When I was like 14, I ran away to Hollywood. I know it's very cliche but I was not trying to become a movie star or any shit like that, I was such a dumb fuck kid that taking off to L.A. to live on the streets seemed like a brilliant idea. Sooo punk rock man, we (my dumb shit friends and I) would meet up with other kids and end up squatting in some train wreck of a building for a couple of months or so before getting burned out and going home. But, while we were there all kinds of crazy shit would go on. We would panhandle all day for beer and drugs and then spend the night getting fucked up and going to shows.
Sometimes we would go back to the squat and party there. One night, this guy (I had been fucking him since my second night in town), went fuck knows where and came back with a severed human head. I'm fairly sure he didn't saw it off himself but it kinda freaked me out anyway. He was holding it by the hair and swinging it around. He later told me that him and some of the other guys had found it out under the freeway overpass. It took me about a week to purge the image (not to mention smell) from my mind and let him near me again. Stupid, I know but I've always had a weakness for for cute gutter-punk types with fucked up problems. The psycho aspect gets me all hot!
Anyway back to the point, even though that was some pretty scary fucked up shit, it doesn't even compare to my near abduction by the Church of Scientology.
We would bum change all up and down Hollywood Blvd., between Gower and La Brea. It was all mucked up with tourists who would pay to take their picture with us. It was also lousy with Scientologists. They would be everywhere, handing out pamphlets, talking to people on the street and trying to get them to go test at their little headquarters around the corner.
We always managed to avoid too much contact with them because they were a little creepy. OK, alot creepy. Anyone who believes in an alien religion, founded by a science fiction writer who spent the majority of his life on a boat frolicking naked with underage boys is alot creepy.
So it went, until one day a few of us were way too wired. It was the kind of wired where really stupid ideas seem absolutely brilliant. We decided to go and find out what was really going on in that blacked out store front they congregated in. For some reason they were always trying to get us street kids to go in and test. My friend Sara said it was because they thought we were all runaways that wouldn't be missed when they drugged us and sold us into white slavery. White slavery not withstanding we bit the bullet and went in.
It was like something out of low budget 80's sci-fi movie. There were all these little cubicles and in each one there was a machine that looked kinda like a lie detector, with all these wires and monitors hooked up.
They took each one of us into a cubicle and told us they were going to test our bio-rhythms, like brain waves and shit. I ended up with little suction cups on my forehead, a cuff around my arm and little electrodes stuck on my fingers. (I was so fucking spun that the heart monitor was jumping all over the place). Then they started asking all sorts of weird questions and seeing how my brain reacted to certain keywords. It was fucking insane! I was just starting to unplug myself and get the hell outta there when the Grand High Headcase (the guy in charge) came over and stopped me.
He put his arm around my shoulders and was starting to edge me towards a door at the back of the room. He was talking all kind of crazy shit about my test results, saying that I had scored unusually high and that they needed to test me further. I tried to pull back but he just held on tighter, telling me that I would be much better off if I went with him. He would see that I didn't have to live on the streets anymore. They would take care of me and take me somewhere nice to live, with people who just wanted to help me.
I started to freak the fuck out!
I screeched for my friends and smacked the shit out of Dr. Strange. We made it out of there eventually but managed to wreck most of their shit and a good number of L. Ron Hubbard disciples in the process . Running out the door and onto the street we didn't stop till we got a few blocks down and around a corner. No one wanted to get arrested. After I calmed down I told everybody exactly what went down.
By that time some of the other kids had joined us and were listening as well. When I finished my story, one of them started laughing, he said that I had just narrowly missed being shipped off to a scientology boot camp. He said that they have these places where it is like a high security research facility, if you score high enough, they take you there and put you through extensive testing and reprogramming. He also said that the point of all that shit was to find the person who was the chosen one, their Messiah. That all those tests were supposed to determine if your body make-up contained a high concentration alien DNA.
L. Ron Hubbard (the pedophile sci-fi writer) had prophesied that this chosen one would be found sometime at the end of the 20th century and I guess they were getting desperate, it was after all 1997. I just laughed off the kid's story, thinking he was trying to fuck with my head and decided to forget all about it. I was cool until one of the girls back at the squat came up to me and told me that Jimmy (the kid) had run away from his parents because they were hard-core scienntologists. They had tried to commit him to a facility because they couldn't control him anymore and he wanted nothing to do with their crazy beliefs.
It was soon after that Jimmy just disappeared, he was there one day and gone the next. Some of the kids said they saw him get pulled into a car off Cherokee, that it was his parents. I decided to move on. I didn't go back to Hollywood for a long time. Even if the kid was full of shit, I had just enough sense not to push my luck.
Now, I haven't thought about that shit in years, I guess I had all but forgotten, until my Doctor's appointment that is. She told me that she wanted me to have a consultation with a post- withdrawal anxiety specialist. I agreed, hoping that I might score some xanax or clonopin for my "anxiety". It was all good until about five minutes into it , when the guy pulled out a set-up that looked like a modern version of the Messiah detector. I about shit myself when he said that he thought I would do best with bio-feedback therapy and tried to hook me up to it. I was out that door so fucking fast it was like that shit you see on Scooby-Doo, where their legs are just a blurry circle going round and round. I thought about it later and came to the decision that a whole roomful of decaying body parts would be preferable to another run in with the Sientologists. They are way fucking scarier than dead stuff.
I occasionally tease my boyfriend C. and tell him that seeing him swinging that head around is what made me fall in love with him.
