Genine Lentine's Articles on Lions Roar

Genine Lentine on how a McJob and her brother’s magic tricks led her to the zendo. Advisory: this piece contains adult language and partially unbuttoned fast food uniforms. What brings you here this morning? This is the guiding question of the “way-seeking mind talk,” a talk students at the San Francisco Zen Center are invited to offer on Thursday mornings during intensive periods of study. On these mornings, the regular schedule of zazen and service is abbreviated so that a student may tell her story of how she got there—a twenty-five-minute slice of how she came to be sitting on a cushion in the Buddha hall at 6:45 a.m., speaking to a group of people sitting in zazen posture, their eyes lowered to a forty-five-degree angle. These talks chronicle an arc of awareness, an unfolding portrait of a mind getting to know itself. They often single out specific traumatic events as turning points, recounting new permutations of what other human beings and circumstance can levy onto the self. They are tales of extremity and moments of clarity, of hunches followed, of determined recommitment to life: an emergency tracheotomy on a premature infant, as recounted half a century later through that blessed, resealed trachea; an encounter with a person who sees something everyone else had missed; an offhand reference to a parent in prison, to suicide attempts. One after another, students explore the infinite ways a life cracks open and shines. These accounts are registered by the assembly with extremely subtle facial responses, the kind Paul Ekman studies, the kind longtime meditators are said to be better than the average population at detecting. Faint variations that say, I’m here with you, or that was funny, or that was tragic, or that’s just like my life. An upturned corner of the mouth, delicate nostril flare, lift of the chin. Sometimes there’s outright laughter—relief at the prevailing nervous suspension—and, of course, much quiet sniffling. A feeling of temporal dilation pervades the room, but still there’s a clear boundary. At 7:20, if the talk hasn’t already tapered off into, “Well, I think that’s about it,” or, “Does anyone else have a question?” a bell might ring to indicate the time. This audience was woken up by a different bell at 4:55 a.m., and they haven’t yet eaten breakfast. When I gave my talk a couple years ago, I focused on a cascade of revelations brought about by a string of very thorny breakups, so-called losses, and strokes of fortune. Yes, they are indistinguishable. Mostly, I gave examples of how the world makes explicit offers framed almost exactly to the specifications of one’s barely registered needs, but usually the offering remains unrecognizable to the recipient. I illustrated this phenomenon by describing how one afternoon I set out on my bike down Commercial Street in Provincetown, Massachusetts, heading to the library to work at one of the spacious oak tables overlooking the harbor, and I almost rode right past a beautiful, perfectly proportioned maple writing desk a guest house had put out at the curb. I caught just in time the familiar flaw in the logic of my hurry: Too bad I can’t stop to pick up that table; I have to get to the library… so I can, uh, use the table there. I turned back to get the desk and right then a gardener appeared from the adjacent yard and asked if I’d like some help carrying it home. With so many tiny moments when an acutely relevant lesson feels fully articulated and noticed in the nick of time, it’s impossible to include them all. I did not find time, for example, to speak of how, the very next day after I met Popeye—a beloved figure in Provincetown who collected aluminum cans, told fabulous stories, and marched at the front of the Fourth of July parade every summer—he suffered a fatal heart attack the morning before the parade. He was found in a porta-potty in full sailor regalia. I took his death personally, numbering it among all the other incidents that verified my theory that if I cared about someone, that person would disappear immediately. But somehow this incident with Popeye, in its acute swiftness, helped me see the absurdity of my theory. And with the hairsbreadth of space that opened for me in relation to this person to whom I’d spoken only once, I was emboldened to entertain other, closer, losses with more space as well. Time constraints require one to be selective, so no Popeye story—that will have to be saved for the director’s cut—but still, the expectation is that the talk is going to touch on all the key points. And so, for months after the talk, whenever I mentioned a new fact about my life to my friend Stephen, his face took on a wide-eyed, genuine disappointment, confusion, and shock: I can’t believe you left that out of your way-seeking mind talk! For him, the way-seeking mind talk is the primary point of reference, the hegemonic text for knowing anyone, as if you are supposed to include every pivotal incident, overshot gesture and course correction, relationship, and part-time job in your life. Though I mentioned only briefly the profound and abundant gifts of working for six years with the poet Stanley Kunitz, Stephen remembers my talk as being very “heavy on Stanley” and yet considers grave the following omissions: (1) My brother is a magician. (2) My first job was as a hostess at McDonald’s. I thought I might reconsider my talk, now, by-inquiring into just these items, including a couple of sub-items: item number two included attending training at a place called Hamburger University and also included my first blowjob. Stephen says, however, I was right not to include that “blue material.” It wouldn’t have played well in the Buddha hall. What can be learned through the select lens of these two biographical points, or in the parlance common to Zen Center, these “conditions of my karmic life?” Let me consider first having an older brother who is a magician. What this does is offer some lessons in form. It provides an opportunity to see someone sewing a cape out of black and white checked gingham and adopting a persona based on the motif of checkers, an identity that then embraces anything articulated in a checkered pattern—jaunty checkered caps, checkered socks, a checkered umbrella. When my brother was fifteen, Mr. Checkers was born and it is an identity he still inhabits today. What I want to believe is that the gingham cloth was on hand already, maybe left over from a church altar banner my mother was making. I prefer this because resourcefulness—responding to the environment—is a cornerstone in my aesthetic. I don’t want to think that he just came up with the name Mr. Checkers and then went out and bought the fabric. If you can’t make magic from the material in your immediate surroundings, it’s no magic I’m interested in. Having a brother with an alter ego makes gift buying easy. Unlike the full-fledged, complex individual ego who may or may not still respond positively to the licorice all-sorts so eagerly received last year, an alter ego is usually based on just a few prominent features with a high predictive value. You find a stuffed plush dog sporting a checkered vest and you need look no further for your brother’s Christmas gift. Watching him receive these gifts was a lesson in the constriction of identity. He had to like these iterations of his chosen self. If he didn’t like them, he himself had to change. Perhaps it was precisely this fixity that offered him a relatively stable place to park an identity dissolving in the tumult of adolescence. I watched him tape Baggies into newspapers, which then became makeshift ovens in which he’d bake a cookie by passing a hand over the sports section. I watched him tuck folded playing cards into oranges, prepping them for when he’d discover them at the birthday party. He emailed me recently to tell me he learned the cookie trick in the parking lot of the Highland Palms Convalescent Home after his first magic show, when a resident, a fellow magician, paid him the highest compliment one magician can offer another: he showed him a trick—two actually—“Right there in the parking lot he showed me a cigarette vanish and the cookie trick.” Fine, he can tell me this now, but then, when I petitioned him to teach me how something was done, he offered only flat refusal, leaving me to study the mirrors, the cut-away doors, the knives with rubber blades on my own when I could get my hands on them. Acting as his assistant made this easy and provided another benefit: the checkered miniskirt my sister sewed for me. The white go-go boots? Those I already had. Magicians’ catalogs arrived in the mail. I got home from school before he did, so this gave me a chance to read them first, to see that there were whole stores devoted to wands, capes, and disappearing chambers. These were items I thought you had to receive by some secret transmission in midnight ceremonies, or have them custom-fabricated by fairies, or you had to be born into them. Our mail carrier handed them to me at the screen door. The access granted by my position gave me training as a cynic. As he lied to the audience, I pictured the Queen of Hearts, creased and soggy, smuggled inside the orange. I wasn’t interested in illusion; I wanted to know how the trick worked—the details of the physical world, the way the baggie hung on the newspaper, how he measured out the flour, cracked the egg. I felt betrayed that he couldn’t recognize that I was a fellow magician and let me in on these secrets and, before long, I felt bored with his act, with the creed he invoked, and ultimately, with what must be a paltry kind of magic if it could not be shared. Even then I knew that if I shared my potato chips with my dog, the effect was not one of diminishment, rather they somehow seemed to last longer. It remains true today that a screwdriver containing several different sizes of bits in its handle intrigues me more than any of those magic supplies designed...

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