The Game

e-meters, devices that measure skin conductance. When curious civilians come into the church, they are hooked up to e-meters and asked various questions. Afterward, the interviewer goes over the results with them and tells them why they need to join the Church of Scientology to fix their problems.
    Students were paired up in the classroom, role-playing the various scenarios that can occur during an interview. They had large books spread out in front of them. Everything the interviewer (or auditor, in Scientology terms) utters—every response to every contingency—was contained in those books. Nothing was left to chance. No possible convert was going to slip through their hands.
    What they were rehearsing, I realized, was a form of pickup. Without a rigid structure, rehearsed routines, and troubleshooting tactics, there would be no recruitment.
    One of my main frustrations with sarging was repeating the same lines over and over. I was getting tired asking girls if they thought spells worked or if they wanted to take the best friends test or if they noticed how their nose wiggled when they laughed. I just wanted to walk into a set and say, “Love me. I’m Style!”
    But after watching the auditors, I began to think that perhaps routines weren’t training wheels after all; they were the bike. Every form of demagoguery depends on them. Religion is pickup. Politics is pickup. Life is pickup.
    Every day, we have our routines, which we rely on to make people like us or to get what we want or to make someone laugh or to endure another day without letting anyone know the nasty thoughts we’re really thinking about them.
    After the tour, Cruise and I ate lunch in the Celebrity Center restaurant. He was clean-shaven and ruddy-cheeked, wearing a dark-green crewneck T-shirt that fit his body like a glove. Over a healthy slab of steak, he discussed his values. He believed in learning new things, doing the work required of him, and competing with no one but himself. He was strongwilled, centered, and resolute. Any thinking that must be done, any turmoil that must be resolved, any issue that must be handled was solved first and foremost in a dialogue between Tom Cruise and himself.
    “I don’t really keep counsel with others,” he said. “I’m the kind of person who will think about something, and if I know it’s right I’m not going to ask anybody. I don’t go, ‘Boy, what do you think about this?’ I’ve made every decision for myself—in my career, in my life.”
    Cruise leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows in his lap. He was low in his seat and his head was parallel with the surface of the table. As he spoke, he expressed himself through gestures as subtle as changing the aperture of his eyes. The guy was born to sell things: movies, himself, Scientology, you. Whenever I criticized myself or made an excuse for myself, he jumped down my throat.
    “I’m sorry,” I said at one point, when discussing an article I’d written. “I don’t mean to sound like one of those writer guys.”
    “Why are you apologizing? Why not be a writer guy? Who are those guys? They’re talented people who write about things that people are interested in.” Then he continued, mockingly, “No, you don’t want to be one of those guys who’s creative and expressive.”
    He was right. I had thought I was done with gurus, but I needed one more. Tom Cruise was teaching me more about inner game than Mystery, Ross Jeffries, Steve P., or my father ever had.
    He stood up and slammed his fist down on the table, hard—AMOG-style. “Why don’t you want to be one of those guys? Be one of those guys, man. I mean it. That’s cool.”
    Okay. Cruise says it’s cool. Case closed.
    As we talked, I realized that out of all the people I’d met in my lifetime, no one had their head screwed on more tightly than Tom Cruise. And this was a disturbing thought, because nearly every idea Tom Cruise expressed could be found somewhere in the massive writings of L. Ron Hubbard.
    I discovered this when Cruise had his personal Scientology liaison bring a heavy red book to the table. He opened it to the Scientology code of honor, and we discussed it point by point—set a good example, fulfill your obligations, never need praise or approval or sympathy, don’t compromise your own reality.
    When Cruise promised to send me an invitation for the center’s annual Scientology Gala, I began to worry that this wasn’t about an article for Rolling