Larry & the Dog People

by J. Paul Henderson

  Larry was jolted from his thoughts by the sound of Moses barking. He looked up and saw Mike walking towards him with Uji, his Shar-Pei. The dog had small triangular ears and a block-shaped head and from a distance looked like a small hippopotamus, an animal as Larry recalled with more human deaths on its conscience than any other. Uji growled at him and Larry became uneasy.

  ‘Hey, cool it, Uji,’ Mike said. ‘Larry’s good people.’

  Uji quietened, but Larry still feared the worst. ‘He’s not going to bite me, is he?’

  ‘Nah, not old Uji,’ Mike laughed. ‘Shar-Peis were bred for guarding so it’s in their nature to be suspicious of people. You two never formally met Saturday, so to him you’re still a stranger. Once he gets used to you he’ll be fine. Go ahead, stroke him, Larry. Get close and personal.’

  Larry did, and was surprised by how prickly Uji’s short coat was. He noticed the deep wrinkles in the dog’s face, its blue-black tongue and the furrows that ran along its shoulders and at the base of its tail. He gently and carefully placed his hands at either side of Uji’s face and looked into the dog’s deep-set eyes: ‘Hello, Uji. I’m Larry MacCabe.’

  Mike bent down and patted Uji on the back. ‘Good boy, Uji. Good boy.’ He then let Uji off the leash and the dog ran to Moses. ‘He’s accepted you, dude. You’re on his Christmas card list! Now if you’d told him your name was Mao Tse-tung it would be a different matter. Mao’s on his genetic shit list and for good reason. That sonofabitch damn near wiped his ancestors out. Can you believe that?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I can,’ Larry said. ‘A visiting professor from Hong Kong told me that more than fifty million dogs died during the Cultural Revolution. At the time I thought it was an odd thing to say because until then we’d been discussing the Desert Land Act and I hadn’t mentioned anything about dogs.’

  ‘Wheeeeew,’ Mike whistled. ‘Fifty million! Wow, that’s genocide, man!’

  Larry thought canicide would have been a better choice of word but didn’t mention this. ‘I know what you mean, Mike. I can understand the communists wanting to kill Pekingese dogs…’ Mike flinched when Larry said this and he rushed to explain. ‘I’m not excusing their behaviour, Mike, but you have to bear in mind that the Pekingese was the breed of dog favoured by the Imperial Court. It became symbolic of everything the communists hated about the old regime. What I don’t understand, though, is why they decided to exterminate all dogs. I can only suppose they thought dog ownership was decadent, and I think the government is still uneasy with the concept. I read in The Washington News only last week that there are all kinds of restrictions in place. In Beijing, for instance, they won’t allow any owner to have a dog taller than fourteen inches.’

  ‘Man, that rules out Shar-Peis, then. I doubt they’d look too favourably on waterfall tuners, either.’

  Larry looked at him, in all probability the same way he’d looked at the visiting professor from Hong Kong when he’d interjected the fact that fifty million dogs had been killed during the Cultural Revolution into a conversation on the Desert Land Act. Mike noticed Larry’s confusion. ‘That’s what I do for a living, man. I tune waterfalls.’

  Mike Ergle had found his true vocation late in life, around the time he realised he wasn’t simply a Christian but a Buddhist Christian.

  Mike was a native of New Haven, Connecticut, an engineering graduate of Columbia University and a casualty of the subprime mortgage crisis. Without giving much thought to the matter, he’d followed his brother into investment banking. It was something to do, something other than civil engineering, and an opportunity to wear the suspenders and floral tie he’d been bought for Christmas that year. He proved adept and until 2007 the dice fell in his favour, first at Goldman Sachs and later at Lehman Brothers, the small grocer made good. But then the recession hit and house prices slumped, mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures rocketed and the value of securities dependent on the housing market tumbled. Overnight billions of dollars were wiped from the investment bank’s balance sheet, and in 2008 Lehman Brothers went bust.

  Mike had been uneasy about life at Lehman’s even before the collapse. The company had lowered its standards and increased risks by selling mortgages to people with weak credit histories and without knowledge of their employment or earnings. But no one else seemed to care. Profits were big and investment banks invincible. It was a macho culture of excess fuelled by the testosterone of its leader, a man who took a private elevator to his office, pumped weights in the basement gym and who, even as the shit hit the fan, took home $22 million that year.

  Like most Lehman employees, Mike had left the Midtown office with only a cardboard box of personal belongings. His bank and savings accounts, however, were overflowing with what he now considered to be ill-gotten gains. He was thirty-seven, unmarried and without responsibility, but still troubled. The system he’d helped maintain for sixteen years, and for most of that time believed in, was crumbling and the world being rocked by its aftershocks: ordinary people and nation states both. Whatever else the future held for him he was determined that his next occupation would be one that benefitted others and harmed no one.

  New Haven, Mike’s home town, had been founded by English Puritans in the late seventeenth century. It was now overwhelmingly Catholic and also the international headquarters of a Catholic men’s fraternal benefit society called the Knights of Columbus. Mike had grown up in the Catholic Church but had long since parted company with its teachings on birth control and abortion. He remained, however, a believing Christian, and after leaving Lehman Brothers enrolled at the Union Theological Seminary, an independent and ecumenical theological college in New York. It was something to do, something other than investment banking, and an opportunity to throw away the suspenders and floral ties that had dominated his life for sixteen years. He also anticipated that the experience would lead to a life of service, to an occasion when he could compensate society for the ills that he and others like him had inadvertently bestowed upon it. After four months at the seminary, however, and in the hope of salvaging his Christian faith, he jumped ship and headed for the Shambhala Meditation Centre on West 22nd Street.

  Mike’s beef wasn’t with Jesus and His teachings, but with the way churches presented Jesus and His teachings. At one end of the spectrum were the Catholic and High Episcopal Churches: hierarchical, distant, overly ritualised and coldly intellectual; while at the other end, and growing in popularity, were the Evangelical Churches: unduly emotional, shallow and purely of the moment. No church provided Christians with any method or technique that would allow them to advance their spiritual experience in their own time, and for this reason Mike turned to Buddhism – not to become a Buddhist, but to learn from them and apply the tools of their wisdom to his life and beliefs. For two years he practised meditation and yoga, learned how to breathe and how to relax. He found inner peace and, at last, connected with God. God was no longer an outside entity, but a part of his very being. Om Mani Padme Hum! Hallelujah!

  Being schooled by Buddhists it was inevitable that Mike would learn about Buddhism, and what he learned convinced him that Christianity and Buddhism had much in common – almost too much in common. On the subjects of murder, adultery, theft, bearing false witness and coveting, for instance, the moral pronouncements of Jesus and Buddha were almost identical; and both urged people to be kind and peaceful, to give to the poor and love both their neighbours and their enemies. In fact, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount was little more than a restatement of Buddha’s Turning the Wheel of the Dharma. It appeared to Mike that Christianity was the Buddhism of the West, and as Buddha had lived 500 years before Jesus was born, it was likely that He had been influenced by Buddhist teachings rather than vice versa. And then it dawned on him…

  ‘Don’t you think it odd that there’s no account in the Bible of what Jesus was doing from the age of fourteen to twenty-nine? What do you think He was doing, Larry?’

&n
bsp; Larry had been listening patiently, more interested in learning about waterfall tuning – something he didn’t know about – than Buddhism, a religion he was already familiar with, and was keeping his fingers crossed that Mike wasn’t about to detail the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. ‘I’d always supposed He was working in His dad’s carpentry shop in Nazareth. And considering the socio-economic make-up of Galilee at that time, I think He’d have been making affordable furniture – a bit like IKEA does today.’

  ‘Suppose for the sake of argument that He wasn’t living in Nazareth, Larry. Where do you figure He was? Go on, take a guess.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me, Mike. I’ve never been very good at guessing.’

  ‘India, man! The Cat was in India!’

  Jesus, Mike explained, had travelled there with merchants and spent sixteen years studying Buddhist teachings in Kashmir, and ancient Chinese, Muslim and Persian texts affirmed this. They referred to Jesus as Yesu, Issa or the Son of God.

  ‘Judea and Palestine had been awash with Buddhist ideas for two hundred years by the time Jesus was born, Larry. Emperor Ashoka of India sent missionaries there, traders talked the talk and it’s pretty obvious that the Essenes and Gnostics were influenced by Buddhist ideas. Jesus tapped into them, man, decided to travel to the source and learn about Buddhism first hand. The Dude needed to chill, get prepared, and he figured the best place to get Himself sorted was India.’

  Larry had listened intently, but having failed to understand why Jesus would go to a hot climate to chill, was now lost. ‘Sorry, Mike, but why did Jesus need to chill? I didn’t realise He was suffering from anything as a teenager, and there’s certainly no mention of Him having acne.’

  ‘Larry,’ Mike said somewhat despairingly, ‘Jesus’ problem was that He was an asshole! He suffered from assholism. That’s why He had to go live in India.’

  Larry’s eyes grew to the size of saucers and Mike wondered if he’d overstepped the mark. ‘Look, man, I’m not being blasphemous describing Jesus this way. I’m telling it like it is, the same way Jesus would be telling it if He was standing here today. He’d be the first to admit He was a badass in his youth. He’d tell it to you straight, man. He’d say: “Larry, I might be a Democrat now, but back then I was a Republican!”’

  ‘And don’t you ever wonder why we never get to read about Jesus as a child in the Bible; that He just shows up in the temple at twelve and then goes missing again until He’s thirty? It’s because the people who compiled the Bible didn’t want us to read about Him – and for good reason, too. But if you read the apocryphal books – the ones they decided to leave out – there’s more than one account of what Jesus was like as a child; and there’s no two ways about it, the guy was a one percenter, a real downer, as capricious and destructive a person as any you’re likely to meet. Anyone who crossed Him got it in the neck and the neighbours hated Him. He shrivelled up one kid for messing with a pool He’d built, killed another for accidentally bumping into His shoulder when he was out on the street and blinded anyone who complained to His parents about His bad behaviour. It got to the point where His dad had to tell Mary not to let Him out of the house anymore, because every time He went out people died. There was no less Christian a person living in Judea than Jesus, man. The guy was a bringdown, a total buzzkill! And you don’t get from being the Country’s Number One Bringdown to the Saviour of the World in a hop, skip and a jump. Something big in His life had to happen, man, and that was His trip to India and learning the ways of Buddhism. That trip changed Him!’

  ‘So, let me see if I’ve got this right, Mike. Are you saying that Jesus is just an enlightened person, a Bodhisattva of some kind, and that there’s no real difference between Buddhism and Christianity?’

  ‘No, Larry, I’m not saying that! There are big differences between Jesus and Buddha and between Christianity and Buddhism. Buddha might have shown the way but he never claimed to be the way. He was a great teacher but that’s all he was; he was mortal and he died the death of all men. The big difference is that Jesus rose from the dead and is alive today, not buried somewhere in the foothills of the Himalayas.

  ‘And Buddhism and Christianity part ways on some major-league issues, man. For one thing, Buddhists don’t believe in God. The only accountability they have is to the cosmic law of cause and effect, and because they have no concept of sin, they don’t have any need for a Saviour. There’s no Heaven for them, just an absence of consciousness. But that’s not to say that Jesus didn’t see things in Buddhism that He liked and wanted to incorporate into His own teachings. In that respect He was a Buddhist and, to a degree, so am I. But I’m a Buddhist Christian and not a Christian Buddhist. It’s all in the noun and the adjective and where you place the emphasis.’

  Larry was agnostic, happy to let the unknowable remain unknowable, but always pleased to discuss religion. He’d read the Bible cover to cover and had more than a passing knowledge of the world’s other religions. Nothing he’d read, however, had convinced him of any truth other than that the world was a cauldron of superstition that occasionally boiled over and scalded mankind. He kept these thoughts to himself though, stored them away in a dry attic and allowed people of belief to believe that he too was a person of belief who probably believed the same things that they did. ‘I don’t mean to pry, Mike – and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want – but were you influenced at all by the Fifth Step of the Eightfold Path when you decided to become a waterfall tuner? And what is a waterfall tuner? I never even knew there was such a profession.’

  ‘Man, Larry, you’re a dude on the ball! I suspected you knew a thing or two about Buddhism when you connected Buddha to the rose apple and fig trees on Saturday but, man, that question blows my mind! Apart from Buddhists there aren’t many people who know about the Eightfold Path – you’re not a Buddhist, are you, Larry? Well, no sweat either way. It’s a pleasure rapping with you, man.

  ‘The truth though is that it didn’t. I’d already committed myself to pursuing a Right Occupation and reading the Fifth Step only confirmed that I had made the right decision. But Buddhism did give me an appreciation of nature that I’d never had before; made me realise that humans are a part of it and not distinct – which is more a Christian belief. I never thought I’d earn a living working with nature, though. That was kind of serendipitous, but serendipitous in a good way.’

  It turned out that Mike, if not appreciative of nature, had always been fascinated by water, especially its flow. Growing up on Long Island Sound and within spitting distance of the Atlantic Ocean, it was unsurprising that his attention had first been drawn by the sea, its vastness and changing moods. But it was an article in a magazine written by a sailor who’d navigated the world’s oceans single-handedly that had captivated him. Until then he’d always assumed that the sea, apart from the occasional swell, was flat; but the article suggested that if an ocean was magically frozen on even the calmest of days, an explorer negotiating its changed landscape would encounter plateaux and valleys differing in height by sixty feet.

  If Mike had been able to sit in a boat and keep his lunch down he might well have become an oceanographer, but motion sickness kept him and his feet on dry land and his interest turned to hydrology and later hydraulic engineering. Until he started attending classes at the Shambhala Centre his interest in water had been purely technical; he was concerned by its flow and turbulence, its conveyance and power and had never stopped to consider its spiritual nature. (He learned that in Buddhism water symbolised calmness, clarity and purity; and in Christianity deliverance from sin, God’s blessing and the gift of eternal life.)

  It was a teacher at the centre who first encouraged Mike to meditate close to water. Mike had taken the advice and driven upstate and found a stream, sat on its bank and lost himself in the sound of its motion. He found that he’d never meditated better and returned there often. But then, one visit, he vent
ured further upstream and found a small waterfall, sat cross-legged next to it and the results were better still. Thereafter he returned to the waterfall to meditate until the day he realised that another waterfall had taken its place. The new cascade was out of synch, the plops irregular and the gurgles jarring. The whole sound had changed and meditation impossible.

  When Mike climbed the bank to investigate the problem he found a large branch wedged in one of the channels, and behind it a small wall of rocks. The unwanted debris had been washed downstream by a heavy rainfall. He removed the rubble, pulled out the tree branch and returned to the spot below the waterfall where he customarily meditated. The sound had improved but it still wasn’t the same. He climbed back to the top and made an adjustment; climbed back down, climbed back to the top again and made further modifications until the sound was as he remembered – in fact, better than he remembered. It was the most meaningful thing he’d ever done. If only he could do this for a living!

  At the Shambhala Centre the next day Mike met with the teacher who’d first encouraged him to meditate outdoors. He told him about the waterfall, its deformation and asked if he’d been right to reconfigure the force to his liking. Was it wrong for a person to interfere with nature and arrogance to believe that nature could be improved? As man and nature were one, the teacher replied, the waterfall was Mike and Mike was the waterfall; by changing the waterfall Mike had changed himself. He took a soiled business card from a fold in his robe and handed it to Mike: Bill Pringle: Roofer. When Mike questioned why he thought he needed a roofer, the teacher apologised and pulled another card from his robe: Summer Gale: Waterfall Tuner. This card made more sense.

  ‘I think you should talk to Summer,’ the teacher said. ‘She doesn’t have a phone.’