The interesting part was that Rinpoche could not see the ear bud, and so, from his angle, the happy and well-dressed father appeared to be talking to himself, or to his Shrimp Pwangathang, saying, “Yes, sweetheart, I love you, Daddy loves you,” in a low voice. I could see that Rinpoche was watching, and I knew him well enough by then to understand that he was struggling between his ordinary urge to laugh at everything and some sense he was beginning to have about Americans, that there were places and times where laughter might be deemed childish, even offensive. The muscles of his face were working as if his skin covered a colony of ants under siege. “My little pickpocket,” the man beside him went on, stirring sticky rice with the tines of his fork. “Daddy’s going to come tuck you in tomorrow night.”
Rinpoche could barely contain himself. His lips were twitching. There were tears forming at the corners of his eyes. At last, he could no longer stand it. A one-syllable laugh escaped him. The man looked over, the ear bud peeking out, but it was too late. Without excusing himself, Rinpoche got up and left the table, made straight for the entrance, and I saw him there on the sidewalk beyond the glass, doubled over, his wide maroon ass pointing back at me and the happy dad. Laughing and laughing, hands on his knees, folds of the robe shaking, passersby stopping to see if he needed assistance. . . . He really was not quite normal.
By the time the entire Siam experience was finished, it was twenty-five past eight, and I thought it made sense for us to get over to the lecture hall so Rinpoche could see if he liked the setup. Out on the sidewalk, I took Cecelia’s letter from my pocket and checked the name of the hall and the time. The event was being sponsored by an organization called Catholics for Interfaith Dialogue, which sounded promising, though I wondered, as we drove to the sprawling green Notre Dame campus, what kind of organization would have their feature lectures at nine o’clock at night.
We drove down a long driveway onto the campus, parked, and asked the first person we saw how to get to O’Malley Auditorium. It turned out to be a five-minute walk from the neat, bland, pale-brick building in front of which we stood. When we arrived, the door of the auditorium was locked and there were no lights on inside. The entrance was rather grand—three glass doors, carved stone archways, trimmed shrubs to either side of the cement walk.
“We’re pretty early,” I said to Rinpoche, by way of explanation, but something felt wrong. Someone should have been there, setting out the doughnuts or aligning chairs. I unfolded Cecelia’s letter and went over it for the twentieth time: “August 9, 9:00 p.m. O’Malley Auditorium on the Notre Dame Campus. Catholics for Interfaith Dialogue. Contact: Marie Desjardins,” with home and cell phone numbers.
We waited another ten minutes, checking with a passerby to be sure there was, in fact, only one O’Malley Auditorium, and that we were standing in front of it. Then I dialed Marie Desjardins.
“Hi, this is Otto Ringling. I’m traveling with Volya Rinpoche and we’re here at O’Malley Auditorium for his talk and no one else is.”
“You’re there now? You didn’t get my message?”
“What message?”
“We had a conflict—another important event on campus tonight—and we decided to move the Rinpoche’s lecture to tomorrow at eleven.”
“Eleven p.m.?”
She laughed. “No, eleven in the morning. It’s the last event on our morning session and the conference ends with lunch. You weren’t told?”
“What number did you call?”
“I don’t know. I called the person with whom we set it up originally.”
“Was it a woman with a bit of a singsong voice? In New Jersey? She made you repeat everything twice to be sure she wrote it down correctly?”
“That sounds right. She said she would pass on the message. I’m so so sorry.”
“Not a problem. We’ll be here tomorrow at eleven. And the hotel rooms are very nice, thank you.”
Rinpoche, of course, thought this was most amusing, and I have to say that, after sixty seconds or so of my usual line of internal sister-criticism, I managed a smile. I had made a vow to myself that there would be no more tantrums in front of the holy man, and to that point I had been good. “Well, you’ll want to get back to the inn, I guess, for the nightly meditation.”
Rinpoche was smiling and shaking his head. “No, tonight we go out, my friend.”
“Out where?”
“Out for American fun.”
“American fun? Have you been watching TV?”
“You choose, my friend.”
American fun, I thought. American fun meaning what, exactly: A movie? And if so, what kind of movie? Lethal Mass Destruction IV? Or should it be pocket billiards? Or should we drop a few hundred dollars at the Gentleman’s Club? “What do you have in mind?”
And then my thoughts swept back around into the past like a middle-aged man at dusk on an August night, standing at the edge of his swimming pool with the long-handled net, and the children inside in their rooms, at peace, and the woman of the house doing yoga on her mat on the study’s hardwood floor, and he reaches out, far out into the shadowy blue middle of the deep end of his overcrowded mind and manages to catch a piece of leaf floating there. In that light, he can barely see the leaf, perhaps he cannot see it at all, but he somehow knows it is there, remembers seeing it there a few minutes earlier, when the light was better, and he reaches out as if by instinct, sweeps the net under it, and carries it back, and the water is now clean, his work complete, duty accomplished, and he can rest.
“Rinpoche,” I asked, “would you like to go bowling?”
“Yes,” he said, with a smile so huge that it wrinkled his skin all the way to the top of his shaved head. “Very much like.” And then, after a short contemplative pause. “What is this bohling mean?”
TWENTY-FOUR
The Chippewa Lanes can be found on South Bend’s south side, and if you go there, try to rent your shoes from a pleasant young man named Jeremy, who refers to himself as “Jeremy the Counter Guy” and who, on a busy Wednesday night in late summer, could have made things difficult for a visiting Rinpoche with no socks and no clue as to his American shoe size, but did not. In fact, with his sunny disposition and tendency to see the humor in everything, the young fellow reminded me just a bit of Rinpoche, and that made me wonder if half the people we encountered had, by some sort of Ortykian magic, been set in my path to help me understand the strange monk.
Jeremy assigned us to lane one. There were seventy lanes at the Chippewa, and probably thirty were free at that hour, but he assigned us to lane one, which wouldn’t have mattered to me except for the fact that lanes two and three were occupied by the Association of Tattooed and Felonious Motorcyclists of the Midwest. Four men and two women, marked as belonging to a certain tribe by the tattoos and cable-tight muscles of the men and the tight-shirted toughness of the women, the fact that they would all curse loudly and without embarrassment when they missed a spare, and that their laughter contained in it the sound of cigarette smoke, booze, and a lifetime of small humiliations.
There was music leaking out of the Chippewa’s ceiling speakers. Nine Inch Nails, Limp Biskit, or something along those lines. Natasha and Anthony would have known for sure. Rinpoche had chosen from the rack a twelve-pound ball—pink in color—and, after watching me manage a strike in my first frame (I had been All Stark County in junior high, and then given up the sport for other pursuits), he stood up there with his thick fingertips in the holes and tried to mimic what he saw: the long smooth strides, the ball drawn back and then swung forward in a pendulum motion, the crouch as the ball rolled, and then the fist pump when the pins pinged and rattled. Except that, in his case, things did not go so well. In fact, the ball slipped out of his hand on the way back, banged hard on the polished maple floor, and skittered sideways into the ankles of one of the women sitting and tapping her cigarette ash in lane two. She looked up, snarling, saw Rinpoche, took in his bald head and the hem of his maroon robe, which ended an inch or two
above blue bowling shoes. A couple of the men looked over as well. Rinpoche shuffled toward them in his unfamiliar shoes to retrieve the pink sphere, saying, “Sorry, sorry,” and laughing in a way that might have been taken wrong.
I got up and walked over to go to his assistance. The men stiffened at my approach. I could feel my hands sweating. I knew a little bit about the world they lived in, or thought I did. There had been some rough characters in the North Dakota of my youth, guys in grade school and, later, on the football and hockey teams, to whose homes I was occasionally invited, who’d lived in a kind of soup of incipient violence, in hardscrabble neighborhoods where the adults had about a fifty-fifty chance of losing a hand or an eye in the factory conveyor belt or meat-packing mash line or eventually going to jail, and those adults, whose futures consisted only of more work like that, came home and tried to drink away the memory of the day, and so they lived their lives hour by hour, just getting by, getting through, finding any way to kill the pain of it. It is hard to be a child in a home like that and then grow up to be kinder and gentler and cherish the idea that people are basically good.
In my experience, some of those adults had not been good. They had been mean and even vicious. I’d once seen a friend’s father slap his wife across the face as casually as you would swat a fly, with a nine-year-old guest sitting right there at table, and for nothing, for some domestic oversight that had to do with the kind of bread she’d brought home, or the way his beer had been poured or opened. But many of them were just coated in a thick skin of roughness, as if they needed an armor to survive their lives, and had fashioned the only armor that came to mind. For some of them at least, underneath all that—the tattoos, the cigarettes and cheap canned beer, the loud laughter, bad language, and obvious prejudices—was the usual tender soul, and if they sensed that you saw them as human beings, if they sensed a basic respect, or decency, or that you were at least not going to mock them, then the armor melted. I hoped, as I went to Rinpoche’s aid, that the people in the next lane fell into the second category. “His first time,” I said to the man nearest us. And then, in my nervousness, I added, “He’s a spiritual master.”
The women turned away. The men looked at me for a few bad seconds, and then one of them said, “No shit?”
“No shit. He’s giving a talk tomorrow at Notre Dame. He gives talks all over the world.”
“No shit,” the man said again, not a question this time. He was looking Rinpoche up and down and, after a second, shifted the bowling ball to his left hand and held out his right in a strange gesture of supplication, as if he were about to bow. We could see the tattoo of a snake curling around a sword up the inside of his forearm. “What about a blessing then?” He said to Rinpoche. “You know. For good luck. What about it?”
I thought, for a moment, that he was being sarcastic, and that now the real trouble would come. Behind him, his friends were smiling, but they were the kind of smiles you see on the faces of scarred young children who are about to pull an insect apart, leg by leg.
Rinpoche did not notice any of this, or gave no sign of noticing, at least. He reached out and shook the first man’s hand vigorously, smiling, nodding at the others.
“Yeah,” one of the women said, “he needs his sins to get forgiven.”
This line caused the man with the snake tattoo to smile and the others to go into paroxysms of hacking guffaws.
Rinpoche let go of the man’s hand and looked at him, moved half a step closer—I was going to try to stop him—and then he put his palms on the man’s shoulders and started in on some kind of a prayer in some language—Ortyk, it must have been—that sounded like a cold Siberian stream running over stones. No one understood it, of course, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the tone, and the tone was like honey, like love made into a song, a quiet, utterly fearless little chant that would have calmed a wolf with her back to the cliffside and three pups on her teats. It went on for maybe twenty seconds. When it was finished, Rinpoche took a step backward and bowed. The man with the snake tattoo stood frozen in place. And then across his jagged features bloomed the smile he must have had as a young boy, before anything had been taken away from him by what he saw and heard, before the world had shown him its teeth and bitten him. He smiled like that, watching Rinpoche, and then he remembered who he was supposed to be and shifted the bowling ball back to his other hand and said, “Hey, thanks, man. You’re all right.” And the woman behind him lifted up the pink ball and handed it over.
For the rest of the evening—Rinpoche and I bowled two strings—things went along without incident. The cursing beside us ceased, and I thought the laughter was less raucous, too. Best of all, Rinpoche turned out to be absolutely crazy about tenpin bowling. By the end, he was doing fairly well. He’d take one step and send the ball away with a small bounce, and then crouch with his hands on his knees and watch intently as it grumbled slowly down the alley. When it banged into the pins he would straighten up, almost jumping (he was extraordinarily limber for a middle-aged man), and clap his hands, and then turn to me with the most beatific smile on his face and come over and let me explain the scoring.
The motorcyclists finished their evening a few frames before we did. Three of the men and the two women just carried their shoes back to the counter, but the guy with the snake tattoo stepped over to me when Rinpoche was bowling and said, “Hey, what’s his name anyway?” I told him, mentioned that he had books in the stores. The man’s green eyes shifted once to Rinpoche and then back, and he said, “He’s the real thing, man, ain’t he?”
And I said that I thought he was.
IN THE CAR on the ten-minute ride back to the Inn at St. Mary’s, Rinpoche seemed almost to be giving off light, he was so happy. At a stop sign, I glanced over and saw that he was looking straight ahead with a joyous grin on his face. I thought he must be pleased at the way the encounter with the tattooed man had turned out, but as we pulled into the lot he said, “Bohling is excellent American fun. Thank you, Otto.”
I wanted to ask him what he had said to the man, what kind of blessing he’d given, but I managed only, “Knock on my door on your way to breakfast,” and then we went inside and I watched him go down the hall to his room, and waited to make sure his card key worked.
When he was settled in, I slipped back outside, took his book from the trunk, and carried it back in. I lay on the bed and started reading. The first couple of chapters were interesting enough, but, I thought, mostly unsurprising. And then on page 19, I came across these paragraphs, and read them four times.
For many people, many, many people, the spiritual situation is like that of a young boy who decides to take up the piano. This boy likes the piano, likes the sound the keys make when he touches them, likes the feel of the ivory against his small fingers. Perhaps he knows someone, or has seen someone, who plays well, and this inspires him.
As he grows older, he continues to play and to practice. As he practices perhaps someone criticizes him in an unkind way, or perhaps he begins to see that he cannot play as well as the person who inspired him, that he makes mistakes, that his hands do not always work the way he wishes them to work, that it requires effort and sacrifice to improve.
By the time he is a young adult, he is somewhat accomplished at the piano—some of this came from natural ability, some from his love of music, some from practice. He plays well, sometimes at gatherings of friends or family. But then, as he grows older, he decides that, even though he can play well, he will never play very well. He will never play perfectly. He is not good enough to be a concert pianist, just as, in the spiritual realm, on this complex earth, he believes he will never be good enough to satisfy his idea of a God who looks over him, so he stops really trying to do so, stops thinking about such things.
Probably he does not even form these thoughts in such a way. He just sets up, between him and the next level of piano playing—the next level of his interior life—a kind of invisible barrier. He makes a limit where there is n
o actual limit. This is not bad. He is not an evil man. Just the opposite, he is a good man, but he builds this limit the way you would build walls around a room, and then he lives there, within that room, not completely satisfied but not knowing what he can do about his dissatisfaction. He grows old. He waits for the end of his life, for God to pass judgment on him, and chases as many decent pleasures as he can while he waits. This is just the way life is, he says to himself. This is as good a player as I will ever be. He would, in fact, like to play the piano better, but what keeps him from venturing outside that room is a kind of fear, the idea that he might fail, that people might mock him for his ambition, or that he would then not be the person he believes himself to be. But where did this idea of who he actually is come from? In the spiritual realm, or, if you prefer these words, in the emotional or psychological realm, what is he denying himself by staying inside these walls?
I set the book on the night table, turned off the light, took off my clothes, and lay on the bed looking up at the patterns of shadow on the ceiling. It was late, and I had promised to call Jeannie, and I knew I would do that. But I lay on the bed caught up in a vague notion, not thinking, exactly, just musing on something, circling some idea, pondering. The metaphor of the piano-playing boy seemed imperfect to me. If I had been editing the book, I would have written in the manuscript margins, “Work this,” meaning that the author should take the general idea and sharpen it, make it clearer to the reader.
Breakfast With Buddha Page 14
