Dinner with Buddha (16 page)

Twenty

On the way into Leadville we passed a small collection of very modest homes—some were trailers, some not—one of which bore this welcoming sign:
TRESSPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGAIN.

We then passed a molybdenum mine that looked, with its cupola roof and windowless metal walls, like some secret government installation where captured aliens were being held and interrogated.

But I liked Leadville from the first. I liked it, in spite of the fact that either the bouillabaisse or the altitude had turned me into a nauseous, headachy, exhausted sack of miserable metaphoric cells. The highest incorporated municipality in America, at ten thousand feet, Leadville is a mix of miners and ex-miners, outdoorsy types, alternative types, employees of the pricey ski resorts an hour down the interstate, and other assorted unlabelable souls. The main street—another historical district—sports a few blocks of red brick buildings and saloons with a distinctly Old West feel. It was like Deadwood, but harder to get to, less touristy, more real.

We checked into the Delaware Hotel, yours truly feeling so sick that he swallowed his pride and allowed the young man behind the desk to carry his bag to the third-floor room. There were no elevators in the place, no room for elevators, I suppose, because the large lobby and the hallways of the upstairs floors were packed cheek-to-jowl with every imaginable kind of antique, all with price tags. You could have furnished two Bowdoin dormitories with the bureaus and beds, the side tables and mirrors, the elaborately carved chairs and bookshelves, chamber pots, coat racks, and spittoons. When the host showed us the room where breakfast would be served the next morning, I came upon my favorite item, a real confessional, circa 1890, that had space for the priest between a kneeling sinner to either side. An absolute treasure in polished oak. And a steal at $7,950.

I have a soft spot for creaky-floored hotels, and the Delaware certainly fit that description. Rinpoche and I were given two rooms that were linked by a bathroom so narrow you could barely sit on the toilet without pushing your knees through the plaster wall in front of you. The windows, covered with lace curtains, must have been ten feet tall. Rinpoche's side had two queen beds and a smaller sleeping couch. I had a king, and Internet access, and I sat down and wrote Natasha this e-mail:

Hi, Hon. We're in Leadville, CO, where Rinp has a talk tonight and where your old father is suffering mightily from what he hopes is altitude sickness. I barely have the energy to go out to dinner, and that's saying something, as you know. How are you? How are Shels and Seese? Any more action with the gun-toting Chinese? Write soon. Hi to Warren.

Your father who loves you.

I waited a few minutes for a response, and when none was forthcoming, told Rinpoche I had to lie down or I was going to fall down.

“Do the lying-down meditation,” he suggested, and I said that I would. And, indeed, I tried to. Despite the physical malaise, or perhaps motivated by the misery of it, I lay on my back and tried to let my thoughts settle, tried to feel every one of the trillions of cells in the body I thought of as Otto Ringling, tried to send them peace, calm, relaxation, good health. It worked, more or less. I fell into a sickly sleep, at least, and when I awoke half an hour later I felt slightly less terrible and strong enough to want to venture out in search of a meal. Rinpoche was skipping dinner—not an unusual occurrence for him—and said he would like some quiet time before his “speaking.” Could I come and fetch him in two hours or so?

I paced myself going down the slanted stairs and spent a few minutes wandering the lobby. Here's a partial inventory: clocks of every size and description, a giant stuffed Santa, sets of dishes with china cups, the embalmed heads of bighorn sheep, a roll-top desk, old hats, old dresses, umbrellas, jewelry of various kinds, smooth stones, figurines, cut glass, steins, vases, a pewter service, carved canes with rubber tips, cookie jars, rings, pins, knives, candelabra, teapots, and a buffalo head.

I went outside into cold—if beautifully sunlit—mountain air, where afternoon shadows stretched across the main thoroughfare and a range of massive mountains blazed pink and purple to the west. There was a clinic across the side street. I dragged myself up the steps, thinking they might offer a homeopathic remedy for suffering flatlanders, only to discover that it was a medical marijuana dispensary, not yet fully functional. On the other side of the hotel was a fossil shop, with dinosaur tracks in stone. A little farther down the block stood the Golden Burro Café, a place with Sinatra playing on the outdoor speakers and a sign in the window,
COME ON IN—WHAT HAPPENS IN THE BURRO STAYS IN THE BURRO.
I saw taped-up notices for psychic readings, and for a hundred-mile running race, and such was the state of my thinking that I was sorely tempted to sign up for both. Just beyond the north end of the commercial strip stood a neighborhood of Victorian houses, some of them in good repair, some not. In front of one house stood a cairn as tall as I am, with something written in white paint on every rock:
DIVINE QUANTUM ENERGY. CLEAN CONSCIENCE.
On a side street I passed a stretch of homes built very close together, some of them covered in decorative shingles. There were joggers and cyclers everywhere, which only made me feel more tired, hungry, and miserable. There was the SpiritWay Reiki Wellness Center in a brick building on the corner that bore a sign saying
BABY DOE TABOR LIVED HERE.
I felt that I should have known who she was. There were bumper stickers—the only ones I'd seen out West—
DRILL IN THE VALLEY? FRACK NO!
and
THIS IS OUR SACRED LAND.
One that was a simple circle with
P
b in the center; another reading,
LEADVILLE, WE'RE HERE BECAUSE WE'RE NOT ALL THERE.

Slowly, slowly, pushing hard at the boundaries of my endurance and will, I looped back around to the main drag, past the Kum and Go variety store (where I bought a
Wall Street Journal
and where the clerk told me that the houses on the side streets had been built close together in order to “share warmth and protect each other from the wind”). I went along an old worn wooden sidewalk in front of the Silver Dollar Saloon, 1879. There were nice brick buildings, five stories, including the Tabor Opera House, which must have had some connection to Baby Doe.

How, I asked myself, could you not love Leadville?

It's entirely possible that, suffering as I was from the thin air, enduring a kind of nonalcoholic drunken exhaustion, I was not running, as we used to say, on all cylinders. I believe the physical malaise had knocked me out of the moderately sane mode in which I usually operate. I was compromised, in other words, about to exhibit poor judgment, battered by physiological forces that would have softened up the most stolid of men. In short, I am making excuses for what I did next.

There, on a side street, stood a handful of small wooden houses in a row. I saw a sign:
PSYCHIC READINGS. PALM. TAROT. PAST-LIFE REGRESSIONS. CRYSTAL HEALING.
Naturally enough—more excuses here—having had a beloved sister whose ramshackle New Jersey home once boasted a similar advertisement out front, I was curious. I made a small detour in order, I told myself, to examine the operation at closer range. A part of me—not the best part—wanted to see what kind of house a high-altitude past-life regressor lived in. That same part of me, crazed by weariness and tormented by wavelets of nausea, half hoped to spy a wild-haired woman sitting in a front window, to see the porch lined with voodoo dolls, its railings draped with beads, its ceiling marked with so-called sacred signs. In other words, one precinct of my brain—bitter, injured, persistent—one nasty little piece of the old me, the piece that had somehow survived years of meditation and the company of holy men, wanted some fuel for the fire of mockery.

The idea was to walk past in a nonchalant way and catch a glimpse of something or someone that would buttress my feelings of superiority to the fleecy souls that believed in things like past-life regression.

Thirteen-year-old Otto, alive and well and still trying to reduce his younger sister to some kind of flake.

Naturally then—this must be the way the universe cures us—just as I was going past, a long-haired fellow stepped out onto the porch to take in a few breaths of mountain air. He was slightly built, with dark brown hair copied from paintings of the imagined Jesus: It cascaded onto his shoulders. He was dressed in jeans, work boots, and a T-shirt, and around his neck he wore a pendant that looked, at first glance, like one of the hats worn by New York Yankees baseball players. Perhaps it was that detail that made me offer him a greeting.

“How goes it?” I said, not slowing down.

“I see the high air's got you,” he replied. He had his hands on his hips, his chin was tilted up slightly, his small shoulders thrown back in a posture almost military. “You have the aura of a lowlander out of his element.”

I stopped. To rest, perhaps. “I hope that's what it is. I feel like dirt.”

“Not a local, I take it.”

“New York.”

He grasped the Yankees pendant—strange thing for a psychic to be wearing—and held it out toward me on its chain. “Not a Mets fan, I hope.”

“Never!”

The man flashed a huge grin, a toothy, oversized display that had enough wacko potential to start me walking again.

“Hey, come on in for a reading,” he said genially. “I'll give you a quick one. Free for Yankees fans. I don't have anyone scheduled for another hour. Come on. I see something hovering around you, some grief or something. Ten minutes and I'll clear it all up for ya.”

I'm the kind of man who does not like being invited into strangers' homes, even if they are friendly strangers, outgoing, and too small-built to do me any physical harm. I like boundaries, social regulations, a polite distance between bodies. Our visit with Edie and her trio of magnificent men had done nothing to change me in that respect. And yet—here I find myself out of excuses—something made me turn and walk up the path and then up the sagging wooden steps of his porch. With the distance of some months I wonder now if it might just have been that I wanted to be finished with the nasty little thirteen-year-old that still whispered to me. Finished with mockery and superiority. Finished, once and for all, with any desire to diminish my good sister (who, in any case, seemed to have given up her regressing and readings).

In my weakened state, climbing the wooden steps was the equivalent of a half marathon. If I made it, I'd be allowed to put one of those 13.1 stickers on the back of my car. Huffing and puffing, I shifted the folded newspaper to my left hand, held out my right, and said, “Otto Ringling,” and I was comforted just a bit that there weren't any circus jokes, and that the man did, in fact, shake hands rather than trying for an embrace.

“Joe John Jones,” he said, and I returned the favor of not commenting on the name.

Joe John ran his eyes over my face for just a moment, then pinched up the muscles to the sides of his mouth and said, “What are you, a Jeter guy? Rodriguez? Torre? Clemens?”

“Just a general fan,” I said. “I grew up in North Dakota and moved to Manhattan and that was all she wrote.”

He laughed and led the way inside. The house was touched with the smallest bit of mustiness, and I sensed immediately, via my own strange psychic powers, that Joe John lived alone. Just to the right of the foyer was a square room with a fold-up card table exactly in its center. On the walls hung drawings, photos, and various artifacts that seemed to include every known religious tradition from Abraham to the New Age. A framed needlepoint yin and yang symbol made a particular impression.

Joe John motioned for me to sit at the table. He sat opposite and began staring at me. I did not like this. His eyes were a peculiar cinnamon brown, as oversized as his smile had been, his face sharply boned, forehead high. Perhaps there was some American Indian blood there but, whatever his ancestry, there was suddenly a bizarre intensity to him that had not been in evidence on the porch.

“I see,” he said, “some large-scale pain lingering on you.”

Wanting, at that point, to go along with whatever he said, offer payment, and then make a quick exit, I started to speak. Joe John held up one hand.

“No, don't say anything, please. It's too easy for the fakers to take what a client says, twist it a little, and make it seem like a true reading. Don't speak, please. And try not to react, facially. Just let me say my little piece here and I'll let you go. I see the pain, yes. Death, illness, some kind of failure or perceived failure or some kind of unworthiness that you should let go of, man. I see that you've done something big in your life, spiritually big, but you're not a churchgoer.” He blinked, held his eyes closed for a moment, then opened them again and leaned one inch closer.

“Hah,” he said. “I thought for a minute that it was a personal pain but now I see that it isn't. This is bigger than just you, man. This is . . .” he closed his eyes and let out a dramatic breath, “this is about something
historical.
You have a wife, or a significant other of some sort, a sister, maybe, and you and this woman are together in this life because you died together in a previous one. I'm seeing Jewish. A Jewish star. Either you have a lot of Jewish friends or you grew up in a Jewish family, or this person and you were Jewish in this past life. There was something unfinished about that death, that passing over. It was part of something larger. A war. It was part of a war. You were in a war together and you died, and then you decided to incarnate as a couple, or maybe related at least. But there's some old karma left over at the place where you died, a communal karma. That was the pain I saw. Italy, maybe, or Germany. You keep carrying it and it's going to bring some disease onto you. That's the way things work. I see a stain, a karmic smudge, on that place. You and your friend, you're supposed to do something to remove it or soften it or something.” Another big breath, and then the eyes opened again and stayed on me, blinking now, not as intense. I was nodding in what I hoped was an agreeable manner. “That's all, man. That's all I'm getting today but you're . . . well, there's something cool about you, spiritually. A little more work to do but, you know, I think things are gonna be all right.”