Fraud (5 page)

A year later, away at college, I would be sent a small newspaper item, the untold story made only sadder by the clinical dispassion of the clipping. A precipitous disappearance, no forwarding address, thousands of dollars in loans and bills outstanding, a shuttered store with no plans to reopen, a sheriff’s department notice of seizure taped to the window.

I often imagine them on an airplane. Athos sleeps. Nick tampers with the smoke detector in the bathroom so he can light up. And there is Melina’s face at the small round window. Shielding her eyes against the glass, she stares out into the night, past the blinking wing lights, past the Western edge of the continent, out over the ocean, scanning the horizon for the next piece of dry land.

INCLUDING ONE
CALLED HELL

I will come to know it as the Omega Hug. The woman in the fringed halter top and wraparound skirt set sees someone she knows. Walking across the wide-planked verandah—long limbed as a Modigliani, her skin tanned to a tandooried fare-thee-well, her ankle bracelets of tiny silver bells tintinnabulating—she embraces her friend, eyes closed, a beatific smile on her face, her hand moving slowly and healingly up and down the friend’s back. The Omega Hug is long and intense, taking a full half minute to execute, but I will see it countless times over the next three days.

At the moment there is plenty of time to Hug. Some two hundred of us are standing around waiting for Steven Seagal to arrive at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, the famed New Age retreat center set in Rhinebeck, New York, among the gently rolling hills of the Hudson Valley. Omega offers hundreds of classes and seminars in a variety of disciplines, including writing workshops led by the likes of Grace Paley. But in large part, Omega usually expends its exquisitely positive energy on a curriculum that includes courses like “Out-
of-Body Experiences & Dream Exploration,” “The Art of Everyday Ecstasy,” and “Women’s Sacred Summer Camp.” Normally these classes are taught by such reigning superstars of the New Age and spiritual movements as Deepak Chopra. But this Memorial Day weekend, the seminar is titled “Cultivating Compassion and Clarity” and our teacher is none other than Steven Seagal—movie star, aikido master, and, lately, teacher of Tibetan Buddhism.

According to the Omega minivan driver who picked me up at the train station, a nice older Santa type who lives six months of the year in a nudist colony in Florida, this weekend’s seminar is quite an occasion, second only to Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk and author who attracts
1
,
200
attendees. There is some concern that it is Seagal’s reputation as an aikido master, as opposed to his fame as a movie star, that will bring out the crazies. “You know,” says the driver, “guys who want to be able to say they mixed it up with Steven Seagal.” Apparently there is heightened security, although aside from having my name checked on a list once on Friday evening by a bird-boned woman whom I could easily take out with a cough, I am not aware of it.

The head of programming for Omega welcomes us prior to Seagal’s arrival. He is impressed with the number of men at the seminar (generally Omega retreats are attended by women in the vast majority). “The customary greeting for a teacher is a slight bow with the hands clasped,” he advises us. “And it would be perfectly appropriate to address him as Rinpoche. It means ‘Esteemed Sir’ in Tibetan, literally ‘Precious Jewel.’ ”

Precious Jewel eventually does arrive some forty-five minutes late. What turns out to be Seagal Standard Time. He is in a large phase, with a bit of the late-model Brando girth about him, a dividend of a long time off from making movies. His narrow eyes, sleek ponytail, and variation on traditional Tibetan attire—an aubergine skirt and saffron-yellow satin jacket—lend him the air of a Mongol potentate. He shambles in, displaying a kind of bewilderment, walking slowly, as if this temporal world were too jarring and suffused with craving and pain for him to absorb just yet.

He begins by asking us three questions: “How many of you have some experience with Buddhism?” Easily half the audience has none. He will have to adjust his dharma talks, the Buddhist teachings of the Way, accordingly. “How many of you have any experience with meditation?” Again, about half of us. And finally he asks, “Did the infamous J.J. ever show up?” A blonde, her platinum mane a carefully styled imitation of postcoital disarray, wearing a wrap skirt and Lycra tank top, raises her hand. “Ah, there you are. I see you, girl,” he says.

If we are a monolithic group, it is only in that we are overwhelmingly white. Among the five hundred or so people at Omega this weekend, I will count about three African Americans and five Asians, mainly staff, including the three lovely young Tibetan women who are Seagal’s disciples. There are some archetypal New Age Stevie Nicks types decked out in southwestern pot-smoker chic—turquoise jewelry, dangly earrings, flowing skirts, and scarves—who all seem to know one another (“Didn’t we meet on the Inner Voyage cruise to Cozumel?” I hear one woman ask another). The healthy contingent of aikido/Seagal devotees from a martial arts studio on Long Island—to a man displaying the thick-necked, wide-assed bulk of the fraternity brother—are here to see a world-recognized martial arts master. Alas, they will be disappointed this weekend because Seagal’s inevitable aikido display, while admittedly thrilling (for all his size, he moves like a snake-hipped matador), lasts only about twenty minutes. The rest of the group, myself included, seem to be the unwitting members of the American Gap-oisie. We are eastern seaboard types. Although I am here undercover on assignment, as a Japanese studies major, I fit in rather comfortably with the rest of the vaguely disgruntled seekers who, if not of actual Buddhist leanings, are at least conversant with the Eight-Fold Path. Twenty years ago we would have been readers of Robert Persig. Now we own well-thumbed copies of
The Jew in the Lotus.
We’ve done yoga. We’ve been lactose intolerant.

Of course, there are a few people among us who have come solely to see a movie star, like the twenty-one-year-old who is still talking about his Sean Connery–themed bar mitzvah (“He’s my role model ’cause he’s so cool”) and the older man who knows nothing about Buddhism and whose questions are generally along the lines of “Anyone ever tell you you looked like a cross between Robert Taylor and Ray Milland?” and “How many meals do you eat a day?”

(Later on I will see this man talking with two women outside the seminar hall, telling them a joke: “Two psychiatrists pass each other on the street. One says, ‘Hello,’ and the other says, ‘I wonder what you mean by that?’ ” He goes on to explain the joke—because aren’t jokes always better when they’re explained?—“See, therapists can’t take anything at face value,” he says, making little lobster claws with his hands. “They’ve always got to—”

One of the women cuts him off. “You’re on shaky ground here, ’cause my husband was a psychiatrist. I don’t need to listen to this.” She gets up and walks away.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t say sorry ’cause you’re not.”

Unable to resist, he says to her retreating form, “I wonder what you mean by that!”)

As for the serious followers of Tibetan Buddhism, they see Seagal as their Man in Havana, someone whose visibility in Hollywood is beneficial for publicizing the dharma. Seagal is one of their own, and they are admiring, but not cowed. Fans, clearly, but more than that: fellow travelers.

At the time of the retreat, Seagal had already been on a two-year hiatus from Hollywood due to a growing conflict he feels between his roles as star and Holy Man. “The studios know what they want. Fighting. As I became a lama, I had to establish a line I could not cross,” he tells us. (He’s apparently made peace with that line since then, crossing it to make a film with the very Buddha-like title
Exit Wounds.
)

The Tibet thing is fairly new in Seagal’s repertoire of identities. All I had known or read about him prior to this weekend had located him in a different, albeit now less fashionable, part of Asia, namely Japan. Aikido is a Japanese martial art, and in countless articles about him, Seagal has spoken exhaustively, if not a tad mysteriously, about the many decades he spent over there. Even in the crypto-autobiographical introductory sequence to his first film,
Above the Law,
his character is seen teaching an aikido class in Japanese and speaking fluently. So this recent and precariously trendy embrace of Tibet comes as something of a surprise. According to the Omega catalog, Seagal, a.k.a. Terton Rinpoche, has been formally recognized as a
tulku
(incarnate lama from a past life) by H. H. Penor Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. There is perplexity within the American intelligentsia devoted to the Tibetan cause as to how Seagal earned the title so effortlessly. “I haven’t looked into this, but I’m curious as to under what conditions or terms he was accorded this status,” says Ganden Thurman, director of special projects at Tibet House in New York. “I’m afraid it troubles me,” Thurman adds. “I always wondered at the action heroes he played. He always seems to be the only one who tortures his enemies.”

For his part, Seagal frames his involvement with Tibet in much the same way he has described his past possible involvements with things like the CIA and sundry international cloak-and-dagger operations: semishrouded, covert, and intrinsically unreliable. “I was in a monastery in Kyoto and met some monks from Tibet who had been tortured by the Chinese. As I was the only one who had studied herbology, bone manipulation, and acupuncture, I treated them, and there was an immediate connection.”

It’s a familiar trajectory. One day you’re a simple bone manipulator, the next you’re teaching torture victims how to get centered. You almost can’t swing a reincarnated cat without hitting someone who’s followed just this path. The audience, completely unbothered by the essential unverifiability of Seagal’s explanation, nods with appreciative understanding; some people close their eyes and smile, credulously savoring the moment like a divine chocolate.

“Mealtimes are signaled by three blows on a conch shell,” says the Omega welcome booklet. It’s a fairly impressive display of lung capacity, and the people lying here and there about the hill outside the dining hall applaud. Can I really be the only one for whom blowing a conch shell resonates with associations to
Lord of the Flies
and the grisly, horrible death of Piggy? But blithe decontextualization seems to be the name of the game here (Inner Voyage cruise, anyone?).

Just as at freshman orientation in college, where the first person you eat lunch with ends up being the person with whom you take all your meals for the rest of the week, whether you like it or not, I am forcibly bonded with Meg, a woman in her late thirties from Massachusetts. She is the first person to speak to me at breakfast on Saturday. I ask her what she thinks of Seagal.

“He’s interesting,” she says.

“Yes. Counterintuitively so,” I reply.

“What’s that?”

“It’s counter to my intuition. I’m surprised. He’s quite smart and funny. It’s not what I was expecting.”

She rolls her tongue around inside her cheek with a smile. “That’s not intuition. That’s judgment.” She is very pleased with herself. This is what passes for a New Age zinger.

Despite his CIA-Buddhist puffery, the biggest surprise about Steven Seagal is that he is not an idiot—far from it. More often than not, he is, in fact, smart, funny, and eminently entertaining. He is far and away the very best thing about the weekend, and he displays near saintly patience and equanimity in answering three days’ worth of frequently whacked-out questions with respect and great good humor.

But he is also chemically, tragically late. As our pedagogical leader, his duties are light, having only to lead us in a morning session from nine to twelve and an afternoon class from two-thirty to five-thirty. Seagal tends to arrive at least an hour into each and stays for only an hour. As the seminar continues, the attrition rate mounts. People switch to other workshops, others simply leave. Those who remain are led through a twice daily stretching routine led by Larry Reynosa, Seagal’s main aikido disciple. There is a desperation to these calisthenics. We know that Rinpoche is not in the building, and Reynosa knows we know. The routines are lengthened and repeated. What begins on Saturday morning as a fifteen-minute break between the exercises and Seagal’s arrival stretches by Sunday afternoon into three-quarters of an hour. I become quite limber.

When Seagal does lecture, it is usually at the primer level. (“It is the law of cause and effect—also known as karma.”) As the weekend continues, he shows that he clearly knows his stuff and is capable of elevating the discourse. (“We look at all phenomena as the miraculous activity of the unfolding of the divine. The only thing that’s common is what one makes common by one’s impure perception.”) Basic or sophisticated, however, what’s clear is that Seagal doesn’t have a whole lot of lecture in him; after thirty or forty minutes the sessions quickly devolve into Q&A. And, as anyone who has ever been to a film festival, stockholder’s meeting, or lecture can tell you, when a room is outfitted with microphones for “Q&A,” you will hear precious little of anything resembling an actual “Q.” So when the young man at the mike kicks off our weekend with, “I guess I’ll share something with the group. I recently took out a personal ad that read ‘Pagan Universalist Unitarian Buddhist seeks . . .’ ” I know this retreat will be no different.

It’s both fitting and sadly telling that the weekend’s discourse begins with someone talking about a personal ad. Unlike college, where a microphone was always an excuse for someone to either exhort the crowd to meet afterward to discuss alternatives to the arms race, decry American imperialism in El Salvador—or, in the case of Columbia University in the early
1980
s, for a tiny Trotskyite named Shirley to get up and spin out a jeremiad in support of “Soviet aggression in any form!”—the questions on this weekend devoted to compassion don’t get bogged down with a lot of heavy thinking about others. Only one woman asks Seagal what she should do in the face of hate speech. She hears so much of it, primarily against blacks and gays.