by Mark Salzman
“There aren’t any kung fu schools in Connecticut,” I moaned.
“Are you sure? Have you checked the Yellow Pages?” my mother asked. This was typical advice from my mother, a classical musician who approached all tasks with the same cheerful thoroughness. To her every day teemed with welcome challenges; she couldn’t see how anyone could feel bored. The days never seemed long enough to her, and she couldn’t understand why a person would lounge around in bed in the morning when instead they could pop out from under those covers and start accomplishing things. In short, she was the exact opposite of my father. She rarely indulged in philosophical speculation, but never tired of stating the two basic principles according to which she lived and worked: If you are busy you won’t have time to complain, and if you ever have a question, you should immediately look it up in the World Book, the Harvard Music Dictionary or the Yellow Pages.
As usual I scoffed at her suggestion—she might as well have told me to look for incense at Sears—but just to make sure, when she wasn’t looking I took the phone book downstairs into the basement and checked under kung fu. See Martial Arts Instruction, the book advised. I opened to the M section, and to my astonishment, just beneath Marital Aids, I found a listing that contained this ad: Chinese Boxing Institute, House of Kung Fu.
My mother drove me there the next evening. On the way, trying to sound casual, she said, “You know, if this doesn’t turn out to be the teacher you want, don’t get discouraged. Sometimes it takes time to find the right person.”
“What makes you say that, Mom?”
“Well … it’s just that the man who runs this place didn’t sound very friendly over the phone.”
My heart stopped. “What do you mean, he didn’t sound very friendly. You talked to him?”
“Well, it’s only right to make an appointment before you go to a teacher, Mark. At least that’s how it’s done with music lessons—the mothers of my new students always call first and make an appointment for a first lesson. That way I know what level the student is at and I can be prepared.”
“What did you say to him?” I asked. I had a bad feeling about this telephone call.
“Well, I told him you’d been practicing very hard on your own for a year, so you wouldn’t be starting as a beginner, and he sort of shouted at me.”
“Oh, my God—”
“Don’t worry, Mark, he was just mad at me, not at you.”
“What did he say?”
“Well, he said, ‘Everybody starts as a beginner in my school!’ Actually, he kind of shouted it. Which is fine. But, Mark, if his karate isn’t what you had in mind—”
“It’s kung fu, Mom!”
“Of course—kung fu. If it’s not what you want, just remember that there are always other teachers out there. You might have to keep looking.”
I rode the rest of the way in silence. Adolescence is not a reasonable time; in my mind she might as well have told the kung fu master I wouldn’t be needing diapers since I was already fourteen.
At last we arrived at the Chinese Boxing Institute, a small brick building adjacent to a cemetery. Through the large picture window I could see six or seven tough-looking men with beards and mustaches, all wearing black outfits and stretching out on the floor under a wall display of swords and throwing knives. I begged my mother not to come in with me. She seemed to understand and said, “All right, I’ll come back in two hours. Have fun!” She dropped me off and turned around for the forty-five-minute drive home.
I opened the door and shuffled in, clutching my purple pajamas tightly against my chest. Looking around, I noticed that the paneling on the wall was crushed in several places, obviously from bodies being hurled against it, and the whole place reeked of sweat and bare feet. A tiny Oriental-style wooden bridge separated the entrance from the workout area. On the far side of the room were three doors, one marked MEN, one marked WOMEN, and the third marked OFFICE. I could hear a small commotion taking place in the office; large objects were being shuffled and bumped around and occasionally a woman giggled.
A huge man, six feet tall and indestructible-looking, walked over to greet me. He had short, curly brown hair, a handlebar mustache, a boxer’s nose and a gaze so intense it made my knees shake. The sleeves of his uniform were rolled way up, revealing a dark tattoo on his arm of a bearded man with a beret smoking a joint. His biceps, I noticed, were the size of my thighs, and his hands appeared to have been chiseled out of granite blocks. He was the scariest-looking man I had ever seen.
“Are you Master O’Keefe?” I asked.
“Nope. I’m Bill. The Master’s in there,” he said, gesturing toward the office. “What can I do for you?” I noticed that his face showed no expression at all; he seemed neither interested in me nor annoyed, so I pressed on.
“I—I’m here for the kung fu class. Should I come some other time?”
“Nope. You bring a uniform?”
“Yes—sort of. It’s not a real uniform.”
“That should be fine. Why don’t you go put it on?”
I crossed the bridge—“You gotta bow when you cross the bridge,” Bill advised me—then went into the dressing room. There were two more grown men in there wearing nothing but jockstraps. I froze with embarrassment; it was the first time I had ever been in a dressing room, and had not taken my pants off in front of anyone since being a toddler. I felt myself blush, but the two men didn’t comment on it. As I unbuttoned my shirt, one of them asked, “Hey, how old are you, kid?”
“Fourteen.”
“Jesus, don’t you think you oughta be in the kids’ class? Sensei teaches one in the afternoon, you know.”
I shrugged. I did not want to be in the kids’ class. I put on my pajama bottoms as fast as I could, but one of the men said, “Hey, aren’t you gonna wear a strap?”
“Oh … I don’t have one.”
They both laughed. “What are you gonna do when you get kicked in the balls? You get kicked in the balls all the time doin’ this, kid. You better get yourself a jock soon, or your voice isn’t ever gonna change.”
They left the dressing room before I had finished changing. By the time I had tied the red bathroom sash around my eggplant costume, I was ready to go home, but there was no turning back—I had to go out there.
When I pulled the sliding door to one side and came out into the brightly lit room, all eyes turned to greet me.
“Jesus Christ, look at this! A red sash! He’s a master already! And a purple gi! Get the camera!”
Thankful that I had chosen not to bring the bald wig, I noticed that Bill, the scary-looking one who had greeted me at the door, was not laughing. He signaled me to approach him, fixing me with his unnervingly steady gaze. I thought he was going to tell me to change back into my street clothes and come back on kiddie afternoon, but instead he said in a low voice, “They’re laughin’ now, but if you stick with it, you might be kicking their asses in a couple years, and who’ll be laughin’ then?” He seemed to grin, but it was hard to be sure. Only an effort of will prevented me from bursting into tears of gratitude. Before I could thank him, however, he grew serious and said, “You’d better take that red sash off, though. Sensei wouldn’t like that much, and you don’t want to get him pissed, believe me.” I ripped it off and would have eaten it if Bill had told me to. Then he advised me to go over to the office, tell the Master that I had arrived and ask permission to join the class.
“But it sounds like he’s, um, busy,” I protested.
“Aw, he ain’t busy,” Bill said, appearing to grin again. “Just knock first.”
I walked across the room and stood in front of the sliding door. I could still hear a woman giggling inside. The men who had laughed at me earlier were now urging me with silent gestures to go ahead, knock on the door! They all seemed to expect something funny to happen. When I knocked, an angry voice yelled out, “What the fuck?”
“I … I …”
Before I could answer, the door slid open and a young wo
man, also dressed in a black kung fu uniform, trotted out. She flashed me a pleasant but quizzical look as she passed. I tiptoed into the office, trying to make myself look as small as possible, and gazed at the Master for the first time. He was sitting with his feet propped up on a desk, under rows and rows of shelves covered with enormous, shiny karate trophies. The walls were covered with certificates and photographs of himself breaking stacks of flaming bricks, grimacing, flourishing weapons and flying through the air.
Sensei O’Keefe was much smaller and thinner than I had expected—he couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred and twenty pounds, and was not much taller than I was—had deep-set eyes with heavy shadows under them behind aviator-style glasses, a handlebar mustache with a Fu Manchu beard growing down from under his lower lip, and teeth that had clearly been rearranged several times during the course of his journey to mastery. He wore three-inch-high wooden-heeled disco boots, bell-bottom hip-hugger pants, a tight-fitting half-shirt that revealed his belly button and was attached to his pants with gaudy chain-link suspenders, a gold chain around his neck and a wide-brimmed leather hat with coins set around the rim. He had rings on several of his fingers, but most prominent was one shaped like a dragon curled around an oval jade stone. He looked like a white character from a black exploitation movie from the seventies—not at all what I had expected. He also looked angry.
“Are you the one,” he boomed, “whose mother called and said you were too good to start as a beginner?”
I couldn’t even speak.
“Well, let’s get something straight, Mr. Salzman. I am the Master of this house, and in this house, I say who starts where, not anybody else, and not anybody’s mommy. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
He glared at me so severely and with such intense loathing that I became dizzy. “All right, then,” he said, looking away as if he could stand the sight of me no longer. “Here are the registration forms. How old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
I was sure he was going to tell me either to go home or to come back for the kiddie class.
“In that case, take ’em home to your parents to sign.” He handed me a few sheets of paper that explained when the class met, what it would cost, and how I was not to hold the Master responsible if I got hurt. “And get a uniform like everybody else. If I want you in designer colors, I’ll let you know.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
I fled out of the office, bowed on my way over the bridge and went straight to the parking lot. I intended to wait there for the two hours in my pajamas until my mother came to pick me up, but then the door opened and Bill stuck his head out. “Hey, Grasshopper, Sensei says you can follow along tonight. Come on.”
I joined him, the other men and the giggly young woman in loose formation in the center of the workout room. The Master stalked out of his office and went into the dressing room, his suspenders making a delicate tinkling sound. A few minutes later he exploded through the door, wearing a black uniform with a faded black belt that had five white bands on it—a fifth-degree black belt! Embroidered on the back of the uniform were the letters AKMF. I assumed they stood for American Kung Fu Masters’ Federation, but Bill later explained that they stood for Ass-Kicking Motherfucker.
“Line up!” the Master screamed, and all took their places in three parallel lines. Bill pointed to the farthest corner spot in the rear line, and I hustled there. The Master did not look pleased with us, however.
“When I say line up,” he seethed, “I don’t mean I want a bunch of goddamned pussies strolling around and bumping into each other! I mean I want to see you move! Hit the ground, goddammit!” Everybody fell face forward and started doing push-ups on their knuckles, and I followed suit. We kept at it until the Master yelled again, “Line up!” and we all moved as if we had just heard a gunshot. Satisfied this time, the Master had us all bow to him, then led everyone through a little prayer:
“Kung fu is my secret,
I bear no arms.
May the Lord forgive me,
If I should use my hands.”
Then he looked right at me, frowning. Though the other students were facing away from me, I noticed that they all were looking at me via the reflection in the mirrors on the far wall. All of a sudden I realized how physically small I was compared with the other students. I was not yet five feet tall and weighed barely one hundred pounds, and for a moment the kiddie class seemed like not such a bad idea after all.
The Master’s face broke into a grin. “Since Mr. Salzman brought his pajamas,” he said, “we ought to give him a chance. Does anybody object to his joining the class?”
“No!” all those grown men yelled enthusiastically. They turned to look at me and their expressions were genuinely friendly. Apparently, by not complaining or starting to cry I had passed their test and was now OK.
“All right, then,” the Master said, nodding at me. “If you get lost, just keep up the count with front punches and don’t worry about it. Let’s get this fucking show on the road. Basic techniques, count out twenty, starting at this corner.”
My heart nearly burst with joy. I forgot about the Master’s suspenders, the hip huggers and the giggling girl, and vowed to go through any physical or mental pain, any injury or indignity, to prove myself in his eyes. I realized with devastating clarity that I had always been a sissy—playing the cello! astronomy! baldhead wigs in the basement! But now that I’d found a man who feared nothing, whom I had just seen reduce a group of burly men to trembling obedience with a single command—who had to ask God to forgive him for what he could do with his bare hands!—now things were going to change.
3
Given that I was now spending most of my free time pursuing a state of mind that was “empty, containing nothing, and therefore full, containing everything,” this became the subject of most of my conversations with my father. I can only imagine how much he must have wished I had gotten interested in painting instead. My biggest complaint at this time was having to spend so many hours at school memorizing facts that were of no interest to me. It wasn’t just that I would have been happier spending that time practicing kung fu; I believed that the knowledge I was gaining in school was actively preventing me from becoming a master.
“What makes you think that, Mark?” Dad asked. That night we were setting up the telescope on the same field we had stood in to watch comet Ikeya-Seki nearly ten years earlier. Our goal this time was to find the Horsehead Nebula, a glowing cloud of hydrogen in the constellation Orion.
All true scientists possess a childlike sense of wonder, but I think that astronomers have to be the most childlike of all. Everything they study dwarfs them, in terms both of size and of longevity, and most of what they observe is hopelessly out of reach. No human being can visualize the distance that light travels in one year, much less the distance it travels in two million years, which is how far you would have to travel to reach the major galaxy nearest to our own.
Children lie on their backs and see familiar objects in the shapes of clouds; astronomers look through gigantic lenses and see familiar objects in the shapes of galaxies, the vast, rarefied clouds of hydrogen that form the nurseries for new stars, and the expanding bubbles of heavy atoms and radiation left behind when stars die in cataclysmic explosions. A map of the night sky reads like a kid’s wish list of good things to hide in a drawer: the Crab Nebula, the Sombrero Galaxy, the Dumbbell Nebula, the Beehive Cluster, the Owl Nebula and a galaxy known simply as the Tarantula.
To answer my father’s question about why I thought high school was ruining my mind, I told him that Lao-tse, the fifth century B.C. Taoist philosopher and author of the Tao Te Ching, had advised people to “stop learning and end your problems.”
Dad looked unimpressed. “That’s it? Stop learning and end your problems? That’s a whole philosophy?”
“That’s only part of it, Dad. Duh!”
“Don’t say ‘duh,’ Mark, it’s so annoying.”
<
br /> “Well, you’re trying to make this stuff sound stupid! It’s only been around for two thousand years, and I think there’s probably something to it.”
“OK, OK. So why would stopping learning end your problems?”
I fetched my copy of the Tao Te Ching out of the car and read in the purplish light just before nightfall,
“In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Truth, every day something is dropped.
Less and less is done
Until non-action is achieved.
When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
The world is ruled by letting things take their course.
It cannot be ruled by interfering.”
My father had a special kind of laugh that he reserved for matters that struck him as funny in one way but unfunny in another. It was not a snort so much as a fast sigh.
“Mark, how is a person supposed to live according to that philosophy? Who’s going to pay your food and heating bills if you don’t do anything?”
I knew there had to be a good answer to his question, but the problem was that you had to be enlightened to know the real answer, and I wasn’t enlightened. I was fourteen years old and had not yet learned that “I don’t know” is a viable answer to profound questions. I took evasive action and told him that the reason he couldn’t understand was precisely that he had gone through all that social conditioning and so-called education that he, my mother and the Connecticut public school system were now forcing upon me.
He gave me the special laugh again and said, “Yeah, yeah, but let me hear you explain what you think it means. Even if I can’t understand it, I’ll be interested in hearing this.”
Seeing that I had no choice but to try to guess what an enlightened person would say, I responded, “You didn’t listen, Dad! It says that when nothing is done, nothing is left undone, so everything actually does get done. It’s just that it’s, like, effortless. You don’t have to struggle because everything you do happens naturally. It’s like the way a cat does stuff. A cat doesn’t wake up and say, ‘Oh, damn, I’ve gotta go to work today.’ It just, like, is, without worrying about it.”
