Leaving Stress Behind

I parked my car and walked towards Runyon Canyon where I was holding my yoga class. I was a little tired and hoping for an easy day. But when you start thinking like that, it is almost inevitable that you’re going to get a wake-up. I call it reverse manifesting.

As I got close to the entrance of the park, I noticed a man sitting on the short wall just before the (honor) snack stand at the entrance. The man sitting on the wall had a pair of pants on his head like a hat and the legs of the pants were hanging down over his face. One of his eyes was peering out between the pant legs and he stared directly into my eyes.

I immediately felt uncomfortable and sensed this was someone very high and largely unstable. I looked away quickly and kept moving.

I started class and everything was moving along as it should. Near the end of the sun salutations, I notice the man with the pants as a hat walking on the other side of the fence behind the class. The pant legs hung down the sides of his head like some kind of insane Disney-type Goofy knock-off.

I continued class and lost sight of him. Just as I was about to forget the entire thing, I hear a rustling in the vines covering the fence to my right. I think someones dog is digging around and then suddenly a naked man is walking through my class. He is walking very slowly and his movements remind me of the old Sasquatch films. He is 100% naked… not even shoes.

He is very pale and built like a fucking Marine. As he slowly walks across my field of vision, he looks over his left shoulder at me for a moment and keeps moving. But very slowly. A couple students say, “Oh my God.”

As he gets halfway through the class, I decide I should do something. What that is, I do not know, but it is my class and I feel somehow responsible for the people attending who now have a naked man strolling amongst them.

I walk towards him slowly. I guess he is probably going to kill me with his bare hands, so I stay back but try to direct him towards the exit.

Thankfully, he moves in that direction. I’m about 4 feet behind him as he walks through the gate. He turns around and looks at me, puts his hand on the gate and says, “Do you want me to close the gate?” And he walks away without closing the gate.

I am relieved. I watch him walk out the entrance of the park. I thought of a book I saw on my parents’ shelves as a child: The Naked Ape. I go back to teaching but am told the next part by a friend.

My friend sees him walk out of the park. The naked, very in shape, very pale man stops at the honor snack bar. People are moving away in all directions. He picks up a banana from the snack bar and begins walking south on Fuller Avenue. My friend grabs a towel from his car and runs up to the naked man now holding a banana and extends the towel to him.

The naked man takes the towel, hands my friend his banana and continues to walk down the street holding the towel, but not using it to cover himself.

After class I walked over to the other side of the fence that he had jumped as his entrance. All of his clothes were on the ground, meticulously laid out in a pattern around the tree… it reminded me of the back of an old Pink Floyd album.

He had pinned a note to the tree. It was chicken scratch and I could only make out a girl’s name: Debbie.

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Written by Daniel Overberger

Edited by Nancy Winebarger