Lunch with Buddha

by Merullo, Roland

  Of solid Lutheran stock, I’ve nevertheless always held a secret envy for the Roman Catholics and their sacrament of confession. Even without any kind of penance or intervening priest, I felt cleansed then, relieved. The worst of me, the moldy, putrid, festering worst of Otto A. Ringling, had been set out in the light of day. Already, it was drying up.

  Rinpoche was busying himself with the fruit bowl, pushing the tines of his fork this way and that through the pieces of melon and pineapple to find a plump berry, which he stabbed and lifted to his mouth. Only then did he make eye contact. He nodded, smiled, reached out with fork in hand and patted me on the wrist. “Good,” he said.

  “Good? It didn’t feel good at all. It felt like betrayal. I felt like a little boy, angry at his dad for breaking his promise about a day at the state fair.”

  Rinpoche shrugged, impaled a piece of melon, looked up. “Now you have now,” he said, gesturing to my meal. “Coffee. Sweet. Drink the now and eat it, say a little thanks to who made.”

  “No talk about the talk, then?”

  Another shrug, a brief flash of impatience through the eyes. “Later anytime,” he said. “Now”—he gestured at the roll.

  “I pictured you sneaking out of the hotel after I’d gone to sleep, sneaking down to Irv’s and finding the woman who’d come to the talk and cheating on my sister with a beautiful transvestite.”

  A splash of amusement. A well-chewed strawberry washed down with a sip of tea.

  “I wondered if the secret thing she’d said to you was, ‘Come meet me,’ or something along those lines.”

  “Sacred woman,” was all he said. “Wery pure being.”

  “Really?”

  “Wery, wery pure,” he repeated. He reached over with his fork, scraped a bit of the frosting from my cinnamon roll, and sampled it.

  “You’re joking.”

  He shook his head, and the gold-flecked eyes were on me then, steady as the sun. “Last night you asked me what she say.”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to know?”

  “No, I asked you because I didn’t want to know.”

  He smiled sadly. “What she say to me was: ‘When the trouble comes, I’ll help you.’”

  “When what trouble comes?”

  “Eat,” he said. “Drink. Look at this something.” From beneath his robe he took a scrap of paper that was folded in half. He handed it across the table. I thought it would be the woman’s phone number, that’s where my mind resided then. She was a psychic in high heels and makeup. She looked into the future and saw trouble with Rinpoche’s marriage.

  I sipped the coffee, prepared myself, unfolded the piece of paper, and saw one word written there: KALISPELL.

  “Her name?”

  Rinpoche laughed so forcefully that a tiny piece of fruit shot out of his mouth and landed on the table between us. “Place,” he said. “Mantana. We go there today, all right?”

  “Why? Another talk?”

  “No more talkings for me,” he said. “Rinpoche is now retiring from the talkings. Near here is a good place. I think we should see it and take Otto’s sadness away.”

  “What about your sadness?”

  He shrugged, crinkled his eyes, but I could see it there. On top of everything else, he’d told me that Shelsa had suffered from several months of mysterious digestive troubles, serious enough for a hospitalization. He and Cecelia hadn’t wanted to worry us, he said. Now, supposedly, everything was fine.

  “I’ll have to check,” I said. “I’m supposed to have dinner with one of my authors tomorrow. I’ll have to see how far away this place is, and if it’s on our route.”

  “On, on,” Rinpoche said confidently. “Check the map, pal.”

  This was an expression I had taught him. Where are we going? he’d ask. And I’d say, Check the map, pal. I’d been trying to tutor him in the important skill of map reading, and he was simply awful at it. Speaker of eleven languages, wrestling master, sometime mind reader and seer into the future, incarnation of one of the great teachers of the mysterious Ortyk lineage, he couldn’t seem to grasp the idea of the world being laid out in colorful shapes and crooked lines on a page.

  Eating and drinking, struggling to hold myself in the famous now, I quizzed him again about how he’d known, or guessed, that I’d be heading in this direction for breakfast, why he hadn’t worried about meeting me in the hotel as we’d planned, why he’d been hanging out at the bus station talking to that man, what the woman had meant by “when the trouble comes.” But it was like tapping a stone with a hammer and hoping water leaked out. An evasive shrug, a focus on his food, a suggestion that I pay attention to eating and drinking and forget the rest. Either Rinpoche was the truest of Christians, spending time with the downtrodden and outcast, the so-called sinners, the sick, the abandoned . . . or he was the most brilliant con man this side of Wall Street.

  Either way, we had three or four more days on the road together. I thanked him for the meal and left him to finish his ministry of the bus station while I went back and fetched our old truck. On the way I had a text from my sister, letting me know that the train had brought them safely home to North Dakota, and asking this question: “Are you going to Kalispell?”

  19

  U.S. Route 2 from Spokane to Kalispell carries you north through Sandpoint, Idaho, within a dozen miles of the Canadian border, then drops you down again, south into the Montana mountains. That part of the West was devoid of the scourge of bumper stickers one sees in New York, those snippets of traveling opinion, but there were plenty of road signs to compensate. On the way out of Spokane we passed Crosswind Church and a sign there, HE WHO WON’T BE COUNSELED CAN’T BE HELPED. Farther along, through a steep-hilled green landscape reminiscent of northern New Hampshire and Maine, another sign advised, ENGAGE JESUS—REJECT THE CULTS. In between were offers for Huckleberry Ice Cream and Huckleberry Lemonade and then we crossed into Priest River, Idaho, which announced itself as A PROGRESSIVE TIMBER COMMUNITY. What could this mean? I envisioned scores of liberal lumberjacks sawing away at Douglas firs and quoting the socialist senator Bernie Sanders on their coffee breaks; carpenters with WE ARE THE 99% tattoos; high school teachers working up lesson plans on single-payer health care and the actual dimensions of a milled four-by-eight. I tried to remember the last time Idaho had gone Democratic in a presidential election: 1582, I guessed.

  Rinpoche was asleep by then, so he missed my favorite sign of the bunch: DEAR LORD, MAKE ME THE MAN MY DOG THINKS I AM.

  It was a perfect day, sunny, dry, warm for those parts. The whole country was baking that summer, crops dying of thirst, newspapers running articles about the Dust Bowl days.

  We arrived in the resort town of Sandpoint and found pleasant tree-lined streets with quaint houses and an Amtrak station. I’d heard somewhere that it had become an artists’ refuge—a progressive painters’ community, perhaps. In my thoughts, though, I couldn’t completely separate it from articles I’d read and a couple of television documentaries I’d seen. Not so long ago, militia and white supremacist groups had considered the Sandpoint area their world headquarters. “Hate supremacists” Jeannie called them. They were, as we understood it, intent on ridding the world of Jews, the nation of “coloreds,” and their lives of any kind of government intrusion whatsoever. Fond of murder, robbery, and hateful indoctrination, they were a bizarre man-cult of nutcases who wanted to remake the world in their own image. The Church of Jesus Christ Christian was a name that stuck in my brain from one of the articles. Perfect. That would distinguish them nicely from the Church of Jesus Christ Buddhist, Jesus Christ Hindu, and particularly from the Church of Jesus Christ Jew. I wondered what Rinpoche would make of them, but I didn’t have to wonder what they would make of him. Not white, not Christian, not packing guns or hatred in his luggage, he would be, quite simply, their Anti-Christ.

  But at Mick Duff’s Irish Pub on the main street, there were no members of the Aryan Nation in evidence. The waitress had a sleeve o
f tattoo down her right arm and the friendliest of manners; on the large-screen TV the British Open was in progress, and Rinpoche was fascinated by it, asking me why they were swinging so “big,” and wondering again how, exactly, it was different from “furniture golf,” and when we could try it. He’d told me he’d played once or twice in Europe, years ago, but I wasn’t entirely sure I believed him.

  I was in the mood for All-American, and Mick Duff’s Angus burger and a glass of local porter did not disappoint. Afterward, we had a brief swim in Sandpoint Lake, where Rinpoche was kind enough to forgo his yoga routine, where a flotsam of wood chips and fly larvae cluttered the lake’s surface, and where a trio of big-armed brutes gave us the parking-lot evil eye. On the way out of town a blue pickup seemed to be following us. I pulled over and it sped past, and I tried as best I could to leave my paranoia there by the side of the road. No doubt the overwhelming majority of Sandpointers were honest, decent people just trying to make a good life for themselves there in the north country. Lumping them all with Randy Weaver was about as fair as lumping all New Yorkers with Son of Sam.

  Still, it was a disturbing stretch for a person of my sensibilities. The radio was awash with a nationally syndicated talk-show host on an anti-Kennedy tirade. “Filthy vampires,” he called that entire family. And then the ultimate epithet: “New York liberals!” Between segments—I simply had to listen for a while—came an advertisement asking, “Do you have guns in your house you don’t need?”

  Thousands of them.

  Except for one sign advertising a Tanning-Espresso-Wi-Fi place, there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment by the sides of the road until we stopped at a historical marker that told us camels had been used in those parts to pack in supplies for the gold diggers of 1864-5. I gave Rinpoche a mini-lesson on the Gold Rush, the frenzy that sent thousands of explorers out here, made a few of them wealthy, and breathed life into outposts like Spokane and Walla Walla.

  “Gold in Russia, too,” he said.

  “Do you miss home at all?”

  He shook his head and worked his Buddhist rosary. “Italy, I miss.”

  “Your center there?”

  More headshaking. “The food. I like wery much there the way the people eat.”

  “Slowly,” I suggested, because we’d done a book on the Slow Food movement, Italian in its origins. “Meditatively. With great appreciation.”

  “No,” he said. “Pasta . . . with the wery small, how you say?” He placed his hands together, palm to palm, as if praying, then opened one side.

  “Clams.”

  “Yes, wery much the little clam on pasta Rinpoche likes.”

  I considered this for a moment, tried to look behind the words to see if he was playing with me again, working some spiritual lesson, tongue-in-cheek. There were times when speaking with my friend was like playing a game of chess. Why did he put the queen’s bishop over there? What’s that all about? What part of my defenses does it threaten?

  “Here’s what I don’t understand,” I said. “I always had this idea that real Buddhists don’t eat living creatures. ‘Buddhist Delight’ is an item on the menu of the Chinese restaurant where we live, and it’s completely vegetarian. I’ve never understood that about you. A meatball the other night, a bit of bacon at the B and B. Now clams. Please explain.”

  “I pray for them before I eat them.”

  “And that’s enough?”

  “Buddha, he eat a little meat, Otto. First he starved himself—no food, wery not much food, long time. But then he said, no, not the right way, starving, and so he eats a little bit of all the food and says thank you.”

  “So asceticism isn’t the route to salvation?”

  “None of the ‘isms’,” he said.

  “It means going hungry, giving up all pleasure. In some systems it’s considered the route to enlightenment.”

  “Route to maybe you die,” he said, and he looked over at me and grinned and I knew I’d been right to be careful. It was possible, yes, that he did actually miss the food in Italy, that he was particularly fond of spaghetti alle vongole, or whatever the correct term was. But it was equally possible that he’d designed the whole conversation simply to help me with my eating issues, my need for variety, comfort, and properly prepared pasta. Part of me did worry about asceticism: was that where the spiritual life would lead? And so, to protect myself from that thought . . . I ate more.

  “Look at your Jasper, okay?” Rinpoche went on. “Hungry, he eat. Tired, he sleep. Gold—doesn’t care about. You see?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

  “Now you got smart, man.”

  We hit the Montana border in mid-afternoon and switched to Mountain Time and a seventy-mile-an-hour speed limit. A short ways into the Treasure State we passed a billboard announcing that each small white cross by the side of the road designated a highway fatality. I explained this to my curious companion and he began to hum a quiet prayer for every one we passed. I counted them: fifty-four crosses there would turn out to be, over a span of fifty-five miles, and that was a mystery. Yes, the road was steep and curved in places, the legal speed high—at least by eastern standards—but there were crosses at almost every turn, as if Route 2 to Kalispell were some kind of suicide alley, the place the distraught came to end their torment. I found myself imagining the pain and suffering each cross marked—some family broken open, some lover or father or mother lost. At one point there were eight of them bunched tight together and I pictured a school bus or a van filled with kids, the terror of the victims in their last seconds, the immense sorrow they left behind. I began to pray for them, too.

  The few homes we passed were small and mostly poor, the Yaak River Valley unpeopled. I saw no road kill and wondered why: No animals here? So much available wilderness that the roadways didn’t tempt them? Descending into Troy we passed a billboard asking “Is the Virgin Mary Alive?” and “Can the Dead Speak?” with a phone number one could call in order to find out. This entire day, it seemed to me, from the sad street people of Spokane to the wholesome families at Sandpoint Lake, from the lingering stink of the Haters thereabouts to the various sects and cults that paid for these kinds of billboards or listened to these kinds of radio shows—all of it said everything that needed to be said about this country. Our almost unlimited freedom was like an African plain, a vast Serengeti of possibility, capable of holding every style of opinion and belief, every kind of life. Boa constrictors, chattering monkeys, regal lionesses striding the riverbank, herds of wildebeest and zebra that wanted nothing more than to be left alone. It wasn’t true, as some claimed, that with enough ambition and hard work anyone could succeed in America, climb to any height. The idea of a level playing field was at best a comforting lie, at worst a thorn under the skin of people like the kids I tutored. But it did seem to be true that we could believe anything we wanted, and say almost anything we wanted, and join these crazed herds that went racing toward the edge of the cliff looking only at each other and trampling everything in their path.

  The town of Troy’s United Methodist church asked “Are you a loved child of God?” which better suited my own tender notions. We stopped there, next door to a bowling alley/casino, for Italian soda and stale ice cream.

  From the other trip I’d taken with Rinpoche I remembered this pattern. There would be what he called “wessons,” some of them puzzling and intense, others encouraging. There were his quick enthusiasms—golf now, hydroelectric power, the workings of a stick shift—his jubilant, almost childish displays; the mysterious allusions and hints; the chess-board conversations. Somehow, once we’d made the turn at the top of Route 2 and begun heading south, away from Canada, I abandoned my foolish ideas about him making his escape, stopped worrying about my sister being hurt, my meditations invalidated. Beyond Troy he was buried in a contemplative silence, rousing himself only to ask the occasional question: Why were there so many casinos in “Mantana”? What meant that red flag with the blue X and white stars? W
hat was this “impeach,” as in the hand-lettered IMPEACH OBAMA sign flashing by to our left. What meant APACHE PAWN—GUNS, TOOLS, JEWELRY?

  We were relatives on a road trip, two guys in a truck, worried about our loved ones, admiring the tree-coated slopes, feeling no great need for talk. And when, at 8:29 p.m., we pulled up to a block of buildings that included the Kalispell Grand Hotel, one of us was exceedingly hungry.

  Entrance to Montana from Idaho

  20

  Speaking of crazed herds, Kalispell was, among other distinctions no doubt, the one-time residence of Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, founder of Scientology and surely one of the most eccentric characters in modern American spiritual history. With his hundreds of millions of dollars earned from the writing of sci-fi novels, L. Ron traveled the world trying to solve humanity’s problems. Addiction, meaning of life, enlightenment—nothing was too big an issue for him to address. He built a fleet of his own ships, wrote millions of words, produced films, started a religion, and had followers who were convicted of breaking into government offices to alter anti-Scientology records. Three wives, seven kids, a California ranch hideout—he was larger than life. I didn’t know any Scientologists personally, but there were a couple of celebrities who claimed that faith, one who’d been in the news that summer for a pricey divorce. What I knew, all I knew, was that Scientologists were vehemently anti-therapy, believed in a version of reincarnation that included lives on other planets, and that practitioners paid for their spiritual teachings in sometimes sizeable chunks. It seemed a peculiar mix, and as Rinpoche and I checked in to the small, tattered, more than satisfactory Kalispell Grand and took a creaky elevator up to our third-floor rooms, I mused about the human phenomenon that went by the title “organized religion.” What, I wondered, was disorganized religion?