Hell-Bent (20 page)

This extends in particular to Bikram himself. A senior teacher tells us that Bikram, the man, will be unlike anything we have ever seen. He explains that Bikram is “a fully realized human, a true master.” A second senior teacher follows that encapsulation by explaining that we can’t actually see Bikram at all. “What you see is not Bikram,” she says. “It is a mirror.” This prompts a third teacher to reverse the whole dynamic, explaining that Bikram will be able to see right through us. “When you stand in front of him, he will read your whole life in an instant. He will see your future and understand your past.” This teacher concludes the whole Bikram expectations–visibility discussion by requesting we restrain our curiosities and never approach the guru outside of lecture. “There are three hundred
eighty of you and only one of him,” he says. “Bikram will try to give, but you will just overwhelm him.”

Finally—after a cringe-inducing pep talk where the head of sales at the Town and Country explains to us that we’re inspirational—Rajashree, Bikram’s wife, gets on the microphone. Just before she takes the stage, several mannequins are placed onstage beside her. These are wearing Bikram-branded yoga shorts and spandex bras. Rajashree’s speech includes lots of sensible advice (“This is not the time to experiment with a new diet, not the time to detox”) interspersed with Hallmark platitudes (“Here is a tough time, the best time, the time of your life!”). She is an impeccably pleasant-looking woman, unmistakably in middle age, but the type of woman who at first glance you mistake for having arrived there smooth and uncracked by life, and only at later glances, who you recognize is perhaps well cracked, but then caulked up sufficiently tight. Watching her speak, I decide she reminds me very much of another remarkable woman married to a powerful man, Hillary Clinton. It’s not just the feeling of a muzzle over her obvious intelligence, but the way it feels like she is submitting to a role—a whole way of presenting herself to the world—that left on her own, she would never seek out, a role that she is also game to make the best of because she understands, however unnatural it comes, she is still better at it than most.

When Rajashree is done speaking, I watch with some horror as she pushes her two teenage children in front of the microphone to say a few words to us. The sense that they are getting groomed for some eventual yoga takeover / succession of the guru throne is undercut by their painfully shy reluctance. I feel an instant almost clairvoyant twinge as to what the Choudhury dining room table is like. As the daughter talks, I notice the son almost visibly shrinking, a cross between a middle school dance recital and one of those old
Mad
magazine cartoons of a human caught under a giant magnifying glass. Relative to every other speaker, it makes me like all three of them a lot. Perhaps because in a room full of posturing, and announcements of fully realized mirrored invisibility, this is finally an interaction I can relate with.

Eventually, Rajashree retakes the microphone and points to the
mannequins. “You will be losing weight and gaining weight and so of course need to be buying very stylish clothes,” she instructs us. “We will have lots of changing outfits with the best styles and you will have to buy.” Then she points to a young male aide-de-camp and explains he will be manning a Bikram-brand shop doing business out of a hotel room. This aide-de-camp, Rajashree informs us, will give “a really honest opinion. Because us girls need honest opinion from boys.” At this she laughs a laugh so stilted and awkward and so oddly long that it must be authentic. The audience responds with actual hoots of enthusiasm.

A few more senior teachers rise to re-inforce the no-expectations rule. Finally, we are given a chance to ask questions. A single girl raises her hand. The room goes quiet.

“What if we are going to vomit? Can we leave the yoga room if we are going to vomit? Is that a problem?”

A senior teacher nods seriously. “Excellent question. This will probably happen for a lot of you at some point. Go quickly, come back quickly.”

Rajashree chimes in: “Let it happen. Let the process move through your body. Let it attack your mind. … You will experience big changes over the next weeks. I am sure in a few days, you will think you have made a terrible mistake.”

The next day, sitting packed in the same chairs, I realize I’m way ahead of schedule.

Where yesterday was boredom, today the room is practically exploding with anxiety. The tremulousness in the feet beside me is actually threatening. We are waiting for Bikram. In flesh. Looking down my row, knees are jostling up and down like a player piano. It is an electric contagious anticipation; I am sure if I had iron filings to sprinkle around the room, they would instantly arrange themselves in field lines.

Listening to the buzz gives me my first sense of how international the yoga is. There are representatives from thirty-three different counties floating around with especially large blocs from Australia, Japan, and Mexico. Despite the inability to communicate directly, everyone is smiles and eager eyes, connected to everyone else by a common, almost primal bond. We
all get it. Whatever scary, tremulousness-inducing understanding
it
may be. Outside of Las Vegas and maybe the UN, you don’t get this wild collection of cultures mushed together by an authentic common purpose.

An aide comes onstage. “Boss will be down in another five minutes.” And then, almost before the aide can make it offstage, there he is. Bikram. Bounding into the room with a “Check, check! Check one, two, three, four …” coming from his headset microphone. Leaping onstage just as all sound is drowned out by cheers. And we are on our feet in San Diego.

The very first thing I hear when the crowd dies down is: “I want to make you rich!”

Bikram is standing beaming before us. He walks up and down the stage. He smiles, showing every single one of his teeth. “Welcome to …” All of a sudden he is blinking helplessly at his staff, a rock star lost on his perpetual tour. “Country, country, town, place, city …”

Someone in the audience shouts out, “Town and Country Resort, San Diego!”

Bikram: “All I know is my shower is shitty!”

The room explodes in laughter. Like a bomb of laughter. Like we are projectile vomiting laughter to dislodge a feeling we would otherwise be choking on.

Bikram grows brighter from the laughter. Suddenly he is asking, “Is it hot in here?” and we watch Bikram take his jacket off. “Should I take off more, ladies?” Which he instantly does, revealing a moderately fit brown belly and producing shrieks from the 70 percent female audience (as well as an actual palm-to-forehead from the senior teacher who just yesterday told us Bikram was a mirror).

The rest of the introductory speech is frankly a blur. We learn Bikram’s last breakfast was in May of 1964. We learn that just prior to that meal, Bikram taught Pope Paul in India for a month. We learn that although it is not his habit, he slept maybe two hours last night. And that twenty minutes before this very introductory speech, Bikram was in his room fixing the brim of his favorite hat. A factoid that, both in content and delivery, I find very endearing. Bikram drops the hat-brim knowledge on us offhand, as an example of how clever he is for maximizing the time he saves by not
sleeping. We learn that his weight almost never fluctuates and that, based on a dog-year-like calculation of Bikram-hours slept relative to normal-person-hours slept minus formative years when Bikram slept like a normal person, that his true age is 220 years old.

All of this is delivered with Bikram bounding around onstage, hopping on his orange throne to crouch for a moment, hopping off, eyes glowing, cackling with laughter. When he is not bounding, he is recovering from bounding, reaching back, hand on hips like a stiff old man. In between the bounding and bracing and sharing factoids about his life, he is flirting with us: picking out people—men and women, the young and the middle-aged—from the audience to tease, to flatter, to shower with special attention.

Bikram concludes his introduction with a series of fist-pumping declarations. “Teacher training! Your body! My brain!”

There is one last roar of applause at this, one more time people get on their feet. Bikram stands beaming in the center of the stage. Then we sit. As he walks offstage, headset microphone still on, the audience rapidly fading into a postcoital buzz of side conversation, we hear Bikram one last time: “I did okay?” Then, softer to himself, “Thanks again, everybody.” Then, “I think I did okay,” before the microphone is finally switched off, and lips still moving, Bikram walks out into the afternoon alone.

You Put Your Hand on Shit Just a Little Bit, It Still Smells like Shit

I return from Bikram’s lecture and begin arranging my room for the next nine weeks. Blessed as I am with a single room, I spread out. A little library of books on the dresser, a second library of protein powders on my night-stand, little piles of folded clothes on the bed.

Then I hear a key card fumbling at the door. Then, through the paperthin walls of the Town and Country, in an accent I will soon recognize as Latvian: “Please excuse me, my English is no good. But I have question for you. Is this how you run hotel? In my country, I think we call this a robbery.”

Enter Janis.

Janis is the very last cadet to arrive at teacher training. He arrives without registration. He arrives without a room. He arrives unable to balance on one leg and unaware of what most of the postures are. And most important, he arrives not caring about any of that nonsense.

Janis is here primarily because he made a two thousand-euro bet with a friend that he could lose eight kilos in nine weeks. He tells me he has taken only five or six Bikram classes in his life before now. His son, an elite high school hockey player in Sweden, recommended Bikram to him as the toughest off-season workout he had ever experienced. After taking a class, Janis recognized immediately that it also helped with an old injury of his own.
¹⁹
He also tells me he thinks he might open a yoga studio. This urge he cannot explain. He just has a feeling. A woman in Latvia who takes sauna with him has a property that would make a good yoga studio. He trusts her. He wants to open a good business that helps people. He says “good business that helps people” in the way of someone who has maybe opened a few bad businesses that ended up hurting people. The thought had been growing in his brain ever since he took class with his son. Then he finds out there is a training that starts in five days. Then his friend makes him the bet.

So naturally he is here.

We shake hands. I offer him a few nori crisps, which Janis finds delicious. His surprise at enjoying seaweed is palpable. He seizes the entire box and brings it up to his smiling face. As Janis scans over the ingredients list, I tell him that I’m a little tired from my flight and about to go to bed. It’s something like 9 P.M. In reality, I’m just disappointed that my paradise of a single room has been violated. But I lie down in bed and close my eyes.

And Janis does what any new roommate would do in this situation.

He sits down on my mattress, high up by the pillows, and starts to show me pictures of his American friends on Facebook. Then he goes over his son’s hockey career. Then he announces he is staying only one night and getting a single room for himself.

This is Janis.

I love him. We bond. He never gets the single room. He is a thickly built Latvian: squat body, big weight lifter arms, and a pudgy roll of fat around his waist: essentially the opposite of the lean Bikram-body walking everywhere else. In personality, he is essentially the opposite as well. As might be expected from his impulsive decision to come to TT, Janis does not believe in the yoga. He thinks it’s a good workout—but he does not think it is the best. He thinks it helps with his injured leg—but he is not completely sure. Mostly he thinks this will be an adventure. He is thirty-six and retired. He was a lawyer. When the USSR dissolved and Latvia reverted into existence, he discovered and exploited a loophole that allowed him to buy back land that had been appropriated by the communist government. This made him a tremendous amount of money. Then he retired. He loves to push himself. He boxed as a youth and tells me at one point he is always looking for a challenge that matches up to the pre-fight fear. Bikram Yoga fits the bill, and it doesn’t hurt that this particular challenge involves being marooned at a hotel with lots of nimble, extraordinarily well-waxed women. It turns out that this type of impulsive inclination toward the extreme marks all his endeavors. He flies helicopters (“Forty hours of training. Almost solo!”); he is taking stunt-driving classes in L.A. (“You learn drift. So
easy
! Maybe we go on Sunday? I pay.”); he raced in the Gumball 3000, a multi-continental overland car race. He plays high-stakes poker and won an ATP Poker Tournament. He Jet Skis. He walks around perpetually dripping with electronic accessories and cables, iPad, iPhone, laptop, portable hard drive, several cameras. He is seemingly unconcerned with money, occasionally pulling out big clumps of cash—say five hundred bucks in twenties—from his pockets and depositing them on the nightstand. At first I think this is the product of a foreigner’s confusion about currency, a Monopoly money disassociation. But quickly it turns out Janis is merely filthy rich.

The next day he greets me coming out of the shower, explaining: “I
think I buy us a scooter. We use for groceries, help get around. Then at end, maybe I can give to you?”

When I shrug and tell him it might be difficult to take the scooter back to New York, he thinks.

“Okay, maybe I give to a friend of mine in L.A.!”

We don’t get a scooter. But Janis does promptly rent a car. A cherry red convertible. He puts the keys on my nightstand for safekeeping. “This is good car. Our good car.”

Later, especially when Janis discovers that San Diego has a few underground poker clubs, his money habits grow to farce. The drawers of our nightstands will fill with loose cash. I will borrow the car and open the glove compartment looking for the parking validation ticket to find literally thousands of dollars in crumpled hundred-dollar bills shoved in. On more than one occasion, I fish actual spendable large-domination bills out of our trash can.
²⁰
It is educational. It is my first time spending serious time around someone who has an entirely different relationship to money than I do. It is paper to Janis. If it grew on trees, he might afford it more respect. There is something vaguely yogic about it all: just as the old high school trope has communism and fascism looping around into each other, Janis’s relationship to money is essentially nonmaterialistic. It doesn’t cloud or define his character. He is still needy, petty, generous, and supremely patient. He uses the cherry red convertible to cart people to and from the grocery store like a soccer mom. He buys flowers for the mothers who are away from their families on their birthdays. He picks up the tab for people who are struggling. He asks an endless parade of women if they are interested in coming back to our room to massage him.