Lost at Sea (20 page)

But still, the controlling didn’t work on me. Nobody successfully got inside my head and changed—for their benefit—the way I saw NLP. In fact, quite the opposite happened. This makes me wonder if NLP even works.

E-mails and telephone calls fly back and forth. I tell Jaime the PR rep that I don’t want to be kept away from Richard Bandler during the sessions. Finally it is agreed I can meet him before he goes onstage on Monday.

•   •   •

THINGS IMPROVE.
There’s a nice, normal delegate here called Nick who teaches executives how to be good public speakers.

“These group things are always a bit creepy,” he says, “but that isn’t the point. The point is that NLP isn’t bogus.”

I tell Nick about Vish noticeably prodding me in the elbow.

“Well, he was just doing it badly,” says Nick. “Honestly. NLP is the most sensible thing out there.”

I corner Paul McKenna and tell him his assistants are driving me crazy.

“You
have
to make them leave me alone,” I say.

He looks mortified and says they’re just overexcited and trying too hard. But, he adds, the course would be a lot worse without them energizing the stragglers into practicing NLP techniques on one another.

Onstage, Bandler and McKenna cure a stream of delegates of their phobias and compulsions. There’s a woman who’s barely left her home for years, convinced the heater will turn itself on when she’s out and burn the house down.

“Do they pay you to think like this?” asks Bandler. “It seems like an awful lot of work. Aren’t you fucking sick of it?”

The woman says a bossy voice in her head tells her the heater will do this.

Bandler gets her to turn down the knob in her brain that controls the volume of the bossy voice.

Then he gets the bossy voice to tell her, “If you keep worrying about this heater, you’re going to miss out on everything good in your life.”

This, Bandler explains, is an invention of his called the Swish technique: You take a bad thought, turn it into a radio or TV image, and then swish it away, replacing it with a good thought.

“I don’t care about you anymore, heater, because I want to get my life back,” the woman says, and the audience cheers.

I still don’t quite understand the Swish technique, and so I make a mental note to get Paul McKenna to do it on me when I meet him at his house on Wednesday. I have a whole potpourri of bad thoughts I wouldn’t mind swishing away.

•   •   •

YESTERDAY RICHARD BANDLER
cured someone who had a fear of doctors. Now he gets him to stand up.

“Are you scared of going to the doctor?” he asks.

“I . . . uh . . . hope not,” the man quietly replies.

“BOO!” shouts the audience, only half-good-naturedly.

Suddenly, I feel a poke in my elbow. I spin around. It is Vish. I catch him in the act of giving my elbow a second poke.

“Did that make you feel good?” he asks me.

“It made me feel confused,” I say.

When someone appears cured, Bandler and McKenna seem quietly, sincerely thrilled. I’m sure they derive real pleasure from helping damaged people improve their lives. And the room truly is scattered with NLP success stories. There are the shy salespeople who aren’t shy anymore, the arachnophobes who swish away their spider phobias and stroke the tarantulas Paul McKenna provides one afternoon.

Onstage each day, McKenna is a mix of entertainer and college lecturer. He tells a joke and then he says, “What was I just doing?”

“REFRAMING!” the audience yells as one. (Reframing is NLP’s way of putting a miserable person in a good mood. If someone says, “My wife’s always nagging me,” the NLP-trained therapist will “reframe” by replying, “She must really care about you to tell you what she thinks.”) I sit in the audience and watch all this, and back at home in the evenings I talk to friends who, it transpires, secretly listen to Paul McKenna’s CDs and get cured.

There’s another speaker here: the life coach Michael Neill, author of
You Can Have What You Want
. One day Michael asks me if I can spot the covert intelligence officers in the audience.

“I’m not joking,” he says. “There’s always one or two.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Most people who want to get inside your brain,” says Michael, moving closer to me, “have negative reasons.”

Michael tells me about an oil-executive friend who only ever uses NLP for bad, to “mess people up.” In busy bars his friend frantically “mismatches.” He sits at a crowded table, uses NLP to establish rapport with strangers, and then behaves in the exact opposite way to what he knows would make them feel comfortable. Before long he has the table to himself. Then Michael adds, “Anyone who knows NLP will have an advantage over anyone who doesn’t. My dream is for everyone in the world to know NLP. Then there’d be an even playing field.”

Paul McKenna, standing nearby, comes over. He scans the room. When the six hundred delegates graduate in a few days, they’ll be given Licensed NLP Practitioner certificates. Some will set up their own NLP training schools. He says he cannot guard against what happens next.

“Some people teach NLP in a way that makes it sound highly manipulative and coercive,” McKenna says. “You know, ‘I will give you power over others.’ And the people who end up going to those are people with very small penises, frankly. People who think, ‘Oh my God! I’m not enough! I’m so out of control! Maybe if I learned how to have power over others, I’d be a better person!’ So you see that criticizing NLP is like criticizing a hammer.”

I tell him I’ve read terrible things about NLP on the Internet—how some scientists call it nonsense—and he says, “I
know
it’s not scientific. Some of the techniques will not always work in the same way in a laboratory every time!” He laughs. “But Louis Pasteur was accused of being in league with the Devil. The Wright brothers were called fraudsters. . . .”

•   •   •

MONDAY.
I spot Richard Bandler by the stage, surrounded by fans.

“Wow,” he says as a woman hands him a rare copy of his book
Trance-formations
. “That goes for, like, six hundred dollars on eBay.”

“That’s where I got it,” the woman replies. He autographs it.

Everything is going fine until someone hands Bandler a blank piece of paper to sign.

“What’s this?” he says. “I just don’t sign blank paper.” He pauses. “I have a thing about it.”

Misunderstanding, the woman hands him different blank paper.

“No, no,” he says. “I just can’t sign blank paper.”

Some of the fans laugh as if to say, “How can you hand him blank paper after he’s just
told
you he doesn’t sign blank paper? Are you
nuts
to expect him to sign blank paper?”

But really it is a strange moment: Richard Bandler has just spent the last few days effortlessly convincing us that phobias are nonsense, and here he is, phobic about signing blank paper.

The moment passes. A woman kisses him and says, “From one child of the sixties to another.” Bandler laughs and replies, “They called us the fringe. We’re fucking
mainstream
now!” Then I introduce myself, and we go upstairs.

•   •   •

RICHARD BANDLER
was born in 1950. He grew up in a rough part of New Jersey. I don’t expect him to talk much about his childhood because several profiles say he never does. The one thing known for sure is that he had language problems and he barely spoke until he was a teenager. So I’m surprised when he says, “I was a compulsive kid.”

I’m sitting down on a low sofa. He’s standing above me.

“When I was a kid I took up archery,” he says. “I can remember sitting out by the side of the house, until three a.m., with just a little lightbulb, shooting at a fucking target, over and over, until I got it exactly the way it was supposed to be.”

“Where did your compulsiveness come from?” I ask him.

“From being alone most of the time,” he says. “I had to be self-motivated. My mother was always out working, and my father was violent and dangerous.” He pauses. “Well, my first father was gone by the time I was five, and he was very violent. My mother later married a guy who was a drunk and a prizefighter in the navy. He was very violent. Broke a lot of my bones. But in the end I won.”

“How?” I ask, expecting him to say something like “Look at me now. I’m getting driven around in Paul McKenna’s Bentley.”

But instead he says, “I electrocuted him.”

“Really?” I say.

“I didn’t kill him,” he says, “but I could have.”

“How did you electrocute him?” I ask.

“I waited until it was raining,” he says. “I got a wire-mesh doormat. I stripped a lamp cord, put it underneath the doormat, put the other end in the keyhole, and put my hand on the switch. When the key went in, I clicked the switch. There was a loud scream. He went over the railing. Six months in the hospital.”

“How old were you?” I ask.

“Ten,” he says.

The family moved to California, where Bandler became “a juvenile delinquent. Then I discovered it wasn’t the Harley that was scaring people. It was the look in the eye.”

He says he was diagnosed as a sociopath. “And, yeah, I am a little sociopathic. But it turns out I
am
right. And my illusions were so powerful they became real, and not just to me.”

He says NLP came to him in a series of hallucinations while he was “sitting in a little cabin, with raindrops coming through the roof, typing on my manual typewriter.”

This was 1975. By then he was a computer programmer, a twenty-five-year-old graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

It’s surprising to me that Bandler would cheerfully refer to NLP as a sociopathic hallucination that struck a chord with the business world. I’m not sure he’s ever been that blunt about it before. But I suppose, when you think about it, there
is
something sociopathic about seeing people as machines—computers that store desires in one part of the brain and doubts in another.

“See, it’s funny,” he says. “When you get people to think about their doubts, notice where their eyes move. They look down! So when salespeople slide that contract in, suddenly people feel doubt, because that’s where all the doubt stuff is.”

“So where should a salesperson put the contract?” I ask.

“They’ve got to buy themselves a clipboard!” he says. “When you ask people to think about things that are absolutely right for them, they look up! So you put the contract on a clipboard and present it to them up here!”

These were the kinds of ideas Bandler was typing in Santa Cruz at the age of twenty-five. The book would eventually be cowritten with linguistics professor John Grinder and published under the title
The Structure of Magic
.

Throughout the interview, I’m sitting on a low, dark red leather sofa with Bandler standing above me. “If I was standing and you were sitting,” I ask, “would I be forming different opinions of you?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Of course.”

“So are you deliberately positioning yourself in my hopes-and-desires eye line?” I ask.

There’s a silence. Bandler smiles to himself.

“No,” he says. “My leg hurts. That’s why I’m standing up.”

The Structure of Magic
was a huge hit. “
Time
magazine,
Psychology Today
, all of these people started seeking me out in Santa Cruz,” he says. “And I started getting interest from places I really didn’t expect, like IBM.”

He designed sales-training programs for businesses across America. They made him rich. He bought a home in Hawaii and a mansion in Santa Cruz. He was hailed as a genius. The CIA and military intelligence squirreled him in, which is how I first heard of him. Had he really smuggled a tiny girl into Special Forces and got her to “model” a world-class sniper?

“It wasn’t a little girl,” he says. “It was a ten-year-old boy. And that’s not as great as it sounds. You can teach a ten-year-old boy to pretty much do anything.”

But by the early 1980s, things were spiraling downward for him. His first wife filed for divorce, claiming he choked her. According to a 1989
Mother Jones
profile, he began to warn associates, “All I need to do is dial seven digits and with my connections with the Mafia I could have you all wiped out without even batting an eye.”

He struck up a friendship with his cocaine dealer, a fifty-four-year-old man named James Marino. By 1986 he was living in a house built by Marino. A few doors away lived Marino’s girlfriend, Corine Christensen.

In early November 1986, James Marino was beaten up, and he got it into his head that Corine had organized the beating so she could take over his cocaine business. Marino was paranoid, and he infected his friend with the paranoia. Bandler phoned Corine up, recording the conversation: “Why is my friend hurt? I’ll give you two more questions, and then I’ll blow your brains out. . . .”

Eight hours later, Corine Christensen was shot in the head at her home, and twelve hours after that Bandler was arrested for the murder.

I’ve been worried about bringing this up with him. Bandler may be quite brilliant and charismatic but he also seems overbearing and frightening. And although Paul McKenna himself strikes me as likable, his team of overzealous (literally overzealous) assistants scattered around the hotel are forever eyeing me with suspicion if I appear anything less than completely thrilled. Plus, earlier Jaime the PR rep cornered me in the corridor and said, “A few people have reported to me that you’ve been asking about banking and finance. You aren’t going to be writing about how NLP can be misused, are you?”

Then she looked me in the eye and added, “Some people are concerned.”

And that’s just because I was asking about banking! What’ll happen if I ask about murder—not the pretend murders Bandler jokes about onstage, but a real one?

Still, they aren’t in the room now.

“Tell me about the murder trial,” I say.

He doesn’t pause at all. He tells me what he told the jury—that James Marino did it. There were two men in the house when Corine was murdered—the famous Richard Bandler and the lowlife James Marino. Yes, he was there. He lifted her head, which is how her blood ended up on his shirt. Why do I think the police went after him?