Lunch with Buddha

by Merullo, Roland

“Feelings pass,” he said.

  “Yes, and leave a mark.”

  “Mark passes, too.”

  “Sure, everything passes. That doesn’t make it all irrelevant. I don’t want to be the guy sitting in meditation saying, ‘It all passes, it means nothing. I might as well leave my kids alone in the room to choke on a pretzel because it doesn’t matter, it isn’t real.’”

  “Means everything, this whirl,” he said.

  “There you go. You’re Zenning me.”

  “Pushing your button,” he said.

  “Right. Next thing you’ll be saying you’re a Christian.”

  “Rinpoche is wery Christian,” he said. “Christ, for Rinpoche, the greatest man! The best spirit!”

  “Greater than Buddha?”

  “Buddha-Christ are the same, Otto, don’t you know it now?”

  “The Christians I met last night would never say so.”

  “Same, same, same. Little bit different way to say the same thing. You can’t see it?”

  “Good. Fine, then. We’ll start a new religion. Buddhianity, we’ll call it. Christianism. The Buddheo-Christian tradition. ”

  “Exactly, my friend!” he said, very happy now, and not out of breath in the slightest as we made the last and steepest part of the climb back toward the pool. “This is Shelsa’s job on earth now. To make this new religion. You are seeing, you are seeing it now! You will help!”

  I could not, of course, take this comment at all seriously. I thought only that he was twisting me around in words as he sometimes did, as the Zen masters were known for doing. Zen, he’d explained to me, was a different tradition, with a different lineage of teachers but the same basic goal, though the goal would be reached by a more austere or perhaps purer path than the one he himself practiced. Years ago he’d told me that his Ortykian school was an offshoot of a Tibetan lineage, close to something called Dzogchen, also known as The Great Perfection. He’d assured me more than once that it was very close to the Dalai Lama’s brand of Buddhism; the differences were subtle. Unimportant. Ortykian Buddhism, Dzogchen, the Dalai Lama, Shelsa as some kind of special reincarnation, Rinpoche’s dreams, Jesus and Gandhi being murdered—I suddenly did not like this progression, not at all.

  “I couldn’t help Shelsa do so much as make a fried egg,” I said.

  “You are her helper,” he replied sternly, and I searched in vain for irony or humor in the words. The familiar cool run of molecules was making its way along the outsides of my arms and up the back of my neck. I willed myself to ignore it. “You are the uncle to help her in this life. John the Baptist was cousin with Jesus, yes? You are uncle with Shelsa.”

  “And look what happened to John the Baptist,” I said. More cold tickling of the skin. I was reaching desperately for a joke, for some whipsaw of cynicism with which to cut the legs out from under the conversation.

  But Rinpoche was drilling his eyes into me, willing me to understand, to agree, to accept.

  “What is the goal?” I asked, trying to slip away from it. “What’s the whole point? Enlightenment? Eternal life? What?”

  He patted me on the shoulder for the millionth time, and said, “You purify. You go and go. Life cuts you and you try and try and try and pretty soon—”

  “You become beautiful.”

  “Yes. Good.”

  “But toward what are we going and going? What does the beauty look like?”

  He shrugged almost helplessly, and for a moment I was gripped hard by the hand of doubt. He seemed only an ordinary man then, and I wanted more than that from him, more than cryptic answers and shrugs. A small inner voice suggested he’d been fooling us all these years, playing a role, maybe even working a scam.

  “I can show you,” he said. “I can’t tell you.”

  “All right. Please show me, then. I’m having a crisis of faith. I’m a little bit lost.”

  He nodded sympathetically. “We find you,” he said. “Don’t worry too much. Shelsa will show you now the next step.”

  “I’ll pray for her,” I said. “That she stays safe.”

  “Good, Otto. Good.” And then, instead of the usual hand on the back or shoulder, he pulled me against him and held me that way, as if we were two soldiers about to go to war.

  At the top of the path, I saw that Winch, Marty, and Charlie, up at that early hour, had opened the gate to the pool enclosure and were about to step inside. I raised a hand in greeting, but they turned away.

  Hike to Columbia River Gorge

  From Cave B Inn

  14

  Always, in my travels, I cling to the hope of finding the perfect meal. For years Jeannie and the kids teased me about it mercilessly, making fun of old Dad by pretending to complain about the coffee or the eggs at a diner, the size of the napkins, the cut of meat, the firmness or lack of firmness of the cooked ziti. I’d long ago stopped trying to defend myself against these friendly familial taunts. Jeannie had been a good cook (I did the dishes); we had similar tastes. My culinary peculiarities were rarely an issue at home (though I was sometimes known, in search of freshness, to open a new bag of pistachios before the old one was completely finished). “You should have been a food critic, Dad,” Anthony said once. “Traveling the American road and trashing one place after the next. You would have had your own show on the Food Network, would have made more money, too.”

  But from time to time, despite my pickiness, I’d hit upon a meal that touched perfection, and I’d rave about it for years. “Remember the duck we had that one time at our friends’ apartment in Paris?” I’d say. Or “I still think about the fried clams at that take-out place near Boston. On a beach. What was it called?”

  It was, like the Ringling Family Plans and the frequent joking, part of our family life, one ingredient in the glue that held us.

  From a patio table at Cave B that morning I texted my son and daughter to tell them that I had, once again, found a meal that was close to perfect. And it was true. Sitting there in the morning warmth and untrammeled silence, Rinpoche and I were served the continental breakfast by a fine young man named Eduardo, originally from Aguascalientes. Truly fresh, sweet, green and orange melon—a rarity in my experience: supermarket melons are so often mealy, the melon chunks of breakfast buffets hard as wood; two slices of mandarin orange; a bunch of champagne grapes smaller than peas and sweet as honey. Two slices of banana bread with chocolate chips embedded. One delectable cinnamon roll coated with the unhealthy white frosting I love. All this, plus excellent coffee and the unmatched view. Exquisite.

  Eduardo had a moment to chat, and said that in the off season, moose came down from the hills and feasted on the vines after the grapes had been harvested. He was glad we were enjoying the food. It made him happy.

  The patio was ours that morning. We ate slowly, done with difficult conversation for the time being, watching the windmills turn their lazy loops on the ridge, and a turkey vulture coasting overhead. Enjoying the perfect breakfast, I texted, but there was no answer. I pictured them still asleep in the hotel and sent a prayer toward Seattle for their well-being.

  We packed up, stopped by the front desk for our checkout and a last handful of cherries, then bade Cave B a fond good-bye and headed off. The vine-lined lane, a right turn, a left onto Baseline Road—so straight it made you wish you were a teenager with a fast car instead of a fifty-year-old in a pickup that, whenever it went above sixty, sounded like an old clothes dryer that was about to shake itself to pieces.

  Uma was a comfortable enough ride, though—loud, gas-eating, but fun. The directional signals would sometimes stick, but so far we hadn’t had to turn on the heat.

  I had a plan in mind for that day, a little detour. Rinpoche was scheduled to give what he called a “small talking” in Spokane that evening, but we’d gotten an early start and I wanted to surprise him with something first. We took 281 to 283 north, both roads straight, flat, and free of billboards. There were irrigated fields to either side, alfalfa it looked like, and one placar
d advertising U-PICK APRICOTS—one of the few foods I dislike. For a little while I tuned in to an AM station, and—the country already in full campaign mode—endured a short rant about our president. The word “socialist” was used seven times in four minutes. Billions of dollars were spent on these campaigns, and millions more earned by the talk-show anger-men. It was like taking money out of the fourth-grade school lunch budget and using it to pay two kids to yell insults at each other on the playground for eight months, while their friends chose sides and wrestled.

  In the small dusty city of Ephrata we stopped for a Mexican lunch. Tequila’s, the place was called. The booths had high backs carved from dark wood, the food was authentic and plentiful, the waitress shy and black haired. My traveling companion revealed a new passion—chips and salsa—and this was the right place for it, I should say.

  From Tequila’s we kept going north then turned left onto Route 17, through the hamlet of Soap Lake, dry hills for company at first and then an amazing run of purplish-brown cliffs. Another mile and the views turned truly majestic, the cliffs rising beyond a lake to our left, and, to our right, steep-sided formations of dark rock that looked ready to break loose and crash down onto the pavement. This was a road for the ages, to go with a breakfast for the ages and a perfectly good lunch. It seemed only right that we should see a sign saying HITCHHIKING PERMITTED, because we’d clearly entered some kind of alternate universe, everything oversized and magical and existing out beyond the boundaries of the usual tourist spots. It was beautiful, yes, but the best part was the surprise of it. No one I’d ever listened to, nothing I’d ever read in any travel magazine had advised, You must go to east-central Washington State on your next vacation. The scenery’s amazing!

  I’d learn only later that this whole area was called “scabland,” a horrible moniker.

  After a stretch of otherworldliness, the scabland morphed into sage prairie again, with Lenore Lake to our left, then a levee crossing a larger body of water on which a fisherman, standing in his boat, was speaking into a cell phone. Aside from a few dozen grazing cattle, an abandoned café and then an abandoned motel, this was untouched land, a moonscape, a divine stage set in which, even in the rattling Uma, sixty miles an hour felt like ten. You had the sense that this arid spectacle would stretch and stretch north, all the way to Alberta.

  Probably I should have been paying less attention to the scenery and more to the speed limit signs, because just after we crossed the levee I made a left, went a mile or so, and became aware of twinkling blue lights in Uma’s mirror. One feels them in one’s stomach. There was that first awful jolt of recognition, the faint hope that the cruiser was after someone else and would pull out and hurry past, and then . . . surrender.

  Strange though it may sound to list this as a talent (those with few abilities must pad the résumé), I have to say that I’m pretty good when it comes to being stopped by policemen. It happens every five or six years, a hazard of a lot of road time and wandering attention. I don’t like it, needless to say, but my father gave me some good advice when I was a boy and I always remembered it when I saw blinking lights in the mirror. “Most policemen are decent, son,” he said as he was taking the registration out of the glove box. “You treat them with respect, and they’ll usually return the favor. Doesn’t mean we won’t get a ticket. If I deserve one here, I’ll probably get it. But you can make things a lot easier by being a gentleman. Watch now.”

  The trick he showed me was very simple: don’t argue and don’t whine. You should get your documents ready. You should say something contrite like, “I was going a little quick there, officer, wasn’t I?” and then take your lumps.

  I turned onto the gravel shoulder and saw the cruiser pull in behind. A state trooper. I fished my license out of my wallet, calm enough until I realized that the trooper must be checking our plate against the Washington State crime database. He’d discover that the truck belonged to one Jarvis Barton-Phillips, and God knew what that dude had been up to between Silicon Valley and Kaua’i.

  Just tell the truth, I reminded myself, and all shall be well.

  “Rinpoche,” I said, “could you reach into the glove box there and take out the white envelope?”

  “What happens?” he said.

  “I was going faster than the speed limit. There’s a policeman behind us. I might get a ticket, that’s all. No big deal.”

  He nodded, flipped open the glove box, and pulled out the white envelope that held the registration, title, and the letter signing the truck over to him. As he did so, a small plastic bag plopped onto the floor at his feet, an event that brought this exclamation from my lips: “Oh, well, shit!”

  “What is?”

  “Marijuana,” I said, as quietly and quickly as I could. In the mirror I saw the trooper getting out of his white cruiser. “Illegal. Quick, put it under your robe and don’t say anything.”

  “Mar-wanna?” He took hold of the bag and squeezed it with great curiosity, making no move to do what I’d asked. One more pinch of his strong hands and it was going to break open and spill the contents across his lap.

  “Rinpoche! Hide it. Quick!”

  He spent another second or two examining the greenish leaves and stems and then tucked the bag into the folds of his robe one heartbeat before the trooper’s face appeared at the window.

  I swallowed. I handed over the license and registration and saw that my hand was shaking slightly. It was impossible to tell if the trooper noticed. He wasn’t the usual big-shouldered type, but a thin-faced, wiry, older guy with squirrel-gray eyes and a head that seemed to have been set on his neck at an uncomfortable angle. “Going a bit quick,” I said. “Sorry.”

  He spent a moment looking at Rinpoche, then moved his eyes across the seat to me. “Your truck?”

  “No. It’s a gift.”

  “Gift?”

  “Yes, a friend gave it to my brother-in-law here, as a gift, and we’re driving it back to North Dakota where he lives.”

  “Long trip, isn’t that?”

  “It is. We were in Seattle for a family gathering. We . . . Volya here lives in North Dakota. The man who gave him the truck lives in Seattle and Hawaii and so on.”

  It was going fairly well until I said that last part. The gray eyes locked onto me as if either the “Hawaii” or the “and” or the “so on” had struck a sour note. The officer was wearing a gray-blue Stetson and now he put his thumb under the front brim and pushed it up an inch. He was missing the top joint of his left ring finger.

  “If there’s any record on it, that’s not me.”

  “Just a driver-for-hire, huh?”

  “Not hire, no, but—”

  There was an awful pause during which I pictured the baggie slipping out from under Rinpoche’s robe. I imagined myself calling my sister from a cell in Coulee City, Washington, a small cell with two hard beds in it and a metal toilet that was lacking a seat. My spiritual teacher would be sitting calmly on the other bed, fingering his beads and studying the graffiti previous prisoners had cut into the wall, my children would be within earshot of my sister at the other end of the line, and I would be required to say something like, “Seese, sorry to bother you, but could you post bond?”

  In one stroke the roles of an entire lifetime would be reversed. I’d be the screw-up, careless, inattentive, and she would be the solid citizen. It was a humbling notion, brought into sharper focus when Rinpoche, giving the trooper a direct, pleasant, sincere, thoughtful look, raised his hands off his lap in a gesture of innocence and said, “No mar-wanna, nothing. See?”

  This remark was not met with a reciprocal friendliness. The trooper stared hard at Rinpoche for a few seconds, then looked back at me. “Some kind of joke?”

  “Not at all. He’s new to America. It’s from watching COPS, or something. He didn’t mean it in a bad way.”

  One blink. “What is he?”

  “A monk. A spiritual teacher. I’m taking him to Spokane to give a talk tonight.”
/>   “Really.”

  “Yes.”

  “Seattle to Spokane, and you’re on Route 17 in Coulee City? Little strange, isn’t that?”

  “I’m showing him America. He has a fascination with dams.”

  “Really? What’s your name?”

  “Otto Ringling. That’s my license I just gave you. I live in New York. He’s Volya, no last name, that’s just how they do it where he comes from.”

  “And where might that be?”

  “Russia.”

  Another evil spark in the cheek muscles. Apparently the trooper hadn’t heard good things about New York, and was old enough to remember the days when Russia had missiles aimed in this direction, when a wrong word, a hasty decision, the twitch of a finger meant the end of everything we knew.

  “Funny name,” he said, “Ringling.”

  “Fairly common in Germany. My folks’ parents were German.”

  “Circus name, wasn’t it?”

  “They had nothing to do with that.”

  There was a small “hmph,” a glance at my passenger, a classic “Don’t go anywhere,” and then we could hear the crunch of boot heels as he returned to the cruiser. I watched him in the mirror. Once he was seated, door still open, I said, very quietly and forcefully, “Rinpoche, listen to me. Just keep the bag where it is and do not say anything about it. Do not say the word “marijuana” a second time. Just smile, send good thoughts. We could go to jail for what’s in that bag. I mean it.”

  He turned down the corners of his mouth and pressed out his lips as if the idea of going to jail—going to jail again, in his case; he’d been imprisoned two years for political reasons back home—was of mild interest. Maybe we’d meet a fascinating person in jail. Maybe there would be chips and salsa and pamphlets on hydroelectric power. Who knew how the whole experience might deepen the meditative life?

  “Rinpoche.”

  “What?”

  “Say, ‘Okay, Otto.’”

  “Okay, Otto.”

  “And please just do what I said.”