Don’t Fear the Freudians
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“Wake up, Jillian,” I said. “Karma is real, and so is herpes, and I’d hate for you to wake up one day with it.”
“Good point,” she said. “But tell me, did you ever read the novel, Coma?”
“Robin Cook wrote it…it’s a good story and a bestseller, although I remember little from the book now save that image of several bodies hovering under white sheets in a medicinal-looking and clinically creepy room.”
“Do you believe Dr. Legg will return from his coma?” she asked. 
“Aneurisms are a tough for anyone to come back from.”
“I miss the filming of the show with Dr. Legg the most,” Jillian said. “The moments where we were improvising, working off a script that was brand new with him and I.”
“Go on,” I said. 
“The two of us popping back and forth like roman candles, and that’s where I appeared to be the happiest, sharpest, sexiest mental health client in all the multiverse.”
“I don’t disagree,” I said. “The waves of nostalgia overwhelm all of us, as we ponder Dr. God-Snow’s booming laugh and his empathic aura now close to becoming nothing but dust.”
“All the bright lights, the relationships barely holding on, the elation when a scene was completed and wrapped,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, for I was in fact the fill-in-writer-doctor-for this-Emmy-award winning broadcast. Not long after Jillian and I spoke, a competing show on FOX last season, America’s Top Shrink was shut down forever after two clients had overdosed together in a bathroom.
“Terrifying,” Jillian said when she heard about it on tv. 
“That’s what Dr. Legg was so gifted at,” I said. “Towing the line between hosting a hit tv show, and caring for the psychic lives of people who risk it all to find help and hope and health and redemption and once in a blue moon, stardom and/or love.”
Before Don’t Fear the Freudians had become a surprise hit, I had worked in other New England mental health programs and at rehabs and group homes and psychiatric hospitals, too, both state-run and privately financed facilities. I had won plaudits, awards, and tried my hardest not to f*** everything up. 
It was an emotional scene when Phin and Dr. Legg embraced at the base of the mountain several days ago. After finishing that moment, hand-held cameras followed Phin as he left, waving to Dr. Legg and the support staff. Phin is doing wonderfully now. He was discharged from Oz and has set his sights on finishing his degree at Yale, before heading out to Colorado, so he can take part in other winter sports, and perhaps find his way along the path of life. Phin was even booked as a guest on The Late Show with David Letterman, helping the host toss watermelons off a parking garage. “So, all that stuff on your show Don’t Fear the Freudians…is legit?” Letterman asked him.
“Sometimes they’re only intense psychotherapeutic sessions,” Phin said. “Other times, though, it’s a superhuman experiences going down.”
Letterman made a sour face: “If your show has people flirting with the Divine and having so many breakthroughs per episode, what the hell am I supposed to do on my own lousy show?”
“Be a normal guy, I guess,” Phin said, reading cue cards. “Movie stars chit-chat and what not.”
“Lame answer, Phin.” Letterman said and when everyone came back from the commercial, Phin and actor Michael Keaton and Letterman were now smoking stogies and tossing water balloons out the windows onto passing taxis and limousines zipping past twenty-five stories below.