Erica Jong - Fear Of Flying

Chapter 12, The Madman, originally appeared in Ms. in a slightly different form.

The 8:29 to Frankfurt by Erica Mann originally appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Winter 68/69.

The Man Under the Bed originally appeared in Fruits amp; Vegetables, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, Erica Mann Jong 1968, 1970, 1971.

Thanks to my intrepid editors: Aaron Asher and Jennifer Josephy. And thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for a grant which helped.

And thanks to Betty Anne Clark, Anita Gross, Ruth Sullivan, Mimi Bailin, and Linda Bogin.

And thanks especially to the live-in muse who gave me a room of my own from the start.

There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and Id been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh. God knows it was a tribute either to the shrinks ineptitude or my own glorious unanalyzability that I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventures some thirteen years earlier.

My husband grabbed my hand therapeutically at the moment of takeoff.

Christ-its like ice, he said. He ought to know the symptoms by now since hes held my hand on lots of other flights. My fingers (and toes) turn to ice, my stomach leaps upward into my rib cage, the temperature in the tip of my nose drops to the same level as the temperature in my fingers, my nipples stand up and salute the inside of my bra (or in this case, dress-since Im not wearing a bra), and for one screaming minute my heart and the engines correspond as we attempt to prove again that the laws of aerodynamics are not the flimsy superstitions which, in my heart of hearts, I know they are. Never mind the diabolical information to passengers, I happen to be convinced that only my own concentration (and that of my mother-who always seems to expect her children to die in a plane crash) keeps this bird aloft. I congratulate myself on every successful takeoff, but not too enthusiastically because its also part of my personal religion that the minute you grow overconfident and really relax about the flight, the plane crashes instantly. Constant vigilance, thats my motto. A mood of cautious optimism should prevail. But actually my mood is better described as cautious optimism. OK, I tell myself, we seem to be off the ground and into the clouds but the danger isnt past. This is, in fact, the most perilous patch of air. Right here over Jamaica Bay where the plane banks and turns and the No Smoking sign goes off. This may well be where we go screaming down in thousands of flaming pieces. So I keep concentrating very hard, helping the pilot (a reassuringly midwestern voice named Donnelly) fly the 250-passenger motherfucker. Thank God for his crew cut and middle-America diction. New Yorker that I am, I would never trust a pilot with a New York accent.

As soon as the seat-belt sign goes off and people begin moving about the cabin, I glance around nervously to see whos on board. Theres a big-breasted mama-analyst named Rose Schwamm-Lipkin with whom I recently had a consultation about whether or not I should leave my current analyst (who isnt, mercifully, in evidence). Theres Dr. Thomas Frommer, the harshly Teutonic expert on Anorexia Nervosa, who was my husbands first analyst. Theres kindly, rotund Dr. Arthur Feet, Jr., who was the third (and last) analyst of my friend Pia. Theres compulsive little Dr. Raymond Schrift who is hailing a blond stewardess (named Nanci) as if she were a taxi. (I saw Dr. Schrift for one memorable year when I was fourteen and starving myself to death in penance for having finger-fucked on my parents living-room couch. He kept insisting that the horse I was dreaming about was my father and that my periods would return if only I would ackzept being a vohman.) Theres smiling, bald Dr. Harvey Smucker whom I saw in consultation when my first husband decided he was Jesus Christ and began threatening to walk on the water in Central Park Lake. Theres foppish, hand-tailored Dr. Ernest Klumpner, the supposedly brilliant theoretician whose latest book is a psychoanalytic study of John Knox. Theres black-bearded Dr. Stanton Rappoport-Rosen who recently gained notoriety in New York analytic circles when he moved to Denver and branched out into something called Cross-Country Group Ski-Therapy. Theres Dr. Arnold Aaronson pretending to play chess on a magnetic board with his new wife (who was his patient until last year), the singer Judy Rose. Both of them are surreptitiously looking around to see who is looking at them-and for one moment, my eyes and Judy Roses meet. Judy Rose became famous in the fifties for recording a series of satirical ballads about pseudointellectual life in New York. In a whiny and deliberately unmusical voice, she sang the saga of a Jewish girl who takes courses at the New School, reads the Bible for its prose, discusses Martin Buber in bed, and falls in love with her analyst. She has now become one with the role she created.

Besides the analysts, their wives, the crew, and a few poor outnumbered laymen, there were some children of analysts whod come along for the ride. Their sons were mostly sullen-faced adolescents in bell bottoms and shoulder-length hair who looked at their parents with a degree of cynicism and scorn which was almost palpable. I remembered myself traveling abroad with my parents as a teen-ager and always trying to pretend they werent with me. I tried to lose them in the Louvre! To avoid them in the Uffizi! To moon alone over a Coke in a Paris caf and pretend that those loud people at the next table were not-though clearly they were-my parents. (I was pretending, you see, to be a Lost Generation exile with my parents sitting three feet away.) And here I was back in my own past, or in a bad dream or a bad movie: Analyst and Son of Analyst. A planeload of shrinks and my adolescence all around me. Stranded in midair over the Atlantic with 117 analysts many of whom had heard my long, sad story and none of whom remembered it. An ideal beginning for the nightmare the trip was going to become.

We were bound for Vienna and the occasion was historic. Centuries ago, wars ago, in 1938, Freud fled his famous consulting room on the Berggasse when the Nazis threatened his family. During the years of the Third Reich any mention of his name was banned in Germany, and analysts were expelled (if they were lucky) or gassed (if they were not). Now, with great ceremony, Vienna was welcoming the analysts back. They were even opening a museum to Freud in his old consulting room. The mayor of Vienna was going to greet them and a reception was to be held in Viennas pseudo-Gothic Rathaus. The enticements included free food, free Schnaps, cruises on the Danube, excursions to vineyards, singing, dancing, shenanigans, learned papers and speeches and a tax-deductible trip to Europe. Most of all, there was to be lots of good old Austrian Gemtlichkeit. The people who invented scmaltz (and crematoria) were going to show the analysts how welcome back they were.