My Leader, Tony Robbins
I was just stretching my right arm because I was tired.
It slowly rolled up into a balled fist when Tony Robbins saw me across the room, noted my unintended gesture, and returned it. There might have been a head nod, too, that punctuated the exchange.
The raised fist (in all its clenched glory) has been observed since Patrick Henry used it while asking for New Hampshire citizenship. It has some profoundly negative connotations that I won’t go into here, or ever, really. But, again, mine was just a full-body yawn caused by three consecutive 12 hour days spent chanting and incanting at full volume during Robbins’ middle class seminar that he cautiously calls Unleash the Power Within.
Ironically, I needed a recharge. I had no pituitary tumor that excreted human growth hormone at firehose levels, needing only to sleep when someone tipped me over like a cow falling in a drunken frat escapade. That’s how I imagine Tony Robbins is put to bed each night. Sometime around 3 A.M. a personal assistant waits in an adjoining room, listening for the 6 foot 7 guru’s speech patterns to slow. In slipper feet, they creep to the suspected location where he’s momentarily powered down and nudge him every-so-thoughtfully onto a portable air mattress built for Orcas.
It’s the last day of the seminar and Robbins is wearing his signature 3 / 3 / 3 polo shirt. A bubbly blonde next to me scream-whispers: “It’s that shirt!” That’s how I know it’s supposed to mean something. 3 is a magic number in religion, spirituality, and adult fun, so I roll with it.
Each “3” is strategically placed on the shirt so that when Tony manipulates his body in a specific way, the 3’s line-up in winning slot machine synchronicity. In those moments, I swear I hear bells ring and Sacagaweas spill out by the handfuls, and my suspicions are confirmed when I see the blonde shooting Tony these looks like she’s just won the lottery, or is about to.
At some point over the weekend, a portly man is consistently late coming back from our rare fruit breaks. There’s a breaking point - even for the master of emotional mastery - and Robbins snaps after a third infraction, gives us all a lecture about integrity, and pulls out a water cannon that I’m pretty sure was used at Kent State. He unleashes a geyser on this man that I’ll call Harold. At this moment I feel secure in my wholeness, as I’m dry as a bone.
The last thing we do together as an intimate group of 2,500 is hold hands and listen to a song called “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” by a band that was once an airplane but - keeping up with the times - became a spaceship. Today, I suppose, they’d be a Cybertruck.
Robbins, singing, lip syncing, it’s unclear - sways to and fro like an NBA player invited to a bar mitzvah - waves his catcher’s mitts at an auditorium of relative strangers who are weeping, vocalizing badly from a printed out lyrics sheet, and wondering when they’ll see their leader again.
The roof is removed from the arena by Tony’s own hands. The rotor blades of his private helicopter, which had been parked back stage the whole time, begin to turn. From the downwash, pages from 2,500 journals ripple like the surface of the ocean during a tsunami as Robbins squeezes into the chopper, gives a thumbs up to the crowd and disappears into the Worcester sky, his gleaming smile providing the searchlight he’ll need to spot the pink dolphins he’ll invariably “helicopter surf with” on his way back to Florida.
It will be three years before I share space, time and a raised fist with him again.
But not once does my solidarity waver.