Hell-Bent (32 page)

In fact, as I saw it, there was only one problem of any consequence in this scheme: Esak and Brigit hated the idea. It made them visibly uncomfortable and twitchy. Quite correctly, they saw it as going against everything the yoga stood for. A central Bikramism is the understanding that if something feels hard, that is where you need to do the most work. And competing in NJ was certainly not hard, nor where I needed to do work.

“But let’s be serious,” I say to Esak. “This would not be about what’s right in terms of yoga. This would be about what’s right for my book.”

“I hear you. I get that,” Esak says. “But for me to be comfortable, it has to be what’s best for the entire community. … This feels bush league. If we want the competition to reach the Olympics, we need to structure it around fairness.”

“I totally agree. But since this is following the letter of the rules, aren’t we actually doing that? Wouldn’t it be more unfair for you to shut me out just because you know my situation?”

“No. It would be called thinking about what’s best for everyone, not what’s best for you. Which is hard for you to do. Because you are you and inherently self-interested. Which is why I am here … But I’ll tell you what, it’s not my call. If you can convince Brigit, I’m open to it.”

Brigit was completely against the idea, although she wouldn’t say that to me, because she is exceedingly polite. Instead, she said she wanted to talk about it more tomorrow. Which was the day of the competition. When I asked her what that meant for me, she suggested I register. Then she took it back. Then she suggested I register again. Then she took it back again.

Of course, sitting at the table, hashing out the extent of my allegiance to New Jersey, the ethics of competition, it was pretty hard not to laugh at the whole situation. I mean, just what type of yoga did we think we were practicing? This was Bikram Yoga, led by a guru who insanely declared he wrote the script to
Superman
once during a lecture and then—just to be clear about the fact that he wasn’t making some type of weird metaphor about his superhuman abilities—followed it up by claiming he wrote specific
scenes for the Peter Sellers drama
Being There.
A man who routinely claimed he didn’t need sleep, despite being unable to rouse himself to teach a single morning class my entire nine-week training, excepting the one week where we had no late-night lectures. If anything, a New Yorker competing in the New Jersey competition for entirely self-interested reasons was the rational path in the absurd yoga we practiced. It was an homage of sorts.

But the longer we discussed the matter, the more I turned down the volume on my internal sneer: I realized their refusal marked a proud point of departure. To someone like Brigit, the yoga was not about Bikram. Nor was it absurd in any way. It was about her health. And my appropriation of some of the obnoxious qualities of Bikram the man was not cute. It was an ugly coincidence. It flaunted an aspect of reality that she accepted—because it was, after all, reality—but refused to celebrate.

But that was because Brigit’s relationship to the yoga was forever unlike mine. At age sixteen, Brigit had five tumors removed from her thyroid. The procedure robbed her of three-quarters of the gland and almost all its functionality. She was put first on a synthetic thyroid hormone, and then a host of immunosuppressants to stabilize her condition. Related or not to the thyroid, she also began experiencing arthritis and her doctor began medicating that as well. By eighteen, Brigit began her meals by counting out pills. Her body was saturated with prescription medication, and instead of young, she felt sluggish, depressed, and grossly unhealthy.

At nineteen, she found Bikram under her windshield wiper. A stuffed flyer led to a single class, which led to more. Within six months, her fractional thyroid had resumed enough production that her doctor took her off her Synthroid. Over the following six years, she shed the rest of her medications. To me, sitting across from her at the kitchen table, her medical history was essentially invisible. She was a beautiful, strong yogi. In fact, I would probably never have found about it at all if her husband hadn’t mentioned it casually one day in the car when I was going on and on about my interview with Joseph and his triumph over his childhood heart attack.

Regardless of the dining room table, I am here now. During one of Brigit’s waffle moments, I registered, paid, and am on the list. The fact that she
subsequently reneged only adds to my tension. After the introduction, I retreat with the other competitors to a temporarily vacant storefront across from the rotunda that we are using as a green room to try to stay loose. In a somewhat private corner, I lean my head back and drop down the wall for my first wall-walk of the day. My face skims along the wall as I count the little holes where the now-defunct store used to hang its shelving. At the bottom, I hang in the moment. I breathe. Then come up for my first head rush, observe the electric crackle up my spine. A groggy early-morning backbend is like waking up and shaking hands with the day, only to find the son of a bitch is wearing a joy buzzer.

Despite knowing I have nothing to lose, I am deeply uncomfortable. Brigit isn’t making eye contact with me. The cold dry air has roused my nipples into attack mode. They stick out from my chest like the bug eyes on a crab. The other competitors walk by with stiff spine assurance, the blond highlights in their hair almost flaunting the fact that they are legitimate denizens of New Jersey.

Worst, my yoga shorts feel impossibly tight. The elastic pinches inward at the tiny amount of fat remaining on my waist, producing a furrow, making me aware of that flesh all out of proportion to its reality. A rational glance in the mirror indicates I am emaciated. Doing a forward bend in a shopping mall in short-shorts makes me feel like a cow. I imagine this awkward, inadequate cow-feeling at age thirteen and swear eternal war against the women’s fashion industry.

Names get called. People leave the green room looking exhausted, do their routine in the rotunda, and return looking refreshed. Finally it is my time. I am on deck.

Bare feet against the mall floor, I walk to the center of the rotunda to demonstrate. I bow. The lead judge tells me to begin. I scan the room and I lower myself into the first balancing posture. Just as my standing knee locks into place, I watch as my whole structure tips forward and I very slowly, with a gentle inevitability, fall out. The rigidity of the rest of my body almost enhances the effect, like there was a fatal swing of the ax and someone to yell “Timmmmbeerrr!” I feel a flush creep up my face. I turn into my next posture, but my brain stays behind with my imbalanced posture on the floor. I
worry so much about falling out of my next posture, also a balancing pose, that the result is so feeble, I might as well have fallen out. I hit the floor and make the mistake of looking directly at the judges. I make eye contact with one and watch as she shakes off the moment by scoring a deduction.

As the judges tally the results of the competition, Esak’s wife, Chaukei, steps into the center of the rotunda for a demonstration. It’s a yogic half-time show of sorts. She has competed on the international level regularly, but her demonstration begins slowly with a few gentle warm-up poses.

Then, from a seated position, she slips both legs behind their respective shoulders, and—with feet pointing in a straight line over the top her head, her hands pressing deep into the floor—she slowly raises her body parallel to the ground. Her arms straighten, her body stiffens, and she hits her note of disturbing stillness: this floating arrowhead hovering above the mall’s poured epoxy floor. She stays there, mastering the moment, until, almost magically, her levitation increases another two inches as she pushes up onto her fingertips.

And although I’ve seen the posture—Crane—hundreds of times, I am still transfixed. Behind me I hear the kind of jaw-dropped “fuuuuuck” that signals someone’s neural fuses were just blown. I turn toward the source and find a middle-aged man with his young daughter perched on his shoulders. His jaw is indeed hanging loose. His daughter is clapping excitedly into his hair. Behind them another women stops, her trademarked Big Brown Bag in hand. Behind her, a young couple. Suddenly an overlapping audience four or five deep rings Chaukei. Above us, the balcony overlooking the rotunda has filled out too. This is a spontaneous crowd of four or five hundred people drawn to silent attention by her postures. Cell phone cameras are out in force, held in front by straight arms like weird religious icons to ward off evil or, in this case, trap a small moment of perfection.

As Chaukei morphs from posture to posture, it is as if she is casting a spell over the place. Creating a central focus, a single object for a communal meditation. The spell is so deep that when an elderly man next to me turns to his wife and says, “I take it back. This really could get to the Olympics,” his wife refuses even to turn toward him to collect her vindication,
instead putting a single finger in front of her lips to reinforce the room’s silence.

Chaukei lowers herself down. She is upright, legs still behind each shoulder blade. Then slowly like she was opening a pair of scissors, her legs split off her back and come down on either side of her.

The most clichéd riff on yoga competitions asks the question, “Competitive yoga? Well, what are you supposed to be judging them on? Karma? Purity of soul?” Which, cliché or not, points to the entirely reasonable fact that much of yoga is devoted to cultivating intangible and immeasurable ends. And more, that judging those immeasurables feels not just impossible, but contra the entire spirit of the enterprise. But in reality, the nuts and bolts of a yoga competition don’t go near those ends. They are purely physical affairs. A subspecies of gymnastics crossed with the sequined leotards of the Ice Capades. But watching Chaukei, feeling the weight of the silence descend on a shopping mall rotunda, it is hard not to feel that something more is on display. Done at the highest levels, a yoga posture will move you. Chaukei is not prettier, stranger, or sexier than many of the other participants. But her postures are different, and that difference has brought the shopping mall to attention.

This effect isn’t limited to yoga. If you ever sit courtside at an NBA game, you understand instantly why people are willing to pay the otherwise demeaning markup for those tickets. The humanity of the players is restored by proximity at the exact same moment their magnificence is amplified. You can feel all the intangibles that Chaukei is expressing. Sportswriters trying to convey the experience usually end up submitting abysmal copy. The sheer
tonnage
of abysmal copy, however, attests to the power of this spell. The difference in yoga—which alternately attracts and repels people—is here these intangibles are emphasized. They are an essential part of the whole enterprise, so chances are, you are paying attention to them in a way that doesn’t usually happen in the NBA.

Before the judges announce a winner, Esak gathers the contestants in the center. He orders us to pose for the crowd gathered at the balcony. We obey
with smiles and bend. When we stand straight again, we shiver and clutch our skinny bodies awkwardly.

Brigit wins! In her jubilation, she jumps over to me and tells me if I can get this straightened out with Headquarters, she’d love to have me represent New Jersey. A few days later, she sends an email telling me, “I just want you to know I think what you are doing is wrong.”

But at this point, I don’t care. I realize how fun it is to play Bikram with the truth. Neither, as it turns out, do the competition’s organizers in Los Angeles. When I explain the situation in an email, they enthusiastically invite me to nationals, excited to have a male representative from New Jersey to further expand the competition.

Beyond Sixty

After Sol’s sixty days, a funny thing happened. By day forty, it was clear the effects were real. He had dropped twenty-four pounds without any conscious change in his diet. His insomnia disappeared. For the first time in his adult life, he was going to sleep without the TV on in the background—and when he did conk out, it was continuous and deep in a way he had never experienced. Everyone we hung out with noticed the changes. He had a freshness that was palpable. His face had tightened. His pants size had reduced several times. He had a habit of cornering people who didn’t know much about his challenge or the yoga and talking to them about his progress with the slightly depraved eyes of a ten-year-old discussing video games. When waiting for the subway, Ashley caught him bending over to practice his grip for Standing Forehead to Knee on the platform. The alcoholic curmudgeons he played darts with stopped ridiculing him for going to yoga and started asking what exactly he was doing to look so good.

In the midst of this day-forty enthusiasm, I left the city for two weeks on an extended business trip. When I returned on a red-eye, I went directly to our 7 A.M. yoga class, the last place I had seen Sol, excited to hear about his progress. But when I looked over the mats and the other groggy-eyed
7 A.M.–ers several times, there was no Sol. He had slept through. I put my mat down and sprinted back to the locker room to call him. But it was too late even for his thirty-second commute. The teacher had locked the front door. It was the first time I had been stood up by Sol. I trudged back. We had emailed a few times during my trip, and Sol had claimed to be going every day, but it suddenly occurred to me that it had all been going too perfectly. That Sol, just like every other yogi, was capable of—if not driven toward—lies of kindness. That my expectations and public pressure made it not just possible but likely. As I straightened my towel, waiting for class to begin, I said good-bye to his month of free classes and began wondering exactly how many classes he had skipped over the last two weeks, and how I would write about Sol cheating on his sixty-day challenge.

Then the guy directly in front of me, picking up on my anxiety, broke the pre-class silence by demanding to know “What’s with all the shuffling today?”