The Mobility Guru
I hate when pain compromises my common sense.
We had driven nine hours to Sedona in a car too small for my height and too unforgiving for my patience, not long after I had been bucked off a horse (story for another time). My back, my neck, my shoulder blades, and my nerves conducted an orchestra of agony—sharp shooting pains when I turned so much as a degree, never-ending dull pain that radiated up and down my backbone, and psychic pain that made me fantasize about a world where torso transplants could be purchased as easily as gum balls outside a grocery store.
A contact in Sedona suggested she knew somebody who could fix me.
“Is he a massage therapist?”
“Better.”
“Okay…”
“He’s a mobility guru.”
“There sure seem to be a lot of gurus in Sedona.”
“I know. There’s a special energy here.”
Ordinarily, after hearing this sort of namaste, snake-oil speak, I would have asked so many follow-ups—sarcastic, snarky, and otherwise—but the pain just had me nodding as best I could, given current my Steven Hawking-level of agility. To put a finer point on it, if not for the unbearable tightness of my being, it’s unlikely I would have gone along with her suggestion.
And I overlooked other warning signs due to the pain, like the fact that this mobility guru did not have a storefront or a medical office. He “practiced” out of his house, which happened to be in a mobile home park. While I appreciated the intentional(?) synergy of practicing mobility medicine in a mobile home, it didn’t exactly instill confidence.
And neither did the guru’s appearance. My Sedona contact drove me to his place where he was waiting outside, standing with an impeccable posture that didn’t go with his appearance: long gray hair pulled back into a pair of Willie Nelson braids; a sleeveless camouflage t-shirt tucked into parachute pants; a baker’s dozen of gold hoop earrings up and down each of his ears; a black fanny pack embroidered with the words “Question Authority” in hot pink; bare feet with periwinkle blue nail polish and several toe rings; and skin so tan and leathery I was certain he spent most of his life in a beach chair.
My Sedona contact introduced me, and he told me the fee. I handed the guru some cash, which he slipped into the “Question Authority” fanny pack. “You can pick him up in a couple of hours,” he told my Sedona contact.
A couple of hours?!
And then I saw my Sedona contact wink before driving off. What the fuck was the wink about? Sure, a wink can be playful, an innocent “You got it, daddy-o” response, but it can also be a signal—a conspiratorial confirmation that says, “I’ll be back in a couple hours with the dry ice and styrofoam cooler so we can harvest this sucker’s kidneys.”
“Wow,” I said to the guru, as the sound of my Sedona contact’s engine faded to silence. “Two hours? Really?”
“There are 206 bones in the human body, each one as important as the next.”
First, I’m pretty sure equality isn’t a thing when it comes to skeletal structure. My cranium gets top billing in the summer blockbuster about my bones. And second, I was there for my back, shoulders, and neck. Okay, quite a few bones between them, but still, not all 206. Whatever, I thought, he already had my money. Sure he had it in a place that read, “Question Authority,” but that place was awfully close to his tiddly-bits, so I opted to let it go.
I followed him to the stairs of his double-wide. He hopped up onto the first step and turned to face me. “Okay, you’re a big guy, aren’t you?” he said, scrambling up to the next step. Next, he reached out and took hold of my shoulders, kneading and cranking on them. A shoulder massage from a stranger in the bright light of a Sedona summer day is awkward enough; however, when you add a face-to-face, eye-contact element to this awkward milieu, you break new ground on cringey territory.
“How’d you get into mobility work?” I asked.
“No small talk,” he said.
In any other context, I would have agreed with every fiber of my being, but the way he said “No small talk” was what I imagine it feels like in prison when a rival inmate shushes you just before he shoves a sharpened toothbrush into your spleen. After a few audible breaths—his, not mine—he explained: “We need you loose, and small talk induces anxiety in most people. Definitely in you. Helen Keller could see that.”
If the goal was to quell anxiety, the mobility guru was failing. After two or three minutes of the most creepy eye contact of my adult life, we went inside.
The sparse decor included a thin mattress on the floor, something I’d expect to see in a Buddhist temple or the room of a psychopath’s abductee; a few framed Thomas Kinkade prints of Sedona landscapes; and a collection of instruments, at least 100: bongo and conga drums, singing bowls, gongs, a variety of bells, and a didgeridoo.
I didn’t even have to ask. “On the full moon, I host sound baths,” he said.
“The full moon, huh? That’s cool. I host my sound baths every Tuesday.” When I’m nervous, I sometimes make shit up.
“Weekly?” he said, incredulously. “Most people I know can’t handle that amount of aural intensity.”
“Well, I only associate with aurally intense people,” I said. He looked at me like I was the full-of-shit person in the room. For a guy who spent so much time luxuriating in sound baths, he had no ear for tone, particularly sarcasm.
I followed him past the didgeridoo into a small room that contained nothing but a massage table and a mannequin that looked very much like a life-sized voodoo doll but was actually an acupuncture study tool
“Are needles going to be a part of this?”
“No, I’m really into DIY projects. I only dabble in acupuncture.”
I’m a big advocate for DIY myself. My can-do attitude of self-reliance and YouTube tutorial enthusiasm tops the list of my best features, I’d argue. Sill, even I admit there are necessary boundaries to DIY. I’d probably place medical care and poking people with needles outside of the acceptable DIY territory.
I laid face up on the table, and he began working on me one section at a time. He started with my neck, his eyes narrowed like Clint Eastwood. His fingertips pressed into my throat haphazardly as if we was reading Braille, and then without warning—
Crickety-crickety-crickety-crack!
He essentially treated me like a six-foot long bottle of bubbly, twisting my head as if it was a stubborn cork. No big deal, I’ve been to my share of chiropractors (shout-out to Dr. Val, the best back-cracker in the game) but then he proceeded to pop every bone in my body.
Let me say that again. Every. Bone. In. My Body.
Yes, I’m prone to embellishment—a comedic flourish from time to time. But not about this.
He popped and manipulated bones in my wrists, elbows, knees, ankles, ribs, the individual knuckles of every finger and toe. He even did something weird to my skull. It didn’t exactly pop, but something moved, as if my cranium had compartments that slid this way and that, like one of those toys where you slide the squares around to unscramble the picture of a pig in a hammock. It’s an odd feeling to have someone treat your skull like a toy.
At some point, he seemed to enter into a flow state, and that’s when the monologuing started. He talked conspiracies for a while (flat earth and the Kennedy assassination), and then he talked about his passion for Cross Fit (how to community builds his body and his brain), and then he talked about the women he’d loved but failed to satisfy (in multiple contexts), and then he talked about his many spiritual journeys, which often ended in either “desperate gratitude” or “grateful despair” (I forget which).
He was a roller coaster of cliche identities, each one subverted when he revealed the next cliche identity. Imagine a Navy Seal whose favorite song was “All You Need Is Love,” or a vegan who enjoyed big game hunting—these would be his peers. Eventually, he had me turn over so that I laid face down.
And this is when the weirdness really ramped up.
His monologuing continued. “You’re a big guy. I’ve worked with lots of big guys like you. I used to do mobility work for a semi-pro football team. Really big guys. Thought they were better than me. They treated me pretty badly…”
And that’s then I heard the sound a seat belt makes when you pull it from its retractor, followed by the sound a seat belt makes when it’s fastened, followed by the sensation of a belt cinching across my lower back, pinning my arms to my sides.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I’m securing you to the table.”
Oh, boy. A lot of questions went through my head.
Why do I need to be secured?
Is the security for me? Or for him?
Should I scream for help?
My pain derives from a long drive after being thrown from a horse, not sacking quarterbacks. Why is he equating me with big guys who clearly traumatized him?
Are those fava beans I smell?
And is that a bottle of nice Chianti in my periphery?
Was the initial pain that brought me here really that bad? Or am I just a big sissy?
I imagine Hannibal Lecter dabbled in mobility work.
He secured me with two more straps, one across my upper back and one across my hamstrings. The mobility guru had effectively immobilized me.
He continued monologuing: “These big guys, these sons of bitches… I’d be in the locker room with them, and they’d grab me by the back of the neck as if I was some alley cat and they’d say, ‘Fix my shoulder, you little bitch,’ or ‘Rub my back, Mary.’”
As he told the story, it seemed as if he was reliving it, and just as I wondered if he was going to take his revenge out on me, he said, “Okay, upsy daisy.”
And suddenly he inverted the table so that my head angled down and my ass angled upward.
“Those big guys,” he continued, “they emasculated me again and again and again…”
I wanted to respond with something empathetic and compassionate, but it’s difficult to support someone who has been emasculated when it’s not entirely clear if you yourself are in the process of emasculation, or worse.
Next I felt him plant his hand firmly on my inner thigh, precariously between my kneecap and my nether regions…
Side note: Several times throughout my career I’ve asked my wife what she thinks I need to include more of in my writing. I value her point of view for a lot of reasons: she’s smarter than me, and she can see me in ways I’m unable to see myself. Her answer to my question is always the same—vulnerability.
So as I was saying… I was strapped to the table, face down, ass up, and the hand of a traumatized mobility guru was clinging to my upper inner ham hock (yes, I know, the ham hock is the lower leg, but it sure sounds upper and inner to me). It felt like I was facing the final boss in a video game about vulnerability. The only thing I was confident about in that moment was that his next words would be something along the lines of, “I bet you can squeal like a pig! Weeeeeeee!”
But no. He just said, “Big, deep breath,” and then his other hand grabbed my ankle and he pulled—
Thwop!
Something popped in my hip. He did the other side. Another Thwop!
“That’s the sound of symmetry,” he said. A moment later, he leveled the table, released the security straps, and asked me to stand up and walk around.
No pain. Nothing. In fact, I felt light, balanced, agile even. I thanked the mobility guru—I even gave him a hug, and I’ve covered my feelings on hugs, so this was no small feat.
I drove my family home from Sedona, and along the way I had plenty of time to reflect. Mobility guru…it’s a curious title since gurus are so often associated with the spiritual. And a guru in Sedona is like spirituality on acid. I wondered about his stories, his approach, the way he made me entirely vulnerable, ultimately to make me less stiff, less rigid, less painful. Vulnerability as a linchpin to movement, as a tool for healing, as a counter to pain—it’s not a bad idea. It might be a genius idea, the kind that only comes by way of a guru.
Thanks for reading. If you’re new to All Kinds of Funny, consider reading some of my other work:
Manslaughter, Santa Claus, and a Hatchet: A whimsical attempt to create my own holiday tradition ends in utter disarray.
Bloody Towels: An exploration of gratitude and an image that conjures the climax of Carrie—ya know, standard family vacation fare.
Are you there, Judy Blume? It's me, Norm.: The birds-and-the-bees talk goes sideways thanks to Judy Blume. Yes, that Judy Blume.
A Spicy Alternative to Antidepressants: My favorite thing I’ve written on this Substack. And my favorite life lesson of the last few years.
Very funny. But I especially loved your constant referral to your "Sedona contact," as if you were a spy or mob hitman. Probably says a lot about how you see yourself and interactions with people. A reformed hitman making amends for misspent youth.
Norm I expected a happy ending after being secured to the table, so a little disappointed.