Lost In Place

by Mark Salzman

  I landed on my arm with a loud crack. The boy jumped down, grabbed my busted arm and started twisting it to make sure I got the message. I think my screaming must have taken him by surprise, because as I recall he departed pretty quickly. The result was that I had to wear a cast for six weeks and Michael lost all interest in me because I obviously had to be some kind of idiot not to know the first rule of preteen suburban anarchy: Never provoke people who are bigger than you.

  Given this background, it should come as no surprise that I viewed Michael’s appearance at my lakeside practice site as a stroke of misfortune. I expected him to challenge me to a fight instantly; I was on his turf displaying combat skills, so what else could I expect? Instead his eyes narrowed to slits and he asked, “You know karate?”

  “Oh … um … Actually it’s kung fu.”

  “Yeah? Where’d you learn that?”

  “A place called the Chinese Boxing Institute.”

  Michael’s face registered interest mixed with skepticism. “You study with Sensei O’Keefe?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” How did he know about Sensei O’Keefe? The Chinese Boxing Institute was three towns away.

  “Lemme see some kicks.”

  I did my best series of front, side, roundhouse and jumping spinning back kicks, and to my surprise and delight Michael looked impressed.

  “One of my brothers took lessons with that guy for a couple of months,” Michael said, still eyeing me suspiciously. “He quit, though. He said he didn’t feel like getting killed. O’Keefe killed some guy in a fight, you know. He had to do time for it.”

  I couldn’t believe it: I was learning kung fu from a man who had intimidated one of the Dempsey brothers! Instead of shocking or worrying me, the news that Sensei might indeed have killed someone only added to my sense of having suddenly become very powerful. It was intoxicating beyond my wildest dreams.

  Michael asked to see some of the forms. I noticed as I was going through the routines that instead of being nervous when he watched me, I felt as if a few thousand watts of power had just been allocated to me through the soles of my feet. I had never done the forms so well. Michael, his jaw set with determination, announced that he was going to start lessons right away.

  Two days later Michael came with me for his first lesson at the Institute. After he had filled out the required forms, I led him into the office to introduce him to Sensei O’Keefe. The Master looked over the paperwork with a bored expression on his face and gave Michael a receipt for his check. Just as we turned to leave he asked, “So how’s your brother?”

  “Fine,” Michael answered, visibly stiffening. It was hard being the smallest Immortal; no matter where he went, he found himself in the shadow of giants.

  “Good fighter. Tell him I said hello,” the Master said, and that was that. Michael looked annoyed, but it was a far more propitious beginning than mine had been.

  In the dressing room Michael put on his brother’s oversized, faded black karate uniform and tied a red bandanna on his head to keep his hair out of his eyes. One of the men who had made fun of my eggplant costume several months before took a look at Michael’s raggedy outfit and said, “Check this out—it’s Long John Silver! Where’s the eyepatch, pirate?”

  Michael said nothing, but I noticed a certain glazed expression come into his eyes. It made them look empty, like a shark’s. He didn’t take to teasing as well as I did.

  After we had done our punching and kicking drills, we moved directly to the Circle of Fighting. I’d had to wait several weeks before being allowed to spar, but Sensei, who was a keen judge of character, sensed that Michael was ripe for combat. After a few lackluster matches, including mine, where, as usual, I got knocked right out of the Circle at least three times, Michael was called on. His assigned opponent was the man who had teased him about his bandanna; Sensei O’Keefe, who I could have sworn was grinning underneath his mustache, truly seemed to know everything.

  Michael didn’t do much at the beginning except block; he seemed unsure of how to proceed. This was his first day at the school, inevitably he was going to be compared with one of his brothers again, and he was facing a grown man who had been studying kung fu for several years. O’Keefe got impatient quickly: “Come on, Dempsey, don’t fuck around. We don’t need the humility act. Fight, for Chrissake.”

  Magic words. You’ll remember this bandanna, Michael seemed to be thinking as he flung himself at the surprised older man. It was like seeing a mongoose attack a bear, where the mongoose apparently has no idea, or just doesn’t care, that he doesn’t stand a chance. He punched and kicked at the man with heroic savagery, and nearly backed him out of the Circle, but his opponent got over his surprise in time to gather his wits and get very annoyed. All pretense to giving the kid a break dropped, and he gave Michael a terrible beating, but a Dempsey never gives up. He kept rushing at the man, only to get kicked in the ribs, punched in the face or shoved backward. At last the man did a foot sweep that sent Michael flying through the air and landing hard on his elbow, on a thin rug stretched over a concrete floor. When he stood up he was clutching the elbow and wincing.

  “Keep fighting!” O’Keefe yelled. He had a look on his face so intense that it could have melted steel.

  “I can’t move my arm,” Michael said.

  “Use the other, then!” O’Keefe shot back, and Michael obeyed instantly. Out of breath and with tears streaming from his eyes, he kept yelling and charging at the man only to be repulsed with a flurry of blows. His elbow was so swollen that it looked as if a tennis ball had been sewn under the skin. At last Sensei boomed, “All right! Bow to me! Bow to each other!” With that ritual out of the way, he told Michael to go clean himself up and get some ice out of the freezer to put on his elbow.

  When Michael was out of earshot, Sensei grinned at his surprised opponent, who was visibly relieved that the mongoose had been called off. “Tough little motherfucker, huh?” O’Keefe asked, laughing. Then he grew serious, pointed toward the changing room and frowned at the rest of us. “Mark my words, that kid is going to wear the black belt someday. Every man in this room could learn from that kid.”

  Bill, the granite-faced man who had been my personal savior the night I came for my first lesson, raised his eyebrows and opened his eyes fully. It was the most dramatic change of expression I had ever seen from him. “That’s your friend?” he asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said proudly.

  “Yeah? Well, your friend has balls this fucking big,” he said, stretching his arms out to their fullest extension.

  At the end of that lesson, Sensei gave us all a speech about how difficult the road to mastery is, and how one must be prepared to give up everything if one truly desires to wear the black belt. He told us that he’d had to drive several times a week from Connecticut to Washington, D.C., to study with his master, sometimes driving all night to return in time for his day job. He had lost count of the number of bones he had broken over the years, and related for us the story of how his first teacher, an American, had committed suicide by first slicing open his belly with a samurai sword, crawling up a staircase with his intestines dragging behind him to the place where he kept his pistol and finally shooting himself in the head. “Death with fucking honor,” Sensei commented at the end of this story, nodding thoughtfully.

  Then O’Keefe gave us a rare treat; he said, “Listen up. When you people do the forms, you look like a bunch of old ladies, and then you wonder why you never use those moves when you fight! I’ll tell you the reason. When you do these forms, you’re supposed to do them like your life depended on it!” Then he showed us what he meant, executing a form so advanced and so secret that none of us even knew its name. He moved with lightning speed, and with each punch and kick the cloth of his uniform cracked like a whip. When he was finished, he stalked over to the heavy bag hanging from the ceiling and said, “The same thing goes when you hit the bag! Don’t pat at it! If you want a nice mild workout, go take badminton lessons. This is kung
fu, goddammit! When you hit the bag, hit it with everything you got!” By now he was really charged. He hit the bag about fifty times in ten seconds, each blow landing with a sound that made me nearly sick to my stomach. Then he let out a piercing scream, jumped up into the air, spun around and hit it with a reverse crescent kick that doubled the bag over on impact. For a finale he put an old towel on the floor, stacked up eight gray bricks over the towel, then splashed lighter fluid on the stack. He had Bill light the stack, then stepped back to glare at it for a moment. He started hissing from the pit of his lungs, sounding like a man being scalded alive. His feet were pulling so hard at the rug that it bunched up between his legs, and his face turned into a portrait of obscene determination. He hit those bricks with the edge of his hand so hard that he might well have just continued right on through the floor and severed the gas line. By the end of this demonstration I was convinced that no man on earth could survive a violent encounter with Timothy P. O’Keefe.

  I thought I feared and admired this man more than anyone else in the world, but when I looked over at Michael I saw that I was wrong. My friend’s jaw was slack, his eyes were bugging out of his head, and the ice pack he’d been holding to his elbow had fallen to the ground. Moses seeing the Burning Bush couldn’t have looked more impressed. He was speechless all the way home, and when I saw him in school the next day, he still could barely articulate words. “Let’s work out this afternoon” was all he said.

  6

  Although chagrined by having been overshadowed so quickly by Michael in Sensei’s eyes, at the same time I was overjoyed to have finally found someone with whom to practice conventional male bonding. Quiet discussions over the telescope with my dad, stimulating though they were, simply could not substitute for affection disguised as aggressiveness, which every healthy boy craves. A useful analogy can be found among vegetarians who, wanting to break the cycle of violence wherever they can, feed their cats soy products, only to watch them lose their hair and become depressed. Cats are carnivores, like it or not, just as young men are weapons with legs. By the end of that week Michael and I were punching each other for hours every day.

  We soon began sleeping over at each other’s house so that we could start practicing kung fu the instant we woke up, resume practice after school, and keep at it until we couldn’t keep our eyes open any longer at night. Our policy was that whenever we were both healthy we stayed over at my house, whereas if one of us had a black eye, a split lip or a sprained finger we stayed at his house. His mother, who had once been a gym teacher and was, after all, the mother of the Golden Horde, was used to seeing boys in various states of disrepair and patched us up without any fuss. My mother, on the other hand, would have had a fit if she knew how often I was jamming my fingers; what if I wanted to play the cello again once I’d gotten over “this kung fu thing”? She was tolerant of my bizarre interests, bless her heart, but she drew the line at bare feet in winter and bone fractures (of which I eventually had several).

  Michael and I were perfectly matched for optimum competition between us. I was more graceful and flexible than he was, so I looked better doing the forms and individual techniques. Michael, on the other hand, always got the better of me during sparring because he was stronger and had superior fighting instincts, lots of previous experience and an alchemist’s gift for turning frustration into pure aggression. Nearly every sparring session followed the same course: it would be an exciting, even exchange until the very end, when he would back me up against a wall with a furious onslaught of sloppy kicks and punches, finish me off by putting me in a headlock and boxing my ears, then cackle with delight and cry, “Once again the fine-boned Roman sentry discovers that his glittering armor, bronze weapons and volumes of Plato are no match for the fearless Hun and his rough-hewn spear! Better luck next time, Loserus Maximus!”

  We tried to outdo, outlast or outsmart each other in every possible way, and endeavored to make our workouts as imaginative as possible. One of our “reflex” exercises was to go down to his basement, each put on one of his brother Larry’s Mexican hats and ponchos (Larry’s field of study was los bandidos de la revolución, and his bedroom walls were covered with black-light posters of Zapata, Guevara and Castro), light up a couple of cheap cigars and face each other like gunfighters. Michael had a portable record player down there, and for this exercise he always played the theme music from the Clint Eastwood movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. As the music built to a climax, we paced slowly toward each other. When we were only inches apart, we would blow smoke into each other’s face as a rude challenge. We would throw down the cigars, toss the ponchos over one shoulder and wait, sneering at each other and squinting like Eastwood. When the tension became unbearable, one of us would finally say “Draw” and act—not by pulling out a pistol, but by trying to kick the other in the chest or face (the higher the kick the lower the chances of success, but the greater glory if you succeeded) before he kicked you. We came out about even in this exercise (we named it The Loose, the Tight and the Chickenshit) because although Michael was a bit slower, I was more nervous and started late about half the time.

  One week Michael saw in the paper that a drive-in movie theater in Danbury was showing The Twelve Tests of Shaolin, a kung fu flick about the harsh training habits of the early Shaolin temple monks. We had to go, no question about it. We pooled our money but found we had enough for only one ticket, so we got his brother Frank, the former rocket scientist, to drive while we hid in the trunk. Once it got dark we crawled out, but unfortunately the pimply kid at the ticket booth saw us. He waited until the film started, then came over to our car and asked to see our tickets. When we couldn’t produce them, he said, “I’m gonna have to tell the manager,” and walked into the office connected to the refreshment stand.

  Frank seemed unfazed by the situation; his eyes never left the screen. Michael suggested that we insist that we simply couldn’t find our tickets, but I said the best thing to do would be to go straight to the manager and confess in order to avoid having him call the police—or worse, our parents.

  “Are you crazy?” Michael asked, looking at me as if I were a complete idiot. I said I would go alone if I had to, but it had to be done as soon as possible because we’d been caught. When I got out of the car and walked toward the office, though, Michael followed me. “You’re out of your mind,” he kept saying.

  We walked into the office and faced a fat, tired-looking man with a crew cut and a cigar in his mouth seated behind a large desk. I made our confession, explaining that we were poor kung fu students who were desperate to see the movie because we could learn from it. I said that we could prove we were really serious by giving him a demonstration in his office. He declined the offer, frowned at us menacingly, waved a plump hand in the direction of the door and said, “Go on, beat it. You did the wrong thing, boys, but I’m gonna give you a break this time. Go see the picture, but next time no clemency.”

  On our way back to the car, Michael looked at me as if I had just turned water into wine. When we sat down to see the rest of the movie, he shook my hand and said, “Man, all these years I’ve been getting caught doing stuff, and I never once thought of that! Goddamn, you’re smart!” I left it at that, and from this point on Michael was convinced that my timorous personality was in fact a highly effective disguise. “You can get anything you want with that innocent act,” he often said, and I always responded with nothing more than an ambiguous smile.

  It turned out to be a great movie. The premise was that all monks ready for graduation from the temple had to pass through twelve rooms, each of which contained a challenge. One room featured a series of crossbows triggered by invisible wires strung across the floor of the room. Qualified monks dodged or deflected the arrows; monks who had slacked off in their training paid a heavy price. Other challenges included thrusting one’s hands into a tub full of red-hot metal filings until one located the tiny pearl at the bottom, sparring while balancing on high poles over a patch of gro
und bristling with deadly spikes, and having to reach into a hole in the wall to grab a greased iron ball without having one’s hand cut off at the wrist by a lightning-fast guillotine blade released as soon as the ball was removed from its pedestal.

  Although we couldn’t find any crossbows or guillotines in Michael’s basement, we did manage to fill a hibachi grill with sand, put one of his mother’s earrings at the bottom, fire it up and poke around in it with our hands for a while. All we got from that exercise was blisters. We also tried sparring while balancing on a two-by-four stretched across a couple of picnic benches; when that got boring we tried it blindfold, and wound up fighting with long staffs à la Robin Hood while balancing on a fallen tree stretched out over the lake. Another favorite game was sneaking out of our houses on nights when it was snowing, taking our sleeping bags out to the foundation of a burned-down barn and trying to sleep as the snow piled up on top of us. The first one to suggest going home was the loser. When we got back to his house, the loser had to serve the winner hot cocoa and give him a foot massage. It was all very Greco-Roman.

  Eager to follow in the footsteps of the ancient masters, we speculated about how many of the martial arts schools had been founded by people who imitated the offensive and defensive movements of animals such as tigers, cranes, snakes, eagles and even insects. Michael’s house was always filled with anywhere from two to seven cats, not counting kittens, so we began by studying them. I was appointed secretary of defense, which meant that it was my job to record their behavior in little notebooks with diagrams and verbal descriptions. Since most cat behavior is related to eating and sleeping, we found little to inspire us, but Michael noticed that if we provoked one of the kittens by dangling a piece of string in front of it to get it going, then dragged that string right over one of the sleeping adult cats, both kitten and adult would soon display the kinds of violent behavior we were looking for. As soon as we saw something interesting I would write it down; then we would rush out to the backyard and try it out on each other. We got pretty good at scratching each other, and Michael even experimented with a move where he wrestled me to the ground, held my shoulders with his hands and kicked my stomach with both of his feet.