Lost In Place

by Mark Salzman

  One day, on a shortcut through a field while doing his paper route, Michael stumbled on a praying mantis, the inspiration for one of the most feared and respected kung fu schools of all. He rushed it home, telephoned me with instructions that I run to his house with my notebook, then began poking at it with a twig to test its parrying skills. When this strategy bore no fruit—the mantis didn’t seem to mind being poked by the twig—we tried putting ants and beetles in front of it. Ours was either an unhealthy or a very well-fed mantis; it barely moved at all. “Maybe it needs to be in a fight,” Michael suggested, so he took it out of the shoebox and put it on the nose of one of the kittens, hoping to start something. The kitten ignored it. When Michael put it on Rasputin’s nose (Rasputin was an old tom with frayed ears, one eye and a forty-five-degree kink in his tail), the once-mighty cat looked at it cross-eyed for a second, batted it to the ground with his paw and swallowed it.

  Ultimately, we never did learn any truly effective techniques from the wild, although Michael did have limited success for a while with a frenzied movement he called the Piranha Attack Sequence. As soon as I learned to counter it with the Net Across the Amazon defense, however, he dropped it from his arsenal and we stuck to what Sensei taught us.

  The other result of seeing The Twelve Tests of Shaolin was that we decided to imitate the outlandishly complicated and spectacular fight scenes found in most Hong Kong kung fu movies. We always finished our serious practice sessions with one of these mock battles, to the point where we had a whole series of cues and responses worked out. One favorite sequence began with Michael’s sweeping me to the ground, then trying to stomp on me, my grabbing his foot and tossing him backward, my getting up and trying to rush forward at him, but his jumping up at the last second, catching himself on the low branch of a tree, wrapping his legs around my neck as he hung there and then strangling me. The finale came when he let go of the branch and we crashed down together in a heap—always with me at the bottom, I noticed.

  A few months after Michael joined the kung fu school, Sensei O’Keefe announced that we were ready for our first belt tests. The ranking sequence at our school was white belt, yellow, blue, green, brown and finally black. Beyond that there were degrees of black; Sensei, for example, was a fifth-degree black belt.

  Neither of us could sleep the night before our test, and we skipped school the next day to go over our techniques, our forms, and to practice breaking boards. Neither of us had any appetite for lunch or dinner. We had my mother drop us off at the Institute an hour early so we could warm up there; we spent most of that time out in the parking lot doing push-ups and egging each other on. Just before Sensei arrived, Michael pulled out of his pocket one of his treasured red bandannas and handed it to me. “Good luck,” he said, and I felt my chest swell with pride as I put it on.

  It seemed to go by so quickly that I barely remember the test itself. In retrospect it seems odd that we were so nervous, because we had trained so hard there was little question of our deserving our white belts. But Sensei O’Keefe was infamously strict about ranking, and regularly cursed the “shopping-mall karate schools” that handed out belts according to how many lessons you took or how much you paid. He would get so angry talking about those schools that I sometimes worried he would give himself an aneurysm.

  Michael and I did our techniques, our forms, and broke several boards, then were told we would spar each other for the rest of the test. We hadn’t expected this; we imagined we would be sparring with the other students going for their white belts, whom we knew we could make a good showing against. “This better be good,” Sensei O’Keefe muttered, then took a seat next to two fearsome-looking black men, both of them wearing uniforms and black belts, who had been sitting there without making a sound during the whole test. They were Sensei’s “special guests,” men whom he had taught and awarded the black belt to years before. Now they were respected and feared teachers themselves, operating out of Norwalk and Bridgeport—cities well known for their tough neighborhoods.

  Michael and I looked at each other and knew we had to come up with something. We started fighting, and as expected, Sensei O’Keefe started yelling at us for looking like pussies. Michael did it first; he gave me the signal that we used during our choreographed “kung fu movie” routines, and then attacked with a flying, spinning kick. I did my part, which was to roll underneath him and come up with a side kick to his upper back that sent him into the wall and then down to the ground. Noting the murmurs of approval from our audience, we proceeded. I jumped into the air as if to flatten Michael with my whole body, but he rolled to one side in the nick of time, did a somersault and put me in a headlock. I bit his leg, he let go, and then came the finale. I ran at him as if to choke him and he, taking me by the forearms, rolled backward and put his foot against my stomach so he could do one of those John Wayne flips that you see in cowboy movies. Our Hong Kong twist was that I used his arms as pole vaults and, instead of landing flat on my back, landed on my feet behind him. We turned to face Sensei and saw that he, along with his two friends, were holding their bellies and laughing so hard that no sound came out.

  “They’re the fucking bandanna brothers!” one man finally said.

  “No, no, they’re the fucking judo-jitsi brothers!” the other guest insisted, recalling the term from one of the old Bowery Boys episodes. Now that we had been given a title, our reputation as an inseparable pair was sealed.

  Becoming very serious all of a sudden, Sensei had us kneel in front of his guests and all of the senior students and asked in a booming voice, “Does any man here object to these students getting their white belts? If so, speak now, or forever hold your fucking peace.”

  “No!” they all shouted, and Bill the Giant gave us the thumbs-up sign behind Sensei’s back.

  “All right, then,” Sensei said, and he had everyone kneel in one line. He put glasses in front of everyone and poured each of us a full double shot of tequila, gave everyone a slice of lemon and poured salt on his hand. He did the same for himself, making his more like a triple shot, however, then knelt in front of us and said, “May the Ancients smile on us, and speed us on our Path.” He licked the salt, bit the lemon, then downed the glass, and we followed suit. It was my first taste of alcohol of any kind, and the instant I swallowed it I wondered why liquor had ever become popular.

  We all spilled out into the parking lot, throwing kicks and doing push-ups and acting like five-year-olds. Within a few minutes the alcohol took effect, and then I knew the answer to my earlier question. Both high as kites, we wrestled in the backseat of my mother’s car all the way home, then went on a barefoot midnight run around the lake to begin our weekend of celebration.

  I had been helping Michael with his paper route for weeks, and together we had saved up enough money for a special treat: a Peking duck dinner for two at the Dragon Inn, the only Chinese restaurant left in Ridgefield after the Rickshaw Inn out on Route 7 closed. We placed our order the morning after the white-belt test, and that night rode our bicycles, wearing our kung fu uniforms, new white belts and red bandannas, announced our arrival to a suspicious maître d’ (how would you feel if two fifteen-year-old boys in kung fu suits and bandannas came into your restaurant and ordered a complete Peking duck dinner?) and had our feast.

  We stuffed ourselves to capacity, then rode over to the ice-skating rink, where the annual Bavarian Beer Festival was being held in full force, complete with oompah band, old couples dancing the polka and beer served in huge pitchers by plump women dressed up as Bavarian hostesses. We managed to gain entrance by persuading a man in his fifties to say we were his kids. Once inside we were wondering how we could get one of those pitchers of beer, seeing as how we were obviously underage and had no money, when we heard someone call out our names. It was Larry and Don, Michael’s number two and three brothers, and at least thirty of their friends. That’s when we knew everything was going to be perfect.

  For one glorious hour I was one of the Immortals,
drinking beer, shouting, playing cards, swearing oaths of loyalty and staring in drunken amazement at every woman. After Michael and I had each finished a pitcher of beer or so (the second time that I had tasted alcohol) the two of us, with no dance partners and plenty of encouragement from his brothers, decided to reenact our judo-jitsi performance from the night before. It met with tremendous approval from our group, but got us thrown out of the Garden. We didn’t care. We rode the five miles home on our bicycles, punching and kicking each other the whole way.

  By the time we reached my house we were both feeling strangely dizzy, and wisely decided to press on to his house. A good thing we did, too, because we spent the whole night propped up against the bathtub with our heads drooped over the edge puking up beer, scallions, Chinese pancakes and pieces of duck skin. At exactly six o’clock the next morning Mrs. Dempsey marched into the bathroom and said, “Well, well, well. What a pretty sight. Since you’re big enough to go out and drink too much just like big men do, you’re big enough to get up on time and work like grown men have to. Michael, it’s Sunday morning, the papers are already here, and people are waiting. I want you on your route in five minutes, and I don’t want any mouth about it. Mark, it’s not my business to tell you what to do, but I know you’re not the sort of boy who’d stay all comfortable with his head in the toilet when his best friend is doing his paper route. There’s coffee downstairs if you want it.”

  I never could have imagined that a paper route could seem so interminable. It took more than twice as long as usual; we had to walk slowly to keep our throbbing heads from moving up or down, took frequent breaks by the side of the road to catch our breath, and spent a good deal of time in the woods throwing up. When we finally got back to his house, we trudged up to his room, crawled into our sleeping bags and vowed that when we got our yellow belts, we would celebrate with clear soup, toast and ginger ale, and at all costs stay away from his brothers.

  7

  Drunk with confidence and ambition after receiving our white belts, Michael and I increased our efforts and made good progress over the next year. We practiced every morning before school, every afternoon after school, and even persuaded the gym coach to let us practice during school in one corner of the basketball court. We entered every karate tournament we could, subscribed to all the available martial arts magazines, saw every Bruce Lee movie at least six times, and on weekends helped Sensei O’Keefe give demonstrations in parks, church basements and at sporting events. He was losing money every month paying the rent for our building; the initial wave of interest in kung fu, set off by the Bruce Lee movies and the David Carradine television series, was already beginning to wear off, and the dropout rate at the Chinese Boxing Institute was high. When I first joined up there were nearly twenty-five students, but by the end of that year there were only three die-hard regulars—Bill, Michael and me—and about six who came sporadically. The demonstrations usually began with our doing forms, followed by our breaking up into pairs and sparring. Since these events were carried out for recruitment purposes, Michael and I refrained from using our more controversial judo-jitsi techniques such as leg-biting, hair-pulling and eye-poking. At last Sensei would call us into a line, bow to us, then to the crowd and deliver the goods. No one goes to martial arts demonstrations to see a bunch of students practice on each other.

  Sensei usually started with a choreographed fight scene with either Bill or Michael or, at the larger events, one of his black belts from Norwalk or Bridgeport. He never used me in this part of the show because I was so tiny it would hardly have impressed anyone to see him neutralize me. Occasionally he would get a bit overexcited during these routines, especially if he’d had a drink or two or three before the show; once he jumped into the air, spun around and kicked Michael in the eye with the heel of his foot so hard it knocked Michael semiconscious and gave him the ugliest black eye I have ever seen. Assuming it was part of the act, the crowd rewarded Sensei and Michael with a standing ovation.

  Next came the demonstration of control, which involved two of us getting on our hands and knees while a third, wearing no shirt, lay on his back on top of us with a watermelon on his stomach. Sensei would blindfold himself, do some loud breathing exercises, then split the watermelon with a samurai sword. It became an especially dramatic feat from our point of view if we could smell liquor on his breath as he did his breathing exercises.

  After that Sensei ordered us to break a few bottles and spread the jagged glass out onto a blanket. He stripped off the top part of his uniform and lay down on the broken glass, breathing even louder this time. Michael and I lowered four or five heavy concrete slabs onto his chest, then stood back as Bill rolled up his sleeves and lifted up a sledgehammer. Bill’s Paul Bunyanesque arms flexed impressively as he took a few slow practice swings to build suspense. Then, after a final dramatic pause, he shattered the slabs on Sensei’s chest with a mighty overhead stroke.

  The climax was always the stack of flaming bricks. I never did get used to the sight of Sensei O’Keefe’s face or the sound of his frenzied breathing when he prepared to break them with his hand. I used to imagine that a truly wild man, in the sense of having grown up without any social or cultural conditioning at all, would probably look and sound like that if he got cornered by a leopard in a cave. Every time Sensei did it my admiration for him, along with the suspicion that I could never be like him, swelled and left me feeling both satisfied and empty.

  One night Sensei announced that he was going to run a weekend kung fu camp up in the mountains. Michael and I panicked when he mentioned the tuition cost, but managed to find enough neighbors who needed lawns mowed over the next two weeks so that we were able to scrape up the money just in time. Bill planned to go too, and was bringing a tent that would be big enough for all three of us.

  Early in the morning on the day the camp was to begin, we all met in the parking lot of the Boxing Institute. It was just Sensei, Bill, Michael and me, but another group from Bridgeport was going to meet us at the campsite. Michael and I packed our sleeping bags, raincoats, swimsuits and extra clothes into Bill’s blue van (it had a big decal in the back window of a guy wearing a beret and smoking a joint, the same zigzag design as the tattoo on Bill’s arm), and Bill let us sort through his box of eight-track cassette tapes and put together a musical program for the ride up. Michael and I were arguing over whether we should start with Black Sabbath or Creedence Clearwater Revival when Sensei walked over and asked, “Any of you guys wanna ride with me?”

  We were stunned. An invitation to ride for several hours with Sensei, in his sleek Mercury Cougar with the vanity license plate that read KUNGFU, was like a dream come true. There was so much we wanted to ask him but had never dared; by always seeming aloof and vaguely angry, he effectively discouraged most attempts at friendly conversation. One night during a lesson an “old buddy” of his burst into the Institute, jumped into a parody of a karate stance and with a huge grin on his face yelled, “Hey, Timmy! Look who’s in town after all these years!” Without a moment’s hesitation or so much as a word of warning Sensei jumped over the little wooden bridge, grabbed the man, sent him flying out the door and into the street and chased him until he was well out of sight. “Don’t any of you fucking people ever make the mistake that man just did!” he fumed when he returned, his eyes black with rage.

  So when Sensei asked if either Michael or I wanted to ride with him, Bill read the situation perfectly and said, “Hey, why don’t both of you guys go in his car, because I have to make a couple of stops anyway to pick up food and lighter fluid and all that other crap. I’ll meet you up there in a couple of hours.” Once again Bill saved the day.

  Michael and I were so excited that we could hardly speak as we climbed into the Cougar. Sensei put on his leather hat and aviator sunglasses, and roared out of the parking lot leaving twin streaks of rubber on the road practically all the way to the entrance ramp to the highway. He drove just the way we’d imagined he would.

  Afte
r what we thought was a polite amount of time—we didn’t want to seem desperate—Michael and I couldn’t wait any longer and started asking Sensei questions. What was he like when he was our age, how did he first get interested in martial arts, and could he tell us any stories about his own master, a Hawaiian-born Chinese who had supposedly killed dozens of North Korean soldiers with his bare hands during the war? Michael and I saw this enormous man only once, at a martial arts convention where he stole the show by shattering a six-foot-high stack of ice blocks with his palm; to do so he had to stand on a folding chair, which got knocked out from under his feet when the huge chunks of broken ice came tumbling down.

  Sensei answered most of our questions by saying either “Yeah” or “Nah” or by shrugging. After a few minutes of this he frowned and turned on the car radio, signaling the end of our interview. We spent the rest of the ride feeling terrible, convinced that we had blown our one opportunity to connect with the Master.

  When we got to the camp Sensei set up his own tent and ate a lunch he’d packed for himself. Our food was in Bill’s van. A few hours later the group from Bridgeport showed up and we started working out. More time passed, but Bill was nowhere to be seen. By nightfall Michael and I were getting worried, not to mention hungry and a bit cold. We had worn our uniforms on the ride up, including our flimsy cloth “Bruce Lee” shoes, which had gotten soaking wet as we exercised in the dew-covered fields.