Breakfast With Buddha by Roland Merullo

Author:Roland Merullo [Merullo, Roland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781565126169
Publisher: Algonquin
Published: 2007-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

The women turned away. The men looked at me for a few bad seconds, and then one of them said, “No shit?”

“No shit. He’s giving a talk tomorrow at Notre Dame. He gives talks all over the world.”

“No shit,” the man said again, not a question this time. He was looking Rinpoche up and down and, after a second, shifted the bowling ball to his left hand and held out his right in a strange gesture of supplication, as if he were about to bow. We could see the tattoo of a snake curling around a sword up the inside of his forearm. “What about a blessing then?” He said to Rinpoche. “You know. For good luck. What about it?”

I thought, for a moment, that he was being sarcastic, and that now the real trouble would come. Behind him, his friends were smiling, but they were the kind of smiles you see on the faces of scarred young children who are about to pull an insect apart, leg by leg.

Rinpoche did not notice any of this, or gave no sign of noticing, at least. He reached out and shook the first man’s hand vigorously, smiling, nodding at the others.

“Yeah,” one of the women said, “he needs his sins to get forgiven.”

This line caused the man with the snake tattoo to smile and the others to go into paroxysms of hacking guffaws.

Rinpoche let go of the man’s hand and looked at him, moved half a step closer—I was going to try to stop him—and then he put his palms on the man’s shoulders and started in on some kind of a prayer in some language—Ortyk, it must have been—that sounded like a cold Siberian stream running over stones. No one understood it, of course, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the tone, and the tone was like honey, like love made into a song, a quiet, utterly fearless little chant that would have calmed a wolf with her back to the cliffside and three pups on her teats. It went on for maybe twenty seconds. When it was finished, Rinpoche took a step backward and bowed. The man with the snake tattoo stood frozen in place. And then across his jagged features bloomed the smile he must have had as a young boy, before anything had been taken away from him by what he saw and heard, before the world had shown him its teeth and bitten him. He smiled like that, watching Rinpoche, and then he remembered who he was supposed to be and shifted the bowling ball back to his other hand and said, “Hey, thanks, man. You’re all right.” And the woman behind him lifted up the pink ball and handed it over.

For the rest of the evening—Rinpoche and I bowled two strings—things went along without incident. The cursing beside us ceased, and I thought the laughter was less raucous, too. Best of all, Rinpoche turned out to be absolutely crazy about tenpin bowling. By the end, he was doing fairly well.

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