Zen and the Art of Faking It

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  I felt like explaining to her that I didn’t really want to become an expert on this stuff, that I was just shooting for superficial and phony knowledge, but I thought she might take that the wrong way. So I stood there and sweated as the books piled up higher than my chin. Then Mildred looked down at me and said, “Well, that’s a start.”

  A start? Yikes! My shoulders felt like they were ripping off my body. At this rate, the scene at the finish would be Mildred and me staring down in horror at my detached arms atop a pile of gory books as jets of bright arterial blood spurted from my shoulder sockets all over the drab carpet.

  Well, that would establish my uniqueness at school, for sure.

  Stumpy, the Boy Buddha. It had a nice ring, I suppose. I staggered behind Mildred to the checkout desk and barely managed to get my heap o’ Zen onto the counter. Mildred looked at me expectantly, and then asked for my library card—the one I’d told her I had.

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t have one for this particular library, exactly.”

  “And to which library exactly DO you possess a card?”

  “Umm, San Jose, California.”

  Mildred raised an eyebrow. “But you do live here in town, right?”

  “Yes, I just haven’t had a chance to get a card yet.”

  “And how old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  The brow shot up again.

  “I mean, I’ll be fifteen. So I’m fourteen. Fourteen.”

  She sighed. “I wish you had been honest with me before you dragged me all over Creation hunting down all these books, young man. Now I’m going to have to put them all back in their places, because you’ll need to come in with a parent in order to get a card.”

  Well, this was a problem. How was I supposed to become a convincing Zen poser by tomorrow without the books? “Isn’t there any way I could get a temporary card and just take out a few books? Please?”

  She looked pained. “I suppose for a student of Mr. Dowd’s, I can work something out. What if I get all of your information now, and we leave the application and these books behind the counter? We have a twenty-four-hour reserve policy. Then you can come with a parent tomorrow and get them.”

  By now, there was a line of people waiting for me to check out. I felt like they were all glaring at me. Because, well, they were. I could feel the cold trickles of sweat running down the back of my neck as Mildred waved everyone around me.

  “OK, but can I please take out just one or two now? I’ll, uh, I’ll leave you my social studies book as a hostage.”

  “It wouldn’t be a ‘hostage,’ young man. I believe the word you’re looking for is ‘collateral.’ But that won’t be necessary. Even though you have not been one hundred percent honest with me so far, I have a good feeling about you. And you are researching one of my all-time favorite subjects. So, you may take two of these books—but I get to choose which two you take. And you have to promise to read at least one of them tonight. All right?”

  I agreed, and Mildred started sorting the books into several piles. Then she handed me a very fat book and a very thin book. The fat book was called The Zen Garden, and the thin one was called Sitting Zen: Meditation in Practice. I thanked her and apologized, and thanked her again. I also pledged to read one of the books. I would have given her a pint of blood if she’d asked for it. I had to get pretend-enlightened, and fast; Mildred was my new hero, bony hands and all.

  As I shoved the books into my bag and headed out, I took one last look back over my shoulder. Amanda the Hot Library Comedienne had magically appeared again, and was leaning over and stacking my books on the Reserve shelf behind the counter. I’d be back. The library was way more interesting than I’d imagined.

  Sadly, so was my arrival back home. My mom was home from her job as a nurse at the hospital and refused to believe I’d really spent several hours at the library without her having dragged me there and nailed my feet to the floor of a carrel. I explained the whole thing to her. Well, except the Woody research part. And the hottie librarian bit. And the thing with my totally fabricated new personal identity. But the woman was just naturally suspicious, which was peculiar since her keen detective sense hadn’t stopped her from marrying a compulsive liar psycho like my dad.

  This was an extra-intense interrogation session too, because I’d missed Psycho Dad’s call. She started in with a whole lecture: “You should have been here, Sanny (Yuck! She truly does call me that…). Your father can only make the one call a week, and it costs a fortune. Now he has to wait all week again to hear his son’s voice. He’s dying to know how you’re adjusting to your new environment.”

  I hoped he was enjoying the bread and water in his new environment, the sleazebag.

  “But, Mom, I was ‘adjusting to my new environment’ by studying. The kids here are way more advanced than the kids were in Houston.”

  She squinted at me, like her special brainwave-vision would reveal the truth behind my library excursion. “Really?”

  This was, in fact, the truth. Plankton were more advanced than the kids in our subdivision outside of Houston. When I’d been there, some extremist preacher had declared our suburb an “Evolution-Free Zone.” I thought he was declaring the obvious, about a million years too late. The only thinking adult in the whole burg was Mrs. Brown, but one great social studies teacher wasn’t enough to drag a whole town kicking and screaming into the age of standing totally upright and speaking in sentences.

  “Yeah, really. And I want to make a good impression here.” Again, totally truthful. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to read an entire book on Zen Buddhism before bed.” This was yet another accurate statement, although I didn’t tell her I’d be reading a short book on Zen Buddhism before bed. What kind of lame-o teenage boy would pick a long book about gardening over a short book on sitting? Sheesh, I sat all freakin’ day at school, and I used to sit even longer after school before we’d been forced to sell off my Game Boy and the family Xbox. I had a feeling a book on sitting would be playing to my strengths.

  She let me go, even though I could tell she was just bursting to ask me another ninety or so questions about my second day in the “new environment.” Invoking schoolwork is a powerful parent-repellant tool; you just have to use it sparingly so that you’re not forced to perform too much actual schoolwork.

  In my room, I plunked down on my narrow and saggy bed, taking a split second to mourn the memory of my old extra-wide waterbed from California. Then I took another second to grieve over my pawned iPod: “O iPod! Pod that you were! I have lost you! Gone is the smooth pinch of your earpiece. Farewell, my faithful dispenser of noiseful bliss!” Et cetera.

  I’m a great procrastinator, or at least I’d always prided myself on being one until this fateful moment. I opened the Sitting Zen book, and entered into whole new worlds of procrastinational mastery. These Zen guys were good—they had turned sitting and emptying their minds of all conscious thought into a religion! They spent years sitting together in monasteries. People actually got paid room-and-board to sit, sometimes for their entire adult lives. And all this time, I’d been doing it strictly on a volunteer basis.

  Well, now it was time for this amateur to go pro.

  sitting master, freezing rock

  I got to school early the next morning, so the weak winter sun was just beginning to peek over a line of storefronts and onto the big lawn across the street from the school building as I found my sitting spot. It had to be conspicuous, but not too conspicuous. My dad had always told me, “Don’t look like you’re trying. The best actors never look like they’re trying.”

  And I had to admit, right up until that bad day in Texas, my dad’s acting skills had been a hit wherever we went.

  So I found a big, flat rock under a leafless, snowy tree directly across from the school’s front walkway and sat zazen. That’s the posture you always see in karate movies, where the guy’s legs are crossed over each other so that each foot rests on the opposite thigh and th
e hands fold over each other to make a little oval between the thumbs and the edges of the palms—kind of like he’s pouring a small, invisible cup of water forward over his ankles. I was facing sideways so that the arriving students would see me in profile, at a distance, silhouetted in front of the rising sun.

  Maybe I should be a movie director when I grow up.

  I had about twenty minutes to kill before everybody started pulling in, so I swayed back and forth until I was comfortable like the Sitting Zen book said you’re supposed to. Then I tried to breathe deeply and evenly until I forgot about breathing. Do you know how hard that is? I tried counting breaths, then I tried NOT counting breaths. But when you’re purposely NOT counting, your brain wants to count.

  It crossed my mind that if the goal of sitting zazen was to forget about all conscious thought and just be, counting and purposely not counting were equally counterproductive. It also crossed my mind that the followers of Zen might not be enlightened; maybe they were just really, really sleepy.

  After a while I did manage to stop thinking about breathing by a clever trick: I concentrated on feeling all the individual molecules of my butt freezing solid, one by one. When my whole butt was completely numb—and I mean novocaine numb—I focused on the numbness. But numbness isn’t the same as not thinking; it’s just thinking about how you have no feeling in your tushy.

  Just when I thought my whole backside might actually crack off and tumble away from my body in a solid block, Woody popped into my peripheral vision. She was getting out of a minivan in front of the school. Jones popped out right behind her. She must have seen me, although I couldn’t turn my neck to look without blowing the whole pose. Then she started walking my way. So did Jones. Yikes!

  Wait. I was way too Zen—or at least too numb—to say “Yikes!” I was in the zone, or at least I was supposed to be. Let the boy-mountain come to me.

  Woody stepped right in front of me, guitar case in one gloved hand. Jones was wearing gloves too. Ha! I spit on gloves. Gloves are for those who have not mastered their inner soul force. Or for those whose moms have money—one or the other. Woody gently laid the case down on the ice-crusted grass, and said, “Good morning, San! How are you today? You were amazing in class yesterday. I can’t believe how much you know about Buddhism!”

  “Neither can I,” I replied.

  She giggled, and Jones grimaced. “So, uh, Peter and I were wondering: What are you doing?”

  Ah, it was time for the Zen Show. “Sitting.”

  “But why?”

  “The sun is up.”

  “What?”

  Half grin maneuver: activated. “I like the morning.”

  Jones—Peter Jones—said, “I like the morning too, but you don’t see me squatting on a rock. I mean, no offense, but what’s the point?”

  “Sitting.”

  Jones was getting frustrated. Goo-ood. “Well, what were you thinking about?”

  “I was thinking about not thinking.”

  I smiled warmly—well, frozenly, but with happy emotion—at Woody. She blew her bangs away from her face—I loved that—and said, “How do you think about not thinking?”

  “Without thinking.”

  Peter Jones rolled his eyes behind Woody’s back, and said to her, “Come on, we don’t have time for this. We’re going to be late. Are you coming, Buddha?”

  Woody said, “We’ll be in in a minute, Peter. I want to talk with San for a minute.”

  Peter didn’t move, although I think his jaw clenched up.

  Woody looked at him with slight scorn: “Alone, Peter.” Oh, yeah, baby. That’s what I’m talking about. Go, Buddha Boy!

  Peter stomped away, kicking up little puffs of sparkling frost. Woody locked eyes with me. “You’re so…different from everybody else here.”

  “How do you know? We’ve only known each other for a day.”

  She nodded her head toward the crowd that was slowly filtering its way into the two main doors of the building. “Look at them. They’re sheep. Small-town sheep!”

  Bitterness was not the way to enlightenment. I think I had heard that on a beer commercial once. It was a pretty clever commercial. “Woody, I have only one answer to that.”

  “What?”

  “Baaaaaaaa!”

  She looked puzzled, then smiled. “See? You’re just so—I don’t know—real. Now let’s go to school!”

  I tried to get up, but my butt was both frozen and asleep. I was thinking, If it’s frozen, how can I tell it’s asleep? And yet, if it’s asleep, how can I tell it’s frozen? Hey, that’s a Zen riddle! I am getting GOOD! But seriously, I think I am stuck here. I cannot move! I half smiled half-dazzlingly at Woody and said, “Woody, would you mind helping me up?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Why else are we put here on this miserable spinning mudball if not to help each other up?”

  See why I loved her? See?

  She grabbed my right hand and pulled me gently, yet with some oomph, down from the rock. I slid forward and somehow managed to unfold my legs just enough to get them under me so that I only crashed into her a little. “Zen,” I gasped through the riot of pins and needles that was suddenly wreaking havoc throughout my lower body, “is not for the faint of heart.”

  “Neither am I,” she purred, and into the school we went. Not a bad start for Day Three, right?

  the right path

  In English class, the teacher put this quote on the board for journal time: PARENTS CAN ONLY GIVE GOOD ADVICE OR PUT THEM ON THE RIGHT PATH, BUT THE FINAL FORMING OF A PERSON’S CHARACTER LIES IN THEIR OWN HANDS.—ANNE FRANK. As usual, we were supposed to spend fifteen minutes jotting down our deep and cosmic thoughts about the quote while the teacher checked her deep and cosmic e-mail.

  What was I supposed to write about this one? My dad didn’t give good advice, he gave evil advice. And my mom gave good advice, but she had wound up as a poor single parent with a felon for a husband, so how much wisdom was I supposed to get from her? And finally, how was I going to form my own character when my role models were total crashing failures? I remember this one time in Alabama, my dad and I were grocery shopping and the cashier was this really nice teenage girl that had always been kind to me. I used to steer our cart to her line every time, because she sometimes even gave me a lollipop. Anyway, my dad let me pay, and she accidentally gave me change for a twenty when I’d given her a five. I realized the mistake when I counted out the fifteen extra bucks in the parking lot, and asked my dad if I could run back in and give the money back. My dad said, “Are you kidding me, Sanny? People are dishonest, and they’ll screw you nine times out of ten. So when you get a break, you take it. You don’t owe anybody anything.” I asked what would happen to the cashier when she didn’t have the right amount of money at the end of the day. He said, “What do we care? She was probably dipping into the till anyway. They all are. And if the boss does ask about it, she’ll bat her pretty little eyelashes and they’ll forgive her. Because people are chumps.” I thought about it all the way home, and turned to look out the window so my dad wouldn’t see me cry. The next time we went to that store, there was a new cashier. And no lollipop.

  “People are chumps. They’ll screw you nine times out of ten.” My dad was like a satanic Doctor Phil. My mom was the warm one, like Oprah. She was always saying, “You have to give people a chance.” When my dad first got busted, she was like, “It’s a mistake. Your father is innocent. You’ll see. Your dad isn’t the type of person who would cheat anybody. We’ll get this cleared up in no time.” I was thinking, Mom, are you nuts? Dad is exactly the type of person who would cheat everybody. He lies just for fun. Throughout the horrible pretrial period, when Mom had to work double nursing shifts at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, and we still had to sell off almost everything we owned just to pay for the hotshot lawyer dad insisted on, Mom said it was all a mistake. When the trial began and witnesses started flying in from all the places we’d lived with hundreds of pages of evidence—that my dad h
ad sold fake title insurance in Alabama, performed home inspections without a license in California, sold spoiled meat to restaurants off the back of a truck in Dallas while he was supposed to be away for the weekend at a Bible retreat—Mom said it was just a series of misunderstandings. Until the police actually came and padlocked our apartment door shut with my cat, Sparky, inside, Mom insisted everything would be OK. But we lost everything. Dad went to prison until at least my twentieth birthday, I never saw Sparky again, and Mom and I wound up in Nowheresville, Pennsylvania, for no apparent reason.

  I guess I could have written all of that into journal form, but it might have cast some doubt on my whole Zen image. So instead I wrote:

  This quote by Anne Frank is definitely true. According to the traditions of my heritage, karma, or the luck you put into the world through your own actions, is the only thing that determines your fate in this or future lifetimes. So even though my father, for example, might tell me to be kind to those who are less fortunate than I am, ultimately I can do whatever I want with that advice. And then I will have to carry around the results of my actions pretty much forever. Also, a great Zen thinker named Yamada Roshi said, “The purpose of Zen is the perfection of character.” And if your parents’ values just automatically made you a good person, nobody would need to meditate in order to perfect his own character. As Basho said, “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the masters. Seek what they sought.” You need to find your own way in the world.

  English Teacher stood behind me for a while when I’d finished writing, then leaned across me and wrote, THOUGHTFUL ENTRY. KEEP IT UP! under my last sentence. I must say, you can learn a lot from a short little book. I was now looking smart in two different classes. And I could even feel parts of my legs again.

  At lunch, Woody only played one song on the guitar before packing up. Then she came over to sit with me at my little leper table. “Hey, San. Are you defrosted yet?”