Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [40]
So after we’d talked for a while, and I realized that the Dalai Lama is a remarkable person—very honest and with a tremendous sense of humor—I thought: why not? I had warned my son and my wife that I was going to do this. As I was leading up to it, they caught on. Tyrel, already flushed with embarrassment, excused himself. My wife was left there to face the consequences, I guess.
TERRY: I knew right when he was going to do it. He knew all the important stuff was over. I watched his body language. I saw that leg start to bounce up and down. That’s when Ty jumped out of his chair: “I have to use the restroom.” I was experiencing what can only be described as total mortification. And I figured by the time Jesse was done, all chances of my having a life-changing event were also going to be over.
I looked at the Dalai Lama and I said, “Your holiness, can I ask you a personal question?” He said, sure.
I said, “Do you watch movies?”
He said, “Not very often.”
I said, “So—you’ve never seen the movie Caddyshack?”
He said, “No.”
I said, “Well, you should, because you’re in it.”
He gave me this kind of puzzled look. Like, gee, I don’t remember being on the set. When did I do that? And where are my royalties?
I said, “Well, you’re in it, though not actually in it—but there’s a whole scene about you.”
The Dalai Lama started to laugh. He gets asked all these mystical questions, to which he can always give you an answer. But someone had finally asked him a real question, which he didn’t know how to answer. I suspect he found this a relief.
I was also hoping that, wherever he stayed that night, his people would run out and get the movie and he’d sit down and watch it.
We snuck the Dalai Lama out of the Capitol Building. It has secret underground passageways where you can get people out if you need to. Then I went out to meet the press, a big mass of the Minnesota reporters. By this point in my career as governor, they weren’t exactly at the top of my list. I was staring quietly at them with a straight face. Of course, the first question was, “Well, what did the Dalai Lama say to you?”
What a lead-in! How could the press spoon-feed me any better? I stayed stone-faced and I said, “Well, the Dalai Lama said to me, ‘Gunga gunga la gunga.’ Which means that when I die, I’ll have total consciousness. So I’ve got that going for me!”
Only one of the media picked up on the humor. That was the fellow from Public Radio, Erik Eskola. He burst out laughing. I turned around and walked back to my office. No more questions. That’s the only quote I gave ’em.
The Dalai Lama did bless me and give me a silk prayer scarf that I have today in my home office, hanging right over the back of my name-chair.
“Hey, honey, we’re almost at the border.” Terry has dozed off. From Phoenix we’ve driven south and then west again, through Yuma, and now to a crossing point into Mexico just over the Arizona-California line, at Calexico. On the other side is the border town of Mexicali. I think of the old Gene Autry song, “Mexicali Rose”: “I’ll come back to you some sunny day . . .” I want to get here in time to cross at dawn, anticipating we can make it to Guerrero Negro by the next night. That’s the separation point between Baja Norte and Baja Sur, 450 miles from the U.S.
You don’t even realize there is a border until you see the looming chain-link fence, covered in canvas so you can’t have a view across from one side to the other, with all these high-powered lights making it look like a night-time sporting event. We find a vacant lot next to the immigration office. I ask the U.S. border patrol officer if it is okay for us to sleep there. He says he has no problem with that and, in fact, they are getting a lot of infiltration, so they’ll be there all night long.
I say to Terry, “If