Breakfast With Buddha (15 page)

“I’ll pass,” I said.

“Pass what?”

“I’ll say no this time.”

“I can show you the big happiness we talked about. You can believe it for yourself.”

“Thanks but no. Just knock on my door when you’re ready. Two hours, right?”

He held up two thick fingers, smiled, nodded, but there was something different in the way he looked at me then. The best way I can describe it is to say that there was a certain amount of authority in his eyes, and that it was perfectly mixed with what seemed to be a genuine affection. To that point in the trip—even as recently as half an hour earlier—it had been easy for me to write him off as a fool, a clown, a chuckling man, but now it was as if he’d turned some internal dial—turned it only slightly—and one layer of foolishness had magically evaporated. He still chuckled and worked the muscles of his face the way a bodybuilder works his triceps, and he still behaved, at moments, like a boy of nine. But I was beginning to think of that as his “act,” and I was beginning, just beginning, to sense something beneath the act, some force, some disguised dignity that I had not been aware of during the first two days of our journey.

None of that made it any easier for me to hear about the anniversary, the lineage, the two hours of meditation. None of it made me as sure of his version of heaven and earth as he seemed to be; none of it tempted me to “sit.” No, instead of sitting, I reclined. On my white wicker bed, with the TV on, the radio clock in plain view, and two of the inn’s fine pillows under the back of my head. In that meditative position I spent the two hours making a study of American morning television.

God save us. God help us. If there is, in fact, a God, and if he does, in fact, pay attention to the way we live our lives (I had been brought up to believe that was the
case, and still believe it, on some level), then what must he—or she, or it—think of modern life as presented on these shows? Three people are sitting on a couch with the host in front of them, egging them on. The people are, from left to right: The wife whose husband divorced her for the babysitter. The husband. The babysitter. The dialogue consists of things like this: “Well, if you’d known how to treat a man instead of being a bitch all the time, maybe he would have stayed!” And the audience is cheering and booing like Romans in the Colosseum, bursting into applause at the nastiest remarks, the host pressing his trio, inciting them, the babysitter and wife eventually, in a climax of toxic absurdity, reaching across the husband and batting at each other’s arms. The husband tries to stop them from fighting, then abandons his post and flees; the women are allowed serious martial contact for five or ten seconds before the security men rush in and hold them apart. All this is done with a kind of trumped-up sincerity as if it is utterly real, and perhaps it is. Maybe there are, in fact, people so eager to see themselves on a television screen—the modern altar—that they will parade their own miseries in front of other people, also eager to be part of the drama, who will sit in an audience and cheer and shout. All this for the benefit of millions of other industrious Americans who have no greater purpose on a weekday morning than to sit and watch. And all that for the ultimate benefit of the shareholders of the companies that make furniture polish, or diapers, or laundry soap, or pills to make you sleep better or have more energy or less anxiety, and who pay to keep the whole tawdry ball rolling: new shows developed, new hosts discovered and trained, new guests—miserable,
desperate, fairly nice-looking—dredged up from all corners of this great land.

Fine, let them spend their time that way, it doesn’t matter to me except as a barometer of the country I love and worry over. Lying there, I remembered my father and mother taking us to a sun festival at one of the many Native American reservations in North Dakota—the Associated Tribes, I think it was, in New Town. After we’d watched the dancing and singing and were on the way home in our car, my dad remarked upon how far we’d advanced since the days when the land was ruled by Indian tribes. There were farms now, he said, where once there’d been only buffalo. Farms with telephones and TVs, tractors, airplanes, medicines . . . whereas in those old days there had been nothing. You worked from morning till night, you hunted and fished and sewed and cooked, sang and danced a few times a year, made war, made peace. “Look at us now,” he said, sweeping his hand out near the windshield at a stretch of heartland. “Look at all this.”

“Look at us now,” I said to the TV. But I spent two hours of my life watching it.

When two hours and five minutes had passed, Rinpoche knocked on the door. I had half a mind to ask him to watch the next show with me, but it was checkout time, and we had miles to cover that day. So I got up and turned off the set, feeling strangely depleted of energy, of urge, of hope. I looked around the room to make sure there was nothing I had left behind—T-shirt, pair of socks, reading glasses . . . desire to show Rinpoche as much as I could of my beloved America.

NINETEEN

I was, naturally enough,
already thinking about lunch. As an antidote to the TV poison, I wanted an especially good meal. Something different. We were checking out of the Inn of Chagrin Falls, and the kind woman there was printing out our receipts and asking if we’d had a good night, and I had the foresight to ask her if I could see the Cleveland Yellow Pages. I knew we were only about an hour from that city, and I suspected the culinary options there would be richer than whatever awaited us on the flat roads to the west. I was rewarded for the trials of the morning by page after page of restaurant listings—Chinese, Italian, Greek, Japanese, seafood, meat-and-potato. Hungarian was the most exotic of the bunch, so I copied down the number of a Hungarian place called Little Budapest, thanked the hostess, then waited until we’d put our things in the car and had our seatbelts on before making the call.

The phone was answered by a woman who spoke very softly and with a thick accent. I was sitting behind the inn, next to the air conditioner that had been bothering me the
night before, with Rinpoche sitting calmly nearby, and a small device pressed up to my ear, and I was shouting into the device, trying to get directions to Little Budapest. The poor soul on the other end of the line must have thought I’d called purposely to torment her. “Four twenty-two, west,” she said, though it sounded more like
“Firr-dvindy-do, yss.”

“West?” I yelled.

“Firr dvindy do, vss.”

I should mention, at this point, that I am somewhat directionally challenged. Jeannie and the kids will attest to this with abundant examples of Dad walking into a building to use the men’s room and then not being able to find his way out again, of Dad returning to his B&B fairly late at night, alone, forgetting which of the second-floor doors leads to his room, and walking into the bedroom of the host family’s fifteen-year-old daughter (who is, to Dad’s enduring gratefulness, fully clothed).

So, to be on the safe side, I took notes as I grilled the Hungarian woman. Rinpoche was sitting patiently beside me, his postmeditative calm acting as a reverse image of my posttelevision agitation. “College Road exit off 422,” I thought the woman said. I asked her to repeat it and she did, and I thought she said more or less the same thing. Then there was something about a road being closed, then another left, then something about what was possibly Columbia Road, a right there I was almost certain, and then Center Reach Road, though when I asked her to spell that, she said what sounded to me like “
S-E-M,
” and so on. I would see the restaurant up there a quarter mile on the right or the left. I waited for her to add the classic phrase, “You can’t miss it.” But she did not.

So we started off. I made my way carefully through the
center of Chagrin Falls, tracing carefully by memory streets that looked rather different during the day than they had at night. Somehow I made a small mistake and ended up in a neighborhood of neat modest homes, where a man was mowing his lawn when he should have been inside watching to see who had scored a knockout in the third round, wife or sitter. I thought of stopping to ask him for assistance, but I did not want to look inept in front of Rinpoche—who, after all, was entrusting me with the task of getting him safely to North Dakota. I was anxious to be on the highway in any case, and I confess to sharing, with a hundred million other red-blooded American men, an aversion to asking directions. I was hungry, too. So I stumbled on, soon found 480, or at least a recognizable road that led to 480, and we put Chagrin Falls behind us.

There is little to recommend the route that leads from Chagrin Falls into Cleveland along 480 and 422. Trees, a smattering of warehouses and low-lying office buildings, a few patches of bog. But then, truth be told, 480 and 422 do not actually lead into Cleveland, at least not if you follow them as we followed them. I became aware of this fact when, as we were speeding along, I happened to look to the right, and there I saw the skyline of Cleveland shining in the sunlight, probably fifteen miles away. We were, unfortunately, not going in that direction. I began to suspect that there had been an important lapse in communication between me and the Hungarian woman. So I picked up the cell phone, dialed again, and this time a man answered. Gruff in the classic Eastern European fashion. No-nonsense. He sounded as if he had a complicated goulash to prepare, or hungry customers to seat, and should not be expected to waste time with
people who couldn’t follow simple directions. His accent was slightly less difficult to parse.

“You are gong all right,” he said. “Jess keep gong.”

“But I’m heading away from Cleveland, aren’t I?”

“All right, all right, I said! Listen! Make sure you go leff after sementy-wan, that’s all. The highway goes two ways, you go leff. Then Clock Road. Then Columbia—no you can’t go that way, that road closed—then right, under-stan? Then leff and right on Center Reach and you’ll find us there. You’re gong fine.”

And he abruptly hung up.

We went bravely on, the top of Cleveland’s silvery skyline fading away beyond the curve of the earth. I began to entertain other options. There might be something decent off the interstate, or near the lake, some little gem of an All-American Ohio diner with fried chicken, baked beans, and coleslaw, a nice piece of homemade rhubarb pie for dessert, the best coffee within a hundred miles. Might be. No doubt there was, but the difficulty would lie in actually finding such a place. Friends at work had told me to take along a book we published,
Unknown and Wonderful Eateries,
which listed hundreds of roadside eateries from coast to coast, but I had declined. If they were in the book, they weren’t unknown, were they, I said. I wanted to make my own discoveries.

I then saw a sign for Claque Road, next exit. And I decided that Claque was close enough to College and to Clock that it was worth taking one shot. Claque road led us—past a Road Closed detour—to Columbia Road. “We’re all right,” I said to Rinpoche, who was elsewhere. But no sooner were those words uttered than Columbia
Road shrank to a winding two-lane street through a district that was painfully residential. Not a 7-Eleven, not a gas station in sight, not a Hungarian restaurant anywhere. House after house, yard after yard, lawns and garages and bicycles in the drive, and then, at last, like a mirage, an intersection with commercial buildings on all four corners. A large restaurant there, to the right. Hungarian-looking. But no, as we drew closer I could see a real estate sign in the window. Restaurant for sale, all equipment included. Instead of cooking, they had spent their time giving directions, and the enterprise had failed, and word had gotten around.

How to navigate the intersection. Right? Leff? Straight? I pulled into a gas station across the way and went into the office. Mom was behind the desk, Pop sitting in a chair reading the comic strip page of the
Plain Dealer
.

Mom.
Hungarian
restaurant? In this neighborhood?

Pop.
(Shakes his head without looking up.)

Visitor. Is there a Center Reach Road anywhere near here?

Mom. Center
Ridge
Road, but that’s all residential down there. No restaurants there.

Visitor. Okay, thanks. You’ve lived here all your life, right, and no Hungarian restaurants anywhere?

Pop,
looking up from the
Plain Dealer. Try taking a right on Center Ridge and going down there a ways. There are a few restaurants there. Friendly’s and so on.

Mom.
(Gives Pop a squint. He has contradicted her in front of a perfect stranger. Soon they will be on the couch, the visitor between, cameras on, the audience screaming, and the host firing questions like poison darts.
Everything was fine in our marriage until my
husband heard from this man about some Hungarian restaurant and then he had to go and try it, and then the waitress there . . .
and so on.)

Without much confidence, I ferried Rinpoche down Columbia to Center Ridge, all hope evaporating as we passed block after block of suburban quietude. This is the middle of the middle of America, I wanted to say to him, but it did not seem like the right moment. In the middle of the middle of America stood two churches. In front of the first, a sign read,
IF YOU ARE TOO BUSY TO PRAY YOU ARE TOO BUSY
. And in front of the second,
WHEN ANGER ENTERS, WISDOM DEPARTS
.

“How about when hunger enters?” I said aloud, and Rinpoche turned and gave me a quizzical look. We took a right on Center Ridge—there was, indeed, a Friendly’s there, to the leff. Unfortunately, I had my mind wrapped around goulash, not clam strips and fries (much as I like Friendly’s ice cream sodas). I pulled into the parking lot of an investment firm not far from Friendly’s and dialed the restaurant’s number one final time. Again the gruff chef. I told him where I was. He said, “Korter mile on leff. You can’t miss.”