Hell-Bent (33 page)

I looked up. It was Sol. In my two weeks away, he had transformed to the point of being unrecognizable to my brief scan. It was day fifty-four, and it was no exaggeration to say he was halfway back to that picture on his student ID. Looking at him sitting calmly upright on his mat, I realized this wasn’t a dramatic change of any one aspect; an agglomeration of microchanges had made him invisible to me. The heuristics I used to identify him—audible sighs, awkward chunky legs, restless shuffling, hunched shoulders—no longer fit. His body, still big, had streamlined. It was a weight distribution more than simply a weight loss. His skin was clearer. His wedding ring was loose on his ring finger. His body had an ease to it. It simply didn’t look like a burden anymore.

As we bent together during that class, with Sol directly in front of me, I saw how much these changes to physical appearance matched his progress in the postures. Sol, who had opted to lie on his back motionless for the bulk of his first class, now made the postures look effortless. Between movements, he stared straight ahead, never flinching or fidgeting, his spine straight even during the most difficult standing postures. In Camel, the posture that had sent him running from the room on his second day, he leaned back deeply, almost basking in the elevated heart rate. When class was over,
he took a long savasana and then, while I was still recovering, bounced up, tapping me on the shoulder to tell me quietly he had to get going.

We finished out the challenge like that: Sol growing stronger each day, me amazed by the yogi who had replaced my tired friend. On the final day, Sol claimed his month of free yoga and announced he was going to celebrate the accomplishment by going to class the next morning even though the challenge was over.

But then the funny thing happened. After his celebratory class, he stopped bending. Abruptly and completely. He just quit. Of the thirty free days he had earned, he ended up using two.

Sol still proselytized. He still told people how wonderful it made him feel, how radically it had transformed his body, but after the challenge, his only relationship to the yoga was verbal. When I would ask him about it, he would shrug.
I know I should go. I’m meaning to go. I want to go.
But something had changed, and we both knew he wasn’t actually going to go. With a free month of unlimited yoga sitting waiting for him—a month he had earned through a seized back, through two months of shitty coffeeless early-morning wake-ups, through self-doubt and self-triumph—he couldn’t be bothered. The transformation started creeping backwards, like a jungle creeping back in over cleared land. The weight came back first. He bumped into his favorite instructor while walking his pugs, and she reached out and pinched his newly re-forming stomach in anger. Sol assured her he would be in soon, but never made it. When we were out drinking, he was open about the fact that he wasn’t sleeping very well again. We made a doctor’s appointment to track the physiological changes from his sixty days, and Sol blew off his first appointment. By the time the reschedule came along, he hadn’t been practicing for three weeks. The yoga glow we wanted his doctors to try to measure had faded into an ember. The whole exercise had been both a resounding success and a complete failure. I became grateful I had made the challenge so public; otherwise, I would doubt my own memories.

It would be exactly what I feared most, the oldest story in the history of binge exercising—the Duncan of yo-yo weight loss—except for one thing: Sol didn’t return to form. Not all the way.

Instead, he started running.

Within a month of stopping yoga, before the weight had completely resettled on his frame, Sol—the single most inactive man I knew prior to his yoga binge—decided to train for a 5K. After successfully completing that, he began training for a half marathon. He made a regular schedule and stuck with it. And that is where he is now Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: a big Mexican doing loops around Prospect Park, becoming a somewhat less big Mexican by the day—a yogi in sneakers, never bending much more than in a few post-run stretches against a tree, but undeniably touched by change.

Strong Medicine

I arrive in Los Angeles for the national competition and head directly to Bikram’s central studio, “International Headquarters,” for class. It is a ritual of sorts: the day before the competition, all the competitors gather and take Emmy’s Advanced Class.

I arrive at the studio just as the preceding class is flooding out. Bikram taught. And he killed. The world’s best are stumbling into the lobby, gasping for air. The floors are instantly slick with sweat, and soon the whole studio feels like we are standing on the edges of an indoor pool, right down to the heavy scent of chlorine. When the exodus clears, a short guy with a mustache comes out and mops the floors down, pushing the standing water/sweat/drippings toward a drain in the cement floor.

I am not keen on putting my luggage down in this muck, and so I head to the locker rooms despite the fact they assuredly are jammed. Inside is a similar jungle, every surface slick and crammed with bodies stripping off or replacing clothes. It is a mash of familiar faces and bodies, a giant yoga family reunion. Everyone gets a head nod, more than a few hugs.

As I search for a spot to stow my gear, I feel a firm clap on the shoulder. It’s Hector, my teacher who had the stroke.

“Been looking for you, buddy,” he says before grabbing a towel and heading out. “So has Rajashree. She’s been asking about you.”

This is fascinating news, but before I can completely process it, the locker room begins to thin out, which is a sign Emmy’s Advanced Class is about to begin. I rush out, towel in hand, in the straight-legged run that I use over slick surfaces to avoid slipping. Once inside, I spot Hector and take a position as near to his mat as possible. I haven’t seen him in months and want to impress him with my strong practice. I am, after all, in the best shape of my life.

At this point, I’ve been on continuous yoga overload since Backbending in Charleston seven months prior. The climax was no doubt the two classes a day throughout teacher training, but I have continued a similar frenzy since returning to civilian life, cramming as many classes and extra homework into my week as I can manage. A fancy little scale that shoots electricity through my body tells me my body fat is down to 8 percent. A week prior, when a meeting for work keeps me from the hot room, I go on a brief jog and end up going nine miles without ever feeling taxed. When my sister visits, she immediately announces I’m emaciated. Which prompts the immediate retort in my head that I’m on the right track.

Best of all, when away from the city on work and I drop into a new studio, the teacher there asks me—me!—to demonstrate my floor Bow for the entire class. During class. So that new students can see what a floor Bow looks like in its advanced form. Since demonstrations like that almost never happen in the tightly structured Bikram room, it becomes quite the feather in my hat.

I want Hector to notice all this. I want all my work to be validated by appearance. Which turns out to be unlikely for two reasons. Primarily because relative to everyone else in the room, I am still nothing to be noticed. The room is filled with people who may or may not be 8 percent body fat, and may or may not be able to dust off lengthy runs, but who have bodies that are far more toned up and in tune than mine. They flow. They focus. I am still a collection of static movements that only occasionally conjoin.

The second reason I realize that it is unlikely that Hector will notice my superb physical condition is that I am about to faint. Really. Almost immediately, from the first sequence of Emmy’s Advanced Class, something weird and awful has been operating on my system. It is like being in
Headquarters is exerting a gravitation pull on my energy. Rajashree’s image implanted by Hector’s offhand comment is stuck in my head. My heart rate rises. Then I’m down on one knee. I close my eyes and worry about what Rajashree wants to talk about. When I rise, the unthinkable occurs: After seven months of preparation for this single Advanced Class, I head for the exit. The impulse to leave is like a biological commandment. It is the first and only time I have ever left a Bikram Yoga class.

The cool air of the lobby does nothing for my condition. My body feels faint, and there is the first sign of an ugly knot rising in my stomach. With a fawn’s legs and addict’s determination, I stagger down the hallway toward the locker rooms. The closer I get, the more clear it becomes—and by the time I am inside, I am frantically searching for a stall. Then I drop to my bare knees on the disgusting wet floor and puke my lungs out. I don’t even have time to put up the rim, and for stability end up gripping it with both hands. I come up for air after a heave and find myself eye to eye with a few droplets of urine. Disgustingly dehydrated cheddar cheese–colored droplets. This prompts a few more pukes. It is a low moment.

When it has passed, I sit in the locker room on a bench for what feels like an eternity. Tamping a towel against my mouth leaves a nice purple ring. I grab two bottles of water, which I had been saving for after class, and muster up all remaining intention for the plunge back into class. Then I am back to staggering down the hallways, back toward the heat, when out of nowhere Rajashree appears.

Her face is perfectly calm.

“You are the man from New Jersey yes.”

A statement to which I can only stare at her and say: “Thank you.”

It hangs there for a moment while I wake to the situation. With the sudden embarrassing taste of acid around my mouth, with my face still pale from the puking, with my brain wondering if Rajashree can tell I was just absolutely shattered by her husband’s yoga, we study each other’s faces intently. I am not actually sure if I have ever stared so intently at another person’s face without a pillow as backdrop. Emmy’s class is still going on in the background. I can faintly hear her voice. Rajashree is very beautiful, and while we look at each other in this completely odd frozen moment in
the hallway, her perfect calm drops into something much nicer—it becomes something perfectly calming to me. I almost wonder if we are going to have our conversation right here in the hallway now.

Instead, I break our gaze. I have a class to attend, after all. I smile softly and leave her with my best thoughts mid-hallway to stagger back into Emmy’s class.

I drop one of my bottles of water by Hector’s mat. He looks up, never quite making eye contact, shaking his head mournfully: a combination of shared adversity, total gratitude, and friendly reproach for leaving the room. I understand completely. Then as if to emphasize the total gratitude and shared adversity, he slumps out of a posture onto his back and guzzles the water.

After class, in the locker room, Hector tells me I look cross-eyed. It becomes a theme of the weekend. Every time I see him over the next few days, he repeats this, “I’m not sure Ben was really there. He looked like he was knocked out.”

So much for being in the best shape of my life.

After drying off, I split a cab back to the hotel with some other competitors. It is driven by a seventy-nine-year-old man who looks like he just turned forty. There are four of us yogis splitting the cab, so I end up sitting in the front next to the driver. He is easily the most handsome, fit, and generally attentive cabdriver I have ever ridden with. He tells me his wife is in a convalescent home. He visits her every day after work. He tells me he loves being a cabbie. He talks about his daughter, about serving in the military, and about gardening. I feel completely empty from the class, and he talks into me as if I were a conch shell that he is blowing to make a sound. Suddenly there are tears as he explains his daily ministrations to his wife.

We talk yoga only briefly at the very end of the ride when he asks me suddenly why I am in town. His eyes widen, and instead of the typical questions demanding to know why competition isn’t antithetical to the spirit of yoga, he asks whether I would recommend it for him.

Recommend? Given that I am writing a book on the topic, the question seems so portentous. And given that I now know more about this cabbie
than about most of my relatives, I take a long time considering it. It is like at different points in the cab ride we have become angels to the other. Unaware but helping each find answers. I tell him he looks fantastic for seventy-nine. I tell him I wouldn’t change a thing. He smiles at this, and when I exit he shakes my hand with both of his. I get out feeling very dizzy.

Two hours later, I am shadow boxing in my room.

The United States Yoga Asana Championships are a production of USA Yoga, which is Rajashree’s organization. They are her baby. She is in charge of organizing the regional competitions, attracting press and sponsors, and in general, transforming an otherwise drab convention space into a cathedral for appreciating all things asana. Which, poking around the Los Angeles Westin, I see she has done to superb effect. The hotel looks like a bona fide Yoga Expo, filled with booths and tables, all hawking specialized hot yoga supplements, berry-of-the-moment rehydration drinks, and rack after rack of synthetic quick-dry yoga gear. Yogis—competitors and voyeurs alike—flit around in bare feet, greeting, hugging, and collecting free samples. The Backbending purple shirt is out in force. Although I notice the circle has expanded yet again; Esak has joined the vendors, hawking the shirts to nonbenders as well.

Striking in absence amidst this cacophony is Bikram, as man, if not brand. The competitions are consciously trying to become more than a hot yoga affair. The stage itself is room temperature, and other lineages are hungrily welcomed. USA Yoga’s stated mission is to push yoga’s physical practice into the Olympics, thereby making it into a serious, perhaps even hip alternative for middle American children to consider when choosing an after-school sport. I arrived with doubts as to whether this was possible, but Rajashree goes to great lengths to preserve the separation. At nationals, Bikram does not MC or lecture or even get onstage, save for a quick wave to the crowd. He is subdued when present, but mostly—probably because he is almost impossible to subdue—he stays away. In fact, the only time I really feel Bikram’s presence at nationals is when, as an official competitor,
I get a gift bag upon checking in. The first thing I pull out: my very own pair of tiger-print Lycra hot pants! You can’t make this shit up. Nor I discover, when I try them on in the mirror, would you want to.