Breakfast With Buddha (11 page)

According to my map, the nearest town was Bedford, Pennsylvania. We followed a two-lane highway south and soon found it. On the left as we entered the town there stood a large Armed Forces Recruiting Center. On the right, in the windows of what looked to be a turn-of-the-century office building,
JESUS IS LORD
was spelled out in large capital letters, with a five-foot-tall poster of a bearded white man from a place where, to the best of my understanding, the men had been, in his day, bearded and brown. Now, I saw these things—the recruiting center and the window-sized letters—almost at the same time, but I do not mean to imply that anyone in Bedford had wanted me to do so, had tried to link Jesus and the military. But there was a linkage all the same, in the America through which I was driving my new friend. It made me uneasy. As I said, I consider myself a Christian, which means I hold Jesus up as a sort of model for how to behave in the world. My father and two uncles were decorated Korean War veterans, and a cousin lost a leg in Vietnam—so I have a pretty good appreciation of and respect for military people and their families. But something was going on in my America in those years, some
wave of bad thinking that even a middle-of-the-road type like me could not be at peace with. My colleagues at Stanley and Byrnes were guilty of ignoring religion, maybe, or dismissing it. But there was another segment of Americans that used it—via a process I did not fully understand—as a springboard to a kind of aggressive ethnocentrism, as if there was obviously a God, and the God was obviously Jesus and only Jesus, and he obviously loved the United States of America more than any other nation in his millions of universes, and therefore any military action we took must have Jesus’ blessing. I could not swallow this, and had become sensitized to it, and so, driving into Bedford, it was on my mind.

We pulled to the curb in front of a tourist information office. Inside, there was a poster advertising a talk by a man whose life had been altered forever when he discovered levitation, so obviously Bedford had more levels to it than I’d at first supposed. My hopes for a decent meal lifted. The couple who presided over the tourist office were as friendly as could be. The woman came out from behind the counter and listened to my short rant about chains and healthy food, smiled at Rinpoche, who was standing peacefully off to one side like an embarrassed spouse, and directed us to a place called the Green Harvest, only a couple of blocks away.

It was hot. I was ravenous by that late hour, tired from the road, big questions about war and love spinning through my thoughts.

The Green Harvest was a find. Wonderfully original oil paintings on the walls, an airy, sunny atmosphere, a screen curtain keeping out the bugs and letting in whatever cool
air was to be found in that part of Pennsylvania on that afternoon. Behind the counter, a young woman presided, and it turned out that this was her first day on the job; she was backed up by a slightly older woman who seemed to own the place. Iced coffee? Yes! Hummus plate? Yes again! Hummus plate with olive tapenade, some kind of cream-cheesy pineapple spread, an excellent fresh salad, even whole wheat pita bread! A magnificent surprise! A find! Rinpoche and I sat at a thickly shellacked table, the young woman served us identical meals, and all was well.

All was well, that is, until, from beneath the mysterious folds of his garment (he had two maroon robes, I later learned; he’d wash one in the sink or tub every other day and hang it up in his room to dry) Rinpoche drew a piece of white paper. We were finished with the hummus by this point, and savoring the last sips of the excellent strong coffee, and he pulled out the sheet of typing paper, folded to one-fourth its size, and handed it across to me without comment.

“What’s this?”

He shrugged, smiled shyly. I thought it might be a poem he’d scratched out the night before, thanking me for my generosity in agreeing to take him west, or for helping him in his struggles to master English. Or perhaps it was some calligraphy for me to frame and put up on my wall when I got home. As I unfolded it, another possibility came to mind: it might be some Vedantic or Kabbalistic prayer he’d ask me to memorize. Let the proselytizing begin.

But no, worse than that, it was a letter from my sister, Cecelia, typed carefully on her old electric Olivetti. I have saved it and shall quote it here in full:

Dear Beloved Brother,

You are the kindest soul to do what you are doing, and to put up with a sister like me. I hope the trip isn’t going too bad, and that you haven’t been cursing me. (Remember, I’m a psychic, I’ll know!)

I don’t know if Rinpoche has mentioned this to you yet or not, gosh I hope so, but he has several speaking engagements that we’ve set up on the route of your trip. He gets hundreds of requests for these things. He gets paid for some of them. Alot!!! [
sic
] And others he does for free.

Well, the first one is in Youngstown, Ohio, a free one set up by some nice people who are trying to change the atmosphere of that town. And then the second is at Notre Dame University, set up by a Catholic priest who is running a conference on crossing religious borders or something like that. Then there is one event in Madison, and that’s it—unless I get some other offers while you are on the road.

I hope this isn’t only another big imposition from your sister who loves you! His schedule is below. A big big kiss and a big hug from me to you, brother, and also to the great spirit in your car.

Love,

Seese

P.S. It was actually the Youngstown reading that gave me the idea to ask you to take Rinpoche. Otherwise, how could he have done it!

I read the letter four times. I read the schedule printed below it five times, and I checked the date and time of Rinpoche’s first talk against that day’s date on my watch
and cell phone. Six times. And then looked up at my traveling pal, who was smiling at me and nodding his head in small beats.

“Rinpoche,” I said, and my voice was calm. Almost calm. “The first one of your talks is in Youngstown, Ohio. Tonight. Six o’clock tonight. Youngstown, Ohio, is a long way from here, and it’s after four. We’ll barely make it if we go nonstop.”

“Nonstop,” he said, smiling, nodding.

“You couldn’t have told me about this earlier?”

“Forgot,” he said, and for the first time I really thought he was lying. Not evading, not skirting, not giving a sketchy account, not engaging in some Zen trickery. Lying.

I had an image of the chocolate churners, big steel arms raking back and forth through a pool of cocoa soup, back and forth, churning, cooking, in my stomach, except that the hummus and the olive tapenade and the delicious iced coffee and the salad with ranch on the side were also in the mix.

“You have a ways to go to get the hang of American politeness,” I said, and I said it calmly. There was an edge, but it was a calm edge.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I mean, you could have at least let me know.”

“Thank you for helping me with American politeness. I appreciate. We should go now. We’re late.”

I just looked at him. The waitress whose first day it was came to the table and asked if everything was all right, and Rinpoche put his hand on her arm in a gesture of quintessential politeness and told her he had found the food to be better than a kiss. He had a nice one in his pocket, could he give it to her?

He meant a Hershey’s Kiss, of course, but the young woman had no way of knowing that. She could not keep herself from a slight recoil, a glance over her shoulder at the boss. Was this what she’d signed on for, part of the summer job? Old bald guys in red dresses coming on to her?

She disengaged herself with some graciousness. I made it up to her by leaving a 30-percent tip.

On the highway again I brought the car up to eighty and set the cruise control. Maybe the state police would stop us, and keep us there, stewing, by the side of the road for an hour, so we’d be late for the talk. Write out a ticket for two hundred dollars, which I would send to my sister with a polite note festooned with exclamation points.

Dear Seese,

My wonderful sister, I hope it isn’t any inconvenience for you to pay this ticket that we got speeding to Youngstown to make Rinpoche’s talk on time! It actually came to me to send it to you as we were sitting by the side of the interstate in the heat with the trooper leaning in the window! This should be the last ticket we get, but if there are others, I’ll send them, too. Hope you don’t mind!!!

Love,                   

your brother, Otto

FOURTEEN

By the time
we had crossed into Ohio and were within twenty miles or so of Youngstown, it was clear that, even though we had been going well over the speed limit for ninety minutes, we were going to be more than acceptably late for Rinpoche’s speaking engagement. This bothered me about fifty times more than it apparently bothered him.

I am the kind of person who believes that punctuality is one of the columns on which a peaceful world is set. What happens to a person like me when he’s running late—or when someone else is running late—is that anxiety builds up like water in a clogged sink. Six inches from the lip of the sink. Four inches! An inch! By the time we turned off the interstate south of Youngstown and began making our way north on State Route 7, the water was overflowing. “It’s ten minutes past six,” I said, as we crawled along that cluttered road in a frustrating stop-and-go. And I could hear and feel that my words were being squeezed up through a tight stomach, through a tight mouth, through half a lifetime
of being kept waiting by my beloved and not very punctual wife. “According to this map, we have something like eleven miles to go on this road, and it’s all traffic lights. No one is answering the phone at the place where you’re supposed to speak. We’ll never make it.”

Rinpoche shrugged. By that point I was building up a small dossier of evidence to support my theory that, Rinpoche or not, spiritual master or not, foreigner or not, he was quite an inconsiderate man. I was even beginning to wonder, again, if he was using Cecelia simply to get the land and the house from her, if he was more clever than he seemed, sly, duplicitous, one of these guys who came to America, surveyed the scene, grasped instinctively the depth of our spiritual desperation and naïveté, shaved his head and bought a couple of robes, and started calling himself a guru. I had a whole string of such thoughts going.

“It doesn’t bother you to keep your fans waiting?”

He didn’t answer, engaged, apparently, in studying the urban landscape of Youngstown, Ohio.

And what a landscape! I’ve seen a good piece of America, and traveled, at various points in my life, to Europe, Asia, and Brazil. Twice a month during the school year I volunteer at a literacy center in a very poor part of the Bronx. So it’s not like I’m a stranger to urban decay, or urban blight, or the slums, or whatever other word we like to paste over the raw wound of poverty. But even given all that, the part of Youngstown we saw surprised me. Once we crossed the city line we drove through block after block of boarded-up houses and businesses. Rusted signs, iron grates over the doors of dead nightclubs and bombed-out bars; side streets where it seemed that all the homes on a block—and fairly nice-looking homes they had been at one time—showed
hollowed-out upstairs windows. Bottles and litter strewn about, abandoned bicycle frames, old wet shoes, a knapsack in the gutter. Rinpoche could not stop looking at it, and neither could I.

According to our directions, his talk was to be in a downtown building, right on the main drag. We found it without trouble, but things were hardly better there. You could see that it had been a healthy downtown at one time, with elegant stone buildings and a strip of greenery, mid-street. But now there were clusters of dead and boarded-up businesses, as if some kind of awful epidemic had raced through this part of Ohio—the symptoms being charred siding, torn roofs, gaping windows, sagging and untended porches—and it had reached even the brick and stone downtown and taken a toll there as well.

When, after passing through all this sorrow, we arrived at the address on Cecelia’s letter, there was a beautiful woman about my age standing at the curb in front of an empty parking space, in a posture of apprehensiveness. She was tall and thin, with large, perfectly wonderful eyes, an ankle-length dress, and brown braids that reached almost to her waist. We stepped out of the car and she immediately went up to Rinpoche and bowed, so that the two braids, color of nutmeg and shining as if they’d been polished, fell down on either side of her ears. She straightened up and smiled a smile that reminded me of my sister, and then she took Rinpoche’s hand in both of hers and said how worried she’d been that something terrible had happened. Saying this, she looked at me and tried to hold the smile in place, but I could see that she blamed me for the fact that her teacher was twenty-one minutes late. I said nothing.

She ushered us inside—not an auditorium as I’d expected
but a space that must have been, at one time, in a finer day, a hardware or small grocery store, or a place that sold undergarments to the wives of the iron factory executives before everything went, well, to China. It was empty now, this space, except for eight or ten rows of gray folding chairs set up on a cracked linoleum floor. It was not an overflow crowd: about half the chairs stood empty. There was a somewhat grander-looking chair up front, raised slightly above the floor on a two-foot-high homemade stage—someone had put a fair amount of work into this production. Next to the chair stood a table, and on the table stood a mug and a small teapot. The assembled audience, eighteen or twenty in all, was an all-American mix of white, black, Asian, and Hispanic. Two elderly couples sat in the front row. Behind them, a smattering of what might have been college students, or recent graduates. Then a pair of Yuppies, to use a word I dislike. And then, strangely, two rows of people with the unmistakable mark of poverty on them—cheap clothing, no smiles, an aspect to their posture and expressions that spoke of a hardness, a kind of pain, a weight they lugged through the days. Everyone knows this mark. We can pretend not to for the sake of some false politeness, but everyone knows what it looks like to be poor. And anyone with half a brain can tell the truly poor from the faux poor, the artists in their torn jeans, the college kids in dirty T-shirts. These were the actual poor.