This is an essay I wrote in 2005 about the drifter who lived with my family for a year…and how we finally “took care” of him.
-Pete

“Just dig!” I say to my mom. “It’s going to get too cold soon, and then we won’t be able to shovel anymore.” I swing the pick ax several more times at the frozen dirt, trying to loosen up the rocks and frozen chunks of soil so that she can shovel them out.

“It looks like this is gonna a pretty shallow grave,” says my mother, huffing as she scoops out another shovelful of stones and dirt.

“Whatever…As long as he fits. Dad says the soil is acidic here, so the body will decompose pretty quickly.”

“Oh! His body is already stiff!” says my younger sister, fighting back tears.

“Don’t worry, just a few more inches,” I reassure her.

The guest bedroom. First floor. Back corner of the house. Smells like moth balls…or old paint…or something like that. It’s in the back, down a long hallway stacked on either side with old unsorted papers, boxes of children’s toys and Christmas decorations, bookshelves brimming with books. It’s the one pristine room in the house, amid all the clutter of twenty years of packratism. Unlike the rooms around it, the guest room sits there, completely empty, always waiting for our next visitor. There’s a bed, usually made with a fresh set of sheets and a blanket or two on it, ready for the very likely chance that we’ll have an unexpected guest.

Usually the people that sleep in the guest room are friends of the family, just pulling through town. That’s not saying they’re “usual” by any means. My dad’s oddball friends always show up at the most unexpected times. “Leggs,” my dad’s wildman friend from Kentucky has made the guest room his home on several occasions. He shows up at four in the morning, dressed in buckskin leggings, pounding on our door with his feral Grizzly Adams grin, hooting and hollering in his backwoods Kentucky drawl. My father, of course, welcomes him in with open arms. Leggs usually brings with him a good dozen lethal weapons (sheath knives, concealed handguns, battle axes, crossbows, spears, flint blades, assault rifles—you name it) with him, “For protection.” He places them carefully around the room, in strategic (and sometimes decorative) locations to make the room feel homier. Leggs may be illiterate and missing that finger from that bar fight where he killed a man – but “when the apocalypse comes,” as my dad often assures me, “you’ll want him on your side.”

The guest room is also a regular rest-stop for the 400 pound mammoth that everybody calls “Little John.” He makes that his bed when he travels from New Hampshire down south to Renaissance fairs to sell his hand-cast medieval ironware. The bed bows and creaks under his weight, and probably even has a permanent indent from John’s many overnight stays, but its antique oak frame has stood strong so far.

Then there are the exchange students. Far too many of them to count (even if you’re using your fingers and your toes). Most of them stayed with us for a few weeks or so. A lot of shy Japanese girls just passing through on their way to Niagara Falls, who are gone before we learn their names. “Was that one Rumiko or Yamada or Asanuma?” “Meh. It doesn’t matter.”

Paul, our German exchange student who could juggle and ride a unicycle at the same time, called the guest room home for an entire year. So did Christian, our lovely juvenile delinquent from Chile, who lived in the guest room when he wasn’t out painting graffiti and getting high. Shinobu, from Japan, lived there for a year too; she liked pressing flowers and washing dishes. Now the room is home to Ika, an awkward fifteen-year-old from the Republic of Georgia whose greatest joy comes from Photoshopping his head onto the bodies of the male celebrity lovers of Angelina Jolie and Halle Berry. The photos of Ika holding hands with Angelina on the red carpet are creepy beyond words.

Anyhow, our guest room has been home to more colorful characters than you could fit in a coloring book. My dad is just too inviting; he loves adding a fresh face to the mix to make things more exciting around the house…no matter how awkward, unsettling, intimidating, disturbing, or downright scary that face might be. Unfortunately for the rest of my family, when there was a knock on the door last September, my dad was the one to answer…

“Hello there! My name is Tim. I couldn’t help but notice that you have an awfully big house here. You wouldn’t happen to have a room you’d be willing to rent me, would you?”

Standing in front of my father was a balding, sixty-year old man with a ring of gray hair circling his head, and thick coke-bottle glasses pressed up tight against his face. He spoke in such a suave, rich baritone voice, that my father hardly noticed the black sweatpants and Velcro shoes that he was wearing.

In fact, my dad invited him right in. Ever the entrepreneur, it sounded to him like an easy way to make some money… The guest room was open, and my dad could use some extra money to help him pursue another one of his passions (the flavor of the moment was growing flax fiber in order to make his own linen cloth). Little did he expect that six months later, Tim would still be living in our guest room, having never paid my family a dime.

“So where you from?” my father asked.

“Santa Barbara. I’m here doing research for a documentary on Wyatt Earp and the O.K. Corral.”

“You’re make documentaries? My son wants to be a documentary filmmaker!”

“Well, I’m a mathematician by trade, but documentaries are a passion. I just finished a study on the odds of Las Vegas roulette wheels. I’m going to publish a book that could make you a very rich man.”

My dad ate up every word. He found Tim fascinating, and like every fascinating character he ever meets, he decided that he had to make friends with him—and let him move into our house. They agreed on a fee of $400 for two weeks’ board, and then Tim was going to move out, and ride off into the sunset (Wyatt Earp style).

Being away at college, I didn’t find out about Tim for a few days. I love my family, but I’m not the type to speak to my parents unless I have a specific reason. When I finally did call home to inform my mom that I needed more minutes added to my cell phone, she broke the news. Of course, she introduced Tim first as a documentary filmmaker, to which I replied “Oh, neat!” I asked her about more specific details, and she told me he was a sixty-year-old man from California, doing research on Wyatt Earp and the O.K. Corral, and he would be staying at our house for two weeks.

I grilled my mother for a long time about the details of this mystery man: where was he from, did he have any family, what was his last name? She didn’t know the answer to any of these questions. Apparently, Tim didn’t talk much about himself.

So finally, I asked her “So what do you think of him?”

A long pause.

“He’s eccentric.” That’s my mom’s code speak for saying that she didn’t like the guy. “Let’s just say, I won’t mind it when he’s gone.”

Despite my mother’s less-than-glowing description of Tim, I was eager to meet him myself, especially since I am such a documentary-a-holic. I wanted to find out about this Wyatt Earp film.

Three weeks later, I got my chance. It was Fall Break, and I went home to visit my family over vacation. I found out that Tim had talked my dad into letting him stay at our house for another week, and he would pay my parents in full when he moved out. On my arrival home, I hugged my parents and sisters, and asked excitedly about meeting our latest boarder. Before I got an answer, I heard across the house the foreboding sound of heavy footsteps: boom boom, boom boom, boom boom. They were coming toward me, up the stairs to our family room. Moments later, a crazy-looking old man wearing black sweatpants and Velcro sneakers stomped through the doorway. He moved like Tyrannosaurus Rex, leaning forward, his powerful legs smashing down as he stared straight ahead, his arms hanging loose in front of him. I put on my best smile and went over to shake his hand. Tim shook back with a fierce, bear-like handshake—the kind where you feel your arm might be ripped off. Scarcely after I had said my name to him, Tim said to me: “Your father says you’re good with computers, Peter. Could you come down to my room and help me with my computer?” The suddenness of his request rubbed me the wrong way, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and agreed. After all, I wanted to see this guy’s documentary. Before I headed downstairs, I turned to see the reactions of my family. They had already scattered—except for my dad who said “Go ahead, Pete, help him!”

An hour later, I found myself nearly pulling my hair out as I tried to explain to Tim how to use his computer scanner to digitize his photos, and then email them to his friends using his laptop. Besides being entirely computer illiterate, he was half deaf, spoke in an increasingly loud and deep voice, piling up question after question and not listening to any of my answers. Eventually, I threw my hands in the air and just scanned and emailed his pictures for him, rather than teach him how to do it himself. I was already beginning to see why my mother and sisters tried so hard to avoid him.

After I had satisfied Tim’s computer questions for the time being, I asked him to show me some of the footage from his much-ballyhooed Wyatt Earp documentary. He dug out from a duffel bag on his floor a stack of early-‘90s VHS tapes and proudly popped one of them into his double-deck VCR. What I saw amounted to little more than a home video of a bunch of guys in cowboy suits running around in a tourist recreation of the O.K. Corral. It was shot on one of those big VHS camcorders that families used to shoot home videos of birthday parties and weddings with; the video quality bordered on horrific. Tim excitedly explained the concept for his film to me: after he had read through hundreds and hundreds of pages of transcripts and testimony from the trial of Wyatt Earp, he discovered a conflicting testimony that one of the cowboys killed in the shoot-out had been shot by a “horse” rather than a “house.” His entire documentary was based on a conspiracy theory over a 120 year-old typo. Tim looked at me, nodding elatedly. “You’re studying documentaries. Would you like to edit it for me? It’s all shot already.”

“Um…yeah…I’ll think about it,” I replied.

Just over Fall Break, Tim was turning out to be quite pushy and quite the creep. On a regular basis, he would stomp upstairs and call my family together for an announcement, like “I’ve rented Tango from the library. Come together everyone, we’ll have a family movie night!” The first few times, my family played along, thinking that Tim was just a lonely old man who wanted a family of his own; we might as well be nice to him. But when he started doing this every night, my family started to come up with excuses. The worst part was that more often than not, the film Tim wanted us to watch was Tango, Tim’s favorite movie of all time, which he rented it incessantly over the next few months.

Tim also decided that he wanted to play music with my sisters. Every day, he would schedule a meeting time with my sisters downstairs at the piano, so that they could play a duet. My sister Sara (age 17, who played saxophone) and Clara (clarinet, age 14) went the first few times out of pity, but after they started skipping meetings on a regular basis, Tim started to get more and more assertive about the duets. My sisters, on the other hand, began to get more and more put off by Tim’s “skeezy” (as they called them) advances. My dad, however, encouraged them to play along: “You might learn something!”

A few weeks after I returned back to college, I learned that Tim hadn’t left yet, and still hadn’t paid my family a cent. Tim would help out with occasional chores, like walking the dogs or unloading the dishwasher, but most of the time he just made messes and dirtied dishes. Worse yet, my father had given him free reign of the kitchen, and he was eating all of my family’s food. Ten or so times a day, he’d tromp into the kitchen and start fixing himself something to eat. Although he still promised to pay my family for the room and board, it was becoming increasingly clear that he was never going to pay. My mom told him that if was going to keep eating from the kitchen, he would have to buy food to replace what he had eaten. Tim took this very seriously, and every few days, he would come home with a huge bag of food – which appeared as if it came from a homeless shelter. He would stock our cupboards with sacks of bread heels, government cheese and more Ramen noodles than an army could consume. “Thanks, Tim. Thanks a lot,” my mom would say.

As my mother and my sisters got more and more fed up with Tim, my dad developed a strong working relationship with him. My father’s latest million dollar idea was to create a new industry to cultivate flax seeds on the East Coast of the United States. In his mind, he had worked out the designs of a new machine that would harvest, thresh and strip the linen fiber from the plants in one single step on the field. He was also in talks to purchase a defunct fiber mill in South Carolina to be his base of operations for this process. So far, of course, this was all just a big idea in the mind of a dreamer, but my father would talk about it endlessly to anyone who would listen. Tim, the only one willing to put up with my dad’s dream talk for more than a few minutes, soon became my dad’s partner on this project. In his hours and hours of free time everyday, Tim would research flax on the Internet and write up reports and grant proposals for the flax project. My mother kept on prodding my dad to kick Tim out, but he kept on delaying it, partly because Tim was now a good friend, but mostly to help perpetuate his latest pipe dream.

Eventually, my mom had had enough. After about the fifth month of Tim living with us, my mother had stopped talking to Tim completely. She either ignored him, or glared at him as he stomped through the kitchen and the family room. Tim got the message and reciprocated. He knew that she wanted him out, and he did everything he could to stay away from my mother so that she wouldn’t kick him out sooner.

Over Winter Break, I recall my mother getting into a loud, angry argument with my father about Tim when he was just across the room. Fortunately for Tim, he’s half deaf and didn’t hear any of it.

“He’s a mooch! He’s just using us, Bob! Can’t you see?!”

“But Cheryll, I need him for the flax project!”

“Forget about the stupid flax! This guy is ruining our family!”

But my dad still dragged his heels. Meanwhlie, Tim continued slinking around the house, enjoying his free ride.

Eventually, the end of January came, and it was time for my dad’s annual trip to Florida with Leggs to go spear-fishing. Tim, of course, was still freeloading off my family. Although my dad was glad to let Tim stay, my sisters, my mother and I had given my father an ultimatum: Tim had to go. But before my father built up the guts to go tell Tim that he had to leave, Leggs was pounding on our front door, telling my dad he was ready to take off for the south for three weeks. To make a long story short, my dad ended up leaving and doing nothing about Tim, telling my mother that he would take care of it when he got back. As soon as my dad was out of sight, my mother vowed that Tim would be gone by the next day.

Now, it just so happened that at the same time as my father had left for his trip down south, our oldest dog, a twelve-year-old beagle name Tubbs, was on him death bed. We were all sad to see him go, but she was an old dog that had lived a full life, and she had been struggling for the past two years. Although Tim was technically supposed to take Tubbs for a walk everyday, as per the rules my dad had established when he realized that Tim wasn’t going to be paying any rent, Tim had neglected to take care of the dog for several weeks. In the meantime, my mother and I were feeding him, comforting him and walking him during his final days. As we expected, during the third week of January, Tubbs finally passed away. Although it still pulled at our heartstrings, we knew it was coming. Tim, on the other hand, was completely oblivious.

The day that Tubbs died, my mother went to confront Tim about taking care of the dog. She asked him when the last time he took Tubbs for a walk was, the last time he fed him, and the last time he gave him a bath. Tim’s answer to all these questions was “this morning,” which was a blatant lie: Tubbs was dead.

Rather than get in a yelling match with Tim, my mother merely signaled for him to follow after her. She took him to the blanket where Tubbs laid, dead, and my sisters and I sat mourning. When Tim saw this, his mouth dropped. He apologized profusely, telling my mother that he was very sorry, and it wasn’t his fault, and he took care of Tubbs every morning except for this one and so on. But he knew he was digging himself into a hole.
My mother just turned to him when he finally lulled on his apology and told him: “I want you out of here. Today!”

Tim tried to reason with her. She would have none of it. “Today!”

Within a few hours, Tim had all of his belongings packed up in his van, with California plates. Tim left our house without a single good-bye. And we haven’t heard a word from him since.

There it sits, in a forgotten corner of the MGM Grand Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. It’s surrounded by a hallucinogenic collection of modern slot machines — Deal or No Deal, Wheel of Fortune and Alien Vs. Predator, exploding in trippy displays of lights and music. And amidst it all, is this humble orange and chrome 1970s-era table, lit from the inside with a few incandescents and the dim digital read-outs of a bygone era. Inside the table, stand five plastic horses, lined up at the starting line of a miniature track decorated with little trees and bushes like a middle school diorama project. And gathered around the table is a collection of rough, tired, hard-on-their-luck gamblers, who are so down and out that all they’ve got left is a plastic cup full of quarters, which they dutifully pump into the table.

But then, something magical happens: the bell rings, the crowd leans in, the gate lifts up — the horses are off!

“Come on #2! Kick it in! Kick it in!”

“That’s what I like to see, #5! Keep it up!”

“Goddammit #3, don’t do this to me! Turn it around!”

The five plastic horses, mounted on a groaning old conveyer belt, jerk forward, fall back and surge ahead, their legs cemented in place despite the dramatic thunder of hooves erupting from the table’s aging speaker. The horses round the corner, and the crowd jumps to their feet, yelling encouragement to their favorites. Suddenly, horse #2 and #4 pull up from behind, jerking forward maniacally down the final stretch, and cross the finish line in a photo finish. Half the table erupts in a cheer, the other half in a groan, and the unmistakable sound of a hail of quarters striking metal fills the room.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is Sigma Derby.

The greatest electronic horse racing game the world has ever known.

Sigma Derby is simple in concept. Five horses race around the track, and you bet on the two that you think will come in first and second (apparently, this is called a “quinella” in horse racing lingo, but I don’t speak that language). At the beginning of each race, players are given odds on each of the ten combinations, ranging from 2:1 to 200:1. Bet a quarter on a winning combination, and if it hits, you get a straight odds payout.

The real magic of Sigma Derby isn’t the odds or the payout, though — it’s the fact that there are ten people sitting around a table, watching little horses race. And talk about a race! Sigma Derby makes these races fun: horses fall back, shoot up from behind, and just about every race comes to a dramatic, nail-biting conclusion. Hence all the cheering and excitement. It’s really an experience. And at 25 cents a bet, how could you afford not to make a fool of yourself playing the Derby?

Sigma Derby’s Last Stand

Unfortunately, that may all come to an end soon…

Sigma Derby machines used to be a common sight in Las Vegas casinos. Even as of mid-2004, you could find them in the Hilton, Orleans, MGM Grand, New York New York, Caesar’s Palace, Imperial Palace, Riviera, Bally’s, the Excalibur, Luxor and the New Frontier — and each and every one of them was constantly surrounded by fans and newcomers alike. But over the past few years, these machines have started disappearing — mostly because a quarter isn’t worth as much as it used to be, and casinos can make more money with higher-yielding slot machines. It’s a shame, really. As of February, 2008, there is only one Sigma Derby machine remaining in Las Vegas: at the MGM Grand. I, myself, a relative newcomer to Sigma Derby, have only had the opportunity to play on that particular table.

Granted, a quick glance at the tacky vintage table and its 25-cent entry fee turns off many “serious gamblers,” but anyone that’s playing Sigma Derby couldn’t care less: it’s just that much fun. The snickers and wise-cracks roll off our backs the moment those five jumpy mechanical equines hit the tracks (which happens about once every 90 seconds).

Sigma Derby players are rabid. Just do a Google search for “Sigma Derby,” and you’ll find hundreds of discussions about the game, and even a blog completely dedicated to Sigma Derby. In fact, in June 2007, a group of fans organized The Sigma Derby Handicapper’s Challenge at the New Frontier, to determine the best Sigma Derby player in the world. (That title, of course, goes to Bob Black of Minneapolis, Minnesota.) Unfortunately, when the New Frontier closed down shortly after that epic competition, it left only one operating Sigma Derby table remaining in all of Vegas, and the fate of the competition is in turmoil. There’s even an online petition to Save our Sigma Derby Game from Extinction.

My friends and I (also rabid Sigma Derby fans, as you’ll see below) have even looked into buying a table for our own to put in our living rooms. A few months ago, we called up a gaming machine company to ask how much a Sigma Derby machine would cost. $20,000 plus delivery charges…which actually sounds like a good deal to me, and I’m a person who has never had more than a few hundred at one time.

But even better, there was an eBay auction a few weeks ago for the bargain price of $8,257.40:

Maybe not in the next few years, but one of these days, when I am wildly rich and successful – or even if I am destitute and have to sell my body to science to finance the purchase – I will own a Sigma Derby machine. That is my solemn vow.

Our latest Sigma Derby trip: It all started with ice cream sandwiches

Monday was Presidents’ Day, and everyone was off work, so I called up my buddy Ram in the late afternoon to see if he wanted to go get some ice cream sandwiches. We live in Los Angeles, and there’s this phenomenal little place called “Diddy Riese” in Westwood, where they sell delicious freshly-made ice cream sandwiches, constructed out of two giant cookies (still warm from the oven), with a generous scoop of ice cream in the middle. And they only cost $1.50. It’s an unbelievable deal, any way you look at it (even from a Sigma Derby perspective, that’s enough quarters to make SIX bets).

Long story short, after we got out ice cream sandwiches, we decided to meet up with some friends down at Playa Del Rey, bringing with us a few bags of fresh Diddy Riese cookies to share. Munching on cookies and burgers, the discussion soon turned to Las Vegas and Sigma Derby (as it often does), and someone suggested, jokingly, that we head to Vegas right then and there.

The five of us looked around the room, there was a moment of silence, a second of hesitation, and then we locked eyes and nodded. We were going to Vegas. Immediately. And we were going to make it back before 10AM the next morning, so nobody was late for work. It was the best idea ever.

We all gave ourselves quick Mohawks, chugged some energy drinks, exchanged an obnoxious number of high-fives, and hopped on the highway. Destination: Sin City.

The Sigma Derby Enthusiast Club

This wasn’t the first Vegas trip for us, though it was our first impromptu middle-of-the-night trip. I’d made the four-hour drive twice before in the past few months: for a three-day trip over Thanksgiving, and as the first waypoint on a cross-country drive in December.

Both Vegas trips, of course, had ended at the MGM Grand’s Sigma Derby table, with me screaming incoherently at the little mechanical horses, as I played for hours on a single $10 roll of quarters.

And there was always a sense of genuine camaraderie with the other Sigma players, who are always interesting characters, to say the least.

There was the Turban wearing middle-eastern guy, who was terrible at placing the bets themselves, but could call the winning horse combination within five seconds after they’d left the starting gate. “That’s 2-3,” he would say, horses #2 way behind the pack, and #3 in a pathetic third place. Sure enough, within thirty seconds, #2 and #3 would surge to the front and win. (Too bad this guy’s premonitions wouldn’t extend back another ten seconds so that he could place the right bets….)

Then there was the old Asian man, who studiously wrote down every winning horse combination in a little notepad, and kept obsessive details of various statistics. I wanted to tell him that keeping track of the races was pointless, because the stats for the horses were randomly generated by a computer program at the beginning of every round…but there was something about his air that told me that he knew a lot more about Sigma Derby than I did. I pictured him as a yogi, a sensei, who would spend his weekends meditating on mountain tops, reaching a full and complete understanding of Sigma Derby

“Have you ever seen 200:1 hit?” one of us asked, referring to the longshot 200:1 odds that show up every few races.

“Oh yes, many times,” he said as he scrawled another 4-5 winning combination down on his notepad. He did not elaborate, but he spoke with such absolute conviction, that we didn’t argue.

That didn’t mean we didn’t have our doubts. In all of our collective Sigma Derby experiences it had NEVER, EVER hit. “Many times?” We had been pumping quarters into the machine for half a day, and nothing remotely close to 200 had ever come up.

But then again, you can’t argue with a sensei.

“You just gotta bet on it”

By far the most interesting player we met was at about 1:00AM after Thanksgiving dinner, a guy named “Willy” who spent Thanksgiving alone playing Sigma Derby. Willy, who had a draping Col. Sanders mustache, a rough voice and wild eyes, looked like he’d just rolled out of a gutter. He was also self-proclaimed Sigma Derby expert. Willy informed us that he’d been at the table all night, and gave us strategy tips.

“When the 200 comes up, you’ve gotta bet on it,” he instructed, nodding his head. “You just gotta bet on it.”

Despite the recommendations from the sensei and Willy, betting on 200:1 still sounded like a terrible idea – those odds were wretched, and the chances of it hitting were slim to nil. Why waste the money?

But Willy, sat across from us the entire night, faithfully putting a quarter down on every 200:1 that showed up, saying every time “You just gotta bet on it.”

Willy was an odd chap to say the least. He was afraid of letting anyone see his quarter count, so he covered up his console with multiple cups, forming a little barrier between himself and the rest of us. And every few minutes, he would reach into his pocket, pull out a little pill crusher, grind up a white tablet and snort it. “Anyone wanna try? This’ll make you feel reeeeeaaal good,” he told us. We turned him down after we got a look at the pill case: it was women’s PMS pain medication, which he informed us he’d bought at a convenience store behind the Paris. (I think by “Real good,” he might have meant “homeless and delirious”…)

But as the night wore on, and we got to know Willy better, something happened. We all realized that he was an absolute crackpot, but his blind faith rubbed off on us. Gradually, when the 200:1 showed up, we started betting on it too, thinking to ourselves “It’s probably not going to hit, but if it does, I don’t want to be the one person at the table that misses out!”

We had all joined the Church of Willy. We sincerely believed.

At least for a few hours.

By 5:30AM, though, our faith in 200:1 — and our supply of quarters — was waning. We sleepily fed our final quarters into the table, and then bid Willy farewell. As one of us shook hands with him on the way out, he accidentally knocked over his drink. But rather than clean up the mess, he stayed put as it dripped all over his legs. Nobody was going to take Willy’s spot or steal his quarters.

As we trudged back to our hotel room, the little bit of faith we had in the 200:1 dwindled. 200:1 was never going to happen in our lifetimes. The church of Willy was a scam.

Retribution

As the Vegas lights appeared in the horizon on our impromptu Presidents’ Day trip, the five of us exchanged yet another round of high-fives. The count was now at 252: we had decided to keep a running tally of high fives for the night, and had made it our goal to pass 1000 by the time we got back to LA. Excitement was in the air, and we were all eagerly anticipating all the colors, the sounds, and the little plastic horsies.

But as the Vegas skyline came closer into view, I had to get something off my chest. Something Sigma Derby related. Something absolutely devestating.

I took in a deep breath, and told the guys about my trip to Las Vegas in December, which was quite possibly the darkest moment of my adult life. All thanks to Sigma Derby.

In December, I was in the midst of a cross-country drive back home to New York for the holidays, and the two guys I was traveling with and I decided to stay in Vegas on our first night. Despite my firm belief that 200:1 would never hit, I was incredibly excited to play Sigma Derby again, and gushed profusely about the game to my friends as we walked down the Strip.

The three of us toured the various casinos for a few hours, tried our hand at a bunch of different slots and table games….but before too long, I led my friends to the MGM Grand for a rousing bout of the Derby.

As we rounded the corner, past the MGM’s live lion display, I could see the crowd gathered around that orange table, cheering excitedly. And oh man, did I get excited for some quarter racing.

Within a few races, the 200:1 odds came up. I was about to make a wisecrack about how betting on those odds was like throwing money into a wishing well…but I was aghast at what I saw. Somehow, The Church of Willy was alive and well. Dutifully, everyone at the table pulled out a quarter and bet it on the longshot every time it came up. All around the table, I could hear people repeating Willy’s mantra: “You just gotta bet on it.”

Granted, it would be awesome if 200:1 hit, but the chances against it were astronomical. How could all of these people be so blind? And brainwashed? Willy’s insane strategy wasn’t going to screw me out of my quarters again.

I took my seat at the table, and watched smugly as the horses ran their race, the 200:1 horses falling behind early and staying behind. “Of course, that’s what’s supposed to happen” I thought, as the 2:1 combination roared across the finish line. I pulled out my $10 quarter roll and pumped it into the machine.

And so, dozens and dozens of races went by, and every four or five of them, a 200:1 showed up. I started using a new strategy – a winning strategy – that did not involve “throwing my money away” on longshots. Rather, I would bet on more probable combinations, and when the big odds appeared, I would put my money firmly on the 2:1 or 3:1, and almost always net a profit. Before long, I was up $20, and feeling fantastic.

The fools around me, on the other hand, were all throwing their money away, betting on the 200:1 odds with an almost religious fervor. “You’ve just gotta bet on it,” they’d say. I’d sip my drink and shake my head, as I ran my fingers through my $20 in cold, hard quarters.

Little did I know that within moments, my world would be shattered.

It was a moment I will never forget, a moment that will live in infamy.

200:1 odds showed up, and the masses obediently placed their bets. I, on the other hand, continued with my strategy of betting on the “sure thing.”

The buzzer sounded, the gates opened up, and I could immediately feel that this race was different. I looked around the table, at the collection of hopeful gamblers, cheering for the 200:1 horse combination, each with a gleam in their eye. I looked at the horses, inching their way around the track. Everything happened in slow motion. And as the two last place horses rounded the corner and began their surge, I knew.

It hit.

200 to 1.

The crowd went wild. The sound of hundreds of dollars of quarters paying out filled the casino. Complete strangers exchanged hugs and high fives.

And there I sat, distraught. Dumbfounded. Destroyed.

I buried my head in my hands.

I was defeated.

…

…

…

“And that’s why you’ve gotta bet on 200:1,” I warned my friends as we took the exit to the MGM Grand Casino just short of midnight.

“Wow man, Willy was right,” one of them said.

Understatement of the century.

Reconciliation

We piled out of the car as the clock struck twelve, bursting with energy and excitement. The high five count had already surpassed 500 by the time we entered our first casino. We spent about three hours casino hopping, trying different table games, playing some video roulette, pulling a lot of slots – and losing money left and right.

By 3:00AM, we were all having a fantastic time, but we had all lost just about as much as we could stomach. It was that time. The quarters came out, and we made our way to the MGM Grand.

We gathered around Sigma Derby, and carefully took our seats, excited to cheer on some horses, but still weary of the elusive 200:1. I had learned my lesson, that’s for sure. I would never let another 200:1 go by, but I was also absolutely sure that I would never see another one hit. I had forsaken the Church of Willy, and the Sigma Derby gods had, in turn, forsaken me.

The first few races went by, and I hit a lucky streak. Pretty soon I had doubled my $10 in quarters, despite “throwing away” a quarter Willy-style on every 200:1 that appeared. The rest of the guys I was with were doing fairly well too, and like always, we had a great time cheering on the animatronic horses as they duked it out on their simulated raceway. It was so fun that we almost forgot how far in the hole we were from the last three hours’ worth of gambling.

The only other people at the derby that night were an old down-on-their luck European couple. We made some futile attempts at conversation when we first sat down, but it wasn’t until about an hour later that the ice was sufficiently broken (or they were sufficiently liquored up), and the words started flowing. They were as impressed with out spur-of-the-moment Vegas trip as we were with their accents.

We talked for quite some time, but none of us had been able to place the accents. I was pretty sure that they were Irish, but wouldn’t have been surprised if they were from Sweden, or Hungary for that matter (my European accent IQ runs about room temperature).

Finally, Ram asked the burning question: “So, where are you guys from?”

“We’re from Scotland.”

“Of course,” we all responded, nodding and pretending we’d known all along.

“Thank God you didn’t think we were Irish,” the cynical wife added.

“Oh, no, of course not!” I said, in a futile attempt to cover up my ignorance. I added, “We just weren’t sure if you had a Glasgow or Aberdeen accent,” speaking straight out of my ass.

After a few minutes, we had learned why the couple was at Sigma Derby: they were down to their last five dollars, after a very losing two days on the Strip. I was tempted to ask how much the damage was, but their faces said it all.

“Well,” I said, “Regardless of how much money you have left, you *have* to bet on the 200:1.”

The Scottish woman looked at me like I was insane, and her husband had a similar reaction. I was probably an undercover agent working for the casino, they must have figured, or just downright delusional. (I’m sure the Mohawk wasn’t helping.)

But then my other Mohawked brethren jumped in, and encouraged them further. “You just gotta bet on it.” “How stupid would you feel if it hit and everyone got it except for you?”

At first, they tried to come up with excuses, but after a few minutes of our pestering, they realized that they were coming up empty-handed. They gave in. And soon, all of us at the table were dutifully placing our 200:1 bets every time the opportunity came up, and dutifully cheering on the longshot horses, even if they routinely finished fourth and fifth.

The hours ticked by, and as our quarters diminished, the doctrine of Willy was alive and well, even if it was costing us quarters. Some would say we were paying the “idiot tax” by following that strategy, others would just walk by and snicker that we were playing Sigma Derby in the first place, but to the seven of us at that table, cheering on miniature plastic horses and betting on the slim-to-nil made perfect sense.

But certainly not from a financial perspective. By the time the clock struck 5:00, three of the people in my group had gone bankrupt, there were only two of us, and the Scots left — who had miraculously made their five dollars hold out.

By this point, we’d lost hope that 200:1 hit. We were just betting on it out of some type of peculiar devotion.

One of my friends looked at his watch. “All right guys, we’ve got to get going if we’re going to make it back to LA in time for work.”

We all nodded in agreement. I was down to my last quarter. Tony had 14 left. The Scottish couple had a handful between them. We had all but given up on any prospect of winning money.

“Okay, but let’s wait until the next 200:1 shows up before we head out. I’ve got a good feeling about this one,” I said, half joking.

My antsy employed friends agreed to stick it out for a few more races, so that we could go out in style. It had been an incredible night, and even if all of us lost on Sigma Derby, at least we had a great time doing it.

Then it showed up, the 200:1. Everyone at the table agreed, this was it, the last bet of the night. We all put all of our quarters on the 200:1 and stepped back. This was the big kahuna, the one for all the marbles.

The gate rose, the buzzer rang out, and the horses were off.

And out there somewhere, Willy was smiling down on us.

Through the exhaustion, the buzz of free casino drinks, the haze of cigar smoke, and our unbridled skepticism, we saw it happen. The two last place horses – the horses that never stood a chance – started coming up from behind. And, holy shit, did we cheer. And as those two little horses made their way up the final stretch, we cheered even louder. And as they took the lead, right at the finish line, we exploded.

They won.

200 to 1 had hit. On the last bet of the night.

Everyone jumped to their feet in sheer amazement. The high five count instantaneously passed 1,000.

The Scottish couple ran to the other side of the table and hugged us.

It was a moment of pure elation, pure insanity.

We had netted close to a grand between us. Tony’s 14-quarter bet alone pulled in $700, which was awarded to him in a combination of cash and a bucket of $100 in quarters, straight from the machine.

I won $50 from my 25-cent bet, and the Scots won over $100 as well. From quarter bets. QUARTER BETS.

But it’s not the money that mattered, so much as the fact that we won it on Sigma Derby.

When those little plastic horses run down their track, and the crowd goes wild over something that trivial, over 25-cent bets that are that inconsequential, something magic happens. It’s something that’s beyond words. It’s a collective experience that defies description.

It’s Sigma Derby. The single greatest casino game ever.

For my grandpa, this was not a big deal. Ever since he got Parkinson’s disease, he quit sleeping in beds and started sleeping hunched over in chairs, because

1. it too hard to move to a bed, lay down and go to sleep,
2. it was too hard to get out of a bed in the morning

and

3. he drove grandma crazy.

That night, I found out why.

You see, my grandfather takes a huge cocktail of pills several times a day — enough multicolored pharmaceuticals to satiate every tweeker in Hancock, NY for a month. And among them are several types of Parkinson’s medication, which make it so that he’s able to move and so that his normally incoherent mumbles are slightly more coherent. The side effect? They make him batshit crazy.

So while everyone else is off snoozing comfortably in their respective beds, I’m laying there, contorted in a ball on a couch that’s about three feet too short and sinks all the way to the floor. An old grandfather clock across the room tick-tocks the minutes away, and the wind outside howled eerily.

And two feet away from me, hunched over in the most uncomfortable wooden chair in all of the Catskill mountains was grandpa, softly muttering to himself. He was drooling all over his shirt (he can’t help it), and clutching a crumpled up ball of paper towel that he uses to wipe his mouth. During the day, grandpa would stare at his paper towel balls and remark about how beautiful the little “paper maché birds” are that someone keeps leaving all over the house. He would also complain about how “that little kid” would keep following him around (you know, the one sitting right there, next to you — oh that’s the pills talking); or spend hours hobbling around the house pulling down invisible spider webs that he’s pretty sure are all over the walls. His latest obsession was that there was a band of robbers who would sneak to our house every night, and start disassembling our cars to steal our engines, or break into his bedroom and steal his prized collection of antique cameras.

Anyway, I was finally on the verge of falling asleep, despite the howling wind, the grandfather clock and the incessant muttering — when my grandfather started yelling “Peter! Peter! Peter!” in his shaky voice…right in my ear.

At first, I tried to ignore it, hoping he’d get sidetracked by “that kid” or a paper maché swan. Outsiders might have read the urgency and alarm in his voice, and think there was a genuine emergency, but I knew better. Years of dealing with grandpa’s crazy hallucinations had made me more than a little skeptical. But the yelling continued. After another half minute, I realized that ignoring him was not going to work. I rolled over and demanded “What this time, grandpa?!”

I was expecting him to tell me that the robbers were making away with his camera collection for the third time this week, but instead, he blurted out: “There’s a possum loose in the house. Here, help me get ‘im.”

To show me he was serious, he lurched forward in a feeble attempt to stand up from his chair. I look around the room….couch…grandfather clock…pile of drool-soaked paper towels…NO POSSUM…everything was normal.

“Sorry grandpa, I don’t see him. He must have gotten away.” I knew by this point not to argue with grandpa about whether or not he saw something, but instead just to play along. He tried one or two more times to stand up, but realizing the futility of the situation, he hunched back over and resumed muttering — this time, looking around the room suspiciously, trying to spot the rogue possum.

Exhausted and still overcoming the triptophan from our turkey dinner, I laid down and quickly fell asleep. Dreams of sugar plums danced in my head. Finally, some rest.

But it was not to last. Suddenly, my slumber was broken by a powerful punch in the face, and some incoherent screaming. I bolted up. “What the hell??!!?” Boom! I got clocked again.

Ducking out of the way, I finally realized what was going on. There was grandpa, gesticulating madly, as he struggled in his chair. A few of his wild arm motions had managed to find their way right to my head.

“What’s going on, grandpa?”

“I got ‘im! Help!”

“What are you talking about? Got what?”

“The possum! I’ve got ‘im!”

Ahhh. I could see where the invisible possum’s neck would fit, right between his two clenched fists. The valient struggle continued, and I thought I’d wait it out, occasionally interjecting “Oh, too bad, grandpa.. looks like he got away. Let’s get back to bed,” to no avail.

He just went on choking the possum. “Well,” I thought, “It’s gonna be a long night.” I started looking around for another place to sleep, outside of his range. But when another of his wild, shaky arm motions knocked over the lamp on the end table, I knew I had to do something.

“What do you need, grandpa?”

“Help me up! We gotta throw ‘im outside. He’s got mighty sharp claws, this one!”

I stepped toward my grandpa, avoiding his swings, and started helping him up. Moving grandpa is not an easy prospect. Usually to help him stand, it takes me, pulling him by both arms, with all my weight and all my strength…and that’s when he’s not trying to subdue a wild possum. I got behind the chair and started pushing. After about a minute of heaving and ho-ing, he finally rose up. I acrobatically grabbed his walker and slid it in front of him, so that he didn’t just keep going, right over onto the floor. Grandpa managed to grab the walker with one hand, and I steadied him. His other hand was still shaking back and forth, clenching the possum.

Grandpa takes a long time to walk anywhere, and when he’s swinging his arm like a mad gorilla, it takes about ten times as long. As we made our way through the house, I kept staring at my watch, seeing the minutes tick by. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes… At the twenty-five minute point, we had finally reached the back door. He still had the possum by the neck, but he had long since tired of choking it, and was now holding on to him limply. I wasn’t going to ask questions.

I opened up the wooden door, and then propped open the screen door. Cold wind and snow flew in through the crack. The wintry Catskills wilderness stared back at us.

Determination in his eyes, my grandpa inched forward and reached his clenched fist outside. With a weak little toss, he flicked the “possum” out into the snow drift and let go.

“Haha, look at him run Pete!”

“We got him, grandpa! …Now let’s go to bed.”

A few weeks ago, I decided to CONQUER the Hollywood Sign on Mount Lee. I’ve been eyeing that mountain ever since I first set foot in Los Angeles, and it seemed like as good of a time as any to show that mountain who’s boss.

The normal approach

Getting to the Hollywood sign isn’t too tough if you want to take the touristy approach. It’s a cinch to drive up to within a half mile of it, take some snapshots, and be on your way. I’ve done it a few times before. (If you’re wondering how, just head north on Beachwood Drive from Hollywood, through some windy neighborhood streets, and keep heading up. I believe you have to take a left at some point, but basically head toward the sign and don’t go downhill.)

Here’s a picture I took this past summer from one of the roads near the sign itself:

There are also several well-worn hiking trails that head up the East side of the mountain from Griffith Park. (This Etreking.com page will tell you all about it.)

Security

Technically, you’re not allowed to actually go up to the sign itself. It’s illegal trespassing, and the top of the mountain has a complex (including that famous radio tower) that is protected with tall barbed-wire fences, security guards, and hidden cameras. We’re talking a state-of-the-art security system:

“Panasonic Systems designed, engineered, fabricated and installed a cutting-edge security network comprised of a ten-camera closed circuit television surveillance system (CCTV), external alarms, microwave-triggered motion detectors and a bilingual audio warning system… Full-streaming color video images are now fed by all 10 remote cameras through fiber optic lines to the City of Los Angeles Parks and Recreation Security Headquarters, where rangers can monitor all of the cameras simultaneously.”

(Not to mention the pack of vicious bloodhounds, and the cybernetic security guards with rayguns and jetpacks they’ve got up there as well.)

So suffice to say, it’s a bit be a challenge to get up to the sign without getting caught.

Hiking up the back side

But I like challenges! I wasn’t going to heed all those “No Trespassing under penalty of law” signs — I was going to go right up and touch those giant corrugated steel letters, and smile for the cameras.

And I also wasn’t going to pussy out and take the streets or the marked trails to the top of the mountain either. To make things interesting (and perpetually more difficult), I decided to blaze my own trail up the untamed West side of the mountain, to the top of Cahuenga Peak, and then follow the ridge over to the top of Mount Lee. It’s only about three miles total, but considering the steepness, the crumbly rocks and dirt, and the sheer amount of prickly brush in the way, it is no easy hike. It’s one of those ones where you take five steps forward and slide back down four in a little rockslide, meanwhile getting cut to shreds by all the bushes and trees.

View Larger Map

I started at the Oakwood Apartments in Burbank, where I lived for a semester when I was in the Ithaca College Los Angeles program. The Oakwoods are home to many things — child actors, porn stars, unheard of levels of infidelity, and the lost soul of “Super Freak” singer Rick James. (In fact, ICLA legend has it that he died in my very apartment at the Oakwoods.)

The Oakwood complex also, conveniently, is right on the back side of Cahuenga Peak. You can literally walk up the back parking lot and just keep going up until you reach the top. Which is exactly what I did.

The first section is really steep, but because of some forest fires two years ago, most of the brush and bushes were burned away. There’s also an access road to reach a bunch of powerlines part way up the hill that I took for a while. You can see it pretty well on the Google satellite image.

Once you get to the other side of the access road, it starts to get tough — it’s a whole lot steeper, and full of brush and rocks like I mentioned before. I can’t give you any advice on how to get up to the top, other than make sure you don’t have anyone beneath you, because they will most certainly get hit by a falling rock… or maybe even you yourself when you fall to your death. I would recommend wearing long pants and sleeves, because you will get cut to pieces. (My legs are still in shreds from that hike, two weeks later.)

From this side of the hill, you get a really nice view of the Hollywood Reservoir, a giant artificial lake that you would not expect to find nestled among the urban sprawl in Hollywood. Unfortunately, it’s tough (and illegal) to get right up to the water, due to some tall fences and security cameras, but at some point, I hope to pay the reservoir a visit as well.

After the grueling, hands-and-knees climb to the top of the ridge, it really levels out, and it’s a relatively flat and easy walk along the ridge over to Mt. Lee. Along the way, you reach the summit of Cahuenga Peak, which is the highest point in the area. I snapped a picture of the Geographical Survey Marker at the top, but I couldn’t make out the elevation because it was too faded.

At the top, I saw a lot of really awesome hawks / condors / eagles. (I’m no good at identifying birds, but they were brown and beige, and had a big wingspan.) I also saw some deer from a distance, further down the hill. And after a little while, I started to get a really good view of the Mt. Lee radio tower and the complex at the top.

When I was within a few hundred yards of the radio tower, I crested a rock and there it was — the back of the Hollywood Sign! It’s a really great view of all of Los Angeles, and you can see everything from Downtown to the ocean.

I also saw the paved access road that leads up the complex at the top and the barbed wire fence. There was a pick-up truck with a worker going up, so I knew to avoid the road. I started cutting down the steep front side of the mountain to the slope in front of the sign itself, so that I could avoid the fenced-in area. The Hollywood sign itself is NOT fenced in, because the fence extends around the back side of the mountain where all of the roads and foot trails lead, but the steep and nearly inaccessible front side of the mountain is open.

I scrambled through the brush and loose dirt on the slope in front of the sign, keeping low to make sure that I wasn’t too conspicuous. There are several very visible security cameras on the letters of the sign themselves, and I did my best to stay low. After a few minutes, though, I figured I would just go for it. I went right up to the letters themselves, waved to one of the cameras, and touched the corrugated steel. There are ladders that go up the scaffolding structure that holds them in place, and I was tempted to climb up, but decided not to press my luck. The letters are huge to be sure — probably around 50 feet tall — though they were actually a bit smaller than I expected.

I had been told that there was an encampment of bums and hippies that lived right under the sign, but I saw no evidence of that. However, there were several beer cans and bottles, and off to the side, the remnants of a campfire, so people had definitely been up there before.

I am absolutely sure that I got filmed by multiple security cameras, but no guards or workers approached me. There was also a helicopter that flew out from the complex on the top of the mountain — right over me — but if they saw me, they didn’t do anything about it. I’ve heard that the police get called when someone is spotted, and then they usually intercept trespassers when they walk down the access road after leaving the sign. I snapped a few more pictures, spent a few more minutes walking the entire length of the sign, and then decided to head on my way.

To avoid getting caught on the access road and trails that loop around the back of the mountain, I opted to go down one of the steep and precarious gulleys down the front side of the peak. The front of the mountain is inaccessible to vehicles, and I figured it was pretty unlikely that a cop or guard was going to chase me down on foot.

This was by far the hardest part of the hike, because the brush was incredibly thick and overgrown here, having not been burned in the fires two years earlier. It was so steep that there were times when I would lose my footing and tumble down quite a ways before I could come to a stop. On several occasions, I would get to a point where I couldn’t make it through a section of brush, and would have to turn back to find another route. Frustrating, to say the least, and my legs and arms got extremely cut up.

Eventually, I came out in some millionaire’s back yard, who had the highest-up house on the front side of the hill. From here, I was able to take the roads and streets back down the hill, toward Burbank. It was more than an hour of walking from that point, but it was along paved roads and very easy. Along the way, I passed by a really cool overflow dam on the edge of the Hollywood Reservoir, that I climbed up. Here’s a picture I took of myself as I climbed up one of the drainage ditches:

All in all, it was a fun hike. I’m glad I finally got around to doing it, two years after I originally came up with the idea. (The Facebook picture alone was worth the hike.)

My Next Adventure

What adventures are in store next in Los Angeles? I’m going to raft down the entire length of the polluted concrete gulch that is the Los Angeles River, of course!

That puppy runs right by my window in Sherman Oaks, and winds 22 miles through LA down to Long Beach, where it empties into the Pacific. Normally it’s only got a trickle of a few inches of water, with the occasional styrofoam cup or Taco Bell wrapper to break the monotony; but when it rains, HOO BOY, does it flow! The normally tame LA River becomes a raging torrent, and the styrofam cups and taco wrappers are instantly replaced with shopping carts, small children and mobile homes. And it is that raging torrent that I’d like to conquer next.

You can view the rest of the photos from my hike in this Flickr photo album.

“I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is!” - L. Ron Hubbard

I just got back from the Anonymous protest of Scientology in Hollywood, and it could be summed up in two words: EPIC WIN.

People showed up in droves — all wearing masks, and all referring to themselves as “Anon.” We picketed in groups of up to 200 people, and I saw more than 500 different protesters over the course of the day. The turnout was truly amazing, and there was so much energy and excitement. If anything, we certainly sent a message to the public, and to the Scientologists themselves that their corporation is corrupt and unethical.

Straight Outta The Tubes

The protesters was the kind of people you’d expect to organize a protest online — probably around 80% young males ranging from 18 to 35 or so, and all Internet and tech savvy. This was definitely a nerdy Internet crowd, and people made constant references to LOLCats and “Caturday”; people spoke in l33t speak (there was a lot of people saying things like “Epic win!” / “Scientology FAIL” / “OMG” / “LOL”) and at one point, we even broke out in “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley…the first real-life Rick Roll I’ve ever experienced. (Apparently many people had had the same idea…many, many people).

A large percentage of the signs that people had were Internet inside jokes. My buddy’s sign said “</scientology>” and mine said “Scientology STFU.”

The other interesting thing was that everyone took the “rules” that Anonymous laid out very seriously. Nobody used their real names, introducing themselves as “Anon” and referring to everyone else as “Anon.” It was kind of a running joke between everyone. We also never got to see anyone else’s faces, because we were all masked. When we eventually split ways at the end of the day, we exchanged email addresses — but not our main email addresses with our real names, just our secondary/anonymous emails and web handles.

Hollywood & Highland

My small group started as four people in front of the Scientology Reading Room near the corner of Hollywood and Highland. Within about half an hour, we were joined by about 40 more people. We got dozens of drivers to honk their horns, cheer us on, and take pictures of us. Almost all of the public that passed by on the sidewalk showed their support, and a lot of them took the anti-Scientology pamphlets we were passing out.

At that first location, the Scientologists had hung drapes in all of their windows, and locked up all the doors — but they did have three security cameras recording us. The building looked completely vacant, which is interesting, because I think they are normally open on weekend afternoons for auditing sessions.

After a while, we got word that there were 200 people protesting L. Ron Hubbard Dianetics Center on the corner of Sunset and L. Ron Hubbard Way, so our group of about 50 people decided to walk a few miles down the road to join them.

Scientology Celebrity Center

Along the way, we stopped at the Scientology Celebrity Center, a fenced-in complex on Franklin where high-ranking Scientologists go (a.k.a., people who have paid enough money to move up to higher levels in the church), to protest for a while. The security guards were out in full force, all with radios and earpieces and dark sunglasses (the Agent Smith look). We tried to talk to them, but they stood in place and refused to say a word.

A few Scientologists from inside the complex started taking pictures of us. One woman stepped out on a balcony and took several photos, and another guard popped out in an alleyway with a telephoto lens and photographed us as well. The Celebrity Center had dozens of security cameras hidden in the bushes around the complex, so we made sure to show them our signs. Luckily, we were all wearing our masks, so they wouldn’t be able to identify us.

L. Ron Hubbard Dianetics Center

When we made it to the Hubbard Dianetics Center, the big protest that we had gone to meet had moved back to Hollywood Blvd., so the majority of the 50-person group decided to head back to join them. This complex was swarming with security guards (multiple guys positioned at every entrance and around the parking lot). There were also several Scientologist guards on bikes who kept circling around the block to spy on us, and occasionally take pictures.

Five of us decided to stay and protest at the main gate to the Dianetics Center, which had three guards who had also obviously been trained not to speak or react to us. We had a stand-off for about half an hour, asking them questions (”Why do you separate families, and force parents to give up their children?” “What kind of religion forces people to pay for ’salvation’?” “How can a religious text be copyrighted, and why won’t you let people share it on the Internet?” “Tell us about Lisa McPherson.” “Why is there a volcano on the cover of ‘Dianetics’?” etc.) No answers, of course, but you could cut the tension with a knife. The security guards were a bit frazzled and nervous, having just been protested by 200 people, and having a bunch of masked guys yelling right at them. Every once in a while, they would radio in to their headquarters to give an update on the protest.

While we were protesting at the main entrance, we saw everyone who entered and left. The demographic of the church looked to be entirely young, white, yuppy / Hollywood types driving really nice cars. Whenever people pulled into parking lot, we were met with angry/disgusted looks, and they yelled at us. Some of the things yelled at us: “Fags!”; “Fucking losers, get a job!”; “Get a life!”; However, many of the non-Scientologists that drove by sided with us, honking and yelling support. Overall, it was a very uncomfortable half hour, and I doubt that the Scientologists will step back and think objectively about their organization — but I’m glad we did it.

On a side note, I heard that one protester was yelled at and then SPIT ON in the face by a Scientologist in a car. Apparently, he just wiped it off and shot right back by telling them that they’re a hate cult.

200 Protesters on Hollywood Blvd.

Afterward, we headed back to Hollywood Blvd. to join back up with our group, which was now 200+ protesters. We went to the CNN building on Sunset Blvd. and protested out front, hoping to make it onto the news.

With this many people, the protest really hit its stride. We had organized chants of “We are anonymous! We are legion!” and “We do not forgive! We do not forget!”

The honking never stopped, and there were several videographers and amateur reporters interviewing people. I also heard that NPR was interviewing someone.

Scientology: One Ex-Member’s Story

At this protest, I got into a conversation with a guy who spent four years of his life in the Scientology church. He worked for them full time, moved to and was being trained to be an auditer. It really revealed a lot of things about the Church of Scientology that I had heard about before, but never heard about first-hand. Here’s a quick run-down of what he said:

• He originally joined when he was 19, after he went in for a free personality / IQ test. He was told that he had a very high IQ, but he had emotional problems, and agreed to counseling…and then got roped in. (He later learned that the personality / IQ test is a scam — everyone who takes it is essentially told that they’re very SMART, but SAD, no matter how you answer the questions. The IQ test also has no logic or reasoning questions, just fluff that doesn’t measure intelligence.)
• After a few months of taking classes, he was convinced to drop out of College and take a full-time job working for the Church in Florida. He had to move there and was isolated from his friends and family.
• In one of his initial classes, he was forced to write down all of his “sins and transgressions,” which were supposed to be only shared with the teacher of the class. His privacy was breached, because all of the executive officers and other teachers read about his secrets and used them as blackmail to get convince him to take more classes.
• He moved into a tiny / cramped condo owned by a Scientology exec, which he had to share with eight other people.
• He worked from 9:00AM until 11:00PM every single day — and some weeks, he was paid as little as $11 for a week’s worth of work. ELEVEN DOLLARS.
• Since he was paid so little, he could hardly even afford food. At one point, he ate “tomato soup” that he made out of boiled water and ketchup packets.
• As a member of the Scientology staff, he was told that he was entitled to two and a half hours of counseling a day, but he rarely, if ever, received the counseling he was promised.
• Although he was permitted to leave the Scientology compound and his apartment during the few hours that he had free every day, members of Sea Org that he lived with were not allowed to leave. They were paid even less than he was for their services ($24 a week), and every bit of their lives was controlled by the Church…not to mention the one billion year contracts they had to sign.
• He was not allowed to have a girlfriend or have sex for four years — the entire time he worked for Scientology.
• He spent four years working his way up in the organization, and only made it to the fifth level of enlightment (I forgot what the level was called). However, people who joined and paid more money advanced much more quickly than him, despite going through fewer classes. (Further proof that Scientology is a for-profit corporation, and an illegitimate religion.)
• The reason he quit Scientology was because he was sequestered in Florida for an intense Scientology training session, where he was not allowed to have any contact with his family. While he was undergoing the training, his step mother, whom he was extremely close with, died in an accient. His family immediately tried to contact him and tell him about the tragedy, but the Scientology organization blocked him from receiving the message. His trainers withheld this information from him for four days, until he had finished the class. Meanwhile, his family was desperately trying to contact him, and was given the runaround by the Scientologist organization whenever they called. When he finally found out about his step mother’s death, he was told that he wasn’t told “for his own good.”
• After this, he confronted one of the higher-ups and filed to disassociate himself from Scientology — a bureacratic process that is similar to cancelling a cell phone plan or AOL dial-up service (ie: needlessly complicated, full of peer pressure and nearly impossible).
• This pushed him over the edge, and soon after, he decided to quit and walk away. On his way out, he was physically blocked from leaving the compound by an Executive. He had to pick her up and move her out of his way to get out the door.
• Since quitting Scientology, he has changed his appearance substantially and only protests scientology anonymously. He usually wears masks to events, and when speaking about his experiences, never uses his name or picture for fear that the Scientologists will track him down and harrass him.

“Epic Win!”

I was impressed by how knowledgable and well-informed the protesters were, and everyone agreed that we were protesting Scientology for how it runs as an organization, not for the beliefs they hold (even though everyone pretty much agreed the beliefs are bogus creations of a crazy and drug-induced science fiction writer / capitalist).

But I don’t care if people believe in an evil intergalactic overlord named Xenu, or that they are inhabited by dead alien spirits who were killed by nuclear weapons in a supervolcano 75 million years ago. To each his own.

We were protesting Scientology’s unethical corporate practices, its violations of human rights, its destruction of families and friendships, its shady / secretive structure, its militaristic copyright laws and quashing of any form of dissent. Scientologists, like all people, should be allowed to hold any beliefs they want — but the way they force their beliefs on emotionally needy people, the fact that they refuse to accept any type of criticism — is unacceptable.

Scientology must be stopped. And I think today we made great progress toward that goal.

We are Anonymous.

We are legion.

We do not forgive.

We do not forget.

EXPECT US.

View the rest of my photos from the protests in this photo album: http://flickr.com/photos/peteberg/sets/72157603884916742/