When I arrived in the jungle compound and signed over all of my belongings to the Great Leader, I was told that those who do not follow the Seven Sacred Paths are consigned to outer darkness and possessed by demons. "Does that include hot Swedish girls?" I asked, only to be rewarded by a month in the turnip field.

But one day there she was, four feet tall and covered with a fine coat of black hairs that speckled her chest and back. I felt the stirrings of true love. Cynics will say that my judgment was impaired by starvation, exhaustion and heat stroke. And you may have a point. But when she wiped the goat's milk out of her cute little mustache, I knew I had to recite the Great Leader's Platitudes of Glory and hold her tight.

Trouble began when we moved back to Philly to sell roses on streetcorners and proselytize amongst the forsaken heathens. Although we spent countless hours making sexytime and worshiping at our homemade Great Leader Shrine, a distance began to settle in.

"Remember our wedding?" she'd ask me as I put in another inspirational CD in the boombox. How could I forget? It was just us, the Great Leader and 500 other couples in a jungle clearing. Mass marriage felt so right, so true, so paradoxically intimate, despite the swarms of mosquitoes and blood-flies. Looking around the unheated storage unit we now called home, I had to wonder if we would have been happier in our tin hut back in the jungle.

Trouble came when I met a Scientologist named Hilda.

-to be continued-