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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Holy hottie with hops
>> Kaneohe
"Something tells me," Joe Kharma said, "it's not the shoes."
Meaning the Nike T-Macs the second Lama Jey Tsong Khapa was wearing while Kamasami Khan introduced him to the game of basketball.
"You sure you didn't play some hoops up in the Himalayas?" Khan said as the young lama drained another three-pointer from the top of the key painted on Khan's driveway. It was ridiculous how he seemed to levitate, hanging in air, in perfect balance, ball, hand, eye, bucket becoming one.
"Remind me," Khan said, "not to play you in h-o-r-s-e, your holiness."
Swish, again, nothing but net.
A car horn tooted. "Nice shot!" Bodhicita Guzman called from the open window of a rusty blue VW coming up the drive.
The young lama had at last abandoned the blond surfer boy wig, revealing a light growth of stubble. He wore Carolina blue shorts and was shirtless. His golden brown skin, almost translucent, glistened with a sheen of perspiration. He was lithe and moved with grace, a holy hottie with hops who could hit the three. Had Bodhicita ever gotten lucky or what?
Wearing khaki shorts and a white blouse buttoned higher than usual, she hurried to Jey, kissed his cheek lightly, not minding the sweat, started to say hello to Khan and Joe. Khan didn't have time. "So what happened?"
As Khan and Jey toweled off, they sat on the lanai overlooking Kaneohe Bay, sipping iced green tea, eating sliced honeydew while they debriefed Bodhicita. She told them of slipping the mystery mickey Khan gave her into Fon Du's wine, and how he almost instantly became a crazed sex maniac, barely finishing the appetizers, getting their entrees to go and dashing home.
"It was nuts," Bodhicita said. "I was doing everything I could to ..." She glanced at Jey, not wanting to offend him. "... to avoid, you know ... I tried to do as little as possible for as long as I could."
"And?" Khan said.
"It worked. I gave him a massage, and all of a sudden, at very little prompting, he started talking. Fon Du never actually used the words Te-Wu.
Never said exactly the goal was to kill Jey. Never admitted being anything other than a banker -- whose colleagues sometimes wear disguises and carry guns. But he was furious that one of his people was arrested at the dedication ceremony yesterday, even more angry that Chinese diplomats succeeded in having the lama's appearance at the capitol canceled. Quote: 'Fools! I had two men there, it was an easy shot.' And they're not letting up. At the meeting with religious leaders this afternoon, they'll have an agent dressed as a Muslim imam."
"The devious duplicity of the Chinese," Khan said, "really is something to behold. OK, I'd better call Michael."
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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