LONESOME SQUIRREL by STEVEN FISHMAN © 1991 Steven Fishman. Non-profit reproduction is encouraged. CONTENTS Chapter Title Page 01 Raw Meat Off The Street 4 02 Life is Just A Present Time Problem 25 03 Theta Doesn't Grow On Trees 36 04 If You Blink, You Flunk 85 05 In Guardians We Trust 95 06 A Case Of First Suppression 105 07 The Environment Is A Nice Place To Visit, 116 But I Wouldn't Want To Live Here 08 Does Anybody Have A Bridge They Can Sell Me? 127 09 Romancing LaVenda 138 10 A Valence In Every Port 171 11 Families Are Nothing But Trouble 183 12 Blank Scripts For Acting Classes 202 13 Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, But We Can Help 214 14 For Less Than Two Million Dollars, 241 You Could Set Half The World Free 15 Death Of A Sailorsman In A Billion Year Time Warp 289 16 History Can Always Be Re-Written 308 17 Crusading For Source Perforce Of Course 325 18 We Always Deliver What We Promise 341 19 When You Yield To Temptation You Always Get Burned 391 20 Charity Doesn't Begin At Home 426 21 If Mary Sue Could Do It, You Can Do It 442 22 It's Easier To Bury One's Mistakes 473 23 Paying The Price For A Fate Worse Than Death 487 24 Earning The Protection Of The Church 522 25 A Race To Get To Sea As The Captain Of A Sinking Ship 542 26 Messiah In The Spin Bin 573 27 Epilogue: Getting Really Clear 602 Footnotes Quoted References of L. Ron Hubbard 609 and Scientology Organizations Appendix A Squirrel's View of the Eight Dynamics, the Ethics Conditions 622 and the Bridge to Total Freedom CHAPTER ONE Raw Meat Off The Street My philosophy of life had been a very simple one. God gets pleasure in Heaven only when we have pleasure on Earth. Every time I reaped the harvest of a lady of the night, I thought of how much I was helping my Creator, who was just sitting up there, watching us from afar. How bored he must be, not to be able to participate in the joys of the human heart in close proximity to human flesh. Thinking about the Lord during lovemaking brought him in, and made him feel a lot better. The greatest sin there was, I believed, was to overlook God. If I were good to him, perhaps he might provide a glimpse into what truth is, and why we are really here on Earth. It was a Saturday night in Spring of 1974, and there was the sound of passionate sterility in the air. Much the same as I did every weekend, I was cruising the forgotten downtown area of Fort Lauderdale for prostitutes. I had just come from the Greyhound Terminal several blocks north of Broward Boulevard, waiting to see if there were any new runaways coming off the 8:45 bus from Daytona. No one who came off the bus interested me. I had a compulsion for some cough drops, so I went to Cunningham Drugs, on the corner of Federal Highway and Broward Boulevard, and bought some Pine Brothers Cherry, and on the way out of the store, an attractive 20 years old with the smell of enthusiasm stopped me to show me a book. It was Dianetics: The Modern Science Of Mental Health, written by L. Ron Hubbard. It did not impress me as much as her legs did. I was used to handling salesmen that came into the door of my father's shoe store, trying to sell us shoes that they could not sell to anyone else. "Why should I buy this book?", I asked. "Because the book is about you!", she answered. I asked her for her name. It was Barbara. "What does this book have to do with me?", I inquired. "It deals with the part of you that makes you fail", she said. "Who is failing?", I laughed. "I own a very successful shoe store in Pompano Beach!" Evaluating my answer carefully, Barbara then asked me, "How are you doing with your current relationship?" I thought to myself, "How the hell did she know I was out here picking up hookers?" So I bought the book for $4.00, and gave her my home address in Pompano Beach for her mailing list. I still had $25.00 in my pocket to find my date for the night. The book sat in my library, in size place, next to a pocket edition on raising parakeets that I got from the Paperback Book Club. I did not read it until five years later. In the next few weeks I received a great deal of mail from The Dianetics Center of Fort Lauderdale. They asked me to come down to their offices to take a free personality test. I threw it all in the garbage. "Some bait and switch ripoff!", I thought. Why didn't I read the book? I had glanced at it, before filing it in the cabinet. It looked boring and irrelevant. I never had any trouble falling asleep, and I didn't have to read before closing my eyes for the night. My father did not like the fact that I was running around with prostitutes. He would register his objection by running personal advertisements in the Sun Sentinel Newspaper. In March of 1975 a girl named Diana Young called and spoke to me on the telephone for over five hours, but she refused to make a date. The following day she called again, and conversed with me for six and one- half hours. But similarly, she would not even give me her telephone number. Her voice felt very pleasant to me, and I wanted to meet her. But I was annoyed with the mystery of it all. Two days later, when she phoned again, I told her that if I could not take her out on a date, she should not bother calling me back again. She compromised, and told me to meet her in a small park near the Lauderhill Mall, on Friday night, at 7:30 P.M. This annoyed me, but I was intensely curious, and although I was apprehensive about being alone in a dark place and not knowing who to expect, I went there, and at 7:45 P.M., a tiny 3 foot 9 inch girl in a wheelchair came rumbling along the disarrayed grass to meet me. That was Diana. She was a Thalidomide baby, a dwarf, or "little person" as she called herself, and was a victim of a dangerous drug that pregnant women had unwittingly taken in the late fifties. I knew at once why she had been so reluctant to meet me. She had told me that she had an "unusual build", but she had refused to elaborate. But she was very friendly and reassuring, and said that she had invited some friends over to her house that evening, including some other man who had answered her personal ad. She even hinted that some of the girls that she invited over were over five feet tall. So I went back to the house with her, and I played honky tonk music on her piano for her during the next hour, and met her father Richard, a pharmacist whom she called "Rufus", who was very kind and good to her, inasmuch as her real mother had abandoned her at birth. Later in the evening her friends began to arrive. There was her closest acquaintance Gail Gaber, a jolly, plump girl who went to the Fort Lauderdale Art Institute, claiming to be a "white witch", and loved drawing pictures of rabbits all over the wall. She had decorated Diana's room with all sorts of bunnies and hares. Gail had brought a girlfriend of hers from the art school, a very attractive streaky- blonde street-wise sarcastic but extremely naive girl with braces, wearing a wide light blue hat and a denim jacket with the name "Metra" sewn on it. I was immediately interested in her. She had an aroma of crunchy feathers in a grey mist, and because I could not tell whether this was perfume or sweat, it of course stimulated me. Some other friends came later. A very profound blind boy with a keen interest in poetry, philosophy and clairvoyance named Mark Damien Fox was driven over to visit Diana. There was a guy named Roland who knew Gail and the others, and afterward a very awkward man about thirty drove up in his Jaguar, extremely overdressed in a white silk ruffled jump suit. This must have been Diana's date from the newspaper ad, we all thought, and it was. He was a very successful and independent professional photographer who also had his own trucking business, and owned several other classic cars, including an old 1953 Packard. He lived in an expensive condominium known as the Fairways Riviera in Hallandale with his daddy, and his name was Steve Goldberg. We all went out that evening for dessert at a Denny's Restaurant, located on the corner of State Road 84 and State Road 441 in Southwest Fort Lauderdale, next to the La Quinta Motor Inn. How nostalgic it is to remember that. Both of those places were torn down since that time to make way for the new Interstate 595. I found Metra very interesting, but she seemed to enjoy ignoring me. She refused to tell me her last name, and was not about to give me her telephone number.