The Dr. Phil Trip

Molly Brodak

Up—the light riggings, the sound panels, the iron walkways, the black background, the whole earth from underneath, some mass of wriggling demons packed into a dark half clod of matter—don’t look up! I tell myself. Ahead, only, into the set of the Dr. Phil show. The cheery shield with his name at the center of it all is wavering some and making me sick so I look into the construction of the false half-walls and ramps and panels fashioned with the same warmth as a video game bathroom, and the stage itself, which is so small, so incredibly small, isn’t hell so small? Hell is not the inverse of heaven, it is a cheap imitation. You get to laugh, once, when you get there—all that waiting! For this! The pain upon arrival is not terror but disappointment, disappointment in the shoddy, careless architecture of hell. Then you feel what you’re there for: regret. Unceasing regret, in a place without time. And they keep you alive in line for so long, demons bringing little sips and sugar sheets and it’s cold, and everyone else is cold, and definitely not on LSD. So I laugh. Everything in hell is made of papier-mâché and cardboard and cellophane. I had been thinking baroque, you know, which means an earthy obsession with entrails that dovetails with flourishing all over the place, which is really just anguishing all over the place. Not even close. There’s an anteroom full of dark chairs stacked specifically not in altar-istically, not like skulls at all, just a very laughable sort of stack of chairs half doubled over in incompetence, a green poly curtain that goes back forever, hiding nothing but another curtain. There’s a framed photo of Dr. Phil and his wife, then another of his family. A lot of the normal, non-drugged people around me laugh at the photos as we file in so I really don’t need to say anything more about those than that. The stand-up comic/three-headed Leviathan who hands us a release form to sign also decides what color badge we’ll wear in hell, which is not explained, ever, but one can come to understand the colors just by looking around. Everyone is already wondering where precisely in hell they’ll be seated and the color badges come to answer. A few people with limps, a mom who needs help down a step, a very old couple—yellow. Infirm. They are ushered in first. We all understand. Some have blue. Blue is second-tier attractive. Fewer have orange, which is first-tier attractive. All of the normal looking people have no card at all and will sit in the back. They are lucky, although they feel just the opposite. The comic looks at me and hands me an orange card. This is an important part of hell, you know, differentiation. It doesn’t take long for the groups to police each other; a blue card tries to mix in with the orange cards and the orange cards expel her before any little demon with a headset gets a peep out. The camp guards at Buchenwald did not have to do as much work as you imagine once categorizing patches were attached to uniforms. My partner and I are in the second row, prime beauty row, surrounded by sets of local high schoolers bussed in to fill the audience—which, very obviously, would not be otherwise filled by suckers like us who came specifically to the center of hell for fun. I am all the way at the end of the row, touching the blonde plywood stage, sunk still in a conference-room chair that feels too small. A young, hopeful model and her mom next to us have come to be seen; her long brown hair wavers like a silk curtain as she flashes her face continuously toward all the cameras. A man whose sole purpose is to throw trash at us is applauded onto stage and we cheer for the trash—I intentionally catch a cordiform stress ball imprinted with the Dr. Phil logo. I need this, I tell myself. I squeeze the heart as if it's necessary. The music, club music, gets unbearably loud, and at the peak of the frenzied enthusiasm for the trash and the music Dr. Phil hobbles quickly onto stage—his legs move like they’re held in place by polio braces—and the music quits in an instant and he’s telling us this mom is living in her car. We all go silent. Then we applaud whenever we hear applause. I thought there would be a signal, or applause sign, but all it takes is a man in a headset to start clapping and everyone joins in. The room is tight-focused on Phil. His suit is slick and unwrinkleable. I’m trying very hard to look normal. I don’t want a cameraman to find my helplessly expressive face and decide a brow-raise or jaw-drop, which I emit regularly despite my efforts, would make a nice punctuation mark for the show. I concentrate on the set ahead. Trying to hold it together is not a fun activity to pair with LSD, and I knew this. Chairs are wheeled out onto stage by beleaguered looking men in black, hyperattuned to each others’ movements like a school of fish. Phil, Satan, whatever, takes his throne, that whole image, you know the one. Binder in one hand, sign of benediction with the other. The adult children of the homeless mom come out and weep, they are listened to for a few seconds, then comes the mom, the homeless demented mom refusing to participate in capitalism and so prodded forth with pitchforks like an animal. This mom is not what we want, her children say. She’s embarrassing to us. She tries dating men three decades too young for her. She quit her terrible job. She sleeps in her car. She refuses to mother us satisfactorily. She is defective. Phil’s head is patted deeply with matte skin powder; it looks like a rubber mask. He lets the sorry souls talk. He uses his mask to express disappointment in them all. He doesn’t quite listen. He hurries them along between pre-recorded clips and quotes from their text messages taken out of context. He hurries them along to the end, which is help. I am squeezing the foam heart, very cold. The children, the mom, the audience—we all know how this is going to end: Phil is going to offer help to the mom and she will accept it, and we will applaud. We will all feel like the defective mom has been solved, and will be satisfied to turn away from the spectacle. I’m embarrassed of my mom too, I’m thinking at these children. Let alone Dad, I laugh. Without an artificial TV ending you can never turn away from the spectacle. You live on set, forever. The children and the mom are real people. They are all in immense pain. They’ve agreed to parade their most private agony on the stage at the center of hell for a moment of artificial resolution. I look around at the audience. Faces all calm, focused, brightly lit. Who wouldn’t do the same, I wonder. My stomach is churning and I’m still in that early queasy stage of LSD but I’m good at sitting still. My partner’s eyes are wild and searching. I smile. My hair is perfectly golden and wavy. My thin sweater is not quite enough—remember it’s cold in hell, not hot, because it is the farthest point from the warmth of God’s love. Of course in the version I know, Satan is crying, and his tears feed the lake he’s frozen in. I look into Phil’s eyes. There’s nothing there, at least not now. Maybe some other time, maybe late at night when the cameras are sleeping and the lights are cold, maybe something rises to the surface and he weeps. The show pauses and we watch a few moments of pickups. Phil’s really a pro. He’s quick and efficient; his pickups and intros for Houston are done in less than five minutes. His wife comes to stand next to him, this pitiable skeleton woman, held tight in skin staples and Botox and fillers and a getup a bit too junior. She’s sweet. It occurs to me that such demons, cogs in the pain-for-profit system, are almost always sweet. That’s how this all works. Remember it is a cheap imitation. They smile next to each other and try to shine with human affection. Satan cries because he’s the only one in hell who remembers God’s love. He had felt it. He was once there, right up next to it. Phil holds a BA, an MA and a PhD in psychology, although he is not licensed to practice. Still, he was once there, right up next to it. The show concludes and we are filed out of the studio for a break. I am crying, shivering. My partner searches my face. “No one loves anyone,” I say, and he stops searching. Outside, wind whips through the holding pen and the smell of real air reorients me. The bathroom lines are long, but we all wait patiently, as if being here is worth it. I had packed food into my purse and now my partner and I gobble it down quickly while the others look on, sucking from paltry juice boxes. LSD lets you stand apart from yourself for a while. This isn’t just a show, I think. This is how everything is. And no one loves anyone. Not really. I mean maybe, but barely. I realize I’m standing still in a way that’s drawing attention. I don’t want to go back in. Last year at Auschwitz I left at the midpoint of the tour, during the break. I didn’t need to see the other part, Auschwitz II–Birkenau. There was nothing left to see but tourists photographing what they weren’t looking at. I’d said something to my tour guide there about what it must be like to work in hell, and she said this is worse than hell. People built this place. I’m just staring now, dropping the performance. The cavernous studio, its black mouth swallowing happy souls, the fraudulent spectacle inside, and the other lots all full of other fraud sprawled all over Hollywood. This is what we chose to spend our time building. Fraud. The opposite of love. “Because whoever made money off of love,” I say to my partner as if it makes sense. He laughs reassuringly but is also not ok. But we file back in, then it starts over. And a new family is prodded forth, and some of them even cry. Now it’s another defective rich mom set against one regular sister and one defective sister who lives in Mom’s basement and does nothing but watch Laverne & Shirley and refuse to participate in capitalism. They show the basement sister Before, when she was thinner and married. Everyone wants the sister to return to her Before, when she participated correctly. I know the basement sister needs nothing more than for these people to stop wanting her to be different. I can see it. I can see her soul. It’s just fine. And I can see her sister’s greedy, thin soul, and her mom’s ugly soul all stuffed with rotten cotton and tacky furnishings. And the cameras light up all their pain and they cry, and I cry too, in a different way. Everyone knows she will be corrected at the end, so the lights and the pain are all worthwhile. But she isn’t being corrected. She’s refusing help. She says “No.” Silence follows. The room remains preserved in yellow light and average blue tones. The model next to me continues angling her commercial face to the cameras. My own tears have sobered me some, and I’ve forgotten the stress ball in my hands. She doesn’t want the Life Coach, whose name is probably Mike, to come to her door and motivate her to change her life. She is refusing to abandon her genuine self here, of all places! The pit of hell! She’s not crying! The camera is needling straight into her yet she’s still saying no. She should be lifted by angels on the spot for ruining hell right now, but instead she is shifted into the hottest fire. “Maybe later,” she says, and Phil just looks at her and waits. We need a commitment, Phil says. Mike’s mouth gapes like a carp. Mike tilts his head and lowers his shoulders submissively, trying to be gentle. He’s saying come with us. Mike is full of steroids and porn; I can see straight through his skin. She is just quiet now, with her hands folded. The room sharpens to a single icy point. Phil turns to us. “Everybody, stand up right now if you would accept this help if it were offered to you.” Everyone stands. I stand. My partner, whose greatest feature might just be his practically reckless commitment to personal ethics, refuses to stand. I pull him up by his sleeve until he’s upright. Phil looks at us, all standing for the wrong thing, waves over us as if to gather up our approval with his hand, then moves it to the refuser. She can see there is no way out. “After Christmas, ok,” she says. But she doesn’t mean it, I can see. She is refusing the spectacle, and I am caught by her, a genuine person, caught. The rest of the audience just want to see her corrected. I’m weeping, utterly sober, dabbing my eyes with my thin sweater sleeve, because I’m one of the demons too, I know, because I never stood up and shouted you are a fraud, I never shouted I AM A FRAUD and that’s why I’m here.

Molly Brodak (1980-2020) was a poet, memoirist, teacher, and baker. She published a full length collection of poetry, A Little Middle of the Night (University of Iowa Press, 2010), a memoir, Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir (Grove Atlantic, 2016), and three chapbooks of poetry. Her last collection, The Cipher, won the 2019 Pleiades Press Editors Prize. Before her death in 2020, she taught writing and literature at numerous institutions, including Emory University, Augusta State University, and Kennesaw University. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Brodak’s poems appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, and Poetry.