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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
A sister thing
» Blaisdell Arena
It was a good costume, Bodhicita Guzman learned last Halloween when, after a night of partying, she'd been stopped at a police checkpoint and the young cop waved and said "Right on through, sister. Bless you."
It wasn't just the gray-and-white nun's habit that changed her from the hot-blooded Japanese-Puerto Rican beauty she was. The winged eyeglass frames from the '60s and more-salt-than-pepper wig completed the look.
"Bless you, sister," the female ticket-taker said as Bodhicita filed into the Blasidell Arena entrance with thousands of others who'd come to see the 14th Dalai Lama introduce the first Hawaiian-born lama.
She smiled, nodded piously. Was it alter ego -- altar ego? -- or just temporary 180-degree opposites that made this role-playing so satisfying?
Whatever, she was entirely into being Sister Mary Miraculoso. She found her seat in the first row of the upper level, to the left of the stage that was aglitter with bright silks and a bejeweled golden image of Buddha. She wanted to see the two holy men and she wanted to see how her lover Fon Du would respond, and had the perfect seat.
She spotted Fon Du down in a business suit on the floor, chatting with a colleague from the Bank of Lhasa and an elderly Caucasian couple. For just a moment Bodhicita felt a twinge inside, the start of a tingle, remembering how he once made her feel and how she'd felt about him. She wondered if the couple, probably investors in the Bank of Lhasa from the way Fon Du showed them to their seats, had any idea they were being hosted by the Chinese secret police. Of course not. She'd been fooled too.
Tonight she was doing the fooling. She saw several other "bank employees" scattered around the arena. One, Doo Wop, walked right past and nodded deferentially.
From stage left, a tall man with a shining pate and a bright smile entered, microphone in hand.
"Good evening, I'm Shep Gordon, and thank you for doing a good thing by coming out this evening. I'm here representing the board of directors of the Tibetan Solidarity Alliance. Soon you'll be meeting two very special, holy men, but it's important to put that in perspective. For those of you too young to remember or old enough to forget, when the Communist Chinese invaded Tibet in 1949, they began the systematic process of wiping out Tibetan culture, language and religion.
"More than 1.3 million Tibetans have died, many by execution. Torture is common. Of 6,219 universities and monasteries, only eight remain. We're trying to save a culture and a people."
Fon Du's face turned red and his right forefinger twitched, as if anxious to pull a trigger. But that wasn't when Bodhicita knew it was really over. It was over the moment she laid eyes on the young lama.
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Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com