Angry Buddhist (9781609458867) (12 page)

 

T
he District Attorney's Indio branch office is on the top floor of the four-story glass and sandstone County of Riverside Administrative Center on Highway 111 a few miles south of where the road becomes the Deputy Bruce Lee Memorial Highway. The Investigators' office is in the basement of the building. An entire subterranean hallway is lined floor to ceiling with boxes of case files, crimes, tragedies, lives rendered in ink and slowly decomposing paper, stacked, filed, crammed, forgotten. Jimmy is standing with Senior Investiga­tor Oz Spengler who is showing him around. Around forty, and gym-toned, his dark hair is buzz cut. He holds ceramic coffee cup advertising a local casino. Oz gestures toward the mountains of legal records.

“We're putting the files into digital format. There must be a million.” Jimmy nods, trying to look interested. It's his first day on the new job and he wants to make a good impression, figures if they like him they're more inclined to leave him to his own devices. “There were this many when I got here. Pile's no smaller now. What you need to understand is it's not gonna be any smaller when you leave. So don't drive yourself nuts over anything.”

Jimmy assures him that he won't.

Oz moves down the hallway. Jimmy is now one of ten investigators working out of this office. Oz is his immediate boss, the man he will be reporting to and Jimmy likes him well enough. They push through the double doors leading to the investigators' bullpen. The room is about sixty feet long and thirty feet wide. There are ten cubicles, several of which are occupied by investigators talking on the phone, doing paperwork, writing checks to their divorce lawyers. The offices of the higher-ups in the Investigations Department, the guys who would rate windows and doors if they weren't in a basement, surround the room.

“Every Monday morning,” Oz tells him, “Five new felony files land on your desk. So what you need to do is allocate your time.” Pointing to an empty cubicle in the middle of the room where a desktop computer sits on a work surface bare but for several manila files, Oz says, “That's your space. Do with it what you want but keep it neat.”

Jimmy thanks him for the tour. Oz says he'd like to grab a burger with him soon so they can shoot the shit, get to know one another. Then he disappears. Jimmy spots a couple of confederates, Danny Stringer, ex-cop from Riverside, and Miguel Sandoval, a guy with whom he's worked several homicides, goes over and says hello. They're glad to see him.

Jimmy talks with them for a couple of minutes but doesn't say why he's working here now. Then settles into his cubicle and glances at the files on his desk. It's the usual array of check kiters, drug dealers, domestic abusers, deadbeat dads, armed robbers, rapists, child molesters, and kidnappers. None are high profile, so none are anyone's priority save for the victim's.

Investigators for the District Attorney's office are given wide leeway in what they choose to pursue. Their evaluations rest on how many successful prosecutions they contribute to so, with this in mind, Jimmy sets about looking for cases he thinks can lead to convictions without too much effort on his part. The plan: maintain a low profile, avoid trouble, and clock hours toward a pension.

The files he was given contain a hundred cases. Jimmy breaks them down into five groups of twenty each. He will rank the cases in each group. Using this system, he intends to come up with five cases he can begin exploring more deeply tomorrow.

After forty-five minutes of strained diligence, it becomes hard for Jimmy to disguise exactly how much he does not enjoy sitting in an office. He is cogitating on this and trying to stay awake when a cell phone ring spackles his brain.

“Jimmy, it's Maxon Brae.”

“Yeah?” Skipping the pleasantries.

“Your brother needs a favor.” Silence. It isn't enough he made the pilgrimage to Mecca to look in on Dale. If Maxon is waiting for him to ask what can I do, he's not going to give him the pleasure. “Randall's going to give a speech at the first annual Riverside County Purity Ball and he thinks it'd be a good thing if you introduced him. We booked Jay Leno but he canceled.”

“What's a Purity Ball?”

“It's a campaign event.”

“And I'm replacing Jay Leno?”

“No one can replace Jay Leno, Jimmy. Jay's an institution. But he had a conflict.”

He figures Maxon is lying. “Kenny Chesney's playing somewhere local tomorrow night, isn't he?”

“Kenny Chesney doesn't like your brother. Asked him for a campaign favor one time. He was kind of an A-hole about it.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Just talk a little about working in law enforcement and what it means to have a brother like Randall.”

“You mean someone who can hook me up at the D.A.'s office after I resign from the police force?”

“Frankly, he looks pretty good in that story. And he'd like it if you wore your uniform.”

“We don't wear those at the DA's office, Maxon.”

“Your
police
uniform.”

“That would be illegal since I'm not a cop.”

“Since when do you worry about what's illegal and what's not?” Maxon knows what ended Jimmy's tenure on the Desert Hot Springs police force, so there's an uneasy silence while Jimmy decides whether to let the comment slide. “Randall wants it, okay? There won't be a problem.”

Jimmy does not want to make any speeches on Randall's behalf. He is not interested in politics. But Randall had gone to bat for him and now he is calling in the favor.
Quid pro quo.
It isn't like his brother can ask Dale. He tells Maxon to give him the time and the place, he'll be there. When he hangs up he briefly considers calling Cali to ask if she wants to go as his date, the evening a potential source of shared mirth. But then he realizes he doesn't know her well enough to trust that she will be able to parse the ironies certain to be on display and decides their next evening together should not involve any of his family members.

 

 

G
rowing up middle class in the broad agricultural fields of Modesto, Maxon Brae was not the only boy without a father. But only Maxon's had a reputation extending beyond Stanislaus County. In the late 1970s his mother had been a graduate student getting a masters degree in history at Berkeley. Maxon was the result of a brief affair with a pony-tailed former sixties radical who was a visiting professor at the university. When this man met bright-eyed, young Anita Brae, daughter of a school teacher in Eugene, Oregon, he was in the process of undergoing a conversion common to certain types of strident, slightly hysterical leftists who, having discovered flaws in liberal dogma, don't simply reject their former comrades but treat them as if they have plague, and transmogrify into equally annoying conservatives. He cut his hair, traded his sandals for wingtips and founded a neo-conservative magazine called the
New Clarion
. All of this occurred in the years following the one time he had sex with Maxon's mother.

Subsequently, this man married an heir to a timber fortune (it was her money that funded the
New Clarion
) and fathered two sons, one of whom graduated from Princeton and serves on the staff of a United States Senator, the other a Georgetown graduate employed as the youngest speechwriter for a prominent cabinet member. The father periodically turns up on various cable news shout-fests opining on the issues of the day. They are Maxon's shadow family and it would be inaccurate to report that he does not think of them often.

When Maxon was born Anita Brae wrote to his father—teaching at the University of Chicago by then—who took a few moments away from the composition of his magnum opus,
The Liberal Attack on America
, to politely write back requesting that she not contact him again. This she acceded to, in the belief that someone who had turned out, in her view, entirely soulless, would have an influence on Maxon that could only be baleful. When the boy was ten, his mother—she had made a life as a high school teacher, never marrying—told him whom his father was but Maxon did not ask to meet him. And he has still never met the man, although he has always known he will introduce himself in time.

After graduating from an obscure state school in central Cal­ifornia, Maxon began working as a legislative aide in Sacra­mento. The zeitgeist was blowing toward Jesus and Maxon was betting Christians to win. So while his Sunday devotions mainly revolved around visiting flea markets in search of mid-century modern collectibles, Maxon joined a mega-church that would allow him to remain anonymous while still claiming membership in a religious congregation.

Maxon Brae adheres to no religious dogma. Zealots are suckers who believe in the malleability of reality, that it can be changed through prayer. History has taught him that none of it has to do with prayer. It's all about power. People can be sold anything, at least for a time. They might wise up eventually, but then they'll be sold something else. He sees this in his own deluded father who first swallowed the cant of the left before rejecting it to make room for the comforting shibboleths of the other side. This knowledge simplifies life for him.

Although Maxon is not a believer in a traditional deity, he worships at the altar of Harmony, particularly the kind that finds aesthetic expression, and so he will occasionally dip into a museum when he finds himself in need of a quiet place to reflect. Today is one of those days. After his encounter with Nadine, he drives a few miles west to the Palm Springs Museum of Art. The museum is currently exhibiting a show of Bauhaus architecture. It is his hope that the cool, clean elegance will help settle his mind. If Maxon has a core belief, it is reflected in the beauty and order of the Bauhaus school.

The exhibit is divided into three galleries, the first showing architectural models, the second arts and crafts, and the third interior design. Maxon walks past black and white photographic portraits of Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, two of his heroes, flanking the door leading to the galleries. Gazing at a model of an apartment building, he removes the tennis ball from his jacket pocket. He begins to work it in his fingers while he considers what to do about Nadine. What was it she had shouted at him?
Try me?
That did not bode well. This woman can, with the stroke of a computer key, destroy Randall Duke's political viability and with it deliver a serious blow to Maxon's own plans. How do you recover if the throne behind which you have chosen to stand becomes radioactive? One either takes a long sabbatical and waits for the stench to dissipate, or finds another line of work. Neither of these alternatives is attractive.

As he considers his options, a distinguished-looking elderly male docent with a full head of white hair and tasteful eye makeup leads a tour group of senior citizens past on their way to the next gallery. Maxon has already ruled out trying to pay the woman to go away. Not having a solution immediately at hand is the kind of thing that ordinarily makes Maxon uncomfortable. But the clean Bauhaus lines soothe him. He holds to the idea that everything will meet in a pleasing way and all will be put right. How this will happen, he is not sure.

 

The heap of case files in front of Jimmy seems to have grown in the hours he has been at his desk although he knows this is not so. On his lunch break, he distractedly eats an apple he brought with him then goes to his car and turns on the air conditioner. But he does not put the car in gear and drive anywhere. Instead, he places his hands palms up on his knees and attempts to meditate. Rather than the elusive sense of calm he seeks, he finds himself lurching through the thicket of Randall and the Purity Ball—What do I owe Randall? What will he owe me if I do this?—and these thoughts crowd out everything else except the memory of his time with Cali. Although that evening was the high point of his past year, Jimmy is not sure he needs anyone else in his life right now. What would it mean other than more obligations? And how can he dock with someone else when he is sorting out his own way of being in the world? Hadn't that been his problem with Darleen? Not to minimize her cheating and his drinking.

When he asks himself why, exactly, did he return to the work force with such alacrity he is not sure of the answer. His expenses are relatively low and he has no dependents. A long restorative vacation was an option. And yet here he is sitting in a pickup truck in the broiling Indio parking lot. He checks his watch and sees he has been at it for fifteen minutes, an eternity for him and more than enough in the current circumstances. He returns to his office and, keen to make sense of his tangled thoughts, logs on to his computer.

His on-line dharma coach Bodhi Colletti, whose computer image Jimmy has spent the past several Sunday mornings staring at, has let it be known that she is available for individual consultation. Bodhi does not respond when he first tries to contact her, but half an hour later his second attempt bears fruit.

 

AIM IM with [email protected] 3:09
P.M.

Jimmy Duke

My bigshot brother wants me to do something inappropriate on his behalf. I feel like I owe him because he helped me get a new job. Is there a way I can do this while practicing the dharma?

Jimmy Duke

I should have asked if this is a good time to talk. Is it?

[email protected]

Jimmy, it's always great to see your icon—but a little relational tip . . . in the future you might want to start by saying hi, asking me how I'm doing, and whether I have a moment to go over something with you.

Jimmy Duke

Sorry. So do you?

[email protected]

We were going to start with you just saying hi and asking me how I'm doing.

Jimmy Duke

How are you doing?

[email protected]

good, thanks for asking, how about you?

Jimmy Duke

Not great. Like I said, Randall wants me to introduce him at an event (he actually requested I wear my old uniform which is a crime) and I'm feeling a lot of anger toward him.

[email protected]

yes, there's a lot wrapped up into that one sentence—your brother wants you to introduce him—he's asking you a favor—what he's asking you to do is a crime apparently even though it seems like a small thing—and you're having feelings around all of it.

[email protected]

So let's try to slow it down a bit and feel what's happening in your mind and body right now.

Jimmy Duke

yeah, you could say I'm having feelings. Like I want to rip his heart out.

[email protected]

is that a feeling?

Jimmy Duke

That's what's happening in my mind. Is it a feeling? I don't know. I think it's a fantasy that I'm having because I'm pissed off.

[email protected]

what's going on in your body?

Jimmy Duke

I'm tense.

[email protected]

Where?

Jimmy Duke

Head, neck, back.

[email protected]

Kalu Rinpoche said “We will never again have a chance to be born into a body like this one.” You need to take care of it. now take a sec, breathe a bit, and see what area of your body stands out as the least comfortable.

Jimmy Duke

Listen, I can go to a chiropractor for that, ok? I need some help with my thoughts.

[email protected]

your mind and your body and your muscles aren't separate though, they're related to each other, soften the body and your thoughts may soften too.

Jimmy Duke

I went to look in on my other brother. He just got let out of jail. I think he's going to have a hard time staying out of trouble. I feel like I'm responsible for him somehow even though I'm not and that's making me tenser.

[email protected]

ok so let's back up a bit,

Jimmy Duke

Ok.

Jimmy Duke

You're the boss.

[email protected]

take a second, breathe a little bit, and see if you can feel a space in the eye of the storm of thoughts in your head right how—here's a hint—to access the doorway into that space may well require you to feel your way into it rather than think your way into it.

[email protected]

And Jimmy . . . . I'm not the boss. You are.

Jimmy Duke

I'm breathing better now. So how can I stop thinking about my brothers when I try and meditate?

[email protected]

Jimmy, you're doing great—the idea here isn't to stop thinking about your brothers or anything else when you meditate, it's to become aware of the thoughts (that you're thinking about your brothers) but not to engage in them.

Jimmy Duke

How do I not engage in them?

[email protected]

The heart of Buddhist practice is something called beginner's mind which means looking at something with no judgements or expectations, just with pure openness. Think of it this way—you're watching a movie—the movie is about two guys who look a lot like your brothers, you're interested in the movie, it may even stir some emotions in you, but you're not going to write the dialogue yourself, you're listening, watching, waiting to see what's going to happen next, you're participating in the movie to the extent you're curious about it but the movie isn't you—it's just a movie—so with beginner's mind try to keep a little healthy emotional distance from it right now then see what happens to your feelings—do they change?

Jimmy Duke

I'd like to walk out of this movie.

[email protected]

That's okay, too.

 

The earnestness with which Bodhi Colletti relates to the world is not something Jimmy ordinarily responds to, but he cannot argue with her general point. When he logs off and goes back to his case files, he is still vexed about Randall but he feels better equipped to get to the end of the day without sticking his head out the window and screaming. Before he leaves work he will sit at his desk and sip a cup of warm tea. He will experience the liquid as it rolls over his tongue, down this throat and into his stomach. He will pay attention as his lungs expand and contract. He will sense the cool air of the office on his skin. But while he will find all of this relaxing he will still be unable to walk out of the movie.

 

Dale Duke is not a man known for his sense of responsibility and Maxon can't be sure that the freshly sprung ex-con will keep his rendezvous with the dentist. So he has taken it upon himself to get him there.

“How's the new place working out?”

“All right”

Maxon thinking: You pissant ingrate, after living in a state prison for three years, inmates howling like wolves all night long, worried about getting shanked, bad food, locked in a cell and the most you can say is all right? It might as well be the Four Seasons your brother put you in yesterday. But Maxon doesn't want to lecture Dale, so what he says is: “Randall really stepped up for you.”

“Want me to write him a thank-you card? Take me to Wal-Mart and I'll get one.”

As they drive past the adobe walls of a popular resort Maxon thinks about the people currently booked into the rooms and suites. On the golf course, in the pool and at the tennis complex, they are oblivious to Maxon's struggles. He knows they must remain that way. It will be a catastrophe if a day from now his problem is what they are chattering about over their fajitas and margaritas.