Hyper-chondriac (15 page)

I rationalized that my departure would be a good test for the other sitting-stillers to see if a fellow stiller's exit would distract them from their task. I was actually doing them a favor. C'mon, let's see just how good all you people are at not moving. I stood up, and as I eased my way past several other participants in this sadistic experiment, no one's body language changed an iota—even though the aisles were so narrow I either nudged them with my knee or stepped on their feet (all accidentally; I'm not that big an asshole) as I made my way toward the doors. No one in the entire temple even flinched; no one raced up from the non-cushioned chairs to seize my superior cushiony seat; no one followed me out. I thought that maybe my quitting would be an icebreaker and that I'd be the Pied Piper of movement and be joined by at least a dozen others who would exclaim “Wait up! We're going with you! This blows!” But I left alone.

I looked at my watch in the hallway. 10:19. Nineteen minutes out of sixteen hours. I'd lasted a mere 2 percent of the curriculum. I'd like to think I was 2 percent calmer, but I was probably 25 percent less calm than when I initially sat down. This whole fiasco was aggravating. I was beginning to appreciate the no-nonsense Zoloft.

I figured I might as well use the bathroom before I began the grueling four-mile drive home. Maybe I would sit still on the toilet lid for another minute and bring my grand total up to an even twenty. My search for the john brought me back into the kitchen, where I saw a large bowl sitting at eye level on the counter. I approached it in hopes that there would be some berries or yogurt-covered pretzels or carob-coated macadamia nuts, but instead it was filled with personal checks. Apparently Buddhists believe in reincarnation but not safes. Now, most of me wanted to skip the bathroom, contract my bladder until I got home and just leave right then. But some of me wanted to see if my $80 check just happened to be in that thing.

I riffled through the bowl and found the check I had made out about a half hour ago. Wait a second. What was I doing? Why was I holding my check in my hand? I couldn't possibly take it back. That would be wrong, and very un-Buddhisty. But on the other hand, $80 was an awful lot of money to pay to sit down for less than twenty minutes. That's over $2 a minute per ass cheek. About the only expense the temple would incur would be the wear-and-tear of the seat cushion, but that would be negligible. God, this was so wrong. I felt like I was in an episode of
Laverne & Shirley
and I was both Lenny
and
Squiggy. I looked around to see if anyone else was nearby. Of course not. Everyone was next door pretending to be paralyzed. This was too easy. Basically I was stealing money from a room full of paraplegics. But it was
my
money. But it still wasn't right. But on the other hand, neither is charging someone eighty bucks to sit still. Especially someone who couldn't sit still. They were preying on the weak—me! I could have probably called the Better Business Bureau. Why did I think this whole thing would be a good idea? I could never sit still. I hadn't been able to sit still for forty years—why would today be any different?

I picked up the check, stuffed it into my pocket and darted off into the bright sunshine. I was back in my natural habitat, moving around frantically. And, as weird as this sounds, it felt good. But I knew it shouldn't have.

5In 1996 I formed a band in London called Invasion of Privacy. We intended to set up our equipment in random places (which we never got around to) in hopes of getting arrested (which they never got around to).

A work friend of Nancy's was over and they were having wine on our patio when suddenly I heard someone honking really loud. It was a neighbor two doors away in our tiny cul-de-sac. I'm not going to lie to you. It can be really frustrating living in a tiny cul-de-sac. Parking here is a hassle. Although we have a three-car driveway, there are only a pair of public tandem spots available for the other four houses that share the cul. So there's usually
some
honking going on, just not the impolite, forty-five-second beeps that were happening now.

Beep! Beeeeeeeeeeepppp!!!! Honk! Hooooooonnnnnnnnnkkkkkk!

I yelled out the window. “Shut up, motherfucker!” (Sorry, Zoloft.) I raced out and saw that another neighbor had blocked him in which, like I said, happens a lot with tandem parking in a cul-de-sac. The neighbor and I exchanged words, and it was not a good exchange rate for him that day. I asked him to be a little more considerate of waking the other neighbor's toddlers, as my voice cut right through the trees and echoed throughout the canyon, waking toddlers in distant neighborhoods.

When her friend left, Nancy was furious.

“Why did you have to scream out the window?”

“Sorry. I forgot you had a friend over.”

“Even if I
didn't
have a friend over, you shouldn't yell at the neighbors. You shouldn't yell at anything. Unless a coyote wanders into our yard.
Then
you can yell!”

“Okay. Please stop yelling.”

It's not like I wasn't trying. After the Buddhist debacle I went back to scanning Hebrew letters and realized that they did have a calming effect. So I enrolled in Kabbalah 102. But before the new charges had even appeared on my Visa, I discovered that Kabbalah has just enough information for the initial course. Each class was redundant and Ethan seemed to speak even more slowly, repeating things over and over and over again, belaboring points and trying to drum up audience participation, hoping no one would notice the lack of actual content. It was impossible not to notice. Although I still scanned occasionally, I was through with any organized Kabbalah. And its special water tastes like Arrowhead. My time would be better spent with my laminated anger card.

 

Early the next morning, Nancy and I heard some rustling in our yard. We assumed it was a squirrel or raccoon scampering through our leaves. When we left for our respective days—she to make money, me to have a mandatory dermatologist checkup for my Zoloft—we noticed something different about our yard. A big human shit was sitting in our driveway. Yes, it was big, it was human, and it was definitely shit. And no, it wasn't a dog's shit. We know all the animals that live on our block because some of the people don't clean up after them. By necessity, Nancy and I have become skilled at identifying what shit belongs to what dog so we can inform the respective owners. Copper is the largest of the bunch and she weighs fifty-five. This was definitely the shit of a 200-pound human. Nancy freaked out.

“Someone shit in our driveway!”

“I know! Who do you think it was?”

“Hmmmm…just a guess but maybe the honking guy you were yelling at yesterday.”

“Oh.”

“You have
got
to stop yelling at the neighbors!”

“I know.”

“Then stop! Now when we're gone he's going to vandalize our house and we'll be
wishing
he was shitting in our shrubs!”

I'd never seen Nancy angrier. Including the time the Town Car driver insisted on carrying her laptop and then left it in the airport parking lot.

We collected the shit in a large Tupperware container for evidence and Nancy went over to the perpetrator's house to question him, like a
CSI
detective. I would've gladly gone but I also would've gladly pissed on his plasma and force-fed his own shit to him. He opened the door and let her in. She paced in his kitchen, tossing out threats.

“We have your shit, and therefore your DNA and we're calling the police
⁶
…so if this was you, beware! They'll be questioning you!” She waved her little fist in his face.

Nancy returned, satisfied with her confrontation, and reported his denials to me in my car, where I'd been sitting and seething. I didn't feel well. My arms and legs trembled and my colon began to palpitate. My visit to Dr. Tamm couldn't have been better timed.

 

“How are you feeling?” he said with sternness, as if it were a demand and not a question. “You seem really tense.”

“I thought I was getting a little calmer, but then a neighbor went to the bathroom in our driveway.”

“Have you been lifting weights?”

“No. I hurt my hip in yoga and it's been over a year now since I've lifted.”

“Good.”

During my new non-lifting era, my body had loosened up considerably and I didn't feel like a robot when I walked. Now I could no longer blame my hypertense life on dumbbells. The entire weight room was officially acquitted.

But my mind and body still weren't working together.

“I don't really want to up your Zoloft again but you're still so tense I think it's necessary,” announced the doctor of skin.

“Then I'm up to 150 mg?”

“Yes.”

So instead of reducing my intake another 50 mg, I was now just one step away from the maximum dose. My experiment in calming down was moving in the wrong direction. I felt like a loser.

Dr. Tamm reached into his wallet and pulled out a business card and handed it to me.

“I also want you to see this guy.”

I stared at the card.

“Have you ever taken Tai Chi before?”

“No.”

“Go. I think it'll help you.”

The Tai Chi instructor that Dr. Tamm recommended happened to be ninety-two years old. Although I didn't know what the point of Tai Chi was, I was intrigued enough to drive forty-five minutes each way just to see a really really old guy who still had a job.

I'd taken Tae Kwon Do for several years in my twenties, but that pretty much consisted of dressing in white and kicking things. It also made me even more paranoid. As a bodybuilder, I just assumed that only people bigger than me were dangerous. With Tae Kwon Do, it became apparent that anybody could potentially beat the living shit out of me. Which stressed me out even more, even while I was kicking things.

Hopefully Tai Chi wouldn't have the same effect.

 

I pulled up at eight-twenty in the morning in a sweatshirt and sweatpants to a 1930s house in a dingy suburb of Pasadena and looked for hints of where the Tai Chi'ing would be taking place. I wondered if I was at the right house number but on the wrong street. But I was too anal for that. Then I noticed an Open sign hanging at the top of the driveway. As I headed toward the only clue I had, I saw an elderly Chinese man with a gray Fu Manchu mustache and a decent head of hair seated behind mounds of paperwork at a small desk in the front of his open garage. He definitely needed to buy some filing cabinets. One gust of wind could have obliterated nine decades of records.

“Mr. Chow?” I said with trepidation. I wanted to make sure I showed the proper respect and didn't seem like an American tourist in Paris in the late 1970s with loud Bermuda shorts and a camera slung around my neck, hollering about the lack of hamburger joints.

“Dr. Tamm recommended that I see you.”

“Come in,” he solemnly answered in a bassy voice that sounded like an Asian James Earl Jones. This guy certainly didn't look ninety-two. More like sixty-two. Maybe he was lying up to get more business.

“You have to buy shoes.”

I already had shoes but apparently not the officially licensed and approved Tai Chi footwear. I followed him into the back of his office slash large garage slash shoe store, where I paid twelve bucks for a pair of black fitted slippers that looked like my little sister's ballet shoes.

“How much are classes?”

“No classes here. Just shoe store,” Mr. Chow said with a straight face before a hint of a smirk slid out.

I was easily persuaded to sign up for two classes a week, which set me back sixty-five bucks a month.

I put on my slippers and Mr. Chow led me back into the largest chunk of what used to be his two-car garage. Only instead of a couple of Jettas, there were a handful of older potbellied men with long hair and mustaches wearing sweatpants and T-shirts moving very…very…slowly. It was as if they were all auditioning to be one of those guys on a street corner who paints his entire body silver and pretends he's a robot so strangers will drop a dollar in his robot tip jar. But even slower than that, actually.

I went to a vacant spot in the dojo—aka the giant garage—and almost slipped and fell. The floor was made of some kind of slate, but it was really shiny and polished: the equivalent of walking onto a frozen pond in Capezios. Apparently this is the way the floor's supposed to be because everyone else there seemed to be pretty upright and stable. I checked the bottom of my slippers to see if I had forgotten to remove a piece of cellophane or something, but I hadn't.

I'd expected some sort of organized class, where Mr. Chow would stand up front and teach us all the same things, like the Anger Seminar, yoga and Kabbalah, but this was more of a free-for-all where each man just did his thing and ignored everyone else. Mr. Chow would then walk around and correct everyone individually. But I didn't have anything to correct yet. At least I thought I didn't.

“The root of your tension is your posture,” he announced to me with the utmost confidence. And a little too loud, frankly.

“My posture?”

“Yes. You have too much curvature in your lower spine. You need to stand up more erect.”

So maybe all of my aggression and illness could have simply been solved by not slouching?

“Like this?” I asked as I made my body stiffer than a West Point cadet and nearly toppled over onto the shiny surface.

“No! You need to drop your chest, you need to pull your shoulders forward and you need to shoot your hips up.”

I did as I was told but felt like a Picasso painting. Mr. Chow just shook his head. This posture criticism was all very surprising to me as I had always been under the impression that my body was
too
upright. But I wasn't going to argue with a ninety-two-year-
old guy who would probably outlive me.

“Let's see you walk now.”

I walked gingerly across the garage but before I had taken five steps was getting yelled at again. This guy was all business. And not only would he easily have won the gold medal in the Senior Citizen Glare Olympics, but I just noticed that two of the four walls were covered with gigantic swords, which I'm sure weren't being used to cut vegetables. I had better be ultra-polite so he wouldn't dice me up.

“You don't walk properly.”

Wow was I a fuckup. And damn was this floor slippery.

“You need to relax,” he said with ninety-two years of frustration.

“I know.” Why do you think I just handed you seventy-seven bucks ten minutes ago?

“Also your breathing is all wrong.”

“I'm breathing wrong?” I asked incredulously. I didn't know how to walk, stand or breathe. It was a miracle I was even alive.

“You need to breathe through your upper back and not your lungs.”

I just smiled and did as I was told. I wasn't going to get defensive or answer his statements with questions anymore.

Finally it was time to learn the “form.” I had to memorize a series of movements that Mr. Chow performed alongside me, nearly all of which I found very confusing. He barked out sequences like “paint the walls with your fingertips,” “carry the ball,” “single whip,” “thread the needle,” “shut the window” and “eat the cowboy's hat.” Yeah, I made that last one up. But it was still very confusing.

In slow motion I had to raise my arms above my head, then slowly bring them down as if my fingertips were painting the wall in front of me while I simultaneously bent my knees as if I were hovering over a couch. Then I'd shift all of my weight onto my bent left leg and then lift my right foot and place it perpendicular to my body. Then I'd pretend to carry a large beach ball from the left side of my body to my right. You get the idea. I did a bunch of really slow movements, which collectively must've taken about ninety seconds, and then had to repeat them again and again and again on my own, until class ended. I also integrated a few original movements, like turning my head toward the clock—in slow motion, of course—to tabulate how many more times I'd have to do this before I could do things at normal speed and not be afraid of falling.

As I “painted the wall” and “carried the ball” I watched the other students engrossed in their own movements. There was one older guy who was great at moving slowly—except that he kept taking a break to drink out of a giant thermos every five minutes and then would dart to the bathroom the opposite of very slowly every eight or nine minutes. I think the overweight bearded guy next to me had Parkinson's, because his entire body never stopped quivering for the duration of the class. Which simultaneously saddened me and frightened me; I often had quivery hands. Only one other person in the class was under fifty—some shaggy-haired guy named Steve who was a veritable pun factory.