Elizabeth Crane: Notes for a Story about People with Weird Phobias

Elizabeth Crane

You Must be This Happy to Enter (Punk Planet Books, 2008):

Notes for a Story about People with Weird Phobias

THERE’S A TALK SHOW.

* The host is "a regular guy."

* He has a New York accent. Or: a faint Boston accent, but not the Waspy kind.

* Host wears sweaters indicating regularness.

* Host’s hair is thick and lush, slightly less than newscastery, but he is neither especially handsome nor unhandsome.

* He is fifty years old. Or: fifty-two.

* The title of this episode is, "Help! I’m Afraid of Wool!" It is about people with unusual phobias of seemingly innocuous things, maybe even things most people think are cute.

* Like say bunnies. The people seem completely genuine about these phobias, shaking even as they speak about them. Friends and family members attest to veracity of phobias and encroachment of phobias on lives of friends and family members.

* Other things people are afraid of on this episode: balloons, birds, clowns, milk, the front door, and the sky.

A SCENE: Host spends a few minutes talking to each phobic guest about the nature of their particular phobia.

Why would you be afraid of balloons? host says, in that tone that says, That’s crazy. That’s crazy! he says.

They’re going to kill me someday, I know it, the guest replies.

What? asks the host. How?

I don’t know, he or she says. There’s just going to be a lot of them.

What is it about them that’s scary to you? the host goes on, with the that’s crazy tone.

I don’t like the way they’re all … floaty, the guest says with a shiver.

Joe or Phil, the host calls offstage to a producer or intern, bring in the balloons!

Producer/intern Joe/Phil brings in a big bunch of helium balloons. Closer and closer to the guest.

Guest runs all around the room screaming.

STYLE: Omniscienty narrator. Something about this being really really cruel on the part of the regular-seeming host

* Qs: Why would he do this? Why would anyone? Host seems so nice. Why am I watching this? That poor lady/guy—Could this possibly help anyone? Maybe it’s just entertainment? Do they warn guests that there might be a bunch of balloons, etc.? Why agree to come on show with possibility of balloons etc.? Why do people want to be on television anyway? Phobia vs. fear: discuss.

SEVERAL SCENES: More segments with more guests and more weird phobias:

* Birds.

Host: Birds? All birds

Guest: Newborn birds are alright.

Host: Why birds?

Guest: Birds are twitchy and fluttery, they are evil demons who want to eat us. Guest carries birdseed everywhere to "toss one way so she can run the other."

* Milk.

Host: Well, a lot of people don’t like milk. I don’t really like milk, but I’m not scared of it.

Guest: You should be. Guest says anything that comes in contact with milk must be washed an even number of times or thrown away.

Host: What about a milk carton?

Guest: Don’t even.

* The front door.

Host: Which side?

Guest: Both sides!

Host: Everyone has a front door!

Guest: Not everyone.

Host: What do you have instead?

Guest: A nice sheet.

Host: What if you get robbed?

Guest: I’d rather be robbed.

* Wool.

Guest: It’s scratchy. It will choke you.

Host (weary now, rolls his eyes): If you say so.

* Clowns.

Host (always with incredulous tone): Clowns? Come on.

Guest: Look at them!

Host has brief second where astute viewer can see he may concede on this one. Guest checks windows and doors every morning and night.

Host (snarky): In case a clown comes by.

Guest: You don’t know.

* The sky.

Guest: It’s big and it’s everywhere.

Host: You can’t avoid the sky!

Guest: Oh yes I can.

—Host brings in more trays full of whatever the people are afraid of. A picture of the sky.

—Most of the guests run around the room screaming. One stays in chair, head in lap. Seems real. Unlike professional wrestling.

—Host says to one of them, Stop shaking! Then puts his arm around one of them. Now he’s their friend. Suddenly. Says, It’s okay now, the sky is gone.

SO-CALLED "SOLUTION" SEGMENT: Later, guests get cured by a "success coach." Offstage. No explanation of how success coach treatment works or who he is, except that he specializes in "phobiology" and has a website. Website of success coach says, Not hypnosis! Not magic! Click here to order! Order what? Testimonies of phobics coach has "successfully" treated include:

"Before my treatment I could not even walk past a Gap store without breaking into hives. One time, looking for some mid-rise jeans, I tried to put back the ones on top of the pair I tried on and became very agitated, I couldn’t do it. I began to hyperventilate. A salesperson had to bring me a paper bag. I had a very bad sensation of embarrassment. Afterward I would constantly imagine trying to find a pair of jeans or a T-shirt and messing up their piles. I would be obsessed with putting them back as neatly as I found them, but it cannot be done. Later I heard they learn a special folding technique. Well, of course they do. Then I heard about the success coach, and no lie, I went to the Gap the very next day and tried on some jeans and left the pile all mixed up. One pair was on the floor even. I didn’t buy anything at all. It was great!"

—Other testimonies of cured phobics with fears of:

Buttons. Boredom. Bolsheviks. Claymation. Two unalike TV shows next to each other on the same videotape. The dollar store. Aldi. The word supermercado. Possibly dreaming about naked Quentin Tarantino—to the point where you try to stay awake. Meter maids. People you’re not sure why they’re famous. Specifically, people on VH1 who comment on stuff from the ’80s. Shrink-wrapped gift baskets. American Girl dolls. And rubber gloves. Which could be removed only with more rubber gloves. Which caused phobic a terrible case of dishpan hands. Which caused phobic to be terribly self-conscious about her hands. Which caused phobic to hide her hands all the time and on dates a lot. Which caused problems because her dates always wanted to hold her hand and then she’d lie about why she didn’t want to hold hands with them and then she’d get mixed up in her lies and usually her relationships wouldn’t last long, because she was a bad liar. This phobic, in particular, was especially grateful to the success coach for allowing love back into her life after she was cured from her fear of rubber gloves and thus also able to cure her dishpan hands.

—But there are curiously not even vague explanations of the "treatment."

OMNISCIENT NARRATOR again.

* More Qs: When will they get to the part where they explain the nature of phobias? If it’s like regular fears? Common fears, fears that make sense, like fear of snakes or public speaking or flying? What about fear that we need? Like the kind that kicks in when you’re about to be abducted and suddenly you know what to do even though you never thought about being abducted ever before? Or fear of global warming and so you stop using hairspray or electric can openers or electric anything? What about conceptual fears, like the idea of the Grand Canyon even if you’re nowhere near it? Maybe especially if you’re nowhere near it. Or: suddenly having zero gravity but not knowing how to propel yourself around so it’s no fun. Or: the fear of being wrongly accused of killing someone and then sent to jail. Consider: if you’re a perfectly nice person but you’re single, or in a long-distance relationship. Maybe: you work at home and you’re alone a lot, hence no alibi for the time of the brutal and fatal bludgeoning of the mail carrier (with—a hammer? a brick? what?); he fails to arrive on Saturday, but you know there’s mail. Or: the paper delivery guy. Or: the girl with the big tall dog that lives down the street. Girl who, coincidentally, unfortunately, annoys you, and it is known that she annoys you because you’ve mentioned to a couple of, or several, people about her parking in the spot closest to your house when she’s got her very own private garage. Also, she doesn’t always pick up after her dog. Really she just annoys you because she’s very stylish and thin, wears heels with jeans cuffed all the way up to the knees that you know she saw in In Style, her highlighted hair looks good even in a messy little knot on top of her head, drives an SUV, lives in the new condo that blocked out your view of the top part of the skyline. Also: talks to other dog people about how hard it is being a person everyone is intimidated by, especially women, how she has no women friends because their boyfriends all totally want her, because she’s a successful (what? does it even matter?), and your best friend and a couple of other friends have also heard about her being so annoying. Then: paper delivery guy delivers the paper with a big headline about the annoying girl. How she’s dead. From a bludgeoning. Maybe you gasp and get scared about if you will get bludgeoned. Maybe for half a second you are glad she was bludgeoned. Maybe you feel a little bad about being glad, but not enough. Maybe the cops come around and start asking questions and even though you do not look like anyone who would ever kill anyone on account of you being wholesome (indicated by what—wearing of headbands? modest jeans and T-shirts? your nice face?). Maybe cops go away and come back later and put handcuffs on you. Maybe lawyers suggest plea bargaining. Say that you can get a guaranteed max of fifteen years. Maybe you say you can’t do that. You aren’t guilty. Maybe they say it doesn’t matter. Maybe you say it does matter and what about the justice system. Maybe they laugh but then say okay, whatever you want. On trial: testimony of your best friend especially does not help your case because she is very likable and pretty and also unable to lie under oath even for you. Probably she weeps, feeling so bad about it on the stand, which only makes her seem more believable plus more sympathetic than you, complainer about neighbors. Plus: your landlord says you’ve complained about her and they believe him even though he looks like he just smoked a bowl and emptied a forty. Plus: a couple of those kind of people who hang out on the stoop who overheard you complaining to your landlord. Somehow? Also? There’s DNA evidence of you on her car. Maybe you made a snowball off it one time. Or: rested your butt on it one time seeing as how it’s so big and in your way all the time. Maybe your boyfriend stands by you the whole time and maybe lies and says you were on the phone with him when it happened. Then: you get convicted (for: murder? manslaughter? for how long?) and sent to the state prison. Which is not like the Martha prison where people will be knitting you things. This prison is like Oz. But with women. Or like the prisons from TV movies where women gang up on you and try to sodomize you with broomsticks or force you to choose between two equally bad options for whose new girlfriend you get to be, except it isn’t even a little bit sexy, your choices are between a fiftyish woman with a frizzy kind of a grayish beehive thing who burned her husband’s house down who chain-smoked some seriously hardcore lines onto her face and a younger girl who was maybe cute before the heroin messed up her teeth really bad and who dyes her blond hair black when she can get hold of the dye but who for sure is very very unhealthy. These two choices being like as bad as if they put wigs on two guys from Prison Break, not the foxy innocent brothers but the craggy one-handed rapist and maybe the evil guard. And: when you tell them to just choose for you because you think that might make things easier, everyone laughs really hard. In a circle around you. If there were a camera it would go three hundred and sixty degrees to make the viewer feel it more. Long-distance boyfriend breaks up with you. Says: (what? I need space? It’s not you, it’s me? It’s totally you?). That does not seem implausible. Maybe, after you are found guilty and sent away, you go on 20/20 or 48 Hours Mystery and they act all friendly but then they go, There was DNA evidence of your butt on the SUV, with the tone of like, I know you did it, bludgeoner. Maybe you get a lot of letters, letters from men who think bludgeoners are a turn-on, or people who say they believe you’re innocent but really don’t. Or maybe: you meet a man who seems to sincerely just like you for you and doesn’t care, is a very forgiving, nonjudgmental person, and you almost marry him but then when it looks like you might get out of jail he breaks up with you because the whole thing for him is that you’re in jail. Then of course you still don’t get out of jail. Everything is bad.

More from O.N.: whether something triggers the phobias. How could anyone live like that? No guarantee you won’t see a balloon or even an image of a balloon or a clown or whatever on any given day. Seems like it might be easy to just avoid one single thing like balloons, but there’s no way to know you won’t see a balloon. Do they all just have to stay in? A lot? Balloons and clowns and the sky are sometimes on TV. What do they do inside not watching TV? What about emotional sorts of fear? Abandonment. Failure. Intimacy. Or: all of them. What if you found a long-distance boyfriend because of your fear of intimacy? Or: if your long-distance boyfriend breaks up with you and you lose your work-at-home job in the same week, and then a really genuinely nice guy comes along who lives in the same town? And keeps coming by your door with little things you like. Mini-cacti. And says, This made me think of you. Or: he writes you a little zine about a girl who is afraid but the guy keeps coming around with stuff and the drawings are so cute. But still you find something not to like about him, like he’s (what?) or (what?) but really it’s because he’s so close. And you see that he won’t go away so you try yelling. And he says, Stop yelling, you’re not a yeller. And you try to say mean things like, You’re fat, or, My last boyfriend was more man than you’ll ever be, but he’s onto that too because you have no last boyfriend although the last guy you dated was fat and your new boyfriend knows it. And you try making up more lies like you slept with his brother, or that he is your brother, and he says you’re a bad liar and you say, Fine, I’m scared, leave me alone, what do you want? and he says, I want you, and you say that’s not one of the choices. And still he stays. So you think about leaving town and changing your identity. Except what if you do that and he finds you? How many times can you do that? What if: all the jail stuff happens, and then you meet this same guy, and he stands by you, and then you do get out of jail because they find the real bludgeoner and your new boyfriend, who wouldn’t go away when you were maybe guilty, still won’t go away? Then what?

—Last five minutes of talk show:

* Guests come back out and interns/producers bring back all the things they were afraid of at the beginning of the show.

* No one is phobic anymore.

* Clapping.

—What happens after the show?