Yoga Bitch

  I can hear monkeys in there, screaming.

  When I was seven years old, my father and I were part of an organization at the YMCA called Indian Princesses. Every month we met with other fathers (“guides”) and their daughters (“princesses”) and wore leather headbands with feathers dyed in primary colors sticking out of them. We wore leather vests with beaded fringe dangling from the hem. The big wooden beads meant something, each one a gold star for some sort of Indian-ish accomplishment like archery or learning how to smoke salmon. As Indian princesses, we would learn to be like Pocahontas, who painted with all the colors of the wind, and wasn’t a pussy like suburban girls. We would have cool, nature-based names that sound sort of stilted when you say them, like you’re a real Indian. I was Snow Star. My father was Thunder Frog.

  It was the greatest: I had my father all to myself, and I got to dress up like an Indian, and once a year we went on a campout, which was a chance to learn how to row a boat and dig for clams and be Indianlike.

  It was on one of these campouts that I got lost. We were on Orcas Island, only a few hours from Seattle, but at seven Orcas Island seemed as far from home as Bali. My dad had stayed back at the cabin while I went for a walk through the woods to the beach with one of the guides and a clutch of princesses. I must have drifted off to look for shells because when I looked up, the beach was empty. I had lost my tribe.

  I had recently seen Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan at my aunt’s house, so I knew that if you got lost in the wild you turned into a monkey. I sat down on a rock and looked out at the sea, then back up at the wooded cliffs above the beach, and the yellow fruits in the trees weren’t pinecones anymore, but bunches of bananas. I would either become a monkey-human, or I would drown when the tide came in. I remember looking out at the waves and deciding that I would just wait there until the tide came in for me. I tried to fall asleep, thinking death would come faster that way. Then I tried yelling, hoping that somebody would hear me and save me from my fate. But no one did.

  What I remember most clearly is that even with all the rosaries and bedtime prayers and masses of my childhood years, it didn’t occur to me in that moment to pray. My yogamates are always talking about this natural impulse we have to meditate, to pray to God or to a higher power, and I get it—I talk to the God in my head all the time—and yet at this crucial moment when I was as close to being an innocent child as I’d ever get, I didn’t talk to God.

  What does that mean?

  God only knows. Ha.

  So, I didn’t pray. Instead, I got up off the rock and tipped it over. Hermit crabs darted in all directions and most of them were too fast for me, but one I could pick up. I cupped my hands around the tiny brown-red shell and little legs and found another rock, brushed its seat of sand with one awkward forearm, and sat down to focus on the little pincers nipping at the fleshy parts of my hands. It was comforting. I was small and the ocean in front of me was vast and indifferent.

  Maybe that’s it. Maybe I knew the truth when I was a kid, that the skies are empty, and the ocean proves the existence of nothing but the ocean. Maybe the natural world is all we get. I suppose it’s possible I knew in some inchoate way that my religion was only my culture, something my people did to express the mystery that linked us, that made us witnesses to the absurd accident of each others’ lives. Maybe I knew praying together was our way of eyeing one another as if to say, You feel it, too, this strangeness? This bewilderment? You wonder, too?

  Enough. No more thinking. I’m going in to spend time with some distant relatives.

  Later

  The monkeys in Monkey Forest are as tame as house pets—tamer, even, than the dogs that roam the streets of Ubud. I mean, sure, they’re still completely spazzy, but in an endearing way. But maybe that’s just because watching them dart here and there, now grooming themselves, now screaming at a mate, now sitting and spacing out in a papaya coma, I do feel a certain kinship.

  The forest itself is stunning. The stone path that leads to the center of the forest is wide, with a waist-high wall along either side that is coated in a velvety green moss.

  I spent a long time sitting on that wall and watching as tourists cooed at the mother macaques with their doll-like babies. They sat on their haunches and ate their bananas and papayas almost elegantly, not so much tossing the peels aside as dismissing them, like a fop in a Molière play. They might have been casually dropping a perfumed handkerchief on a settee, knowing an obliging servant would soon be by to pick it up. And there he was, their servant: a small man in a yellow sarong and black T-shirt, feeding the monkeys from a basket full of papayas.

  A bit farther down the wall, I noticed two mother macaques sitting together on the ground, facing each other with their babies in their laps as if they were discussing the tribulations of modern motherhood, the importance of work/life balance. I moved toward them and crouched a foot away to get a better look. They ignored me. The babies clung to their mothers’ hairy chests and stared at me. Jesus, they were cute. It occurred to me that I would like to have a monkey for a pet. Also, that I would like to be Jane Goodall, go to Africa and live with chimps. Embrace science, for a change. Abandon all this hocus-pocus in exchange for empirical proofs!

  Just as I was thinking this, a sudden weight landed on my shoulder and tiny fingers clung to my hair. I turned my head to look into the funny face of a young macaque. He grinned at me and proceeded to rub a banana peel on my arm. At the same time, a tall, bearded white guy approached with a grin.

  “Cheeky monkey!” he cried, laughing. The monkey posed happily as fanny-packed tourists rushed over to capture the moment with their digital cameras. I sat still as long as I could, smiling at my new friend as if I were Jane Goodall posing for her latest book. But I was still me, worrying less about Jane Goodall things like monkey habitats and chimp behaviors than about the possibility that this cheeky little bugger was going to pee on my shoulder or give me lice. My new friend was grooming my hair as if he had already passed his own critters over to my head. His little fingers at the nape of my neck tickled. I stood up, trying to stay poised for the photo op, but as I did so, my new friend jumped off my shoulder onto the ledge and hopped away, screaming.

  As I sat back down on the mossy wall, brushing slimy bits of banana off my arm and shoulder, I noticed that the white guy was still hanging around, watching me. He was long and gaunt, at least six foot two, and skinny, as if he’d been five foot five before he was put in a taffy pull. He wore his white button-down shirt untucked, and it was stained with sweat under each arm. His hair and beard were short and inky black. And he was tipsy, maybe drunk.

  “Can I join you?” he asked, smiling broadly. He had an Australian accent.

  I really would have preferred to be alone. “I’m just watching the monkeys,” I said.

  “I wasn’t asking about monkeys,” he said. “I asked if I could join you.”

  I shrugged. “Whatever,” I said.

  “You don’t have to beg,” he said happily, sitting down on the wall next to me and extracting a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. For a minute or two we were silent. He smoked, and I did nothing but focus on not asking him for one. I wished Baerbel were there to see me being so disciplined.

  “So, what is it, then?” he finally asked.

  “What is what?”

  “What is it you’re doing here in Ubud, classic traveling question.” He looked me up and down, his gray-blue eyes a little foggy, but mostly curious.

  I told him, and he jumped off the ledge to the ground. “Yoga!” he said. “I do it, too.” He sat on the cobblestones in lotus. Then he winked at me before bending forward at the waist in order to slide his arms through his legs and lift himself up off the ground.

  All this with a cigarette clenched between his teeth. He beamed at me and spoke like a yogic Humphrey Bogart: “I learned it in India.”

  I was speechless. And annoyed; I still can’t do that pose. “What were you doing in India?” I asked.


  “I was in jail there for eighteen months.”

  “Oh.”

  “My cellmate taught it to me.”

  “Ah.” I made a mental note not to go deeper into the forest with this man.

  “But, you know, asana really isn’t where it’s at. You’ve got to meditate. Asana is the easy part. Meditation is where you’ll find true liberation. And then you’ll be able to recognize the real beauty of life.”

  This tan, hairy drunk was telling me about the real beauty of life. I laughed. “I think I’m looking at it right now,” I said, gesturing at the trees and the monkeys.

  He looked puzzled. “So, what are you learning in this yoga camp of yours? Wait, let me introduce myself. I’m Carl.”

  “Suzanne.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well,” I began. “I’m learning about …” I looked at Carl, then straight ahead. My brain hurt. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I’ve fried my brain with pranayama and Sambuca shots. “I’m learning about yoga, and—well, shit. I don’t know.”

  “You’ll find your true self in meditation,” he said. “If you keep doing it. Most people think meditation is a bus you take to your destination. But no.” He shook his head as if to second himself. “It’s a struggle. A struggle every minute, but it’s the most worthwhile activity there is.”

  This was when I decided I was too old to think that bums were wise. “I’m going to walk a little farther in and see some more of the forest,” I said, standing. “It was nice to meet you.”

  “That’s cool,” he said, standing to join me, and the next thing I knew, we were walking deeper into the forest.

  That’s me. Sticking to my guns.

  “Look at us,” Carl said, skipping along beside me. “Two yogis on the path, walking down a path.” He grinned at me, rolling his eyes a little, which made me laugh in spite of myself.

  “I’m not sure if I’m on the path or not,” I said. “I think I may have fallen off the path.”

  “You just don’t want to struggle,” he said, and just hearing the word struggle made me want to lie down right there in the middle of the forest. I took a deep breath and sighed.

  “Okay,” I said, “so why is meditation such a struggle?”

  “The mountain.”

  “Okay?”

  “You’re eventually going to discover the mountain you have to climb. You look ahead of you and see that enormous mountain, you look behind you and, just having tasted a bit of the serenity of meditation, all’s become misery. You see too clearly. So which do you choose?”

  “I choose …” I stopped. “Hell, I don’t know.”

  “Listen,” he said, “do you want to be free from mental suffering?”

  I nodded.

  Carl began to shake, and then he started shouting like a preacher. “Do you want to be free … from pain?”

  Suddenly my drunk companion went berserk, lifting his arms up and thrusting them repeatedly higher; he looked like Atlas trying to swat the world off his neck. He launched into a sort of drunken sermon, delivered in a twitchy caricature of a Southern Baptist. “Do you want to be free from confusion?” he asked me, “From lust, from resentment, from jealousy?”

  I stood back and watched, shrinking slightly as tourists walking by were jolted from their monkey watching by my companion’s performance. “Do you want to be free from anger? Do you want to be free from despair? Do you want to be free of politics and the raging abuses we heap on one another every day? Do you want to be free from fear?” His eyes opened, but they didn’t focus on anything in particular. He blinked a few times and then lowered his chin so that he could look at me. He was waiting for an answer. I grabbed him by the arm and guided him back onto the path, away from the gawkers. “Seriously,” he said. “Do you?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He giggled and glanced over his shoulder at the scene he’d left behind. He turned to me and grinned. “Me too.”

  I am a lightning rod for the insane.

  We walked along the path, aimless now. Carl pulled a flask out of the back pocket of his trousers.

  “So, what did you do in India to land in jail?” I asked.

  “I killed a pimp. Several, actually, but I was only caught for the one.”

  I looked at him. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah. Child-hustlers. I’ve never lost any sleep over it.”

  I nodded. “Well, good, I guess.” I wasn’t sure if I believed him or not. But something was distracting me from Carl’s story of pimp killing. Each time I turned my head to the right, I couldn’t help but sense that the macaque that had befriended my shoulder for a few minutes had left something of himself behind.

  “Hey, Carl?” I said, interrupting him, “do you smell something on me?”

  He leaned in and smelled my neck. He hummed. “Delicious,” he said.

  I laughed. “No,” I said, “I think it’s my shoulder.”

  He sniffed my right shoulder. “Ohh,” he said. “Monkey ass.”

  “Gross,” I said, pulling back. “I’ve got to do something about this.”

  Carl took on a more scientific tone. He smelled it a few more times, then wrinkled his nose. His whiskers twitched. “Tangy,” he commented. “There’s a distinct tang to it, isn’t there?”

  I had to laugh, but I wished I could take my arm off at the shoulder and chuck it into the ravine. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to transcend my physical body more profoundly.

  Just then, Carl cried out. “Lookie!” he said. “Look at that!”

  I followed his arm to where a large macaque was screaming and clawing in the direction of a smaller female. Another female rushed at the male, scaring him off for a moment or two before he came charging back at them, baring his teeth and hunching his shoulders to look larger.

  “What is he doing?”

  “Look, there,” Carl said, “the one on the left.”

  The female in question was holding a calico kitten in her arms. Its tiny body bristled with fear as it clawed at the female macaque, who only held on to it more tightly. Once or twice the kitten managed to writhe free from the monkey’s arms and crawl around her neck, but each time the mother patiently ripped it off like a piece of Velcro and cuddled it again. She appeared completely unfazed by the male macaque, as if she had absolute faith in the diplomatic powers of her female friend, who continued to bark and spit at the male.

  Carl’s face was reverent. “I love the animal kingdom,” he breathed.

  “You love the animal kingdom now,” I said. “Wait till you can smell its ass on your shoulder.”

  We made our way back to the central monkey-watching spot, where we said good-bye. As I turned to leave, Carl wished me luck on the path. Then he pulled his flask out of his pocket and gestured with it, saying, “As you can see, it’s done a lot for me.” With that, our brief acquaintance ended. Carl drifted toward a group of French tourists, and I hauled ass to Casa Luna, where I’ve spent the past twenty minutes scrubbing my shoulder clean.

  Later

  I certainly believed in the wisdom of the Drunken Bum when I was a teenager. Just as I probably believed in the archetype of the Wise Native forever cropping up in westerners’ spiritual narratives to dispense their simple, profound, native truths. College delivered me of that evil, I think. But perhaps not; my brief encounter with Carl has, strangely, obliquely clarified something for me:

  The strongest among us are atheists. The weakest are those of us who would believe, if only we could. We are the most susceptible to despair. We want to believe, we sense there might be something out there, but we can’t find it, can’t feel it, or can’t believe in it. And calling ourselves agnostics doesn’t do a damned bit of good.

  My head wants to be an atheist. I want to commit to this life, this world, this plane of being, a finite world of milkshakes and monkey asses. But I can’t accept that science has excluded the possibility of a God. I don’t buy it. Atheism would be as big a leap of faith as accepting Ch
rist as my Lord and Savior. But I would love to be able to wake up and make choices knowing that I get one shot at life and that when I die, I’m dead.

  I belong to the camp of wishers, dreamers, wouldn’t it-be-nicers. I yearn for order, for sense. For God. That’s why I’m here, I think. Because I’m too much of a pussy to just suck it up and make my own meaning.

  My heart wants to believe. I want to be someone who wakes up every day and meditates, or prays, or goes to Mass or temple or the mosque. The atheist might say these folks are weak, that they need a crutch, but, my God, what I wouldn’t give for that crutch! Life is hard and full of opportunities for strains and breaks. Good to have a crutch on hand, just in case.

  I just wish that I could find a spiritual leader who didn’t disappoint me. Or an idea of God that held water. Gosh, they’re basically the same, aren’t they? Indra, God, religion. All flawed. All disappointing, in the end, no matter how promising they once seemed.

  But, Christ. Who am I kidding? I’m the disappointing one. I’m the one who doesn’t want to struggle, like Carl said. Because I am a coddled American who still acts like a spoiled teenager. Poor me, my yoga retreat has disappointed me! Poor me!

  You know what? Fuck it. Fuck that higher bird!

  I’m going to go buy myself a purse. Isn’t that my cultural religion? Weren’t we all told after 9/11 to pray to God and go shopping?

  Perhaps one learns to have faith from taking smaller leaps first.

  Ah, yes. My precious. My dearest, my darling.

  One small step for my inner doubter, one giant step for my outer wardrobe.

  Perhaps I should think of it this way: my handbag could have come from the mind of a great designer, or from the chaos of an anonymous assembly line. But if everything is an illusion, then real or fake doesn’t mean a thing. It just is. It is me, I am it. And, honestly, in this moment, I don’t give a rat’s ass if it’s real or not. Go practice your cultural religion, Suzie-Q. Don’t question it, just give in, indulge yourself. Isn’t that what faith is all about?