The Best Australian Stories (33 page)

Today on
Dr Phil

Tom Cho

Today my Auntie Lien and I are appearing on the television show of the famed psychologist Dr Phil. The
Dr Phil
episode we are appearing in is titled ‘What Are You Really Mad At?' and Dr Phil is asking Auntie Lien and me about how we deal with anger. Auntie Lien is right in the middle of talking about her propensity to explode in anger when Dr Phil asks her why she gets angry so easily. Auntie Lien hesitates. Dr Phil advises her, ‘You've got to face it to replace it.' Hearing Dr Phil say this prompts Auntie Lien to confess that her anger stems from the many difficulties she has experienced with relationships. She says that she has been unlucky in love. Furthermore, she says that the sadder she gets, the angrier she gets. I feel that I can relate to this statement and so I join the studio audience in enthusiastically applauding my auntie's comment. Auntie Lien suddenly says something in ancient Greek. Dr Phil looks at her blankly, and she explains that she was quoting from
Medea
, the classic play by Euripides. She confesses that she likes to study the work of the great Athenian dramatists. She translates the lines for Dr Phil: ‘The fiercest anger of all, the most incurable / Is that which rages in the place of dearest love.' As Auntie Lien goes on to discuss in minute detail the structural imperfections in Euripidean drama that have puzzled scholars for centuries, I can tell that Dr Phil and the studio audience are struck by the fact that they are sharing a room with one of the finest scholars of ancient Greek drama that the world has seen. Me, I have always found it interesting that Auntie Lien has such a great mind for scholarly pursuits as well as such a great capacity for flying into fits of anger. This makes me think about my own experiences with intellectualism and anger. Sometimes I have a tendency to ‘intellectualise first and get angry later'. Interestingly, like many people, when I get really angry I can transform into what seems like a completely different person. This makes me turn to Dr Phil to ask him: if anger can transform me, in what other ways might anger be transformative? I suggest to him that perhaps I could use my anger creatively, even proactively. For example, surely some of the most significant political revolutions in history have been in part driven by a sense of rage? This then leads me to consider my attraction to anger. Could it be that I associate anger with power? This would be ironic, given that anger can occur as a consequence of not feeling powerful enough. But Dr Phil is too absorbed in Auntie Lien's discussion of the function of the chorus in ancient Greek drama to listen to me properly. However, eventually the topic turns back to anger when Dr Phil begins reflecting upon the murderous actions of the character of Medea following her betrayal by her husband. In fact, Dr Phil declares that Medea ably demonstrates his belief that people who experience uncontrollable rage actually have unfulfilled needs that must be addressed. Hearing this makes me think of my own life, and so I confess to Dr Phil a fantasy that I have recently had. In this fantasy, I become extremely angry. The fantasy begins with me starting to sweat from my anger. My heart starts beating faster. I clench my fists and the anger makes my face heat up. In this fantasy, I am like the Incredible Hulk in that the angrier I get, the stronger I get. So my muscles start to grow. My muscles become so big that they start to outgrow my clothes. The seams of my shirt and pants begin to split. My neck becomes thicker, and my thighs and calves swell and become harder. I am growing and growing, putting on height as well as bulk, and soon I am around eight feet tall and full of strength and fury. First I go rampaging through the streets, smashing things out of sheer anger. No one is stronger than me. I can bend lamp posts and break walls and throw cars. It does not take long for the police and the military to be sent after me. But they cannot stop me. Their guns and explosives only make me angrier and stronger. I rip apart their trucks and tanks. Then I move on to the sheer satisfaction of destroying whole buildings. After a good hour of smashing and destroying, I stomp all the way to my girlfriend's house. She opens the door and looks a little surprised to see me. I am standing before her, breathing hard and still very angry. She says to me, ‘I was just watching you on the news. You were destroying all these buildings. You should have more respect for the property of others.' I pause for a moment before replying, ‘Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.' I enjoy saying this line to her – it is what Dr Banner used to say before he turned into the Hulk. But, as it turns out, my girlfriend does like me when I'm angry. She begins looking at my muscles in admiration. I glare at her but that only makes her sigh happily. This just makes me glare at her all the more. I am so angry. The angrier I get, the stronger I get. And the stronger I get, the more aroused she gets. She looks at me and her face begins to flush. Her breath starts to quicken. And the more aroused she gets, the younger she gets. She used to be thirty-three but now she is getting younger. She smiles and winks at me as she goes back into her twenties. Fascinated, I watch as she gets younger and younger, and she doesn't stop until she is in her teens and blushing and cuter than ever. And the younger she gets, the fewer people she has had sex with. She slips her hand into mine and tells me that she is sixteen years old and a virgin and that she is eager for me to teach her all about sex. So I scoop her up in my arms and take her to her bedroom and we spend all night having the hottest sex you can imagine. After I have finished telling Dr Phil my anger fantasy, there is complete silence in the studio. I had been hoping that the audience would enthusiastically applaud my fantasy but they just stare at me. It is then that I wonder if I have said too much. Finally, Dr Phil breaks the silence to tell me, ‘You have to name it before you can claim it,' and he encourages me to look inside myself to work out what I really want in life. He then says that we have run out of time and so he faces the camera to deliver a final address about the issues we have spoken about today. He begins to deliver a very moving address about how life is managed, not cured. As Dr Phil speaks, I think about the pain that anger can cause and I start to feel sad. I look at Auntie Lien's face and I can tell that she is feeling sad about this too. In fact, the more poignantly Dr Phil speaks, the sadder Auntie Lien gets. But then I remember that the sadder Auntie Lien gets, the angrier she gets. I soon notice that she is clenching and unclenching her fists. Her eyes dart around the room in agitation. As Dr Phil continues to speak, she begins to mutter angrily under her breath. Finally, it is too much for her. She explodes in anger, jumping out of her seat and attacking Dr Phil. Security guards run up to the stage and try to pull Dr Phil and Auntie Lien apart. The studio audience is hollering and chanting and Auntie Lien is swearing so colourfully that her words will have to be bleeped out before the episode goes to air. Auntie Lien calls out to encourage me to join in the fisticuffs. I am unsure about this but she reminds me that releasing anger can be very satisfying. The thing is, Auntie Lien has a point – quite a valid point that not even Dr Phil has raised. But first, I take the time to intellectualise about Dollard et al's ‘Frustration–Aggression Hypothesis' and its subsequent behaviourist/neo-associationist reformulation by Berkowitz. Having considered this and its implications for research on factors affecting aggression, I become angry and join Auntie Lien in releasing my rage. As Auntie Lien and I engage in a dramatic punch-up with Dr Phil and his security guards, the show's end credits start to roll. A few people in the studio audience begin to applaud. Auntie Lien and I still have plenty of rage left but, soon, the show will be over.

Act Fifteen

Jessica Anderson

In the doorway she halted for a moment, surprised by the look of the place – by the light-blue walls and the comfortable cane chairs set casually about a rectangular blue-green carpet. And cushions, too, in some of the empty chairs.

As she went in she said to herself with sarcasm,
Act 15 – the curtain
rises on nine chairs set around a swimming pool.

But another doorway was concealed by a heavy dark curtain. Not, she thought, convincing as a changing room.

Only four of the chairs were occupied – two by men and two by women.

She crossed the carpet, sat down, and put her bag on the floor.

The other two women, one young and tall, with red hair, and one old and lumpy, sat on the other side of the rectangular carpet. An old man sat at the end, biting on a thumbnail, and in the chair next to hers sat the other man, who to her casual observation was tall and fair, wearing shorts, legs crossed, one skinny foreleg swinging.

The old woman opposite wore long yellow beads which, over and over, she stroked, perhaps irritating the redhead beside her into giving her those jerky glances.

They should have had music, thought Monica.

While she was worrying away at this thought, selecting and rejecting the music, the man next to her stopped swinging his foreleg, uncrossed his legs, and leaned sideways out of his chair towards her. Without looking at her, he sheltered his mouth with a curled hand and whispered, ‘We've got to stop meeting like this.'

She burst into laughter. She leaned back and laughed, then turned, still laughing, to look at him sideways. Lanky, fair-haired, about forty. Grinning. Probably the office joker, she thought. She was grateful to him. This was the stomach ulcer clinic.

He raised an arm, gestured across the ceiling. ‘Not a cloud in the sky. But where are the palm trees?'

She said, ‘Somebody wants to be nice to us.'

‘Sure,' he said.

‘Somebody wants to soothe us.'

‘Well,' he said, glum, ‘we could do with it.'

‘Always,' she said.

‘Listen,' he said, ‘I've seen you somewhere. On TV, was it?'

‘Possibly. I've done a bit of acting. Not lately. Not for years.'

‘Hard game, they say, is that how you get yours?'

Monica was about to craft a repressive reply when the young woman on the other side of the carpet, the redhead, jumped to her feet, gave a loud wail, and rushed out of the door. ‘Whoa!' shouted the man at the end of the carpet, while Monica's neighbour whispered, ‘Jesus', and the old woman clutched her beads and cried out, in true distress, ‘Oh dear! Oh dear!'

The heavy curtain was pushed aside, and a nurse stood there, smiling, and saying in sing-song, ‘Mis-ter Stanley Mal-on-ey.'

The man at the end of the carpet got up. The old woman was stabbing a forefinger at the chair by her side, ‘Nurse, nurse, this one – this one.'

‘Bolted,' said Mr Stanley Maloney as he crossed the carpet. ‘Whoa! Whoa! That one,' he said with satisfation, ‘she bolted.'

‘Oh dear,' said the nurse. She looked at the list in her hand. ‘Well, Mr – Maloney, isn't it?' She smiled at the man. ‘Come in, Mr Maloney.'

‘Whoa, whoa,' said Mr Maloney, going in.

‘They're nice here,' the old woman called out across the carpet.

Monica and her fair-haired neighbour, in chorus, agreed. ‘Yes,' they called out. ‘Yes, they are.' Then he lowered his voice and said, ‘Scared of the big C, the bolter. The big C.'

‘What?' she said. ‘Oh, cancer. I suppose so.'

‘Well, aren't we all?'

‘Well, no. It hasn't been much on my mind.'

‘Me neither, to be truthful. You can't go by weight loss.'

‘My doctor didn't mention cancer. And according to my X-rays, mine has been getting steadily better.'

‘I've always been fairly skinny. Now they tell me, “Get some weight on those ribs.” Ar – but who wants to be bloody fat?'

‘My first X-ray looked like a map of Borneo.'

‘Borneo? Mine, more like … like … Greenland, mine.'

‘Well, last X-ray I thought, about mine, perhaps Lord Howe Island.'

‘Lord Howe, eh? Well, Greenland mine was, and after six X-rays, Greenland it still is. And what I want to know is why, after all those X-rays, making bloody fools of us, putting us into that lab gear, those baby clothes and all, with our big hairy legs sticking out, not yours of course, mine, why after all that they send us here to have a tube stuck down our gullet, with a light on the end of it?'

‘It's called an endoscopy,' said Monica. ‘And it finds out things that the X-rays can't.'

‘Exactly,' he said.

‘And there's a little anaesthetic,' she said, rather coldly. ‘Very quick, I'm told. They just dip you in, take a look, then pull you out!'

‘And then – do they give you the news?'

‘The usual thing is to write—'

‘Exactly! To write to your bloody doctor. And then you've got to trot along to him. Now what I want to know is why can't they …'

It occurred to Monica that if he was afraid, he may be fostering this aggression to conceal it. He was about the age of her son. She smiled at him, and gestured with the hand she would have laid on her son's shoulder.

‘I don't know why.'

‘And you don't care.'

‘This is my fifteenth examination.'

‘Fif
teen
!'

He turned his head to stare at her. Across the carpet, the old woman was running her hand down her chest, from neck to waist, quite hard, as if to subdue those long yellow beads.

The man beside Monica said, ‘Of course, you're a good bit older than what I am.'

‘That does make it easier.'

‘This is my eighth,' he said sullenly. ‘Seven 'rays, and now this.'

‘After my eighth X-ray, I decided to join the army.'

‘Ah,' he said. ‘I get it. Yair. I've been there. Obedience.'

‘Mine not to wonder why, et cetera.'

‘I get it.'

‘Also, lack of responsibility.'

‘Yeah, yeah, I take your point.' He leaned closer. ‘But listen, she's even older than what you are. You'd better tell
her
that.'