by Bruce Wagner
They met a handful of times. He was an eager student—meditation is popular on Death Row because it dangles the popular out-of-body-experience carrot of astral projection. Kelly began keeping a journal with an eye to writing something for one of the Buddhist magazines, Tricycle or Shambhala Sun. The subscription dharma rags love that shit; growing the sangha in Sing Sing is a perennial. Then she got more ambitious and set her sights on a book. A memoir (dual memoir, actually), part about her, part about Little Ricky. Well, mostly about her, but still, a kind of we’re-all-on-Death-Row type of thing. I thought the framework was immensely compelling: a condemned convict and a middle-aged Berkeley Buddhist engaged in the ol’ impermanence dialogue. Very cool.
I knew it was only a matter of time before she found out the nature of his crime—his crimes. She was making it too much of a thing not to know, which never works. The No! thing never works. I think she was being somewhat naïve. She was naïve, which happens to be her nature. But if she were really serious about writing a book, she’d eventually need to learn. She’d eventually have to ask. Their evolving intimacy alone, so to speak, would force the issue.
As it happened, her caged songbird was a child killer.
Do you remember Polly Klaas, the girl from Petaluma who was kidnapped? Well, Little Ricky was the monster who snatched her. Richard Allen Davis . . . remember him? If you’re from around here, you probably do. You’re certainly old enough.
Can I remind you of the case? Polly Klaas was having a slumber party. Twelve-year-olds. Around eleven at night, Little Ricky waltzes in with a knife and ties up the girls. Polly’s parents were home when it happened, how’s that for survivor guilt? If you’re a mom or a dad, you’ve got to be saying Kill me now. Swoops in and swoops out, Polly under his arm. Classic unthinkable bogeyman shit. Mrs. Klaas didn’t know anything was wrong until the morning, when she came in to see who wanted pancakes.
The weird thing is (in terms of the Winona connection) that Winona Ryder went up there after the murder—I want to say it was ’93—she went up to raise money for a reward. Because that’s where she’s from. Winona’s from Petaluma. And she did, she raised a lot. I want to say the final tally was $350,000. I don’t know the numbers, maybe fifty from the community, three hundred from Winona. Winona was awesome. A very kind thing to do, everyone appreciated it, you know, local girl made good, she didn’t come with a movie star vibe. None whatsoever. It hit her hard, hit everybody hard.
Little Ricky was of that genus of killers who begin their careers by torturing animals. Now imagine what the man-version of that boy would do to a lamb like Polly, a lamb who barely has its fur. A little lamb can certainly bring out the worst in a Little Ricky. A fellow just did the same thing down in Florida to a gal who was a few years younger than Polly. Went right into the house and grabbed her. Took her home and raped her, then wrapped her in garbage bags with her stuffed animal and buried her alive. I think about her. I think about Polly. I think about these things . . . Polly’s with her friends, they’re doing their girl-talk popcorn thing, playing music and dancing—safe. Maybe he punched her head to shut her up as they left the house, she’s under his arm, limbs slow-moving like a drugged crab, his adrenaline’s surging, he’s wasted, invincible, can’t believe he’s pulled this off. Drenched in alcohol, pot and meth, barely feels the lamb-crab moving on his hip, a pirate’s pride and booty—I’ll stop. Not from lack of candor, that’s one thing I’ve never been accused of. It’s more, well, you can’t know how far I go into thinking about these things, of inhabiting that sort of evil, examining it from every angle. Particularly of a child’s. It’s just so unpleasant, Bruce, but that’s how I’m wired. My “lingua franca.” If there’s a terrible place to go, I tend to be there. See, that’s what they did to me. I know it’s dreadful but that’s what I do, I conjure the details because I was killed, right around Polly’s age too. And I’ve had lots of time to think about it, I’m a student of murdered children, I inoculate myself. I know that’s selfish . . . well, the reasons I study them I suppose are two-fold. One is to honor and grieve for them—and honor and grieve for the child I once was before those monsters . . . I suppose another reason I go so deep is to celebrate that I made it through. That I survived. Because I believed for so many years beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’d be killed by those men. That God could not—would not save me. Because it was He who put me in harm’s way.
It was God who was intent on destroying me . . .
And if you’re wondering why Kelly didn’t recognize Richard Allen Davis when they met—I mean, from being in the news—well, her mom got sick right around the time of the abduction, that was when she started flying back east. Massively distracted. Plus, she had to stay out there whole hunks of time to deal with the hospice and the home liquidators, and with her brother. She knew about Polly’s murder—we never spoke much about it—knew from the Learys about the Winona fundraiser. But it all happened during this period of difficulty for her and never really landed on her screen.
He looked as if he was going to continue, but grew quiet. He stared out the window. After what felt like 10 minutes, I quietly left to use the restroom. When I came out, the door was open; was he gone? No—just letting in fresh air.
He smiled at me as he brewed some tea and smoked a roach. I declined his offer.
Pardon my trance.
Needless to say, the crimes and misdemeanors of Little Ricky put a dent in Kelly’s mood. But it was more than a fender bender. It was a full-on karma crash.
Suddenly, she didn’t have the stomach for it—who would? But her pride was tangled up. How could she reconcile the mandate of sharing the Buddha’s teachings, of campaigning for the enlightenment of all beings, with the horror and rage she felt toward the animal that slaughtered Polly Klaas? And what about her project? I know the book was on her mind. She didn’t dare broach it because she didn’t want to sound narcissistic. I know that in her hour of the wolf, my wife still thought the book was essential (which I think it was), not just as an expression of her creativity and development as a Buddhist and a woman but as a tool to work through this terrible dilemma. It seemed to be one of those classic at-a-crossroad crises. You know, what doesn’t kill your practice makes it stronger. But how can I face that monstrous piece of shit? That was her most pressing concern. She couldn’t seem to build a bridge from where she was to where she needed to be, knowing what she knew. So she went back and forth between abandoning the book and resuscitating its high hopes.
Kelly sought counsel from her teacher, who, like most roshis in the Bay Area, was a late-sixtysomething Jew from the East Coast. He said that her work with prisoners was a gift. She wanted him to talk about Richard Allen Davis specifically but he deliberately wouldn’t, invoking all prisoners instead. You know, “the dharma doesn’t come with strings attached.” That was the teaching. I thought it was smug and heartless. To me. No compassion, just bullshit. I’m just saying.
My wife continued her lessons with Davis. She was losing weight, puking before and after she saw him. And Little Ricky knew something was wrong. Kelly said she had a parasite, which made her even more disgusted with herself. That she didn’t have the balls to say something, anything—even Go fuck yourself!—was eating away at her. And Little Ricky was concerned, he was filled with metta, he was genuinely worried about her! He told her to make sure she saw a doctor and maybe she shouldn’t come back until she was better. Finally, she got too sick to handle it. She never returned, not to San Quentin or any of the jails. I remember wishing at the time that she wouldn’t go back to the zendo and that phony roshi either.
I read in People that Polly’s favorite book was Little Women. Winona starred in a film adaptation. It had a dedication to Polly at the end.
To all the murdered Little Women—
The halfway point in her sabbatical had been reached.
Kelly decided that her path was to teach “secular” Buddhism in the schools, lik
e her friend. When she told him she was striking out on her own, Dharmabud said he was thrilled. But I learned through the grapevine that he was stung (don’t get me started on the whole sangha jockeying-for-power thing). My wife was on the rebound from the trauma of San Quentin, a colossal failure in her eyes. Now she had other fish to fry. She knew she was encroaching on Dharmabud’s territory, co-opting his shit, and struck a kind of warrior pose to justify her actions. She walked around the house saying it wasn’t possible for her to step on her friend’s toes, how could teaching the fundamentals of meditation to children be a negative in any way? Her argument kind of boiled down to “this town and the job of enlightening it is big enough for both of us.” Dharmabud did a slow burn. He got mad at her, then mad at himself for being so proprietary—attached—in the first place. His teacher (some other Brooklyn-transplant roshi) told him that an assertion of Self was the cause of his suffering. Hence, Dharmabud redoubled meditation and seva. What a farce! He ended the Impermanence Rocks! tour entirely, so Kelly won by default. She began with farther-away schools, ones that had been overlooked by her mentor because of their geographical inconvenience. Gave her time to gain self-confidence, like Sylvester Stallone in training. Impermanence Rocky!
She ran into an old editor-friend at a party. After a few mysterious meetings in the city, Kelly came home with a bottle of wine and an announcement—she’d been given a $20,000 advance from Chronicle Books for a memoir about being a menopausal, bisexual, Berkeley-bodhisattva. She would write about being adopted. She would write about her cancer (six years in remission). She would write about her affairs. She would write about our son. She wanted to write a lot about our son—what it was like to raise a boy with her gay male partner. She was even screwing up her courage to unravel the nasty Little Ricky experience . . . but she wanted the overarching theme to be Buddhist thought, practice and doctrine. That was where she lived, it was the landscape surrounding the long road that brought her to where she was now: introducing meditation and metta into elementary schools. Kelly wanted to expose herself, warts and all, the trials and tribulations, and the healing. She’d been asked to write a book! She couldn’t believe her good fortune. It was as if the Universe rung a prayer bell, summoning her to put everything on the table for that sacred, invisible tribe—readers.
You go, girl!
Suddenly, I wasn’t in the way anymore.
She was a thousand pounds lighter and the transformation was lovely to behold. Whatever troubles we had, I always wanted my wife to be happy. (I still do, though it’s impossible now.) That was a constant. It was nice too because before the settlement, I was really marinating in my own shit. Waiting for Godot and the call from my attorneys. So any rays of light were welcome.
One night over dinner, Kelly said she needed to reach out to Dharmabud. She’d decided to call her book Impermanence Rocks and wanted his blessing. That came as a surprise because the working title had been Nirvanarama. (Which I rather liked, particularly because of the felicitous Rama pun. An alternate was Divine Mess, which she rejected as “too Bette Midler.”) Kelly claimed that her friend wouldn’t—couldn’t—object. Plus, she contended that by removing the exclamation point she had rejiggered the phrase’s entire meaning. Without the ejaculatory punctuation, it was no longer juvenile. Impermanence Rocks had a plaintive, stately quality to it, nearly ironic, as if reminding that one can be shipwrecked on the shoals of impermanence as surely as anything else. Though she did decide to reinstate the exclamation point for the chapter on how she brought kiddie dharma to a whole new level.
She already had a dedication in mind: “For Stewart [aka Dharmabud], who gave me the match to light the fire.”
Nope—not Buddhist enough . . .
“For Stewart, who brought me to puja.”
Naw. People might think Stewart and I are a couple.
“For Mother, who speaks to me each day from Silence.”
No. Not light enough/too New Age cliché-hokey. And a lie.
“For my teacher, Maurice Epstein Roshi.”
Right, that’s it . . . keep it simple, stupid!
My wife informed the school district that she wouldn’t be returning to her old teaching position. Instead, she asked them to consider appointing her mistress of ceremonies for the oldest established impermanent floating crap game in the Bay Area. The new, improved version now included yoga for the 2nd-grade set.
Get your ya-yas out!
A home-schooled Ryder was the precocious recipient of Mom’s private intensives. He became a kind of proving ground (I guess you could say more of a living laboratory), not just for Impermanence Rocks! but Kelly’s book as well. The whole house was a work-in-progress. We were incredulous at his sophistication in embracing some of Buddhism’s more subtle concepts, and that made my wife think. It was common knowledge that when it came to learning foreign languages, kids left adults in the dust—so why not teach them ethics and empathy? Kelly began to see herself as a promoter of what she believed was a radical new way to educate children in the spiritual realm. Based on whatever Ryder sparked to, she burned CDs of herself narrating Buddhist texts for her toddlers to listen to at the end of class while powering down in savasana. Kelly became the de facto ambassador for the growing “Armies of Awareness,” a phrase she trademarked.
Ryder hung out at the zendo and became a favorite of Kelly’s teacher, who whimsically suggested we might have a tulku on our hands. That’s someone of high rebirth. I never really knew if the teacher was serious but I think Kelly believed he was. Made her prideful. Ryder even “sat” and they just marveled at his focus. He was really coming along, under Kelly’s tutelage. All the women had crushes (and the men too), they absolutely doted over him. He was a gorgeous kid. Handsome. And I have to say pretty amazing because none of it went to his head. For him, it was like swimming or playing the piano, he just took to it. Ryder was what they call a “natural”—I think he could’ve been a big guru when he got older, not the bad kind, but a true teacher, with followers. People would have followed him anywhere, he had an innate charisma. Ryder was one of those rarities, a born leader with a keen mind. And completely book crazy too. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. He went through that period boys do when they read with a flashlight under the covers.
One night I asked what he was reading. It was Songs of the Saints of India, a book Kelly gave him. But on any given night it was a medley of Huckleberry Finn and the Watchmen comic books and even Kelly’s favorite, Chögyam Trungpa—Allen Ginsberg’s and Pema Chödrön’s teacher. He handed it to me. As I flipped through, I saw that he’d made annotations.
“Did you know that to Ram,” he said, “everybody stinks? Ram said they stink like pus from pimples. Or diarrhea from your butt.”
“Nice.”
He laughed.
“But Ram loves us anyway, Daddy! Bodies are smelly, and it doesn’t matter if they’re alive or dead—they stink. Ram said everything was stinky, even honey. Even milk from a sacred cow stinks.”
“Okay. Uhm yeah, right on.”
“Ram said the only thing that made people untouchable was if they couldn’t love.”
As for my wife, she wowed ’em at the schools. Her reputation and minor fame preceded her. Plus, she was now duly certified; she’d acquired some kind of district license that Mr. Unenterprising Woo-Woo Dharmabud never got around to applying for. Which opened more doors because these days you can’t just stroll onto school grounds, not even in Berkeley. Too many issues of liability.
She hatched a scheme to go national. Her plan was to visit school districts all over the country and provide a template of the Armies of Awareness “Compassion Revolution.” At no cost, of course. The economic downturn was in her favor. Cities were so strapped for cash that teachers were paying for crayons and Kleenex out of their own pockets. (That’s still happening.) She’d go into some of those lavatories—they were a disgrace. Hellacious places, toilets c
logged with shit, in shards from vandalism. In order for their kids not to go without, teachers bought juice for homeroom with their own money. They bought glue and glitter for art class, lightbulbs and Scotch tape . . . Jesus. Some of the teachers told Kelly they were doing this back in the ’80s and everything got steadily worse after the lottery was supposedly coming to the rescue. The lottery came and things got worse!
I audited classes at a few of the formerly Dharmabudless start-ups and have to say that Kelly was pretty fucking slick. She soothed the savage Ritalin beasts, made ’em into little bhaktas faster than you could say puff the magic drag queen. The tapped-out, stressed-out educators got a respite in the bargain . . . a little downtime to reboot, before making the next Safeway run for nutritious snacks and yellow Ticonderoga No. 2s.
Kelly figured the memoir would take a few years so in the meantime self-published a Zen children’s book she’d been working on called How It Can Dance! It was filled with quirky koans—“Does an Awfully Messy Room Have the Buddha Nature?”— loved that one—along with Kelly’s distinctively squiggly, faux-naïf illustrations. (I take full credit for sneaking in a poem from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues and an “upside-down” nonsense rhyme by Kabir, the cantankerous saint of Varanasi.) Mom drew Ryder à la Jules Feiffer—she stole from the best—as the prototypical great-grandchild of the Beats, and her sweet, fanciful narrative allowed him to surf from page to page with beginner’s-mind alacrity and charm. He had a blast . . . though again I’m compelled to say that Ryder’s exuberance remained sunny and pure. Not a prideful bone in his body. Don’t get me wrong—all kids like to please their moms but he somehow struck a balance between the scholarly and the Oedipal. I’ve tried to do that all my life and failed! Anyway, I kept a close watch on that heart of mine—one of my duties as househusband, don’t you know—and can proudly attest that our son’s head stayed firmly on his shoulders.
