Life of Buddha

by Lucius Shepard

  Life of Buddha

  Lucius Shepard

  Shepard disgorges ideas like a drunk or a junkie, streams of images described in visceral prose that essentially numb you to their force. An anaesthetic effect is present in stories like "Life of Buddha" (1988), in which a heroin addict provokes the transmutation of a male transsexual into a perfect woman. Shepard's characters crave freedom and transformation; the narratives over-reach and become baroque in their pursuit of it, and so lose some of their power. They express the central paradox of Shepard's work: his acceptance and celebration of claustrophobia and the "feeling of stricture" (as in "Griaule"), and his desperate raging against it.

  Lucius Shepard

  Life of Buddha

  Whenever the cops scheduled a raid on the shooting gallery to collect their protection money, old cotton-headed Pete Mason, who ran the place, would give Buddha the day off. Buddha rarely said a word to anyone, and Pete had learned that cops were offended by silence. If you didn’t scream and run when they busted in, if like Buddha you just sat there and stared at them, they figured you were concealing a superior attitude, and they then tended to get inside your head.

  They had beaten Buddha half to death a couple of times for this very reason, and while Buddha hadn’t complained (he never complained about anything), Pete did not want to risk losing such a faithful employee. So on the night prior to the September raid, Pete went downstairs to where Buddha was nodding on a stained mattress by the front door and said, “Why don’t you hang out over at Taboo’s place tomorrow? Police is comin’ ‘round to do they thang.”

  Buddha shook himself out of his nod and said, “Talked to him already. Johnny Wardell’s gon’ be over sometime makin’ a buy, but he say to come ahead anyway.” He was a squat black man in his late thirties, his head stone bald, with sleepy heavy-lidded eyes and the beginning of jowls; he was wearing chinos stippled with blood from his last fix, and a too-small T-shirt that showed every tuck and billow of his round belly and womanly breasts. Sitting there, he looked like a Buddha carved from ebony that somebody had outfitted with Salvation Army clothes, and that was why Pete had given him the name. His real name was Richard Damon, but he wouldn’t respond to it anymore. Buddha suited him just fine.

  “Beats me why Taboo wanna do business with Johnny Wardell,” Pete said, hitching his pants up over his ample stomach. “Sooner or later Wardell he be gettin’ crazy all over a faggot like Taboo…y’know?”

  Buddha grunted, scratched the tracks on his wrist, and gazed out the window beside the front door. He knew Pete was trying to draw him into a conversation, and he had no intention of letting himself be drawn. It wasn’t that he disliked Pete; he liked him as much as anyone. He simply had no opinions he wanted to share; he had cultivated this lack of opinion, and he had found that the more he talked, the more opinions came to mind.

  “You tell Taboo from me,” Pete went on, “I been livin’ in Detroit more’n sixty years, and I done business wit’ a lotta bad dogs, but I ain’t never met one meaner than Wardell. You tell him he better watch his behavior, y’understan’?”

  “Awright.”

  “Well…” Pete turned and with a laborious gait, dragging his bad leg, mounted the stairs. “You come on up ‘round two and get your goodnighter. I’ll cut ya out a spoon of China White.”

  “ ‘Preciate it,” said Buddha.

  As soon as Pete was out of sight, Buddha lay down and stared at the flaking grayish-white paint of the ceiling. He picked a sliver of paint from the wall and crumbled it between his fingers. Then he ran the back of his hand along the worn nap of the runner that covered the hallway floor. All as if to reassure himself of the familiar surroundings. He had spent the best part of fifteen years as Pete’s watchdog, lying on the same mattress, staring at that same dried-up paint, caressing that same runner. Before taking up residence on the mattress, he had been a young man with a fixture. Everybody had said, “That Richard Damon, he’s gon’ be headlines, he’s gon’ be Live at Five, he’s gon’ be People magazine.” Not that he had started out different from his peers. He’d been into a little dealing, a little numbers, a little of whatever would pay him for doing nothing. But he’d been smarter than most and had kept his record clean, and when he told people he had his eye on the political arena, nobody laughed. They could see he had the stuff to make it. The trouble was, though, he had been so full of himself, so taken with his smarts and his fine clothes and his way with the ladies, he had destroyed the only two people who had cared about him. Destroyed them without noticing. Worried his mama into an early grave, driven his wife to suicide. For a while after they had died, he’d gone on as always, but then he’d come up against guilt.

  He hadn’t known then what that word guilt meant; but he had since learned its meaning to the bone. Guilt started out as a minor irritation no worse than a case of heartburn and grew into a pain with claws that tore out your guts and hollowed your heart. Guilt made you sweat for no reason, jump at the least noise, look behind you in every dark place. Guilt kept you from sleeping, and when you did manage to drop off, it sent you dreams about your dead, dreams so strong they began to invade your waking moments. Guilt was a monster against which the only defense was oblivion… Once he had discovered that truth, he had sought oblivion with the fervor of a converted sinner.

  He had tried to kill himself but had not been able to muster the necessary courage and instead had turned to drugs. To heroin and the mattress in the shooting gallery. And there he had discovered another truth: that this life was in itself a kind of oblivion, that it was carving him slow and simple, emptying him of dreams and memories. And of guilt.

  The porch steps creaked under someone’s weight. Buddha peered out the window just as a knock sounded at the door. It was Marlene, one of the hookers who worked out of Daily’s Show Bar down the block: a pretty cocoa-skinned girl carrying an overnight bag, her breasts hushed up by a tight bra.

  Her pimp-a long-haired white kid-was standing on a lower step. Buddha opened the door, and they brushed past him. “Pete ‘round?” Marlene asked.

  Buddha pointed up the stairs and shut the door. The white kid grinned, whispered to Marlene, and she laughed. “John think you look like you could use some lovin’,” she said. “What say you come on up, and I’ll give you a sweet ride for free?” She chucked him under the chin. “How that sound, Buddha?”

  He remained silent, denying desire and humiliation, practicing being the nothing she perceived. He had become perfect at ignoring ridicule, but desire was still a problem: the plump upper slopes of her breasts gleamed with sweat and looked full of juice. She turned away, apparently ashamed of having teased him.

  “Take it easy now, Buddha,” she said with studied indifference, and hand-led the white kid up the stairs.

  Buddha plucked at a frayed thread on the mattress. He knew the history of its every stain, its every rip. Knew them so thoroughly that the knowledge was no longer something he could say: it was part of him, and he was part of it. He and the mattress had become a unity of place and purpose. He wished he could risk going to sleep, but it was Friday night, and there would be too many customers, too many interruptions. He fixed his gaze on the tarnished brass doorknob, let it blur until it became a greenish-gold sun spinning within a misty corona. Watched it whirl around and around, growing brighter and brighter. Correspondingly his thoughts spun and brightened, becoming less thoughts than reflections of the inconstant light. And thus did Buddha pass the middle hours of the night.

  * * * *

  At two o’clock Buddha double-bolted the door and went upstairs for his goodnighter. He walked slowly along the corridor, scuffing the threadbare carpet, its pattern eroded into grimy darkness and worm trails of murky gold. Laughter and tinny music came fr
om behind closed doors, seeming to share the staleness of the cooking odors that pervaded the house. A group of customers had gathered by Pete’s door, and Buddha stopped beside them. Somebody else wandered up, asked what was happening, and was told that Pete was having trouble getting a vein. Marlene was going to hit him up in the neck. Pete’s raspy voice issued from the room, saying, “Damn it! Hurry up, woman!”

  Getting a vein was a frequent problem for Pete; the big veins in his arms were burned-out, and the rest weren’t much better. Buddha peered over shoulders into the room. Pete was lying in bed, on sheets so dirty they appeared to have a design of dark clouds. His freckly brown skin was suffused by a chalky pallor. Three young men-one of them Marlene’s pimp-were gathered around him, murmuring comforts. On the night table a lamp with a ruffled shade cast a buttery yellow light, giving shadows to the strips of linoleum peeling up from the floor.

  Marlene came out of the bathroom, wearing an emerald-green robe. When she leaned over Pete, the halves of the robe fell apart, and her breasts hung free, catching a shine from the lamp. The needle in her hand showed a sparkle on its tip. She swabbed Pete’s neck with a clump of cotton and held the needle poised an inch or two away.

  The heaviness of the light, the tableau of figures around the bed, Marlene’s gleaming skin, the wrong-looking shadows on the floor, too sharp to be real: taken all together, these things had the same richness and artful composition, the same important stillness, as an old painting that Buddha had once seen in the Museum of Art. He liked the idea that such beauty could exist in this ruinous house, that the sad souls therein could become even this much of a unity. But he rejected his pleasure in the sight, as was his habit with almost every pleasure.

  Pete groaned and twisted about. “Stop that shit!” Marlene snapped. “Want me to bleed you dry?”

  Other people closed in around the bed, blocking Buddha’s view. Pete’s voice dropped to a whisper, instructing Marlene. Then people began moving away from the bed, revealing Pete lying on his back, holding a bloody Kleenex to the side of his neck. Buddha spotted his goodnighter on the dresser: a needle resting on a mirror beside a tiny heap of white powder.

  “How you doin?” Pete asked weakly as Buddha walked in.

  He returned a diffident wave, went over to the dresser, and inspected the powder: it looked like a nice dose. He lifted the mirror and headed off downstairs to cook up.

  “Goddamn!” said Pete. “Fifteen years I been takin’ care of you. Feedin’ your Jones, buyin’ your supper. Think we’d have a relationship by now.” His tone grew even more irascible. “I should never have give you that damn name! Got you thinkin’ you inscrutable, when all you is is ignorant!”

  * * * *

  Nodding on his mattress in the moonlit dark, feeling the rosy glow of the fix in his heart, the pure flotation of China White in his flesh, Buddha experienced little flash dreams: bizarre images that materialized and faded so quickly, he was unable to categorize them. After these had passed he lay down, covered himself with a blanket, and concentrated upon his dream of Africa, the one pleasure he allowed himself to nourish. His conception of Africa bore no relation to the ethnic revival of the sixties, to Afros and dashikis, except that otherwise he might have had no cognizance of the Dark Continent. Buddha’s African kingdom was a fantasy derived from images in old movies, color layouts in National Geographic, from drugs and drugged visions of Nirvana as a theme park. He was not always able to summon the dream, but that night he felt disconnected from all his crimes and passionate failures, stainless and empty, and thus worthy of this guardian bliss. He closed his eyes, then squeezed his eyelids tight until golden pinpricks flowered in the blackness. Those pinpricks expanded and opened into Africa.

  He was flowing like wind across a tawny plain, a plain familiar from many such crossings. Tall grasses swayed with his passage, antelope started up, and the gamy smell of lions was in the air. The grasslands evolved into a veld dotted with scum-coated ponds and crooked trees with scant pale foliage. Black stick figures leaped from cover and menaced him with spears, guarding a collage peopled by storytellers and long-legged women who wore one-eyed white masks and whose shadows danced when they walked. Smoke plumed from wart-shaped thatched huts and turned into music; voices spoke from cooking fires. Beyond the village stood green mountains that rose into the clouds, and there among the orchids and ferns were the secret kingdoms of the gorillas. And beyond the mountains lay a vast blue lake, its far reaches fringed by shifting veils of mist in whose folds miragelike images materialized and faded.

  Buddha had never penetrated the mists: there was something ominous about their unstable borders and the ghostly whiteness they enclosed. At the center of the lake a fish floated halfway between the surface and the bottom, like the single thought of a liquid brain. Knowing that he must soon face the stresses of the outside world, Buddha needed the solace offered by the fish; he sank beneath the waters until he came face-to-face with it, floating a few inches away.

  The fish resembled a carp and measured three feet from its head to its tail; its overlapping scales were a muddy brown, and its face was the mask of a lugubrious god, with huge golden eyes and a fleshy down-turned mouth. It seemed to be regarding Buddha sadly, registering him as another of life’s disappointments, a subject with which it was quite familiar, for its swollen belly encaged all the evil and heartache to the world, both in principle and reality. Buddha gazed into its eyes, and the pupils expanded into black funnels that connected with his own pupils, opening channels along which torrents of grief and fear began to flow. The deaths of his wife and mother were nothing compared with the hallucinatory terrors that now confronted him: demons with mouths large enough to swallow planets; gales composed of a trillion dying breaths; armies of dead men and women and children. Their bodies maimed by an infinity of malefic usage. Had he witnessed these visions while awake, he would have been overwhelmed; but protected by the conditions of the dream, he withstood them and was made strong.

  And before long he fell asleep in the midst of this infinite torment contained within the belly of the fish in his dream, contained in turn within his skull, within the ramshackle frame house, within the gunshot-riddled spiritual realm of the Detroit ghetto, whose agonies became a fleeting instance of distress-the fluttering of an eyelid, the twitching of a nerve-within the dreamed-of peace of Buddha’s sleep.

  * * * *

  The shooting gallery was located in the Jefferson-Chalmers district, the section of the ghetto most affected by the ‘67 riots. Hundreds of gutted houses still stood as memorials to that event, and between them-where once had stood other houses-lay vacant lots overgrown with weeds and stunted trees of heaven. The following afternoon, as he walked past the lot adjoining the shooting gallery, Buddha was struck by the sight of a charred sofa set among weeds at the center of the lot, and obeying an impulse, he walked over to it and sat down. It was the first day of fall weather. The air was crisp, the full moon pinned like a disfigured cameo of bone to a cloudless blue sky. In front of the sofa was a pile of ashes over which somebody had placed a grill; half a dozen scorched cans were scattered around it. Buddha studied the ashes, the grill, the cans, mesmerized by the pattern they formed. Sirens squealed in the distance, a metallic clanging seemed to be issuing from beyond the sky, and Buddha felt himself enthroned, the desireless king of a ruined world in which all desire had faltered.

  He had been sitting for perhaps an hour when a teenage boy with a freckly complexion like Pete’s came running along the sidewalk. Dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and lugging an immense ghetto blaster. The boy looked behind him, then sprinted across the lot toward Buddha and flung himself down behind the sofa. “You tell ‘em I’m here,” he said breathlessly, “I’ll cut ya!” He waggled a switchblade in front of Buddha’s face. Buddha just kept staring at the toppled brick chimneys and vacated premises. A dragonfly wobbled up from the leaves and vanished into the sun dazzle of a piece of broken mirror canted against the ash heap.

  Le
ss than a minute later two black men ran past the lot. Spotting Buddha, one shouted, “See a kid come this way?” Buddha made no reply.

  “Tell ‘em I headed toward Cass,” the kid whispered urgently, but Buddha maintained his silence, his lack of concern.

  “Y’hear me?” the man shouted.

  “Tell ‘em!” the boy whispered.

  Buddha said nothing.

  The two men conferred and after a second ran back in the direction from which they had come. “Damn, blood! You take some chances!” said the boy, and when Buddha gave no response, he added, “They come back, you just sit there like you done. Maybe they think you a dummy.” He switched on the ghetto blaster, and rap music leaked out, the volume too low for the words to be audible.

  Buddha looked at the boy, and the boy grinned, his nervousness evident despite the mask of confidence.

  “Ain’t this a fine box?” he said. “Fools leave it settin’ on the stoop, they deserve to get it took. “ He squinted as if trying to scry out Buddha’s hidden meaning. “Can’t you talk, man?”

  “Nothin’ to say,” Buddha answered.

  “That’s cool… Too much bullshit in the air, anyhow.”

  The boy reminded Buddha of his younger self, and this disquieted him: he had the urge to offer advice, and he knew advice would be useless. The boy’s fate was spelled out by the anger lying dormant in the set of his mouth. Buddha pitied him, but pity-like love, like hate-was a violation of his policy of noninvolvement, an impediment of the emptiness to which he aspired. He got to his feet and headed for the sidewalk.

  “Hey!” yelled the boy. “You tell them mothafuckas where I’m at, I’ll kill yo’ ass!”

  Buddha kept walking.

  “I mean it, man!” And as if in defiance, as if he needed some help to verbalize it, the boy turned up the ghetto blaster, and a gassed voice blared, “Don’t listen to the shuck and jive from Chairman Channel Twenty-Five…”