Hell-Bent (36 page)

But one day Tony realized he needed to get out. His studio was still financially successful, but his newer students were treating him differently. He was no longer just their yoga teacher. People would smile at him, but they wouldn’t talk. Others would talk incessantly, seeking endless validation and advice. One night a woman filled up his entire answering machine with different messages about her anxieties. A man sought him out and calmly explained he just wanted to be near him. Then a former pupil announced he had created a shrine, complete with candles, pictures, incense, and one of Tony’s old T-shirts.

And so Tony decided to leave. One week, he stopped giving out business cards. Three weeks later, he donated everything in the studio to charity.
He did a last interview with
a reporter from
Self
magazine, and then, on the final night, locked the studio doors and climbed into an idling car; his wife had filled it with all their most important possessions and was waiting for him. Together, they drove the 1,500 miles down the California coast to the tip of Baja. From there, Tony disappeared. He went into what he calls a sabbatical. He continued a daily practice, growing even stronger—occasionally resurfacing to teach private lessons at the local resorts—but for the most part, he disengaged from the yoga community, withdrawing into a period of study and practice.

Tony’s life in Baja feels like a myth. The type of urban afterlife that exists as a promise, the deliverance awaiting all our shitty commutes. He wakes at 6 A.M. on a house overlooking the Pacific Ocean, bedroom window facing the waves. Then, on a small section of his living room, between a coffee table and a couch, he begins a personalized posture sequence. It is just over one hundred positions, and Tony moves slowly and meticulously through them,
stretching the sequence to four hours. Afterwards, he has two eggs, a slice of toast with butter and jam, and a cup of green tea. Then he begins his day.

He cultivates his talents. He has apprenticed himself to a Qigong master and traded yoga with several gourmet chefs for cooking classes. His kitchen has the manicured look of a
Food & Wine
photo shoot: the counter arrayed with little bowls of onions, bundles of scallions, a plate packed with tiny red cherry tomatoes. When he cooks, he always makes a tiny version of whatever he is cooking for his dog Rex, whom he calls his sous-chef. This includes his experiments with duck confit. When he sits down to eat, he will pull up a stepstool to the table, so Rex, a cairn terrier, can hop up onto the middle step to observe the proceedings.

After breakfast each morning, he drives a quarter mile to his former house to feed four wild cats. The cats dart off when approached by anyone else, but make an exception for Tony. They move toward him with the stretched-out sensuality of feline affection, and he will sit on his old stoop and rub their bellies in the sun until they tire of him. I have heard students of four different ethnicities describe Tony as reminding them of their grandfather. And somewhat abashedly, I will admit he reminds me quite a bit of my own. He is legitimately funny, often a little raunchy, but his humor is always slightly self-deprecating, never offensive. There is an unconscious courtesy in his movements. He opens his wife’s side of the car first. He will not speak if you are speaking. His margarita orders have the same exacting precision as his postures. “Only the juice of a single lime and one hundred percent agave tequila, please no sugar, no premade mix.”

Tony’s biggest indulgence is watching bodies. It distracts him during conversation. He is endlessly assessing the obese Canadian tourists who parade around Baja in the winter. “I look at everyone and imagine they were a client,” he says. “I think how would I adjust them. Do they have an imbalance in their walk? How could I make their life easier?” The waiters at his favorite restaurants all know and love him, because he offers them free one-on-one instruction. “No one has more aches and pains,” Tony explains. “And although I think the waiters here are quite grateful now, at first they were very suspicious. ‘Oh, you! When you come around, I want a warning. Who knows what you are going to ask of us?’”

In a kryia-like attempt to maintain his dog’s health, he spends a half hour cleaning Rex’s teeth with soft cotton cloth each evening. Rex, who is fifteen years old, responds by patiently submitting. When they are finished, he jumps off Tony’s lap, stands waggling his tail, looking upward for more, before bounding up the spiral staircase to the roof deck where Tony and Sandy eat most of their meals. When Tony eats dinner out at one of Cabo’s many resort restaurants, he always buys a rose for every woman at the table, much to the exasperation of his wife. One night when we are out, Sandy rolls her eyes, clutching the rose close to her chest, “Do you know how many of these I have back at home? He’s impossible, I tell him, No, no, no, I don’t want another. … But it’s useless. It’s like a talent of his. If there is a rose out there, Tony will find it and buy it for you.”

And so this is Tony’s urban afterlife: buying roses, teaching himself classical guitar, eating meticulously prepared meals on his terrace overlooking the ocean with his wife and fifteen-year-old dog. The day typically ends around midnight, with him squeezing in a last few postures before sleep, the ones he really wants to work on: Tony in handstand Scorpion, toes lowering toward his head while Sandy watches
CSI: Miami
on the bed above him.

I meet Tony and Sandy for lunch in Baja. Tony is dressed in tennis shoes, blue jeans, and a rugby shirt. The only hint of his profession—aside from his preternaturally calm demeanor—are his forearms, rippling with muscles when he makes small movements, such as shaking hands with the waiter who serves us.

After looking over the menu, Tony orders an espresso. He holds the tiny cup softly, bringing it to his lips.

“When I first met Bikram, he was a wonderful person. He was very new to L.A., and he would literally take the shirt from his back and give it to someone who asked for it. He didn’t have so much money back then, but he was always giving. Very excited. Very idealistic.”

Like everyone when talking about those days, Tony’s body relaxes. “We used to do the Advanced Series together, sometimes eight hours in one day. Bikram had a beautiful practice at that point, and we would just lose
ourselves in the yoga. He was strong, eager, and patient. It made him a fantastic teacher. … And when we were done, he would drag me off to the movies. If it was a Saturday, we’d stay all day—three movies back to back. In between, when the lights went up, we’d talk yoga.”

It was the perfect time, but it couldn’t last. “As Bikram got bigger, the stars walked away,” Tony explains. “And instead of new stars to replace them, more everyday people came. The stars wanted private classes. They didn’t want to be ogled. Bikram couldn’t understand this. … At one point, Elvis was begging him. But Bikram wasn’t convinced the yoga would help someone who wanted it on a silver platter. So he always said no.

“Having the stars leave hurt Bikram in a way that it might not hurt you or I.” Tony says, “He gets mesmerized by fame and wealth. It’s almost innocent, like a little boy fascinated by the fire truck. … Even back before he had the wealth, he wanted to buy the same Bentley that Howard Hughes had. Or the same Aston Martin that James Bond rode. This is the stuff he would talk about. We would stay up late, go dancing at a disco, end in a diner, maybe five A.M., and Bikram would be talking about the cars he wanted to buy. It wasn’t greed. It was what he wanted from the world.”

Raquel Welch represented an important moment in this exodus of celebrities. Bikram loved Raquel. He taught her like a daughter. She in turn became one of his most dedicated students. But then she decided to profit from the experience. She came out with a near identical yoga series, put her name on it, and sold the whole thing as an exercise video. For Bikram, it was a huge betrayal, the first time he sought legal counsel, and brought a lawsuit.

“Bikram believed Raquel taught him about America,” Tony says. “This was his student, but she had no obligation to her teacher.”

The food arrives. Three fish tacos for Tony and Sandy. Tony very carefully splices the middle taco down the center. Then he slides the plate into a slightly more centered position, and they both begin eating off the same plate.

“Bikram’s idealism fell apart. When I met him, he truly believed that yoga was
the way,
that he had the responsibility to train people, to help humanity.

“But by the mid-1980s, he was really very different. He got pulled over
for speeding at one point and spat on the cop who gave him the ticket. There was a notion that he was untouchable.” The confidence that had made him such a powerful idealist was turned inward. “He could still turn on the charm when he wanted. If you saw him work with Martin Sheen or Kareem’s father, it would pull your heart apart, just how compassionate he could be. But at a certain point, that compassion wasn’t for the regular people anymore. …”

“There was an equality in the early relationships. The stars didn’t need anything from Bikram. They enjoyed him as a peer. They all had other focuses to their lives.” Tony pauses. “The next generation of students were chasing that relationship. And when they became his students, they made him their focus, they surrendered to him.”

“I watched the changes. I went from being his very best teacher to hearing, ‘Tony, you will never be a good teacher because you aren’t loud enough. You don’t make them afraid.’ He would tell me, ‘Just make them fearful. You will have them in your pocket.’”

“Now his teachers have it much worse, I think. They are meant to be used and spit out. … They believe his contempt is his love.”

When I ask Tony if this was all there from the beginning, he is slow to answer.

“It was a metamorphosis. We all change. But we also have some control over the path. We choose our surroundings; we choose where we put our energy. Bikram—one of the most powerful forces to spread yoga—chose his road of materialism and control. He chose to surround himself by very needy people who gave themselves to him. Was it always there from the beginning? Of course it was. But so were many other possibilities. …”

The Negative

After six years of his sabbatical, Tony reemerges to offer a teacher training program. It isn’t for the money. He has a private client list that includes multiple—as in several different—billionaires. Tony is teaching again because he finally feels he has a coherent system to offer.

“I needed to become a recluse to evolve. It is very tempting to keep forcing information into yourself, but you never get a chance to see the bad habits that develop, the big picture that surrounds you. Without the breaks, I could not choose how I was developing. It would have been a very passive process. This might not be the path for everyone, but for me to grow and choose how to grow, it was essential to disappear.”

In preparation for the training, Sandy designed a small flyer announcing an “advanced instructors workshop,” which they sent to a few old friends. It was quickly forwarded widely.

While there are students with many different yoga backgrounds at his training, by far the biggest group are senior Bikram studio owners. They have come secretly, risking their jobs and place in the community.

The hotel where Tony is holding his training is not Club Med, but it is close. The practice space itself is a small unheated room overlooking the beach, with huge windows cleaned to the highest degree of transparency. Below us, blue pools spill out onto a sand beach, which in turn fades into the even more blue water of the ocean.

There are no mirrors; there are no mats. Just a towel on the floor marking your space and Tony moving slowly around the room, giving individualized adjustments.
⁴⁰

After an initial breathing exercise, the first thing Tony does to me is walk over and whisper in my ear. “Please do not go one hundred percent. Today is your first day with us. Try fifty-five percent. Tomorrow maybe sixty-five percent.”

When I ask him later, he explains, “One hundred percent is an illusion. Why do you think so many people in the Bikram world have a beautiful practice for a few years and then slip away? One hundred or even ninety percent is impossible to maintain. You will become exhausted. Mentally if not
physically. Terrified of practicing the yoga you love because it is draining you not replenishing you … But even if you could practice at that intensity—even if you were so strong, you would never become exhausted—it would be undesirable. You can’t make adjustments at your edge. You can’t listen to your body. For regular practice, seventy-five to eighty-five percent is fine—you will never tire out and in the long run you will grow much stronger.”

In almost every way, his class is like a photo negative of a Bikram class. The room is cool. Tony moves from person to person, offering individualized instruction. He focuses on stillness within a posture rather than the pushing to get there. There is no humor to distract you from the discomfort. Where Bikram emphasizes the stretch on one side of the body during a posture, Tony will focus on feeling compression on the other side. And when we do balancing postures, Tony walks up and taps my knee.

“You don’t need to ‘lock the knee.’ There are only two places where you lock the knee, ballet and Bikram Yoga. Both are aesthetic decisions, and both end up hurting people.”

After we finish with the three-hour class, people rise off their mats, buzzing. Conversation picks up. This being a meeting of Bikram studio owners outside of the usual fearful Bikram space, there is a lot of gossip to be exchanged. Everyone has formed into four-person pods of chatter.

When he is ready to discuss the class, Tony stands in the front of the room silently. Nobody pays him any attention. Then he says, “Can we discuss?” and the room hushes out like a blanket thrown over a flame.

Without any pause, Tony launches into an explanation of several modifications he made during the morning’s class. All eyes are on him, notebooks out, scribbling his every word.
⁴¹