The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

by George Plimpton

  The windows were tall and narrow. Debbie Sue was able to chin herself up to the sill of one to peer in. The monks were in their lotus positions in long rows on their prayer mats. A temple bell chimed softly. A low "Om!" erupted from one of the monks. A drone of summer flies.

  It must have been a traumatic moment for those meditating monks ... to have a young woman's face appear at a window-fragmenting the sunlight on the flagstone floor-and a voice ring out, tumultuously in the contours of the chapel, "Sidd, are you down there?"

  Debbie Sue reported that afterwards she only had time to shout, "Sidd, I made an awful mistake. I want you. I'm staying at the Red Roof Inn. Room tog!"-before she dropped out of sight.

  The reaction among the people below must have been galvanic. Debbie Sue couldn't describe it because she had hauled herself up to the sill by her fingertips (the window was about six feet up) just long enough to see the linedup prayer mats, the brown-robed rows, and to shout her vibrant message before her arm muscles gave way ("I never could have done it if I didn't have the wrists of a golfer") and she dropped back down to the grass outside the chapel walls.

  "He was down there," she said. "I had a glimpse of his face. He certainly got the message!"

  "I'm glad you two got together again," I said.

  "It's not as nice as it was here, Owl," she said, looking fondly around the bungalow. "Sneaking into a monastery ... the monks get spooked."

  "Can't Sidd get to you? Can't he get out on leave?"

  "Sometimes he sneaks out and comes to the Red Roof Inn," Debbie Sue said. "He throws a stone through my window. It's very romantic. I come to the window and see him standing on the far side of the parking lot. Like Romeo and Juliet. We go out and have picnics in the pines."

  "Is he happy?" I asked.

  "How can he be in that place!" Debbie Sue said hotly. "They chant a lot. They all shout `Moo!' Sidd tells me that's the symbol of Absolute Eternity. He sits on a mat, not counting lunch, for fourteen hours. I told him that was silly and unhealthy, and he said that in Japan the monks sit on their mats for ten days! They're allowed to doze off only between one o'clock in the morning and three. Where Sidd is there's this awful man called a sensei who walks up and down the rows of mats with a wooden paddle called a 'warning stick.' If a guy even twitches, the sensei steps up and whacks him across the shoulders. He shouts `Sit still!' But sitting still isn't enough. The student has to work at it. The sensei tells him any old stone Buddha can sit still. No, it has to be live stillness. Whack! Sit still! Sit still! Can you bear it? I keep telling Sidd that if he ever gets whacked that way, he should get off the mat and knock the guy flat! The creep!"

  "Is he in good spirits?" I asked.

  "He worries about your writing. He wonders if you've tried the mantra he gave to you to help you write."

  "No," I said. "I'm saving it up. What's his state of mind, Debbie Sue?" I asked.

  She looked out over the back lawn, bright in the summer evening. "He's still not sure what he wants to do," she said. "One afternoon on the picnic blanket he said he felt like a man on a blind donkey pursuing a fierce tiger. I'm no help. My coming around just means trouble. I'm sure the head monk speaks to him about me quite firmly. Maybe the sensei beats him. I don't know. He doesn't tell me everything. But there are rules. They are called vi naya. Sidd told me there are two hundred and twentyseven strict rules of priestly discipline. Most `mundane' pleasures aren't allowed. That's why you don't see Buddhist monks at football games. Or standing in line at the movies. I don't dare ask, but I'm afraid I'm a 'mundane' pleasure."

  "Do you ever talk about baseball with him?"

  "More and more," Debbie Sue said. "He brings it up at our picnics in the woods. I bring him the paper, he reads the sports pages to see how the Mets are doing. He asked me to explain to him how to read a box score. I don't know myself, so we did a lot of guessing.

  "He says the monks have a softball team. He doesn't play on it, but he watches carefully and he's learning lots about the game."

  "That sounds as though he ... was toying with the idea of coming back."

  "Well, he is thinking about it."

  "Why would he want to?"

  "Come back? Well, he never really left because he wanted to," Debbie Sue said. "Remember the morning he threw those wild pitches at Huggins?"

  "How can I forget?" I said. "I had just finished telling the reporters in the clubhouse about yak dung."

  "I was on my way home," she said. "I always thought that in Sidd's mind I was number three-third after Buddha and baseball. That was his big problem-which one was the most important. Halfway home, I decided I didn't mind being third. So when I got to Huggins to tell him I'd changed my mind, I heard he'd lost it and hit an iron pipe. Owl, I had the order all screwed up. I wasn't as far down as I thought."

  "So he was glad to see you when you found him in Colorado."

  Debbie Sue smiled and nodded. "When he sneaked out of the monastery, and he saw me waiting for him in the parking lot of the motel, he shouted something that is very important in his culture. Guess what it is."

  "I have no idea."

  "'Hai'

  " `Ha'?"

  She looked embarrassed. "Don't tell a soul, Owl. Promise? Well, it's the exclamation monks make when they achieve bodhicitta."

  " `Ha'?"

  "That's all it is," she said. " `Ha!' and sometimes quite a lot of weeping and laughing."

  "Is that the first time you've heard it?"

  She looked at me slyly. "You always wanted to know about when I came ashore from the Windsurfer in Pass-aGrille? You thought Ueberroth sent me?"

  "That's right."

  "When I came over the dunes Sidd looked at me and the baseball fell out of his hand. He cried out, `Ha!' I've heard whistles and cute remarks, you know ... but not `ha!' It just sort of explodes `ha!'-nothing like a laugh at all, and it scared me a little.

  "Then he made one of those incredible imitations of his-a bell ... it was the cylinder bell of the monastery at the foot of Mount Everest, the one that separates the monks and the nuns at the end of the day? I could see his throat muscles quiver.

  "I said, `How the hell did you do that?'

  "He looked miserable. But he was interesting ... shy and kind of cute, with his English accent and everything ... throwing baseballs at his tin cans in the dunes.... I mean, it was something you just couldn't walk away from. So I sat down in the sand with him."

  We went out that night and had dinner in Pass-aGrille. Debbie Sue was going back to Colorado the next day. We talked a little more about my writing. I told her that I had written a short essay about a man who flew over Long Beach in a deck chair-getting all of it down on a three-by-five card.

  She interrupted, "Would you come to New York if Sidd decided to play for the Mets?"

  I shrugged. "I don't know what good I could do."

  "He depends on you," she said. "I don't think he'd come without you." She looked out across the restaurant dock at the dark glimmer of the canal. "I'd love to come to New York. My aunt lives in Trenton, New Jersey, but that's as close as I've ever been. Wouldn't it be like old times?"

  "I don't know," I said. "Perhaps not."

  She ordered three shrimp cocktails to be served separately, as if each were a full course. I ordered something more predictable and a bottle of white wine. We toasted each other.

  "What did you do to amuse yourself when you weren't storming the monastery?" I asked.

  "Oh, I hung around," Debbie Sue replied. "I went to the town library one day in Boulder and looked up stuff about Nepal and Tibet. I learned little things to surprise Sidd and please him. I found a book that had charts of tantric sexual positions-almost thirty of them. They had wonderful names-A Singing Monkey Holding a Tree. I tried to take the book out of the library so Sidd and I could practice after our picnics in the pines, but I had to have a library card and be a resident. The library people got suspicious after that; I'd see a face peeking around the corner of the bookshelves."
>
  I remarked-somewhat emboldened having had a glass or two of wine-that I was surprised that someone training to be a Buddhist monk ever had any sexual interest at all. Wasn't it part of Buddhist religions, at least among the monks, that one had to suppress all desiresmuch less the pleasures of carnal love?

  Debbie Sue did not know what carnal love was. She had been told once but had forgotten.

  I explained and she said, "Oh that!" She went on to say that Sidd had been bothered by the restrictions of the monkhood-the vinaya-oh yes, and since he probably wasn't going to be a monk all the way (as she put it) he could pick and choose among the various cults. "Thank God for that!" she said. "He's learned more than to throw a ball very fast-I mean of all things to pick! He's got me into lovemaking and Taoism."

  I said I was a little rusty on Taoism. Maybe I knew it once, but like Debbie Sue with carnal love, I had forgotten.

  She gave a long sigh. "Well," she said, drawing it out, "the Taoists have lots of gods. In fact, they have a god for just about everything. They have gods for parts of the body ... the foot! ... They take a lot of baths. The priests eat only vegetables. They leave home. Like Milarepa, they can do these fabulous physical things, like float, and everything. They believe in alchemy-turning things into gold? When they're not making love, they're doing that. They are very into sex....

  "It's all in a very short book called the Tao Te Ching, about five thousand words in all, which makes it, Sidd told me, one of the most important short books in the world. It says wise things like `A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.' Sidd thought that was a good thing for you to know about your writing. A book starts with one word."

  She leaned across the little table to tell me about a kind of Taoist sex practice called imsdk. "It says you can see better if you don't have an orgasm. So it tells you not to have one."

  "Did the book tell you how to do this?"

  "Well, they tell the person not to get excited or too passionate?"

  "Well, I mean, how do you do that?"

  "You think of something else. They have a list to choose from. Weird oriental things. A soup bowl with one kernel of rice in it. I told Sidd if he felt out of control, he should think about birds, or swimming with the porpoises, or doing the dishes...."

  "What did he say?"

  "Oh, Owl, he gave me that sweet Himalayan smile of his. It's crazy for me to suggest anything like that to him, because he's been practicing that sort of mental control for years.... But then one night-now don't you tell this to anyone, Owl, or I'll shoot you-we were lying, making love, just on the edge of this little shallow lake, and suddenly Sidd made the sound of a bird in my ear-a blue jay, so clear I thought I was in the North Carolina woods...."

  In mid-July I got a call from Sidd. It came late in the evening. It was swelteringly hot in Pass-a-Grille. It had rained; that afternoon the mists rose off the pavement like steam. The frogs had taken over the weed-choked pond with such force that the chorus could well have come from up-country Vietnam, where the frogs are as big as small dogs-so pervading that I had begun to think about moving away. "The frogs are driving me batty," I told my sister. "When they stop they all do it at once, as if collec- ti'ely garroted."

  "Come to Marblehead. It's lovely up here."

  "Perhaps."

  I told her that the effort to move seemed so massive. It was easier to close the porch door and turn on the television.

  The night Sidd called the door was open because of the heat. A fan moved the air above me.

  "Wait a minute, Sidd," I said.

  I slid the door easily along its runners and it clicked shut.

  "Namas-te."

  It was a pleasure to hear the soft, slightly inflected accent once again. He came right to the point. "I am coming back to the Mets."

  "Have you told them?" I asked.

  "I called up Mr. Cashen. It took a long time getting through. They thought it was a joke. I said I wanted to come back."

  "What did he say?"

  "He said, `Oh my God.'"

  Rather haltingly, Sidd asked me if I would come to New York and see him through August and September ... perhaps share an apartment. He didn't feel he was going to feel at ease in the city. Over the phone he made one of his brilliant vocal imitations-the sound of a taxi horn, a police siren, and the sigh of a bus pulling away from its passenger stop.

  "There are no mantras," he said, "to take care of this sort of thing."

  He asked how the Mets were doing.

  "According to the papers, they're having their troubles," I said. "A lot of injuries. But they're neck-and-neck with the Cardinals."

  "They were always very good to me," Sidd said. "They kept to their word."

  "Where's Debbie Sue?"

  "She's right here-at the Red Roof Inn. Sometimes she comes to the monastery. At the evening meal we sit at long wooden tables in the dining hall. There is a prayer and then the meal is consumed in silence. The clacking of spoons against wooden bowls. One night Debbie Sue put in an appearance at the door. On either side were two diminutive monks, struggling with her in a most tentative way because, of course, handling a determined young woman is not something in their line of work at all. She spotted me, looking up, startled, from my wooden bowl. She called out, `Sidd, the ice machine in the motel has conked out. Totally!' "

  Sidd giggled, and I could hear Debbie Sue laughing in the background.

  "I hear you peg stones through her windows."

  He told me the first night he crept out of the monastery and threw a lemon through her motel window. He wasn't sure if it was the right window. So he stood off a long distance, pegging the lemon from the edge of the motel parking lot-a couple of hundred yards away.

  It turned out to be the right room. Debbie Sue's silhouette appeared briefly at the window. She leaned out. Her voice soared out over the parking lot. "Sidd Finch. You crazy beautiful monk!"

  Once again I could imagine Finch's ambivalent feelings about Debbie Sue-cringing with embarrassment at her Klaxon-like voice bellowing over the parking lot, and yet knowing that within seconds she would be flying on her bare feet toward him across the macadam, her white T-shirt like a huge moth among the parked cars, and when she reached him she would envelop him with her slender arms, the smell of soap in her hair as she would whisper in his ear some little affection she had thought up, "My bird, my love."

  Once again Sidd would know that The Path to The Way was extremely difficult.

  Debbie Sue came on the telephone. Her voice, as usual, was much too loud, as if at some point in younger days she had been told to "Speak up!" It made me move the receiver back from my ear. She could hardly wait to get to New York. "The monastery life isn't for me!" she announced gaily. "But, Owl, the bells are so beautiful the way they echo, and the mountains! I can't wait to see you. I can't wait for New York. It'll be like old times."

  I said I would think about it. Almost as soon as I said good-bye the phone rang again and it was Jay Horwitz.

  "Have you heard?"

  I said I just finished talking to Sidd.

  "Can you believe it?" he said dolefully. "Here we go again."

  XII

  CAT came with the apartment. That was the one stipulation with the signing of the lease-the tenants had to take care of the cat, whose name (I was told in a long note about him) was Mister Puss.

  I had closed the bungalow and flown up from Florida. My own New York apartment, boxlike, musty and hot, sheets over the furniture, was too small even for the spartan needs of Debbie Sue and Sidd. So I searched around. The Mets were helpful. They said most of the players rented homes in the Port Washington area, which is about thirty minutes out on Long Island from Shea Stadium, but Sidd and Debbie Sue were set on finding a place in New York City.

  "You'll be staying with them?" Jay asked over the telephone.

  "They seem to want that," I said. "Debbie Sue has an aunt in Trenton. She went to see her once. That's as close as she's been to New York. Sidd seems to
be confused by the idea of urban life. So maybe I can be of some help."

  "That's great," Jay said.

  "Besides, I have a good time with them."

  "Davey Johnson's thinking of using Sidd against St. Louis next week. They've come in for a four-game set. Starts with an afternoon game and then they leave Thursday night," Jay said. "It depends on his control."

  "Debbie Sue tells me that out in Colorado Sidd threw a lemon through an open motel window from a couple of hundred yards out ... across a parking lot."

  "Is that so?"

  "How's the team going to accept him?" I asked.

  That had always bothered me-how the players would take this curious specimen into their midst. A monk? A mystic? Would they mimic his English accent? Would they crowd around him in the locker room and challenge him to perform the Hindu rope trick?

  "It'll be all right," Jay said. "They'll take anybody. We're hurting. Gary Carter has pulled a hamstring trying to keep his garage door from slamming down on the hood of his car. Keith Hernandez's got a sprain. Darryl Strawberry's got a hurting thumb from opening a jar of apple cider. It's in the nature of the game."

  As I hung up I wondered why these domestic mishaps so often happened to the great athletes, freak things besetting them, very often in the kitchen. I remember Phil Rizzuto saying in a radio broadcast in the late seventiesI was driving somewhere in a convertible in the height of summer because I remember the thick texture of the leaves along a country road-that Yogi Berra had pulled a muscle in his back while reading a newspaper!

  The people who owned the apartment (and the cat) were named Mullins. They were off on an extended safari in Africa. The husband enjoyed big-game hunting; he was taking his wife and two teenage sons with him to Botswana. Their apartment was in a building as far east as you can go on Manhattan's Seventy-second Street-in the last of a row of four walk-up flats ... squat, adjoining buildings of black-brick walls and bright red doors that lead in off the street to the stairwells. The apartment was one flight up-a duplex with a spiral staircase connecting with the floor above. The windows of the front rooms looked out on the East River; the tugboats throbbed by at night. One of the front rooms had a pool table; stuffed animal heads looked down from green-tinted walls.