Lost In Place

by Mark Salzman

  After Bill’s comment about my attitude toward Sensei showing through too clearly, I made an effort to be respectful of the Master and more understanding of his situation. It was true that without realizing it I had developed the idea that I could pay my tuition and learn all of his skills without having to pay attention to him as a man. But in his own inarticulate way Sensei was letting me know that I couldn’t learn his skills if I didn’t accept the whole package. If I ever wanted to fight like him, or break as many bricks as he could, I was going to have to think more like him and appreciate what had brought him where he was.

  That summer I tried to look at him in a different light, to convince myself that even though his behavior and thinking were different from mine or my father’s, they were still legitimate in their own way. My father was often depressed, and I respected that, so who was I to say that Sensei’s morose hostility was bad?

  I think Sensei noticed my attempt to change my attitude, because that summer he did start to treat me better. He began speaking to me without using sarcasm in his voice or acting as if he were talking to a baby, for example, and when he explained techniques he would look me straight in the eye without glowering. My sparring ability did improve slowly, and once I began winning matches in tournaments he took to standing by the ringside with his arms folded and watching, nodding when he approved of something I had done and coaching me with hand and eye signals.

  Just as I was beginning to feel more comfortable around Sensei, however, an accident occurred that threw me right back into a state of moral confusion. A brown belt who was formally studying karate with someone else but who had known Sensei for many years was in town one night and joined us for a workout. It happened that one of Sensei’s black belts from Norwalk showed up on the same night, and the two of them decided to work on their sparring after class. They were both competitive, and with Sensei watching closely there was a lot at stake. In sparring somebody often gets a little overexcited, or moves forward at the same moment that the other throws a punch, so that he gets hit a little harder than he would have liked. Then the pace steps up. This is what happened that night. After a few minutes we heard another hard hit and the pace went up another notch.

  “Everything cool here?” Sensei asked.

  “Yeah, fine,” they both said through gritted teeth, so Sensei let them continue.

  They slowed down a bit, but not for long. About three minutes after the pause the pace built up again. The black belt spun around with a spinning back-heel kick that was meant to whiz past the other man’s face, but the brown belt unexpectedly darted forward at that exact moment. The kick landed right on his mouth with a sickening crunch. He fell backward, and when he sat up we could see that the lower part of his face was caved in. Blood and teeth were everywhere.

  Showing no sign of panic, Sensei picked up all of the teeth, made sure that the man could be safely moved, then calmly led him to his Cougar and raced him to the hospital. Eventually he had to have both his upper and lower jaw rebuilt, his mouth wired shut, and most of his teeth replanted. We were told he wouldn’t be able to eat solid food for a year. For several weeks thereafter I had a difficult time sparring because I was so afraid of being hit in the face, and some nights I could barely make myself go to lessons. Even Michael seemed shaken for a while.

  The summer ended at last and I started the eleventh grade. Without Mr. Rowland championing me I had lost some academic momentum, but two new teachers quickly picked up where he had left off. One was Al Leighton, a no-nonsense U.S. history teacher with a booming voice and loads of charisma who thought it was about time that I focused some attention on my own culture, and the other was Jacob Friedman, a language teacher who had been on sabbatical the previous year. During our first day of French class he explained that he had spent his sabbatical year in Taiwan, realizing a long-standing dream of learning to speak, read and write Chinese. It took an effort of will for me to sit still for the rest of the hour; when the bell rang I practically knocked him over when I rushed to his desk to beg him to help me with my Chinese. He agreed, as long as I didn’t mind having our lessons out in the corridors during his hall-monitor duty, a task he was only too happy to augment with learning.

  Just before Christmas I turned sixteen and got my driver’s license. The day after my test I asked a girl on a date and she said yes. Her name was Annette Guillaume, and I had first met her on one of my fruitless missions to her older sister Marie’s house. I’d had a crush on Marie for years—she was in Rick der Stick’s class with me—but she was permanently attached to an older guy who owned his own Volkswagen bug and had driven it to Mexico and back. One winter afternoon I rode my bicycle over to Marie’s house to say hello just in case anything had changed with the older guy (who was all of eighteen), but no, there he was in the living room talking with Marie’s mother about socialism. It was blizzarding out and I was covered with snow, so Marie said I should borrow some of her brother Jean-Rodolphe’s clothes and change down in the basement. When I went down there I scared her younger sister, who was also changing into dry clothes after spending the afternoon sledding. I saw only her face, but that was enough. A month later, when I got my license, I called her up and asked if she liked Chinese food. I figured she’d be impressed when I told her that our waiter was also my painting teacher.

  Our date was a success, though in an entirely unexpected way. I suppose I had fantasized that my first real date with a girl where we were alone in a restaurant and then in a car would be—or at least should be—worth writing about and sending off to Playboy, but instead what happened was that we started talking, and kept talking, and simply couldn’t stop talking, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Annette was smart and funny and, to my surprise, a lot like me: she got interested in things easily but was bored with school, she wasn’t very popular because she was seen as a goody-goody, she played a classical instrument and she liked her parents. To my adolescent male confusion, I realized that she seemed less interested in my kung fu skills than in my study of brush painting and calligraphy.

  When I drove Annette home she invited me in. I knew from experience that you didn’t just pop in to the Guillaumes’ house in the evening; you had to be prepared to think and talk intelligently. An evening there was like hanging out in a Paris café around the turn of the century. Annette’s father was a French Moroccan Jewish doctor—he’d patched me up after several of my kung fu mishaps—who smoked a pipe, played the violin and always had a recording of Bach’s violin sonatas and partitas playing in the background. Her mother was a German Catholic doctor (my sister’s pediatrician) and gourmet cook who wrote fiction in her spare time. Their three children were functionally trilingual, and they always had interesting people in their house sipping espresso, eating one of Mrs. Guillaume’s homemade tarts and discussing either art or international politics. I hesitated to enter; with my extremely long hair, double-knit Sears bell-bottom pants, dirty sneakers and swollen knuckles I worried that, having just taken their daughter out on a date in my dad’s rusted VW bus, I might fare poorly at Café Guillaume. As soon as I stepped in the door, however, Annette’s father nodded with approval, made a skyward flourish with his pipe and mentioned how much he had enjoyed my mother’s last recital. How glad I was that she played the harpsichord and not the accordion, and how glad I was that I finally had a girlfriend.

  Michael made no attempt to conceal the fact that he thought that Annette was pure trouble. Trouble in the sense that I would have to spend time with her when I should be working out. He was sulky for a few weeks and gave me the cold shoulder for the first half hour of each time we met, but once we got practicing, everything was like the way it had been before. In the meantime his brother Frank had decided to join us on the Path of Kung Fu. He was a student at Fairfield University by then, majoring in medieval studies, and managed to find us an empty classroom with mats on the floor that we could use for lessons. Sensei checked out the place and gave it the nod; we would all miss the Blue Nun parties by the l
ake, but it was getting too cold to work out in the open anyway.

  Frank also managed to find two complete suits of armor built for kendo, Japanese bamboo-sword fencing. The heavy suits were made of metal, bamboo and canvas and protected you from head to toe. Sensei was delighted; these suits would allow us to practice all-out, no-holds-barred fighting without the danger of accidents like the one that had crushed Brown Belt’s face earlier in the year. I hated fighting with those suits on, however; they were hot and cumbersome, and hard to see out of. Often you would get kicked in the head full force without even knowing a foot was coming your way, so you couldn’t even tense up to receive the blow. Most of all, I dreaded sparring with Bill when we wore those suits because even with sixteen-ounce boxing gloves on his hands and twenty pounds of armor on my body, a punch from him was an experience that I had no choice but to savor for days afterward.

  Having a roof over our heads improved Sensei’s mood for a few months. One night after class he handed Michael and me certificates for our green belts without testing us at all. “I’m not giving you these because you deserve ’em,” he said. “I’m giving ’em to you to see what you’ll do to earn ’em.” As he walked away he added, “But I wouldn’t give ’em if I didn’t think you would earn ’em.”

  His improved mood did not last long, however, and soon he was back in his funk, wondering aloud why he wasted his time with pussies like us and telling us over and over that not a single one of us would have lasted five minutes in the schools at which he had learned. “I give you two guys green belts and what happens? You slack off! You know what I had to do for my fucking belt tests? A couple of senior students would drive me to a fucking bar out in the middle of nowhere, pick the biggest motherfucker in there, go over to him and say, pointing at me, ‘See the guy over there? He just said you’re a fucking scumbag piece of shit,’ and then they’d sit back and watch. I let you guys off so fucking easy, and what do you do? Jerk off all day, that’s what. Why I waste my fucking time I’ll never know.”

  I must confess that in a sense Michael was right: Annette was trouble. Having an intelligent girlfriend made what I was going through at the Chinese Boxing Institute seem a whole lot less attractive. She never said a thing about it; it was just her presence—self-assured, relaxed and together in spite of not having the least idea how to break someone’s neck—that made me wonder how I had gone from wanting to be at one with the universe to letting a borderline sociopath scream at me twice a week.

  The decisive incident was Sensei’s lesson in strangulation. “I never taught any of you guys how to cut off somebody’s windpipe,” he said one evening after our warm-up drills. “I want a volunteer. Who’ll let me knock him out?”

  I didn’t think he could be serious, and even Michael looked uncertain. There was an awkward silence as we all grinned nervously, which only enraged Sensei.

  “I said I wanted a fucking volunteer!” he roared. “What, is everybody in this place a fucking pussy? I’ve been knocked out so many times I can’t even count—and by God, if I ever hesitated when my teacher asked for a volunteer he would have beaten me so bad I would have been in a hospital for a fucking week! So I’m gonna ask one last time, Who’s gonna fucking volunteer?”

  “I will, Sensei!” Michael blurted out. He jumped forward and stood at rigid attention to make up for his earlier indecision.

  “Sit down in front of me,” Sensei said curtly.

  Michael obeyed and Sensei came up from behind him, wrapped his arms around Michael’s neck and squeezed. Michael struggled to keep his arms at his sides, but as his face began to lose color he lost control and started to claw at Sensei’s arms. The Master was wrapped around him like a python, however, and could not be budged. In reality only a few seconds passed, but it seemed to take forever for Michael to lose consciousness. His eyes bugged out of his head and his body twitched and writhed in panic, but at last he went still, his eyes wide open and glassy. It was a shocking sight. I looked over at Frank, who was staring quietly at his unconscious brother with his arms folded tightly in front of him. Bill was frowning; this time he was the one letting his attitude show.

  “This is how you revive a guy,” Sensei said. He reached around and slapped Michael hard in the diaphragm, and like magic my friend popped straight up into the air. He was a bit disoriented; “What’s everybody looking at?” he asked several times. He didn’t remember any of it, and seemed to think that Sensei had not yet carried out the demonstration. Everyone was a little uncomfortable after this. It might have been my imagination, but I thought that even Sensei appeared a bit subdued for the rest of that night.

  That turned out to be my last lesson. I was upset over the strangulation tutorial, because it was obvious that we hadn’t learned anything. Who didn’t know that if you strangle a guy he’ll lose consciousness? And the slapping-the-stomach part—well, he could have just told us that and we would have believed him, for God’s sake. It was such a stupid way for Sensei to vent his temper that I knew I couldn’t continue with the lessons. I spent the next few days drafting a letter to him thanking him for what he had taught me and apologizing for letting him down, but explaining that the Path of the Warrior just wasn’t for me. I walked over to Michael’s house as I always did before we drove to lessons and handed him the envelope and asked him to give it to Sensei.

  “What is it?” he asked benignly. He had no idea what I had been brooding about.

  “I’m quitting lessons.”

  At first Michael thought I was joking. When he realized that I was serious, I saw where the expression “his face fell” came from. It was as if all the muscles in his face went loose, and he looked about five years old.

  “You’re cradding lessons?” he asked, in a strange, thin voice. “Cradder” was a word he had made up to describe the sort of person who takes karate for a few months, practices on weekends and then quits when it gets tough. Here he had turned the word into a verb.

  “Yeah, I guess I am.” I held my breath waiting to see what his second reaction was going to be, and when it came it was pretty much what I would have predicted. His expression turned to one of sheer disgust.

  “Sure, I’ll give him the letter, cradder.” He put it in his pocket, climbed into his car, slammed the door and drove away, leaving me to wonder how to spend my first Thursday night in nearly three years away from him.

  11

  Once I had cradded lessons, and without Michael to practice with or compete against, my commitment to martial arts began to weaken. Neither Annette nor my family, nor her family nor anyone else, for that matter, seemed disappointed that I was no longer training to become an ass-kicking motherfucker. That made me wonder if the whole thing hadn’t been a mistake to begin with. I told my dad one evening as we tried to find the planet Neptune that I had doubts I would ever become a black belt.

  “You mean you’re not going to be able to break flaming concrete slabs after all? I was counting on that, you know.”

  “It’s not funny! I just wasted three years for nothing.”

  “What do you mean? You had a good time with that kung fu stuff, didn’t you? You can’t expect everything you try to lead to a finish line somewhere. You have to take a few wrong turns, hit a few dead ends, get mad and turn around. Everybody does—we’re all the same that way.”

  “Oh, yeah? What about you? You liked astronomy and painting as a kid, and here we are looking for a planet through the telescope and you paint every night. You don’t seem to have hit any dead ends.”

  “Hold on, I think I see something. You want to go get the nine-millimeter eyepiece?”

  Got him. He was stalling for time to think. I went to the car to fetch the eyepiece, but this time, instead of walking the way a cat walks, free and easy, I was shuffling. It was an all-too-familiar teenage situation: I was arguing a point with my dad and felt driven to try to win the argument, but if I did, it meant that I was right about something depressing—in this case that three years of my life had been a sham.


  He put the eyepiece in and looked for a while. “Here, see if you can see anything.”

  I looked, but couldn’t tell if the dim object in view was a planet or just a star made to appear slightly fuzzy by our unstable atmosphere.

  “I think if it was Neptune, we’d know it, Dad.”

  “Yeah. If we had just a few more inches of mirror.… Oh, well.” He backed up and looked upward, presumably deciding what to look for next.

  “So you think I haven’t hit any dead ends, eh?” he asked abruptly.

  “I never saw any pictures of you wearing baldhead wigs or trying to eat peas with sticks.”

  “Well, OK. You have more … panache than I ever did, I’ll grant you that. And yes, I was lucky to find two things that I’ve stayed interested in all my life. But what about this: I chose social work as a career because I thought I could save people or solve their problems. I had big ideas; I was full of compassion. By the time I realized how hopeless the situation is—or at least how hopeless I think it is—and saw that it was a dead end, I’d driven so far down the road I couldn’t afford to back out. So be glad you wore your wig and ate peas with sticks early and didn’t make kung fu your college major. Now you know you won’t have to do it for a living.”

  “Dad, you’re talking about college. What were you like when you were my age? Come to think of it, I don’t know anything about you before I was born! You’ve never told me anything about what you were like as a kid. I don’t know any stories about your childhood at all.”

  He kept looking for Neptune.

  “Well?”

  “Well what? There’s nothing to tell.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “Yeah, it is. I was moody and shy and not very interesting. Just like now. What else do you want me to say?”

  At first I tried to keep in shape on my own, but instead of being a challenge, as in the old days, kung fu had become tedious. Every punch and kick felt sloppy and slow, as if I had weights strapped to my limbs, and I felt winded all the time. It was a dead end. Once the kung fu practice stopped, everything else followed. I stopped brush painting (all of a sudden I wondered, Why the hell am I painting little guys with robes and topknots staring at waterfalls? I’ve never even seen a waterfall, let alone a guy with a topknot), put the Chinese history and philosophy books into the crawl space and suddenly found it ludicrous to think that while even Stone Age tribesmen wore moccasins, I was going barefoot. I kept up with the Chinese lessons, but only because I liked Mr. Friedman so much and felt guilty about having already let one teacher down.