In Which Our Heroine Goes To Work In The Big City
When my first boss decided to move to North Carolina, I had to find another job.
I scoured the want ads and found a job with an old-school, big-name attorney in the county seat. (“Old school” is code for pompous, male-chauvinist pig, but that goes without saying.)
It wasn’t a horrible job, But he wasn’t really the problem. The problem was his wife.
See, the way to make sure your husband isn’t sleeping with the secretary is to either be the secretary, or find something else to do in the office so you can keep an eye on them all day.
This guy’s wife was the “office manager”. Let’s call her Mary. It’s as good a name as any.
Mary was prone to statements like, “What’s your blood type?”
Me: “Uh… O positive.”
Mary: “Oh, you shouldn’t have caffeine.
Me: “Er… Okay.”
She also liked me to sit up very straight in my chair (which I, the human cocktail shrimp, found challenging). And when I almost cut my finger off one night trying to pry some frozen hamburgers apart, her first words were:
“Will you still be able to type?”
The answer was “Yes”, if you call this typing. It’s almost funny how I’ve been sitting at a keyboard for 30 years and my typewriting skills haven’t improved one iota.
This was the ’90s, and since I couldn’t surf the internet during office hours like I can now (my co-worker is full-on binging entire seasons of basically everything), and since being a legal secretary back then was laughably easy, I had long stretches of time in which to tear the office apart.
Because, as I may have mentioned elsewhere, I am nosy AF.
Now, back then, people were not very savvy about wiping their personal information from a computer when they left. (Believe me, when I go, the entire hard drive is going with me.)
Usually, you found goulash recipes or pictures of their cat.
I was apparently using the computer Mary had used before I came on board. And what I found was a list.
It was a list of names. Names I recognized. Names that belonged to people like, oh, the mayor, and the town’s most prominent psychotherapist. Big names. Important names.
And they were all members of a cult.
A lot of things can be labeled a “cult”:
Cult [kəlt]
NOUN
A system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.
A relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.
A misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing.
Scientology is a cult, but so is Christianity. It depends on your point of view.
That list of local VIPs was labeled The Gurdjieff Society. So I hot-footed it to the library and found a biography of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a sort of Rasputin-lite from the mystic fringe of the early 20th century.
I skimmed the bio and was mostly fine with it, until I got to the part where Gurdjieff’s acolytes believe they can move things with their minds.
To be fair, I can’t find mention of that particular tidbit anywhere today, and I didn’t take any notes back in the ‘90s because I didn’t know I would one day want to blab all of this to the world on the internet. That was very shortsighted of me, and I apologize.
But I had fun imagining Mary, and the mayor, and the psychotherapist, and the rest of them with their faces scrunched up, trying to move a chair with their minds.
Today, I’m not so much amused as deeply disturbed.
Somehow The Gurdjieff Society has flown under the radar all these years, eclipsed by Scientology cray-crays like Tom Cruise and John Travolta, who believes that he can heal people by way of something called “assists”.
There’s a rumor that Bill Murray is a Gurdjieff-ian? Gurdjieff-ite? But until somebody really f—s up and draws attention to it, as happened with the Nxivm sex cult, the Gurdjieff Society will go its merry way, sucking money out of the bank accounts of gullible people looking for answers to questions that don’t really need to be asked.
I am currently reading a collection of letters between Sam Shepard and a guy named Johnny Dark and one of the things that brought them together was Gurdjieff classes. I’ve been reading Shepard’s work since the eighties and this is the first time I found out about that. Yeesh.
Somehow I feel being nosy AF should pay really well, but I gues you have to be willing to open up your private eye agency which sounds dangerous.