THE STONES still hurt my feet on bindabat. Farmers in tattered shorts shout abuse at their water buffalo ploughing the rice fields. Ruk is sick so a young Thai monk ,Tan Wee, leads me through the village on our morning begging rounds. Old women chat with their neighbours and spit red betel juice before kneeling down to put rice into our empty bowls as we pass. We are part of the rhythm of their day. A little girl helps her grandmother donate coconut sweets wrapped in greasy banana leaves. She puts three into my bowl and I smile at her, risking offence. On the long walk home, I feel hungry. Tan Wee is far ahead of me. I dip a hand into my bowl and pull out a small lump of sticky rice. Although the sun is up, and by the rules I am permitted to eat until noon, a monk would never munch food from his alms bowl while walking on bindabat. I eat the lump. It tastes chewy and a little sweet. I never relished glutinous rice before and often wondered why the others liked it so much. Secretly I eat a second handful, taking care not to be seen by the six women planting new green shoots in a paddy. I roll the rice on my tongue, enjoying the added tang of sacrilege. Puddle crabs scuttle out of the way as I pass. The ground is wet with flood water. My feet sink into the path, red mud squirting through my toes. I laugh and walk on the grass and paddy dykes. My mind wanders to the future. I have filled my life with enough plans to keep three people working overtime. The fantasies drop away into the wet, fresh fields. I leave them there and follow Tan Wee’s trail back into the monastery.
The teacher had gone to visit another temple that morning. He had been invited there to give a special dasana, since it was Wan Phra. Villagers had already arrived at our wat to prepare our meal. Several cars were parked at the edge of the compound. More visitors had come from Bangkok. We of the community tended to shun these crowds, but when a minibus full of Thai monks arrived, it stirred much interest. A famous Thai Ajahn, a disciple of Ajahn Chah’s, had come for breakfast. He was ushered into the sala and given the seat of honour. Even our own teacher would not sit in it. With him had come half a dozen monks and a few female Thai pakhaos, old women who would be staying several days in the fenced-off far section of the wat. We took our places in the food line while the hall filled with guests, most of whom had already donned their white clothing for the day. They brought fifty-three dishes of food in to us, including the banana and coconut milk dessert usually served only at ordination ceremonies. “Bot bananas” Jim called them. Tan Casipo warned us that we must take some food from every dish when many villagers come to feed us in order to avoid offending a donor. Never ever sniff at a bowl and pass it on, the helpful monk advised. Our bowls soon became a jumble of tastes, which suited Jim well. Since our decision to fast, he had decided not to crave taste in his food. He religiously dumped fruits, curry, vegetables and sweets on top of one another, mixing them together with his hand.
We gloomily expected the substitute Ajahn would follow our own teacher’s practice of giving a long dasana in Thai on Wan Phra morning. It was a way of thanking guests for their contributions, teaching us to renounce our appetites at the same time. It was also customary before breakfast for the Ajahn to give the eight precepts to outsiders planning on staying for the evening vigil. The visiting monk did none of this. He gave a perfunctory blessing after the food was served, then munched right into the feast. Perhaps our guest did not know he was required to sing for his supper. It should have fallen on Tan Bodhipalo to give the precepts. The dour monk was doubtless relieved when the holy visitor took his place. Once the meal had begun, there was no graceful way for the number two monk to recover the normal order. The white-clad villagers left, once we were served. Having been denied the precepts, they did not stay for their morning chanting.
“You see Jim, without the Ajahn, things break down,” I said as we dug into our loaded bowls. The food was delicious, despite the mix, and despite my early start on the rice. I ate swiftly and without restraint.
“Bob, Bob, take a look at yourself,” said Jim, reprimanding me. “Where is your mind?”
“All over the place. I know what I’m doing.” I laughed. I felt giddy, like sliding on a roller coaster. “It’s not how fast you eat, it’s concentration, knowing what you are doing. This morning on bindabat I felt hungry. I started eating rice.”
“On alms round?”
“Why not? We’ve made eating into such a big deal but that’s going in the wrong direction. It complicates life with rules. Keep it simple. As the song goes:
I eat when I’m hungry, drink when I’m dry
If the sky don’t fall on me I’ll live till I die.
Whiskey, rye whiskey I’ve known you of old,
You’ve emptied my pockets of silver and gold.”
“Go back to your bowl, Bob.”
“If I could put my head inside it, I’d do it. And scrape the bottom with my teeth. That’s not forbidden in the Vinaya.”
After we had finished feeding, the visiting Ajahn permitted first the higher, then the lower ends of the hierarchy to bow before his pudgy figure and cherubic face. When we finished, he gave us a wai which caused Jim to gasp.
“Did you see how high he held his hands? They were halfway up his nose. The higher the wai, the more respect is shown. He did us a great honour.”
We washed our bowls and the spittoons as usual, then sat in the sun against the sala wall to watch them dry. Both of us had eaten too much. We were content to sit, lazily watching a purple butterfly flit around the water tank. There seemed no point in hurrying back to our kuties to meditate. Jim turned and noticed the body of a small lizard dangling from the shutters of a sala window. It was limp, bent over backwards, hanging upside down by one foot which clung to the wood with suction-cup toes. It looked ridiculous and sad.
“Must have had a heart attack,” I said. “One minute catching flies, content as a lizard can be; the next, reincarnated as a human being.”
“Now that’s a teaching,” said Jim. “Too bad nobody else is here.”
We left it hanging there, a new reminder of mortality. When the sun had soaked up the last of the moisture from our bowls, we slipped the orange wool covers back over them and began lacing up the straps.
“When will you tell the Ajahn?” I asked.
“Today.”
“That’s not much notice.”
“I don’t think he’ll have to close down the wat until they find a replacement. I can’t wait to see the look on his face when I tell him I’m leaving in two days. Of course, if I never see his face again it won’t bother me either. It doesn’t make a difference.”
“Do you mean either way you’ll suffer, or either way he’ll suffer? This doesn’t feel very spiritually gratifying, Boomer.”
“It’s not supposed to. Why should he suffer?”
“You said you’d stay three months.”
“By his rule I’m allowed to leave any time I choose. Even a monk just has to tell another monk three times that he quits and he’s released from his vows.”
“I think the Ajahn will be disappointed.”
“I doubt he really cares. How much attention has he given either of us since we’ve been here? None. Do you think he’ll be concerned about me when I go? No way.”
“If he feels bad, that might be a good thing. I wish he had a chance to hear the things you told me about this place. Maybe it would have helped the monks to get a better perspective on some of their own problems.”
“It’s too bad there wasn’t anybody here who could tell it as it is to these guys, Tim. Someone who didn’t play the game or fall for the twenty-five hundred year tradition. Someone who could be himself. Don’t you get any ideas.”
“I guess that used to be Ajahn Chah. He’s back from Bangkok, you know. Tan Casipo told me he was driven to Wat Pah Pong in his special van last week.”
“What’s his condition?”
“Stable, according to Casipo, whatever that means.”
“I think they keep him alive like a vegetable so they can keep building branch monasteries,” said Jim with sudden anger. “Since his stroke over twenty new monasteries have been built affiliated with Wat Pah Pong. For the Thais it’s a sure way to make merit, giving to Ajahn Chah, an arahant if ever there was one living. This happens all the time in Thailand. Once an arahant is dead, you can’t make merit off him, so the donations stop flowing. They keep him alive in a two million baht air-conditioned kuti near his monastery. When he dies they’ll build some great memorial to him so that some money will keep coming in. I saw the mausoleum of one teacher from Bangkok. His disciples gilded his body and set it on display. How’s that for impermanence?”
“I’m glad you haven’t lost your cynical edge.”
“I’m still suffering, with or without it.”
We grinned at each other, and went our separate ways in the jungle.
At drink time, my beautiful red cup was gone. I searched all over the kitchen. I thought perhaps one of the visitors had taken it. Separation from the liked is suffering. Transience. The objects of our thought are unstable. After drink I asked if anyone had spotted it. No one responded. Tan Casipo helped me search the sala. All we found were ants. They had moved from the concrete water tank into the shelf at the rear of the hall.
“Material objects just dematerialize sometimes, don’t they, Tan Casipo?”
“Then maybe it will rematerialize as well,” said the sympathetic monk. I remembered he was an applied physics student in his pre-bhikkhu days. “Try not to think about it,” was his sound advice.
Without the Ajahn, Wan Phra was dull. There was no dhamma talk for us. Tan Bodhipalo set up a taped dasana for the villagers. There were far fewer this evening than there were in the morning. We didn’t even get medicine with our evening coffee. Jim gulped down two cups of caffeine. I drank three. The night passed swiftly. My own sit was calm but full of mosquitoes. I wrapped my feet and my arms in a blanket and covered my bald head with a sitting cloth. There was no thought, no concentration, no wandering, no energy.
“This isn’t meditation, it’s suffocation,” I thought. “Death through inertia, that’s the goal.”
“You flatter yourself with death,” came the silent voice.
“You again.”
“You think you have achieved something? Are sloth and slackness freedom? Have you ceased striving because there is no gain for you? You forget those you held up as examples. Have you done that which has yet to be done? You have only taken a little step along the way. Now you sit inert as a stone.”
“I’m trying to avoid the ego.”
“Who is avoiding?”
“Self, I admit. But I’m not trying to make points. I can’t meditate on anything without it being self.”
“Meditate on the non-self. This is freedom.”
“But everything is non-self. Self is only illusion.”
“That should make it easy for you.”
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Neither to be nor not to be, that is the answer.
Avoid extremes.
“Just what is the point of staying up all night on Wan Phra?” I overheard Percy say to Herbie in the dark. I strained to hear the layman’s response.
“There’s no point to it,” Herbie answered, as if stating the obvious. This was the second time I suspected him.
Making cocoa that morning before dawn, Jim told Herbie that he was leaving soon. No one else knew of Jim’s departure, except me. His intent was to draw Herbie out a bit about his background and future plans. The teenager had indicated from time to time that he didn’t have much money. Jim still thought he was a runaway.
“A wat is the perfect place to hide,” my twin had said. “Nobody would ever find you. You get food and shelter for free. Look how secretive Herbie is about everything. He hardly eats at all, there’s so much tension in him. I’m worried about the kid.”
Despite his inner struggles, Herbie had remained a model layman. Although he seldom did morning sweeping, he was always in the sala before bindabat, helping the monks put on their outer robes. He knelt at their feet every day, fastening the clasps inside their robe linings. After alms round he assisted the novices in sorting the rice and goodies into separate basins. He worked silently, without pretension, grateful if nobody took any notice of him. He seldom complained and never asked for more than unwanted olives on Wan Phra nights. He was an example of service and humility to us all, except for the secret smile which sometimes crossed his lips. After the smile, he would laugh, as if surprised at its presence on his face. For an instant his tension would dissolve. Then he would fade into the background again. Otherwise he appeared as flawless as a robot.
Jim’s information succeeded in drawing the little layman out of his shell. Herbie confessed that he too would soon be leaving.
“I thought you didn’t have any money?” said Jim.
“I wired my mother in Canada. She’s sending me some.”
“Where will you go?”
“Beijing. I want to take the Siberian express to Moscow, then go to Europe. I have relatives in London. They will put me up for a while.”
“Any plans to go home?” Jim’s question betrayed a lawyer’s technique, but the concern was genuine.
“No.”
“I’ll bet your mother was glad to hear from you.”
“Not really.” He shrugged. “I just called and asked her to send money. We don’t talk a lot.” Herbie turned back to the kettles. He added cocoa to the steaming water and stirred. I could see he was an expert, well trained by Pakhao Michael, long ago.
At dawn there was good news. Mr. Chicago was back in town. He had returned from Bangkok with Ajahn Chah and had spent the last week at Wat Pah Pong. Since Ruk was not feeling well and decided to fast through Wan Phra, Mr. Chicago went in his place on bindabat, with little Tan Wee wedged between us.
“So, kiddo, how are you progressing?” he asked as we began our walk out towards the gates. Tan Wee was already ahead of us. The older bhikkhu seemed in no rush, content to chat with me as we did our morning round. “Any pretty girls in the villages?”
“There’s one who’s a real honey, even when she kneels,” I said with a grin. “She’s out there with the rice every morning. Pretty, but wedding ring. Some day before I leave I’m going to walk around on bindabat in my civvies just so I can smile back at her.”
“That was a trick question, you know. You’re not supposed to look at them.”
“You caught me. I confess, Mr. Chicago, I’m glad I’m not in the robes for life.”
“It’s Sumeno, Tan Sumeno. You should call me by my Pali name. I remember you from before. I want you to know I’ve been a monk for over twelve years so you should listen carefully to what I’m going to tell you. This may be the most important conversation in your life. Maybe you haven’t considered this seriously. You’re young. You have your whole life ahead of you. I was middle-aged before I even heard the dhamma. Remember that it was 27 May 1985 when a monk named Tan Sumeno first said to you, kiddo, ‘why not throw it all over? Cancel your travel plans. Write to your family and friends and tell them you’re not coming back. Get yourself ordained as a novice and become a monk.’ I’m getting old. This body will soon wear out. You, you’ve got everything on your side. You could attain enlightenment in this very lifetime if you devoted yourself to the practice.”
I was excited at Mr. Chicago’s words. At last, a hard sell job, a monk who wanted to convert me. This was familiar territory. After so much indifference from the rest, I loved it. It was something I could argue with. I pondered the monk’s words in silence until we had safely crossed the paddy dykes and were on the wide track to the village.
“Why can’t I attain enlightenment without becoming a monk? Can’t I do it out there in the real world instead of locked up in a wat?”
“Kiddo, out there you’d just be swamped by samsara. There’s no time to meditate.”
“It’s samsara in the wat too, Mr.—er, Tan Sumeno. And just as swampy. The temptations may be fewer, but they are more intense. Inside or outside, everywhere is samsara. The Dhamma only teaches about samsara. Samsara is what we need to learn about.”
“You don’t learn about it by drowning in it. You’ve got to renounce and restrain, or it drags you under.”
“But I learn best when I’m in the middle of things, when I’m so thick in samsara it scrapes against me on all sides like sandpaper. The most productive meditation period of my life happened while I was falling passionately in love with a German woman I met in India who had agreed to be my lover. She was a foreign student in Varanasi. It would have been very bad for her to have been seen with a man. I spent days just watching my desire rise, accepting the complications, letting it pass away. I had to live without expectations that it would ever work out. My lust taught me a lot of patience.”
“Alone you’ll never make it,” said the monk, shaking his jowls. “Why not stay here? It’s much easier.”
“I could stay. There is no real reason for me to go. Either way, I will suffer—I have learned that much here. I guess some people are better suited to one environment than to the other. For me the monastery is a very seductive form of samsara. It’s tempting to think you are progressing just because you’re here. The market place keeps me on the razor’s edge.”
“A monk’s life is not so easy. Just the other day I was sewing my robe in the sala at Wat Pah Pong. The robe was ripped. I had to use an old machine to fix it. The needle always sticks on it and it’s impossible to stitch straight. The thread kept breaking. The room was full of mosquitoes, all biting me. It was hot and sweat kept running into my eyes and stinging so I couldn’t see. Some Thai people started arguing on the far side of the hall. I wanted to throw my hands in the air and quit, give it all up and just walk out into a new pair of blue jeans. But I persevered until the robe was finished. I struggled with aversion all the way along. After all, I am happier with only three old robes to my name than I was when I used to buy a new suit every other week.
“Let me tell you how I came to be here, kiddo.” He smiled at me and continued as we passed the lotus pond. “I was a millionaire before I was thirty-five years old. I ran ten companies out of Chicago. Not little ones either. One of them had over a hundred employees. I was a name in real estate. I had one wife, one ex-wife and a string of girlfriends. I had to be careful because I didn’t want the girls to find out about my wives. I had a new car every season and every headache and hassle you can imagine. My businesses were all making money and my friends all looked to me to bail them out of trouble. Some days I felt I was running the world— without any help. Then the IRS and the FBI started getting on my back for some small thing. Just another headache. One day I called all my girlfriends and said goodbye. I went to all the directors of my companies, told them they were in charge as of then, and that I was sending over legal papers to put everything into the hands of the employees. I told them to share profits in any way they agreed upon. I came home early in the evening, which surprised my wife because usually I was out late or with a girlfriend. I told her to pack a suitcase. ‘I have bought two round-the-world tickets for tomorrow, honey. I’ve sold the house to the agency. Anything you can’t take in the bag, give it away.’ She thought I was crazy. Then I went out to play mini-putt with three old friends. We hadn’t been together in years. I called them up for the occasion. We played for a quarter a hole, just like in the old days. They all loved it. When I told them I was saying goodbye, they said I was crazy. They said in two months I’d be back in Chicago. My wife cried. Then they offered to drive us to the airport. I knew when I left I was never going back.”
“Did you ever go back?”
“I did. Just last autumn, still in my robes. They were surprised to see me, all right, after fifteen years. They were pretty interested in what I had to say.”
“What about your wife?”
“She went back to the States without me. She’s an artist somewhere in Maine, I think.”
“So how did you eventually find Theravada Buddhism?”
“Theravada Buddhism found me.”
Mr. Chicago slung his bowl strap over his right shoulder as we reached the village gate. The monk frowned and told me it had been a long time since he had been through this particular village. He wondered if we had changed the old route in the last five years. Little Tan Wee was waiting for us. He stepped into place, looking ridiculously small between two tall farang. Tan Sumeno bowed his head in quiet humility. Then the ex-millionaire, who still talked like a real estate racketeer, led us through the village to beg for our daily rice.
We started off well, but at the first crossing where there were no kneeling devotees to indicate the way, the monk faltered. We could not just wander aimlessly through town. Our alms givers expected us to pass by their houses. I waited for Tan Wee to direct, but the little Thai remained silent. We hovered indecisively.
“Left,” I hissed, with as much decorum as possible. Sumeno turned down the correct road. Although the route had become part of the pattern of my life, I had always been a follower, keeping my head bent and my eyes to the ground. I knew how quickly word would spread through the villages if it appeared the farang monks were lost. It would truly humiliate us. So I directed our way from the back of the line, trying to remember in advance which way we would turn, searching for any landmarks to guide us through the rough stilt houses, litter and buffalo dung. Mr. Chicago responded to my commands without ever looking back. The only cause for concern among the Thai villagers that morning would have been the constant muttering and peering around of the rude pakhao. I was sweating by the time we reached the village wat. We came out of the far gate of the village and passed the two giant trees at the edge of the paddy fields. Tan Sumeno suggested I offer to carry his alms bowl back to Pah Nanachat. A more mindful pakhao would have done so without having to be asked. When Tan Wee once again walked ahead of us, the elder monk resumed his attempts at conversion.
“If you don’t become a monk, what do you want to do with the rest of your life?” he inquired.
“I want to write books.”
“Write books?” He sounded dismayed. “Don’t you think there are enough books in the world already? I remember bookstores from my days in Berkeley, books stacked past the windows. Too many books. Burn the books! That’s what I say.
They don’t do anybody any good. Better to let the paper stay on the trees.”
I couldn’t speak. I looked at the mud on my feet. I wanted to argue that the Dhamma is also written in a book. Did he want to burn the Dhamma? But I knew real Dhamma is not a book. His point seemed strangely valid. Especially from the perspective of the trees.
When we neared the shelter of the monastery’s jungle, I showed the senior monk a short cut Ruk used which avoided most of the gravel road inside the tiger gates. It led along a slippery mud dyke, across a paddy which was now flooded.
“I remember this field from ten years ago, when Pah Nanachat was first started,” said Tan Sumeno. “Ajahn Sumedo and I used to come out here for walks every evening. I remember he came back here from England for a visit a few years ago. ‘Sumeno,’ he said to me, ‘when you get old and can’t get around on bindabat, you’ll retire and come to Chithurst monastery. We’ll stay together and just watch the seasons roll by.’”
“And feel your teeth growing long?”
“Meditate on that, kiddo. ‘Watch the seasons roll by,’ he said to me. What could be better than that? Remember, I’m telling you this for a reason. Once, I thought I had it all: money, business, women, cars, success. Now I have only a nice little hut in the jungle, a twenty second walk away from work. I eat one good meal a day, served to me by beautiful and generous Thai people. I sew my own clothes and spend my days in quiet contemplation. In the end, the body will grow old and weaken. It will return to the earth. But before I die, I will sit on a porch and watch the seasons roll by. . . .”
The monk began to slip off the dyke. Before he overbalanced, he leapt across a little channel of water, landing neatly on a dry section near a clump of bushes. From there, the path led back to the wat.
“You still seem pretty spry to me, Mr. Chicago. How long did you say you’ve been here?”
“Twelve years. Twelve years of peace and satisfaction.”
“And you’re still not enlightened?”
At the footbath outside the sala, I jumped in first, carrying both bowls around my shoulders. Even after weeks on bindabat, my feet were still painfully tender. Mr. Chicago looked at me with reproachful eyes.
I knew what I had done. “Come on in,” I said, moving over to the side of the square little pool.
He shook his jowls at me quietly.
“Is it against the precepts for us to take a bath together?”
“That’s right. The senior monk should go first.”
“That’s a precept? Sorry. I didn’t mean to break the law.” I stepped out of the bath with my feet still muddy.
“It’s only a rule for convenience in case there is any confusion about who should go in first. It’s not that I mind.” He stepped into the bath.
“If you don’t mind, then why do we need the rule?”
“Just to avoid confusion.”
“If neither of us minds, then there’s no confusion. We were both pretty confused for a minute. It was the rule that confused us.”
“The rules are so that you can be mindful and control your desires,” said the monk, stepping out of the bath.
“The desire to follow the rules just controls other desires,” I said stepping in.
“You didn’t understand me. You should meditate on what I just said to you.”
“I do, I do understand you,” I said to Tan Sumeno’s wet footprints. The monk had disappeared inside the sala.
I rubbed my hands with glee at the thought of Jim’s reaction to my morning conversation with Mr. Chicago. The story of riches to robes would disgust him. Yet I was glad the evangelical monk was back in town. I liked having somebody try to convert me. It would give me something to scrape against once Jim had left.
After drink time I helped my twin with the special chores he usually did with Nimalo instead of water hauling. It was their daily responsibility to empty the washing cisterns by the wash pump and fill them with fresh water. Nimalo had gone to Wat Pah Pong for a few days so Jim had taken me on to help with the task. He fumed as I recounted Tan Sumeno’s tale. He told me the monk was just like the rest, he had given up on life and settled for comfort and personal peace, sponging off the “beautiful and generous” Thai villagers who worshipped him.
“But you’re a dipshit for that crack ‘not enlightened after twelve years,’” my friend said. “Why should you insult him?”
“Suddenly you’re sympathetic to the sangha!” I said, surprised and a little hurt at the criticism.
“So he’s a failure at his chosen vocation. So he’s complacent. So he’s living a lie. What points do you make by rubbing his face in it? What are you doing playing with him like that?”
“I like him better than you like the Ajahn. I just found some loose links in the armour of his logic I wanted to open up.”
“For whose sake, Bob?”
“Ego, Boomer. I’m a slow learner.”
“You’re a dipshit.”
I pumped water into the buckets in silence. Jim emptied them into the last of the cisterns to be filled. We walked together past the mango trees, back into the jungle to a well near the furthest kuties. There was one more cistern to fill at the toilet nearby.
“Have you seen the moss-aphids?” said my twin, stepping off the overgrown path. He turned up a leaf to reveal a clump of white moss or fungus on its underside. I looked closer. They were insects, each with a delicate feather-like tuft rising from its back.
“It’s a perfect disguise,” said Jim. He released the leaf. “I told the Ajahn this morning. I said I’d leave tomorrow.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he didn’t have much to say, so he didn’t say much. ‘Lots of people come here,’ he told me, ‘but the ones who stay are the ones who are really fed up with the world.’”
“Like Mr. Chicago.”
“I suppose so. I told him I guessed I wasn’t fed up yet.”
“That’s all?”
“It’s all he said to me. But I should pass this on to you if you want to know more about Mr. Chicago. He came by when I was finished with the Ajahn and wanted to talk with him about a visa problem. The Ajahn said to him, ‘This is the third time you’ve come to Pah Nanachat and you’ve never paid proper respect to the Ajahn. Whenever you arrive at a monastery you know you are supposed to pay respect. You haven’t done this once since I came here as abbot. I know I have only one pansa more than you. That is a personal matter which doesn’t make any difference.’ Mr. Chicago got flustered. He went to pieces like a child scolded for being bad. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he almost whimpered. ‘I know I still have a lot of aversion inside me. I admit it. But I do like to bow. I know it’s good for me. It humbles me. I love to bow. I’ll do it now if you’d like. Next time I won’t forget.’ He kept on talking, but I never saw him bow. No wonder he gave you the hard sell, Tim. He’s totally insecure himself. When he heard I was leaving, he asked me to help him with his visa problem. What could I do for him? He wanted me to speak to the embassy. He seemed incapable of doing anything on his own. I said I didn’t have a phone where I was staying so it would be hard to get in touch. It was true. Suddenly he changed. ‘That’s okay, we’ll probably just bump into each other on the street,’ he said in a cheerful voice. ‘That’s the way these things work.’”
“And I wanted to bully this man, Jim?”
“Like I said, you’re a dipshit.”