Samsara (from THE TOY BUDDHA)

But first things first. The day after my would-be shopping spree, I decided to catch some lunchtime pickup action at Wooly Gym. Not having so much as touched a roundball in over six weeks, I was rustier than an old nail and couldn’t have hit water if I’d pissed off a dock. I really didn’t care, though. It just didn’t seem to matter anymore. I was learning to live with failure, becoming less of a perfectionist.
    After four or five games I nevertheless hoped to forget, I walked out of the gym into an unexpected snowstorm. Tiny pelletlike flakes were bouncing everywhere, frenetically ricocheting off everything, generating an ambient hissing sound like Rice Krispies in milk. The sidewalks were already covered with grainy slush. What possessed me to leave them and walk back to my dorm the long way through the woods (something I never did) I don’t know. My motives weren’t premeditated but impulsive, beyond logical explanation.
    Snow pitter-pattered down through the pines as I sucked deeply on the invigorating air that gave me a York Peppermint Patty sensation. In my mind’s eye I was whisked back to Chetaube County, to my imaginary childhood spent wandering through nearly identical woods, building tree houses and snowmen, catching lizards and crawdads in the creeks and hunting for arrowheads down in old Mr. Deyton’s tobacco fields.
    I visualized a twelve-year-old me sneaking into Mr. Deyton’s barn and climbing up into the rafters to the crawl space just below the warped tin roof where, foreshadowing the sex-starved nineteen-year-old I would become, I could enjoy at length the stash of Penthouse magazines I kept hidden there—
    What was that lying just off the path up ahead? Impossible. It couldn’t be. Could it? Good God, what if it was!
    With epic foreshadowing, a sense of History in the Making, I approached and knelt beside the lumpy, snow-covered form. My heart fluttered and my hand trembled as I reached out and tentatively brushed away the snow. Underneath, sure enough, was the raped and pillaged corpse of what had once been a silver Vespa.
    Her engine, seat and wheels had been stripped clean, but there was surprisingly little damage to her frame, hardly any rust at all. Running my fingers along her sleek skeleton, electric pulses raced up and down my spine. I was overcome with a powerful, soul-to-marrow urge to restore her and make her my very own.

Which was precisely what I did. I won’t trouble you with the details, how I telephoned Dante and enlisted his help, and how a day later he showed up in Yoda with a garage’s worth of tools having grown a bright red fungus of a beard that made him look like one of Santa’s helpers, and how, hearing his knee-high knock, I opened the door to find him standing there with a gremlin grin holding a case of Southern Comfort nearly as big as he was, and how he wondered if I’d lost weight and I said I’d gained a few pounds, and how he’d started working third shift making lingerie at Lipton Hill Hosiery and dating someone named, of all things, Beatrice, who was almost four years older and nearly three feet taller, and how I made him promise not to go and get himself hitched, marriage being the supreme antisocial act, and how, Egbert temporarily shelving his bitterness to join us, it was almost like old times the three of us cooped up together like hysterical sardines with laughter in our bellies and mischief on our minds, and how we drank record-breaking quantities of alcohol and smoked superhydraulic bowl after bowl of happy homegrown courtesy of Dante while grooving to REM and the B52s—
    Allow me to interject that one of Penny Genet’s critiques of my first story, of which there were several I failed to mention, was that it contained too many references to pop culture: Tatum O’Neill, Rod Stewart, Joan Baez, Neil Young … The list goes on. Her point was such allusions were ephemeral, period-bound, likely to be lost on future audiences, that serious writers should stick to universals. I apologize in advance to any member of a future audience who has never seen The Bad News Bears. I realize missing that reference has ruined your experience of this series, that not knowing the words to “Muskrat Love” dealt a devastating blow to your ability to follow the complex chain of symbolism that links the Captain & Tenille to the B52s to the Buddha and ultimately to the Amazon Rainforest. Sorry.
—and how Dante was all ears to hear about my collegiate experience but principally the parties I’d attended, the drugs I’d done and the girls I’d met, and how I told him about Halloween but for some reason left out Vanessa, and how it occurred to me I was the only one of the three of us still sexually inactive, a fact I tried desperately to hide, and how I also failed to mention I was considering dropping out of college, how it suddenly seemed the right thing to do, how I felt I’d accomplished whatever it was I’d come there for, and how, after a week of debauchery, we finally got around to lugging the Vespa up out of the woods, and how, the room transforming overnight into a mad scientist’s laboratory, it was such a joy to watch Dante work, his fat greasy little fingers agile as waterstriders performing mechanical miracles with parts and tools, how I mostly stayed out of his way but did weld on the very last piece, a chrome rearview mirror, and how we christened her simply but elegantly the Vespa while smashing a bottle of Asti Spumante across her svelte gas tank, and how, with a fresh coat of metallic silver, she was a real eyeful, candy for the optic nerve, how I couldn’t have been prouder if she’d been my girlfriend, and how, Egbert slipping back into a misanthropic mood, the incarnation of bad energy, Dante and I slipped outside ostensibly to get away from the paint fumes but really to avoid Egbert and, emerging into that hour of winter twilight just before dark when the sky is red marble and it’s the earth that appears ethereal, a blood sunset for blood brothers, we didn’t even talk but just stood side by side in the shivering cold sharing a heaping bowl filled with each other and the excitement of the Moment as the smoke mellowed our brains and night dropped its curtain and the streetlamps cast our cartoon shadows, ridiculously squat and ludicrously elongated, against the balcony wall.

Technically, since the Vespa was classified as a motorcycle (as opposed to a moped), I should have gone through the onerous, demeaning process of getting a North Carolina tag and driver’s license with a motorcycle endorsement. But ever since imagining myself into existence, I’ve suffered from a life-threatening allergy to bureaucracy, one that sends me into anaphylactic shock whenever I so much as come into contact with red tape. Besides, having been a pedestrian so long, there was something almost disloyal about acquiring a license. But luckily, I purchased a helmet.
    Dante hung around long enough to witness my first ride—the beginning of it anyway. He seemed nearly as moved as I was when the engine cranked on the very first try and purred in idle as I checked the gauges, switched on the headlight and kicked up the kickstand before pulling on the throttle and burning rubber down the street.
    It was late evening and the air was colder than a frozen shitcicle, penetrating in seconds to my bones despite my heavy winter coat and insulated underwear. But I wasn’t about to allow such a trifling consideration as frostbite to ruin my maiden outing.
    I cruised across campus into town as the city lights winked on, then headed out toward Chatterton County as a frosty sickle moon levitated above the horizon, and finally zipped back along the winding country roads under the cold twittering starry night sky. The life that lives in motion, the life that is motion, the way motion erases our stasis physical and otherwise, speeds up our molecules, makes us fluid, smelts down our old patterns only to reforge us at journey’s end into a purer, cleaner version of ourselves. To this day that first ride on the Vespa ranks near the top of my list of memorable scenes. Never before had I felt so cinematic, so made for the big screen.
    Don’t get me wrong. I’ve always been aware—obsessively—of the candid camera filming my imaginary life. For me the myth of Narcissus is no myth. At times I could practically turn around and grab my personal camera by the lens—it seems so close, so real.
    Pure folly. Won’t ever happen. The camera’s much quicker than I am. But I know it’s there because I’m forever playing to an offstage director who alternately praises and pans my performance. Little does it matter this director is merely an extension of myself. On an epistemological level we’re as different as we are similar ontologically, and in any case we depend on each other for our mutual existence. Such is the Catch-22, the Möbius strip, the Escher print of self-consciousness: to be both star in and critic of one’s own movie.
    And so it was that, literally, I watched myself exit the dorm and climb on the Vespa that late February afternoon. Dante had long since returned to Beatrice, but I’d spent the past two weeks in the Misery Loves Company Suite with Egbert, who’d spent the past two weeks complaining incessantly with characteristic pomposity about the rotten state of his affairs, pacing the floor delivering variations on the same maddening speech complete with Shakespearean gesticulations.
    “I don’t mean to sound elitist, Luke, though I am. I no longer have either the luxury of denial or the comfort of asylum. I’m like a great eagle born, bred and made strong all the while tethered to the sad earth and now finally ready for flight but feeling the constant telluric tug of an adamant ball-and-chain! Why have I allowed myself to play such archetypal roles: Adam, Samson, Holofernes, John the Baptist?
    “I feel exhausted, emptied of everything but my poisons—to the point that hope itself has become arduous. Last night I dreamt Cindy had taken on a fistful of lovers to spite me. Adonis himself would have had his head served up on a platter by her! The little bitch.
    “Have you ever noticed how certain women must kill in order to live? I won’t go into the gory details of our breakup. Suffice it to say it was very loud and swift and had to do with her unwillingness to hear my needs versus my willingness to hear hers.
    “Why does she have to fuck other people, Luke? Is that not the central question? If only I could shake off the cruel fetters of jealousy that have been forged around me! If only I could break the iron grip of unhappy circumstance and slay the memory of the foul harpy that feasts daily on my artist’s soul!”
    In short, he came within inches of driving me criminally insane. But though I let him push me to it, I didn’t let him nudge me over the edge. I went out of my way to be cheerful and supportive—except for one time when I slipped and said, “Look, Egbert, if I really put my mind to it, I might be able to care less”—and even changed my note on the door as I was leaving that afternoon to a more positive (if equally vague) one: I’m somewhere doing something and will be back sometime. Leave a message.
    Lately, the weather had been full of personality. The past few days alone, it had gone from bone-cold to a winter wonderland to so balmy you could get by with a Speedo to a torrential downpour early that morning to an afternoon with springlike shadows rippled with golden lesions of sunlight. One of those afternoons that can’t seem to make up their mind, teetering between winter and spring, dark and light, an indecisive afternoon waffling between tree-tossing winds and toasty sunshine.
    I watched myself turn right onto Jefferson, the wind playing like a soundtrack in my ears, then hang a left onto Pendleton at Carthage Milk. I had no particular destination in mind; I was simply getting away from Egbert, blowing off some steam, enjoying my two-wheel mobility.
    It wasn’t as if I needed an excuse to be out riding. I’d made a point, weather permitting, of riding every day. It was the only thing that kept me from murdering Egbert. Outwardly jovial as I might have been, I confess I got no small pleasure contemplating the front-page headline of the Daily Toe Jammer: SKIDMORE SCHOLAR BRAINS ROOMMATE WITH CROWBAR.
    At the bottom of Pendleton I turned right onto Thyme, then immediately right again onto Mephisto headed back toward campus. I remember thinking I was making a lopsided circle, which I was, then I realized I was near Billy’s house, which brought Halloween to mind, then the wackiest thing happened: I started tripping right there in the saddle—I mean tripping—pins, needles, flashing lights, spinal tremors, the works. As surely as I’d ever felt anything, I could feel the Spirit or my Ally or whatever you want to call it possessing me again.
    And then, for the second time, I saw the Buddha. Glimpsing him out of the corner of my eye, I knew instinctively he was the same Buddha that had passed by Billy and me at the end of Halloween. But now, instead of riding in the back of a pickup driven by someone who may or may not have been Blue, he was sitting alone in someone’s front yard under an elm tree.
    He had the same ambivalent smile, the same drowsy eyes, the urna, the belly, the familiar pose, the radioactive glow. The little sucker was definitely alive this time because he was talking to me. But the strangest thing was: he spoke with Blue’s foghorn voice!
    “LUKE, MY MAN, I WANT YOU TO LISTEN CLOSE. YOU LISTENIN’?”
    Was it all in my head? Or was this actually happening? Stupid questions, it occurred to me, for someone who invented his reality.
    “I’m listening.”
    “GOOD. I WANT YOU TO REMEMBER SOMETHIN’, SOMETHIN’ REAL IMPORTANT. YOU PROMISE TO REMEMBER?”
    “I promise.”
    “YOU CAN’T TRAVEL THE PATH ’TIL YOU’VE BECOME THE PATH.”
    “What?”
    “I’VE SPOKEN.”

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly life’s important episodes are over. During my vision—or whatever—I’d drifted into the oncoming lane. The next thing I knew I was staring down the business end of a beige Cadillac driven by a fossilized Southern belle with a Marge Simpson bouffant every bit as freaked as I was.
    We were both going about thirty miles an hour, which made for a combined sixty-mile-per-hour collision. The camera captured it all: the alarmed expressions, the desperate application of the brakes on both sides, the skidding, the screams, the crack of impact, the Vespa folding like an accordion as its frail rider flew over the handlebars into the grill of the Cadillac then flipped three hundred and sixty degrees over the Cadillac only to splatter on the pavement in a sickening, contorted mass of road burger.
    Such was the external image. Inside, tumbling through the air like clothes in a drier, I watched with serenity as my imaginary life passed before my eyes, scene smoothly dissolving into scene until, barely a nanosecond later, I was back in the present and again staring down the barrel at death.
    “This must be what the Buddha meant by becoming the path,” I remember saying to myself philosophically as I plummeted like an out-of-control aircraft, end over smoking end, into a terrific crash with no burn. The feeling, verging on the absence of one, wasn’t even painful.
    Then sounds. Car doors opening, footsteps approaching, urgent voices—one, masculine and oddly familiar, yelling for someone to call an ambulance; another, feminine with a Southern accent, hysterically repeating, “Oh God! Oh dear sweet Jesus! I believe he has left his body!”
    Then silence.
    And then nothing.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.