CONTINUED NEXT PAGEHALF-SCORPION VARIATIONI got into fitness during a very difficult time in
my life. Working out offers a pathway to a certain
level of ease in your mind, a certain level of con-
trol in your thoughts. But yoga literally changed
me. I went in with one philosophical view and
came out different.
When I was eighteen, I made a decision that I
wanted to be a drug dealer. It went OK for about
a year, until I got caught and did three months
in jail.
That didn’t discourage me. Instead, while I
was in County, I decided that I didn’t want to be
a drug dealer—I wanted to be a superhero drug
dealer. I justified it by telling myself that the
criminal conviction had left me with no other
options in life.
At the time, I was attending college. I didn’t sell
to students, and they didn’t know anything about
me. They saw me as the president of the Paul
Robeson Club, a person with good grades. I threw
all the parties and drove a nice car. People said,
“How the hell do you have that Lexus?” I was like
the fake Puff Daddy of Rutgers University.
I actually loved school. I got a degree in
business management and then started on a
master’s. I dropped out of graduate school with
just one final paper to write because my busi-
ness had really started growing. I was selling
cocaine and crack to suburban middle-class Cau-
casian, Latino, and black people in New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, and Ohio. I wouldn’t touch it—not
cocaine; hell, no. But it didn’t bother me that
other people were being harmed.
Then, in 2001, a cop pulled me over and found
a brick of cocaine in the trunk. This time, I was
going to federal prison.
Why did I choose the path of selling drugs?
Well, all of my friends in high school were
engaged in it at some level. I wasn’t completely
scared of it. And when you are young, you ask
yourself, “How am I going to win the game of
life?” You can say, “I’m going to be in the Army.”