Out of this world
Jeremy Clarke
After chucking-out time a few of us went round to Trev’s to smoke crack through a water-pipe. Water-pipes can be tricky and when it was my go I sensibly asked for assistance. Step forward an unusually introspective Trev, who held the pipe for me and diligently put a flame over the drug, leaving me free to concentrate on drawing the smoke that accumulated above the waterline steadily into my lungs. Then I retired from the mouthpiece, taking my lungful of Class-A smoke with me, and went and sat down on the sofa beside the others, feeling immediately warm and open-hearted.
At this point my phone rang. I fished it out of my pocket and looked at the screen. No name. A number I didn’t recognise. Normally if I don’t recognise the number I don’t answer, but I was feeling more beneficent, nay, left-liberal, by the minute, and I decided to take a chance and answer it. ‘Hi!’ I said.
It was a bright young lady calling from the Church of Scientology. A few months ago I’d taken the stress test advertised in a Scientology-centre window. They connected me to a thought-measuring machine called an ‘emeter’ and an attractive young lady in a low-cut blouse leaned towards me and asked me a succession of searching questions about myself. The needle on the machine was going like a windscreen wiper.
There was no doubt about it, she said, eyeing the needle, I was stressed. The cause, she said, could be located at birth or even in a previous life. But not to worry. All I needed to do was take a basic course in Scientology, then get myself ‘audited’ which is to say treated — using innovative talking therapy designed by the late L. Ron Hubbard to identify those hard-to-get-at pre-incarnation sources of stress and erase them. When can I start? I said.
As luck would have it, there was an academy of Scientology situated on the floor above and a class was starting in half-anhour. I filled in the forms, paid the money, and half-an-hour later I was upstairs in the classroom face-to-face with this Scientology teacher, who, when you got to know him a bit, seemed to know absolutely everything about the teachings of Lafayette Ron Hubbard and zero about anything else. We spent the afternoon comparing my foolish definitions of everyday words with L. Ron Hubbard’s strictly accurate ones, which we looked up together in a dictionary compiled by the Commodore himself. The teacher was a sincere and patient man, I felt, but one who was completely barking up the wrong tree. I was relieved when it was time to go home. As we parted, the teacher shook my hand very affectionately and made me give him an assurance that I’d be back the next day to continue our adventure together.
I never did go back. And in the three months since then, the Church of Scientology have been bombarding my mobile with calls and messages. Each number that they called from I carefully logged in my phone book so that whenever they rang me the word ‘Scientology’ came up on the screen and I knew not to answer it. But her ringing from a new number while I was returning to the sofa after a visit to the crack pipe had wrong-footed me. And now they had me on the end of the line.
‘So why didn’t you come back, Jeremy?’ she said. ‘Did we do anything to upset you?’ I decided to be frank with her once and for all and tell her that there was no way they would ever get me to believe that mental health professionals are evil aliens from the 5th Galactic Invader Force who must be eliminated to make way for the benign rule of the Church of Scientology. Nor that 75 million years ago an evil galactic overlord called Xenu froze the world then blew it up with hydrogen bombs aimed at Hawaii. Nor that we are descended from clams, which accounts for some people being susceptible to jaw-ache or having an irrational fear of being picked up and dropped on to rocks by seagulls.
But before I could begin, I was recalled to the crack pipe. My turn again. Apparently, L. Ron Hubbard regarded politeness and modesty as the most destructive traits an individual can acquire. Nevertheless I asked the bright-voiced woman politely if she would please excuse me for just for one moment. Then, cradling phone between shoulder and ear, I knelt and sucked and inhaled deeply while Trev slowly wafted a flame over the nugget of crack cocaine.
I returned to the sofa, held the smoke in for as long as possible, then exhaled slowly. My word it felt good. Equality? Relativism? Unlimited immigration? Destruction of my culture? Bring it on. All of it. ‘Sorry about that,’ I said. ‘You were saying?’
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