44
Among the many jobs that Richard from Texas has held in his life—and I know I’m leaving
a lot of them out—are oil-field worker; eighteen-wheeler truck driver; the first authorized deal-
er of Birkenstocks in the Dakotas; sack-shaker in a midwestern landfill (I’m sorry, but I really
don’t have time to explain what a “sack-shaker” is); highway construction worker; used-car
salesman; soldier in Vietnam; “commodities broker” (that commodity generally being Mexican
narcotics); junkie and alcoholic (if you can call this a profession); then reformed junkie and al-
coholic (a much more respectable profession); hippie farmer on a commune; radio voice-over
announcer; and, finally, successful dealer in high-end medical equipment (until his marriage
fell apart and he gave the whole business to his ex and got left “scratchin’ my broke white ass
again”). Now he renovates old houses in Austin.
“Never did have much of a career path,” he says. “Never could do anything but the hustle.”
Richard from Texas is not a guy who worries about a lot of stuff. I wouldn’t call him a neur-
otic person, no sir. But I am a bit neurotic, and that’s why I’ve come to adore him. Richard’s
presence at this Ashram becomes my great and amusing sense of security. His giant ambling
confidence hushes down all my inherent nervousness and reminds me that everything really
is going to be OK. (And if not OK, then at least comic.) Remember the cartoon rooster Fog-
horn Leghorn? Well, Richard is kind of like that, and I become his chatty little sidekick, the
Chickenhawk. In Richard’s own words: “Me and Groceries, we steady be laughin’ the whole
damn time.”
Groceries.
That’s the nickname Richard has given me. He bestowed it upon me the first night we
met, when he noticed how much I could eat. I tried to defend myself (“I was purposefully eat-
ing with discipline and intention!”) but the name stuck.
Maybe Richard from Texas doesn’t seem like a typical Yogi. Though my time in India has
cautioned me against deciding what a typical Yogi is. (Don’t get me started on the dairy farm-
er from rural Ireland I met here the other day, or the former nun from South Africa.) Richard
came to this Yoga through an ex-girlfriend, who drove him up from Texas to the Ashram in
New York to hear the Guru speak. Richard says, “I thought the Ashram was the weirdest thing