Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [36]
“Do you love the Lord Buddha?”
“Dollface,” Sonny answered, so lonely and touched that he could have scooped her up and carried her home, “I love everybody.”
Shwedagon: he’d never seen or even imagined anything like it, a sprawling, technicolor theme park of the soul, ten acres of temples and statues and gem-encrusted shrines surrounding the bell-shaped spire of the towering central zedi. Sonny eyed the zedi’s dazzling golden mass, its bowl base and tapering vertical flow, and after a while realized that he was looking at the world’s largest, albeit upside-down, golf tee. An omen? Meanwhile his guide was intoning the Buddha’s main tenets, telling Sonny that life is dukkha, all pain and illusion; that the cycle of thanthaya, death and rebirth, will continue as long as desire remains; and that through bhavana, meditation, one might achieve the proper karma for enlightenment and nirvana. Yes, Sonny thought, yes yes all true—he felt something swelling in him, a weepy and exhausted soulfulness, a surrender that felt like wisdom’s first glimmerings, and coming down off the plinth he acknowledged the moment by passing money to every monk he saw.
Thursday morning there were more monks at the first tee, wizened old men in orange robes who stood off to the side quietly chanting. Sonny said a little prayer himself, teed it up, and played lights-out golf for the next four days, dissecting fairways with thunderous three-hundred-yard drives, sticking iron shots like the latest smart bombs, and wielding on the greens not his usual limp putter but a veritable stick of fire. His gallery swelled by the hour, a fun though basically clueless crowd yelling “Tigah numbah one!” for encouragement, and while the reference to Tiger slightly broke his heart he obliged by crushing their fancy new resort course. Sunday afternoon he acknowledged their cheers with a shameless Rocky Balboa salute, but the real prize came after the trophy and the check, when he was ushered into the hotel’s penthouse suite to find the council of generals waiting for him. Ah, the generals—after trying to chat them up at the nightly banquets Sonny had come away actually pitying them. What was the point of having power if you were comatose? They were weird little guys, homely men with pot bellies and wispy tinted hair and all the liquid charm of formaldehyde. Sonny took a seat amid the chill of their anti-charisma and listened to General Hla make the pitch: they wanted Sonny to become Myanmar’s ambassador of golf, their consultant on matters of tourism and sport and their host to visiting dignitaries and businessmen. As compensation he would be provided a car, a house, reasonable expense money, and a salary of twenty-five thousand dollars a month. “We also request,” Hla added as his colleagues came to the edges of their seats, “that you please be available to give us private instruction.”
Sure, like he had something better to do? In Dallas his ex-wife was about to impound his car for nonpayment of child support. Back there lay failure and angst, the permanent hangover of a badly blown youth, whereas here he’d gone from zero to hero in a couple of days.
“Gentlemen,” Sonny said, laying on his corniest Texas charm, “I would consider it an honor to be your golf ambassador. Just show me where to sign.”
By the Tuesday after his victory he had a Mercedes sedan, a fat U.S. Dollar account at the Myawaddy Bank, and a rent-free bungalow at the National Golf Club, an antique gem left over from the days of the British Raj. It was a tight, slyly challenging links-style course with lots of blind approaches and tricky doglegs, while its emerald fairways and parklike woods suggested the moist, hushed intimacies of a tropical greenhouse. Only the military—the “Tatmadaw”—and their relatives and guests were allowed to enjoy the National’s sumptuous perks. Fore-caddies chased