Breakfast With Buddha (20 page)

And I was hungry.

Rinpoche said he wouldn’t mind a little something to eat, too. The night before, as we’d been driving south on South Bend’s main drag, searching, in a kind of wilderness of warehouses and small office buildings, for the bowling alley to which we’d been directed, we had, in fact, passed an Adult Emporium or something of that nature. Rinpoche had noticed it, naturally, and asked about it, and I had done my best to explain the place—which was not, as you might imagine, an easy task. And then, on the way home, we’d
passed a store with a bright yellow sign that read:
TAQUERIA CAMICERIA
. The place seemed somehow outside the realm of everything else we’d seen on that night, as if it had been plucked out of a parallel universe and dropped down in urban Indiana. When we left the campus, I retraced our route of the night before, found the yellow sign, and turned into the lot.

There, we asked an ancient and very small man selling Popsicles from the back of a truck if it was possible to get lunch in the store.

He turned his sun-dried face up to me in a puzzled way and smiled at Rinpoche.

I made an eating gesture with one hand, pointed to the glass door, and he nodded and said, “
Sí, sí,
” but did not understand when I tried to tell him we would buy our dessert from him on our way back out.

Inside, we found a sort of Mexican American Wool-worth. Sandals, bottles of guava juice, heads of lettuce, and boxes of laundry soap for sale in eight musty aisles, and off against the left wall, a six-stool counter behind which two men worked, frying meat. Rinpoche and I sat there beside three T-shirted, black-haired, brown-skinned construction workers who were finishing their lunches and who gave us a thorough inspection—frank, unabashed, neither smiling nor sneering. It seemed that people who looked like us, like me at least, did not often take their midday meal in this place.

The fellow behind the counter had a scar running from his jawline up to the outside corner of his left eye. Above our heads were four handmade signs with the offerings. I asked for a chicken and bean burrito, and Rinpoche did the same.

“What do you have to drink?”

The cook pointed to a cold case nearby, but the only offerings there were of the sugary carbonated variety, so while the man prepared our food, Rinpoche and I made a tour of the little store and found, among the guava and pear nectar, a large bottle of apple juice. We carried it back to the counter.

The cook’s helper was much younger, still in his teens, and on the side of his neck he had an elaborate tattoo in Gothic font that read
CHICO
. I asked for a cup and he shook his head. No cups. He watched me a moment, then pointed to his own cup and his coworker’s. Cheap blue plastic, large, and sitting upside down on a dishcloth, obviously just washed. With his hands and facial expression he indicated that we could use those cups if we were willing. We were. The men to our left finished their meal with another round of stares, and then we were the only customers, with the meat and beans and onions and cilantro spitting on the grill, and then tortillas there beside them, like the thinnest cross-sections of a paler earth. We asked for ice. No ice, but the juice was cold, and soon the burritos were served and they were enormous. Pinto beans and flakes of cilantro spilled out from the cut; the chicken was tender as cream cheese and almost sweet.

“Ever been to Mexico?” I asked Rinpoche.

He shook his head.

“We went there for our honeymoon. Jeannie speaks Spanish pretty well, you know, and I had two years of it in school. We spent most of our time in Mexico City. Then a place called Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast.”

Rinpoche said a prayer over his food, took one deliberate bite, chewed thoughtfully, nodded, looked at me,
swallowed. “When you say the names it sounds like you were happy in that place.”

“Hard not to be happy on your honeymoon,” I told him, but even as I spoke I knew there was more to my feelings for Mexico than sweet memories of love. It had been loud in the capital, I’d gotten sick. And then, in Mazatlan, we’d shared our hotel with a bunch of beer-guzzling Yanquis, down for a week of sun and superiority. Still, something about the people we met there, the real Mexicans we went out of our way to meet, had touched us in a certain way. Some of them seemed, to Jeannie and me both, to live by a different set of assumptions. Smaller, poorer, they walked and talked as if the world were enormous and mysterious—which, of course, it is. I’d felt some of that from the Popsicle man outside. I’d felt some of it in O’Malley Auditorium, too, listening to my new friend talk about his idea of enlightenment and studying the old priest’s face. I watched the men behind the counter and ran through my mind a series of questions, for Rinpoche, that I was almost ready to ask.

It took him as long to eat one of the halves of his burrito as it took me to eat the whole. He asked for the second half to be wrapped up to go. We left a generous tip, exchanged nods with our cook—who seemed pleased and proud that we’d ventured into his world—and then we went out into the parking lot to discover a police car parked where the Popsicle man had been.

Up Michigan Street we drove in a slow, full-bellied silence, past the Glo-Worm Lounge, past a bar with a sign outside that read,
NOTRE DAME STOP IMPORTING CRIME, DRUGS, AND HOMELESSNESS FOR MONEY
, past the Hope Rescue Mission, then, after a few blocks, past the shrine
to the miracle at LaSalette, the Inn at St. Mary’s, and then into a gas station where we stopped for a fill-up and where the newspaper headlines read
FORTY-ONE KILLED IN BAGHDAD BLAST
. And then onto the superhighway headed west.

TWENTY-SEVEN

It was at
this point in the trip that something in my interior world began to break open. The shell cracked, the thick whitish fluid started to leak out, though I had not yet taken the drastic, untakebackable step of pulling the brittle halves apart and dropping the egg into the pan. It was the passage I’d read in Rinpoche’s book, and the angry, proud resistance of the nun reminding me so much of myself. And then that sense of having stepped, for half an hour, into the Mexico I remembered from our honeymoon. “No one runs away from anything here,” Jeannie had said as we boarded the plane for the trip home, and though it wasn’t precisely true, I have always remembered that remark.

And then, just as we merged onto the interstate and turned in the direction of Illinois, I spotted three white crosses by the side of the road, with flowers and an inscription I could not read. It made me think of my parents, naturally, of the feelings I’d been having since their death, that puzzled emptiness, that sense that the ground had slipped out sideways from beneath our secure, rich life. There, on
that highway, I felt something change inside my mind, and it was a physical sensation, though very small, as if four tiny walls had been moved outward a few inches, or a door cut in one of them, a sliver of light peeking through, nothing more.

As we rode along the flatlands of northern Indiana, Rinpoche fell into one of his quiet reveries, those stretches of time during which he did not speak, and seemed not to move and, almost, not to be breathing. In order to relieve the monotony of the landscape—and possibly to put a temporary halt to the breaking of the eggshell—I turned on AM radio. Rinpoche wouldn’t mind, I knew that, we’d talked about it. AM radio did not reach the place he traveled to.

It did not take more than a minute of hitting the seek button to come upon another religious talk show, the kind of thing I’d been listening in on, during odd moments, for as long as I could remember. This one turned out to be a Catholic show—unusual in my experience—from a Chicago station. The name of the host was Colleen or Eileen or Irene, and her subject was gluttony. I am not making this up for narrative convenience. My belly was full; her subject was gluttony. The first words I heard her say were: “Remember, gluttony is the sin that brought sin into the world.”

I pondered that, took it personally perhaps. I assumed she was talking about Adam and Eve and the apple, and I started talking back, as I sometimes do. “I thought their sin had been a sin of
pride,
” I said, too loudly. “I thought they were kicked out because
they were sure they knew better
!” Stirred from his contemplation of the internal alfalfa fields, Rinpoche sent a curious look across the front seat. Eileen
or Colleen or Irene went on about gluttony for so long I felt myself starting to get hungry again, and then she took a call and moved on to one of the other great areas of sin.

The caller was a mother, concerned and upset because her twelve-year-old son had been told in school that it was okay to fantasize. About sex apparently, though that incendiary term was not explicitly mentioned. Eileen told her that what she had to do was to take her son out of school on the day sex classes were given and have a talk with the principal.

“Sure,” I said to Rinpoche. “The kid’s twelve, bursting with hormones. Keep him out of school. That’ll do it. That’ll fix everything!”

Rinpoche said nothing.

“Let his mom keep him home on the day of the sex lecture, so all the other kids can give him a hard time for the rest of the semester. He’ll turn into a . . . a . . . a glutton, for God’s sake, Mom. Cut the kid a little slack, Irene!”

But there was no slack to be had from the direction of Colleen. She started to go on about how bad the schools were for making kids think it was okay to be “selfish” and “do selfish things with their bodies” when sex was supposed to be “a selfless act for the pleasure of husband or wife.”

I was, by that time, squeezing the steering wheel with both hands and wondering who it was we were talking about, which twelve-, fourteen-, or eighteen-year-old boy or girl on American soil—bombarded with erotic images from every angle—who was going to think of sex only in terms of giving pleasure, ten or fifteen years down the road, to his wife or her husband? Why was it always the middle-aged and old people, their sexual urges barely a shadow
of what they had once been, their own guilt and regrets ballooning as they aged, who insisted on telling the young to abstain? And why was it that the loudest and most public religious types always sooner or later circled around to sex: talking about the “filth and whoremongering,” and the evils of birth control, and going on about abstinence, and then everyone expressing such shock when teleministers were caught with prostitutes of both sexes and priests went after little boys and pregnancy rates shot through the roof. Sure, kids were having sex too early—we’d talked about it at length with our own children. Yes, the act of lovemaking ought to have some meaning attached to it—it was the source of life, after all—ought to be more than a release of some thoughtless, mutual lust. But sex was natural and wonderful, an essential part of life, and I hated this overlay of guilt and terror, hated to think of my children growing up to think it was somehow filthy in the eyes of God.

There were a lot of Catholics in Dickinson, and senior year in high school I had dated a Catholic girl. She was, in fact, my first real girlfriend. And I remembered, with a kind of agonizing vividness, the things she would and wouldn’t do; the way, in the grassy field behind her uncle’s house, she’d tiptoe around the Catholic definition of sin and somehow manage to suspend us both in a state where sex was all we could think about, for days. Her mother told her I’d end up in the flames of hell after I died, simply for being Protestant, and that she would, too, forever and ever, if she married me. I remembered sneaking into St. Patrick’s Church in downtown Dickinson and attending Mass with her one time, and how wonderful it had been—the stained-glass saints and gilded altar—and how terrifying and old and marvelous the ritual had seemed.

I have a real affection for Catholicism; I make that claim in all sincerity (believe me, not all my Protestant brethren share that feeling). A deep respect for real Christianity. But these radio shows were making me want to strangle somebody.

The last straw came when Colleen took the subject and ran with it, going on about couples who had their “two token children.” When those words registered I slapped my fingers down hard on the dashboard and yelled out, “They are not token, goddamn it!”

And Rinpoche put his hand on my arm until I calmed down.

“Listen,” I said to him, snapping off the radio. “I want you to tell me something. In your tradition, is pleasure bad? I mean, sex, eating, and so on, does it keep you from holiness? Does it keep you from God?”

“It leads you to God,” he said in a simple way, as if he were a chemistry teacher answering a question about the molecular weight of calcium.

I had an urge to reach out and shake his hand. “Now
that
makes sense to me. I want to convert. Where do I sign up?”

He was smiling and nodding. After a while he said, “But when you get tired of those things, your tiredness leads you to bigger pleasure.”

“What if you don’t get tired of them?”

“You should get a little tired of them,” he said.

I was suddenly not so sure about converting. “But what if you don’t? What if you like to eat, and you always like to eat; it never gets boring. Does that make you evil somehow? Not as good as these goddamned, self-righteous—”

He held up his hand, smiling, smiling, smiling. “Sex, food,
anger, violence, greed,” he said. “Dirt in the glass. Then if you give up sex and food and anger and greed and you feel so proud about giving these things up, better than people, all about you,
you
gave this up,
you
are good, other people are not as good as
you.
That is more dirt in the glass, that’s all. No big fuss, just that.”

“You’re talking about the golden mean,” I said hopefully. “The middle way.”

“Middle,” he repeated. “Little this side of middle, little that side of middle. No fuss. What matters is how you treat people.”

“Not what you believe about what happens after death?”

He laughed. I had made a joke, apparently. “What difference makes what you believe? What happens will happen anyway, exactly same, no matter what you believe. What you do makes the important part, what you do.”