Stop the Madness

From his second-floor office on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, entrepreneur David Morgan has a dream.

His dream is that someday whites and blacks, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, and the rest of God’s children will take a foam baton in hand and beat the living daylights out of a 5-foot dummy.

Another critical part of the dream is that they’ll pay his new business, Anger Behind Closed Doors, for the privilege to pound. For less than $10 a session, clients can enter one of two padded, sound-retaining, “venting rooms,” where they can scream, kick, punch and swing their way to better mental health, Morgan says.

“How many times have you wanted to choke someone because they really deserved it? And, of course, you can’t do it,” said Morgan, a fit 52-year-old resident of West Los Angeles. “But here you can do, say, feel what you want.”

Morgan believes that if people spent just a few minutes every week in one of his padded rooms, the world would be a much happier place. Instead of road rage, physical violence and other inappropriate expressions of anger, people would be more likely to work out their frustrations constructively by letting off a little steam, he adds.

And for that, there’s little that compares to clubbing a dummy or smacking around an inflatable Goofy or Donald Duck punching bag, Morgan says.

While the point of his 15,000-square-foot facility is to take the gloves off, Morgan makes clear there are still rules. To ensure that anger is released and not merely recycled, he coaches beginners on how to get the best results.

“I don’t want people to just go bananas in there,” says Morgan, who left the construction business last year to start the company. “Otherwise, you leave the same way you came in.”

He instructs each client to tie his or her physical acts to a specific angry thought. Thoughts like “the boss yelled at me” or “my girlfriend broke up with me” power most of the thrashing that occurs in the venting room, Morgan says.

Having only just opened in June, and with a limited advertising budget, business hasn’t been booming, so to speak. In total, about 40 people have tried out the venting rooms, with only about three or four regular customers.

One recent afternoon found 39-year-old Prather Jackson face-to-face with the green dummy. Jackson, editor and publisher of three community newspapers that carry advertisements for the facility, says he was eager to get out his frustrations with the newspaper business.

After a few moments of raining down blows upon the dummy, Jackson broke one of the foam batons. (Not to worry, Morgan says, a baton is destroyed every week.) Like most beginners, a sweaty Jackson emerged after less than five minutes of swatting.

“It felt like an eternity in there,” says Jackson, whose papers are distributed in Fox Hills, Westchester and the San Fernando Valley. “It’s physical, but it’s also very therapeutic.”

After acting out their anger in the venting rooms, clients then unwind in the facility’s “thought and relaxation area.” The area consists of four private booths in which clients listen to soothing music through headphones before heading back out to the mean city streets.

In addition to the venting and relaxing stations, there are also anger-management sessions hosted by Morgan in his two classrooms. Morgan has no formal anger-management training but, rather, relies on his “life observations,” he says. He also rents out one of his five counseling rooms to therapists and his clients.

“People said I was crazy to try this,” Morgan says. “But there’s so much stress out there . . . so much.”