by Mark Salzman
Pleased with Bill’s example of courage and determination, and perhaps a bit relieved that he had not lost the battle himself, Sensei O’Keefe called us all together for a little talk. We sat cross-legged in a tight circle around a nineteenth-century grave and Sensei said: “Listen up. You’re all here because you want to understand the Path of the Warriors who came long before you. You want to know what this is all about; you want to know what kung fu really means. I’ll tell you what it’s all about. It’s not about winning or losing or wearing a brown belt or a black belt—it’s about learning to die well. If you find yourself cornered in an alley someday and five guys are bearing down on you with baseball bats or shotguns, you might know you don’t stand a chance. You might know that you’re gonna die, and that there’s nothing you can do to stop those bastards from killing you. But you know what a warrior does then? He doesn’t give those bastards the satisfaction of seeing him flinch. He doesn’t whine or beg for his life; he dives right the fuck in and he takes at least one of those sons of bitches with him when he goes down—that’s what he does. If you train with that in your head, if you train like your life depends on it, and if you act like everything you do might be the last thing you do on earth, then you’ll become a master and you’ll wear the black belt like me. Otherwise, you’ll always be just another bullshit karate student who breaks a couple of boards on weekends, but never really understands what the Path is all about.”
We bowed to him and to one another, uttered our little prayer about kung fu being our secret, and then, without having to be told, ran the punitive mile at top speed, shouting one another on and feeling like gods. The winning team was so pumped up that they joined us for the run, and when we returned to the school we did our hundred push-ups in the parking lot together, on our bare knuckles on a patch of asphalt covered with broken glass.
That was one of the high points of my experience at the Chinese Boxing Institute, partly because of the seductive mixture of fear, violence and male bonding, but mainly because of Sensei O’Keefe’s speech, which had brought me to a realization that I was convinced had to be enlightenment at last: when he said that kung fu was about learning to die well, it occurred to me that this must be what the Tao Te Ching meant when it said that one should become like a block of wood. Of course! It meant that you should act as if you were already a dead man and had nothing to lose! That, in turn, explained all the references to emptiness; an empty mind, I deduced, was a mind empty of hope for the future or of petty cares about one’s safety, comfort or possessions. That night, at home in the basement, I decided to test the strength of my realization by sitting up all night in the lotus position like the Buddha. I wouldn’t budge or relax my concentration until the first rays of sunlight came in through the window—I would sit as if it were my last night on earth before being executed at dawn.
I began my vigil at around 11:00 P.M. By twelve o’clock my back was killing me and I was feeling exhausted. By twelve-fifteen I knew I was going to fall asleep, but I saved the evening by reminding myself that being in a sense already dead, I no longer had to care about proving to myself that I was enlightened or not, so I could do whatever I wanted. Much relieved, I crawled into bed, a kung fu master at last.
My father woke me up at six-thirty; even dead men have to go to school in our achievement-oriented society. I ate some cereal and let him drive me that morning, reasoning that I no longer had to walk barefoot or do anything unpleasant now that I was enlightened. Within an hour my new spiritual status was in trouble, however. I had a crush on a girl in my biology class, so naturally I figured that this would be a good time to ask her out, seeing that I was living in the eternal Now and had nothing to lose. But when the opportunity came to approach her, I froze as usual and she walked right past me, unaware of my inner turmoil. How could I be enlightened and still be nervous about asking someone for a date? I wondered. My temporary solution was to decide that part of being enlightened meant ceasing to make distinctions between behavior that you formerly called “good” or “bad,” and accepting that whatever you did was an expression of your inner nature, or your “Original Face before you were born” as the Zen manuals called it. Being insecure was just the way the cosmos decided to manifest itself when I was born.
For two days I dwelt in this state of philosophical limbo, where I still wanted to believe I was enlightened but had to constantly talk myself into ignoring evidence to the contrary. My epiphany came to an end on the third day, when I went back to the Chinese Boxing Institute and got called into the Circle of Fighting. At the sound of my name my knees went weak as usual, I got beat up by my opponent as usual, and then got yelled at by Sensei O’Keefe afterward for being a candy-ass, also as usual. This couldn’t be enlightenment, I finally admitted to myself, because none of the Asian philosophy books I had read said anything about enlightenment’s being just as miserable as ignorance.
4
Just before entering the ninth grade at school, I persuaded my parents to let me give up my cello lessons. I’d started playing the cello when I was seven, after having already tried the violin and piano without much success. It was hardly surprising that I had shown an early interest in music, since my mother was both a concert pianist and a concert oboist who practiced a minimum of four hours a day, and who gave lessons every afternoon in our living room. She was the first person to major in two instruments at the Eastman School of Music, and was one of the founders of our town orchestra. She loved music, but what really made an impression on me was that she loved practice. Performing was fine, but practice was what it was all about for her, and being able to do it for hours every day meant she was happy for hours a day.
That really burned my dad up. “Don’t you ever get tired of playing the same passage over and over and over?” he would ask.
“Of course not! It’s different every time! Besides, you know the answer yourself. Don’t you love working on your paintings?”
“I like having painted, Martha. Painting is one big pain in the ass.”
“Really? What a shame! I think that’s the best part—the struggle!”
My mother was also fond of saying that the neck, back and giblets were the best part of the chicken. She sure was easy to please.
Unfortunately, I took after my father more than my mother when it came to work habits. I hated practice. It was a joyless exercise, made bearable only by the implied promise that if I kept at it, I would eventually become “good” and then people would finally have to take me seriously. I started violin when I was four, and showed some promise. When I was five the music teacher at our school invited me to join the orchestra. When I walked into the music room for my first rehearsal, however, it so happened that the teacher had just stepped out of the room for a moment. That was all the older kids needed to reduce me to tears with their teasing—“Look at the baby! Ha, ha!”—and that was the end of the violin for me.
After that I tried learning the piano from my mother, but every time she criticized me I felt my whole body go rigid with frustration, so that lasted less than a year. Then in 1967 my mother took me to hear Aldo Parisot give a recital of unaccompanied cello pieces. When the concert ended I announced two momentous decisions: I wanted to become a cellist, and I wanted a pair of shoes that were as shiny as Mr. Parisot’s.
My cello teacher, Rudolph Gordon, was an exceedingly gentle man who walked with a severe limp, often using his old cello as a cane. Our lessons were in his study, which had a grandfather clock in it that ticked loudly and occasionally threw off my sense of rhythm during lessons. As sweet as he was—I quickly grew very fond of him—I always felt a bit frightened of Mr. Gordon. It had nothing to do with anything he said or did; I was shy and frightened of almost everybody when I was a kid, but teenagers and old people made me particularly nervous. Mr. Gordon’s limp, his deep voice and his bald head—added to the fact that I was not a particularly brilliant cello student—all prevented me from ever truly relaxing around him. During one of our lessons I reali
zed I had to use the bathroom, but I could not bring myself to admit it. I don’t know what the big deal is for kids about going to the bathroom, but I just kept playing, my mind racing and my bladder in agony. At last I could stand it no longer and wet my pants. I never stopped playing, though. When the lesson ended I stood up, holding the cello in front of me, and walked backward out of Mr. Gordon’s house. My shoes made a little squish-squish with every step I took. It truly did seem like the end of the world.
After I had spent six years with Mr. Gordon, he modestly recommended that I move on to a more serious teacher and try out for a spot with the Norwalk Youth Symphony, the state’s best youth orchestra. I started taking lessons with someone in Westport, an hour’s drive away, and every Saturday morning there was another hour’s drive to Norwalk for orchestra rehearsal, which lasted two hours.
Once I got into kung fu I found it harder and harder to bring myself to practice the cello, and orchestra rehearsals came to seem unbearable. I brought my Chinese philosophy books to the rehearsals and often had them open on my music stand so I could read them while pretending to be playing. When I asked my parents to let me quit the orchestra, they were disappointed at first, but finally got used to the idea. For my last concert with the orchestra, my grandparents in Ohio drove up to Connecticut to be there. On the first dramatic note of our first piece, I got a little too excited and came down on the string too hard with my bow, which snapped in two. Usually the string breaks, not the bow, but that night it was the bow. I had to sit onstage through the whole piece staring at all the tangled horsehair and hoping my grandparents had a good sense of humor.
Getting out of cello lessons was harder. I had to work on my parents all summer to get that bill passed. By the fall, however, I was free to spend all of my time after school and all weekend meditating and practicing kicks. That was when I knew I had to go the next step and lobby for my own bedroom.
I had shared a tiny room with Erich for thirteen years. This arrangement had worked fine until the time I decided to become a Zen monk, and then a disturbing change came over him. Whereas in the past he would only tease me for doing something especially foolish, his manner now suggested that he thought I was getting weird overall and needed close supervision. He had inherited my father’s withering, disapproving gaze, and he started using it on me more and more often. Unlike Dad, however, Erich had a booming voice and charisma to burn, making him difficult to ignore. My sitting in the lotus position on the couch when we watched All in the Family, for example, bugged him. He would lean across Rachel (he consistently got her to sit in the middle, where the two cushions never quite met and all the springs below had collapsed, by reminding her that in chess as in life, queens always sit between their servants), flash me that look and say, “I’ll bet those guys in China wouldn’t sit like that if they could afford chairs.” He also didn’t like the way I ate pork chops, fish sticks and even corn on the cob with chopsticks. We three kids always ate dinner on this same living-room couch, using fold-up trays so that we could watch television while we ate. Erich would rush to empty his plate, then point to my still-unfinished dinner and say, “If you ate with a fork and knife like a normal person you’d be done by now and we could eat dessert.”
Erich had always been a force to contend with. When he was three he fell into a swimming pool while my father’s back was turned. After another man fished him out, Erich shook himself off, frowned at Dad and said, “Why don’t you take better care of me?” When he was nine he tried to get my mother to quit smoking by stuffing tiny explosive caps into her cigarettes. Now he was twelve and, given that Mom and Dad were apparently letting me slide right off the deep end without a fight, felt saddled with the responsibility of showing me the error of my ways. Incense made the house smell bad, he declared. Only babies and old people walked around in their pajamas during the daytime. Americans drink Lipton’s tea, not some kooky stuff that doesn’t even come in bags, for God’s sake. But his real pet peeve was my meditating. This drove him nuts. “You’re not thinking of nothing,” he would seethe while I sat cross-legged at the foot of our bunk bends. “That’s impossible! I’m only in sixth grade and even I know that. You’re thinking of something right now. Faker.”
Erich conceded that the martial arts aspect was OK, but it enraged him that I wouldn’t use it to avenge myself on the assholes who made fun of me for being short and having a high voice. I tried to explain to him that being a kung fu master meant knowing that it was better to walk away from a fight than to hurt someone, but he didn’t buy that for a minute. “Couldn’t it be,” he asked, his eyes narrowing, “that kung fu masters are just a bunch of chickens? If not fighting is so great, how come they spend their whole lives learning how to break people’s jaws? Why don’t they just practice letting people beat them up, if being peaceful is so great? God, Mark, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” In short, Erich, his booming voice and his common sense posed an unacceptable threat to the unfathomable knowledge of old. I needed privacy.
There weren’t any extra rooms in our house, so I proposed that I move down into my basement temple. I already had all of my books and candles and incense down there; all I needed was a clothes hamper and my half of the bunk bed. Eventually Mom and Dad agreed to this, but they reminded me that I would have to share the basement during the daytime with my mother, who had taken out a loan that year and commissioned a harpsichord maker to build an instrument for her so that she would no longer have to borrow or rent one for her early-music performances. When the instrument was ready it would have to go into the basement.
Unlike pianos, which have sturdy metal frames, harpsichords are made almost entirely of wood. Rapid changes in temperature or humidity can make the soundboards warp or crack, causing expensive or even irreparable damage. The basement was the only room in our house whose temperature and humidity were fairly stable and could be regulated easily; it goes without saying that my jumping spinning back kicks, spear thrusts and sword flourishes would have to be regulated as well. Based on what I had done to the walls and ceiling before the arrival of the harpsichord, the new regulation was that I had to take my kung fu outdoors.
The new harpsichord arrived a month later and, along with my clothes dresser and coffee-table shrine, almost filled the basement. To save space, I left my bed upstairs and slept on an old feather couch cushion (a very old cushion, in fact—my father had been born on it) with my head just under the harpsichord. My mother’s fierce eagerness to practice, set against my tendency to sleep late on the weekends, led to a morning ritual that I complained about at the time but now think back on with fondness. She would tiptoe down the stairs, presumably so as not to wake me up, sit down as quietly as possible at the harpsichord and then start playing Bach. While it is true that the harpsichord is quieter than the piano, it isn’t much quieter, particularly if it is a seven-foot-long French double manual and you are sleeping with your head directly underneath it.
Unbeknownst to my mother, I taped what I considered to be an essential quote from one of my Zen books to the bottom of her instrument so it would be the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing I saw before going to sleep. The quote read: “The attainment of enlightenment brings a feeling of unshakable interior peace as well as unequalled security and liberty. The tensions with regard to becoming are absent, and the peace of Being alone remains.”
This message was supposed to inspire me, but after my false-alarm experience with enlightenment, it only served to remind me at least twice a day of my failure. Disgusted with myself, I saw how deeply I was still mired in becoming. It would not have been so bad if I was at least becoming more popular at school or more self-confident, but the opposite was true. I was no longer “just like a little brother” to my female classmates; I was now “kind of like a weird little brother” to them. It may be hard for people who have grown up listening to bands like Talking Heads and Boy George to imagine a time when weirdness was an obstacle to popularity, but 1974 was just
such a time. You could be wild, like Ted Nugent or Ozzy Osbourne, but not weird. If you drank and smoked pot until you passed out, drove a Camaro with slicks on the back wheels and primer sprayed all over the body, set something on fire inside the school building or made noises loud enough to cause adults to have fits, you were wild, but if you cut the soles out of the bottoms of your shoes, read books on your own and meditated in the outdoor smoking lounge, you were weird and pretty much undatable.
In spite of my apprenticeship to a man who referred to himself as an Ass-Kicking Motherfucker, I commanded little respect from the boys in my class. Who cared if I could break bricks or kick three feet higher than my head if I never even argued with anybody? Status among the boys in my school was determined by action, not potential. In any case, athletic prowess held little sway among the members of my class; the few jocks we had were considered out of touch. Success in academics, needless to say, was also a liability, and playing a musical instrument like the cello was hardly something to brag about. Conventional ambitions were looked upon with suspicion. During a school assembly one brave soul dared to get up onstage and sing “The Candy Man” with a few girls dancing around him dressed like dolls and holding giant lollipops. You had to admire him; he really belted it out, gesturing with his hands, doing complicated dance steps and singing with lots of vibrato but no irony. He paid a price for it, however. The whole song was accompanied by a chorus of snickers and guffaws from the audience that became deafening near the end when one boy yelled out, “Show us your candy cane, man!” I don’t remember ever seeing the poor candy-man singer again after that morning.
Although I was not by any means the class valedictorian, my interest in Chinese culture indicated an enthusiasm for learning, which was not cool; a cool person did not show enthusiasm, with the single exception of being eager to party at all times. The surest way to earn the affection and respect of one’s peers in the mid-seventies, marvelously depicted in the movie Dazed and Confused (which I considered a documentary when I saw it), was to provide beer, marijuana or transportation for the parties held every night out in the fields during the summer and on weekends during the school year. Since I was obsessed with purity and feared that alcohol or drugs might weaken my mind, and since I was too young to drive, I occupied a low position in the class hierarchy. Occasionally I won points by being funny in school, but class clowns are never truly popular because the very reason anyone pays attention to them is also the reason no one takes them seriously. And I, who willingly submitted to all sorts of physical and mental punishment in order to learn how to “die well,” wanted more than anything in the world to be taken seriously.
