Hypnothe-Rapist: Starr Scores Ch. 05

To every gentleman in need of female companionship and affection...your dream doctor. Literally.

***Dr. Angela Starr: The Hypnothe-Rapist***

SS28: STARR SCORES V—"Attack Of The Hormones"

***

Here she is—Angie's back once more in another adventure. However, Dear Reader(s), there's something you should know going into this one so that its details will make sense—this is a prequel.

This story is going to illustrate how it was in the beginning, five and a half years ago, when Angie was only in business for a short time, and gave her very first Starr Treatment*.

Before Timothy Jacobs, before Kevin Grant, before Jed Parsons, before Dennis Lunder, even before Paula...

There was Angela Starr...and this fellow.

***

February 29th, 6:58 a.m.

31-year-old Angela Starr pulled up in front of her still relatively fresh, new clinic, at 2125 Columbia Street. She shifted the car into park, clutched her briefcase, opened the car door, and immediately felt the frigid mid-western winter breeze slap her in the face, stinging her eyes and causing them to begin watering. Jacket on, hoodie over her head, she reflexively shielded her squinting baby greens, locked the car and scurried to the front door of the clinic. Fumbling with the keys in her mittened yet freezing hands, she finally located the correct one, got inside and exhaled in warm relief.

She hit the lights and shivered her way down the hall and across from the restroom into the large, wide-open space she had adopted as her office. She set her briefcase down and slipped off her jacket, hanging it in the closet. She adjusted the thermostat for now to a cozy 75° until she warmed up, and dropped into the restroom.

Angela'd been in business since late fall of the previous year—to be exact, shortly before the winter solstice. She'd just graduated earlier that year from the Heartland University with her doctorate in psychology, and couldn't wait to get started practicing professionally after all those years preparing scholastically. Now licensed and qualified—to say nothing of being exhilarated beyond belief—her bank set her up with a generous loan, and she got her savvy brother to advise her on the business end of things, and help her locate an effective location for rent to transform into her clinic, which ended up being the most arduous part of the whole process and taking up the better part of the late summer and autumn.

Her brother Bryan's input on the location was that it should be in the heart of downtown, where the city's business really took place, but Angela vetoed that idea, reasoning that because she wanted to practice hypnotherapy, her domain should be somewhere in a much more relaxed vicinity and atmosphere, which would make patients more inclined to feel at ease and not worry so much about the pressing concerns which waited on the outside of her building.

A friend of Bryan's knew a real estate agent who specialized in businesses, so Angela lucked out, with someone whom she could trust to find her an ideal clinic. She showed her almost a dozen buildings, but none seemed quite right, until they pulled onto Columbia Street. Angela knew it was perfect the moment it came into view. It was spaced just right from its neighboring buildings, just far away that patients could feel a sense of guarded seclusion, but not so far that it was impossible to find, or would make clients feel they were in the middle of nowhere. Its atmosphere was peaceful and safe, with nature blooming on each side. The agent told her it needed a little maintenance, which Angela expected, but when she got inside she knew she'd found her palace. She fell in love with it. It was even more beautiful than she imagined.

December was underway. She furnished the waiting room and ordered some magazine subscriptions. She put her name in the Yellow Pages and started circulating the word. What played out in her favor was that even if other doctors created competition for her, her name would more than likely still be the first listed alphabetically. Though she wasn't quite ready for any immediately, she was very hopeful for some business soon, figuring that there were lots of therapists in town, but very few combined their healing methods with hypnotism. With this extra little something to offer, she felt she could do some exceptional good with her spin on the vocation, and connect with her patients on a level traditional therapists could not. It was a unique craft, and one in which not everyone believed—she knew it made some folks skeptical—but she also knew that if she could just reel in her share of business, she could get herself off the ground.

She had the perfect work ethic: she genuinely loved her fellow human beings, and was determined to do everything in her power to heal what ailed them. Who knows, she thought, one day her name might even be household words. Of course, while she'd welcome all the business thrown her way, it was the patients and the success in treating them that mattered, not the fame.

Needless to say, when she got her very first appointment, she was excited, anxious and a bit nervous. His name was Martin Foley, and he needed help kicking his smoking habit. It was scheduled on December 13th at 1:00 p.m. She honestly hadn't expected any business quite this soon, and she actually hadn't finished prepping her office for the big opening. She also hadn't hired a permanent receptionist just yet. But there was no way she was going to turn this patient away. She shifted into preparatory second gear. She contacted an agency, had them send her over some temps, and chose one who would do for now, a young English lady named Lucy.

Wow...my first patient! Angie told herself to keep calm. She'd had plenty of dry slumber runs with friends and family, but this was not just fun and games anymore. This was a jumping-off point of what could possibly be her career. This was a real non-acquainted individual, a real case, grappling with a real personal issue, coming to her for help and expecting treatment. She had to get her act together and be sure it stayed that way. This could either make her or break her.

She talked him through the initial interview, and once he agreed to the treatment, she put him under and planted the message in his subconscious that his problem was mind over matter, and that his willpower could trump his compulsive desire to smoke. Eventually, she woke him up, asked him how he felt, and sure enough, he did feel his urge had decreased a bit. The news made Angie happier than she'd ever been in her life. She told him to go home and monitor his progress until the next time they met, and asked him how a week from now sounded. She also gave him a breathing exercise to practice, not totally unlike meditation, while he reinforced to himself that he was stronger than his addiction.

Smokers, she already knew, were not going to be extremely easy to cure (not that anyone in particular would), but again, she did have a special edge virtually no one else had: her conduit deeper into the core of the human brain and subconscious where the conscious world could not reach or penetrate. This in mind, she approached her professional challenges with confidence, but also didn't allow her head to get too big. However, this didn't stop her from relishing and reaping the fruit of her labor.

The Starr had as well held on to her sense of innocent wonder. She kept her cool as Mr. Martin Foley paid Lucy and set up his next appointment with her, and once he had gone, Angie quietly shut the door, quietly slipped her shoes off and quietly leapt into the air with as much quiet spring as she could muster, letting out a celebratory whisper-shouted "Yes!!" She was of course a professional now, but that still didn't hinder her enthusiasm about how well her very first appointment in her professional journey as a hypnotherapist had gone. Now, not only did she have a first patient, she had a returning first patient, who would be back to see her again in a week! She was officially in business.

The timing wasn't ideal for a lot of patients right away, what with the impending holiday rush, but that was just fine; Angela needed the spare time in and around her first several weeks to get everything in order, and to obtain some additional office amenities for the benefit of the patients. Her second (new) patient was a young woman named Jennifer Richmond, who had a problem with overeating, and she also became Angela's second repeat client. And certainly enough, business did start picking up, even more rapidly than she'd anticipated. Before she knew it, it was a few weeks later, and she'd had not one, not two, but twenty successful sessions—which was to say that though not all of them involved actual hypnosis, all of them did involve a fair deal of progress. Though she wasn't aware of it at the time—and even if she were, she'd be too modest to say it out loud—the Starr had a true gift for her craft. She was a prodigy.

Word got around fast. When the second week of February had concluded, Angela had seen forty-two different patients, most more than once, and kept their files in the cabinet near her door. While there was nothing wrong with this system (aside from its unspoken obsoleteness), Angela felt a more efficient database in which to keep her patient info would be beneficial to everyone. So she bought a laptop and began logging the clients into a spreadsheet. The application was magnificent, and perfect for her situation; as every patient was different, she could use different colors to indicate, for example, what sort of malady a patient dealt with, different fonts, she could insert as much space as she desired for notes...she loved it. She was so happy—it was as if all the pieces of her occupation were falling perfectly into place. Angela was already by nature a positive, upbeat individual, but once her dream job became a bonafide full-fledged career, she found herself often having to calm down to keep from going veritably airborne in ecstasy.

As she entered the patients into her new database—she still kept the old filing system around, as a backup of her archives, as well as for a bit of sentimental value—she noticed something of a pattern. Out of all the separate clients she'd seen and treated in her career thus far, only slightly less than 30% were female. There was no such similar pattern on the basis of ethnicity or personality traits, but for the most part, men seemed far more comfortable placing their trust in her hands and letting themselves under her spell. Yet even a few male clients who visited proved skittish when presented with the idea of actual hypnosis, which Angela could understand. It was still a relatively novel art, in comparison with its non-hypnotic counterparts. It also made sense to her that leaving the hypnosis angle out of the picture altogether, the majority of men felt it easier and more satisfying to confide in a female therapist, whereas many women preferred a male therapist. So the pattern did not really bother her in the slightest; she simply accepted that this was the nature of the business.

It didn't make a difference to Angela one way or the other who exactly the patients were; as established, the vital element was improving the quality of their lives. Yet simultaneously, as time went on and she saw more and more gentlemen, she eventually discovered an as yet rare glimpse into the "archetype," as it were, of the male psyche. Obviously, every man was different, which she loved—nonetheless, she also grew to love the categorization of these men in her database, overlapping frequently present characteristics—privately, of course; she was naturally obligated to keep client sessions confidential—to draw her own speculations and perceptions about how the male mind operated, and thoughts, feelings and ticks of men that were...she hesitated to say "typical," so she went with "commonly abundant" instead. She became intrigued to no end.

She wasn't particularly surprised, per se, by the vast, multifarious spectrum of nuances the male persona stored in its capacity—on the contrary; she found it amazingly fascinating—what did give her more of a surprise revelation was the innate but widely unknown truth that they really weren't so very different from women at all. Messages from the outside world taught her from an early age of the various, incredibly numerous and diverse distinctions between the sexes—to say nothing of the groundbreaking tome insinuating such a striking dissimilarity in the two entities that they actually came to Earth from completely separate planets on either side. Angie Starr believed in these ideas as a child, only because she was fed them so relentlessly often...until her 30s.

Once in private practice, she acquired the frankly startling first-hand knowledge for herself, that most (what seemed at least 90%) of all traits societally "assigned" to either one or the other, did in fact belong to both—to a given extent. The concept interested her beyond words. As she looked back on it, she realized that alarmingly enough, these instances of stereotypes and generalizations were not even so much addressed or debunked in her psychology courses in graduate school. How sad it was, she thought, that such widespread presumptions about a person could be made solely by what was displayed on the surface. Angela made up her mind that she'd never jump to such conclusions; she would take the person on a metaphorical hand-held walk until reaching their conclusion together, side by side, in normal, paced strides. No jumping. This broken sex myth also quickly shattered any and all stereotypical misconceptions Angie may have held concerning folks belonging to any other group. From this point forward, she would never judge a publication by its cover.

As her first full calendar year in business was a leap year, its 366th day was squeezed in, today just happening to be that fateful extra, irregular day. For especially superstitious folks, any number of bizarre occurrences could take place in these twenty-four hours. More grounded people tended to muster courage to do something spontaneous and adventurous—to take the proverbial leap. Never one for superstitions herself, Angela wondered what sort of leap she might end up taking at any given point today.

She got into the clinic herself each morning at 7:00, and officially opened it for the day at 8:00. She didn't really need an entire hour to prep things for business—which only really took about ten minutes, if that long. She spent the other fifty putting on coffee, downing it, and quietly coursing the structure in its entirely, either clockwise, or counterclockwise, or sometimes completely randomly, reveling in the splendor with which she'd been bestowed.

Every morning, Angela traversed the dark clinic, shuffling along in her slippers inch by inch, like an angelic ghost passing through the hallways of an abandoned house. Wonderfully as the office came to life upon arrival of her receptionist and guests, she too vastly enjoyed the short time she had the building exclusively to herself, listening to the lonesome sounds of the wall clocks ticking and trees rustling outside. She wanted to be thankful for everything life gave her and take nothing for granted. During the months when it was still fall and winter, she got to also gaze outside and enjoy the varied beautiful sunrises. She let her fingertips guide her along the walls until she made her way to and alit each room: her office, restroom, kitchen/break area (where she made the coffee), receptionist desk...the only areas of the building she passed by but needn't enter nor illuminate were the supply closets, the electrical room and the additional office space the building provided, which was not in use, but for which Angie hadn't yet found a purpose. The truth was, her love of this building and its surrounding foliage-covered environment rivaled her love for her own home. As a matter of fact, she thought of the clinic as her other home. This just happened to be the home in which she worked and got paid.

The building itself wasn't particularly massive in relation to the impressively large—thirty square feet—room inside which Angela obviously chose to be her office. The only part as wide open would of course be the waiting room and receptionist area, and furnishing it was pretty straightforward: chairs, end tables, lamps, magazines, and hopefully one day a mounted TV. The front desk was a breeze; Angie had a computer installed, provided the supplies and left the rest entirely up to the receptionist herself.

As for the thirty-square foot office, Angela was looking highly forward to all the thinking she had to put into it. It needed to be comforting and relaxing, giving off a tranquil vibe which would shield the patient under a veil of protection and security. Having the patient's best interests at heart was and would always be priority one. It had an adjacent built-in washroom, the closet and window on the other side. The rest was all up to the Starr and her imagination.

What furniture would she need in here, she thought. A desk, obviously...desk chair, her filing cabinet, a bookcase for her occupational library, a sofa bed, and...maybe a plant or two, for atmosphere...

...Gee, anything else?

That appeared to have taken less effort than she'd anticipated. Well, should any more necessities present themselves in due time, she'd handle them in their course. In the meanwhile she knew she'd need to go with lots of—preferably lighter—blue, to help psychologically induce sleep in patients' minds. Clearly enough, a converse color like red would not very easily lull a person into the serenity of peaceful slumber. So she had a painter come in, then a couple movers from IKEA to deliver and assemble the furniture.

The most crucial piece was of course the sofa bed. At Angie's request, the bed came with very soft blue sheets and bedding, and about a googolplex of pillows. While she didn't know about others, Angela absolutely loved pillows and felt there could never ever be enough of them. And she herself also decided to kick in some old stuffed animals from her childhood collection.

How exciting! she thought. My dream is becoming a reality!

Cut to a few more weeks later, on Leap Year Day, the initial excitement had worn off a bit, but the intoxicating thrill, the high she got from helping her clients—coupled with their visible gratitude to prove it—that rush sent Angie over the moon. The possibility of that wearing off was nonexistent.

A couple hours in, Lucy and the first patient had arrived. The clock was about to tick over to 9:00 a.m. Her desk phone rang.

"Yes, Miss Taylor?"

"Good morning, Dr. Starr," said Lucy from the recep desk. "Your first patient is here. A Mr. Carl Blankman."

"Excellent!" the Starr replied. She believed that was a new name. Checking her database just to be sure, she asked, "So this would be his first visit, correct?"

"Indeed it is."

"Terrific. Well, I'm ready anytime he is; go ahead and send him back!" instructed Angie.

"Right-ho!" Click.

A few moments later, back he came. When she caught sight of his shadow, she stood, brushing any accumulated dust from herself.

"Hello there, sir!" she welcomed, extending her hand. "Thank you so much for coming to my clinic! I'm Dr. Angela Starr."

He shook her hand. "Hi," he responded, rather listlessly. "Carl Blankman."

"It's lovely to meet you, my friend," she smiled. "Well, why don't you go ahead, have a seat, and we'll get going."

He removed his jacket and draped it over the sofa bed's arm. Obeying her request, he plopped down on the end of the couch closer to her desk. He propped his elbow on his thigh and deposited his cheek in his hand, studying the carpet pattern.