Coaching, Inner Counseling, Emotional Healing - American Snake Oil Salesmanship At Its Very Best

Harpers Notch, Illinois a small town on the Mississippi River, Huckleberry Finn country. It was nowhere in particular and of no special note, just Grovers Corners kind of place - a town not unlike Thornton Wilders where good people lived ordinary lives. It had its share of tourism - readers of Twain's book wanted a look at the venue where Huck, Jim, and Tom Sawyer lived, but it was never a tourist attraction like Graceland or even Tupelo where Elvis Presley was born. 

The downtown was just like that of any other small town - Dot's kitchen which opened early for the bargemen who worked river, local police on early morning duty, and night shift workers at the 24-hour emergency health clinic. 

Employment was seasonal and intermittent.  Most people held two jobs - the towheads in the river always needed parting,  part-time haulers and axle-jacks always had a place at the depot, and a turn in the kitchen of Rivers Madness, the new age startup hoping to upgrade the farmland.   Few people had steady employment, were recently laid off, or had always cobbled together wispy jobs to make a living.  The law offices of Parker, James & Early did a desultory business.  Parker and James had long gone back east, leaving Early to handle the few cases of civil law that crossed his desk. 

There was the suit that Heidi Simmons brought against the Illinois Central for 'dereliction of duty', an odd codicil in Illinois labor law that offered protection and damages to anyone unduly inconvenienced by the railroad's operations. Heidi travelled from Harpers Notch to the western spur of the railroad, a whistle stop along the way north, little more than a place for minor repairs, water, and realignment.  Heidi decided she could lay claim to her rights under the arcane provisions of the law, and finally get out of debt and leave her miserably poor and uninteresting life. 

She won the suit, thanks to John Early's persuasive lawyering in Carbondale, moved to Beau Rivage trailer park, left her job as a janitorial aide at Billings Feed and Copper Wire, took a lover - a telephone lineman on temporary assignment from Rock Island- and engaged Roman Archer, therapist, psychological coach, and organic healer. 

Roman had recently hung out his shingle, advertised widely, and promoted his innovative, 'inner rooms' therapy.  This is how he described it in his online website:

Everyone has inner rooms, those private, intimate, personal sanctuaries of the heart and soul.  Inside these rooms are the keys to being, the pathways to becoming, the vibrations of one's true nature, and the bright light of happiness. Let me help you open those doors, free your spirit, and give wings to your soul

'Why not give it a try?, thought Heidi who had for the first time in her life a few dollars to spend and why not on herself.  Her life so far had been nothing but dreary, years of cleaning, scraping, unclogging, washing whatever in this dysfunctional, forgotten, crunchingly boring existence; and here was the chance to be unfettered, sailing in a ketch across the broad reaches of glittering ocean, climbing Himalayan heights. 

Roman Archer was an attractive man - not a drop of pretention, posturing, posing, or supposition.  He believed in what he was doing and felt that he could actually open the doors to the inner rooms of the most recondite and repressed individual.  

His basic training was a stitched together program of Sixties otherworldliness, Carlos Castaneda Mexican shamanic healing, New Age self-awareness, and a strand here and there from Carl Jung and B.F. Skinner.  The program's sponsors, benefactors, and advisors were dismissive of classical psychology - attempts to steal one's soul rather than rescue it - and felt that alternate mental therapy was the way of Old Testament prophets, African griots, and the medicine men of the Amazon. 

The residents of Harpers Notch had not a clue about any of this.  This New Age, shamanism, Gaia One Earth residency, and soul emerging energy was all an unknown, a mystery, and at best an import from Baltimore; but somehow it captured Heidi's imagination and curiosity and her new 'Why Not?' philosophy. 

Roman's offices were clean, nicely arranged, simple, and with portraits of  Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Mother Teresa, Shiva, and Joan of Arc among others represented the highest evolution of the human spirit.  So strongly did Roman feel their emanations that he expressly designed 'A Gantlet of Holiness' whereby the newcomer to his practice would walk past the images of these spiritual greats and already be prepared for his therapy. 

During the first session Heidi was asked to dream. Roman was not interested in Freudian recreations of childhood trauma, sexual inhibitions, or psychological impediments.  He wanted to hear her 'other being' speak, the voice closeted in her inner rooms waiting to be let out. 

Heidi had no dreams or fantasies.  'I can tell you about my year at the Walmart in Little Rock', she said, 'Or mule skinning down Grand Canyon.  Two pissers of jobs, if you want to know the truth.  Took them only to pay for Baby Luke's hare lip and Rodney's engine chop on his beater '77...'

'Beautiful', said Roman. 'Peaceful, harmonious, and interwoven. '

A tough nut to crack, he thought as she rattled on about the toilets at Harper Notch city hall.  'You'd think that politicians would know how to shit right', she said and went on about the gross graffiti on the walls of the men's bathroom, the Tampax clogging the women's toilet and the gross leavings on the sinks.

'Wonderful', complimented Roman, anxious to get on to the associations with the Buddha who meditated at Nalanda, the first Buddhist monastery in India, a marvel of modern-style sanitation, the proto-idea of mens sana in corpore sano; but Heidi kept rattling on with insignificant irrelevancies.  The trip to her inner rooms would be a difficult one. 

'Let me tell you a story', Roman said, and recounted a story from the Ramayana where a great battle between Hanuman's army and that of the evil Sri Lankan emperor ensued.  Sturm und Drang and all the excitement that could to wake Heidi's dormant spirit. 

But all she could do was look at her watch, adjust her flip-flops, glance at the pictures on the Gantlet of Holiness and say, 'What's that got to do with Rodney, the toilets at City Hall, my fingering, buggering stepfather, and being broke from sunup to sundown?' 

'Everything in the world', replied Roman caught deep in an inescapable morass.  Nothing in his training had prepared him for this ignorant woman.  

As soon as these thoughts crossed his mind, he hated himself.  The problem was his not hers, and it was his job, his duty to help her, to find her way to her inner rooms.

Needless to say, a case of Bud Light, a rack of ribs, and a good screwing by Rodney did more for her lagging spirits than anything  Roman Archer could concoct. 

Roman never gave up.  The rivermen, farmers, and day-laborers who were his potential clients would eventually come and he would figure out ways to penetrate their resistance and locked tight inner rooms.  It would take time, patience, and practice, but he was ready. 

Of course he made no headway whatsoever.  Maybe if he moved his practice to Portland, he might find a more congenial, open, and needy clientele, but he already had two kids with one on the way, so made the trip to the Walmart/Target shopping center twenty miles out of town and sold hammers and saws in the Home Improvement Centers of both. 

It wasn't exactly that Heidi and the residents of Harpers Notch were all well-adjusted and not in need of psychological help.  Far from it.  Everyone has their moments.  It was just that Roman's impossibly fantastical ideas were the wrong fit. He would be better off in some Idaho panhandle commune, some throwback to the Sixties, but not here in Harpers Notch, definitely not here. 

The heartland of America, of course, is a sensible place, one where much is made out of little, where travails never become more than sticky patches, where misfortune is a given, family a blessing, and oddity rare. 

Sherwood Anderson wrote Winesburg, Ohio about 'grotesques' - misfits in the prescribed order of things, brilliant in their own way, desperate for an understanding audience, but slated for nothing more than far corners, a remoteness from the town, unsure of stepping out. 

Tennessee Williams wrote of Laura in The Glass Menagerie and Alma in Summer and Smoke, young women of irrepressible sexuality but locked within - and here Roman Archer was on target - their inner rooms. 

Archer was not up to the task.  He was far removed from the inner workings of the minds of people like Laura and Alma or any of Anderson's characters.  He adopted a template as rigid and prescriptive as anything Freud or Adler had come up with; and there was no way that he could even fathom the anomie of Heidi Simmons.  It was too subtle, too cultural, too indefinable for any of his New Age nostrums. 

Did Heidi really need coaching? Or was it comic book fantasy, for what Roman was offering was indeed something out of Marvel or Japanese manga?

Roman Archer was supernumerary, an incidental bit of popular culture, a social vagabond, a hobo jumping freight trains, a flash in the pan, if anything a channeling of the dreamy Sixties, at best a good listener. 

Some critics claim that the rise of coaching has something to do with America itself - the nastiness, divisiveness, chaotic blackness, and social foundering demand a focus on the inner self.  Others say that it indeed has something to do with America - its long history of snake oil salesmen, con artists, and shell game masters. 

Heidi did fine, used her money to far better purposes; and Roman managed to right his ship. Nothing to write home about, but this is a tale of dull people.