Hell-Bent (21 page)

But on day one, I don’t know any of this. I know he has arrived in San Diego having taken five yoga classes at a training full of people who have been practicing for years. I know he is sweet and loud and excitable. But, with my back still bruised from Backbending, I decide I am more than a
little worried about Janis when it comes to classes. It’s clear he doesn’t know what he’s in for.

Training begins the same way it continues for the entire nine weeks. Every morning I wake Janis. And every morning he is first to be dressed and out of the room. While I load up my water bottles, Janis runs out to the elevators and holds the perpetually closing doors for me, yelling “Come on come on come on! Elevator is waiting for you!” I run over and announce that we are late. We ride down in silence and when the doors of the elevator crack open, we smile and say “late, late” to each other, me speaking in the adopted Latvian accent I use to communicate with Janis, and then, together, we force our creaking bones into a slow jog toward the hot tent.

As we pass the other sleepy stragglers, Janis’s energy grows, and he’s yelling, “Come on! Come on! We late!” sometimes slowing our pace so other people can jog with us, sometimes smacking them with his rolled yoga mat as we pass by. We arrive at the tent just in time for class. We bend. We stagger out. And then I avoid him for my own sanity.

No matter how crippled he looks, no matter how grueling the class, every class ends the same for Janis if I am around. “What you think? Me?
Easy!
”

After class we disappear to separately memorize our dialogue, and we rarely see each other again before the second class.

At night, we sit in lecture listening to Bikram. Afterwards, if the lecture ends early, Janis runs off to go play high-stakes poker. Then he returns with the big wads of cash that he dumps all over our room before crawling under the covers for sleep. Then I wake him up and we do exactly the same thing again and again.

Here Is a Steeple

In San Diego, to accommodate the 380 students, we practice in a giant tent erected in one of the many Town and Country parking lots. It is the chapel of our megachurch.

The tent itself is huge and white, stretched sheets of plastic held erect by massive belts and bands, themselves secured to I-beam-sized tent poles. There are two double-door entrances, each with tiny alcoves for shoes and personal possessions, although after experiencing the crush of 380 bodies bolting for the door after a hot class just once, everyone learns not to bring anything except flip-flops into the alcoves.

When you walk in, especially when the tent is empty, the space is unexpectedly vast and extraterrestrial. Black Astroturf carpeting.
²¹
Giant plastic tubing running rafterlike across the ceiling. Vast flapping sheets of plastic. And although from the outside, the tent rises at least three stories, inside, a thin plastic ceiling truncates the space, stretching oppressively low over our heads. It is insulation to trap the heat, and it ripples like a low living sky when the heaters begin to blow.

The front of the room is lined with paneled mirrors, cheaply affixed to plywood frames. The mirrors will steadily warp over the weeks, giving out an increasingly nauseating reflection. A few will fall off completely. The result would be more unsettling, but the truth is that in a room of 380 people, almost nobody can actually see themselves in the mirrors anyway. Rising in the very center, above the paneled mirrors, is the teaching podium. It juts into the front row. And in the very center of the teaching podium, visible from all sides, Bikram’s throne.

The throne is befitting only Bikram: lord over this room of plastic and mirrors, prom king of the apocalypse, our very own babbling Lear. The base is a thick black leather sofa chair that looks stolen from a suburban basement. The upholstery long cracked from the humidity and temperature changes, it is accordingly, always draped in several bright orange beach towels. A small table on the right holds a small bowl of hard candy, which Bikram likes to suck on during class to soothe his throat, and a tall glass of water,
which will grow almost erotic at our most desperate points. But the real magic of the throne is above: two ribbed plastic ventilation tubes hang down. They connect to a personal air conditioner, pumping cold air down on Bikram’s head as he teaches.

As the tent gets warm in preparation for yoga practice, everyone stands on spots marked by plastic tape. We are packed tight: mat to mat, row to row. To do the postures correctly, you will invade another’s space and you will be dripped on. During the later hazier weeks when everyone is operating closer to a point of failure, and bonding under adversity reaches physical proportions, there is lots of touching for support, hand squeezes, toes being tweaked, and water passed from those with excess to those in need.
²²
The density on the line is enhanced by several irregularly placed
gaps, where no one lays a mat. These are the spots directly underneath the heating vents, where the hot air beats against the skin so harshly, it feels like it may actually cause a burn. Inhaling here, you feel the distinct sensation of nose hairs smoldering. By week four, they become my favorite spots of all: not for the space, nor due to my obvious growing masochism, but because I discover, if you can suffer through the beginning blast, later in class, the mere existence of any airflow against the skin feels downright luxurious.

All lights in the yoga tent lie behind the plastic sheet of the ceiling, giving the interior a soft muted glow.

Sometime, by the middle of class, when the tent has completely warmed and the sweat from the 380 bodies has risen into a dense moist blanket of humidity, when the rushing white noise of the furnaces matches the rushing blood at the ears, there is a moment where all 380 people lie flat on their backs in the tent and tuck their knees into their chests. It is pavanamuktasana, it comes every class, and all 380 of us lie there fetally, following commands that boom down from the speakers above, each a curled dot in the massive room, winding back to an earlier state, another time when we surrendered to the loud incoherent babbling of outside noises while cloaked in heat—but instead of evoking the warm comfort of the womb, lying there, looking up at the oppressively white plastic ceiling, body straining in discomfort, ribbed plastic tubing shooting around the field of vision, sweat running from the corners of the eyes, you feel all the horror of a preemie baby screaming in his bubble.

It is horrible and choking and dystopic and exactly how Bikram wants it.

After all, if you can create peace in the hot tent—if you can locate the grace in your inner preemie baby—you can probably create it anywhere. Or as Biks would say: “I push I push I push I push and then, when you are right up to the edge, half foot on, half foot off, I give you a great big kick and you fly off. … But instead of falling, you float. You levitate. You are yogi now.”

Things I Learn about Bikram Within the First Three Days of Teacher Training that Will Make the Rest of This Section Make Sense

That Bikram is a man without a vocabulary for moderation. That when he says, “Every yoga in the United States is fake yoga,” realize he is also the same man who in the next breath says, “You know the most repulsive creation ever made in the West? That thing called blue cheese dressing.” For Bikram, no idea of his is not the greatest, no acquaintance is not “my very best friend,” every punch could kill someone, every rich man is a multi-multibillionaire, and any random thought that might come out of his mouth could be “the most brilliant sentence ever created in the English language.”

That he will make you believe that charisma is a physical quality of the universe. That it can actually radiate off someone.

That you are not immune to his charms. That’s how real charisma works. You may decide you don’t like him or that you find him cartoonish and silly, or you may decide you love him and want to run away to join his circus—it doesn’t matter. When you are around him and actually experience him, unless you are jaded to the point of a clinical pathology, you will be surprised. Impressed by his variability, aware of his attention to the present moment, his ability to pick up and react to the people around him. He will, in short, undermine your expectations whatever they are and make you curious about what exactly will happen next and then convince you that this quality of curiosity and unpredictability is authenticity.

And
that it was none other than
Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh, the proudly deviant, ultimately monstrous force of twentieth-century charismatic wisdom, who famously decreed that “authenticity is morality” just prior to diving right off the high board of sanity into the deep end of withdrawn madness, eschewing his life as a yoga guru to become a Valium- and whippet-addicted, ubermaterialistic, sexually abusive fiend slash international bioterrorist who was exiled from twenty-one countries. And that although nobody except Rajneesh who thinks about the implications of the statement “authenticity is morality” can rationally accept it, it does subconsciously
align with our most self-righteous notions of self and is very helpful in understanding why Bikram can appear warped, egotistical, and charming at the same time.

In other words: he’s got it figured out for himself (even if that means the rest of us are fucked).

That he does not tolerate
the color green in his presence. That he will occasionally recognize that this is illogical and no matter what, never try to defend it, but will, depending on mood, fly into caustic rage if you momentarily forget and accidentally wear green in his presence or bring a green object into a room he is occupying.

That by the end of the third day of Teacher Training, he has announced he “invented the disco ball,” “was responsible for launching Michael Jackson’s career,” “brought Bruce Lee to America,” “is number one in the world in hits since the computer started,” “cured Janet Reno’s Parkinson’s,” and was “best friends with Elvis.”
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That he dresses only in complete outfits, never the discrete suburban options I grew up with, whereby pants, shirts, and socks were pulled from separate drawers.

That his sartorial style might best be described as a concerted effort to make disco balls cloth.

That beyond disco ball as cloth, Bikram limits himself to the colors of orange, red, and black. That, without irony, he wears shirts with tigers and flames. That he loves fedoras, pocket hankerchiefs, and wing-tipped shoes.

That, again on the clothing, he never wears anything restrictive enough to prevent immediate removal should an opportunity present itself for him to strip down to brown flesh either to show off the preternaturally preserved condition of his body or to literally give the shirt off his back to a deserving, demanding, or mildly confused man who happens to be standing in a room full of people Bikram wants to impress.

That I have personally stood behind him when he thought he was off-mic and heard him muttering to himself over and over that he is “Bikram, a gangster like Cagney, like De Niro, like James Caan, like my most favorite Mr. James Caan, Sonny Sonny Sonny Sonny Boy” while rubbing his hands and cackling to himself. That I have no qualms about revealing these essentially personal mutterings, because I have heard Bikram mutter an identical rant of gangster comparisons to an audience of hundreds while on the microphone. And that this merger of public and private mutterings is just one example of a gigantic merger that occurs when you elevate into the truly weird sphere of being a full-time guru, where private and public selves by necessity must be blurred into one because that nonduality is precisely the product you are selling.

That when it comes to yoga, he is foremost a servant. That he is compulsive in his desire to help people achieve benefits from his postures. That this is perhaps the greatest reason for his success.

That he truly believes yoga will change the world, and his love of money and glitter and gangsters aside he will do anything to further this goal.

That he is a man who has been so successful at this goal that he once got in an argument with the adjacent passenger in his first-class seat of his Delta Airlines flight back to Los Angeles over his own identity. An argument where the adjacent first-class passenger insisted politely that there must be some language problem because it was impossible for his seatmate to be Mr. Bikram of Bikram Yoga, because there was no single Mr. Bikram, thereby encapsulating a belief widely held by those not in the know that Bikram Yoga is one of the ancient systems, a lineage passed down by the generations, a lineage where it is assumed that the
Bikram
in Bikram Yoga is either the name of a long-dead sage or, more likely, is some yuppie-appropriated Sanskrit word of the type now thrown on jeans or soaps or ergonomically branded office furniture. That the argument in the first-class bay escalated—as the man continued dribbling inaccurate details about the yoga into the conversation, details that he knew for a positive fact because his niece was deeply involved in this ancient Bikram yoga—and was settled only because by chance the Delta inflight magazine was doing a story on the sensation of Bikram Yoga, which featured an imposing picture of the
real and nonancient Bikram in exactly the same fedora he happened to be wearing at the moment.
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That although that is what Bikram relayed to us and it seems probable, as there have been many stories about Bikram written in many in-flight magazines, I have no idea whether it is true. That Bikram routinely mixes stories that are definitely true (“I kick Robert Flack and Shirley MacLaine out of class for being late!”) with stories that could very well be true (“Ronald Reagan called me for advice about his daughter,” Patti Davis, who was a serious student of Bikram’s and who went on to marry one of his most senior teachers) with stories that are almost certainly not true (“I get Bruce Lee his role in
Enter the Dragon
!”) with stories that are false and told tongue in cheek for laughs (“Best client, Statue of Liberty. Hundred years she stands without bending the knee. Tough cookie.”)