The Good Luck of Right Now (3 page)

Is it wrong for Buddhists to masturbate?

I used to tie my hands to my bedposts—you can do this without help if you practice enough times to master the art of making effective wrist nooses—in an effort to keep from masturbating as I fell asleep at night. But then Mom—who seemed never to tire of liberating me in the a.m., whenever I called out for freedom—reluctantly told me it was better to masturbate than have sex with strange women who have diseases like AIDS and herpes and the flu. She said you can even get the flu from having sex with strangers, and that many people die from the flu every year, which is why we got flu shots at Rite Aid every September.

But Mom also said, if I needed gratification, I should take care of it myself. She said that to me when I was in my twenties and was arrested for trying to solicit a prostitute who was an undercover cop.

Father McNamee arranged for a lawyer to help me and took me to the thrift store to shop for a suit. The men working at the thrift shop were homosexuals, and were—according to Father McNamee—therefore well versed in fashion. They were nice and helped me find the perfect courtroom outfit. “How does he look?” Father McNamee asked them when I came out of the dressing room. “Innocent,” one of the homosexuals said, and then smiled proudly.

“Catholics aren’t supposed to approve of homosexuality, right?” I asked Father McNamee when we were walking home.

“Catholics aren’t supposed to get arrested for soliciting the services of prostitutes either,” he said in this terse, almost mean way, even though he knew I was (and even looked) innocent.

“I liked the homosexuals who helped me find my suit. Is that wrong according to the Catholic Church?” I asked. “I just want a definitive answer.”

“Between you and me only—off the record—it’s not wrong,” Father McNamee said. “I liked them too. I’ve known Harvey for thirty years.”

“Who’s Harvey?”

“The owner of the store—and my friend.”

“So you have homosexual friends?”

“
Of course
,” he said, but he sort of whispered it fast.

During a dinner at our home, Mom once said to Father McNamee, “Seventy-five percent of all priests are gay. That’s why the church makes homosexuality a sin. Every rectory would be an all-out Roman orgy if they didn’t.”

They both laughed so hard at that one, maybe because they had been drinking bottles of wine.

When I went to court the judge said it was entrapment, because the cop—who was dressed up in a pink wig and a leather miniskirt and pointy cone bra and the highest heels you have ever seen—had stopped me on my way home from the library and rubbed up against my leg, calling me “Big Baby Daddy” (which was confusing, because how can you simultaneously be a baby
and
a daddy?) and asking me for money.

I asked how much she needed, and she said, “Twenty for head. Sixty for anything you want.” (I wrote that down later in my Interesting Things I Have Heard notebook.) No one had
ever
rubbed up against my leg like that before—it felt like I was frozen in time and space, like an ancient caveman trapped in ice or amber maybe—like it was a moment, and so I agreed to give the pink-haired woman some money with a nod, mostly because I thought it would make her happy, and my mouth was too dry to speak.

To be honest, I thought it would make her keep rubbing against my leg too, and that felt really, really good—like I was a stack of pancakes and she was the butter melting on top of me, sliding down. And I also did this because she had hypnotized me with her lips and eyes and mind and her makeup and her smell and her sweat—I wanted her to rub up against my thigh forever.

Pancakes and butter.

It all felt very lucky, like I had won a prize.

But just as soon as I pulled money out of my wallet, all of these men jumped out from behind trees and trash cans—pointing guns and flashing badges and screaming for me to get down on my knees and put my hands behind my head. They had a bullhorn that hurt my ears and made me feel like there were angry wasps tunneling through my mind. When they handcuffed my wrists behind my back, I was so afraid, I peed my pants and the cops yelled at me because they didn’t want “the piss” to get on the seat of their cruiser. One of them called me “a fucking retard,” I remember, because I wrote that down later in my notebook too—and also, I don’t like to be called a retard, but have often been called one, which is unfair and maybe even cruel.

He said, “Another fucking retard. He pissed himself.
Look!
”

The men laughed and the woman dressed in the pink wig lit up a cigarette as she rolled her eyes at me and shook her head.

“We should put this pathetic sack of shit out of his misery,” said a short cop. He was dressed like a bum, but his badge was hanging around his neck. It shimmered under the streetlights. He had a compact modern pistol in his hand, like what cops on TV carry. I worried that he was really going to shoot me between the eyes, because he looked at me like he didn’t believe I should exist, and all he had to do was pull a trigger to make me disappear forever. He had the power.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. I didn’t want to be the root of so much trouble. I was starting to believe that the angry cop was right about me. “I didn’t mean to cause any inconvenience.”

He shook his head disgustedly—like I was dog dirt he had just accidentally stepped in—and then he walked away, scraping me off on the rough cold sidewalk until his sole was completely clean of me.

I hope you have surmised by now that I am not a retard, Richard Gere.

I am “above average intelligence.”

Mom always told me that, anyway. She said I scored remarkably high on an unconventional IQ test my elementary school required its students to take, but that the world doesn’t always measure intelligence the right way.

“The world likes money better than truth,” Mom also used to say. “So we’re screwed!”

She used to laugh so hard whenever she said that.

“And you’re just a little off,” Mom would say. “Off in the
best
of ways. Perfect the way you are. My beautiful son. Bartholomew Neil. I love you so much.”

My young grief counselor Wendy says I am “emotionally disturbed” and “developmentally stunted” from having lived in a “codependent relationship” with my mother for so many years.

I don’t think Wendy likes Mom very much.

She once said Mom fed off me, which made my mother sound like a cannibal with a bone through her nose, stirring me up in some giant cauldron perched upon a pile of flaming wood.

Mom wasn’t like that at all; she was no cannibal.

This all went into my notebook.

Wendy told me I was “emotionally disturbed” and “developmentally stunted” when I asked why I needed a grief counselor, since I wasn’t really sad anymore that Mom had died—when I told her I had made peace and didn’t cry at night or anything like that. I had no grief to manage. She was wasting her time.

“She died peacefully because of the morphine,” I said. “And I’ll see Mom again in heaven.”

Wendy the grief counselor ignored my mention of heaven. She said, “You say you haven’t even cried yet.
Yet.
You are most likely repressing many emotions.”

“Do birds repress things?” I said, as a joke, keeping my eyes on my shoelaces, and Wendy laughed in a good way that made me feel like I had stumped her with her own metaphor, and was therefore not a retard.

But as I was saying before, Mom had to come get me out of jail, and it took so long that my pants were dry by the time she got there, but my thighs had chapped from rubbing against wet jeans because I was pacing while incarcerated.

There was this interesting Puerto Rican man in my cell wearing makeup and he kept blowing kisses at me and saying he wanted to “cut me gently” whenever the cops weren’t around. I know he was Puerto Rican because he had on a T-shirt that read
PUERTO RICANS FUCK BETTER
. Although maybe he could have been a non–Puerto Rican who just liked to have sex with Puerto Ricans, I suppose. Regardless, it was interesting and unusual, so I wrote it in my notebook.

That night, after she bailed me out of jail and took me home, Mom told me that self-gratification—while it was technically a sin in the Catholic Church, sometimes referred to as the sin of Onan—was probably the path for me. She wasn’t really mad at me for getting arrested, especially after I told her what had happened—how the pink-haired woman had basically jumped out of an alley and began to rub against my leg before I could say or do anything. Mom nodded and said she wished she had told me about self-gratification before all of this happened, but such talks were usually the job of the father, and my father had died far before I was old enough for sex talks, so Mom really isn’t to be blamed.

That night Mom came into my room, sat on the edge of my bed like she used to when I was a boy, pointed above my headboard to the crucifix—her gift to me when I was confirmed—and she said, “That guy hung out with prostitutes. He got arrested too. So you’re in good company, Bartholomew. Don’t let this rip you apart inside, okay?” When I didn’t respond, Mom said, “I wish you had run into a Vivian Ward instead of an undercover cop.” She was referencing Julia Roberts’s character in
Pretty Woman
, which I don’t have to tell you. “I want more. I want the fairy tale,” Mom said, just like Julia Roberts said to you in the movie. “I want the fairy tale for you, Bartholomew. If I couldn’t have it, I want it for you. So keep believing in fairy tales, okay? Keep believing that even some prostitutes are good-hearted women. Believe. Pretend even!” I don’t know why—maybe because Mom was always so hopeful for me, and I never could manage to confirm her wild suspicions about her only son—but I had to turn my face away from her. I felt the tears coming, the pressure building up behind my eyes. Mom ran her fingers through my hair for a few minutes, like she did when I was a boy. Even though I was too old to be tucked in like that, I was glad she did what she did. It made the angry man in my stomach fall asleep. It was like her hand was able to perform a miracle that night. “I want the fairy tale for you, my sweet, sweet trusting boy,” she said once more before she turned out the lights and exited my bedroom.

My father was most likely murdered by Catholic-hating Ku Klux Klan members, and I therefore have no memory of him. People forget that the KKK hated Catholics just as much as they hated Blacks and Jews, once upon a time. Mom said no one cares if you hate Catholics anymore because of all the pedophile priests, which is why people forget that the KKK probably still hates Catholics. (Mom also said if priests keep molesting little boys, the KKK would soon have a higher approval rating than the Catholic Church.) This is also why my father’s killer was never brought to justice, according to Mom, nor did any newspapers cover the murder, which is maybe why I couldn’t find any record of it at the library.

“It was once very hard for Catholics in this country,” Mom used to say when I was a boy. “Your father—a good Catholic man—went out for a pack of cigarettes and never was seen again. The police say he left us for another family up in Montreal, where he was originally from, but we know better.”

So Mom did her best and can’t really be blamed for my arrest. I once asked her if my father was also a good pretender, and she said he was. Apparently, he was a lot like me.

Why didn’t my father get to give Mom the fairy tale?

Why do most people fail to give each other the fairy tale?

Do you know why, Richard Gere?

Has your moviemaking taught you this?

Your admiring fan,

Bartholomew Neil

3

SADLY, I DO NOT THINK I AM TELEPATHIC

Dear Mr. Richard Gere,

I woke up this morning, put on coffee, and tried to listen to the tough (or lazy) morning birds, but the tiny angry man in my stomach was raging, screaming,
Idiot! Neanderthal! Stupid!

It was quite disconcerting because I had no idea why he was upset. Usually I know right away what’s bothering him, because it’s usually what’s bothering me.

I racked my brain, but I couldn’t remember.

I fixed my coffee, and when I took my first sip—it came to me.

I had completely forgotten the point of my last letter, going on and on about unrelated past things. I didn’t even tell you the most important part about yesterday’s trip to the library, which makes me feel that I am indeed a gigantic emphatic moron.

(I get sidetracked easily by interesting things, and for this reason, people often find it hard to converse with me, which is why I don’t talk very much to strangers and much prefer writing letters, in which there is room to record everything, unlike real-life conversations where you have to fight and fight to fit in your words and almost always lose.)

At the library, I found an article on the
Huffington Post
that said you “received blessings from the Dalai Lama at Mahabodhi temple in Bodh Gaya.” It was dated March 18, 2010. There were pictures of you bowing to the Dalai Lama and him reaching down, touching your forehead with his hands in prayer position. There was also a photo of you praying with your eyes open while wearing expensive-looking Bose headphones. I wondered what you were listening to. On your left wrist were wooden beads, and on your right an old leather watchband. Judging by your eyes, you were enraptured.

Do you remember that day?

Have you seen this photo?

Being blessed by the Dalai Lama must have been a great honor, and I want to congratulate you right away, even though this event happened almost two years ago. I guess this is your equivalent of meeting the pope. I’d be very excited if I met the pope—even this new pope who is German. Mom never liked Germans, because her father was killed in World War II. (I have nothing against Germans.)

Then I found an article from the
Syracuse Buddhism Examiner
. It read “A TIME magazine survey on a wide-ranging list of the highs and lows of the past 12 months has listed the ‘Self-Immolation of Tibetan Monks’ as the number one ‘underreported story’ for the year 2011.” There was a picture of a monk on fire. He looked like a pillar of flaming lava. It was hard to believe that the photo was an actual man burning alive because the reddish orange color almost looked beautiful and the man was perfectly still.