Breakfast With Buddha (7 page)

On that note I got out and filled the tank. Gas prices were breaking records that summer; filling the tank cost me forty-seven dollars. I wiped the windshield clean with the rubber-edged tool, trimming the water off in neat rows as the Rinpoche watched, intrigued. He seemed to be studying everything—the landscape, the design of the gas station’s
logo, the displays in the front window and the numbers on the pumps. Forty-seven dollars! If you made six dollars an hour, it took a day’s work to fill the tank.

I went in to use the facilities, and on the way out I noticed an old man in overalls sitting on a folding chair just outside the front door. Rotund in cheeks and belly, balding, past seventy, he seemed to be one of these local people the chains sometimes hire for minimum wage, a fossil-fuel Buddha doing odd jobs. He sent a shining smile up at me. I stopped and asked him where we might find a place to spend the night. “Not a chain motel,” I added. “Someplace real. I have a friend along, visiting from another country, and I want to show him the real America. An old inn. A B&B, something like that. Would you know of anyplace like that in these parts?”

“Lititz,” he said.

I thought for a moment that he was being vulgar. Uncle of the owner, down on his brain cells, he was offering commentary on the body parts of female customers.

“Say again?”

“Lititz,” he repeated, and waved his cane to the south, past the east-west highway we had just been on. “Little old town. Nice inn there. Feed you good, too, if you can afford it, and from the looks of things, you can. Go to 501, head south, and keep going. You’ll feel like you missed it. Go on and on, an hour from this spot right here. Inn is right on the road. Feed you real good.”

“But we’re heading northwest,” I said.

“Nothing that way. Go to Lititz, I’m telling you.”

I thanked him and had turned and started to walk away when he rapped me on the calf with his cane. I turned back.

“Listen to me,” he said, rather fiercely. “Go south. Lititz.
And don’t eat too much there. Cut your life short. Chops the sex urge in half, too, you know.”

“We wouldn’t want that.”

“No, we wouldn’t.”

I smiled politely, patted my belly, and hurried away, erasing his advice from my mind almost immediately. I got back in the car and was clicking my seatbelt on and there he was again, hobbling toward us, then pushing his face practically through the window. He gave Rinpoche a big smile and a wink and said to me, “You don’t take advice good, do you, son?”

Rinpoche laughed. I mumbled something about being as open to advice as the next person, but that we had a schedule to keep.

The old man pushed two fingers into my left shoulder. “I’m telling you, Lititz is special, a special place for you. Look at my eyes.”

I looked. Cloudy, silvery, intense. I felt the stubbornness rising up in me.
Back off,
I was tempted to say.
Go harass somebody else.
But then his face softened, his fingers tapped my shoulder lightly, and his voice turned into a kindly grandfather’s voice. “Listen,” he said, “I wouldn’t send you down there for nothin’. You like your food, am I right?”

“Absolutely.”

“This place has the best food within fifty miles of here. You’re talking just a little ways off your route. Here.” He reached into his overalls and produced a folded up scrap of glossy paper. “Coupon. Ten percent off. You trust me now, okay. Show your friend here the very best of Pennsylvania.” He looked across at Rinpoche and winked again.

“Yes, I want to see this place,” Rinpoche said, and that sealed the matter.

I
FOUND ROUTE
501 without any trouble, and headed south along it, relieved to be away from the interstate noise, the hurtling semis, and the insistent advice of old men in gas stations. This was an even prettier road, lined with sedate, perfectly manicured farms and neat white barns, some of them made with a pale stone or surrounded by walls of that stone. There were small ponds in these yards, straight rows of corn, smooth carpets of alfalfa and beans in the fields, and I supposed that the old guy had been right: It was worth it, after all, to lose a bit of time going south if the territory was prettier and the food better. I could always make up ground the next day. Along the side of the pavement an Amish family clop-clopped in their black buggy. Another calm, artificial life, I thought, another little world within a world, separate from reality. But then it occurred to me to wonder if these lives were in many ways harder than my own, not less but more real. Rinpoche had been in prison, after all, if he was telling the truth. There was nothing artificially nice about that.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, I understand,” I said. “But, at some point, I’d like to know what that was like, the prison. I’d like to hear the story of your escape.”

He nodded. Nodded, then uttered this memorable line, as if he’d been pondering it while I navigated Pennsylvania’s country highways and took advice from its old men: “You are a good person, good soul.”

“What? For asking to hear about your escape from a Soviet prison?”

He reached across and patted me on the forearm, two firm slaps. There were two or three syllables of the famous chuckle, and then: “You are a clean soul.”

“I try to—”

“You are close to a major step.”

And you haven’t even looked at my palm,
I thought.

“You don’t see,” he went on, “but you are now very close to a major step. You have the dreams about escaping, yes?”

Here it came then, the dreaded spiritual nonsense. “Listen,” I answered, as kindly as I could manage. “I’m not such a clean soul, as you put it. I try. I’m a good dad, good husband. I try to treat people decently. But I have to tell you that I am a Christian—not in the judgmental, hateful sense in which that word is lately thrown about, but an old-fashioned Christian. A Protestant, in fact. That’s my faith. That’s what I live by. I don’t go to church often, it’s true. Those rituals don’t do much for me anymore. But the basic principles—”

“You don’t see,” he said.

“No, I don’t.” And then, in another small fit of anger, I pulled the car over into a gravel driveway that led to some kind of metal storage building. I killed the engine, turned and gave the Rinpoche all my attention, then took a breath to calm down. “Look, I’m not fond of proselytizers.”

He raised his eyebrows and kept them raised, then dropped them.

“I’m not a big fan of the touchy-feely, the past lives, the chakras, the important steps someone who doesn’t know me tells me I am about to make. I’m an ordinary American man, with a wonderful wife and family, nice job. I try to be good. You’ll excuse me for being blunt, but, really, I don’t need anything—any words of encouragement from you or from any other spiritual teacher.”

He watched me. There was the tiniest smile at the corners of his mouth. “Why angry?” he asked.

“Why? Because my sister is forever trying to convince me to do this or that—meditate, stop eating meat, start washing my hands with organic soap, and so on. It annoys me, frankly. I have a very nice life, thank you, and a faith of my own.”

“Why angry?” he repeated.

“Because you frustrate me, you people. The evangelical so-called Christians telling everyone else how to live, when they can’t even stay away from prostitutes. The New Agers telling everyone else what to do and not do when they can barely manage their own mortgage payment. What right have you to tell me about my important step, my dreams? You hardly know me.”

But he was smiling at me as if he did know me. The smile was an odd combination of innocent goodwill and sureness, as if he were at once happy to see me standing up for myself, but also laughing at me, kindly, the way a father laughs at his two-year-old when she mispronounces a word. No, that’s not right; that implies a condescension that wasn’t there. It was more like a seasoned affection. Strong, even, yellowish teeth, lips stretched wide, longshoreman’s face still and solid—the Rinpoche was looking at me as if he knew me through and through and liked me in spite of it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m blaming you for things other people do. I’ll buy you dinner to make up for it. It’s just a sore subject with me, that’s all. A sore subject with a long history. Family stuff.”

“Okay,” he said, and the smile broadened. He reached across and poked me in the arm, hard, with one thick finger, and chuckled. “Okay. Sorry, too.”

I started the car and continued down 501. At just this point—this is the absolute truth—we passed a stone church
in front of which stood a small sign carrying this message:
IT’S NOT ABOUT RELIGION. IT’S ABOUT RELATIONSHIP
.

“Sorry again,” I said.

He said, “Open American conversation.” And I felt a twist of something—anger, shame—in my guts. Or a combination of the two. Or maybe just hunger.

Another sign by the side of the road:
GO IN PEACE. SERVE THE LORD
.

Then a diner called Kumm Esse, and a sign there saying,
TRY OUR STRAWBERRY PIE
. I very nearly pulled in.

And just beyond Kumm Esse, another church, with another message,
DISCOVER YOUR PURPOSE. SUNDAY 10:15
.

It was the message center for the proselytizers of the world, all of them confident in their knowing, eager to make others like them, sure of what would spread happiness. I decided I’d go home and make a sign for my front yard that said
LEAVE THE REST OF US ALONE, DAMN IT
! but then, beneath all this, something was nagging at me. Why so angry?

Soon we drove up a gentle slope and into the village of Lititz. We found the inn just where the fellow with the cane had said it would be, right on 501. All I could think about then was the consolation of food. A good dinner, the best dinner Lititz could offer. Glass of wine, cut of meat, vegetables. Slice of strawberry pie, if strawberry pie happened to be the specialty hereabouts. That would calm me down. Two more days with Rinpoche and I’d be done. We’d leave early in the morning to make up for our little detour. We’d play music on the CD player, listen to the hot winds from the right and left, Rush Limbaugh or Rachel Maddow, a sports show, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Joyce Meyers, the Reverend Armando Fillipo Buck. We’d get through this and go
back to our normal lives. I felt suddenly strong and sure of myself . . . and ready to eat.

Except that, as I found a parking spot on the street near the inn, and did a neat parallel parking job, I happened to remember—in the way you remember such things—a flash of recurring dream I’d been having over the past few months. Half a dozen times. Always there was some flood coming, or some animal, or, once, a churning yellow bulldozer. And always yours truly was sprinting for his life.

Escape.

TEN

The General Sutter Inn,
located in the quaint village of Lititz, Pennsylvania, turned out to be the absolutely perfect antidote to a long day on the road. From his carpetbag, Rinpoche pulled a wad of bills, and he asked for the least expensive room, which turned out to be sixty-two dollars plus tax. He counted out the money slowly and carefully and smiled at the young woman behind the desk. I handed over a credit card, asked for something larger, and was given a key to a hundred-dollar room, also on the second floor, 212 in fact, my office area code. “What about dinner?” I asked Rinpoche. “My treat. I promised. Make up for any bad moments on the drive.”

He lifted his eyebrows and flexed his cheeks—his face had an amazing elasticity, as if he’d spent years in a specialized gym developing the muscles over his cheekbones—and shook his head, no. “Just sitting now. Just sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow we eat, Rinpoche and you.”

“Fine. Good night then.”

“Good night, you-are-a-good-man.”

Rinpoche and I took the carpeted stairs together, then went along separate hallways without another word.

The inn was 250 years old, and seemed it. In the best sense. Creaking wooden floors, wainscoting, lace curtains, sitting rooms with three armchairs and a shelf of books. Room 212 faced onto the street that intersected with 501, and it was a little noisy but otherwise perfectly fine: a king-sized bed, an old-fashioned tiled bath, heavy mahogany dresser and desk in the style of the pieces I was driving all the way to North Dakota to fetch. A television the size of two half-gallons of ice cream stacked one on top of the other. There were exposed pipes, and the ceiling had suffered from a leak at some point, but I liked all that, liked it a thousand times more than the sanitized chain hotels with three hundred rooms, the kind of place I was used to from my business travel. I liked having an actual key instead of a plastic card, liked the old porcelain handles on the shower, liked the fact that you could actually open the windows, liked the absence of disinfectant smell, generic wall prints, an “entertainment center,” and the “bar” with its four-dollar bottles of spring water and nine-dollar bags of nuts.

I stretched, sat on the bed, took off my shoes and socks, and called home.

“Is this the Prince of the Road?” Jeannie asked when she answered.

“It is. The prince is tired. He misses his wife. He is traveling with a man who wears a gold-trimmed red robe.”

There was a rather long pause. And then, “Otto? Really?”

“The Prince of the Road never lies.”

“Is it some kind of midlife trouble, honey? Is there something I should know?”

A two-second delay and then I lay sideways across the bed and burst out laughing. The laugh was like something from my childhood, and it seemed to wring the whole day’s weariness out of me. When it died, it died slowly, in a fading out of smaller riffs. “Nothing except the fact that my wonderful sister tricked me into taking her spiritual master instead of her. I am traveling with the guru Volya Rinpoche, newly arrived in these United States by way of Siberia.”

“You’re making some kind of a joke.”

“Dead serious.”

“Seese didn’t come? After all that?”

“Seese is back in Paterson regressing a good friend.”

“And who is with you, really?”

“Volvo Rinpoche or Volya Rinpoche, something like that. Shaved head, nice smile, slight trouble with English, and mysterious as the day is long. I like him, I think.”