by Jane Heller
“Yes,” he said. “The patients who can handle it do well.”
“The patients who can handle it?”
He nodded. “Some find it too overwhelming. You have to be willing to immerse yourself in the fear in order to get over it.”
I was willing to immerse myself in cow dung if it cured me by Sunday. “Do you have their number?” I asked.
“CAN’T YOU SQUEEZE me in sooner?” I said, my voice cracking as I spoke to the receptionist at the Virtual Reality Treatment Center (aka VRTC). Their first opening wasn’t for three weeks.
“Sorry, but there are a lot of people with panic and phobia disorders,” she said. “It’s only gotten worse since nine-eleven.”
“I understand,” I said, not wanting to act like those overbearing types who think their problem should take priority over everybody else’s. Still, there was a ticking clock here: only six days until Sunday. “Can you at least put me on a waiting list in case you get cancellations?”
“Sure, but it takes eight to ten sessions with the therapist to see results. One appointment isn’t enough.”
“One appointment will be just fine,” I said, figuring that I didn’t have to like flying by Sunday. I just had to do it.
MEANWHILE, I PINNED my hopes on Walter Riddick, the self-proclaimed “healer with the magic hands.” Angelina Jolie had told me about him when I interviewed her. She said she’d been afraid of fire—something about getting burned as a kid while toasting marshmallows—and how he’d come to her house and unblocked her. In desperation, I called him.
At nine-thirty that night, he rang my doorbell. He was an attractive blond man in his thirties wearing a clinging black T-shirt, blue jeans, and two gold hoop earrings, one in each nostril.
“So Angie gave you my name?” he said as we stood in my threshold.
“Yes. She told me how you got rid of her fear of fire.”
He beamed. “She’s a trooper now. Even lights her own candles.”
So she used to—what?—hire someone to light them? “How do you accomplish your, um, unblocking?”
He nodded at the large folding table and duffel bag he had set down on the floor. “I detoxify the system through the art of deep body work, which you probably think of as massage.”
He was a massage therapist? Like my old boyfriend Skip, who never healed anybody? I had pictured a laying-on-of-hands type of person, someone more evangelical.
“Deep body work gets at your issues,” he said. “It attacks the stuff that congeals, and brings you to a place of courage.”
Courage. Exactly what I needed. I ushered him inside.
He set up his equipment in my living room, pulling freshly laundered sheets and blankets from the duffel and turning the massage table into a comfy bed. Then he said he’d leave the room while I undressed.
“Take everything off,” he instructed.
“Everything?” I called out after he was too far away to hear me. I was thirty and still ridiculously modest about my body. I bought bras online. I doubled up on those paper gowns they make you wear in doctors’ examining rooms. I shaved my legs and “bikini hair” as opposed to subjecting myself to the scrutiny of a waxer. It was probably the influence of my mother, the catastrophizer. When I was growing up, she told me that women who “showed themselves” either caught fatal diseases or were murdered.
I was stark naked and hiding under the blankets when Walter returned. He dabbed a few drops of oil into his palms, rubbed them together vigorously, and told me to turn over on my stomach.
“For the next hour I’m going to work on your blockages,” he announced. “When I’m finished, you’ll feel great about flying.”
I closed my eyes and prepared for a relaxing massage if nothing else.
Suddenly, Walter was climbing up onto the table, his legs straddling me, his hands swooping down and grabbing the skin around my lower spine and pulling it—hard—causing me to practically levitate. I yelped. The pain was searing, hot.
“Keep breathing,” he said as he twisted and tugged on my back. “Allow the pain. Surrender to it. If you fight it, I won’t be able to destroy your toxins.”
He ended up nearly destroying my sanity. He tore at every body part, claiming my “hardened structures” were making me rigid and that his work would have a profound effect on me.
It did. By the time he was finished, I was so sore I couldn’t walk. Or talk. He had applied his magic hands to my chin and cheek muscles too, the result of which was that I had lockjaw. Worst of all, I was just as afraid of flying as ever.
I was about to send him on to his next sucker when James started blasting Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” It was only eleven-fifteen, not his usual middle-of-the-night concert, but I wasn’t sure I would survive if he didn’t turn down the volume. Every nerve ending was throbbing.
“Could you do me a favor?” I asked Walter in this weak, faraway voice I hardly recognized. I was leaning against the wall so I wouldn’t fall down. “Could you go upstairs and ask my neighbor to kill the music? He’s very nice. He just forgets he doesn’t live in a soundproof recording studio.”
“Will do,” said Walter. “And don’t hesitate to call if you need me again.”
Right.
In the morning, I dressed very slowly for work and limped out of the apartment to my car. James came running over. I assumed he wanted to apologize for the music; he was always so guilt ridden after the fact. He took my hands in his and kissed them.
“Okay, okay. I forgive you,” I laughed, aching everywhere. “Why so dramatic?”
“Walter,” he said, as if it were obvious. “You sent him to me.”
“Yes,” I said, “to get you to turn down the—”
“He’s The One, Ann.” He sighed like a lovesick fool.
“I hope you’ll both be very happy,” I said and eased myself into my Honda.
ON THURSDAY MORNING, the receptionist from VRTC called me to say she’d had a cancellation for that very afternoon.
“I’ll take it,” I said with profound gratitude and relief.
The office was located on the fifth floor of a mid-rise building on Sepulveda Boulevard. As I sat in the waiting room, I filled out a questionnaire intended to evaluate the intensity level of my fear of flying. On a scale of zero (not at all disturbing) to eight (extremely disturbing), I was asked to rate everything from standing in line on the boarding ramp to experiencing turbulence during the flight (I gave that one a ten, even though the scale didn’t go that high). The average score for people with aviophobia was 130. I scored 148.
The doctor, Hilary Horner, was a babe, reminiscent of those reality-TV bachelorettes who claim they’re in it for true love, then pose nude for Playboy. She was in a slinky navy blue dress and matching high heels with pointy toes. And she kept flicking her long blond hair off her face with her manicured fingers, one of which—her left ring finger—was adorned with a diamond the size of my head. “Have a seat,” she said.
My “seat” in her therapy lab was a replica of an airline seat. It was affixed to what I would later learn was a vibrating platform.
“All set,” I said after buckling up. “But before we get started, I should explain that what I need is an accelerated treatment.” I told her about the flight on Sunday and how essential it was that I get over my fear by then. “You’ll be cramming a lot of virtual reality into a short amount of time, but I can handle it.”
She shrugged, as if to say, “It’s your funeral,” and hooked me up to a biofeedback machine. Little sensors were taped to my wrists, fingers, and waist in order to keep track of changes in my heart rate, breathing patterns, and skin temperature. Her giant diamond nearly got stuck in all the adhesive.
Then she showed me how to breathe properly—from the abdomen, not the chest—and attempted to correct my misconceptions about flying.
“What you have is an irrational fear,” she said.
“It’s very rational,” I said. “Planes do crash.”
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��Most planes don’t,” she said. “You’re catastrophizing.”
Well, I knew where that came from. “Still, I do feel that flying can have disastrous consequences,” I said.
“I see we need to do some reframing of your thoughts by replacing them with positive probables.” Sounded like a board game. Or maybe a children’s snack. “For instance, the odds of dying in a plane crash are one in eight million. That’s a positive probable.”
“It’s not so positive if you’re the one in the eight million,” I said.
She flicked her hair. “Here’s another one. Statistically, a traveler would have to fly every day for more than eight thousand years to be in an accident where there are multiple fatalities.”
“What about non-multiple fatalities?” I said. “On Sunday I’ll be flying with only one other person. If we crash, maybe I’ll be a fatality but he’ll survive. What are the statistics for a situation like that?”
Another flick of the hair. “Let’s move on, since we don’t have that much time,” she said. “I’ll give you a card with additional positive probables on it and you can practice them when you get home.”
“Will do.”
“We’ll begin the in-vivo exposure.” She retrieved the bulky black headset from a nearby table, the one with the earphones attached. It was a very science fictiony gadget, complete with this 3-D screen that jutted out and fit over the eyes. She strapped it onto my head, then dimmed the lights in the room. “I’m going to project some environments onto your screen that will provoke anxiety. You’ll use your breathing technique and I’ll monitor your reactions.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let it rip.”
I peered into the screen. Suddenly, it was as if I was sitting in a window seat on an actual commercial plane filled with other passengers. It was only a computerized movie, but it felt incredibly real. I could see us taxiing to the takeoff area, and my heart raced.
“Breathe from your abdomen!” Dr. Horner commanded.
Inside my headset, we were now lifting off from the ground! Up we went. Over buildings. Over freeway traffic. Into lots and lots of clouds, which produced not only raindrops on my virtual reality window but turbulence. Apparently, Dr. Horner had arranged for me to fly into a virtual reality storm.
“Breathe!” she said.
I couldn’t. My seat was vibrating and it felt as if the plane kept dropping in altitude. I gripped the arms of the chair for dear life.
“Uh, this is Captain Jenkins up here in the flight deck,” intoned the virtual reality pilot. He spoke in that generic, world-weary voice they all have. “We’re passing through some choppy air, so I’ve turned on the seat-belt sign. Please remain in your seats with your seat belts securely fastened.”
Just then, Dr. Horner turned up the vibration on the platform, and my seat started rocking and bucking and rattling so badly that I actually screamed. I was terrified. Stricken. In a complete panic.
“Breathe from your abdomen!”
“Breathe out your ass!”
I whipped off my headset and threw it onto the floor. I’d immersed myself in my fear, but enough was enough.
After I apologized for being impolite and abusing her equipment, I thanked her for trying to help.
“You didn’t give me a lot of leeway because of your Sunday deadline,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”
I sighed despondently as she disconnected me from the biofeedback machine. I felt like a failure and a chickenshit and a person who was running out of options—and time.
She put her hand on my shoulder as she walked me out the door. “When you wake up on Sunday morning, reframe your thoughts with the positive probables. Remind yourself of the odds.”
I thanked her again and promised I’d repeat her positive probables over and over until they sank in. As a professional writer, I could certainly appreciate the power of words. I would use her words to strengthen my resolve. And I would get on Goddard’s plane, conduct the interview, get off Goddard’s plane, and lead a long and happy life.
Chapter Seven
I spent several hours on Saturday writing up my interview questions for Goddard. Peggy Merchant had forbidden me to ask about his rumored engagement to Rebecca Truit, his occasional run-ins with photographers, and especially his estrangement from his father, a sometime actor who was said to have pocketed his superstar son’s money instead of managing it. But there were plenty of other topics to cover, and I compiled a long list of them. Some examples…
Q: Tell me about your childhood in Manhattan, Malcolm. Did you like growing up in the city or did you envy kids who lived in the suburbs?
Q: Were you a jock or a geek as a kid? Good in school or good at avoiding it?
Q: Your parents split up when you were twelve. What impact did their divorce have on you?
Q: What’s your earliest memory of wanting to become an actor?
Q: Were you intrigued by movies as a boy? Which ones?
Q: What kinds of jobs did you take to support yourself while you were auditioning?
Q: Did you ever consider giving up acting in those early days? And, if so, what field do you think you would have gone into instead?
Q: Tell us about your first big break. It was a part in a Sidney Lumet movie, wasn’t it?
Q: How did that film change your life?
Q: Since then you’ve gone on to become one of America’s most accomplished and successful actors. How do you choose your roles? Is it a good script that pulls you in? A director you’ve wanted to work with? A genre that appeals to you?
Q: Is there a movie you wish you hadn’t done? A performance you aren’t proud of?
Q: How do you prepare for your roles?
Q: Which are your favorites of your films and why?
Q: Are you one of those actors who loses himself in a role? Is that part of the pleasure of acting for you? To become someone else?
Q: You’re nominated for an Oscar this year. How do you feel about awards for acting? Are you a competitive person?
Q: You have many female fans, and I’m sure they’d like to know what you’re looking for in that special woman. What attracts you to certain women? What turns you off to others?
Q: Do you see yourself settling down, getting married and starting a family at some point? Do you think about becoming a husband and father?
Q: Are you close to people in the industry or are your friendships with people you knew before you became a star?
Q: Is there anyone, living or dead, whom you particularly admire?
Q: What’s a typical day like for you when you’re not acting in a film? How do you enjoy spending your time off?
Q: Speaking of hobbies, here we are in your private plane today. When did you get your pilot’s license and what motivated you to do it?
Okay, that last question made me queasy, but it had to be asked. I, for one, wanted the answer, because I couldn’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would voluntarily take to the skies.
I came up with lots of questions, as I said, but in the end the key to getting a good interview was not only to be prepared but to be spontaneous—to take advantage of openings in the conversation and pounce on any off-the-cuff revelations.
Of course, my prowess as an interviewer meant squat if I didn’t have the nerve to get up in that plane, and by Saturday night I wasn’t sure if I could do it. For every one of Dr. Horner’s positive probables that I pounded into my head, there was a what-if hovering right over it like a dark shadow. I’d think positively about the one-in-eight-million statistic and then imagine a bird wandering into the Cessna’s fuselage, causing us to explode in midflight. Or I’d think positively about how I was more likely to die in an avalanche than a plane crash and then picture Goddard pulling the wrong lever, sending us plunging into the pool at the Hotel Bel-Air.
But I was determined that the positive probables would outmuscle the what-ifs, so I made an audiotape on which I reeled off all the reasons why I wo
uld survive the flight, and listened to it again and again in the hope of reframing my thoughts. I even fell asleep to the tape. When I awoke on Sunday morning, I was actually feeling a little better and decided to take a jog/walk around the neighborhood. One of my favorite things about living in L.A. was the great weather, and Sunday was a great-weather day. It was early February, and while the temperatures were below freezing in Missouri, they were in the high seventies outside my front door. I loved the fact that the bougainvillea bloomed all year long and the grass stayed green and the birds continued to chirp. I also loved that there was an honest-to-goodness French patisserie just blocks from my apartment. I planned to exercise for an hour or so and then reward myself with one of their buttery croissants. Hey, if it really was my last day on earth, some sunshine and a fattening breakfast were the way to go out, I figured.
I bought the croissant (okay, a croissant and a blueberry muffin), jogged/walked back to my apartment, and made some coffee. As I sat down to eat, I picked through the sections of the hefty Sunday edition of the L.A. Times, pulled out the front section, and set it on the table beside me.
Hmm, this muffin is delicious, I thought as I sank my teeth into some blueberries and scanned the headlines. There was a story about Iraq. There was a story about social security. There was a story about the latest CEO to be indicted for fraud. I took another bite of the muffin, congratulated myself on how well I was doing in terms of my anxiety, and took another bite. Sure, I was afraid, but I was coping. One in eight million. That’s what I kept telling myself.
And then I flipped over the paper, intending to read the headlines that were below the fold, but a photo stopped me cold.
“Oh my God!” I said out loud when I saw the image of the wreckage. Airplane wreckage. A tail here. A wing there. Police officers everywhere.
“Oh my God!” I said again after processing the accompanying headline: “Couple Dead in Crash of Small Plane.”
I spit out the unchewed morsel of muffin, since my throat had immediately closed up and I knew I’d never be able to swallow it. And then, with great trepidation, I read the article.