Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

You go, girl!

Suddenly, I wasn’t in the way anymore.

She was a thousand pounds lighter and the transformation was lovely to behold. Whatever troubles we had, I always wanted my wife to be happy. (I still do, though it’s impossible now.) That was a constant. It was nice too because before the settlement, I was really marinating in my own shit. Waiting for Godot and the call from my attorneys. So any rays of light were welcome.

One night over dinner, Kelly said she needed to reach out to Dharmabud. She’d decided to call her book Impermanence Rocks and wanted his blessing. That came as a surprise because the working title had been Nirvanarama. (Which I rather liked, particularly because of the felicitous Rama pun. An alternate was Divine Mess , which she rejected as “too Bette Midler.”) Kelly claimed that her friend wouldn’t— couldn’t —object. Plus, she contended that by removing the exclamation point she had rejiggered the phrase’s entire meaning. Without the ejaculatory punctuation, it was no longer juvenile. Impermanence Rocks had a plaintive, stately quality to it, nearly ironic, as if reminding that one can be shipwrecked on the shoals of impermanence as surely as anything else. Though she did decide to reinstate the exclamation point for the chapter on how she brought kiddie dharma to a whole new level.

She already had a dedication in mind: “For Stewart [aka Dharmabud], who gave me the match to light the fire.”

Nope — not Buddhist enough…

“For Stewart, who brought me to puja.”

Naw. People might think Stewart and I are a couple.

“For Mother, who speaks to me each day from Silence.”

No. Not light enough/too New Age cliché-hokey. And a lie.

“For my teacher, Maurice Epstein Roshi.”

Right, that’s it… keep it simple, stupid!

My wife informed the school district that she wouldn’t be returning to her old teaching position. Instead, she asked them to consider appointing her mistress of ceremonies for the oldest established impermanent floating crap game in the Bay Area. The new, improved version now included yoga for the 2nd-grade set.

Get your ya-yas out!

A home-schooled Ryder was the precocious recipient of Mom’s private intensives. He became a kind of proving ground (I guess you could say more of a living laboratory), not just for Impermanence Rocks! but Kelly’s book as well. The whole house was a work-in-progress. We were incredulous at his sophistication in embracing some of Buddhism’s more subtle concepts, and that made my wife think. It was common knowledge that when it came to learning foreign languages, kids left adults in the dust — so why not teach them ethics and empathy? Kelly began to see herself as a promoter of what she believed was a radical new way to educate children in the spiritual realm. Based on whatever Ryder sparked to, she burned CDs of herself narrating Buddhist texts for her toddlers to listen to at the end of class while powering down in savasana . Kelly became the de facto ambassador for the growing “Armies of Awareness,” a phrase she trademarked.

Ryder hung out at the zendo and became a favorite of Kelly’s teacher, who whimsically suggested we might have a tulku on our hands. That’s someone of high rebirth. I never really knew if the teacher was serious but I think Kelly believed he was. Made her prideful. Ryder even “sat” and they just marveled at his focus. He was really coming along, under Kelly’s tutelage. All the women had crushes (and the men too), they absolutely doted over him. He was a gorgeous kid. Handsome. And I have to say pretty amazing because none of it went to his head. For him, it was like swimming or playing the piano, he just took to it. Ryder was what they call a “natural”—I think he could’ve been a big guru when he got older, not the bad kind, but a true teacher, with followers. People would have followed him anywhere, he had an innate charisma. Ryder was one of those rarities, a born leader with a keen mind. And completely book crazy too. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. He went through that period boys do when they read with a flashlight under the covers.

One night I asked what he was reading. It was Songs of the Saints of India , a book Kelly gave him. But on any given night it was a medley of Huckleberry Finn and the Watchmen comic books and even Kelly’s favorite, Chögyam Trungpa — Allen Ginsberg’s and Pema Chödrön’s teacher. He handed it to me. As I flipped through, I saw that he’d made annotations.

“Did you know that to Ram ,” he said, “everybody stinks? Ram said they stink like pus from pimples . Or diarrhea from your butt. ”

“Nice.”

He laughed.

“But Ram loves us anyway , Daddy! Bodies are smelly, and it doesn’t matter if they’re alive or dead — they stink. Ram said everything was stinky, even honey. Even milk from a sacred cow stinks.”

“Okay. Uhm yeah, right on.”

“Ram said the only thing that made people untouchable was if they couldn’t love.”

As for my wife, she wowed ’em at the schools. Her reputation and minor fame preceded her. Plus, she was now duly certified; she’d acquired some kind of district license that Mr. Unenterprising Woo-Woo Dharmabud never got around to applying for. Which opened more doors because these days you can’t just stroll onto school grounds, not even in Berkeley. Too many issues of liability.

She hatched a scheme to go national. Her plan was to visit school districts all over the country and provide a template of the Armies of Awareness “Compassion Revolution.” At no cost, of course. The economic downturn was in her favor. Cities were so strapped for cash that teachers were paying for crayons and Kleenex out of their own pockets. (That’s still happening.) She’d go into some of those lavatories — they were a disgrace. Hellacious places, toilets clogged with shit, in shards from vandalism. In order for their kids not to go without, teachers bought juice for homeroom with their own money. They bought glue and glitter for art class, lightbulbs and Scotch tape … Jesus. Some of the teachers told Kelly they were doing this back in the ’80s and everything got steadily worse after the lottery was supposedly coming to the rescue. The lottery came and things got worse!

I audited classes at a few of the formerly Dharmabudless start-ups and have to say that Kelly was pretty fucking slick. She soothed the savage Ritalin beasts, made ’em into little bhaktas faster than you could say puff the magic drag queen. The tapped-out, stressed-out educators got a respite in the bargain… a little downtime to reboot, before making the next Safeway run for nutritious snacks and yellow Ticonderoga No. 2s.

Kelly figured the memoir would take a few years so in the meantime self-published a Zen children’s book she’d been working on called How It Can Dance! It was filled with quirky koans—“Does an Awfully Messy Room Have the Buddha Nature?”— loved that one — along with Kelly’s distinctively squiggly, faux-naïf illustrations. (I take full credit for sneaking in a poem from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues and an “upside-down” nonsense rhyme by Kabir, the cantankerous saint of Varanasi.) Mom drew Ryder à la Jules Feiffer — she stole from the best — as the prototypical great-grandchild of the Beats, and her sweet, fanciful narrative allowed him to surf from page to page with beginner’s-mind alacrity and charm. He had a blast… though again I’m compelled to say that Ryder’s exuberance remained sunny and pure. Not a prideful bone in his body. Don’t get me wrong — all kids like to please their moms but he somehow struck a balance between the scholarly and the Oedipal. I’ve tried to do that all my life and failed! Anyway, I kept a close watch on that heart of mine — one of my duties as househusband, don’t you know — and can proudly attest that our son’s head stayed firmly on his shoulders.