Cult Indoctrination Techniques – Part Three

The Magic Trick
November, 1969

The dark-haired child is five years old, though her height gives the impression that she is older.  Diesel fumes permeate the chill in the night air.  While their parents speak with another adult near their turquoise-colored sedan with the boat and trailer attached, her almost-teenaged sister entertains her with a magic disappearing-coin trick.  Insert the nickel, fold the four tabs down to cover it, say your magic words while you quickly and slyly flip the contraption over, your audience’s attention distracted by your delivery of the magic words, and open the identical tabs on the empty side.  Presto!  The nickel appears to have vanished!

* * *

A light-haired child watches through the window of the Tucumcary, New Mexico truck stop restaurant, sitting in the booth and playing Behind Closed Doors on the mini-jukebox while her parents are . . . somewhere.  It isn’t unusual for her to be in a truck stop restaurant with her parents after 10:00 pm.  They travel by car often, her father having business with many people in different places.  She watches the younger, dark-haired child outside, her ankles showing beneath stretch pants that she’s grown too tall for, practicing her magic tricks with her sister.

 * * *

The plastic cap snaps onto the bottle of Coke, but there is a hole in the center of the cap.  Surely, if she tips the bottle, some of the liquid will leak out, but she tries, and it doesn’t!  Amazing, this world of magic and illusion!  Her sister smiles at her as she shows her that the Coke hasn’t spilled.

* * *

The light-haired child slides out of the booth and ventures outside.  She approaches the dark-haired child and her sister, and watches.  She is practicing the coin trick again.  The nickel falls from her hands.  The light-haired child bends to pick it up and hand it to her.  Blue eyes and green eyes meet for the first time, almost twenty-one and a half years before they will meet again . . .

* * *

. . . Except that isn’t the way it happened.

The place wasn’t a truck stop.

It was in Albuquerque, not Tucumcary.

Behind Closed Doors hadn’t been released yet. 

The dark-haired child’s parents were never on the road past dinnertime when they traveled.

I was the dark-haired child.  I’ve had a memory all these years of the little magic kit my sister bought for me, and for most of my life, the smell of diesel fumes made me smile and think of that little magic kit.  That was what led me to assume that we’d been at a truck stop that night, during our November 1969 trek from Oklahoma to California, but based on the best information my sister and I can piece together now, it must have been the parking lot of the hotel where we stayed the night the axle on the boat trailer broke.  My sister, who was 12 at the time, remembers that our parents waited over an hour for the repair man to arrive.  Evidently she kept me occupied while the repair man talked with our parents.  The smell of diesel fumes came from the fact that the hotel parking lot was less than 100 feet from a traffic light on Route 66, where big trucks were stopping and idling at the light.  She also remembers the vending machine that I knew had to have been there, because she’d bought the bottle of Coke for me.

The light-haired child was Jane.  She supplied the details of her “memory” of our first meeting as children during a telephone conversation that took place somewhere in the span from November of 1990 to March of 1991.

This is a perfect example of Point # 7 from the list of Cult Indoctrination Techniques that I began writing about in Part One of this series of entries:

7. Get information and hone their weak spots . . . and then use this information to manipulate them.

In all the hours and hours of talking that we did while getting to know one another over the phone, I had unknowingly given her plenty of information, which she made use of.

My father was in the military and we traveled by car a lot during our moves as he was transferred from base to base.  This particular trip took place over the Thanksgiving holiday and was filled with lots of “adventures” for my family, including Thanksgiving dinner at a Shakey’s Pizza (with my family as the only customers in the restaurant and a fun player piano for entertainment), a tire blowout, and the axle on the boat trailer breaking and needing repair.

Since I was so young when the trip took place, I’d assumed for many years after that that we’d been at a truck stop that night, because of the diesel fumes, and I’d never thought to question or ask my parents or sister.  I simply enjoyed my pleasant memory of a sweet moment between my big sister and myself while she entertained me and kept me occupied that night.

However, being given false information from the start can be a problem for someone who is working to create an illusion of something that never really happened.  The fact that Jane took my “truck stop” theory and chose to build on it, claiming we had met there as children, tripped her up in the eyes of my sister and parents, because when I related to them what she’d told me (“Guess what!  Jane and I met as kids when we were traveling through New Mexico!”), my sister immediately told me, “We wouldn’t have been out that late at night and Mom and Dad never stopped at truck stops”.  (Our parents are very routine-oriented people and we always traveled until it was time to stop and check into a hotel, have dinner, allow us to play and work out some of our pent-up energy, and spend some quality family time together before going to sleep for the night.)  She later called a radio station to confirm her suspicion that Behind Closed Doors would not have been released yet by that time.

(Incidentally, in December of 1990, Jane also began talking with a friend of mine who happened to originally be from Las Vegas, which was where Jane was from.  The theory of everyone involved has been that she was “working on” her as a backup in case things with me didn’t work out.  She’d had this friend almost convinced that they’d met on a playground in Las Vegas as kids, until my friend’s partner became suspicious and intervened, essentially threatening Jane that she’d better never call again.)

By the time the conversations about the truck stop took place between my sister and me, I’d already been taken in by much of what Jane had told me, so while a small part of me suspected that the story wasn’t true, the part of me that clung to the romanticism of the notion needed to believe it, along with Jane’s explanation of why my family was working so hard to sway my belief: they didn’t like Jane and wanted to put a wedge between us.

Meanwhile, in reality, Jane was working night and day to secure that wedge firmly between my family and me (a point that will be discussed further in a future entry, when discussing Point # 17).