My other Scientology story takes place twenty years and two boyfriends later than the first one--I had gotten with Racer (my current and probably permanent old man) a while before; we were feeling the pinch of short funds and flat wallets so I looked online for spot or gig jobs a lot, even running a classified ad on some free pages. One afternoon I got an e-mail from a stranger saying that if I wanted a night's hard work and was available that night, please call this phone number. I did, and was soon speaking to a woman we'll call Mary. She had a pressure washing gig at a few places, she said, and she needed another person or two to make up her crew tonight, and was I interested? I was.
She told me to meet her at the bus stop at Treasure Island at a pretty late hour that night, so I took a long-ass bus ride to the isolated bus stop, sat down, and waited about two cigarettes worth of minutes. It was a cold drizzly night and I was uneasily conscious of the desolation of that bus stop. After my second smoke a lightweight truck came along and slowed down at the bus stop. There was a hard-faced woman a little older than me behind the wheel--she turned out to be Mary, who I'd spoken to earlier. The back of her truck was filled with cleaning supplies and hoses. I climbed aboard and tried to make conversation. She was a strange person, courteous but cold and a bit distant. We were going back to San Francisco to pick up Bob (as we'll call her other crew guy) and start the pressure wash job, she explained.
This we did. Bob was about Mary's age and very clean-cut and square-looking. But with something mildly weird about him, something I couldn't quite put my finger on,like Mary. They obviously knew each other well and were quickly deep in conversation. I was only half-listening until I heard Bob tell Mary about a "great session" he'd had earlier, and how it had helped him "exteriorate a lot of shit". Now, I had learned a fair amount about Scientology by that time and I recognized the word "exteriorate". It's one of their words; nobody but a Scientologist would use the word "exteriorate". He said a little more but Mary cut him off, saying "Our friend Sparrow isn't a member". He shut right up, then so did she. I kept my peace, filing away the new information in my brain.
I understood at the time why they didn't necessarily want to identify as Scientologists to me, an utter stranger to both. People fuck with Scientologists, a lot, after all. So I elected to stay quiet, and after that Bob and Mary were a lot less talkative too.
We got to the first job. It was an old hotel in San Francisco with a marble sidewalk out front. We went over it for an hour with a pressure hose, a broom, and soap powder. Then without a breather we were off for the major part of the job quite a ways down the peninsula. Our destination was the parking area for San Mateo County's entire fleet of garbage trucks. Great big white garbage trucks with the week's accumulation of dust and mud and garbage all over them. Mary, it seemed, had gotten the contract for cleaning the entire San Mateo County garbage-truck squadron. She told me we'd be working until 6 or 7AM, it was bout 1:30.
After a couple of hours I was exhausted and frantic. Mary had hooked up a high pressure hose for me and Bob showed me how to hose down the trucks. It was pretty hard; I'd swoosh one layer of mud off a truck only to spot the next one. Bob and Mary both came to check on me occasionally and never failed to show me a spot I'd missed or tell me how I'd done it wrong. I was sweating like a pig even though it was a cold foggy late night. There were nine rows of garbage trucks and we'd each taken three to work on as our share--I was halfway through my first row when they were both on their second or third. They were tireless, I had to hand that to them. Eventually it got to where I was not only trying to hose down garbage trucks but to hide from my co-workers as well.
At 7AM we quit, finally. I snuck off to smoke a cigarette then came back to get paid. $40. For a night's work. Admittedly I was fairly shitty at it, but nonetheless it stung.
Mary gave me a ride back into San Francisco, but dropped me off half-way across town from where me and Racer lived. It was very early Sunday morning so I waited half an hour for the bus to get me most of the way home. Walked the last few blocks and when I got home I took off my clothes and dropped on our bed without saying a word to Racer and fell into the sleep of the utterly bone tired.
So there you have it. Scientologists worked me nearly to death one night, for a measly forty bucks.
