Later that afternoon Sunderson made a trip to the grocery for some Stouffer’s mac and cheese of which he always ate two packages, and then at the bar he ran into an old friend and his family sitting in the corner with a menu for the Italian place down the street trying to figure out if they could afford dinner. This embarrassed Sunderson with his ample pension and secret money from blackmailing the rock ’n’ roller’s rich mother. He supposedly saved the kid from a sex abuse charge for which he had received fifty grand. Little did she know that the charge she paid to protect him from was just a mixture of rumors a college friend at the LAPD had told him. They had been watching the rock musician hard but didn’t have anything that would stick. And here Sunderson was chasing his tail about sex while millions were unemployed including his friend. His educated wife worked checkout at the supermarket while he was one of a legion of out of work computer programmers and a fine angler. Their son Billy had Down syndrome but their daughter Wendy was a straight-A student headed in the fall to Kalamazoo College on a big scholarship. When Billy saw Sunderson he brayed and aimed his finger around the room shouting bang-bang in honor of Sunderson’s former profession. His sister calmed him down. Sunderson lied and said he had just won two hundred bucks in the lottery and wanted some greaseball lasagna so let’s all go to dinner. He could tell that the mother didn’t believe him but everyone was suddenly happy. He had a quick double and off they went. It was a chilly evening and he had a sense of winter approaching although the day had been pleasant.
Later that evening with considerable prostate discomfort he called another fishing friend who was a doctor. He told Sunderson to stop fucking so much. Sunderson lamely replied that he didn’t know you could fuck too much. At dinner he had sat next to the attractive, flirtatious daughter and managed to get excited and sighed in despair. She was the daughter of a friend, he reminded himself. He slept poorly that night waking again and again to Barbara’s delightful odor on the bedclothes. He thought over and over of his teen desire to become a Maori warrior in New Zealand where there was also a great supply of brown trout. By morning he had decided to control his obsessions by traveling more, even to New York City again to spend a week at the Museum of Natural History with several trips to Katz’s delicatessen. When he was growing up his father would occasionally make him Jewish-style pickled tongue in a stone crock which he loved.
He decided to fly to Ann Arbor and rent a car, rather than make the laborious drive, and soak his wealthy client with the expense. He didn’t want to face the airport twice so he bought a one-way ticket and thought he’d go fishing on the way back. He arranged to meet Mona at Zingerman’s where he always had a brisket sandwich with extra hot horseradish, an inevitable gut bomb but sacrifices must be made. Mona proudly announced she had bought him a pile of used janitorial supplies at a yard sale. A man must have a professional mop. That morning Barbara had dropped by for what she called a “quickie” which his prostate scarcely needed. He suspected that her athletic abilities promoted her sexual energy. He would need a long trip to simply recover.
He checked into a small suite at the Campus Inn where he slept twenty minutes to handle his sandwich, then drove over to the church basement to unload the supplies of his new craft. There were long neat rows of zafus and zabutons, Zen sitting cushions that Sunderson thought very uncomfortable. He had sat on the one Diane owned that she kept stored in a closet and had fallen crudely off to the side which meant to him that he wasn’t built for meditation. They packed the janitor stuff in a coat closet. Sky Blast and the Ziegler girl came in the basement door with her carrying a heavy load of groceries. He wasn’t the grocery-carrying type and wore a look of seedy reverence in his black robe, the slack look of “Isn’t life wonderful” that one sees in nickel orientalists to whom the universe is a spiritual playground. Mona introduced them.
“We can afford to pay you very little.”
“I’m volunteering because of my curiosity about Zen. My ex-wife was a practioner and it seemed to do her a lot of good.”
Sky Blast looked at him with a trace of cynicism then let out with a shattering howler monkey screech that startled Sunderson witless. He was answered by Margaret in the kitchen who was equally loud.
“We are cleansing the dead air,” Sky Blast announced with pretension. Sunderson went into the kitchen to help Margaret unpack the groceries. She was a big girl with a reasonably shaped fanny. It was strictly vegetarian stuff with lots of fruit, vegetables, juice, and not a trace of the pork sausage he valued so highly. There were also big bags of a Tibetan cereal called tsampa. He would have to make his own breakfast before he came to work. Michael Ziegler the lout was making eyes at Mona, who regarded him as one does a dog turd.
“What are you doing?” Sky Blast barked.
“Helping with the groceries.”
“That’s women’s work,” he said.
Margaret served them a cup of tea at an aluminum table. Sky Blast had seemed to notice Sunderson’s glance at her butt.
“You may find my approach to zazen a bit unorthodox but I received a dispensation on the top of Mount Tamalpais last year that our age will be undergoing a resurgence of the natural world in our time. Howler monkeys are our primate predecessors. We must honor them. I am fascinated by the oneness of all living things.”
“Me too,” said Sunderson for lack of anything else to say.
“Good. Then we’ll get along. Call me Roshi Sky.”
“Fine by me, Roshi Sky.”
“See you at five tomorrow morning.”
Sunderson wasn’t enthused about getting up that early except to go fishing though he rather looked forward to howling like a monkey. People of this ilk kept trying to help you “get in touch with yourself.” He wasn’t at all sure that this was a pleasant idea though he knew in his heart that he had to put a stop to things with Barbara however late in the game it was. He vowed as punishment that he would have to go to that mind doctor if he screwed her again. Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye, they used to say.
He was up before daylight and fried two good-sized sausage patties. He had read that mountain climbers were never vegetarians. Of course he had no intention of climbing mountains but he liked the solidity of the idea that pork rather than cereal could get you up Everest.
In the church basement the rows were three-quarters full of meditators and Sky Blast glowered at the late arrivals from the kitchen, finally making a mighty howl which the others joined. Sunderson started tentatively with not much more than a squeak. Sky Blast came up behind him and told him to use his lungs completely as if he were a monkey singing opera. He did so and found it oddly satisfying like yelling at his sister Berenice when he was young. As he glanced into the kitchen it occurred to him that Margaret must eat a lot of vegetables to get an ass that big. Down the row her brother Michael’s face seemed fixed permanently in a smirk. He was a heavy cross for Margaret to carry. Sunderson learned that he was a football player and allowed to eat a big steak at a restaurant every night for dinner. He was also the only man allowed to date outside the group. His father had given him a new yellow Corvette for making the team. He had a black girlfriend and would say loudly that he preferred “dark meat.”