Toys for the Buddha
“Imagine you’re hiking up to a Tibetan monastery,” the bandleader said, “and you’re hearing the bells for a long time as you approach … It’s all about the vibrations; we’ll see where the vibrations take us.”
After they’d been playing a while, the guy sitting next to me started getting agitated.
“Yak butter,” he muttered, “I can smell the yak butter from here.” Finally, he turned to me:
“At shows like this, I think you should just do whatever you want, right?”
And I said, “Oh yes, absolutely, bang and yell, act out.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I feel like I want to strike back, go up there and juggle or something.”
“Go,” I said, “juggle, dance.”
“But I can’t juggle,” he said, “I can’t juggle or dance. So what I wish is that a man in a black three-piece suit would come in the door right now, carrying a big suitcase, and he’d open it up and take out toys and hand them out to everybody.”
Then the guy sitting next to me bent down, and from his backpack began pulling out toys – but not real toys, no; they were old toys, antiques, broken pieces: a wooden Busy Bee, chewed by a dog; a half a plastic man with the name Sam on his shirt who was pushing a garden cart ….
“Strange things are going on in Sam’s garden,” the guy said to me, pushing the cart back and forth on the table between us. Then he handed me a tin airplane fuselage, its cockpit filled with the big metal head of a pilot from a larger plane. I played with it, spun the propeller, picked it up and flew it around and around the guy’s head, making the sound of an engine as I did.
Meanwhile, the band played on … Leaving long tones hanging like airplane epiphanies; bells rang; waves of saxophones and trombones rolled in. I flew the airplane around his head, imagining I’d meet the Buddha on the road myself. My engine noise merged with the wave of bells rolling in … We were almost there, and then the guy spoke again:
“I have only one code I live by,” he said … “I have only one code I live by … When you meet the Buddha on the road, you must kill him.”
Kill him?! I thought. Kill him? The band played on, but with smooth tones turned jagged, as if they’d heard, too. Danger on the road to the monastery.
So I put down the airplane and pushed it across the table toward him, got u,p and headed to the bathroom next door, thinking I’d escape ….
But when I emerged, the guy with the toys was outside waiting.
“At last,” he said. In the next room, the band had stopped. In his hand the airplane like a hatchet.
“I am not the Buddha,” I said. “This is not the road.”
I am not the Buddha, this is not the road … I am not the Buddha, this is not the road … I am not the Buddha …