Hell-Bent (22 page)

That he is the greatest example of sage-as-child I have ever come across.

That as sage-as-child, he skews toward the awkwardly horny, early-teenage child, who has just discovered masturbation and exaggeration but who is still really, really excited about video games, instead of the perhaps more wholesome wide-eyed and innocent child who fingerpaints and runs around in grass whom people tend to imagine when imagining their sages as children.

That he certainly has those wide-eyed and innocent moments too.

And that really, when you think about it, there isn’t that big a difference between those two versions of sage-as-child, since the salient quality isn’t exposure to sexuality or running through grass but the degree of wonder and curiosity and energy that occurs when an ego that hasn’t been bashed aside yet by the wearies of maturity, the responsibilities of caring for oneself, and the learned boredom of sophistication is left to explore a universe it believes it is at the very beating center of.

That his understanding of America and what it means to be American has largely been formed by the Beverly Hills elite of the 1970s and ’80s and their corresponding mannerisms in Hollywood movies. That because of this, he shares the same weird cultural warping you see in Japanese rock stars and/or Scandanavian jazz and/or hip-hop’s adoption of Italian mafioso mannerisms, in that he’s grasped a small, essential, and extreme part and used that part as a lens to frame the whole.

That the result of this sociological synecdoche is a Bikram who believes Las Vegas is the apex of American culture, thinks that name-dropping is a valid rhetorical strategy, and has trouble believing that his students are motivated by carrots beyond money and self-aggrandizement.

That he really believes it when he says he loves himself so much because it allows him to love you.

Both because he really, really loves himself and because he really, really loves you. As long as you stay as you a concept and don’t morph too much into you an individual with needs that may conflict with his own.

That his love for you as either concept or individual will never, ever, under any circumstances allow you to outshine him.

That he was by his own admission a virgin until the age of twenty-eight, whereby he experienced his first orgasm when several women brought him to climax against his will. That who knows what that particular series of events does to someone’s neural pleasure center, but that developmentally and behaviorally at least it resulted in him promptly going on an early-thirties sexual binge whereby he explored this new sensation to its utmost with many of Hollywood’s leading ladies and many of his most devoted acolytes.

That he is the type of man who thinks that announcing in public that he has had “seventy-two hours of marathon sex, where my partner has forty-nine orgasms, I count” makes him appear more, rather than less, virile.

That he is incredibly, achingly lonely. That he can’t stand to be by himself. That he misses India. That his need to be surrounded by people begins with senior teachers but quickly extends to essentially unknown newbie practitioners should senior teachers desire to go to sleep or otherwise have some personal space. That he will tell us not once, but hundreds of times from his throne, that he believes “loneliness is the number one punishment
in human life” and/or that he can endure any amount of physical pain, “but put me in a room by myself, and I will kill myself.”

That one of his most senior teachers describes his teaching method as “he takes a pin and finds the softest part of you, and he will prick you again and again at that point, never actually penetrating, never hurting you, until that part of you is the hardest place on your body.”

That already in just a few days, one of his most junior teachers can see that although his instinct for finding the softest spot on people is unerring, almost genius level, he occasionally and very definitely misapplies the whole pricking part—and has ended up hurting people very badly.

That even among people who feel hurt, cheated, or injured—the people who seek me out as writer with grudges and curses and to expound on the reasons he is dangerous—even these people will typically have a moment when they think about him and their eyes grow big with memories and say, “but it’s true, you know, the guy broke my heart, and I love him anyway. I can’t help it.”

That he never drinks alcohol. Abhors cigarettes. That there is something very touching about the way he is saddened when people close to him use those substances.

That by all indications, he does not practice the yoga class he is famous for creating. But that he clearly does exercise in other formats, including, bizarrely, doing thousands and thousands of stomach crunches in the sauna.

That he possesses an absolutely transcendent singing voice. That Quincy Jones wanted to record him, at a time when Quincy was at the height of his creative powers, in the mid-1980s, having just put out
Thriller
with Michael Jackson. That Quincy found himself crying when Bikram sang to him at the end of their classes together.

That Bikram can be both kind and terribly cruel in the same moment to the same person. That this push–pull is his métier and essential truth. That it operates on fragile, needy people like a drug.

That he is in no way anything but a human. And a particularly small human at that. That he is a man who through great personal effort has whittled away his humanity into a small, sharp point. That as with many great men,
this has left him both mesmerizingly effective and totally and completely imbalanced. That it could be perceived as irony that yoga would be the skill that led to this imbalance, but that implies a misunderstanding both about the type of yoga Bikram is teaching and exactly what it takes to teach and spread yoga to millions and millions of people.

And with That as Background and Foreground, I Dive Wholeheartedly into Teacher Training

This is how lectures at Teacher Training begin. After a long, restless wait, after announcements about endless mundanities like laundry or postal delivery that are necessary but taxing to listen to, after his throne has been properly assembled and outfitted with fluffy blankets
and his tea has been
brewed, Bikram strides in. He will enter bundled up, hunched inward like he is perpetually cold, with a cap pulled down tight over his head, then he will look around left and right a few times, then strip down to reveal leopard-print gold lamé-lined short-shorts. Which he will show off with an excited ass-waggle or two to his now screaming trainees before bouncing up into his cozy throne to swaddle himself in an avalanche of orange blankets
²⁵
and begin the night’s lecture.

Instead of a specific topic, Bikram will come with a single idiom he wants to expound upon. This idiom typically comes directly from his dialogue (“What does it mean ‘pulling is the object of stretching’?”) or has a Rudyard Kipling
Just So Stories
quality to it (“Let me tell you something incredible but true: the heart hate the lungs”) or a mathematical precision (“99 percent right is 100 percent wrong”) or really requires no explanation at all (“Best food is no food”
²⁶
). Bikram does this because as he puts it, he
can “tell you with idiom in ten seconds what it would take another teacher ten minutes to explain. So simple.” Of course, in real life, it is not so simple. Instead Bikram relates the night’s idiom in ten seconds and then spends an hour and a half unpacking it, and explaining how it relates to sex, yoga, pleasing women, and/or the lives of various wealthy and influential friends of his. However, just as surely as a slot machine pays off with the variable reinforcement that keeps the suckers suckling, regardless of the inanity of the lecture, during his hour and a half babble per idiom, Bikram will make at least one offhand comment that registers as pure gold. It will gleam as it trips out his mouth, bobbing to the surface in an otherwise muddy stream.

Tonight’s lecture is on
the art of teaching. Bikram is explaining who our prospective clients will be. The idiom, to the extent there is an idiom guiding the lecture is one of Bikram’s favorites: “Having doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t know how to use it.” The lecture rambles from a discussion of the famous people Bikram has thrown out of class to the reason he hates San Francisco and Ashland, Oregon, and the “dirty hippie artists” who live in both places. Finally, talking about hippies, women with “armpits like a second pussy,” there is a moment of coherence:

“The worst, dirtiest people in the world will come to your class. Physically, mentally trash, spiritual garbage, minus ten thousand mental attitude. You must be very nice to them. They pay very well. But expect a bunch of vegetables to come in wheelchair.

“Many will have tried to commit suicide even and were unlucky enough to fail. You will tell them: Don’t worry, I will help you commit suicide very quickly—and kill you with this class!”

The audience laughs. Bikram grows serious.

“You laugh, but you don’t know. … The saddest part of my life is that I know your lives. I know my power. I have used some of it—not all. But you—” He leaps out of his chair. “—your grandfather left you a
trillion-dollar investment, and you don’t know how to get it, you don’t know the life you could be living.

“God gave you everything, but you don’t know how to use it. It makes me so sad.” He sits back down, looking instantly older. “Why should I care? Because that is my karma yoga, that is my purpose. That is the promise I made to my guru.

“Yoga is the key. You already have the sports car. You already have Rolls-Royce. But you don’t know how to turn it on. … The people who come to class, the vegetable garbage in wheelchair, it is unbelievable at first, but they have sports car too.” He pauses. “But having sports car doesn’t mean a thing. …” Here he stops as the audience roars back with the conclusion to his couplet:

“If you don’t know how to use it,” the room obediently and joyously chants.

“Yes! See, you learn something. God makes everyone a gold mine. That is your trillion-dollar investment. Your job is to dig it out and process it. To make it from dirt into gold. Have you seen gold directly from the mine? It looks like mud. You can’t even tell it is gold, you need a geologist to tell you it’s gold. That is the role of guru, sensei, master … to help you see the gold in yourself that you have been mistaking for dirt. Guru helps you process it, clean it, shine it.

“Then you take gold and make a necklace … and I promise you someone will buy!” He cackles.

At this there is a moment of silence; then he bursts into song. It is his theme song. A love song. We hear it almost every day, often in class at our weakest moments. With his soft voice, it is always unexpectedly beautiful, always mocking, always a little funny.

Don’t look so sad,
Don’t look so lonely
Long way from home
To kill yourself
That’s what you pay for,
That’s why I am here. …

Bikram lets the song trail off. He putters for a moment around the stage. Then we move to the next idiom.

Each night, this process is repeated with two or three idioms, the lecture extending into its third or fourth hour of babbling sermon, the room of four hundred people sitting in a state of sunken exhaustion, eyes blinking to wipe the growing fuzz from their lenses, legs beginning to knot up from iterant cramps, butt cheeks flexing to sustain blood flow, even individual hairs beginning to ache from fatigue.

Finally this is how lectures at teacher training end. Not with a whisper but a groan. Eventually, when Bikram has exhausted himself, just past the point when even butt-cheek flexing has grown unbearable to his audience, when he himself is no longer sure what his original point was, a fact he will often gleefully remark upon, he will announce with a blaze of enthusiasm that he is finished with the night’s lecture.

And
that he wants to show us
a movie. A Bollywood movie!

Without exception, this will fill the room with huge groans and a few cheers. The cheers come from raving sycophants. The groans are filled with a loving grouchiness from the adults who realize they are stuck no matter what. The vast decaying majority remains silent, uninterrupted in their attempt to try to sleep with their eyes open. At our training, these movies never start earlier than midnight, often much later, and never finish until the room has been reduced to a refugee camp. Huddling trainees slumping on each other, wrapping themselves in bedding stolen from rooms, curling on the floor in the spaces that aren’t visible to the rotating aides who circulate to ensure everyone stays awake. Although we never see an actual sunrise during my training, and despite a plethora of 3 A.M. bedtimes, I learn we get it easy. In the previous Palm Springs training, cadets suffered through week upon week of bedtimes that hurt my hair to even imagine: 5 A.M., 4 A.M., 5 A.M., 6 A.M., 5 A.M. All with the yoga bright and early in the morning to greet them, all to be repeated again and again day after day, week after week until they broke.
²⁷

Movies were not an original part of teacher training, but have always been an authentic part of Bikram the man. He loves them and sits upright in his chair, eyes glued on the screen, occasionally chortling at slapstick jokes, often demanding like a deaf grandfather that the volume be raised. Invariably, there is a woman standing beside him massaging his back, or a woman on her knees by his side massaging his calves and thighs. Or two women massaging both at the same time. He has watched movies late into the night for as long as anyone can remember. It is part of his insomniac drive. Back in the 1970s when he was training Emmy, it was Elvis films. During the 1980s he watched gangster movies. Now it’s all Bollywood. Originally, however, they were a personal affair, just for Bikram and whichever senior teachers he invited back to his home or up to his hotel suite.

But then as the trainings grew from thirty to three hundred people, someone showed Bikram that the projector purchased for guest anatomy lectures could also be used to project DVDs. Suddenly Bikram could give more of himself to his cadets. As with everything at Teacher Training, the movies are not optional. (Unless Bikram is in an exceptionally good mood, at which point the entire room clears out in a stampede for bed, leaving him alone with a few die-hard movie fans and a few die-hard massage girls.)