He looked like a yeti. Big shoulders and a gorilla grin. He wore basketball shorts and a pink t-shirt with a smiling dog on it, the name of an ice cream place in the middle of nowhere Vermont. Slick's Ice cream. It was a green and yellow painted shack on the side of the highway that always smelled like weed. Pimply teenagers handing children towers of ice cream the size of their faces for $2.50.

He and I worked at a Buddhist camp for children nearby, and we'd drive them to Slick's on the way back from the swimming hole. He was a divorced forty-two-year-old and I was a depressed thirty-year-old. By day, we told children to sit on cushions, stare at the floor, and focus on their breaths for a handful of minutes until they got so squirmy and made little noises like they were going to burst. In those moments, before ringing the gong to release them, I felt like a torturer sick with power. I'd make eye contact with one of them and move my hand a few inches toward the gong, then smile, look away and remain stationary for another full minute, which to them, was an eternity. Then they'd be free and we'd lead them into the forest to cut down saplings to make into bows and arrows. They were warriors now, we said, and their weapons were fearlessness and gentleness. They shuffled their feet listening to us drone on, pointing arrows at each other.

At night, when the campers were asleep, the yeti and I would convene with the other teachers around a campfire, drink beer and smoke weed. The yeti would hold court, 12-17 years older than the rest of us, telling us ridiculous stories of his past drunken antics and sexual misadventures.  The yeti was a white rapper. Who during the school year worked at a nursery school. Born in Brooklyn but raised in Canada. His parents, like mine, were students of a lama who escaped Tibet at the age of nineteen, leading a party across the Himalayas and chewing on shoe leather for sustenance. He was a monk, studied at Oxford, then came to America and shirked his robes for a suit. He took up smoking. And drinking. A lot. When he was thirty a sixteen-year-old ran away from home to marry him. He taught his students the Vajrayana, known as the 'Lightning Bolt' path, the path of sudden, quick, dangerous enlightenment, as opposed to the Hinayana - the path of discipline, and the Mahayana - the path of bodhisattvas, those who abandon their hope for enlightenment in favor of helping all suffering beings.  He chose seven female students to 'empower' with his secret sexual teachings, then died at the age of forty-seven from alcoholism (and let’s be real - exorbitant cocaine abuse to make his alcohol-drinking powers look like magic). When he died, he named his son as his successor, but until his son was old enough, he appointed an interim leader.

This man was now known to have knowingly infected others with HIV. But he said the lama had told him that, if his intention was pure, his disease would not spread. The lama also taught that to drink alcohol was to drink 'the blood of ego.' When the yeti was five years old, his parents were having a party with their circle of meditator friends and the yeti found himself alone in a hallway with the interim successor, who flung rubber bands at the yeti's crotch. The yeti was terrified, and could not move.

Now the lama's son was in charge, and his Buddhist organization had centers all over the world. But the son had become an alcoholic too, and now many women were coming out to say he had treated them like shit. The students of the lama shook their heads. 'When the lama had sex with us, he was kind, he did it out of compassion,' they said. 'This son is drunk with power, he is not an enlightened being like his father.' The successor who flung the rubber bands was long dead.

The organization was falling apart. 'Was this the lama's teaching?' people asked. 'Did he know it would all fall apart?' No one knew the answer. But no one wanted to disappoint the children. So the camp went on.

I brought the children down to the stream to soak the saplings they'd cut down in the water to make them flexible before we strung them. When we got there, the yeti appeared from under a little bridge. He was shirtless and covered in mud, taking chomping bites of hard-boiled eggs and spitting them out as he spoke.

'WHO DARES TRESPASS IN MY STREAM!' he bellowed.

The children backed away on the rocky shore, huddling closer together. They were caught between fear and laughter, looking at me for a signal, but I just stared wide-eyed and frozen at the yeti.

'It's not your stream!' ventured one brave child.

'OH REALLY?' yelled the yeti. 'THE STREAM BELONGS TO THE FOREST! THE FOREST BELONGS TO THE ANIMALS! AND I AM… AN ANIMAL!!' He beat on his chests with his fists.

'We're animals too?' tried a child quietly.

'Oh are you?' said the yeti. His voice was quieter but filled with vitriol. 'Then tell me, what does it feel like to know no home? What does it feel like to know the trees are your brothers and sisters? Can you tell me that?'

'No..' a few of them muttered.

'THAT'S RIGHT! YOU CAN'T! SO GET THE HELL OUT OF MY STREAM TREE-KILLERS!'

'WE ASKED THE TREES PERMISSION!' they yelled back, starting to get riled up, the chance to yell at an adult overriding their fear. Plus they had started to notice the stream-dweller looked like the yeti, and were murmuring about this amongst themselves.

'I'M NOT THE YETI!' he bellowed. 'THE YETI IS MY TWIN BROTHER! HE BETRAYED MY FAMILY TO GO LIVE WITH YOU HUMANS WHO DESTROY THE LAND! NEVER SPEAK TO ME OF HIM AGAIN! WHAT DO YOU WANT ANYWAY? WHY ARE YOU HERE?'

The kids gestured to the bundle of sticks I was holding, tied together with rope. 'We want to soak our saplings in the water! We're making bows!'

'BOWS THAT YOU WILL USE TO KILL?'

'NO! WE WILL SHOOT AT HAY BALES!'

'WHY WASTE YOUR TIME DOING THAT? WHY NOT KILL?'

The kids didn't have an answer for that.

The yeti prompted them. 'WHAT IF YOU MISS?'

'IT DOESN'T MATTER!' they yelled. I had already indoctrinated them. 'WE JUST LET GO!'

The yeti paused. 'Hmm,' he said. 'This does not sound like the behavior of most humans I know. Perhaps I will let you soak your sticks here. But you must promise me something. You must promise me you will kiss the ground every day, and say thank you.'

The children giggled insanely. 'Ewwww!'

'IT'S NOT A JOKE!! IF YOU WON'T KISS THE GROUND THEN BE GONE FROM HERE!'

'OKAY! WE WILL! WE'LL KISS THE GROUND!'

'THEN DO IT!!'

The kids looked over at me for help. I put the sticks down, got on my knees, and kissed the ground. Some of them did it too. Some of them pretended. We wiped dirt off of our mouths. When we stood back up, the yeti was gone.

*

The yeti and I both lived in Brooklyn, so we hung out sometimes, hooked up sometimes. One day he invited me to bike from his apartment in Ditmas Park down to Coney Island. I arrived at his place and he handed me a strip of weed candy. We set off and the whole way there he blasted reggaeton music from the bluetooth speaker he had attached to his bike. As we breezed down Ocean Parkway, I felt myself trying too hard to impress him with my bike skills. I wanted him to see the version of me that I feel like on my bike. Which is powerful, not giving a shit, graceful, attentive.

He was mostly riding ahead of me though, and at every intersection he’d turn back and explain when the right moment to go would be. Ocean Parkway was a four lane road intersected by other big streets. But I understood how to know when to go. So I said, half-joking, ‘Stop man-splaining biking to me.’ The yeti raised his eyebrows and smiled, half-amused. 

When we got to the beach a storm was brewing over the ocean. The yeti hopped off his bike, locked it, and started striding briskly toward the water, determined to make it in before the lifeguards tried to harsh his buzz. I awkwardly locked mine and trailed behind him. 

Sometimes I was the type to dip my toe in, wince, and then slowly, tortuously hobble forward into the water, letting each inch of my body experience the sharp coldness anew. But today I resolved to follow the yeti’s lead and glide unhesitantly all the way under. We bobbed in the waves and watched the storm clouds moving over the beach to cover the skyscrapers.

The lifeguards made us get out anyway. We got back on our bikes and the yeti said we should bike down the boardwalk. ‘Just watch out for the uneven boards and loose nails,’ he said. So we weaved through the people past the hot dog stands and carnival games and speakers blasting top 40 radio, someone singing about the demons inside.

We stopped at a bodega at the bottom of Ocean Avenue for drinks. It was drizzling and I was freezing. He showed off how he poured Strawberry Budweiser Lime-A-Rita into his water bottle. ‘It’s gatorade,’ he said. Then stared under the overpass. We were stopped at a bench near the beginning of the bike path. ‘That homeless lady thought we were her peeps,’ he said, smiling.

Back at his place we sat at his table in the dim light and he crushed up some coke. Then we started going over, as we had been recently, ways the cult we were raised in had fucked with our heads. We didn’t used to call it a cult, but now we did. The yeti had been given a name by his teacher, the disgraced son who was hiding in Nepal. Rahula eye. The yeti said Rahula was covered in eyes. And sometimes he made me feel that way, like there was nowhere to run. 

It was hard to say whether it was him doing that, or my own mind. I had the tendency to make people into gurus. And when I got high, I started to fear the presence of omniscience. It felt like he was speaking to me on different levels at once. He once told me about how you have to get people into a ‘compromised state of mind’ for the real truth to come out. He was an immaculate conversationalist. Because he would listen and respond with precision, validating and clarifying my thoughts. I’d like to think I did that for him too. But I couldn’t handle my alcohol and weed and coke the way he could. I got paranoid, sick, manic, depressed. And he got so coked up all he could think about was sex and rap. 

Deep into the night and the ritual of snorting coke and sipping beer he suddenly hit me with an accusation: that I had called him sexist while biking. I said I’d been joking (half-true) and he yelled,

‘BE MORE MINDFUL OF YOUR SPEECH!’

I said, ‘Be more honest about your feelings for me,’ or something - I probably said something more incoherent if I’m being honest - and I tried to leave, taking the stairs down to the lobby, which was covered in mirrors. I took a selfie and realized I was way too tired to bike all the way home to Ridgewood from Ditmas Park. Reluctantly I went back up, and passed out on the couch.