Breakfast With Buddha (30 page)

We splashed around for half an hour, then came out, dried off, and took turns changing discreetly with a towel and the open car doors blocking the family’s view. “Like it?” I asked.

“Kisses. Bohling. Golf. Outside swimming. Now America is my favorite place, and you are my favorite friend. Thank you, Otto!”

“Not a problem.”

“Thank you for showing me fun.”

“I have the feeling you’ve had a little fun before you met me.”

“Yes, little bit,” he said, and he laughed some more, and it occurred to me that the modern spiritual leaders of my tradition were always somber, self-important men, thickly coated in others’ idea of who they were supposed to be. Rinpoche seemed free of that. It made me think of a tiny news report I’d read somewhere—browsing the
Times,
probably, with a cup of coffee and a sandwich on the table and a hundred other things on my mind. It had been an article about Pope John Paul, when he was still young, before illness had taken over his life. Apparently, he’d sneaked away from the Vatican for a day or two, in disguise maybe, I don’t recall, and taken a couple of runs down a ski slope in the Italian Alps.

O
NLY A LITTLE WAYS
farther down that same highway, we came upon the Northern Lights Casino, built, more or less, in the shape of an Ojibway lodge. More American fun. I explained to Rinpoche what it was and how it had come to be, and he said he was interested in trying it. We went into the windowless world of ringing bells, flashing lights, and Minnesota retirees sitting dull-faced in front of slot machines, making compensatory payments, a quarter at a time, to the people whose land had been appropriated by their ancestors, so many years ago. It was a treat, I have to say, to sit beside the holy man and watch him watching the spinning dials. He was not a conservative gambler. He would put in four one-dollar tokens—the maximum bet—and push the
SPIN
button and, when he won, when four or ten or twenty coins clanked down into the bright chrome tray, he’d clap his hands once, fill up his plastic bucket, and start feeding them in again without delay.

“We can cash in our winnings and leave, you know,” I told him once, when he’d just made a 7-7-7 score and had a pile of dollar tokens in front of him.

“Not yet, not yet.”

After half an hour, Rinpoche was still holding his own, focused on the spinning dial as if the salvation of the troubled modern world depended on it. And then, as so often happens, the machine started to exact its payment for earlier kindnesses. Rinpoche’s white plastic bucket went from full, to three-quarters full, to half full, and still he plowed on, feeding and feeding. I’d sworn to myself to keep to a twenty-dollar limit, and had gone through those coins in ten minutes. So I just stood by his shoulder and watched. “It’s fixed, you know. Rigged,” I said, when I saw that his bucket was now only a quarter full. “Keep playing and eventually you’ll lose everything. It’s mathematical. Eventually the machine always wins.”

But he was a man of faith, not math, and paid me no heed. He had sixteen coins left. Twelve. Eight. He fed the last four in deliberately, as if the problem was that he’d been pushing them into the slot too quickly, not giving the machine enough time to absorb the full measure of his goodness, his earnestness, the blessing of his presence. The wheels spun, the symbols appeared, and they demonstrated convincingly that the machine had no real appreciation for the blessing of his presence. Rinpoche sat there a moment in shock, letting the fact of his losses sink in, and then he was reaching into his robe for his wad of money, already looking around for the place where you changed cash into tokens. I took him firmly by the arm and lifted him out of his seat. “Let’s go,” I said.

“Not yet, not yet, Otto.”

“We’re going.” I kept hold of his arm and marched him sternly toward the exit, a scene the likes of which I’m sure the security people had encountered once or twice before.

It was always a surprise, going through a casino door and back out into natural light. The casino designers’ seemingly innocent, self-contained, artificial playground had cast some kind of magic spell, so much so that, even after only forty-five minutes, it was the bright, relatively quiet and plain outside world that seemed false. And boring. No promise of free money there on the tar streets. No ringing bells when the fates turned their smile upon you.

“I was winning the big prize almost,” Rinpoche said, when we were in the parking lot outside the front door.

I led him a safe distance away, toward the car.
It’s a fool’s gambit,
I started to say,
a trick. I’m surprised you fell for it.
But then I saw his face. The muscles near his mouth were twitching. He was struggling to keep the big smile from breaking through.

“Otto, you saved me,” he said, dramatically.

“You could be on stage, you know, Rinpoche. You could be in films.”

“Next time I pushed the button,” he started to smile, “big prize would be!”

“Right, big prize. You are what we used to call in North Dakota a piece of work.”

“Piss of work?”

“Right. Exactly. Get in the car, your highness.”

All the way out of the parking lot, and for another mile or two along Route 200, my friend the Rinpoche had his chuckle going. It rose up through his chest, bubbles of joy, and spilled out across the car’s leather dash. I was thinking about what the massage therapist in Duluth had
said. A reincarnation of the Buddha, or Jesus, or Moses, he was supposed to be, this kooky character. I was thinking that, maybe, if you saw the creatures and objects around you as pieces of a sacred whole, everything temporary, just playing out a role in a dream, then things would be funny a lot of the time, kadeidoscopic, comically absurd.

FORTY-TWO

I had originally
planned for us to spend our last night on the road in a place called Detroit Lakes in western Minnesota, about fifty miles from the North Dakota border. But, I don’t know, maybe it was hearing Jeannie’s voice on the phone, maybe it was the fact that the first two hotels I called in Detroit Lakes said they were booked—some kind of festival going on, Miniature Dollhouse Collectors of America or something—maybe I was just feeling the tug of the old homestead, the reality of my duties there, and didn’t want to delay things any longer. Whatever the reason, after I’d made the calls and put a few miles between us and the casino, I asked my companion if he minded stretching out the driving day. “We can probably get all the way to Bismarck,” I said. “Then tomorrow we’ll have only a short ride.”

Rinpoche let it be known that it didn’t matter to him in the slightest what our schedule was. He was in no rush, he was never in a rush. He could not remember the last time he’d had such an enjoyable day.

For dinner that night we decided to sample the local specialty and go German. I knew from experience that the phone books in that part of the world could almost have been taken from Berlin or Stuttgart. Five hundred Schmitts, a hundred and fifty Wanners. Many of the Germans had come by way of Russia and Catherine the Great’s broken promises. They settled the fertile plains of the upper Midwest, bringing along their farming methods, stern morals, and solid but unimaginative dietary preferences. I remembered that two of the shocks I’d experienced in coming to New York were discovering that Ringling was considered an unusual last name and that most people had never heard of knoephla soup.

We pulled off the highway in a little city called Park Rapids, which had the distinction of offering a two-car-wide parking lane right in the middle of its broad main street. I somehow knew there would be a German eatery there, and after walking less than a block we came upon it, the Schwarzwald Inn restaurant. Inside, it was as I expected, as I’d remembered: pale wood booths, decorative steins lined up by the cash register, wall hangings of Bavarian Fräuleins in lederhosen. And the wonderful smells of frying bratwurst and beer. It was a plain little place, but they had Spaten Premium in bottles (I convinced Rinpoche to take a sip, but did not tell him it had been the first alcohol to pass my lips, fourteen years old, behind the barn at Mickey Schlossen’s farm), a meaty menu, and old farm couples in overalls and cotton dresses—for me it was all a snapshot from a childhood album. Rinpoche contented himself with a dish of potato salad and a slice of the brown bread—it arrived already buttered, dense as it was delicious. Yours truly went the bratwurst and mashed route, in
tribute to Mom and Pop. I had been thinking about them more and more as we got closer to North Dakota. They’d been a sweet pair, really—unadorned, unself-conscious, hardened by work and weather and girded about by the cool emotional climate into which they’d been born, but decent as the day was long.

I looked up at Rinpoche and told him, “Bratwurst, beer, and bread, my father used to say. No man needs more.”

He nodded, swallowed. “I remember also the things my father said to me. He was a kind man, very small for size, very famous where I was as a boy. There were not so many trees there as in America. Hills that went brown color in the summer. You hear the train go by from many miles, and you walk up the hill and see very far, and in the winter there was deep snow, and wind.”

“A Siberian North Dakota.”

“He used to say the land there made your mind big. Perfect land for meditation.”

“No bratwurst and beer though, I bet.”

He laughed. There was a spot of butter on his lower lip. “Sausage and beer, almost the same.” He paused and took another bite, swallowed, all very deliberate. And then, “He used to say—and sometimes my mother would say—that I, that my when I was born—”

“
That my being born
is how you’d say it in English.”

“Thank you, my friend. That my being born made them the happiest of anything.”

Here’s where our stories part company,
I thought, because it was something my parents would never in a million years have told us, even though it might have been true. Kind, yes, but they’d been trained to terseness, and never questioned that. They did not spend a lot of time embracing
us, kissing us, telling us what a blessing we were in their lives. Something happened to me then, in the midst of this memory, some small internal tremor. I could not, at first, find any reason for it. Looking at Rinpoche, I felt an unexplained nervousness rising up in me, that’s all. And I noticed that I had the urge to fall back on old habits and cover over the nervousness with a cute little remark. I resisted.

Instead of going on, Rinpoche just nodded in a satisfied way, as if cherishing a happy memory. He wiped his lip with one finger.

“You’re a reincarnation of some kind, aren’t you?” I heard myself say, from out of the center of the nervousness, but there was no mockery in the words. “Is that why it made them happy?”

“Yes. That is why. Also they loved me.”

“A reincarnation of who?”

“Just a teacher. In our lineage. No special man.”

“No?”

He shook his huge head. “You sure?”

“Yes, very sure,” he said, but for the first time on that trip he wasn’t making eye contact when he spoke.

“Are there female reincarnations, too?”

He laughed at this foolish question, seemed to regain his balance. “Of course, Otto. My mother was the incarnation of a great . . . you would call it, I think, a saint.”

I had a strong visual memory then, of Rinpoche in South Bend, prostrating himself before the statue of Mary as if he were as Catholic as any Father O’Malley or Sister McFinn. The feeling I had been trying to repress rose up further in me, up into the place between my lungs. I had a mouthful of bratwurst and found I was having difficulty swallowing.
I felt as if I were fighting with myself inside myself. I’m tempted to use the expression “of two minds” except that I actually
felt
that: There were two distinct minds in me, old and new, and they were doing battle. I thought of Rinpoche’s recent description of the digital universe, of a continual decision-making that led the individual soul this way or that. A or B, A or B. I was remembering, again, what the massage therapist had said. I was replaying the things I’d seen and heard between Paterson and here.

“I’m curious about something,” I heard myself saying, when I’d gotten the mouthful of bratwurst down. To calm myself, I took a sip of the cool, tangy Spaten. “If there are saints, really, in this life . . . I mean, if they are actual people and not just a sort of myth we make up after they die, to give us hope or something . . . I mean . . . I’m not expressing myself very well here.” I took another sip of beer, the Rinpoche watching me now, calm, intent. “What I’m trying to ask is, if there are actual saints, and maybe even actual teachers or gods come to earth, I mean Jesus, Buddha, you know. How does it work? Who sends them? Why are they sent? What is the mechanism by which a being like that appears in a human womb? . . . I mean . . . does your lineage have anything to say on the subject?”

“Of course. Yes,” he said, smiling a small tight smile as if he saw right through me. He considered the question for a moment. “How to tell you?”

I tried to make a wise little remark—
Oh, the usual way,
I was going to say—but I simply could not get the words out.

“On this planet, this earth, there is the physical and the not-physical, yes?” He pronounced the word
fuscal.

“I suppose.”

“You love your wife very much, yes?”

“Yes.”

“There is the physical wife that you love—that you can see and touch and listen and smell, yes? And then there is also the not-physical wife that you love that you can’t touch, can’t see, can’t smell. The physical body holds the not-physical, yes, but the not-physical makes go the physical body. Makes go the heart. Makes go the brain, you see?”

“All right.”

“On this planet, the physical world is mostly water and stone and air. A few other things but mostly water and stone and air. Those things you can touch, you can smell sometimes, you can see. But what makes go those things?”