The Ecstatic Adventures of the Exuberant Bodhisattva.
by Erica J. Schmidt
Exuberant:
- Full of unrestrained enthusiasm or
joy.
- Lavish; extravagant.
- Extreme in degree, size, or
extent.
- Growing, producing, or produced
abundantly; plentiful
Bodhisattva:
An enlightened being who, out of compassion, forgoes nirvana in order to save
others.
Nirvana:
the blowing out or the extinguishing of the delusional flame of passions
and cravings.
Sometime between the ages of one year and nine months and two years and three
days, Annabelle Gordon forewent nirvana, or a comparable type of extinguishing.
On Friday, March 21st, 1987 at 5:37 P.M, she fell down her mother’s
basement stairs, hit her head and lost consciousness for ninety-seven
days. On the ninety-seventh day, her eyes began to flutter open and
shut, open and shut. Open. That day, Annabelle Gordon was
two years and three days old. “Mommy,” she said to Manuela, her mother, who had
spent most of the previous ninety-seven days watching Annabelle consume
intravenous nourishment and have her sheets changed. “I’m awake now. Can
I have a sandwich?” These were the Exuberant Bodhisattva’s first words.
Her request was granted, immediately and many times
over. Throughout the Exuberant Bodhisattva’s childhood, Manuela’s
sandwich platters provided a reliable interval for sticker trading, hide and
seek, violin lessons, dog walking and playdough. At the age of eight, in an
effort to reduce the suffering of edible sentient beings, the Exuberant
Bodhisattva became a strict vegetarian. Manuela promptly transformed the
piles of salmon, tuna and cold cut creations into wraps, rolls and whole wheat
combinations of grated carrot, tofu, hummus, eggplant, nut butters, vegetables
and legumes. It was all she could do to thank her daughter for coming
back to life. Then, at the age of eighteen, the Exuberant Bodhisattva
announced that the gluten in her sandwich bread was responsible for the red
blemishes around her mouth. Manuela prepared herself to seek out
alternative bakeries but the Exuberant Bodhisattva told her not to
bother. She was moving to Montreal, where she would obtain her own
nourishment, become a busker and strive to get in touch with her Inner
Luminosity. Manuela prepared her a package of organic granola, extra
violin strings and warm socks. She kissed her goodbye, made her promise
to call every Sunday and let her go on her way.
One year and two months later, the Exuberant Bodhisattva
walked down Saint Catherine street singing. She left her bike and a trail
of unwashed grapes and organic baby carrots behind her. How tantalizing
life seemed today. She was headed to her beloved yoga studio where for
ninety minutes she would breathe and stretch and dance and sweat upon her
purple mat. Afterwards, in her tattered clothes, she would bike to Parc
Lafontaine, where her once estranged gentleman friend had proposed to la
voir. On her way, half naked billboard girls would stare at her with
blackened eyes. She would ride right past them.
That evening, the Exuberant Bodhisattva wholeheartedly apologized to the short,
handsome, curly-haired, dark-skinned man on the park bench. “I’m sorry that I made
you feel like a blow up toy.” She hadn’t meant to. After all, he
was a person. His name was Alphonso. Quite cute.
***
Oh Fabulous Life! The Exuberant Bodhisattva thought the
following morning as she sped down the Atwater hill towards the Super C.
Gliding, whooshing, whizzing, she began to rewrite her favourite Irving Layton
poem. “Whatever Else Youth Without Pregnancy Is Freedom.” All
over the city, all sorts of questionable sexual combinations were taking place.
Surely, then, she could sleep with Alphonso, despite their
incongruous proportions. Last night the two fell out of bed after he
said, “Quelle belle grande paire de fesses.” What a beautiful large pair
of ass cheeks. The Exuberant Bodhisattva manoeuvred herself
indescribably. The lovers landed on the floor; the large beautiful pair
of ass cheeks landed on Alphonso. Had the bed been larger, the act might
have seemed less assertive. Tiny Alphonso, who had little flesh to
support the fall, would not have procured so many bruises.
The Exuberant Bodhisattva always felt like a mammoth when
she slept with Alphonso. But perhaps she was more fortunate to have been
the mammoth than to have slept with one.
***
Once again at the beloved yoga studio, Shankara, the son
of some great guru, stood on his lime green mat, his hands in front of his
heart. The Exuberant Bodhisattva and her fellow practitioners listened
intently.
“Once the body becomes fit and supple, the sense
spectrum becomes increasingly sensitive to external stimulation. Odour,
taste, sound, touch, each have a profound effect on all of the body’s
systems. By properly nourishing the Sense Spectrum, the seeker creates
internal balance.”
The next day the Exuberant Bodhisattva woke up in Alphonso`s
bedroom and peed in a plastic green garbage can with a used condom in it.
Alphonso had left her the can in case she had envie to pisser while he was
upstairs having breakfast with his mother. Seeking relief that she hoped
would help her to fall back asleep, she peed. The odour entered her sense
spectrum. She remembered Shankara’s discourse of wisdom. She felt
internally imbalanced. Making remedial efforts, she ran her hands across
her back, creating sensations in her hand, and on her back. And in her
arms, she supposed, from the movement. Such a soft smooth back, she
thought. And all without moisturizer. She glanced at her Alphonso`s
leopard print polar fleece blanket. What sort of balance or imbalance did
this create? Taking a shit would almost certainly balance the level of
toxins and wastes inside of her and thereby create internal balance.
But it would happen that in Alphonso’s room, there was no
easy path to freedom anywhere.
***
When the Exuberant Bodhisattva was in a coma, her mother
used to read her a story about a family of gorillas. Patty Cake, the baby
gorilla, was born at the New York zoo. Her parents’ names were Tandy and
Lulu. They ate vast quantities of bananas and peanut butter and ice
cream. One day there was an accident. Lulu, the mom, was on one
side of the cage and Patty cake was on the other. Lulu pulled Patty
Cake’s arm and it broke. Patty cake had to go to the hospital and get a
cast all the way from her shoulder to her wrist. Then they took the cast
off and she went back to the zoo where there was a big party for her first
birthday.
Last night was Alphonso’s twenty-sixth birthday. They had spent the evening
disregarding the Exuberant Bodhisattva’s gluten allergy and consuming white
pasta, tomato sauce and Coronas. Now it was up to the Exuberant
Bodhisattva to bring her darling Alphonso to nirvana on his creaky sheetless
bed with the leopard polar fleece blanket. Opening her mouth widely, she
embraced his Great Vehicle.
The Exuberant Bodhisattva found herself thinking about
the Gorilla story. She could remember the ice cream and the peanut butter
and the bananas, but she couldn’t remember the gorillas’ names. She
wished that she was eating ice cream and bananas right then. Patty
Cake. That was the baby’s name. Patty Cake.
Patty Cake, Patty Cake, baker’s man. Maybe it would
help if she did it to a rhythm. Bake me a cake as fast as you can.
“Plus vite, plus vite.” Faster, Alphonso was
pleading. The Exuberant Bodhisattva remembered the first book she ever
learned to read. “Bears,” it was called. Bears, bears,
everywhere. Bears on chairs. Bears climb stairs. What else
did they do? Draw squares? She remembered the crackers and honey
that her grade one teacher had given her for writing bears twenty times in her
printing book. B-e-a-r-s.
“FUCK!” screamed Alphonso. She hadn’t brought
him to ecstasy. She had accidentally bitten his Great Vehicle.
Red blemishes emerged around the Exuberant Bodhisattva’s
small, fat lips, as a direct result of her gluten consumption. “Je ne
veux plus te voir,” said Alphonso. Because of the red blemishes, or for some
other reason. He did not say. Only, I want no more to see you. All the
Exuberant Bodhisattva knew was that she’d wounded him on his twenty-sixth
birthday, barely a week after treating him like a blow-up toy. She felt
deflated. Like a deflated mammoth.
Alone, the Exuberant Bodhisatta dreamt that she was
waiting for the metro with Alphonso who had somehow exceeded the Exuberant
Bodhisattva’s mammoth proportions. They exchanged unenthusiastic kisses until
the metro arrived. Frazzled and disorganized, the Exuberant Bodhisattva
got on the second car instead of the third. As she entered, the door closed at
her shoulder. The Exuberant Bodhisattva waited for the doors to reopen
but the train ignored her suffering rotator cuff and zoomed into the
tunnel. Somewhere between Lionel Groulx and Atwater station, the train
came to a halt and the third car, containing Alphonso, was sucked into the
tracks. Rotator cuff liberated, the Exuberant Bodhisattva ran to find her
friend whose legs and arms now ended at his elbows and knees. Barely two feet
tall, he was happy and excited about the triple flips and trampoline routines
he could now learn at the circus. The Exuberant Bodhisattva wondered why
he wasn’t bleeding to death.
She woke up extremely hungry with the urge to
urinate. After relieving herself, she stirred her non-hydrogenated peanut
butter with a pencil. Once she had eliminated the natural oil separation,
she raised the jar to her lips and drank.
* * *
“I felt like a mammoth when I slept with Alphonso,” the
Exuberant Bodhisattva confessed to her nearly sexually liberated friend Maria
over lunch.
“Well there’s lots more fun to be had, with or without Alphonso,”
Maria replied as she bit off a head of baby corn from her tofu stirfry.
“You should get a vibrator. Find out what booming rockets are really
like.”
The Exuberant Bodhisattva took a sip of water.
“Maybe I’m just not the kind of girl who appreciates a booming rocket.”
“Don’t be silly,” Maria scoffed, this time combining bok
choy and broccoli. “Everyone appreciates a booming rocket. You need to
release your second chakra. My new boyfriend, Cavan, is only seventeen
and he knows the kama sutra. He promises to release all seven of my
chakras before my twenty-first birthday.”
“My mother used to be into chakras. Then her
boyfriend got dementia and she sort of lost interest.”
“Yah, I don’t know how that works,” Maria mused.
“I’ll have to ask Cavan. But you should definitely get a vibrator.
And a haircut. I have a fantastic hairdresser. His name is
Paul. He touches my hair as though he loves each strand.”
The Exuberant bodhisattva poured soy sauce over her
remaining broccoli and rice. She touched her own hair, pulling it out of
her unmeticulously placed pony tail. It felt coarse, dry, limp and
unloved. After the stirfry, the two women French bisouxed each
other goodbye. “Cheer up,” said Maria, who was off to see Cavan.
“You’ll feel better soon. Just remember. Vibrator, haircut and you
can’t expect to get over anyone until you get under someone else.”
Walking home, the Exuberant Bodhisattva wondered if her
life was destined to become a perpetual saga of getting over and under a series
of people? Before coming to Montreal, the Exuberant Bodhisattva had
hardly ever thought of sex. And masturbation, like squatting over public
toilets, had simply never occurred to her. Yet it certainly occurred to
Maria and most other people in this city.
Before Alphonso’s booming rocket, the last penis the
Exuberant Bodhisattva had seen had belonged to Charlie, the tall, skinny albino
kid who she fell in love with in junior kindergarten. The other kids forced
them to kiss in the playground. She and Charlie traded stickers at each
other’s houses. Once, at Charlie’s house they took off all their clothes,
ran around in the garden and hosed their naked bodies with freezing cold
water. Charlie’s father Dave had scolded him, because he wasn’t supposed
to expose his white skin to direct sunlight and because some of the water had
gotten through the screen door and soaked the living room furniture. In
senior kindergarten, Charlie and his family had moved to Australia. This
began the Exuberant Bodhisattva’s decade and a half long boyfriend drought
which didn’t subside until early into the twenty-first century, when Alphonso
dropped a quarter into her violin case at Metro Lionel Groulx.
But now the drought had resumed. Her second chakra,
though not released, had been inconveniently awakened. She felt horny,
or, to be more eloquent, lustful. She didn’t have a vibrator. But
she had a violin and an empty apartment that she had decorated in order to
balance her sense spectrum. And avocadoes and corn chips and
pineapples. Yes. She would get over Alphonso without getting under
anyone else. This very evening would be entirely reserved for releasing
her Inner Luminosity.
***
Her coarse, limp, dull, unloved hair fell beside her
violin’s chinrest. On an up bow, she rose beneath the ceiling she had painted
yellow. Five coats for the ceiling. Six for the eggplant purple
walls. As she pressed the mounds of her cracked toes into the bare
mahogany floors, she thought about how ninety-eight percent of her long and
lustful body was water. She transcribed Bach’s Partita 2.1 onto the
violin’s neck. Inside of her, the efforts of her fingers and bow
coalesced. She imagined the melody enter her ears and flow down into her
stomach, through to her small intestine, where the vibrations swirled around
her navel. From the navel, the vibrations traveled outwards, saturating
the blood of her extremities. Up the torso, branching off into her two
shoulders, elbows, wrists and fingers. Down the pelvic floor, rushing by
the hips, the thighs, knees, ankles, toes, feet. Her sound was rich and
smooth, like the four ripe avocadoes she had used for her guacamole.
Yesterday’s avocadoes resonated in their transformed cellular states.
Today’s awaited their transformation as she permeated their smooth, rich
fragments. She danced with her processing and processed avocado
fragments. The corn chips and the pineapples joined in. Radiantly,
she circled round and round the eggplant purple room, carrying the dance in her
body. Her sense spectrum stimulated her internal systems into
balance. The acne around her mouth dissipated. She danced to the
room’s perimeter. At the corner she paused. The last note.
Silence. The Exuberant Bodhisattva was infused with her own
luminosity. It was almost enough. Then the doorbell rang. It
was her neighbour, Cameron, who was in charge of the building’s recycling
program. Full of unrestrained enthusiasm, the Exuberant Bodhisattva
lavishly and extravagantly invited him in for smoothies and leftover
guacamole. The door frame flattened Cameron’s abundant spiraled cherry
hair as he entered the apartment. The Exuberant Bodhisattva thought about
how ninety-eight percent of his lean but extensive body was water.
It was time for another ecstatic adventure.
The End.
