The New, Improved, Fully Actualized Me

Two months ago, while gnawing on a bratwurst, I suddenly realized that none of my friends had any respect for my intellect. Although I was highly regarded as a parent, a husband, a journalist and a leader in community recycling programs, I could no longer deny that my friends viewed me as a curmudgeonly old bore who never had anything original or interesting to say. This disturbed me to no end.

That night I stayed up late to watch Arsenio. I must have drifted off to sleep during his stimulating interview with Halle Berry, because when I awoke at three A.M., the screen was filled with one of those annoying infomercials that are cleverly camouflaged to look like actual TV programs. Reaching for the remote, I was ready to zap the set and see if there was an Adrienne Barbeau flick on USA cable when my ears pricked up. I was watching something called A Fire in the Mind, in which a dapper man was standing in front of a roaring fire pitching the 100 greatest books of world literature. He said that if I tried reading the 100 greatest books of literature at the rate of four a year it would take a quarter-century to reap their rewards, whereas if I listened to just one of these 45-minute tapes every day on my way to and from work, I could have a "functional mastery of the entire library of classics in only weeks." Testimonials from various satisfied customers proclaimed that functional mastery of these 100 great books quickly translated into new friendships, renewed self-confidence and a deeper appreciation of life itself.

Although I am normally not susceptible to the lures of such cunningly packaged TV come-ons, this product definitely piqued my interest. For a while I had been complaining to my wife that I could never find time for serious reading. Twenty years earlier, when we'd met, I used to lace my conversations with allusions to Tolstoy, Sartre, Euripides and Lord Byron. But years of cranking out reviews of trashy novels, ghostwritten autobiographies and snap books knocked off by third-rate journalists had purged all that top-shelf material from my intellect, so that I had become just as likely to quote from the works of Charles Barkley as from those of Charles Baudelaire.

So it isn't hard to see why A Fire in the Mind appealed to me. Armed with a blazing intellect and suffused with a daunting command of Western civilization's acknowledged masterpieces, I would no longer stand mouth agape when friends discussed the situation in Bosnia, but would instead burst forth with some oracular insight gleaned from Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. When business associates lamented the rise of avarice in America, I would array newfound wisdom I had appropriated from Theodore Dreiser's American Tragedy.

That night I reached a momentous decision. Although there was still a part of me that bridled at the thought of spending my hard-earned money for a product pitched on a late-night infomercial, there was something so intellectually seductive about A Fire in the Mind that I was powerless to resist. So, swallowing my pride, I dialed the 800 number--where operators were standing by to take my order--and shelled out $268 plus shipping and handling for the astounding collection.

I was sure it was a phone call that would change my life forever.

•

A few days later, the 50 cassettes containing the 100 greatest books of world literature arrived. Overjoyed, I began listening to them immediately. Alas, almost from the beginning, I had problems. Why did the 100 greatest books of world literature have to be so depressing? How was I supposed to start the day on a chipper note by listening to Hamlet, which deals with murder, A Farewell to Arms, which deals with an army deserter whose wife dies in childbirth, or Oedipus Rex, which deals with a man who first sleeps with his own mother, then blinds himself and then acts like it's everybody else's fault? This is no way to get the day rolling.

I decided to listen to the tapes only while I was out jogging in the late afternoon after work. To my dismay, this only made things worse. It's hard enough to get motivated to go jogging late in the afternoon under normal circumstances, but when you're staggering around the track on your 39th lap and your ears are filled with the sounds of George killing his retarded friend Lenny in Of Mice and Men, you kind of lose whatever joie de vivre you were supposed to be getting from your runner's high. Worse still, the batteries in my Walkman kept running down. Just when things were starting to get interesting in Karl Marx' Das Kapital, the damn Walkman would click dead. Infuriated, I came very close to tossing A Fire in the Mind into the fire.

That night I stayed up late to watch Arsenio. I must have drifted off to sleep during his stimulating tête-à-tête with Downtown Julie Brown, because when I awoke, the veteran shill Dick Clark was on the TV screen, beaming his headlight smile straight through a 30-minute infomercial for something called the Buddy L Super Charger. Although I am normally impervious to the allures of such transparent comeons, I must admit that there was something mesmerizing about watching Dick Clark speak for that long, and with that much passion, about two payments of $24.95 for a deluxe mail-order battery charger.

The most captivating feature of Dick's presentation was his astute observation about the often overlooked role of "battery management" in contemporary American life. Dick said that ordinary people like me inadvertently sundered the tapestry of our lives by constantly going back and forth to the store to buy batteries for our Walkmans, Discmans and Game Boys when we could have been using that time much more productively. He said that through an effective program of battery management, I could potentially save thousands of dollars over the years, and would have more free time to do the things I really wanted to do. Like listen to Karl Marx' Das Kapital while jogging.

That night I made a momentous decision. I dialed the 800 number, where operators were standing by to take my order, and forked over my money for the Buddy L Super Charger. I couldn't wait for it to arrive. I was sure it would change my life forever.

•

Although my battery charger was not due for several weeks, I now found it virtually impossible to function without it. With all those Fire in the Mind cassettes to listen to, I was constantly having to visit Woolworth's or Caldor or Sears to buy new batteries for my Walkman. But then I would lose track of how much life was left in them, and they would wind down at the wrong moment. There I'd be, out in the middle of the woods, miles from anywhere, reveling in the rich prosody of Plato's Republic or Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species when the tape player would suddenly click dead. Furious, I would heave the useless cassettes deep into the woods, outraged at having my arcadian reverie interrupted.

That night I stayed up late to watch Arsenio. I must have drifted off to sleep during his stimulating interview with Patrick Ewing, because when I awoke, Dionne Warwick was on the screen telling me how I could change my life by calling the Psychic Friends Network. Dionne's program was filled with incredible testimonials from people who had met the loves of their lives through psychic networking. It was also filled with "psychic reenactments" of actual events in people's lives. The astonishing ability of Warwick's psychic network to predict the future was further evidenced by a moving testimonial from a French Canadian actor who couldn't even speak English when he first arrived in America, yet went on to become rich and famous as a soap opera star.

Ordinarily, I am immune to the allures of such tawdry pitches as the Psychic Friends Network, but Warwick's earnest exhortations throughout this captivating infomercial impressed me so much that I jumped up and dialed the 900 number. A recorded message apprised me that the call would set me back $3.99 a minute and that billing would start three seconds after the message concluded. The recording clicked off and a live psychic came on the line. After our formal introductions were completed, I presented her with the one question about my immediate future that I most wanted answered by a trained, professional psychic.

"If you can actually predict the future and can actually see what lies ahead for me, could you please tell me when my Dick Clark Buddy L Super Charger will be arriving in the mail?"

The psychic muttered something about my contacting the manufacturer to inquire about the delay in delivery, but I cut her off.

"I'm not asking you for information about how to deal with the manufacturer. I can handle that myself. All I'm asking you, in your capacity as a psychic, is to tell me when my Dick Clark Buddy L Super Charger will get here."

She could not answer the question, and I hung up in a tizzy.

•

By this time my frayed nerves were starting to take a toll on my family. Depressed at the lugubrious contents of A Fire in the Mind, worn out by constant trips to the store to replace the batteries in my Walkman and feeling like an idiot for having forked over more than $20 to ask a veteran lounge lizardess' trained psychic if my coveted battery charger was ever getting here, I started to snap at my wife and children as if it were all their fault. More and more, I found myself marooned from my family, barricading myself in the den and staying up brooding about the failure of the infomercial universe to make good on its promise to improve the quality of my life.

One night I stayed up late to watch Arsenio. I must have drifted off to sleep during his stimulating interview with Danny Bonaduce, because when I awoke, John Tesh and Connie Sellecca were on the screen, cuddling and giggling like frolicsome love bunnies and talking about how their first marriages had foundered in seas of conjugal miscommunication. Determined to avoid similar mistakes in this marriage, Connie and John set aside lots of time from their busy professional schedules to watch "video seminars" conducted by a charismatic man named Gary Smalley.

Smalley then appeared on the screen and confirmed Connie and John's statements about his tapes. He said that marriages often fall apart because "women tend to feel things several times deeper than men do." He stressed the importance of communication in marriage, the importance of recognizing the differences between men and women and the importance of honoring one's spouse. As he spoke in soft, mellifluous tones, it occurred to me that I had become so wrapped up in my own little universe of self-improvement that I had neglected to pay sufficient attention to my wife. I had not honored her. I had not recognized the differences between us. Worse, I had allowed the lines of communication between us to atrophy. In all likelihood, I was probably suffering from what Gary described as "relationship scurvy." Right then and there I made a momentous decision: I would dial the 800 number and tell the operator who was standing by to take my order to send me Gary Smalley's video Hidden Keys to Loving Relationships as quickly as possible. I was certain it would change my life forever.

•

A couple of days later, Gary Smalley's first video seminar came in the mail. After my wife and kids were in bed, I ducked into thse den and loaded it into (continued on page 150)New, Improved Me(continued from page 116) the VCR. Relations between my wife and me had reached a new low because I'd come home from my afternoon jog in a foul mood after my batteries ran down halfway through Othello, which is, after all, a story about a disgruntled middle-aged guy who murders his wife. So I was counting on Gary to come through for me big-time.

The video seminar depicted Gary, a bland, middle-aged corporate type, yakking in front of a bunch of festively attired couples who looked like they were trapped on a cruise ship in the middle of Lake Superior in December. Gary was rattling on about some weird right-brain-left-brain distinctions between men and women, and claiming that men are interested in maps, whereas women aren't. He also insisted, though I doubt he had much experience in the matter, that women make out much better in concentration camps than men do.

But Connie and John said Gary had it all figured out. He understood, as only an infomercial king could, what really goes on in a marriage. It's just too bad it wasn't my marriage. Contrary to what Gary claims, my wife is always dragging maps out of the glove compartment to study the street plans of Hartford, Connecticut, whereas I never go near the damn things. And while it was true that I hadn't survived a concentration camp, I had survived Catholic schools and growing up in North Philadelphia.

He also argued that women don't like to use facts in their conversations, preferring the universal language of emotion. My wife is a certified public accountant--guess again, Gary. Then Gary started talking to a houseplant that symbolized his wife--whose name is Ivy--and started plucking off its leaves to provide the audience with a visual metaphor for a relationship that's coming apart at the seams. I realized then and there that Gary and his houseplant named Ivy and his video seminars simply weren't going to work for me. Gary ended up convincing me of only one thing: that John and Connie's marriage will last only slightly longer than Shannen Doherty and Ashley Hamilton's did.

•

I guess that could have been the end of my attempts to improve my life the infomercial way. A Fire in the Mind had proved to be a colossal downer, my Dick Clark Buddy L Super Charger still hadn't come, my chats with Dionne Warwick's bush-league psychics had been fruitless, and spending about $130 on Gary Smalley's video seminar had driven a larger wedge between my wife and me. Seeking respite from my disappointment, I turned on Arsenio, but I must have drifted off to sleep in the middle of his stimulating chat with Spike Lee, because when I awoke, the screen was filled with the image of an effervescent young man named Don Lapre, who was appearing in his very own infomercial entitled Making Money.

Although I am usually impervious to the enticements of video hucksters like Don Lapre, something about the young man's quiet confidence sparked my interest. Don, who described himself as "America's most exciting entrepreneur," even though he looks like the guy who parks your car whenever you dine at a restaurant with the word trattoria in its name, said that moneymaking opportunities were staring ordinary Americans such as myself right in the face, yet we inexplicably chose to ignore them.

"There's a gold mine slipping through your fingers every morning," said Lapre, who never even graduated from high school and had actually declared bankruptcy at the age of 23. He said that his program could teach me hundreds of ways to make millions of dollars without ever leaving the comfort of my home. He vowed that he could teach me eight different ways to buy and sell, assured me that I wouldn't need any money to get started and promised that I could build the first part of my fortune by placing inexpensive classified ads in newspapers throughout the country, and the rest by setting up my own 900 line.

This got me to thinking. I was already down around $600 for the various infomercial products I had purchased, and if there was even a smidgen of truth in what Don was saying, I could earn back that money in no time. Then and there I reached a momentous decision. I would call the operator who was standing by to take my order and purchase Don Lapre's Making Money. For calling now I would also receive Lapre's Eleven Secrets of Success. This time, I assured myself, I was ordering a product that would change my life forever. This time I'd make that final breakthrough.

•

A few days later I finally hit bottom. No sooner had I inserted Don Lapre's videotape into my VCR than I realized that the plastic siding on the videocassette had fallen apart inside the packaging. As I tried to play it, I discovered to my alarm that the videotape was now stuck inside my VCR, which now had various pieces of plastic sprinkled throughout its electronic innards. What's more, the reels of videotape themselves had come loose inside the VCR, so now I not only could not watch Don Lapre in action, and thus lay claim to the elusive secrets of his awesome success, but I couldn't even get the tape out so that I could use my VCR to watch reruns of Arsenio or Gary Smalley's video seminars.

Turning to the stack of manuals that accompanied the videotape--the reading materials describing the various ways I could make my fortune overnight, like holding a yard sale--I found these pearls of wisdom from Lapre staring up at me:

"Don't buy anything that could break, malfunction or go wrong in any way."

"Watch out for gimmicks."

Thanks a lot, Don.

•

At this point my life had completely fallen apart. I was tortured by the failure of Gary Smalley's video seminars to improve my marriage. I worried that my wife would now pack up the kids and divorce me, claiming that I had emotionally and financially impoverished the family by becoming an infomercial junkie. Her argument would not be entirely without merit, for, sad to say, I could no longer control my addiction to infomercial products, convinced as I was that somewhere out there was a device or instructional video that could fill my life with meaning and purpose.

Since jogging had now become such a depressing experience, what with my batteries constantly going dead in the middle of Das Kapital, I had stopped exercising and started stuffing my face with junk food. In an effort to control my junk-food binges, which had added five pounds to my abdomen, I ordered Stop the Insanity, the electrifying program by Susan Powter. Susan Powter is a thin, bald, hyperactive Annie Lennox impersonator who prances around in her high-energy infomercial like a perky cheerleader from Chemotherapy U. Joking that she used to be a 260-pound lard-bucket, she regales an audience full of active lard-butts with exhortations that they don't need to starve in order to lose weight, they need only to stop the insanity.

Determined to stop my own insanity, I ordered her tapes, booklets, videos, dietary guides and fat-measuring devices, but in the meantime I also sent away for Kevin Trudeau's Megamemory from the American Memory Institute. I found out about the American Memory Institute by watching a snappy infomercial called The Andy Anderson Show, which has a set designed to look like Larry King Live. Andy, who even dresses like King, has a cheesy Errol Flynn mustache that makes him look like a Forties-era lush, while his one and only guest, Kevin Trudeau, is a good-looking smoothy who performs astonishing feats of memory throughout the infomercial. I figured I could use this breathtaking course in memory improvement, because I could no longer keep track of which infomercial products I had sent away for and which ones had not yet arrived.

Unluckily for me, these programs introduced more havoc into my life. My wife absolutely, positively refused to watch any video that featured a woman who looked like a survivor of the Bataan Death March. So it was impossible for me to get our household diet under control. And Kevin Trudeau of the American Memory Institute said that I should never use sugar or white flour while trying to improve my memory. Unfortunately, my wife is a terrific baker and bitterly resented my refusal to eat her pies and cakes on the basis of advice proffered by some television megamemory entrepreneur. I criticized her vociferously, telling her that sugar and white flour were making us all hazy and dopey, and that her behavior was a classic example of what Trudeau calls unconscious incompetence. I also told her that it was about time she stopped the insanity. She stormed out of the kitchen, doubtless still suffering from relationship scurvy.

Desperate to stop both the insanity and the scurvy, I sent away for Barbara De Angelis' inspirational tapes Making Love Work. De Angelis is an OK-looking babe with a nice figure shoehorned into a flamingo-colored suit, and she struts up and down on a stage during her 30-minute infomercial claiming to have brought innumerable couples back from the brink of divorce. Divorce, she argues, can come about for all kinds of reasons: marital infidelity, changes in physical appearance or job-related stress. It can even come about because one of the spouses would rather stay up all night watching infomercials than go to bed.

"When you're love-starved, what do you end up doing?" De Angelis asks the crowd at one critical juncture. "Filling yourself up with other things. Like what? Food, drugs, alcohol, work, shopping."

That was my problem, all right. But that wasn't all. No, relationships could also disintegrate because, as one man in her infomercial put it, "I was very blamey."

These words were like a dagger through my heart. I was an unbelievably blamey guy. I had always been an unbelievably blamey guy. I blamed my wife for everything: the stress and strain in our marriage, my intellectual shortcomings, the negative attitudes of my children, the delay in getting my Dick Clark Buddy L Super Charger. I was blamey, blamey, blamey.

I sent for the tapes that very instant.

•

Sending away for Barbara De Angelis' tapes did not change my life. As soon as it became apparent that there was a holdup in the pipeline, I turned to Kebrina's Psychic Answer. In this 30-minute infomercial, Kebrina Kinkade, "original psychic to the stars," has convened a celestial powwow of her most talented psychic colleagues in Sedona, Arizona, where they plan to tap into some of the most powerful energy vortexes known to man. Whereas Dionne Warwick had no real pretensions to psychic expertise, Kebrina Kinkade had received official recognition from the state of California, the FBI and even Scotland Yard. What's more, she had predicted Erik Estrada's big comeback: an ongoing role in a Spanish-language soap opera and his own Taco Bell commercial. As if that weren't enough, one of her psychic employees had predicted the World Trade Center disaster, telling his client to take an early lunch on the last three Fridays of the month. That advice had certainly paid off.

I called Psychic Answer that evening and told my psychic interfacer that I was desperate to find out if my Barbara De Angelis tape would arrive in the mail any time soon.

"Something was promised to you in the mail and you're sure it's coming?" the psychic asked.

"Yes. It's that powerful Barbara De Angelis program, Making Love Work. And I just know it's going to change my life and sort out all my relationships."

"Well, I don't see anything in the mail."

"Nothing at all?

"Not today."

•

Right then and there I could have lost my last remaining shreds of sanity. But just then I had an experience that would change my life forever. Clicking on the TV, right below the VCR where Don Lapre's video was still lodged, I found my eyes riveted upon a dynamic young man with a powerful jaw pitching his revolutionary new life-affirming program. The young man's name was Tony Robbins, and he was the creator of a program called Personal Power.

Initially, I had problems with this aggressive super-motivator. For one, he looked like a big galoot who didn't have two brain cells to rub together. Second, his infomercial featured endorsements from Casey Kasem, easily the worst person who ever lived, and from Fran Tarkenton, the worst quarterback ever elected to the Football Hall of Fame. But Robbins was so positive, so assertive, so dynamic and so vivacious that I found myself entranced. Besides, at this point, I was ordering anything that appeared on the TV screen anyway. So, yanking out my credit card and dialing the 800 number emblazoned on the TV, I placed my order and prepared to tap into all that amazing energy.

It was a decision that would change my life forever.

•

"The only way our life gets greater is if we become more," Tony Robbins announces in the first audiotape of Personal Power. He also says, "Get absolutely clear on what it is you want out of life."

I did, I did. Yes, almost from the moment I launched myself into Tony Robbins' ambitious program, I could feel my life improve in dramatic ways. By using the dynamic breakthrough techniques of Tony's trademarked program, Neuro-associative Conditioning, I began to strengthen my mental fortitude and rid myself of negative anchors. Every morning, as soon as I rose from bed, I would listen to one of Tony's holophonic, subliminal cassettes and unleash my personal power while Tony and a female colleague whispered powerful, albeit inaudible, subliminal affirmations such as "I feel the joyful pulse of life as I take consistent action to shape and achieve my destiny."

True, the subliminal cassettes did sound a bit like dentist's-office music--sort of a cross between Toto and Art Garfunkel--but as I listened to the tapes each day, committing to memory such messages as "I feel strong and powerful as I take consistent action to accomplish my purpose," I could sense that my life was taking on new purpose and meaning. Yes, at long last, I felt my life beginning to change.

And change dramatically. Some time earlier, the Dick Clark Buddy L Super Charger had finally arrived in the mail, but I'd been too depressed to use it. Now I could go jogging in peace, no longer worried that my run would be interrupted by a trip to the store for fresh batteries. "You don't want to run out of gas when you're climbing the mountain of success," Tony says. You got that right, big fella.

Within days, Tony Robbins had changed the way I looked at life. For the first time in memory I had control over my emotions. For the first time in my life I had a high level of personal energy. For the first time in my life, I was absolutely clear on what it is I want out of life. For the first time in my life, I could take Tony's words and make them my own, shaking my fist at an indifferent universe and proclaiming: "I handle and invest my money wisely, and I profit daily."

Or could I? That Don Lapre video deal still had me kind of ticked off. After all, it set me back almost a hundred bucks, and then the goddamn videotape didn't even work. Jesus, was I peeved.

But then, just as I felt myself being dragged under by the remorseless tug of all those negative anchors that threatened to disempower me, I pulled myself together and knocked that big chip off my shoulder. Instead of bellyaching, I decided to roll up my sleeves and and go back and have another crack at Don Lapre's Making Money.

OK, the tape was still lodged in the VCR because the videotape was already busted when it arrived, with the plastic in pieces, and when I put it into my VCR it jammed up the machine. A week ago, before I had mastered the art of Neuro-associative Conditioning, I would have just moped like a big crybaby, whining about how much I was going to have to pay a VCR repairman. But now that I had cut myself loose from all those negative anchors, I simply yanked out my screwdriver and got cracking on the VCR. Dragging the tangled reels of tape from the spools and vacuuming out the fragments of plastic still lodged in my machine, I actually managed to repair the VCR all by myself in 15 minutes.

True, my experience with the tape was still a dud, and I would never be able to learn Don Lapre's 11 secrets of success. But somehow that no longer mattered. Indeed, just as I was poised at the edge of the emotional abyss, prepared to descend into another quagmire of moping, I opened one of Don Lapre's inelegant manuals and read the part where he talks about the fabulous sums of money that can be made by placing classified ads for--of course!--VCR repair shops. Now that I knew how to repair VCRs, I could go into business for myself, repairing VCRs that went on the fritz after all those other infomercial fans sent for videocassettes. Better still, I could make a fortune by taking Don's advice and setting up my own 900 line. Then it hit me: I could set up a 900 line and charge people $3.99 a minute to get information about how to get their VCRs repaired after videos busted inside them, gumming up the works.

More and more, I started to look at my experience as a blessing in disguise. Even if videos arrive in unusable conditions, it should encourage thousands of Americans like me to get off our fat butts and seize the opportunity lying right there in front of our eyes--by making millions of dollars running 900 lines for people with queries about defective infomercial videos.

Obviously, I could never have achieved any of this without Tony. And in the weeks to come, I would achieve much, much more as I learned to use the extraordinary techniques of Personal Power to get my life completely under control. Little by little, my willpower returned, as I could now watch dozens of infomercials yet blithely ignore such negative anchors as The Video Professor, The Komputer Tutor and Hooked on Phonics. Thanks to Tony Robbins, I was now impervious to the enticements of the NuHart Hair clinics, the Mystery Power of T'ai Chi, the Skewdriver and that insane guy with the ponytail. Thanks to Tony, I could now liberate myself from personally disempowering relationships such as the ones I already had with Dionne Warwick, Kebrina Kinkade and Gary Smalley, and the ones I was almost certain to have with Carleton Sheets, the Edgar Morris Skin Care people, Vanna White and Ron Popeil.

Today, like Tony Robbins, I can declare, without fear of being contradicted: "My Mondays are better than most people's Christmases." Gone are the days when my wife would accuse me of relationship scurvy and I would accuse her of unconscious incompetence and insanity. And gone is all that dieting madness. Today, like Tony, I can boldly proclaim: "I respect my body's healing wisdom and its energy." Today, like Tony, I can jubilantly declare: "I am a giver and what I give comes back to me multiplied manyfold." And today, just like Tony, I can boldly declare: "I was born to share freely in the abundance of life." Finally, today, just like Tony, I can shout from the highest rooftop: "I am aware of the priceless value of my life and the lives of everyone I meet."

With the possible exception of that bitch Barbara De Angelis, who's taking forever to send me those goddamn videotapes.

"Susan Powter prances around in her high-energy infomercial like a cheerleader from Chemotherapy U."