Hell-Bent (29 page)

I learned in conversation after conversation with these women that Bikram is not all rhetoric. I learned because these women brought it up, angry and still trying to come to terms. He is not a world-class flirt, not a goofy ham. He might let you wear his wristwatch, but occasionally he wants something in return.

This is the ur-story.
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Maybe you have the best postures. Maybe you are stronger than almost everyone else. Maybe you can make other people laugh, and everyone in the room naturally looks to you. You are a woman
who is noticed—whether at your training, at headquarters studio, or teaching class. Then you are noticed by Bikram himself. Maybe you dance with him at a party. Maybe you volunteer to massage him. The idea of service attracts you. The idea of honoring an elder attracts you. Bikram has given you something that made you. That transformed the way you see the world. He took a life that existed in pea green and colorized it. You also understand how important the role of guru was in Bikram’s life. You want to show him that you get that, and that he is similarly important in your life. Maybe he personally invites you up to massage him. Maybe this happens only once or maybe it goes on over the course of many weeks. The fact that you are noticed builds. Maybe he gets off the podium and stands behind you in class. Maybe he mocks your postures and pushes you harder than anyone in the room. Amidst the 380, he has seen you—and now every interaction with him in the room builds your relationship. Whether he calls you up to the stage or he ignores you and flirts with someone else, he has you on some level. Finally, it is late at night and you are mostly alone in his suite. Just you with the senior teachers, the chosen few. He jokes with you. He makes an amazingly accurate uncanny bird noise for you. He makes fun of someone else in the room and then looks back at you for a reaction. His attention, usually divided up among 380 bending bodies, is focused just on you—and it is enormous. You see how human he is, how needy. When people leave his suite, he explains how lonely he is, how nobody understands him. He explains how similar you two are. He tells you he is going to make you famous. And although you are usually savvy and would normally be impervious to this idiotically clichéd line, you indulge the fantasy as he repeats it again: He can make you big in the yoga world. He whispers he will take you to the
international level.
He invites you to massage him in the bedroom. Just so he can lie down. This kills the fantasy, and you don’t know what exactly went wrong, what messages you sent, and you blame yourself for letting the situation get to this point. He invites you into the bedroom again, but this time turning directly toward you, placing one of his hands on one of your thighs, and then his other on your other.

You tell him firmly no.

You get out of there and then you really freak out.
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Of course, maybe I have it all wrong. A senior teacher, a woman, looked me deep in the eye and said, “Don’t make any mistake, they want to sleep with him. They are women. Don’t devalue them.”

I can’t speak for anyone except myself. And Bikram certainly never tried to sleep with me. But I am not making a mistake when I say the women I spoke to did not want to sleep with him. All of them expressed discomfort or disgust. I am also not making a mistake when I say, they described pressure, games, and promises that sound like the manipulative, abusive, and ultimately self-destructive behavior of someone who has found himself atop of an empire and will continue pushing boundaries until he is stopped. They described a man who was punitive when he didn’t get his way, who was aggressive in his pursuit, and who would bully past their objections when he sensed weakness. A man with a financial and spiritual stake in their lives who was unafraid to use that leverage to manipulate them. These were not women telling stories out to ruin Bikram. Almost all expressed reservations that their comments would ultimately damage them financially because Bikram Yoga was their occupation as well as their life. Many of them are still active in the community. Some still interact with him at formal events. But every single one said, I don’t look to him for anything spiritual anymore. I don’t really respect him.

“I’m not sure exactly when I realized,” Chad is telling me. “You are surrounded by people who are in silent compliance, acting like everything is okay, when the situation is totally out of control.”

Chad Clark, the heat specialist, is telling me about his time working for Bikram as his superintendent in Los Angeles. “I didn’t even blink when he asked me to spy for him—it was an honor.” Bikram sent Chad out to studios across the country as his “policeman,” investigating studio owners who were cheating him: which translated less as a financial issue and more in terms of
control. Cheating Bikram was failing to do what he asked when he asked it: teaching with words beyond his dialogue, refusing to put carpet on the yoga room floor, keeping the heat too low, renting a space too big or too small, or disobeying any of the other hundred tiny byzantine regulations he insisted upon when someone opened a studio in his name.

“There were other spies too,” Chad says. “Obviously, my work put me in a special position, going in and out of so many studios. But reporting on someone else is a way to prove you love him. Having a network of ‘spies’ goes right along with his whole gangster fantasy. It builds him up. Bikram on the top and everyone else below and uncomfortable.”

The spying didn’t give Chad pause. Neither did Bikram’s frequent requests for Chad to work for free. Neither did the constant screaming, the petty tantrums, the casual insults to women, the insane boasts, or the refusal to consider Chad’s personal needs on the rare occasion he voiced them. What eventually pulled Chad out was a growing belief that Bikram was driven to hurt the people who were around him.

“I was superintendent, so maintenance fell on me. And his personal studio was a death trap. I don’t say that lightly. Bikram refused to pay me to make basic repairs.
And any construction
that I was involved with used illegal untrained labor. He had the money, of course. He was swimming in money. But he just wouldn’t spend it on something that didn’t benefit him.” Chad pauses. “
I went through this slow
realization that he really and truly does not give a shit about other people. Not about their lives. Not about their safety.

“And so I was working in a death trap.
We got over twenty-seven
violations from the fire department in a single year. The enclosures around the windows were electrified hot where the wiring was put in poorly. The cleaning staff would complain to me that they couldn’t close the laundry door or they would ‘go to sleep’ from the carbon monoxide that collected there. Light lenses would fall out of the ceiling and crash onto the floor. Dryers were constantly catching fire because they were overused and needed to be replaced.” As Chad is listing these grievances, it feels less like the details matter, and more his way of expressing a greater outrage. This is just the one area he has a firm grasp on. “This was normal life. Another fire in the laundry room! Bikram screaming at another girl until she cries! And
for a long time, my attitude was, it’s his business. He can run it however what he wants. And then one day, he demands that I help him expand the studio. He wanted me to cut a hole between two buildings, with two different landlords, without informing either one, in a seismic zone. It was totally illegal. I told him I couldn’t do it.”

And so Chad was out. Exiled from the community, banished from Bikram’s presence.

“But that hole is there today,” Chad says. “Right through two buildings, right in a seismic zone … And at the end of the day, that’s why he is still where he is. Someone will always step up and do exactly what he wants.”

The Hole

Eleanor Payson began studying narcissists out of necessity. She was working as a marital therapist in Michigan and noticed a sharp spike in the number of her patients struggling with a narcissistic partner. “But at the time, the literature on narcissism was almost unreadable.” She explains to me, “It was a dense overacademic tangle. Completely unhelpful to someone actually dealing with an abusive relationship in their life.”

She decided to fill the void. The book that resulted,
The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists,
became a runaway hit: spreading first among therapeutic professionals hungry for a resource to give to their patients, then by word of mouth as their patients reported back to their friends and families. It is written with a casual, direct tone, an expertise earned in the field rather than filtered by academic theory.

“You don’t have to be particularly clever to remark that we are living in an age dominated by narcissism,” she says. “So much of society rewards that behavior, and so many social pressures help form it. It is held out as a virtue.”

Narcissistic personality disorder is tricky precisely because of those social pressures. It takes qualities we all strive toward and carries them to warped extremes. Confidence is stretched into delusion, passion is converted to ruthlessness, drive to obsession. Self-love prevents love of another.

But because we all must possess a healthy form of these qualities to thrive, recognizing the narcissistically disturbed often feels like a queasy mix of jealousy and self-indictment.

When we talk, Eleanor begins by
addressing these concerns. The narcissist, she explains, is in desperate pursuit of a need we all have: to feel valued. Unlike healthy individuals, however, the narcissist is unable to satisfy this drive no matter how much admiration, money, sympathy, or status he receives. Instead he builds an idealized, grandiose self—an image of himself that is special and magnificent and therefore justified in pursuing his own needs, regardless of the effects on others. The charismatic narcissist hungers, above all, for adulation. It is his greatest need; and like all creatures that hunt to survive, he has learned from a young age a number of strategies to feed himself.

As a result, these narcissists are often extremely charming on first impression—laugh-out-loud funny, persuasive, and energizing. “They intoxicate, they tell stories of this amazing life, and although they might feel overwhelming—perhaps a little too self-referential—it is very easy to brush that feeling aside.” If he is surrounded by codependents, the interaction might end with an eye roll and someone explaining “that’s just Steve being Steve.”

Later as the scales begin to fall, the introduction seems less of a one-off performance than a mode of being. “A narcissistic relationship is a one-way street,” Eleanor explains, “Once you engage the narcissist, the dynamic increasingly takes place on his terms—each encounter dictated by his moods and whims, and inevitably serving his agenda.” Indeed, the narcissist’s pursuit of his own needs are so overwhelming that he has a great difficulty seeing other people as humans with separate needs and wants. He might give—indeed he might shower attention, love, and gifts—but only to receive in response. He will impart knowledge but withhold crucial information so nobody can rival his expertise. The narcissist will seize on trivial details as weapons. Corrections become a method of establishing dominance. Friends, coworkers, sons, wives exist only to serve his purposes. Indeed, in the most extreme cases, the world itself—the fabric of reality—exists only as an extension of the self.

And until something—or someone—acts to disprove their delusion, everything can move merrily along its way. But when the world deviates from their expectation—when things do not go their way—the narcissist will often react catastrophically. Alternately becoming outraged or wounded, overtly domineering or covertly engaged in sabotage as they work to manipulate the world back to their self-obsessed image.

Eleanor points me to the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM) criteria for diagnosing narcissistic personality disorder:

1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents)

2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

3. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high status people

4. Requires excessive admiration

5. Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations

6. Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends

7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him

9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitude

According to the DSM IV, a narcissistic disorder is indicated if five out of the above nine descriptors are present in an individual. In my opinion, it offers a description, in bullet point, of Bikram.

At one point during our conversation, apropos of nothing, Eleanor cuts me off. “So is this a cult?”

The question catches me unawares, leaving a full two seconds of silence.
I had been giving background on my book, rattling off my professional history while her mental gears were clearly still grinding over something I’d said previously.

“No.” I scramble. “I mean, I don’t know. There are a few people within the community who might have a cultlike relationship to Bikram the man. But I think they are the minority. … Also everything is out in the open.”

Eleanor responds with her own moment of silence.

It turns out, not surprisingly, that
people who experience a certain type of wounding in childhood are more vulnerable to the charismatic image of the narcissist than others. In a community, these individuals may be empowered by the narcissist to act out their own needs—seeking adulation, status, and control.