Hyper-chondriac (12 page)

“I have prostate problems, too!” I said, way too excited and loud for a large empty space with a lot of tiles.

“Aren't you a little young for prostate troubles?”

“Yep.”

By the way, you'll know if you have prostatitis when your penis stops working. It's pretty scary. Imagine that one of those “Back at ___ o'clock” signs that antique shop owners leave on their doors has been hung on your groin—except there are no hands on the clock. Because even when you squeeze your glutes together, you CANNOT FEEL YOUR PENIS! Fortunately, the treatment is saw palmetto capsules, warm baths and frequent masturbation to keep the prostate busy.

“I only have one kidney,” said another older woman proudly, having bullied her way into our conversation.

I realized I had more in common with octogenarians than anyone my age.

After drying off and changing, I'd head upstairs where a team of land-based therapists manipulated and stretched my limbs on a giant table in hopes of strengthening my hip. It felt as if they were playing tug-of-war with my torso. Then it was off to the recumbent bike for some more hip strengthening and light resistance exercises.

Unfortunately, as my hip got stronger so did my dependence on Celebrex. I was at the mercy of the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug and, as with my Zoloft, was frightened at the prospect of running out, or needing a refill on a bank holiday. I was told by members of my land therapy team to drop down to 200 mg. However, halving the dose seemed to double the pain and set me back weeks on my PT schedule. I secretly went back up to 400 mg to go with my 100 mg of Zoloft. I really didn't need to become addicted to
two
pills, but I was equally frightened of tapering off. I even Googled “Celebrex Anonymous” to see if there was a support group. Nope.

Finally, my Celebrex habit took care of itself. I had so much inflammation from the onslaught of pills that my stomach was hemorrhaging. The ulcer diagnosed by my gastroenterologist made for an easy decision. My PT sessions were a lot more painful without pills but it was better than “…stomach problems such as bleeding can occur without warning and may cause death.” And bleeding to death in an indoor pool would really freak out my new old people friends.

A scant fourteen months after being introduced to the magic of yoga, I was finally able to walk without pain. And despite having Blue Cross and Blue Shield, by the time the smoke cleared and I had paid my deductible, my acupuncturist, my team of physical therapists and the pain specialist, that one yoga class had cost me over $6,300. Yes, I had parlayed a $15 donation into a 42,000 percent loss. And that doesn't include replacing the yoga mat I'd borrowed from Nancy's friend and forgot at the studio during the gurney hullabaloo.

Maybe it was a sign to focus more on my mind.

4In July 2006, prosecutors in Los Angeles charged Bikram with operating a yoga studio without a permit and nine other criminal counts. Bikram has threatened to move his headquarters to Honolulu. I'll drive him to the airport.

I stood awkwardly in the courtyard of the Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles waiting for my watch to say eight-thirty. If anyone had ever bet me that I would pay $270 to sit in a classroom listening to Kabbalah lectures for ten weeks, I would have wagered my entire checking account. Which wasn't very much after the hip episode, but that's not really the point.

Due to my yoga accident I wasn't able to exercise much, so I had some extra time on my hands and thought maybe a little spirituality would calm me down. I had heard about Kabbalah from the likes of Madonna, Ashton and Demi, but it was my friend Renata who actually encouraged me to go. Earlier in the year, she had been in a bit of a rut and needed some divine inspiration to get a better job and quit smoking. So Renata enrolled in Kabbalah Level One and moments after completing the course got a better job and stopped smoking—which the cynic in me thought could've also been accomplished through Monster.com and the patch.

I tried to convince Nancy to come. She's much more impressionable than I am, anyway. Whenever the alarm clock, VCR or microwave has all three numbers the same (1:11, 2:22, etc.), she orders me to stare at it with her and make a silent wish. My wish is always the same: “I wish Nancy would stop making me stare at things for one-minute increments.”

“Come to Kabbalah with me,” I begged. “C'mon! I went to yoga with you.”

“Nah. But if you bring me home one of those cute red string bracelets, I'll buy you sushi tonight.”

I had mentioned to Renata that I had issues with organized religion. She assured me that Kabbalah wasn't that organized. Ever since my rabbi converted to Episcopalianism, I'd been unable to set foot in
any
house of worship because of acute panic attacks. The trauma was manageable when I was a teen because my religious exposure had ended abruptly after Setzman shunned Judaism.

But when I was a freshman in college, the issues resurfaced. A group of girls in my dorm were going to High Holy Days at a local synagogue. Since they were really cute and I was really horny, it was a no-brainer to tag along. Ten minutes into the services, my head was spinning, my stomach churning, the pews swirling and I nearly blacked out. After I staggered into the bathroom and lay on the cold tiled floor to recover, it took all my strength to return my yarmulke and grab a cab back to the dorm.

As I got older, things only got worse. Regardless of the religious affiliation, freaking out, turning ghost-white and blacking out became the norm. Whenever I got invitations to weddings or bar mitzvahs, I'd either lurk in the back of the temple/church/mosque/Scientology Center so I could take frequent breaks or skip the ceremony completely and just go to the reception, blaming my tardiness on car trouble or MapQuest.

In the spring of 1999, due to a flurry of friends getting married and a desire to rid myself of this religion affliction, I called around to several doctors, described my problem and asked if they knew of anyone who could treat me. After dozens of phone calls and months of detective work, I had struck neurological-therapeutic gold. Peggy Townsend specialized in religious issues and was eager to meet me.

Ms. Townsend was a twice-divorced, wavy silver–haired Texan. She was raised a Southern Baptist, but her first husband was Catholic and her second Jewish. Despite being in her early seventies, Peggy had a quiet intensity about her, as if underneath the sheen of authority, she was a fiery gal who still got in bar fights.

“So when you go into
any
religious venue, you have these attacks?” she said with remnants of her southern twang.

“Yep.”

“Are they more acute in a temple than a church?”

“No. Same.”

“Do you think this has to do with your rabbi becoming an Episcopalian minister?”

“That probably has something to do with it, yeah.”

“So you feel betrayed?”

“Sure.”

“And is there anything specific, that you can tell, that triggers these attacks?”

“Nope. It's more of a time thing than a content thing. I can last up to ten minutes if I completely block out everything and think about sports or a movie I just saw. But if I just sit there and listen and absorb everything, I'd say I last an average of three to five minutes.”

I told Peggy how religious worship makes me feel on the verge of collapse and blindness, as if God is turning me into a helpless marionette. Congregants then approach me and tell me I look deathly ill and I have to lie and say that I think I have food poisoning. My only salvation is to stumble out of the church or temple pew and lie on the bathroom floor, where I can continue to breathe deeply out of earshot of the minister or rabbi until the color returns to my skin, the strength to my legs and the sight to my eyes.

“Then what happens?”

“I slowly recover and stagger to the foyer and wait until the ceremony is over. I don't want to take any attention away from the bride and groom. And I really don't want to make a scene twice.”

“Why do you think you feel like God's marionette?”

“I guess if I knew I wouldn't be here.”

Peggy then slid her entire set of lips over to the left side of her face, lost deep in thought as I whirred on.

“Religion feels like a combination of begging and nagging to me. I mean, do I want to worship a God who needs me to constantly tell Him how great He is? Would the Creator of the Universe be
that
insecure? And if I'm continually asking Him for things and promising to be good in return, isn't that a little like extortion?”

Peggy's lips then quickly moved, trombone-like, completely onto the right side of her face.

“Maybe I just feel that my family's devotion to God really hasn't paid off. It all seems so futile. I don't know. Maybe He's punishing me. He punished my mom and my brother Andrew and my grandparents.”

“Do you think you're an atheist?”

“No. That's the weird thing. I do believe in God. My head is just all messed up. Like I say that I don't believe in an afterlife, but on the other hand I refuse to check the ‘organ donor' box on my driver's license.”

“So you're agnostic?”

She was just going down a list of questions in her head now, and not listening. I had just told her nine seconds ago that I believed in a God, though not necessarily One that demanded a lot of back-and-forth chitchat.

“No. And I don't feel that everything fits so neatly into one of our preconceived categories.”

Religion itself was full of contradictions. If everybody's prayers were hypothetically answered, there'd be a lot of them canceling each other out. So what would be the determining factor in who gets what? Is it based on need? Who asked first? Or is it just completely random like everything else in the universe? Even before my panic attacks started, I had always felt a little awkward about the whole sitting-in-the-same-place-and-saying-the-same-thing-to-the-same-entity-at-the-same-time thing.

“Let's get back to your panic attacks for a moment. After your rabbi left, these feelings became heightened?”

“Yes.”

I didn't even tell her about the Star of David sternum grinding.

Despite my occasional bouts of exasperation, I saw Peggy Townsend weekly for nearly three years, mostly talking in circles about religion to get to the root of my troubles. The answer always came back to what she had uncovered within the first seven minutes of our very first meeting. Betrayal. I felt betrayed by God that my rabbi left the temple and converted and I had felt uncomfortable dealing with Him ever since. It was as if a girlfriend and I had had a messy breakup but then kept running into each other at the hostess stand at Bennigan's.

It took two years of sessions before I told Peggy that when I was fifteen my temple was razed and retirement homes were built on the exact spot where we used to worship God. I guess I had blocked all that out.

Although discovering the origin of my problem was good information, it didn't cure me. It just enabled me to tough it out at weddings and bar mitzvahs for slightly longer periods of time before the attack swarmed my body. Even 100 mg of Zoloft couldn't fend off the meltdowns. I was barely able to make it through my own wedding. Had it not been for the 50 mg and Nancy alternating between squeezing my hand so hard it changed colors and burrowing her fingernails deep into my palm to distract me, I probably would have passed out. And, had that happened, she probably would've smashed the entire cake into my face and then run off in her giant white shoes.

So perhaps now you can understand why paying $270 to stare at a group of Hebrew letters at a Kabbalah Centre for two and a half months seemed like the last thing I'd ever do. But Renata had been a chain-smoker with limited professional skills, so I decided to give it a try.

 

The Kabbalah Centre was inside a stone building that looked to be a hundred years old, which in Los Angeles is the equivalent of the ancient pyramids. (Incidentally, I'd prefer to spell “Centre” as “Center”—however the former is the way it's spelled on the black hardcover Kabbalah 101 binder that they gave me.)

I had forty minutes to kill before my first class, so I browsed around in the adjacent Kabbalah gift shop. It gave me pride that these pseudo Jews were into marketing their cult, or whatever it was. I firmly believe that's why Christianity really took off and Judaism didn't. Marketing. Think about it—they have a guy's face (and often his body) on necklaces, posters, stained-glass windows, sculptures, air fresheners and bumper stickers. We have a six-pointed star—which can easily be confused with the Houston Astros' logo. Quite frankly, it's amazing that there are any Jews up against a PR blitz like that. We'd be much better off having a guy's head on our jewelry, like Ed Asner or Michael Landon.

There was an eerie sense of peace inside. All of the customers/students/already-brainwashed humanoids had portions of smiles glommed onto their faces and fashionable red strings on their wrists. The cashier, who looked like Lisa Loeb had she opted for the tinted tortoise-rimmed glasses, turned to me.

“Excuse me? Can I help you find anything?”

I wanted to blurt out: “Yes! My SOUL!!!”

Instead I just doled out the standard “No, thanks.”

The courtyard connected to the gift shop had four or five round black metal tables with matching folding chairs. Since everyone seemed to be shopping, I was able to snag a chair next to a tall potted plant that kept swatting me in the face whenever a breeze approached. As I became irritated and started swatting it back, a flood of people came streaming into the courtyard. The early classes had finally let out and I could find my classroom and grab a seat—in the back near the doorway in case the material became too “religiousy” and I had to flee for the bathroom floor.

As I barged into the classroom to secure a suitable seat, other students trickled in behind me. The “fiftyish housewives whose kids have finally gone off to college and who now have way too much time on their hands” contingent; the “English is my second language but I'm a goddamn knowledge sponge, so give me what you got and I'll absorb it” gaggle; the “hot girls who might be fun to fuck but are obviously nuts” faction; the “horny guys who just want to meet someone—anyone!—and are tired of singles' bars and online dating” group; and the blond Jew who is trying desperately not to have an anxiety attack by not making eye contact with the scattered Hebrew letters on the walls.