Fraud (12 page)

“Are those goddamn
10
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people here?” asks Carolla. “Dennis Miller wants his credibility back.” The audience reacts with a mock-scared “whoah,” thrilled to finally smell blood in the water. Carolla’s dis clearly isn’t merely about the fact that the Dennis Miller spots are wincingly unfunny, nor is it because a colleague has sullied himself by making commercials—
The Man Show
boys make spots for beer and
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-COLLECT themselves, after all. The difference between them and Miller comes down to the fact that Miller posits himself as a humorous Cassandra, exposing the lies at the very heart of our society. Carolla and Kimmel don’t purport to stand for anything but having a good time.

The commercials are very funny, and the winner, a spot for Ameritrade, is hilarious. But they are, simply stated, commercials. There was a time when there would be something a little eggheady about watching compilations like this. One was either in the advertising biz or at the very least a weekend McLuhanite; either way, you had to go to some lecture hall or broadcasting museum to see them. In this epoch where science continues to assiduously study Center Square Whoopi Goldberg to see if there is a product she will not endorse, there is no sense here in the audience that the medium might have something to do with the message. That at the end of the day, something is being sold. But who am I to argue with the sheer joy and paroxysms of delight of the people around me as they laugh at all of this dot comedy? They might as well be a chain gang watching a Mickey Mouse cartoon.

Hours later I chance upon the Antero Room at the St. Regis—American Eagle HQ. Looking inside, I see none other than Dick Smothers, sitting in a director’s chair, earnestly talking to a rapt audience of three sportswear publicists about when he bought his first piece of microfiber. The remaining shards of my illusions are ground down into dust.

At least I witnessed this only on the last day of the festival, the evening of which will finally lead me to my prey and the closing-night gala, the American Film Institute tribute to Robin Williams. It is the festival’s most prized ticket and very hard to get. In the press room the transcribers are worrying aloud how they will ever be able to write down the torrent of words that will invariably pour out of Williams. He is spoken of in the awed, reverent, and vaguely terrified tones usually reserved for an approaching hurricane. As mere mortals, we are powerless in the path of the Williams juggernaut. He is considered a priori brilliant, and the task of simply keeping up would be task enough, even if he weren’t so funny!

I have yet to meet anyone outside of the press room, however, who does not actively revile Robin Williams. “Can’t people see through that shit?” asks one comic rhetorically when the subject comes up. The evening is set up as a one-on-one interview between Williams and Monty Python alumnus Eric Idle. It will presumably involve a serious discussion of Williams’s film work, but there is the widespread and chuckling expectation that Williams can be trusted to riff with his usual frenetic abandon. I am aghast to find that the stage has been set up with shelves of props, dwarfing Castellaneta’s modest selection of dramatic aids. Tonight we will observe, it is assumed slack jawed with amazement, the catalyzing of comic jewel after comic jewel to be hurled forth for our wonderment and delectation.

AFI director and CEO Jean Picker Firstenberg opens the floodgates of smarm as she kicks off the evening: “Comedy is cherished by those of us who love movies, and I believe it is vital to the national well-being. But all of us know that funny movies are . . . often snubbed by the cultural intelligentsia. The time has come for funny films to have the last laugh.”

It strikes me that with Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, and Adam Sandler commanding $
20
million a movie, funny films are already having the last laugh, and quite a few of the laughs prior to the last laugh. Moreover, I don’t know of a single film studies intellectual who wouldn’t rank the work of Buster Keaton on par with that of Ingmar Bergman. So what precisely is Picker Firstenberg talking about? It is in that phrase
vital to the national well-being.
Is the lack of an Oscar nomination for, say,
Big Daddy
really a miscarriage of justice, a wound to the Republic on par with the suppression of the Pentagon Papers? And while she may well have been given a limited time to speak, it seems ridiculous that the head of the American Film Institute cannot come up with a broader continuum of cinematic comedians than Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and “the man we are here to honor tonight.” She talks about Williams as if he were penicillin or the polio vaccine: “You have made this world a better place. Regardless of the delivery system, your creative impulses are uncontainable.”

Once again the clips begin, interspersed with footage of Williams’s stand-up over the years. Watching his live act over almost two decades—the endless reel of cocaine jokes and spoofs of Valley-speak—drives home two little-acknowledged facts: First, Robin Williams is a really good, competent actor when he shuts up, which is never. And this is too bad because, second, Robin Williams isn’t actually all that funny. He is the Billy Joel of comedy, accessibly catchy in the initial moment, but with the shelf life of yogurt.

From the moment the interview begins, Williams is off. There is the theory among some psychologists that spontaneity is really nothing more than overlearned skill. Certainly Williams’s rapid-fire delivery and shifts of accent attest to this. The tropes and shamanistic visitations feel tinny. The feng shui consultant (a trend, it must be said, already a few creaky years past) who minces around the stage expounding on energy flow and open space is precisely what we have come to expect from him; ditto generic Black Guy. A pirate’s tricorner hat becomes his means of accessing the seafaring persona of his own penis, “Har har har!”; picking up a photograph of Al Gore, he utters the predictable “Please don’t listen to my speeches and operate heavy machinery”; George W. Bush’s alleged drug use is trotted out. It feels warmed over and dated even as the words leave his mouth. Never has spontaneity seemed so practiced, the very opposite of fresh. The overtested child who knows all too well that the mirror is really an observation window.

To his credit—and the detriment of my evil purposes—Williams comes off fairly well and keeps his dewy-eyed Angel of Laughter in check. Surprisingly, the evening’s allotment of treacle comes from Eric Idle, who opines, “They are the finest people in the world, aren’t they, comedians?” Yes, not like those pushy, conceited Doctors Without Borders, and don’t get me started on that bitch Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. He then follows it up with the self-aggrandizing, “It’s not a normal thing to do, is it, to be funny?” Even the disingenuous Idle must know that being funny, or at least the attempt thereof, is arguably the most normal human impulse there is (aside, perhaps, from our need for the quick and convenient fresh breath provided by Listerine PocketPaks!).

I had arrived here thinking of that oft told urban myth of the man who, newly diagnosed with cancer, checks himself into a hotel room for the weekend with videotapes of his favorite funny movies, only to emerge days later with the carcinoma beaten into remission by a flood of levity-induced endorphins. There’s really no arguing with Preston Sturges. It does seem wholly preferable to try to weather the vicissitudes of this cockeyed caravan through levity rather than through tears, but it bears repeating that even though laughter may well be “the best medicine,” it is not, in point of fact, actual medicine. One needs more than laughter to round out and sustain life.

On my last morning I eat a ridiculously extravagant breakfast of salted pork products and eggs, washed down with a gallon each of coffee and orange juice. Not the smartest meal to have before boarding the notoriously bumpy ride to Denver, affectionately referred to by locals as “the vomit comet.” But I do not care; I am entering the hypomanic state born of the prospect of my imminent departure. I emerge from the hotel to smoke my last cigarette only to find the sky gray with the ominous promise of flight-canceling snow, lowering down onto the surrounding mountains like the lid slowly closing on a lobster pot.

I’m suddenly reminded of that legendary medieval torture wherein infidels and malefactors, their chests constricted by tight leather straps, have salt poured on their feet. Goats are then brought in to lick the salt off and the victims expire in horrible, suffocating guffaws, unable to escape or draw their next breath.

I panic at the prospect of being trapped in this chic mountain enclave, awaiting the thaw. I see the icy months before me, still trying desperately to clamber up on stage, trapped in the audience in a circle of leather-tanned ski bunnies, listening to ceaseless routines, our throats ragged and the skin of our faces chapped and cracking open from the never-ending laughter.

CHRISTMAS FREUD

I am the Ghost of Christmas Subconscious. I am the anti-Santa. I am Christmas Freud. People tell me what they wish for. I tell them the ways their wishes are unhealthy or wished for in error.

I will be sitting in a chair, impersonating Sigmund Freud in the window of Barney’s department store at Madison Avenue and
61
st Street every Saturday and Sunday from late November until Christmas
1996
. My Freud imitation is limited to growing my winter goatee, being outfitted in the store’s tweediest, most
1930
s merch, and sitting—either writing or reading the
New York Times
or
The Interpretation of Dreams.
I did not have to audition for the role. I got the gig because I am friends with the store’s creative director. At the same time, I don’t suspect that he was inundated with applicants.

My window is a mock-up of Freud’s study, with the requisite chair and couch. It is also equipped with a motorized track on which a videocamera-wielding baby carriage travels back and forth, a slide projector, a large revolving black-and-white spiral, two hanging torsos, and about ten video monitors that play Freud-related text and images: trains entering tunnels, archetypal mothers, title cards that read “I DREAMED I WAS FLYING” “I DREAMED MY TEETH FELL OUT,” and so on. The other Barney’s windows this Christmas season are devoted to Frank Sinatra, Martin Luther King Jr., the Beat poets, and Blondes of the
20
th Century. The Freud window, titled “Neurotic Yule,” is the only live one.

When I sit in the chair for the first time, I am horrified at the humiliation of this, and I have no idea how I’m going to get through four weekends sitting here on display. This role raises unprecedented performance questions for me. For starters, should I act as though I had no idea there were people outside my window? I opt for covering my embarrassment with a kind of Olympian humorlessness. If they want twinkles, that’s Santa’s department.

I am gnawed at by two fears: one, that I’m being upstaged by Linda Evans’s wig in the Blondes window next door; and two, that a car—a taxi, most likely—will suddenly lose control, come barreling through my window, and kill me. An ignoble end, to be sure. A life given in the service of retail.

Sometimes for no clear reason, entire crowds make the collective decision not to breach a respectful six-foot distance from the window. Other times they crowd in, attempting to read what I’m writing over my shoulder. I thank God for my illegible scrawl.

Easily half the people do not have any idea who I’m supposed to be. They wave, as if Freud were Garfield. Others snap photos. The waves are the kind of tiny juvenile hand crunches one gives to something either impossibly young and tiny or adorably fluffy. “Oh, look, it’s Freud. Isn’t he just the cutest thing you ever saw? Awww, I just want to bundle him up and take him home!”

There are also the folks who are more concerned with whether or not I’m real—this I find particularly laughable, since where on earth would they make mannequins that look so Jewish?

My friend David wrote down what people were saying outside:

“Hey, he really looks like him, only younger.”

“Wait a sec. That’s a real guy.”

“He just turned the page. Is he allowed to do that?”

“Who is that, Professor Higgins?”

If psychoanalysis was late-nineteenth-century secular Judaism’s way of constructing spiritual meaning in a post-religious world, and retail is the late twentieth century’s way of constructing meaning in a postreligious world, what does it mean that I’m impersonating the father of psychoanalysis in a store window to commemorate a religious holiday?

In the window, I fantasize about starting an entire Christmas Freud movement. Christmas
Freuden
everywhere, providing grown-ups and children alike with the greatest gift of all: insight. In department stores across America, people leave display window couches, snifflingly and meaningfully whispering, “Thank you, Christmas Freud,” shaking his hand fervently, their holiday angst, if not dispelled, at least brought into starker relief. Christmas Freud on the cover of
Cigar Aficionado
magazine; Christmas Freud appearing on
Friends;
people grumbling that here it is not even Thanksgiving and already stores are running ads with Christmas Freud’s visage asking the question “What do women want . . . for Christmas?”

If it caught on, all the stores would have to compete. Bergdorf Goodman would leap into action with a C. G. Jung window—a near perfect simulation of a bear cave—while the Melanie Klein window at Niketown would have them lined up six deep, and neighborhood groups would object to the saliva and constant bell ringing in Baby Gap’s B. F. Skinner window.

There is an unspeakably handsome man outside the window right now, writing something down. I hope it is his phone number. How do I indicate to the woman in the fur coat, in benevolent Christmas Freud fashion, of course, to get the hell out of the way? Then again, how does one cruise someone through a department store window? Should I press my own number up against the glass, like some polar bear in the zoo holding up a sign reading “Help, I’m being held prisoner!”?

I come up to the store for a photo-op for a news story about the holiday windows of New York. It is my thirty-second birthday. I am paired with a little girl named Alexandra. By strange coincidence, it’s her birthday as well. She is turning ten. She is strikingly beautiful and appears in the Howard Stern movie. She is to be my Dora for the photographers. (Alice Liddell to my Lewis Carroll is more like it, she is so dewily alluring.)

In true psychoanalytic fashion, I make her lie down and face away from me. I explain to her a little bit about Freud, and we play a word association game. I say, “Center,” she responds, “Of attention.” I ask her her dreams and aspirations for this, the coming eleventh year of her life. Without pausing, she responds, “To make another feature and to have my role on
Another World
continue.” She sells every word she says to me, smiling with both sets of teeth, her gemlike eyes glittering. She might as well be saying, “Crunchy!” the entire time. But she is lovely. I experience extreme countertransference.

I read a bit from
The Interpretation of Dreams
to her.

“Is this boring?” I ask.

“Oh no, it’s relaxing. I’ve been working since five o’clock this morning. Keep going.”

Even though her eyes are closed, she senses the light from the news cameras outside. She curls toward it like a plant and clutches her dolly in a startlingly unchildlike manner. The glass of the window fairly fogs up.

I’ve decided to start seeing patients. I’m simply not man enough to sit exposed in a window doing nothing; it’s too humiliating and too boring. My patients are all people I know. Perhaps it is because the patient faces away from both the street and myself that the sessions are strangely intimate and genuine. But it’s more than that. The window is, surprisingly enough, very cozy. More like a children’s hideaway than a fishbowl. Patients seem to relax immediately upon lying down.

S. begins the session laughing at the artifice and ends it crying on the sofa talking about an extramarital affair. Christmas Freud is prepared and hands her a handkerchief.

K. has near crippling tendinitis and wears huge padded orthopedic boots. The people watching think it’s a fashion statement. She wears a dress from Loehmann’s, but I treat her anyway.

H., a journalist, likes to talk with children and write about them. Perhaps that is why his shirt is irregularly buttoned.

I. is not happy in his relationship. His boyfriend stands outside among the watchers in the gray drizzle, his face a mask of dejection. It’s quite clear he knows exactly what we are talking about, although he cannot hear a thing we’re saying.

In fact, the real transgression, in this age of tell-all television, is not that the therapy, no matter how sham, would be conducted in a store window. It is that its particulars remain private and confidential.

I’m told that a woman outside the window wondered aloud if I was an actual therapist. I suppose there must be one in this town who would jeopardize his or her credibility in that way.
I’ve scheduled our next session for the window at Barney’s, I hope that’s okay. . . . Huh . . . you seem really resistant. Do you want to talk about it?

A journalist is doing a story on the windows for the
Times.
He asks me if this is a dream come true. “Well, it is a dream. It’s logical,” I reply. “One of my parents is a psychiatrist, and the other is a department store window.” He doesn’t laugh at my joke, but it’s half-true. One of my parents is a psychiatrist, and the other is an M.D. who also does psychotherapy. I’ve been in therapy myself for many, many years. The difference between seeing a shrink and being a shrink is not only less pronounced than I imagined it might be, it feels intoxicating. When my own therapist says to me, “I have a fantasy of coming by the window and being treated by you,” I think, Of course you do. I feel finally and blissfully triumphant.

When I sit there with a patient on my couch, my pipe in my mouth, listening, it feels so . . . perfect. Like any psychiatrist’s kid, I know enough from growing up, and from my own years on the couch, to ask open-ended questions, to let the silences play themselves out or not, to say gently, “Our time is up,” after forty-five minutes. The performance feels real, the conclusion of an equation years in the making. And more than that: it is different from being in a play. The words I speak are my own.

The press coverage for this escapade is extensive and strange. There is such desperation for any departure from the usual holiday drivel they have to churn out, the media come flocking. Yet the public doesn’t particularly want to read about Christmas in the first place. It’s like trying to jazz up a meal nobody wanted to eat anyway. People from newspapers and television are asking me these deep questions about the holiday, the nature of alienation at this time of year, the subtextual meaning of gifts, things like that, as though I actually
were
Freud. In a moment of odious pretension that is extreme even for me, I can hear myself actually saying the word
Durkheim
to the fellow from Dutch television. A stringer for a London paper arrives late for his interview—his third wife gave birth to his first child the night before. When Marlene Dietrich’s rendition of “Falling in Love Again” comes up on the repeating tape loop that plays in the Blondes window next door, he stops midsentence, and says, “Oh, this is the song I always sing when I start to have an affair.” It’s a disconcerting moment for me, not only for his inappropriate disclosure, but also because with very little effort, I could be drunk with the power of my Freudness and advise this stranger on his serial infidelity problem.

I get a call from the store that Allen Ginsberg might be persuaded to stand in the Beats window on Sunday and, if he wants to, would I speak with him? “I have no sway over Mr. Ginsberg, but if he has something he’d like to talk about, I’m certainly available,” I reply. Not entirely true—I’m pretty well booked.

The whole Allen Ginsberg thing depresses me a bit, though. Then again, if he can see it as some cosmic joke, why can’t I? I feel indignant and very territorial. Impostors only! No real ones in the window! Fortunately, it’s moot; he doesn’t show. When he dies the very next year, I am relieved all over again that he didn’t succumb.

A street fair outside seems to have brought a decidedly scarier type of spectator. They are a crowd at a carnival sideshow and I the Dog-Faced Boy. A grown woman sticks her tongue out at me. Later, during a session, a man in his fifties presses his nose up against the window, getting grease on the glass, presses his ear up to hear, and screams inaudible things.

When I leave after each stint, I put up a little glass sign that reads “Freud will be back soon.” It’s like a warning. The postmodern version of “Christ is coming. Repent!” “Freud will be back soon, whether you like it or not.” “Freud will be back soon, stop deceiving yourselves.” In the affluent downtown neighborhood in Toronto in which I was raised, someone had spray-painted on a wall, “Mao lives!” to which someone else had added, “Here?”

My window is a haven in midtown. I can sit here, unmindful of the crush in the aisles of the store, the hour badly spent over gifts thoughtlessly and desperately bought. As I sit there, I can hear the songs that play for the Blondes display. Doris Day singing “My Secret Love” and Mae West singing “My Old Flame.” As I listen, I feel that they’re really referring to
my
window; to Freud. Every time they come up, I find them almost unutterably poignant, with all their talk of clandestine love, erotic fixation, and painfully hidden romantic agenda. But they might also just as easily be referring to this time of year, with the aching sadness and loneliness that seems to imbue everything. Where is that perfect object, that old flame, that secret love, that eludes us? Unfindable. Unpurchasable.