The Buddhist Coffee House

By Luther Hughes

William is out of luck and soon to be divorced. Thus, he attempts to escape his troubles by leaving America with his two young daughters to spend a month in the UK where he expects to find a calm tea drinking place where he thinks everyone speak his language. What he finds, however, are dangerous roundabout, Buddhists women, wizards, drunk elves, 100 women in wedding dresses, pagans obsessed with rock circles, a strange language called English and some very expensive coffee...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luther Hughes
• Release date: Jan 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9780978585730

Luther Hughes

Luther Hughes is the author of the chapbook Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), recommended by the American Library Association. He is the founder of Shade Literary Arts, a literary organization for queer writers of color, and co-hosts The Poet Salon podcast with Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat. Recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, his writing has been published in American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Seattle Times, Orion Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and more. He curates a monthly poetry newsletter called Lue’s Poetry Hour. Luther currently lives in Seattle, where he was born and raised.

Book preview

The Buddhist Coffee House

A Novel by Luther Hughes

©2010 by Luther Hughes.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copy Conventions. Published in the United States by Waccamaw Press

Horry County, South Carolina

IBSN 0-9785857-0-5

IBSN for the eBook edition: 9780978585730

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Please e-mail me what you think of this book: [e-mail]

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To Deanne

(Thank you for putting up with me for two years.)

All of this happened more or less.

– Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969)

Part I: Do Buddhists go to heaven?

Coffee? asked the flight attendant with a uncomfortably tight smile on her face and Fran on her blue plastic name tag. Although, all humans are beautiful in their individual ways, a casual eyewitness might have described Francis as somewhat attractive using our media’s definition of attractiveness. A less than casual eyewitness might have described her as tired. She was tired, but not in the temporary state of tiredness that comes from not getting enough sleep. She possessed the more permanent state of tiredness that comes from doing something that one hates to do for far too long. Fran’s blonde hair was somewhat frizzed and slightly disheveled, but pinned up in one of those flight attendant buns that the older flight attendants seem to always wear.

Our little story begins 30,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean on June 19, 2007. All of this happened more or less.

Coffee? This time her one word question had more emphasis on the ee part of the word. William, the passenger and object of her contempt, was daydreaming and did not hear her one-word question the first time. Fran’s stiff smile became tighter. After the smile tightened, her eyes bugged out a little as if the tightness of her smile might cause permanent damage to Fran’s tired face.

The airplane shook a little from some slight turbulence. Fran had been on hundreds of fights and appeared to not even notice.

William awoke from his daydream and answered the second one-word-question with a one-word-answer: Sure.

Pause.

A few seconds passed with no coffee being poured.

Oh. Where are my manners? May I please have some coffee?

A few more seconds passed with no coffee being poured.

Fran looked at him and her smile became tauter and somehow did not rip a slash into her face. You have to place the coffee cup on my tray so I can pour it, Fran said, carefully pronouncing each word. Moron, Fran probably thought.

William stood six feet and four inches when he stood up straight. Thus, the space between the seats was not big enough to accommodate his legs. In fact, his legs were tangled worse than the thin cords attached to the tiny earphones that he and other passengers used to listen to the ten channels of music and two channels of audio from the in-flight movie, Hairspray. Resting at an angle atop his tangled legs was the plastic seatback table. On the plastic seatback table was a small plastic tray where the chicken and rice formally rested in another small plastic tray. Now, however, atop the tray were only sticky, slimy and empty plastic wrappers. Somewhere below this both sticky and slimy mountain of empty plastic wrappers and plastic trays was a tiny blue plastic coffee cup that William had to place on a little blue plastic tray held by Fran in order to receive a cup of coffee.

He followed her directions, and Fran poured hot coffee from a blue plastic pitcher lined with a stainless steal interior.

May I please have cream and sugar? he asked.

His question hit Fran like a slap on her drowsy face. Her smile tightened to the point of popping, and she responded, You already have both sir.

Besides the blue plastic pitcher lined with a stainless steal interior, Fran was also pushing a large heavy cart. What was in it? Why did it not contain cream and sugar? Where was William’s cream and sugar?

Sure enough, one of the plastic wrappers, under his slimy pile of empty plastic wrappers, was not empty. Far from empty, in fact. He opened the clear plastic with his teeth. Inside he found smaller plastic wrappers containing not only the aforementioned cream and sugar (both in powder form) but also salt, pepper, a little straw for stirring and a Wet Nap.

A few steps behind Fran a younger flight attendant carried an identical blue plastic pitcher also lined with a stainless steal interior. The name engraved on her blue plastic name tag was Carrie. Tea? she asked to the passenger seated behind William.

William took a sip from his coffee. Fran asked the woman seated in the next row, Coffee?

***

In the Jewish tradition both a schlemiel and a schlimazel is an unlucky person. The difference between the two is the following: A schlemiel is an unlucky person who brings the bad luck to himself; a schlimazel is an unlucky person whose bad luck comes without invitation. Thirty-seven year old William Charles Presley was neither Jewish nor a Yiddish speaker. Thus, he did not know the difference between the two, but, had he known, he would have understood that he was, in fact, a schlemiel. On the other hand, the vast majority of his luck- if luck truly exists- was neither good nor bad.

He rested his weary head against the padded headrest and thought how happy he was to be flying over the Atlantic Ocean with his two children: Savanna and Zoë, who sat next to him. Zoë sat beside the window, because Savanna had the window seat for the first four hours of the flight. In order to avoid arguing over the prized window seat, William had given his daughters the choice of either having the seat during the first half or the second half of the flight.

He was also happy that he had to only remember two dates: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 and Friday July 20, 2007. Those were the dates of his flights in and out of London’s Heathrow Airport. Between those dates he did not have to keep track of time.

Thus, on Tuesday, June 19, 2007, William and his two children boarded an all-night flight bound for London. For the next 30 days, they saw stuff and did stuff that had little impact on the world as a whole, but made for a funny story. For this reason, he wrote a 157 page book called The Buddhist Coffee House. (The original version was 157 pages.)

It was no small coincidence that about 157 years earlier (probably on June 20) an eleven-year-old boy named Søren Kierkegaard fell out of a tree in Denmark. About thirty years later, he died from injuries sustained in that fall. However, during those thirty years he wrote 30 books, and is now known as the father of existentialism.

Existentialism is just a fancy word that means that things just happen because they happen for no reason. This is a simple philosophy, but with deep and complicated implications toward how one lives one’s life. The book you are currently reading is about an American daddy taking his two daughters to the United Kingdom for a month. That daddy (as fathers are called in the southern United States) unplugged his headphones from his armrest and plugged them into his mp3 player where he had loaded many songs with lyrics that appeared to have random to no meaning, but may have had deep meanings.

As I have previously stated, William was happy to be on that airplane 30,000 feet above the Earth and several thousand miles from home. Two days prior to boarding this plane, his slightly untidy world unraveled a little more. As he rested, he returned to his daydream about these events. His daydream concerned the events from just two days prior to take off. His daydream concerned a girl named Matilda. The daydream he had begun daydreaming was about a terribly embarrassing event that started with the following question: Do you think Buddhists go to heaven? and ended with William being naked and alone in his future ex-wife’s swimming pool. Later in this story, William will have another flashback and the readers of this silly little book can read what happened with Matilda and William on that fateful day back in South Carolina.

30,000 Feet above the Atlantic Ocean

Daddy! Daddy! I have to pee! William woke up from his flashback. Zoë was nearly buried under a pile of plastic wrappers, plastic cups, crayons, coloring books, and stickers. The aforementioned tray table and plastics had William nearly buried as well. Daddy! I have to pee really bad, exclaimed little Zoë.

More coffee? asked the flight attendant to the man sitting in the chair in front of them. Her cart had the isle blocked from the front. More tea? asked the flight attendant to the man sitting behind them. Her cart had the isle blocked from the rear. Little Zoë could not have had to urinate at a worse time. However, this was no problem. In short order, both Zoë and Savanna would be skillfully excavated from beneath their debris, whisked around the obtrusive cart and taken to and fro the lavatory. The day-to-day parenting was no problem for William. Sure, he made mistakes, but he felt confident about his abilities as a parent. On the other hand, he lacked confidence with women including his future ex-wife and the other women who popped in and out of his life. Had he treated his wife as well as he treated his children, he would not be in the process of getting a divorce.

***

Ladies and Gentleman, Welcome to London’s Heathrow Airport…

Thank you for the coffee, seignor, I shall miss that when we leave Casablanca.

– Ingrid Bergmann (Casablanca, 1941)

Part II: Why is this prologue not at the very beginning of this book?

In 1974 Robert Pirsig published his classic book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He used the story of a motorcycle journey he took with his son and a couple of friends to explain his bizarre philosophy called Metaphysics of Quality that was neither Zen nor Motorcycle Maintenance, but included both. I remember reading the book and thinking, What a great idea. Consequently, in this book I plan to tell a story and explain my views on the much maligned philosophy of existentialism and how it applies to traveling and religion. On the other hand, I remember getting bogged down in the philosophical parts of Pirsig’s book and enjoying the story parts. For this reason, this little novel contains much more story than philosophy- much more show than tell.

My views on existentialism have been influenced by other writers of existential philosophy and, ironically, my Christian upbringing. This book is not a scholarly writing, but a whimsical journey; however, we will lightly touch on the writings of the following writers: Jean-Paul Sartre, Søren Kierkegaard, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac and Dr. Theodor Seuss Geisel. The reader of this book should keep in mind that I am not intelligent enough to craft a scholarly work with perfect grammar. To the readers, I say, "Enjoy this story for what it