Did a ‘Cringe-fluencer’ Manifest Her Own Abysmal Decline?

Feature originally published in August 2018 in the New York Times***

In the late summer sun, the sidewalk in Austin scorches as hot as Bodhi Bruce’s career once did. Bodhi has asked me to call her by her first name in this article, and I’ve agreed—it’s a name as ephemeral as the woman herself. As we walk from my rental car two blocks to Guero’s, the South Austin Tex-Mex restaurant that Bodhi claims is one of the “last true good places left,” her designer sandals shuffle against the pavement, her turquoise sundress flowing around both her legs and mine. She is quieter than I anticipated her being, subtly shifting her wide-brimmed fedora hat down and her sunglasses in place so that her face is less visible. For someone who has made a living sharing her image with the internet, Bodhi now seems very concerned that she will be perceived.

Waiting outside of the restaurants is a man who is clearly not afraid of being perceived: Chaz Nickolson, wearing a shirt that those who love and hate him online will clearly recognize. It’s his signature muscle tank, which fits tightly across his chest, stretching the logo “Chaz Your Dreams!” across his pectoral muscles. The logo has the feel of an old-school Batman television show fight: explosive and vintage and bright. His dark hair is pulled back into a bun, and he has paired the tank top with dark shorts, tennis shoes, and sunglasses. He seems to be coming from or heading to a workout, and Bodhi appears ready for a night out at a beach resort. Perhaps the disparity in their clothing choices reveals a disparity at the heart of a relationship that both of them described as “complex” but also, in Bodhi’s words, “very much over.”

Or, perhaps the clothing choices say that it is so hot in an Austin summer that anything that allows your body to breathe is the correct option. In full disclosure, I flew down from New York for this feature, and clearly missed the memo in my black skinny-leg jeans and black three-quarter shirt. I am sweating by the time we step into the coolness of the restaurant and I am grateful for the raging air-conditioning.

The coolness of the air inside the restaurant reflects the coolness of the relationship between Bodhi and Chaz (who also asked me to call him by his first name since “Chazzing is both a name and a concept.”) They famously held what they called a “candlelight uncoupling ceremony” in May, following a viral video in which Bodhi yells at young woman for messing up her order for avocado toast. That viral video is often referred to as Bodhi’s “barista-gate,” and I didn’t ask about it for most of lunch. I want them to trust me. It is clear from the stiff way they interact that this is the first time they’ve seen each other in several weeks.

I asked both of them to join me for this interview because Bodhi and Chaz together created a fame that, for the length of their relationship, was both electric and lucrative. The question in many corners of the internet is whether it was real or a ploy. I want to find out the truth.

The dark wood feel of the rest could have been soothing; the chips and salsa are good, though I am the only one eating them. They turn down my offer for queso, but I am rarely in Austin and know you never miss the opportunity to have authentic queso when you come here. They do, however, take me up on my offer for margaritas: Bodhi has half of one; Chaz has four. I secretly ask my waiter when I go to the bathroom to make mine virgin (I don’t drink on the job), but I meet Chaz’s order drink by (non-alcoholic for me) drink so that he feels comfortable. I do not think he is drunk by the time we really dig in, but he is buzzed enough to be more comfortable with me.

After we order our meals (enchiladas for me, salads for both of them), I ask questions for twenty minutes about where they grew up (White Settlement, Texas for her; Blue Oak, Texas for him), about their siblings and parents and early careers—all information easily searchable for both. But any good feature writer knows, the goal is not to ask questions, it’s to build trust. Halfway through his second margarita, I can finally feel Chaz opening up.

Bodhi, however, never warms to me. I wonder: does the fact that Chaz clearly trusts me negatively decrease Bodhi’s capacity to trust me as well?

Finally, we discuss their uncoupling ceremony, which Bodhi speaks about with the kind of reverence most women reserve for fond memories of their wedding: “I wore that adorable little Alemais dress,” she tells me. “And the candles were from a local artisan who honored my request to include three different types of sage so that the saging of ourselves and our spaces happened within the candle ceremony itself.”

“It smelled like my grandmother’s chicken dinner,” Chaz says in a cutting aside to me that clearly displeases Bodhi. His gaze at her is mocking and I think for a brief moment they will fight, but Bodhi gazes at him, breathing in and out four times, making a box motion with her hand, before returning her eyes to me.

Online, in the weeks since Bodhi and Chaz collaborated on a post revealing the uncoupling ceremony, which had the wide camera shots and close-ups of a rose ceremony on The Bachelor, the posts have been widely panned. This is not their first brush with snarky publicity: The couple were well-known for Chaz’s reaction to Bodhi’s use of a “yoni egg” in 2017. His outsized reaction became a ubiquitous meme.

I’m curious whether they hoped for the same kind of reaction to the “uncoupling ceremony.” The golden light of the candlelit circle, their earnest faces, the poems of love they read to one another, the “gratefulness pages” they recited out loud in which they cried remembering several of their favorite memories (Bodhi was very pretty when she cried, her makeup flawless, the tear tracks subtle) and then burned in an artisanal copper fire pit—all speak to a high-production value. As one commenter said on Bodhi’s post, “This season finale clearly had the biggest budget of all.” Whether or not the “uncoupling ceremony” had the desired effect on their audiences of invoking what Bodhi referred to as “crucial closure for our dearly beloved friends who walked with us during these years of joining and unjoining,” is not clear.

What is clear: Many, many people made fun of the ceremony itself, particularly the end when Bodhi and Chaz blew out all of the candles and then Bodhi lowered her head, her face visible only in one light source, and said dramatically, “It is finished.” As one commenter wrote, “Does she think she’s Jesus and she’s sacrificing her relationship on the cross?”

When I asked her if she meant to invoke the Christian imagery in her post, Bodhi dismisses me with one hand. “I will not be speaking about the past, which has been closed in my mind. We call it ‘closure’ for a reason. I am not able to access it. The door has been locked. I will not return to that place.”

That is, in fact, her response to almost all of my questions. No, she and Chaz are not together any more: “We uncoupled,” she tells me with rank compassion, as if I am too unintelligent to understand what the term means. Chaz rolls his eyes and orders another margarita at that answer.

Bodhi does not want to discuss “barista-gate” either, though she does display more tension in that answer: “My lawyer has informed me that this topic is not open for discussion. Believe me, I would love to tell you the context that reveals why my reaction was not ‘over-the-top,” she makes quotation marks with her fingers, “but just a normal and correct response. But, once again, the internet loves to hate more than it loves to love, and I’m a giver and a lover, I always have been.”

Chaz is not quite as cagey as Bodhi is on some of the questions, perhaps due to the amount of alcohol he consumez. He insists, much to Bodhi’s consternation, that her chakras had been spinning incorrectly that day and that the “inversity of the chakra alignment” had created a situation in which she “manifested the opposite of what she really sought.”

I’d eaten half of an enchilada by then and a jalapeño catches in my throat; I cough and have to drink half a glass of water to swallow it down. I ask him to repeat that phrase to make sure my recorder catches it correctly. He does, and when he says it a second time, Bodhi takes his hand in an affectionate gesture. It is the only moment in which they touch during the entire meal.

I am a natural skeptic, as most journalists are. Even if I were a believer, I know enough about Hinduism and Tantric Yoga from my World Religion class as an undergrad at Columbia to know that chakras don’t work that way. But what I do know is this: Chaz’s face is annoyed, frustrated, and even angry when Bodhi speaks; he seems like a typical ex-boyfriend throughout their interactions. I do not see any evidence that they have rekindled a relationship that has had more ups and downs than the “Judge Roy Scream” at Texas’s famous Six Flags amusement park. But in that moment, when he defends her “inverse chakras,” his face is lit with earnestness.

I cannot say, as a journalist, what the subject of a profile is really feeling. All I can reveal is what their faces and bodies tell me. Whether or not these two influencers, often referred to as “cringe-fluencers” by the analysts critical of their fame and their wellness advice, actually believe what they are selling the public, I cannot determine. I hoped to have a sense of that at lunch, but their performance personas are too firmly in place for me to access the truth from one interview.

However, that one moment, when Chaz defends Bodhi’s actions because, as he says, the universe misunderstood her desires, rang true for me. It seems clear to me that, whether I believe the universe misunderstood what Bodhi intended to manifest, they do. Psychologists often dismiss manifesting as too much woo-woo, but it’s been proven in multiple peer-reviewed journals that a person’s mindset can determine their actions, which can often lead to consequences that very much mirror what they’re afraid will happen. Bodhi’s “inverse chakras” might have created a mindset that she took with her into the day: a day in which the people around her at the coffee shop caught her on video ranting in deranged ways at a young woman for mishearing an order for avocado toast.

Was that manifestation or mindset? I do not feel qualified to answer. I can only say that Bodhi and Chaz seem to believe with certainty that “inverse manifestation” was the cause—not Bodhi’s own actions.

The consequences for Bodhi’s career have certainly been stark. We leave the restaurant after more than an hour of talking, in which I feel like I barely got answers to the questions I am asking. In our conversation, they are slippery and slick—exactly what I’d expect of influencers. But that shifts for Bodhi, at least, as we walk from the dark coolness of the restaurant and back into the blazing Austin sun. Bodhi slips on her sunglasses and shrinks into herself. She glances around nervously, evidently worrying someone will film her. She hugs me briefly and thanks me for writing an “article that will make me look good” (not my goal, in case my editor is concerned), and insists to both Chaz and I that her assistant will pick her up for shopping. Chaz does not hug me and he does not hug Bodhi. He waves at both of us, tells us to “Chaz your dreams,” and walks down the street in the opposite direction from me.

After the interview, I drive to the Houndstooth coffee shop from the viral video to interview the barista whose name I withheld because she is still a minor. She is not longer working there, her manager informs me. She recently had her entire college tuition paid for by an anonmyous source and has decided to focus on her studies. She is studying engineering, according to her manager, and is well on her way to inventing rain collection filtration systems for use in rural areas of Central America. It is clear the manager is proud of the young woman and believes her work will be important.

I leave the coffee shop feeling that, even if the outcome of “barista-gate” has not been beneficial to the influencers in the story, at least some good came from Bodhi Bruce’s “inverse chakras.” Whether she manifested her own future, I have no idea.

But the future of the barista she yelled at that day suddenly seems very bright.

***[AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a fictional promotional site for the novel A Zoom with a View by Jess Cannon. All articles and links are fictional. TMZ, Newsweek, and the New York Times are all trademarks of their respective owners and are used here for fictional purposes only as an extension of the world-building in the novel. No affiliation or endorsement is implied.]