Read Online Angry Buddhist (9781609458867) by Seth Greenland - Free Book Online Page A

childhood, and hoped that the dark clouds that shadowed her early years would finally dissipate. She thinks about her mother, who ran off with a friend’s husband when she was little and her father, a Navy veteran who raised her and an older sister on a restaurant manager’s salary, bringing the girls to free tennis clinics in the city parks. The sister didn’t take to the game, but Nadine loved it, playing for her high school team and earning a spot on the varsity at San Diego State. Her father had been a heavy smoker and was sipping a whiskey sour in a Tijuana bar when he went into cardiac arrest. Nadine took it hard and dropped out of college a year short of graduation. San Diego was starting to feel old and she found a job as a tennis instructor at a desert resort. But a month after she arrived, the property was sold and the new owners wanted to give it a facelift so she found herself filing her nails on the unemployment line. To her chagrin, Nadine discovered there were not a lot of tennis instructor jobs to be had. She saw an ad in the paper one day and so began her career as a tanning technician. The job is a stopgap; something to do while she tries to determine her future. Now she has been assisting people with their tanning needs for more than a year and is getting antsy. The Valium’s taking the edge off that feeling. At least that’s the idea. When Hard is an hour late, she wonders if she should take another. How many has she taken today? Recently she’s been losing count. The bottle advises no more than one every six hours, Nadine leaving that suggestion to the amateurs. Figures the chemical palliative is easier on her internal organs than the four tequila shots it takes to get the same effect. She calls Hard, but it goes straight to the message.
    Now she’s tap-tap-tapping on her beat-up iBook, filling out an on-line application for a popular reality show. A professional football player from the depths of the eighties is allegedly in search of a wife. He made a couple of bad action movies, had a DUI arrest, then declared bankruptcy. In his picture on the web site for the show he has a mane of hair blown dry from here to Las Vegas and full lips that have been god-knows-where. Wrapped in fake endangered species skins, his entire mien screams STDs but Nadine doesn’t care. She’s not planning to marry the guy, and since twenty women are going to be chosen as contestants she probably won’t have to anyway, assuming she is even selected. But she likes the idea of being brought to Los Angeles for a few weeks, installed at the mansion where the show is taped, given free food, a shopping spree at a mall, and the other seductive perks made available to those women lucky enough to be chosen.
    Now her attention is drifting from the application. Is that the Valium? Wonders whether or not taking too much Valium can cause some kind of hyper-activation in the brain. She’s heard it can put a girl on the crazy train. But if you take too much Valium, you’d die, right? Or would you go crazy and then die? And if she were to go crazy, would she be aware of it? Did crazy people know they were crazy? It was a conundrum. She’d have to get on the Internet and do a little research.
    If her social life were better she’s certain her tranquilizer intake would drop precipitously. Lately it’s been an utter disaster. From the time Nadine was in high school she displayed an unerring lack of discernment when it came to men, which she mistakenly attributed to her occasional bi-sexuality. She has gone back and forth between men and women with a pendulum-like regularity and occasionally wonders if this fluidity has hindered her deeper understanding of either gender. But she has listened to straight girlfriends with their endless complaints about the inscrutability of boyfriends, and to straight men that cannot fathom their incomprehensible girlfriends. She is comforted by what seems to