Sex, Lies & Coffee Beans

PROLOGUE

I’m not violent.

Well, not that violent.

I mean I’ve never killed anyone before.

But this is different. This is something I know I have to do.

I like to think of it as an act of kindness. Altruism. Charity. I will save the rest of the world from HER. Spare everyone her evil malevolence, the poisonous tentacles of her nasty, humiliating clutches.

Some folks would say this is just petty revenge. A selfish and spiteful act of violence. Payback for what she did to me.

Like I care.

It’s neither here nor there. No looking back. Seize the moment.

I’m amazed how easy it was to get to this unoccupied private booth here in the auditorium, armed with a high-powered rifle, even with a bulky marksman’s telescopic sight mounted conspicuously on top. It’s not something you see someone carrying around every day.

But here I am. It was fate. Everything happens for a reason. Ha! Now I believe it.

She’s the feature speaker tonight and if my calculations are correct, she’s right now at the podium delivering her self-serving pack of lies to several thousand gullible people.

Dr. Joy Smothers. The singing psychologist. Excuse me. Folk singing psychologist.

What a joke! But there are a lot of suckers out there. She has a nose for them. Like a wolf sniffing the wind for fresh kill.

I really can’t believe it. This thing is sold out!

She has certainly come a long way. She’s doing well for herself, that’s for sure.

What’s wrong with people?

I step quickly across the deep red carpet of the landing, making my final approach to the private viewing booth. I’m on the third floor at the back of the auditorium. From up here, I can get a nice clean shot off and since the entire floor appears unoccupied, have a decent chance of escaping down the stairs I just came up on, duck into a service hallway, and break for the alley behind the building from the loading dock.

One last time, I look in both directions to make sure no one saw me.

Alright! I’m in luck. The door isn’t locked!

Oh yes! Revenge will be sweet.

HELP!

"It’s all so predictable, isn’t it?"

It was the early 90s. The usual number of people were suffering from plunging self-esteem. For the past decade, the book shelves had been bursting at their pressboard seams with every conceivable fix.

Misery sucks. Hope sells. A sucker is born every minute.

Yes, indeed … so much idiocy. So little time. Someone was making some serious bucks.

To give just a few examples.

Women Who Love Too Much

I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me

Healing the Child Within

I’m Okay, You’re Okay

Living, Loving & Learning

The Feeling Good Handbook

Healing the Shame That Binds You

The Road Less Traveled and Beyond

The Relaxation & Stress Reduction Handbook

Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy

Self-Esteem: A Proven Program of Cognitive Techniques

for Assessing, Improving and Maintaining

Your Self-Esteem

Personality Plus: How to Understand Others

by Understanding Yourself

Most bookstores had a whole section devoted to this cornucopia of DIY quick-fixes, me-healing therapies, supercharging serotonin boosters.

Riding the gravy train of this orgy of mewling empathic support, the selection of slick magazines dedicated to dissecting, analyzing and refurbishing the human mind was multiplying. Perhaps the most popular was Psychology Today. Nice and readable with lots of zippy graphics and photos.

And let’s not forget the columns in the newspapers and magazines which had droves of droopy-eyed, drooling dysfunctionals turning to someone with great hair and chemically-whitened teeth to make the bad stuff miraculously go away, in a mere few paragraphs each day, week, or month, depending on the publication.

It was as if a huge portion of the American public — putatively a tough crowd, raised as rugged individualists, beneficiaries of get-the-job-done street smarts and frontier survival skills — had become a bunch of helpless, whiny, self-pitying pre-toddlers, who couldn’t stop wetting the bed, regardless of how many toys or sugar-laced treats were dangled before them. Things had simply gotten out of control.

It was hammer time. Drastic problems called for drastic solutions. Time to pull out all the stops. Put the pedal to the metal.

People were hanging like loose laundry in gravity boots, glueing crystals to their private parts, dangling power stones around their Botoxed necks, floating in sensory deprivation tanks, packing into ashrams and monastic cloisters, poring over psychic readings and astrological prognostications, doping on anti-psychotics and mood elevators, self-asphyxiating, hyper-ventilating, snorting spirulina, swimming with dolphins, communing with space rocks, party-crashing past lives, channeling dead knights, priests, witches and saints. Folks were quantum praying, astral planing, orbit planking, meditating, levitating, primal screaming, curling up in fetal position and sucking on latex prayer balls, harmonically converging, naked ecstatic dancing, light bathing, drinking their own body fluids, eating the afterbirth. They left their inhibitions and common sense at the door, plunging headlong into uncharted and incomprehensible territory. Come one come all, lose control to take control.

Psychiatrists were booked up for months. Gurus were turning them away at the door. Lifestyle coaches were rolling in dough from workshops, book sales, self-help tapes, videos, tête-à-têtes, seminars. High priests, low priests, monks, ministers, astrologers, palmists, psalmists, phrenologists, hypnotists, aura readers, astral pocket jockeys, harmonic wave surfers, all were the rock stars of a new age of enlightenment.

Still, the zaniest of all of the obvious signs that the world had gone completely mad and people would embrace just about anything or anyone in a desperate attempt to conjure up the ‘NEW YOU’, was the lady we will meet on the pages which follow. Unorthodox? How about Alice in Wonderland strange. Weird. Off the charts. Barking mad. Totally whack. We’re talking about …

Dr. Joy Smothers, the folk singing psychologist.

My my! What a gimmick she had!

Sling a guitar over her shoulder. Spread some love and happy talk to the sweaty masses. Hit the road, Jack. Don’t look back. Walk the walk. Groove is in the heart. Karma, baby!

Yes, Joy figured it out. She didn’t need all her fancy book learning after all. Of the people, by the people, for the people. No more ivory tower. The stuff shirts could stuff it.

You don’t need peer review to sing a song.

You don’t even have to make sense.

Not that she didn’t have proper credentials. She had them all! She was a poster girl for higher education.

BS in Sociology from Northwestern, MS in Applied Psychology from Rutgers, PhD in Psychology from Stanford.

But the real money isn’t in academia. Neither is the fun.

Dr. Joy was looking for a quick, lucrative way out of the publish-or-perish meat grinder. Something that would dislodge her from big brain bubble and deposit her on the main stage of modern life.

She found it. It was the uptown express.

Heading downtown.

ANNIE LAFLEUR

"I feel like an angel and … I’m flying!"

Being a waitress wasn’t fun. But it paid the bills and there was enough left over to afford five ballet classes a week.

Annie was 27 years old, still young, toned, elegantly graceful, and indisputably stunning.

Unfortunately, she was over the hill. At least for her chosen profession — not that she ever made a dime from ballet. Yes, she had given it her best shot. But she never made the cut.

It didn’t matter. She had never thought of dancing as a way to make a living. Not growing up. Not now. Ballet was her passion. It was her religion. It was her raison d'être. And she had learned to accept that she would never fulfill her childhood dream of a permanent position with a ballet company.

That’s life, eh? It’s not a perfect world. What’s new?

Annie worked the lunch shift, five days a week, at Romero’s, an Italian-American family restaurant in Northridge, California. Northridge would become famous for the 6.7 earthquake that shook the San Fernando Valley and beyond in 1994. Romero’s was already famous for Thursday night half-price lasagna.

Annie, of course, could have made a fortune in tips working Thursday evenings. The line of people waiting for a table was legendary. The Northridge police assigned an officer to manage the traffic.

But evenings were sacred.

As was this evening.

Only this evening, things weren’t going very well. Not well at all.

Annie owned a 1975 Chevette hatchback. When she drove it off the used car lot six months ago, it ran perfectly. All she could say for it now was the radio worked. In fact, Baby Baby by Amy Grant was playing on that very radio when she pulled out of her drive. Then the car stalled. She tried to restart it. The engine just cranked and cranked, moaning like an old man trying to make it up the stairs. She switched off the radio to conserve the battery. Finally, the engine sputtered, the whole car shook, the engine caught, gained function, and began, if haltingly, to behave again like an automobile engine. Maybe she had flooded it? Was it time for a tune-up? Maybe the car simply was a pile of crap and she would have to look for a new one.

As she pulled away from her tiny rented house, on went the radio again. She couldn’t live without music. Promise of a New Day by Paula Abdul now played and Annie sang along. She sang along as much as her pitch-challenged vocal cords permitted. Then again, what she lacked in performing skills, she made up for with enthusiasm and volume. When she stopped for a stop sign, a pedestrian looked at her like she was bonkers. Maybe she was. Or maybe she was just damn happy to be heading to Debbie Reynolds Dance Studio. Her ballet class with Sally Fields, the best ballet teacher in town, started at 7:00 pm. For two hours she would feel like an angel. An angel launched into weightless emancipation — leaping, twirling, whirling. The studio and everyone in it disappeared when she danced. Everything made sense.

Unfortunately, what didn’t make sense was what happened when she pulled into the studio parking lot and walked up to the entrance. Oh no! It was closed tonight. Locked up tight. No prior warning. No announcement. Just a sign on the door that read:

Due to a special rehearsal, no one except

cast and crew (you know who you are) will

be admitted to the studios this evening.

It was not uncommon for big stars to use the DR’s for rehearsals. About a year ago, Annie had hurriedly rounded a corner on the way back to class from a very quick restroom break, and impaled herself on Michael Jackson’s chest. She looked up into his surgically modified face. In the whispery little-girl voice for which he was famous, Michael just smiled and said: Hi. Excuse me. Yes, MJ used this very studio to prepare for video shoots and tours. In fact, if you watch The Making of Thriller, the rehearsal studio Michael, his choreographer Michael Peters, and his dancers are in, was mega-size Studio C at Debbie Reynolds.

Hey! You can’t get much bigger than MJ. Yet he never locked down the whole studio. Who could tonight’s paranoid mystery celebrity be?

Annie would never find out. Quite honestly, she didn’t care. What she did care about was missing a day of ballet class. She was really really disappointed.

Annie wasn’t a drinker. She had never tasted an alcoholic drink in her entire life. If she was going to drown her sorrows, it would have to be by some other means.

There was only one option. It wouldn’t make the depression go away. But it would make it at least bearable. Suicide would be off the table.

She exited the studio parking lot, turned left on Lankershim Boulevard and headed for the only thing that could rescue her from her plunging fortunes and restore her will to live. That would be …

Mud pie at Red Robin Restaurant!

Who invented mud pie? Obviously some mad scientist. But a true genius. If there were a Nobel Prize for Confections, whoever came up with this sucrose bomb was a shoe-in.

Mud pie was a sucrose tsunami consisting of coffee ice cream, chocolate fudge sauce, chocolate sandwich cookies, garnished with more chocolate sauce, taken to the stratosphere with whip cream, peanuts, and a maraschino cherry. It was the highest order of perfection. God was still embarrassed He never thought of it.

When the waiter put the confectionary masterpiece in front of her, just seeing it immediately reversed the course of her slumping mood. One bite and she was well on the road to a complete recovery. Almost anyway.

How many calories were in this dessert? 1500? 2000? A whole day’s caloric intake in one serving! Thank God Annie never had to worry about her weight. She could eat like an entire army and never gain an ounce. Apparently her tight, flat stomach was made of steel and her pancreas nuclear powered. Mud pie? How many deaths by sugar shock had this single dessert item accounted