used to be E., so I decided to disown it.  Eventually I will get around to changing my middle name to X.  

If it isn’t, give your girl a holler: cintraw@gmail.com

Artwork: “Lucky Hanuman,” oil on linen, 2023 Cintra Wilson