Hell-Bent (14 page)

For those, like Luke, who choose to get clean, reduction occurs at 5 milligrams per week, moving slowly through an agony that lasts months.

Luke went through the process on the Bikram floor. First gradually as the program suggested, but as his confidence increased, in a great enthusiastic push. When he got to his final 20 milligrams, just the point where the clinical literature recommends tapering reductions even more slowly (down to 1 milligram per week) because the withdrawal symptoms grow the worst, he gulped the rest of his prescription, enjoyed the last great high of his old life, and braced for fall. That night he crawled into bed and fell asleep weeping.

By the time he hit the studio the next morning, on what would turn into his final day of detox, the methadone withdrawal undid him. From the second posture, he went down to his knees, losing vision. He spent the entire remainder of class on the floor, “shivering, boiling, dripping,
wheezing.” He realized the class was over when he heard feet stepping gently around him and the cool air creep in from the opening and closing of the door. Luke continued to lie facedown. About an hour later, he heard the door open again, followed by feet shuffling, the pump of the spray bottle, and the sound of the squeegee on glass. The studio owner, Mike Winter, had begun to clean the mirrors, doing Luke’s work for him. Luke tried to get up but fell back, listening while Mike silently and methodically completed his sole contribution to the studio. Then he heard the supply closet open again and the footsteps head for the door. He was convinced he had utterly failed.

Instead Mike reverted to the simple and factual. “Drink water, please. See you tomorrow, son,” before shutting the door. Luke lay back on his mat for another hour. It was the only time anyone at the studio had modified a posture or an act for him. “When I was at the end, Mike gave me what I needed, just enough to pull myself up. Anything more or less, and it wouldn’t have worked the same.” When he finally mustered the strength to head back home, he slept the rest of the day, through the night, and so far into the next morning that he missed class.

But he showed up to clean the mirrors after it was over.

Eventually Luke became completely hard-drug free. He went on to attend teacher training, buy a studio in New York, and manage it successfully. His living curriculum kept unfolding.

Or as he says in an interview with the online magazine
Heyoka:
“Realization is an infinite process, it is a path not a destination.” The mirrors help guide you, the postures help guide you, and, if you get out of the way and let it, the yoga will open you to it: “Trust me, I was there at the brink and I came all the way back again.”

The problem with Luke is that he existed only online in that single interview for
Heyoka.
It was as if the living curriculum had played a joke on me. The interview was profound and simple. It told his basic story, it explained how he had used the tool of yoga to view himself, and it, in fact, introduced me to the concept of the living curriculum. But it also left me with tremendous questions I felt needed answering. Who was this punk rock
yogi who saw the practice so clearly? Why wasn’t he off giving seminars? Posing for
Yoga Journal
? Or at least maintaining a Facebook account? The more I searched for clues about Luke, the less certain I was that I hadn’t just actually imagined him. On the Internet, there were a billion potential Lukes but no trace of one whose life was saved by Bikram. At a certain point, I found a deceased blog that seemed a tantalizing lead, but it contained only poetry. And it was (god bless) a poetry devoid of reference to yoga in general and Bikram in particular. So there was no way to be certain. Pieces would fall at me every once in a while. When a friend prepared to go off to teacher training, she directed me to a blog that contained a single sentence about “an amazing man named Luke who taught class and reduced us all to tears.” But that was it. I went in search of the Chelsea studio the
Heyoka
article mentioned he owned. But when I visited and asked the teacher behind the desk about Luke, he looked confused and explained the studio had changed ownership several times. For two years, the only evidence of Luke remained this ghostly interview on a ghostly webzine.

Then one day, I was doing what I typically do when I decide to write, which was not to write and instead play Scrabble-like games on Facebook, when I stumbled on a status update of yoga friend: “Just took amazing tape recorded class by Lucas M.”

I clicked her profile, and at the very top of her friend list there was profile picture of blue fuzz with the label Lucas under it. I clicked on the blue fuzz. There appeared a man in sunglasses, board shorts, and a cardigan. He was holding an oversized beer stein. Beneath the picture, he had decided to comment on himself and wrote:

Yo yo yo, Hey wuddup, bitches?!

My name is DJ Luke and I clean the dishes

Make ’em shiny like childhood wishes,

Swimming though yer dreams like magical fishes …

I emailed immediately, asking if he was, by chance, a yoga instructor once featured in
Heyoka
magazine. Within ten minutes, Luke had replied.

The living curriculum was alive.

Oddly, however, the first place my interaction with Luke sent me—through the simple mention of how far his life had come, how radically people could change—was to essentially the opposite type of yogi: Joseph Encinia.

Joe and Sol

“My mom’s still in touch with a couple of my doctors,” Joseph Encinia tells me. “She sends them links to the YouTube videos of my postures. They’re happy for me, inspired and all, but at the same time totally baffled.” He laughs.

“They’re like: ‘What! Him! That kid! What happened?’ ”

It strikes me as he talks: Joseph is beautiful. He is stretching out in the near splits, torso rising straight up from the floor. His body isn’t muscular like an action hero, it isn’t fatless and magnificently articulated like some backbenders. Instead it has fluidity; when he moves, his muscles ripple like pond water at the point of disturbance.

It’s a body that Joseph clearly takes pride in. He pulls the shirt over his head; his mood changes. He absentmindedly begins stretching his body in disorienting ways, the sides of his smile widen by a few millimeters.

A lot of the joy comes from simply knowing he can.

“When I was a teenager, doctors told me that at twenty-five, I would still be living with my family,” Joseph says, “that my parents would be my caretakers. I remember being told that by thirty, I would need a walker.”

The doctors had good reason for their pessimism: At eight, Joseph was diagnosed with pediatric rheumatoid arthritis. The sterile white synovium that capped his bones was being eaten alive. In rheumatoid arthritis, an unknown trigger causes the immune system to attack itself; his white blood cells were literally digesting the cells in the tissue surrounding his joints. And as each of these cell exploded, they unleashed a chemical cascade into the joint cavity, causing swelling and raw inflammation. To move meant to hurt.

So instead he mostly slept and ate. “I wasn’t allowed to play. No gym class, no sports, no horsing around. Everyone told me I would hurt myself more.” He pauses. “And the last thing I wanted was to hurt myself more. My body was already broken. I had knees that would swell up like grapefruits.”

This form of arthritis is supposed to be a modern curse, a disease of the elderly, common only to the extent that medical advances have made it common to reach old age. For Joseph, it was his boyhood. He was channeled from bed rest to doctor’s offices to hospital waiting rooms. There was a major surgery on his knee. There were warnings not to play outside. There were lots of lollipops for being a good patient. Instead of comic books, his memories of the time are filled with the superhero-like brand names of all the painkillers he took. Vioxx, Celebrex, Ultram.

Taking the pills was better than the pain, but they just reinforced his feeling of being hopelessly sick. Even now he can’t differentiate between their side effects and his depression.

By thirteen, Joseph was a pill-swallowing machine. His register of daily painkillers, antiinflammatories, and antacids (for a stomach ulcer he had developed) grew every time he saw the doctor. “Something was always being added,” he says, “something adjusted.”

But it didn’t last:

“I was at home during summer vacation. Of course, that’s what summer vacation meant to me at the time, being home while everyone else was out playing. … And I just felt really sick. All day my head was hurting, my breathing uneven, I got dizzy. So my mom took me to my pediatrician. We waited. He thought it was a combination of a summer flu and a cold. He just ordered more bed rest.

“Later that night, I woke up, and I was having even more problems breathing. This was different. I was taking deep breaths, but each breath was killing me. I remember my mom putting me in the car. I remember us starting to drive. Then I blacked out. … I woke up the next day in the ICU, attached to every machine in the unit.”

Joseph had just had a heart attack at the age of thirteen.

For the last forty-eight hours, his coronary arteries had been in spasm,
a condition known as variant angina. The narrowing in the coronary vessels blocks blood flow to the heart muscle cells, starving them. As these cells shut down, circulation throughout the body slows.

Although Joseph had exhibited textbook symptoms of the disease, it wasn’t until he was hooked up to life support that doctors at the Children’s Medical Center in Dallas realized what had happened. Variant angina isn’t supposed to happen to teenagers. It is a condition for elderly smokers, men with histories of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and alcohol abuse.

It’s easy to imagine this being the final straw in Joseph’s chances at life as a normal kid. If his family was protective before, it’s hard to imagine angina relaxing the situation. But instead of driving him deeper into his medicoDickensian childhood, the heart attack marked a small turning point.

“First of all, I got a lot of attention all of sudden. Nobody was quite sure why this happened.” The hospital assigned him two cardiologists: one pediatric, one adult. As Joseph stayed recovering, attached to his beeping machines, a debate over his condition was happening just out of earshot. “The pediatric cardiologist, looking at my medical records, my weight, and my diet, essentially saw this as a forgone conclusion. The other cardiologist said, ‘Wait a second. This kid is on way too much medication. We’re suffocating him. We’re medicating this heart attack.’” The result was that Joseph emerged from the hospital with decreased dosages from some of his more heavy-duty painkillers.

Off the medication, Joseph was clearer. But he kept gaining weight. And both cardiologists agreed that with his arthritis compounded by a cardiac condition, sports were out of the question. “I spent high school eating. I was depressed. I was lonely. This was especially true, because my brother was this all-around all-star: good with sports, good with girls. And I was none of that.”

In the grand tradition of alienated, anti-athletic students, he poured himself into his studies, especially the sciences. “Being in a hospital my whole life, I had all these fascinations. I wanted to understand all my conditions. I wanted to understand what it meant to be healthy. It was really a chance for me to open up and come into my own.”

His junior and senior year, Joseph got the opportunity to spend every
other day working at the hospital as an intern. First with a nutritionist and then with an occupational therapist.

“As I got more confidence, I just woke up. And when I woke up, I was fed up. Fed up with social status. Fed up with my brother. Fed up with no girls. So I started testing the boundaries I was always told I shouldn’t break. I was still taking painkillers, but I realized I had to take control.”

This boundary crossing culminated when a girl he met out at a concert dragged him to a Bikram Yoga class. “I knew nothing about yoga. I grew up in a Roman Catholic household that was very interested in academics, very invested in Western medicine. But I mean, if she invited me, of course I was going to go.”

He died his first class. “Like I really thought I was going to die,” he says. A claim that is far more believable, given his previous brushes with cardiac arrest. “It destroyed me.”

But two hours later, he felt amazing.

He went back a second day and upgraded to a monthly pass. The studio owners noticed him coming every day and they offered him work-study: clean the studio on Wednesday and get free yoga for the week. From there it really took off. “For the first time in my life, I felt my body improving. I felt myself becoming an athlete.”

Joseph began a daily practice and watched his body transform. He lost fifty pounds in the first six months, lost his depression for good, and most important, stopped being afraid. “I was always told, especially with the heart attack, I couldn’t do certain things. I was always told I had to limit myself.”

Around the one-year mark, his arthritis went into remission. It wasn’t that he was pain free, exactly. It was that for the first time in his life, he could deal with his pain. “Doctors taught me to cover my pain. Bikram has taught me to accept it,” Joseph says. His knee might still swell up if he overstretches it during an advanced class, but his instinct isn’t to reach for a pill bottle.

“I started the yoga six years ago, and for the last five years, I’ve taken no painkillers. Which is a huge step for me. To be honest, my parents actually weren’t very happy about that at first. They thought I was behaving recklessly. But,” he laughs, “they’ve come around.”

The reason they’ve come around, and the reason he can laugh, is because looking at Joseph today, there is no evidence that a transformation has even occurred. He shines. He glows. He’s excited. I try to picture a tired, pudgy boy with cotton balls stuffed in his brain, but I can’t quite do it.

So I ask him, “Do you have any connections with that past? Is the kid still in you?”