Hyper-chondriac (9 page)

“So?”

“So? Isn't that great news?!”

“No. That's
normal
news. That's how people are supposed to behave in society.”

It was going to be harder to impress Nancy than I thought.

I shut the bedroom door and Googled “Anger Management” in hopes of gathering up more quotes for a second laminated card. There, in the middle of the first page, I saw something that piqued my interest even more than a series of quotes worthy of draping heated plastic around: an “Understanding and Transforming Anger” course, a mere three highway exits away. The two-part, four-hour program would cost $50, so my anti-anger laminated card and I signed up.

 

The building was a two-story concrete slab. As usual, I was excessively early. No matter where I was going I was always the first to arrive. Even meeting friends for lunch at a café a mile from my house, I'd arrive at least ten minutes before we had arranged. To me, being on time was being late. My rationale: boredom was a pleasant alternative to a stressful battle with minutes and seconds.

I sat down in the corner of the back row and waited for the other angry people to show up. The advantage of getting somewhere first is that you can avoid getting trapped between two people you'd rather not be near. The wall is your friend and always will be.

I had expected to see a lot of white guys with shaved heads and earrings, most of whom looked as though they had either done jail time or were running late because beating their wives or girlfriends had taken longer than expected. However, the majority of the people drifting in were women. Old women with gray hair and ponytails who looked like they had been waiting on line for Lilith Fair tickets for sixty years; twentysomething women casually dressed in T-shirts; and women about my age in business suits who had come straight from work.

The room was already a third of the way full and the workshop wasn't going to start for another ten minutes. This turnout had already exceeded my expectations.

There were still at least twenty-five empty chairs when a middle-aged couple came in and sat right next to me, which was uncalled for. There were plenty of other seats that weren't next to anyone! It was as if someone sat next to me on an empty bus. Jerk.

My new neighbor wore a Tommy Bahama shirt with red suede sneakers and had a large William H. Taft–like mustache. I wish I could tell you what his wife looked like, but his giant walrus mustache blocked my view. In any case, he didn't waste a second before he started yapping loudly to her while simultaneously smacking his gum. I considered switching seats, but by the time I had decided to move, there were barely any left.

New stragglers included a couple of guys with shoulder-length hair who looked like either members of bad rock bands or roadies for good ones. A man in a blue pin-striped suit, with a full head of black hair, sat in front of me. He seemed to be a banker, which made sense because people in finance tend to get angry. There always seems to be shouting when lots of money is at stake. I suspected that he had strangled a coworker who had given him a “can't miss” stock tip that quickly did just the opposite. These were not people you wanted to fuck with. I wondered if anybody had been required to enroll as part of a plea bargain or a deal with his or her parole officer.

 

The instructor walked in at three minutes before the hour. She was a peppy, high-intensity, no-nonsense lady with light red hair, wearing a white sweater with a pink cat on it and was probably on her third face-lift.

“My name is Eileen and I'll be your teacher. This class is sold out, so we'll wait five more minutes for everyone to get here.”

It wasn't starting on time! I wondered if this was just a gimmick to get everyone in class enraged and start a riot and flush out the truly angry. Perhaps there was a bevy of police officers on the other side of the wall, ready to pounce if we acted up.

In the meantime Eileen scribbled “Anger” on a giant flip pad the size of my kitchen table, being sure to make each of the letters really squiggly so the word looked angry. She was one clever lady.

Meanwhile, the gum-snapping next to me continued. It was as if the walrus was popping a giant sheet of bubble wrap inside his mouth. It was hard to concentrate, even though there wasn't actually anything to concentrate on yet. But if this kept up, I knew it would be hard to concentrate when I had to. The class hadn't even started and I was about to snap. I removed my laminated anger card for a quick consultation.

 

If there is a remedy and you can repair it, then do it and don't be unhappy; if there isn't a remedy, then there's no point in being unhappy.

 

Part of the trouble is that I think the second half of the above statement never applies to me. I believe every problem can be “remedied” and fixed. In this instance, I could rip the gum out of Walrus Head's mouth.

I relaxed a little, comforted by my capacity to solve things. Besides, I figured that when the class started, Eileen's resonant, energetic voice would drown out the gum-snapper anyway. I'd have to ride it out. It was too hacky to get angry in Anger Management.

At five after seven, Eileen walked around passing out a packet of articles to each student. Taft turned to his wife and boisterously said, “I didn't study for
this
test!” and then laughed uproariously at his own joke even before he had finished his sentence. I couldn't imagine how loud it would've been had his mustache not absorbed 90 percent of the sound.

“Did you know that when you get angry, the adrenal glands release cortisol, epinephrine and other stress hormones?” Eileen singsongingly asked. “And then the heart rate speeds up, blood pressure rises and breathing becomes short.”

The class seemed to give a collective shrug as if to say, “Yeah, so?”

“Your muscles tense, the brain becomes hyper-alert, while the heart pumps more and more blood to the legs and arms. And that's not all,” she said as if she were an electronics salesperson doing an amped-up commercial. “The digestive and immune systems practically
shut down
!”

This was the root of all my hyper-chondria. Being hyped-up, stressed and angry taxed my organs and invited disease into my body. Just what those Australian researchers said in the footnote on page 3.

“But even when you
stop
being angry…the stress hormones continue…to linger…in the bloodstream!” Eileen then repeated it a second time just in case we neglected the importance of her slower cadence. “That's right. Even when you STOP being angry, the stress hormones
continue
to linger in the bloodstream!”

Walrus-mustached Rip Taylor fucker next to me then turned to his wife and jokingly said, “I wish she hadn't told me that: Now I'm even
more
stressed!” Then both of them chortled for what seemed like a minute and a half.

Eileen explained, “Sometimes we just can't seem to escape our rage. But think about this. If a tiger jumped out of that cabinet, you'd forget about your anger, wouldn't you?” That's where she's wrong. I'd be angry at how a tiger got past security and that people didn't spay or neuter their tigers. No matter what, I would find someone or something to blame and get pissed-off at. My anger would be intact. I could logically find anger anywhere.

“But here's some good news.” She paused for added emphasis. “Did you know that anger isn't real? Well, it isn't. Anger is always a cover-up for another emotion. That's right! Anger is imaginary. There are a total of twelve emotions that masquerade as anger…” As her voice trailed off, she began to list each of them on the giant pad, though thankfully not in that squiggly font.

1. Hurt, sadness.

A fifty-year-old guy trying hard to look thirty and wearing giant BluBlockeresque tinted glasses interrupted.

“So when I fight with my girlfriend, it's because I'm planning on breaking up with her and I'll be sad?”

“I don't know. I'd need to learn more about your relationship.”

“But it might just be because I'm sad then, right?” This guy's life probably peaked in 1975 when he was a pot dealer in New Haven.

“We can discuss your situation after class, if you'd like,” said Eileen diplomatically.

Suddenly I heard a rapid clicking noise to my immediate left. It was Taft giving his thumb a workout on his pen.
Clickclickclick.
He was really driving me nuts with his parade of noises so I decided it was time to take action. It was time to break out Orange Juice Carton Face. Orange Juice Carton Face was discovered in 1985 by my then roommate, Tema, after she unconscionably put an empty half-gallon cardboard orange juice container into our kitchen garbage can without crushing it so it would take up markedly less space—a handy trick I had learned from my father. Instead, because of her callous carton conduct, I was forced to reach into the garbage and pull out the hulking Tropicana container and crush it myself. The next time I saw Tema, she claims I gave her a look as if she had just intentionally burned the apartment complex down, then killed my entire family before stepping on every puppy's tail at the pound. It was the angriest look I was capable of. My eyebrows scrunched down into improbable angles, my eyes protruded from my sockets and my lips snarled as if I was about to bite someone. Welcome to Orange Juice Carton Face. Tema was petrified. It was my secret weapon and I was hoping that I could frighten Walrus Man into a clicking cease-fire with a little of my persuasive downward eyebrow movement. However, Orange Juice Carton Face failed miserably this time. It's powerless if people aren't looking.

2. Fear, frustration.

“Anger is also a substitute for fear or frustration,” said Eileen.

Up went BluBlocker's hand again.

“So…does that mean that maybe I'm fearful of breaking up with my girlfriend and that's why I'm angry?”

The banker guy in front of me looked agitated. I wouldn't have been surprised if he stood up and told BluBlocker to shut the fuck up or he'd crush him with giant bags of money.

“Um…I don't know. We can discuss it after class if you'd like,” repeated Eileen, who, at this rate, would never get to explain all dozen emotions.

3. Habit.

“Anger can also be a result of habit,” continued Eileen. “If one of your parents was angry, then you got it!” Yep. I got it, all right. A lot of times I don't even feel that I'm the one governing my body. It's as if my mother wrote the script and I'm just acting it out.

A spindly man in the back row with all gray hair except for a small dark patch on the side (the opposite of John Henson) raised his hand.

“Is there any hope of breaking the habit?”

“Oh, sure. It just takes a lot of discipline.”

Spindles seemed satisfied.

4. Reaction.

A petite lady in a sweatshirt raised her hand, but Eileen was already on to scribbling her next number, apparently trying to make up some time.

5. Disappointment based on expectations.

“This is the number one cause of anger,” Eileen said with pride. “What is disappointment based on? What do you think causes disappointment?” Before anyone could respond she blurted out the answer. “Expectations. If we have no expectations, we can never be disappointed. We need to practice removing our expectations.”

This was my Achilles' heel. People always seemed to disappoint me. They're late, they're inconsiderate, they're rude, they don't signal, they think they're the only person on the planet, they're unreliable. They're human. As much as I hated the way my mother treated my father, I was as guilty as she in demanding perfection. I was a drill sergeant. I was the one who wasn't human. It wasn't everybody else that was the problem, it was me. Shit.

6. Indignation in response to perceived injustice.

“Other than number five, this is probably the most common cause of anger,” Eileen told us. “Indignation in response to
perceived
injustice. Remember, the injustice isn't actually there. You've just imagined it.”

A large blond woman who probably had the night off from stripping interrupted.

“So if anger is imaginary and so is the injustice, why do we get angry so much?”

“Because anger is our default emotion when it should actually be set on ‘happy.'”

“I'm not having a visceral connection to what you're saying,” said the probable stripper, showing off her vocabulary. Maybe she was one of those strippers who
was
putting herself through school.

“We have a tendency to rehearse things in the negative,” Eileen said. “How come we never choose to rehearse things in the positive? Like we never say to ourselves, ‘Where am I going to find the room to store all my money?'”

The banker guy released a wry smile.