Born to Be Wild.

S2 Ep. 18: The Man Who Woke up the Buddha.

Previously: Sid’s first radiation brought up memories of 6th-grade teachers, plastic pumpkins, and hallucinogens, until the appearance of the Greek philosopher Diogenes raised some very interesting questions about who one really is.

The first time Sid’s granddaughter Courtney walked into her dorm room freshman year she found her new roommate tossing clothes on one of the beds.

“Hi, I’m…” But before Courtney could finish introducing herself, the girl had turned around, taken one look, and called out, “‘Sistah!’”

“Sistah?” Courtney responded curiously.

“Hmm, you’re right,” the girl said, frowning as if about to make a life-changing decision, “I’ll be Sistah and you can be…”

“Well, if it helps, my name is Courtney.”

“Courtney,” the newly self-christened Sistah said. She looked a little disappointed. “Well, OK, if I can call you ‘Court.’”

Courtney shrugged. “Sure.”

Sistah was at college on some kind of scholarship or maybe the kindness of a distant relative. Her parents were vague apparitions who rarely appeared in conversation or consciousness. Sistah told various disconnected stories that led Courtney to think they had divorced and disappeared, or died together in a car crash, or disowned her for some reason that Sistah didn’t remember or didn’t want to talk about.

The one time Courtney asked directly where her parents were, Sistah agreed it was an excellent question and that she’d often wondered the same thing herself.

That first afternoon they went to get coffee at the college snack bar and talked non-stop for several hours. Other kids would start to sit with them and unexpectedly change their minds, as if there was an invisible force field around them. At one point, Courtney was in the middle of a sentence when she noticed Sistah looking at her as if she were some kind of science experiment.

She stopped talking and waited as her new best friend studied her from all angles, sometimes smiling, sometimes frowning, sometimes nodding her head decisively, other times tilting it doubtfully. No one had ever looked at Courtney that way before. In fact, she’d never seen anyone looking at anyone that way before. After several minutes out of time, Sistah nodded and said, with a seriousness she’d not shown ’til that point: ‘Court, I think we should be identical twins.”

“Identical?” Courtney asked skeptically. She had good reason to be skeptical.

She was about 5’10” and Sistah was barely pushing 5’2”. Courtney had stylish, short blond hair and Sistah had a tangle of brown. Courtney had big breasts she wished were a little smaller and Sistah had small breasts she wished were a little larger. And while Courtney was 100% Caucasian, when Sistah filled out a registration form she checked every box, even “N/A,” “Declined to Answer” and “Other” (writing in “Romani”).

Courtney was really smart. Sistah was off the charts—any chart.

If you scratched the surface on Courtney, you’d discover a fairly clear-headed, rational person who behaved in relatively predictable ways. Scratch Sistah’s surface and you never knew what you’d get.

She’d start spontaneously dancing whenever she heard music, wherever she was. Down the hall at school. On street corners. In coffee shops.

In class, she’d ask questions or express opinions that totally undermined whatever the discussion was about. Not on purpose. Just because she’d been thinking about something and the thoughts that came out of her mouth and their connection to the conversation, while tenuous, were just relevant enough for the professor to try to understand what she was saying.

But both she and Courtney dressed like 21st Century privileged vagabonds by way of Dickens…every arm, leg, cuff, and collar either a little frayed, askew, or mended with a random patterned patch. Each of them had even arrived at college with a tiny yin-yang tattoo on the left shoulder, which was always exposed, regardless of weather. Clearly, they’d been separated at birth, and it didn’t take long for Courtney to agree that looks were only skin deep—they felt like identical twins. And from then on, they were together all the time.

The only class they didn’t take together was biology, because the professor had kindly suggested Sistah find some other way to meet her science requirement after she snuck into the lab one night and set free all the frogs they were going to dissect. Physics was a better fit since she was a walking, talking experiment in quantum mechanics—all particles and waves with no way of knowing how she’d behave next.

By sophomore year, Courtney’s parents Melissa and Chucky had long forgotten that Sistah wasn’t part of their family. Sometimes when Melissa called Courtney, she’d say, “Oh, sorry, Court, meant to call Sistah.” “Mommmm….” Courtney would say. “Just kidding,” Melissa would relent. Even though she wasn’t.

Sid, showing remarkable sensitivity, always made sure he paid a little more attention to his “real” granddaughter, but it was a struggle.

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One morning, Sistah was sitting on the hood of a car, rolling a cigarette, and waiting for Courtney to get out of biology so they could take Sid to his 15th radiation treatment.

It was the Fall Equinox—a day when Sid had seen fire and he’d seen rain…and sunny days and hurricanes and heat waves and cold snaps and boring gray season-less in-between days neither warm enough to feel like summer nor cold enough to feel the bracing of fall. Days when the fall colors had come a few days too soon, were already a few days too late or, rarest of all, were actually as bright as those in your imagination…and tourist brochures.

He was sitting on the porch, wrapped in an old sleeping bag, waiting for the girls to pick him up in Sistah’s 1996 white Cabriolet convertible. The car had been sitting in the lot next to the girls’ dorm for several weeks until, one day, when they walked by, Sistah opened the driver’s side door and said, “Let’s go for a ride!”

“But it’s not our car,” Courtney objected.

“Yes it is,” Sistah said, as if it were obvious.

“How do you know?”

“Because the keys were in my backpack,” Sistah explained.

“Well, how did they get there?”

“I was wondering the same thing myself,” Sistah acknowledged.

That day, when Sid walked out the front door, (wearing a hoodie Di had made him take even though it was supposed to reach 80 degrees) the two girls were leaning against the car, slightly slouched. They were wearing identical black sneakers, skinny jeans with hand-knitted socks, old sweaters with sleeves rolled up, embroidered skirts over the leggings, streaks of bright aqua in their hair and matching bright aqua lipstick.

Sistah was laughing. A borderline titter. Fortunately it didn’t cross the border. They all smiled. It was going to be a fun day. Although in very different ways.

A few minutes later, when they reached the 5-mile marker on the highway, Sid reached a milestone of his own. He began losing his hair.

He had been warned that somewhere along the radiation highway, he might cross the hair-loss checkpoint, so he hadn’t had it cut in a couple of months, and it was just beginning to make its way over his collar. The Buddha hadn’t had his hair cut in many centuries, so he wasn’t about to let this batch get away either, at least without a non-violent fight.

Sid was sitting in the passenger seat instinctively pushing his right foot hard against the floor trying to slow the car down as Sistah plied the 4-lane road like the native she was…or maybe wasn’t…radio blasting: Get your motor runnin’, head out on the highway…all of them singing along at full volume…Sid shamelessly disregarding his age, Courtney shamelessly disregarding her grandfather’s diagnosis, and Sistah shamelessly disregarding the actual lyrics.

Just as they (or at least Sid and Courtney) belted out, "We can climb so high, I never wanna die,” part of Sid’s scalp—the part being zapped with radiation—suddenly started itching as badly as any case of poison ivy he’d ever had. The urge to scratch was overwhelming. He resisted as long as he could, not wanting to annoy the Buddha or open the still-surreal line of stitches in his head. But, as Sistah belatedly started signaling to cut back across three lanes to the exit, all of them now laughing as if they were stoned (Sid was—he always did a little tincture before radiation), he took his right hand and tried to rub the itchy part without scratching and ended up with a big-time clump of hair. Threw it in the air. Went at it again. Another smaller clump. “Yes!” he shouted, lifting his left hand to give Sistah a high-five which she instinctively was ready to meet.

Well, it was fun while it lasted, the Buddha thought.

Sid took both hands and, starting at the forehead, smoothed his hair back across his head like a ‘70s greaser, to see he could cover the bald spots.

He should try one of those curly man buns we had, the Buddha thought, although the snails were kind of annoying.¹

“Hey!” Sid yelled over the sound of the 70-mph air rushing past, as Sistah careened around the off ramp. “Maybe I’ll have a man bun.”

Then he turned to high-five Courtney in the back seat. But she had lowered her head and begun to cry, a few strands of Sid’s hair plastered against her cheek.

To be continued.

Table of Contents • Season One • Family Tree • Apple Podcasts

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1. There’s a rumor that those signature tight locks on the top of the Buddha’s head that you see in statues and paintings weren’t hair—they were 108 snails who, for some reason, were there to help him achieve enlightenment. It was one of the stories from that lifetime that even he thought was kinda weird.