|
My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Feminine distraction
By the time Bodhicita Guzman was pulling her rusty blue VW Beetle into the driveway at Kamasami Khan's hillside home overlooking Kaneohe Bay, she'd made up her mind. She was never going back to Fon Du.
Khan had also made up his mind. The last thing they needed was a beautiful young woman hanging around and distracting the young lama. As far as that goes, distracting Khan and everyone else with the clandestine Free Tibet Warrior Society from the job of protecting the lama from Te-Wu.
And what was the saying, nothing pulled a butterfly back to the pack of caterpillars faster than a female? Something like that.
He greeted her at the door, accepted a kiss on the cheek, offered tea.
"Thanks, but I'm a Starbucks girl."
"In that case you're out of luck around here."
"Guess we'll have to change that in a hurry."
"Whoa whoa whoa ..."
"I mean it, Khan. There's something about Jey and ..."
"He's just a kid."
"I figured out who he is. He's the young lama. The costume, by the way, is brilliant. Anyway, I could fake it before with Fon Du, but that was B.J. ..."
"Excuse me?"
"Before Jey came into my life. And now I must follow him, serve him, learn from him, protect him."
"The best way to help protect him is to stay the hell away. Dammit, Bodhicita, the last thing we need is to have the head of the local Chinese secret police's girlfriend hanging around!"
"Ex-girlfriend. But I hadn't thought about that part."
"And what makes you think Fon Du is just going to let you walk away? From what I can tell, he's totally hooked on you. And this is a guy who's used to getting his way. Remember what happened to that wahine who tried to break up with the gambling kingpin out in Waianae?"
A tear started down Bodhicita's cheek, then another.
"Oh jeez," Khan said. He knew Bodhicita as a bright, irrepressible party girl who was fun to hang out with because, as Joe Kharma, the lama's older brother, had once put it, "Bodhicita's not like most women. She's like a guy except with boobs." So what's with the tears?
"Can I see him?" Sniffle, sniffle. "Please."
"He's downstairs getting a computer lesson from Joe. Apparently he has ideas about using computers to spread the Dharma."
They found the young lama with virtual-reality sensors attached to his head and body, chanting "hum yam hum, hum ram hum, hum lam hum" as Joe's monitors flashed with colors and scenes unimagined. Bodhicita reached out, gently touched his hand, but he was in a deep trance and ignored her.
"Don't know where he went," Joe said, "but it's far, far from here."
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com
