Hell-Bent (13 page)

Emmy speaks to something similar when she talks about her own training. “Back in the beginning, there was no teacher training. There were just very accomplished practitioners who got pressed into service,” Emmy
says. “Bikram would just disappear—sometimes he’d just run off to India, and he would ask you to teach in his absence. That is how I learned. … There were days when Bikram would call early in the morning and say, ‘Emmy, my voice, it hurts,’ and you would have to step up, because people looked at you as a healer.

“He didn’t believe that you could make a real yoga teacher in less than five years,” Emmy says. “He was impossibly protective. That was how he learned.”

But, of course, being protective was its own liability. Success was rising all around him, and there were no other teachers to help him manage the demand. “He was already losing his voice in 1974,” Bonnie remembers, “teaching five or six classes a day. You could hear the toll it was taking.”

Five years later, with business exploding, and still almost no teachers to sub in for him, Bikram watched the success take his own practice. “We would ask him about it,” Jimmy Barkan says, “but he would always say, ‘No, no, no, no. Interest in the bank. I practice yoga thirty years. Now run a little on interest.’ But every once in a while, especially at the beginning, he would still take class with us. Emmy would coax him in. … He’d showboat around; he loved it.”

St. Luktananda

It is axiomatic in the yogic world that, instead of searching, a guru appears when the student is ready. This is called the living curriculum: a student learns what they need when they need it, because the universe provides it. Although obviously full of mystical overtones, there isn’t anything necessarily extrasensory about the living curriculum. To some extent, it is a little like when you learn a new word and then suddenly see it all over the place. Or the way that general knowledge can crest to the point that several different scientists or philosophers can make simultaneous breakthroughs on different sides of the globe. It is a sign that there are an infinite number of connections to be made in our world, and that we weave narrative threads through those we are capable of comprehending. At its worst, the
living curriculum probably fuels groupthink, tribalism, and other introverted self-satisfied approaches to understanding the world. But in the case of our spiritual teachers, it’s far more benevolent: As our brains begin to connect ideas internally, we become primed to recognize when other people start expounding on those connections. They in turn open doorways to new connections, and slowly, as we are able, the living curriculum allows us to grow.

And so I found Luke. Or Luke found me. Or however it works.

An intense sage in tattoos, Luke has the body of Iggy Pop with the well-jowled facial hair of Wolverine. Personality-wise, he is the ultimate dharma bum: part poet-surfer, part beer-soaked goof, part deeply self-aware mentor. All eager, all giving, and most important for me, someone with enough self-knowledge and clarity to know when to shrug his shoulders and laugh.

To give myself credit, I recognized his qualifications almost immediately. Unlike so many in the healthier-than-thou set who end up worming their way into the yogic world, Luke is a fully realized survivor of his own stupidities. Near-lethal carbon monoxide poisoning. Slogging through day labor while drug-sick. Broken legs from leaping off bar tops. Stoned negotiations with completely unstoned Eastern European gangsters. Hustling art to tourists. And in general, a “lifetime of parties and bands and warehouses, wrecked cars, lost jobs, and black market abortions” that leave you either hung by your own petard or hoisted slightly closer to a nonbullshit perspective.

He has the compassion and instinctive giving that come from really having suffered. Listening to Luke, I can’t help but think of the Czeslaw Milosz quotation: “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.” And while I wouldn’t exactly call the endless chatter of self-betterment and self-promotion in the yogic world a conspiracy of silence, Luke’s story still manages to cut through it and leave a wake.

The story begins with Luke drifting westward toward the end. After a drug-addled tour of Eastern Europe, life savings exhausted, compulsively
using heroin and cocaine, he settled with a girlfriend in Houston. “It was the most American part of America we could imagine,” Luke says. “We wanted sun, English, beer, and strong, close-to-the-border-of-Mexico, old-fashioned hard drugs.”

Luke found work as a day laborer. Houston was in the endless middle of its housing boom, and unskilled jobs were everywhere. He navigated the city by foot, trotting each morning to a pickup location, where he would wait for the day’s contractors to fill in their crews. He was white and hungry-looking, so he almost always got picked. This led to an eight-month string of persistence work: scraping the paint off prerenovated shanty houses, carrying stacks of lumber from truck to site, cleaning up debris after skill workers finished their skilled work. His girlfriend got a job as a bartender at a topless bar, which Luke was never permitted to visit and which he decidedly does not want to remember. “No part of me wants to suspect what really went down on those nights out. … We were trapped in a real mess of a life.”

The couple never had the funds or the motivation to move into a place of their own, so they slept on the same couch in a junk house for months. They woke to dry mouths and a darkness cut only by the slender light cracking through the house’s well-drawn curtains. Clothes and dishes littered the floor. There was never ever any money. Except for dope. Days looped. To the extent the routine was interrupted, it was just barely and totally predictably with the small overdoses Luke and his girlfriend experienced regularly—all handled with amateur self-assurance, cold showers or hard slaps, bodies propped on their sides and pants unbuttoned so ice could be shoved down between the legs—and by the solemn serious resolutions to get clean that followed those nights. It was a lifestyle with a narrow but definite focus, a mechanized junk-oriented stability.

The primary catalyst for breaking this stability was a generous dealer. The couple had a daily ritual. There was a slender three-hour overlap between the time Luke returned from work and before his girlfriend went off to work the bar. Each day after getting paid, Luke headed to a prearranged 7-Eleven, where he took five dollars from his sixty-five-dollar daily take to purchase a hot dog and a large blue Gatorade. Then he took the entire
remainder of his wages and sat on the curb, eating his hot dog and waiting for his heroin dealer. His girlfriend was responsible for procuring their cocaine.

When they met at home, they would sneak to their roommate’s room to borrow her bed while she was at work. The CD player would get started, the dope would get mixed, and like magic, from anticipation alone, the dope-sickness withdrawal symptoms would begin to disappear. Finally they would tap in: “watching the rose bloom of blood gurgle into the syringe, then waiting—riding the wave of excitement for a few moments more—until we plunged the drugs home.”

On one particular night, a generous dealer upgraded their dope and pushed what would have been a small overdose into one just slightly larger and scarier. Luke remembers waking after passing out for just a few seconds, needle still in his arm. His girlfriend was next to him not moving, not breathing. Like many times before, he pulled off “a bit of poorly rendered CPR and dragged her to the shower.” She came back to her body and headed back into the bedroom. To reward himself for his bravery, his efficacy under fire, Luke decided to give himself another quick shot to the arm.

At which point he “fell out for a moment.”

Upon waking splattered on the bathroom floor, alone, scared shitless, and pulling himself up to the sink for a splash of water, “right in the mirror, right in front of me, was me looking back. But it was not me how I always saw myself in the mirror. Instead there was a younger me.”

Luke stared at this clear vision of a younger self. And the morning afterwards, both he and his girlfriend decided to check into a state methadone program. “Which proved absolutely useless. … Lots of red tape, forms to be filled out, endless waiting, and a grossly inadequate dosage that left you craving for more and which were administered in the presence of some of the most well-equipped dealers in Houston, who were also ‘recovering’ and waiting in the lobby with you.”

This program led to another program, which was significantly more successful, if only because it was experimental and deregulated and the administrators supplied such adequate doses that further attempts to get
high were pointless. The couple would pick up their weekly maintenance dose and leave the offices buzzing. According to Luke, the operating premise of the program seemed to be “get them so high that if they try to get more high, they can’t feel it.” And it worked.

Totally energized and euphoric, the two began pouring themselves into sobriety projects. “It was time to fill the void. But after all the silverware is clean, the pens and paints are labeled and sorted, the late broadcast TV is over … what to do then?” His girlfriend headed to yoga. He began working at Whole Foods with a manager who also doubled as a tai chi coach. Together they began a transformation process that ended somewhere pre-transformation when he lost his job at Whole Foods after a three-month trial period. His tai chi coach was one of the managers who opted to let him go. So, in Luke’s immortal words, “Fuck him, fuck Whole Foods, and fuck tai chi.”

Without a job, his girlfriend dragged him to a Bikram class. His first class was a “macho dickhead disaster,” where he lined up directly in front of the teacher and pushed himself as hard as possible from minute one, and where the only existential realization came shockingly early, after only the third posture, when suddenly he awoke to the understanding that “I AM GOING TO VOMIT.” This led to him fleeing not only the hot room but the entire complex, out to the cool of the parking lot, where he sat on his haunches by the hub caps of an impossibly nice “top-of-the-line, silver Jaguar S-Type car” and puked his brains out. He did not return. He felt betrayed, ambushed by the class and his girlfriend, by the teacher, by a weak body: instead of energy, he felt flooded with resentment.

“Shame might be a predecessor to humility. But shame as a process is ugly, and this instance was no different,” he told me of this time period. “It took a while for me to go back, but somehow my girlfriend persisted through my bitchiness and managed to convince me to step into the hot room one more time.”

The second class left him for dead as well. But he made a connection that would change his life. Even though Luke himself was still unsure, the studio owner, Mike Winter, seemed to understand how badly Luke needed
the yoga. He offered Luke an opportunity to enroll in his “Janitorial College of India.” Luke would come six days a week and clean the yoga room, and in exchange, he could take classes if wished. Luke accepted.

It is an understatement to say he didn’t fit in around the studio. Luke is a long man, over six feet tall, with buzzed hair and piercings. His pink body is all lean angles, all pointy intensity. In yoga gear, with shirt off, he is a messy pastiche of tattoos, which wraps around his chest and arms like the tatters of a costume. He does not channel “safe” or “soothing”; he mostly channels “hug your grocery bag tighter, old women.” But nobody intruded on his practice. His teachers gave him space and encouraged him to come. The middle-aged moms he practiced alongside gave him the type of prolonged plain smiles that meant they had no idea what he was going through but wanted to let him know they were trying to be supportive.

His obvious pain was addressed in the same way all pain in the yoga studio was addressed: It was personal, unique, and factual. Nobody could help you through it, and it was not to be avoided. Pain was simply part of the routine. Concealing, glossing over, or denying it was as pointless as indulging it or letting it become definitional. And if you trusted in this routine, surrendered to it, the pain would become more bearable.

“Yoga practice becomes a mode of self-inquiry, self-healing, and self-actualization,” Luke says. Bikram asks you to stand and stare at yourself during your most agonizing, day after day after day. The practice is excruciating, and instead of running from the trauma, you revisit it. “I study myself in asana. I examine my way of being, who I am choosing to be. … Where I am being absolutely authentic and beautiful, and where am I being less than honest and selling myself short.”

After six months, things started to change. Luke softened. One by one, like ignored former acquaintances, his addictions dropped off: first heroin, then cocaine, then the dextroamphetamines. He watched this happen in the same way he watched himself in posture. He and his girlfriend broke up. He grieved. He founded a stable job. He started assembling the pieces of his life, so he could at least begin contemplating putting them back together. He kept practicing: attending class daily, burning himself to the ground.

His last addiction was methadone. Although proposed as a government-sanctioned alternative to heroin because of the more moderate high, in one of those bureaucratic ironies that uses good intentions as pavement, physical withdrawal from methadone is actually much more brutal than heroin withdrawal. Symptoms ranging from vomiting and tremors to full-body aching and intense sleepless hallucinations can last for weeks longer than a heroin detox of a similar dose. Luke compares it to “the sickest you have ever been, the worst flu, the worst, most throbbing headache, the sweatiest, sickest fever … multiplied by one thousand.”
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Luke was doing 80 milligrams of methadone a day. Cold turkey withdrawal at that level can and has killed people. There is a respected medical position that, given these side effects, reducing from methadone isn’t actually necessary. That it is a perfectly acceptable outcome for addicts to simply maintain an indefinite weekly dosage, just like any other prescription drug.