Dancing with Fat Tibetan Monks

Dancing with Fat Tibetan Monks

It’s a hunter’s trick. You have to tighten all your muscles to keep warm, Jake told us. I clench my butt cheeks and my legs stop twitching for twenty seconds. I’m a slow smoker normally, but when it gets this cold I take longer drags with less space between them. A tiny conflagration trembles between my fingers. But I’m still cold. 

The hunter trick works better than Emily’s story about naked monks on top of a frozen mountain. Emily says the monks imagine a fire burning in their bellies to keep warm. I don’t buy into most of that Zen bullshit, but it’s so cold that I try it. There is a fire in my stomach, my insides are boiling, my organs are in flames.

 It doesn’t work, so I smash my Camel Crush on the porch ledge. The scorching red of the ashes meets hard bluish brick. The butt is zapped like a supernova, sizzling out of existence. All of its big colors and rage are extinguished against the glacial backdrop of black sky. I imagine that’s what the end of the world will look like. All smoldering, then poof. Nothing.

Inside isn’t much warmer. The house is an old one with poorly insulated windows. I flip channels on the couch, still shivering. I picture myself dancing atop an ice-capped mountain amidst a circle of almost-naked men with fat bellies pouring over thin loincloths.

They dance with me, teaching me how to keep warm.

A kettle is screaming on a stove crusted with bacon grease and pancake mix. For the love of God, get me off this blasted burner! She is in agony, but so am I.

Five or six boxes of green tea sit in eager cardboard boxes on the chilly pantry shelf. Bigelow, Lipton, Bentley’s, Trader Joe’s, Celestial Seasonings. Some with cheesy quotes about Chinese monks sitting on the banks of the Yangtze River meditating upon the most important things in life.

The cheesy teabag wrapper asks me: Will you not join him?
I’d like to, but I’m stuck out here freezing my butt off with these monks on the icy mountaintop.

Robert Frost said the world could end in fire or ice. He preferred death by fire. I think I’m with him.

These days, I’m almost always nauseous from too many cigarettes in the cold and too many cups of green tea. My hands hover over the mug, collecting sticky vapor molecules. I take one cautious sip, then the liquid moves past two lips (burning a tongue along the way), down the esophagus, into a belly filled with boiling tea.

The fat monks are running in place now. Lifting brown legs up to their stomachs. Grunting, arms up, puffs of breath mixing with the steam that rises from my Christmas Bear coffee mug. And I am with them, spinning dizzily to loud rock music. The monks’ voices join in with Mick Jagger. They circle around me, cheering as I perform the strut.

They mimick. I whistle.
They clap. I scream.

And we all collapse on the mountainside, sweating and gasping for breath.
Heat rises from snow, it echoes among cliffs, it binds to my pulsing skin.

What are you doing, my roommate wants to know.
I tell her that my body is on fire. It’s finally warm.