by Mark Salzman
He leaned back in his chair and said, “Try to think of the school as a huge ocean liner. It’s out there in the ocean, it’s overcrowded, the engine is overworked, but it’s moving slowly in the right direction. Then imagine that one kid falls overboard. We simply can’t turn the whole ocean liner around just for him. I’m sorry; you’ll just have to stick with the regular courses.”
Man overboard! I was going to have to drown in algebra, French and chemistry after all.
Adults tell you that school is not about learning particular facts, but about learning how to learn. When the time comes that a subject intrigues you deeply, they insist, you will be grateful for having developed the skills needed to master that subject. “Someday this will all make sense,” they say. And they’re right. The problem for all of us as teenagers, unfortunately, is that until we find that special subject we have to take their word for it, and that’s a lot to ask when you’re talking about memorizing the Louisiana Purchase, the atomic weight of uranium or the pluperfect-tense conjugation for verbs in other languages. How about the chemistry involved in photosynthesis? Yep—could be useful someday. Anyone read Tess of the D’Urbervilles lately? Now, there’s an enjoyable book when you’re fifteen, especially all the descriptions of the flowers. If a sailboat left San Francisco thirteen hours ago against a 5-knot current and a 4-knot breeze and is just now reaching Santa Barbara, 312 miles away, what was its average speed? Hey, couldn’t you just ask the Coast Guard? That’s their job, isn’t it? It’s a miracle any of us make it to the drinking age without having gone insane.
Even with my limited knowledge of physiology at that time, I knew that teenagers were designed for humping, fighting and little else, but the modern world asks that we put all that off until after high school. Instead we must fidget in uncomfortable wooden chairs and learn how to learn. As mentioned before, you’re told it will pay off one day, but between the ages of thirteen and eighteen you cannot help wondering, What if it doesn’t pay off? What if our parents, and their parents, were all wrong about what’s really important? How will it ever end if no one questions it? And these are supposed to be the best years of your life.
9
We’re moving,” Sensei O’Keefe said abruptly after class one night. He and Bill lit up a joint in the parking lot and sat quietly; Michael and I decided to take a few last whacks at the heavy bag for old times’ sake. The rent had finally driven us out. Sensei had found another building, this one in Danbury on Main Street, which at that time was a depressed area. It was not an ideal space; the room was long, but only about ten feet wide, so the Circle of Fighting became the Sliver of Fighting. Better than nothing, Sensei said, so that weekend he, Bill, Michael, three other students and I moved the equipment to our new house. During the move I noticed that Sensei had thrown away several dozen old trophies, framed karate and judo diplomas and plaques. One wooden plaque, with his name engraved on it, caught my eye, so I pulled it out of the garbage and put it in my equipment bag to take home and put on my wall.
Sensei, who was seriously depressed and drunk quite a bit of the time that season, apparently saw me take the plaque out of the garbage can, but instead of being flattered he called everyone together and denounced me as a thief. “Barabbas, the Christian thief. That’s your new name: Barabbas. Listen up, Barabbas. Don’t you ever think you can do something without my knowing it.” He poked his callused finger hard against my chest for emphasis. “I am the Master here, and you better get something straight. I can see right through you—I know what you think and what you do. I know you better than you know yourself.”
Instead of being mystified or impressed by something Sensei did, for the first time I felt annoyed. I didn’t question his status as a kung fu master, I didn’t object to his unusual training methods, like the time he had one man hang from the rafters with one hand and hold a paper target between his dangling legs with the other so that Sensei could practice archery, and I didn’t mind his calling me a candy-ass or a sissy, but even I knew that he was no mind reader. As I put the plaque back in the garbage an unwelcome thought came to me: This guy can punch well, he can kick well and he can cut watermelons blindfolded, but what if underneath all that he’s really just a jerk?
I did not express that thought to anyone, least of all to Michael. It seemed that the worse Sensei behaved—the more hostile and abusive he got—the stronger Michael’s loyalty to the man became, as if he were trying single-handedly to make Sensei’s life turn around by being the perfect disciple. On one of our first nights at the new school Sensei came in looking even more morose than usual. “I just drank seven fucking rusty nails,” he said to no one in particular, then put on his uniform. Halfway through the class he announced, “I’m gonna show you guys how to defend against a fucking cartwheel. Mark, do a cartwheel at me.” The cartwheel as an offensive maneuver is about the stupidest thing you can imagine; it makes you completely vulnerable to just about any counterattack, and besides, even if you do it successfully and hit the person with your ankles, it hurts you more than your opponent. I obeyed him, of course, and he defended himself by planting a hopping side kick into my thigh so hard that most of my leg turned black and I had trouble walking for over a week. That night I was so upset that I cried in the car on the way home (Michael had just turned sixteen, so we no longer had to rely on our parents for rides). “Don’t be such a candy-ass,” he scolded me. “You deserved it for trying to steal his plaque. That was a lesson to you, man—don’t try to blame it on Sensei.”
We lasted at that studio for only a few months before Sensei ran out of money and had to default on the lease. He told us that he had an acquaintance who could help us out; he never called anyone his friend. “I don’t have any fucking friends,” he liked to say with a combination of bitterness and pride in his voice, as if this were the unpleasant but inescapable burden all warriors “who don’t give in to the bullshit” must bear. This acquaintance ran a bar near a lake, and said we could hold our lessons on the lawn behind the bar. In lieu of rent, Sensei worked as a bouncer after our classes. Learning kung fu on the grass behind a bar took away some of the romance from our lessons, and unrestrained access to rusty nails and tequila sunrises caused a noticeable decline in Sensei’s skills.
One night Bill and I were sitting by the lake after a particularly bad lesson; either Sensei was in a foul mood or he just couldn’t think of any new techniques to teach us that night. In any case, he had us spend most of the lesson doing punishment exercises like push-ups and crab-walking (where you crawl on all fours but with your chest facing upward rather than downward). To no one’s great surprise, Bill crab-walked right over a broken bottle; there was glass all over the ground behind the bar. After the lesson, while pulling slivers of glass out of his palm, Bill sighed, looked back at the bar and said, “Pretty fucking seedy.” Coming from Bill, who never complained about anything, this seemed a bad sign indeed.
“What’s going to happen to us, Bill?” I asked.
He chuckled, but then fixed me with that stare of his that could stop a charging elephant. “We’ll move on and we’ll do just fine,” he said evenly. “I’ve been with Sensei for six or seven years now. Having to watch him flush himself down the toilet is no fun, but it’s his problem, not yours or mine. If he can’t teach us, we’ll find somebody who can. That’s all there is to it. It’s your buddy I’m worried about. Mike hasn’t figured it out yet.”
“Figured what out?”
“That Sensei makes his own fucking problems. You’re smart; you figured it out, but I gotta tell you, Mark, your problem is that you let it show. That’s why Sensei gives you such a hard time. But Mike still thinks the guy is God. It’s because he doesn’t have a father, man. You don’t have to be Sylvester Q. Freud to figure that one out.”
Once we made that final relocation, we stopped giving recruitment demonstrations for the Chinese Boxing Institute. We still went to tournaments, however, and Bill, Michael and I usually did well. Michael always came home with a f
ighting trophy, I with one for forms, and Bill either with trophies in both categories or in neither because he had been thrown out for “excessive contact.” The way this always worked was that Bill would face the rare opponent who looked as powerful and tough as he was, and things would get rough. Neither man would protest, so the delighted judges would let it go the distance. Although he was usually smaller than the other man, Bill was always tougher, and in the end the judges would disqualify him for the inconvenience of having to revive the other man and wipe the blood off the floor.
We traveled up to Canada one weekend for a big tournament, and Sensei, Michael and I were invited to spend two nights in the apartment of a young kung fu teacher, one of the organizers of the tournament. He was a friendly guy who spent a whole afternoon teaching Michael and me some exotic combinations with names like Monkey Climbs the Tree and Splits the Coconut. This involved running straight at your opponent, stepping up onto his thighs as if climbing a ladder and then pounding straight down on his head with your clenched fist. The first night he stayed up until 4:00 A.M. with Michael and me, talking about kung fu and telling us about his own experiences as a student. Sensei was out carousing with some of his old buddies and didn’t return until long after dawn. That day was the tournament, but Michael and I were so tired from having stayed up all night that we both bombed out early. The man we stayed with ended up winning the Grand Championship that night, though, with Michael and me at ringside shouting our lungs out and having a ball. Afterward a big group of us went to a restaurant to celebrate, then back to the champion’s apartment. I thought it was to go to bed, but it turned out that Sensei just wanted to change before going out for some real partying.
“Hey, Mike, Barabbas, look alive. How would you boys like to get your cherries popped?” he asked. “I met two nice ladies tonight who’d love to help a couple of kung fu students work on their internal energy!”
Michael and I both flushed red and declined. “Oh, don’t be a couple of pussies! Come on, you wanna know what their names are? Auggie Doggie and Doggie Daddy! They both have false teeth, so they’ll gum you if you’re real nice!” He was having a great time, but our host could see how miserable Michael and I were, so he persuaded Sensei and the rest of his friends to let the two of us go to bed. “OK, but we’re gonna bring Auggie Doggie and Doggie Daddy back here for you,” Sensei promised. “If you feel something fat and warm and sticky crawl into your sleeping bags tonight, don’t piss your pants!”
After they all left, Michael and I panicked. We were sure he was going to come back with those women to humiliate us, so we left the apartment with the idea of spending the night in Sensei’s car, as we had at camp, but then we realized that this would be the first place he would look. We ended up finding a car with an open door at the far end of the apartment complex’s parking lot and crashing there. Neither of us could sleep. At some point in the night Michael said, “If you tell any of my brothers about this I’ll cut your balls off.”
“Why would I tell them, for Chrissake? I chickened out too, you know.”
“Fuck you! You chickened out, I didn’t! I don’t care, I could do that, no problem. It’s just I’m not going to do it with somebody ugly.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
Silence for about ten minutes.
“OK, Barabbas, you’re the smart guy. What the fuck does it mean?”
“What?”
“That they’re gonna ‘pop our cherries.’ What the fuck is the cherry?”
“I have no idea! Why do you think I’m sitting down here? It’s probably some weird thing where they stick something like a cherry up your ass and then pull it out and eat it. I don’t know.”
Michael’s face puckered and creased up so violently that he looked like a shih tzu dog. “Fuck that! I am never, ever gonna watch somebody eat something that came out of my ass!”
“Me neither,” I hastened to agree.
“Jesus! There’d be shit all over it! What the fuck’s the matter with those people? Man, now look what you did—you made me want to puke! What’d you have to tell me that for, you asshole?”
“You asked, so I told you! It’s just a guess, I don’t know.”
Silence for another ten minutes. Then Michael, looking out at the empty lot and shaking his head, muttered, “I hope that’s not part of the black-belt test.”
The school year passed quickly; I made it to the end of Speak Chinese, Volume I, finished the readings and wrote the papers for the Chinese history course, and completed not one but several scrolls featuring T’ang dynasty poets standing on mountaintops admiring mist-shrouded waterfalls. In fact, I took to paying for my kung fu lessons by selling the paintings for twenty or thirty dollars apiece. I found customers by hanging them from the branches of trees at local Arts and Crafts fairs, sitting underneath them and playing the cello to attract attention. My best customer of all, ironically enough, was the vice principal of the high school. He couldn’t turn that ocean liner around for me, but he wasn’t going to let me starve out there on the water either. He bought paintings every time I showed up at one of those fairs.
What I was really waiting for was the Ch’ing Game, scheduled for the next-to-last week of school. No one in our world history class had any idea that I had been doing all of that preparatory work, so I looked forward to surprising everyone by making the game especially fun by being a damn realistic emperor. I knew how the ministries of finance, war, agriculture and foreign affairs operated, and I had carefully planned out what to do in case of internal rebellion, barbarian attack, famine, flood, locust infestation, or even my own early demise due to sickness or assassination. The game required that for the entire week we twenty-five students would be excused from most of our other classes and had to stay in character all day long while Mr. Rowland, who played The Will of Heaven, challenged us with the unexpected. The most attractive aspect of the exercise was that for the first time I (who had never been chosen with any enthusiasm for even so much as a softball team) would be in a position of social status, and I planned to make good use of the opportunity. I wasn’t going to be an asshole emperor, a corrupt, paranoid, harebrained despot like so many of the real ones; I intended to be such a wise, humane, competent and good-humored emperor that it would be remembered long after the game was over, particularly at prom time.
My only worry was that during our weekly after-school sessions I had noticed a change coming over Mr. Rowland. He seemed preoccupied, as if he had found something more interesting than world history but couldn’t decide whether to tell me about it or not. A month before the Ch’ing Game he confided in me: he had become a Christian Scientist and was experiencing supernatural visions. While reading the newspaper one morning the word “Lebanon” suddenly leaped right off the page and hung in the air in front of him, he told me, then seemed to explode and bathe him in a shower of dazzling light. Another day he leaned forward and asked, “You saw that it was raining out today, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“When I rode my bicycle to school this morning, the rain parted for me.”
“Wow.”
“It can’t be a coincidence. I’m thinking of giving up all of my material possessions and going to Lebanon to help.”
All I could think was You’ve been so good to me, if you want to give everything away and wander the desert in rags I won’t say a word to anyone, but just hang on until the Ch’ing Game is over.
Two weeks before the game was to begin Mr. Rowland led a student government club field trip down to Washington, D.C., for the weekend. On the morning they were to leave he got frustrated by how slowly the hotel was checking the group out, so he called in a bomb threat from his hotel room, thinking that this would be one way to get everybody into the charter bus quickly. It was a disaster—he was fired immediately, and our substitute teacher, who had never heard of the Ch’ing Game, finished out the year with a series of lectures on the Soviet Union. Several weeks after the hotel incident Mr. Rowland showed up at my h
ouse one Saturday morning looking gaunt but determined. He had several huge boxes tied to the back of his bicycle.
“I’m leaving for Lebanon tomorrow. These are all my books about China from the M.A. courses I took,” he said. “I won’t be needing them, obviously, and I think you ought to have them.” Most of them were university press hardcovers; if bought new, the collection would have cost thousands of dollars.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” I said.
“Well, do you have any money? Those were pretty expensive books.”
“No, actually. I don’t have any money.”
He grinned. “That’s OK! Just thought I’d ask. Hey, sorry about the Ch’ing Game. You really worked hard for that. But that effort wasn’t wasted, I guarantee you. You’ll know what I mean someday. I guess not everything works out the way you want it to, though, huh?”
There it was again: my father’s philosophy, leaking out even in fanatical Christianity. Rick der Stick got on his bicycle, waved good-bye vigorously, then rode off to the wars, and the summer officially began.
10
The summer of 1975 was especially hot and humid, making my daytime workouts with Michael and our evening lessons at the lakeside bar almost unbearable. We worked out a system of reward and punishment where, if one of us scored a point on the other, he got to dip his bandanna in a pail of fresh cold water or run underneath one of the neighbors’ lawn sprinklers, while the loser had to do push-ups in the sun. Immediately after lessons we ran straight into the muddy lake and stayed there for half an hour. When we climbed out of the water, one of Sensei’s friends who worked at the bar always had a bottle of Blue Nun sitting in an ice bucket waiting for us.
