Killing the Buddha Read online

  Daniel why don’t you control Rosie more?—because the dog kept running into the yards of the neighbors—and Why are you so unhappy about spending time with my family? and Daniel you think so much about yourself—And I, Daniel, turned to her with my swirling gray poet eyes, and she said: See, you are not even listening to me now—

  I said nothing, seeing the white columns of the doctor’s house peeking from the bottom of the hill. And in my heart I began to feel dread, about all of it, and I felt I should not have come.

  After our run on Xmas Day, I went downstairs to get some clothes out of the car. My girlfriend was upstairs lowering her strong, white body into the tub, a nice steaming bath. I held some shiny pants on hangers, a suit jacket, a soft, expensive shirt, and a small wool hat from Agnès B. with a pom-pom. It was a gift from my girlfriend. And I had given her a CD player to listen to while she ran.

  Lundy was strolling around the circular driveway surrounding the house. Trees were dying in every direction. You-Nick stood with his schoolteacher girlfriend tugging shopping bags full of brightly wrapped gifts out of the car. Lundy was decorated in a red velvet bow. I, Daniel, closed the car door with clothes hanging off me. Click.

  Lundy shouldn’t be in the driveway, complained the new wife. She was in a pink quilted coat, policing the grounds as I turned toward the house, one foot already on the concrete front stairs. Lundy doesn’t know the neighborhood, the pink wife continued.

  This crazy big dumb dog from Maine, so casually strolling out into the road across from the high school—Mariah Carey’s high school. In front of the whole world, this famous place, Lundy, poor Lundy, will get killed. You-Nick was being summoned into action. He would help. You-Nick of the animals. You-Nick of the House.

  What would You-Nick get when the doctor died? He would absolutely get some.

  Lundy, I called. For they did not think I was a man. I was certainly more of a man than You-Nick. And I could do his job. Lundy, hey Lundy. I grabbed the dog’s worn leather collar. In a moment I was on all fours in the snow. I kneeled helplessly, and dark red blood gushed from my wrist as Lundy’s huge fangs plunged deeper and deeper into me.

  The trees crowded in. Green, green, smothering.

  I slurred, “Oh baby,” words slurped out of my mouth: nonsense words, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. My wrist was a foghorn. I radiated: numb, numb, pulsating waves, waves of something tiny riding far from some timeless spot in the distance on the other side of pain. Over it and past. Like all of time was a recording of this pain, a wavy bacon of me. Give me drugs. Oh, wine.

  It was fine and reedy, a radiating feeling. Oh baby.

  Lundy struck again, teeth sunk into the fat underside of my left forearm. I collapsed, threw my whole body on the dog’s body, and the new wife did this too. Whip, whip, whip. The trees began springing back. The pink wife saved me. Strangely, she did it, she totally saved me. I got up and staggered away from the animal. My blood in the snow. I was sobbing.

  The good girlfriend was upstairs puking in the toilet. Because of her mother’s death, she could not tolerate physical distress. Meanwhile my girlfriend’s younger sister wiped my face and held my hands and found my gloves and held on to them. The old doctor half blind came stumbling out. The trees crowded in. It’s not so bad, my dear, just clean it up.

  He looked into my eyes, gleaming.

  Oh yeah I know your stepdad, the emergency room doctor told my girlfriend as he was sewing me up on Xmas Day.

  The woman in triage had followed me with her eyes as the two good daughters led me into the lobby and up to her window. I held my arms out before me with huge bloody bandages taped to my wrists.

  So what’s up, Daniel, she said. She was talking really tough. She slid me a chart. I can’t write, I told her. I had gauze piled three inches high on each of my wrists. I’m a holiday suicide. I’m a gift, right?

  My wrists hurt today. As I write. Each word pulls these veins and ligaments, a caravan of pulsing thought—these words appear before you, like my heart.

  Under the white lights of the operating room the doctor explained, We don’t want to stitch this too tight because dogs’ teeth are very dirty—it’s almost impossible to avoid an infection with this deep a bite.

  A few hours later I was back at the house. In my running clothes, my arm in a dark blue sling, and the dumb pom-pom sitting on my head. Later we washed it and it shrunk and my girlfriend’s sister had a baby and we gave it to him. Maybe it’s quietly sitting in his drawer. In California.

  The pink wife continued to show concern. Before dinner she invited me to join her in the den. The chairs were thick leather and dark. I loved the chairs and so did my girlfriend. It was a pediatrician’s office. He had a good practice. A way with kids. That’s how he got the good wife.

  The walls of his office were dark and old.

  So what do you do? she asked. I told her I write and her eyes looked deeper, waiting for the truth. She was looking all around the room. The pink wife was kind. Do you work? she asked. I teach workshops, sometimes. Oh, she said, seeing me now. You teach. And she breathed again. I teach. We just want to know that you’re going to be okay, and she patted me on the shoulder and walked out. I liked her. And I think she liked me.

  I was sitting on the bed with the good girls after everyone had gone to bed. We were having some tea.

  Do you think she was wondering if you were going to sue? my girlfriend’s sister asked.

  God, do you think that’s why she was talking to me?

  She looked at me, and she looked at her sister. Yeah, I do.

  East L.A., California

  My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.

  PSALM 45:1

  IN the barrio people like to say buildings painted with murals of the Virgin don’t get fucked with, and it’s not just a play on words. Marked with Our Lady of Guadalupe, brown-skinned and emanating a thousand beams of light from her blue and gold robes, at once an Azteca maiden and the mother of the Christian savior, they’re as safe from graffiti and break-ins as the homeboys who etch her on their arms hope to be from gunshot wounds.

  We’d heard the section of East L.A. we fell into could be as lethal as a lions’ den if you were so bold or so foolish as to go there at night without a god or a gang getting your back. It wasn’t long before we made a friend, though, a guy named Pablo, who giggled when we met him for no other reason than that he found it funny to shake hands. He shook ours with a smile that suggested it was a real novelty to him, and took genuine pleasure in the act, moving his arm in the herky-jerky way of a puppet, like he was being tugged by a string.

  Pablo had landed in East L.A. when he arrived in California a few years before, an Argentinean immigrant thrown by circumstance into a neighborhood with roots in the less prosperous, more dangerous corners of Latin America: Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras. Light-skinned and soft-spoken, with hair just long enough to tuck behind his ears, he stood out despite all efforts to blend into a landscape illuminated by murals of ghostly Mexican revolutionaries, Aztec warriors plumed like peacocks, dead Latin Kings haloed in gold. Colors were important here: His bandanna was neither red nor blue but turquoise, bold both in its effeminacy and in the question mark it became in the grammar of the gangs. It was the kind of thing that could get a guy into trouble. But Pablo understood colors, he knew what he was doing. He wanted to study art; he’d spent his whole life with a ballpoint or a pencil close at hand. “I draw always,” he told us. “I draw in Argentina. I draw here.” Drawing held the two places together, connecting different languages, different lives. It made him feel powerful. But it couldn’t keep him safe: Since he wasn’t in a gang, he’d found he needed another form of protection.

  He had it now. Pablo’s right arm was covered with open-jawed skulls, their eye sockets glowing like embers. A red-and-black dragon wrapped his left arm, climbing from his elbow toward his shoulder, sliding up under his sleeve like a lover’s hand. Pablo smiled at the monsters he had inscribed on his skin, a
nd spoke of them in hesitant English. He didn’t want us to get the wrong idea.

  “I am no Antichrist,” he said. The word tripped over his lips and his cheeks flushed, as if the sound of it made him uncertain it was the one he wanted.

  “No,” he said, then scratched his ear, closed his eyes, and tried again. “I like skulls,” he explained, “but I believe in God, too.”

  He offered his heart as evidence, stretching his T-shirt down with his left hand, rubbing his right over smooth skin a few inches below his collarbone.

  “Here I will put Jesus,” he said, then shaped his thumbs and index fingers into an oval the size of a pack of cigarettes. “Just a small Jesus though. I need some others and there is not much room.”

  Other tattoos, other gods, crowded onto an altar of flesh. We’d met Pablo in their temple: a storefront tattoo shop tucked in among the mercados and botanicas of East L.A. White cinder-block walls, harsh fluorescent light, blue neon OPEN in the window, the shop was covered floor to ceiling with samples of various body art styles: thick-lined birds and stars and lightning bolts; daggers and roses delicate as spider silk; big-breasted devil women with doe eyes and pointed tails. Cartoons as illustrations of the strangeness of our inner lives, and black inked words to mark our bodies as parts of a larger whole. “Mafia Mexicana,” “Longbeach,” “Mi vida está en tus manos,” My life is in your hands. Most of the artists in this shop seemed to specialize in a gothic script favored by the local gangs, but at least one had a knack for cursive as well. His talent was displayed in a Polaroid close-up of a fat girl’s ass. Left cheek: try, right cheek: me, divided by a satiny green line of thong. An exclamation point rounded out the phrase; whether plea or challenge, it was forceful in its symmetry.

  We leaned in close to read the writing on the wall, wondering if somewhere in the middle of all this we might see God: on the waiting canvas of Pablo’s chest, in the pen-drawn patterns that decorated the shop, in piles of snapshots stacked like decks of cards by the cash register. Pablo turned them over for us, dealt them out: Praying hands grip teardrops strung like rosary beads. Jesus wears a bloody crown of thorns. Our Lady of Guadalupe holds a flower. She holds an infant. She holds a body pocked with bullet holes.

  Pablo flipped through the photographs like he was reading scripture, handling each by its edges. Body after body, tattoo after tattoo, he glanced and moved on, skimming for something new. Then he stopped and stared at one. He lifted it toward the light for a better look: a close-up of a bare and muscular back, flexing like that of a carnival strong man, arms up at right angles, bent at the elbows. Across this canvas was painted a full-color crucifixion scene, Christ’s skin a shade darker than that of the man who wore him, his muscles more pumped, his blood leaking from wounds so finely drawn even the picture looked like it needed a Band-Aid.

  Pablo studied the photograph for a long minute, bringing it closer to his face to examine the tattoo’s details: Jesus’ hands impaled on the strong man’s shoulders; Jesus’ feet tucked at the ankles under the strong man’s belt. Pablo smiled and shook his head, not jealous of the artwork, or of the physique, but bemused by the excess displayed in each.

  “Belief is good,” he said. “But maybe some believe too much.”

  Behind him the door clanged open and two glowering homeboys walked into the shop. The older of the two wore his loyalty inscribed on his forearm: three gothic letters telling the world to watch itself. The two men looked Pablo over and sneered at his lack of affiliation.

  Not far from the tattoo shop there was another temple, the Dolores Mission Catholic Church. At the rear of its sanctuary, the church featured a mural that looked like Scarface meets Animal Farm in stained glass. In the lower left corner of the scene, two blue, pig-nosed gangsters enter a crowded church. One, wearing a suit, is pointing with a hooflike hand; the other holds a red and yellow tommy gun and shoots a bullet past worshipers painted in dark pastels. The bullet screams across the altar and into the priest with a burst of blood like a flame. His arms flap out sideways as if he’s trying to fly. Another man unprotected by faith; another whose prayers only saved the lions the trouble of saying grace before their meal: Archbishop Romero of El Salvador, gunned down by government men in 1980, in a world the mission’s parishioners left but could not leave behind.

  On its shoulder, in the corner to the right of the altar, the church wore another martyr: a girl named Stephanie Raygoza, killed in front of her house a block or so away. Her neighbor had tagged some buildings in a rival neighborhood, Cuatro Flats, branding their barrio with the mark of his gang, The Mob Crew. He’d walked in and out of enemy lands without notice or a scratch, painting out the locals’ graffiti and then tattooing everything with three bold letters—TMC—not just the initials of his gang or a talisman of protection but barrio shorthand for “I got balls this big.” Try me, cabrón.

  They did. Stephanie Raygoza was out riding her scooter when a van pulled up and five Cuatro Flats homeys piled out at the end of her street to do some tagging of their own. Glocks instead of spray cans, bullets instead of ink. One ricocheted and put Stephanie Raygoza’s image permanently on the church wall. Now she stands there forever, older and taller than her ten years, staring out with eyes aged by the wisdom only martyrdom and a mural painter can give.

  The sermon at Dolores Mission the day we attended was on Thomas, the Doubter, the disciple who in the Gospel of John insists on putting his finger into Christ’s bloody wound. “Thomas is also called the Twin,” the priest said, “because he is always of two minds. He’d like to believe, but, God, would it hurt to give us a reason now and then?”

  A woman in the front row nodded. She was dressed head to toe in deep Lakers purple. Her jogging pants made crunching noises when she shifted on the pew’s hard bench. On her back her shirt was marked in gold, BRYANT, 8. Even her hair was purple; chicana black hennaed red with surprising results. She closed her eyes and shook her head at “give us a reason.” Later, we would find out why: Her brother was in prison for a gang-related murder, one of her sons was dead.

  “Jesus is an immensely physical person,” the priest offered. “All through the Gospels we see him touching, feeling, reaching toward people. He spits in his hands and holds you to restore your sight. He caresses the sores of the leprous. By touching he makes us whole. So when Thomas wants to touch his wounds to be sure he is who he claims, Jesus just opens up and says, Touch me, enter me. Know me.”

  Stephanie looked down; Romero looked down; the Laker woman looked down at her purple shoes. Those who know.

  The priest continued, “Better you should believe without evidence, Jesus tells Thomas, but if you need this, go ahead.”

  Try me.

  It was time for communion. The purple woman crunched into the aisle in her nylon pants, bowed to the cross, and joined the priest at the altar. Together they turned to face the congregation, he with a gold bowl filled with wafers, she with the chalice of wine. Instead of the usual words of presentation, “The blood of Christ,” when she offered the cup she whispered simply “His blood” to every communicant, and every communicant answered, “Amen.” His blood. Amen. His blood. Amen. “His blood,” two dozen times, but each time she said it emphatically, each time a little different, as if it was not just a ritual phrase but an entire vocabulary of grief.

  His blood.

  Amen.

  Whose?

  Amen.

  Why?

  Amen.

  Would it hurt to give us a reason?

  Pablo rolled up the right leg of his jeans to the knee, then reached out and grabbed our arms to keep his balance. On his chest he had made a space for Jesus, but he would leave the shop today with the Virgin on his calf. He had already made a rough start of it: the face of a woman like a candle flame, her body below in robes that dripped like wax; thin black lines waiting to be filled with color. “After she is colored I will put roses, something good all around.” He smiled at the thought, tracing a finger over the flowers and vines he s
eemed already to see.

  “I can only afford a little at a time,” Pablo said to explain the partial tattoo. He looked again at the two gangbangers, then added softly, “But still she is protection.”

  After their entrance, the gangsters had presented the tattoo artist with a drawing of the artwork the younger one wanted, black shapes on blue-lined paper. We’d seen the artist shake his head.

  “I don’t do gang tats, man. They get me in trouble.”

  “It’s just letters, bro.”

  With a shrug the artist had shown the gangster to his bench. Sometimes acting like you believe but knowing better is the best protection around.

  We watched then as the artist’s needle buzzed to life, and the gang kid’s eyes narrowed at the sting of it. He bit his lip and tilted his head back, looking down over smooth cheeks and a wisp-covered chin to see trenches of color dug into his forearm. Cutting a pattern of holes opened with metal, filled with ink, the needle’s hot finger shot in and out of walnut brown skin. Three dark letters, outlined then thickened, a single dot at a time; a thousand tiny entrance wounds that made him wince and scowl and put his free fist to his eyes. Maybe the pain was the point of it: Each black dot was a spell, a prayer, the controlled suffering of the temple, given by the artist, his priest, meant to protect him from the uncontrollable kind, waiting always outside.

  Pablo stood there watching, anxious for his turn at the needle. He motioned again to the tattoo patterns on the wall, the snapshots by the cash register. “I would like to learn this kind of art too,” Pablo told us. “I like to work with other…” He stopped and asked in Spanish to anyone who might help, “Cómo se dice ‘material’?” And someone answered “Material.” He looked embarrassed that it was the same word but carried on. “I like to work with other material. I come here not just for my tattoos but to see how the pictures are done. To learn the machines. How to draw on skin.”