At fourteen, maybe thirteen, I made my first solo trek into New York City from the quite comfiness of suburbia. It wasn’t entirely solo - I was with a friend - but it was solo enough to feel like we were striking out on our own, independent and brave, barely pubescent Lewis & Clarks ready to face the fatal dangers of Midtown Manhattan on a quiet Sunday afternoon. “The City” lay at our fingertips, ready to be taken. We were not afraid.

But we did immediately manage to fall for nearly every scam in the book. I paid huge cash for comedy club tickets in Times Square that we couldn’t use for another 7 years (that two drink minimum kills you). I bought twenty dollars worth of candy to fund a basketball team’s jerseys. I sat for a wildly inaccurate, maybe mean-spirited, caricature. And then, to round it off, I agreed to take a Free Stress Test.

There I sat across from a middle-aged white guy with thick glasses and turtleneck. He tried and failed to make small talk, then he asked me to grab two metal bars, which were attached to a meter. The meter had a dial hand that swung frenetically from one end to the next. The guy looked at the meter with interest, adjusting a knob on it, then his glasses, murmuring under his breath as he imagined a good doctor would do. My diagnosis was prompt, curt and non-negotiable: I was stressed. I told him I didn’t feel stressed, but I was informed that I was wrong. Shucks. But there was a cure. Thank goodness! I had to buy a book with a cartoon volcano on it. Okay! For $10.99. But I had spent all my money on comedy club tickets with two drink minimums and the local team’s basketball jerseys and a mean-spirited drawing of myself. Maybe I was stressed after all, but I couldn’t buy the book. My tester hurried me away to make room for the next patient. That was the end of the Free Stress Test and my first little brush with proselytizing.

It turns out, as you probably know, that the book was Dianetics by L Ron Hubbard, and the Stress Test was a ploy by the Church of Scientology to get you to take the red pill. All this was relayed to me sometime later and when it was I felt like I had survived a trap, that maybe there was something to the Lewis & Clark comparison after all.

This isn’t proselytizing in the normal sense - it’s more like trickery in that its fundamentally dishonest. But it did give me a sense of the vying for souls, or minds, the cut-and-thrust, that proselytizing is all about. It is, simply, exciting.

Sam Dresser

Written by Sam Dresser

Edited by Sam Dresser