The Black Stiletto

by Raymond Benson

  Well, we started dating. Mack and me. He was born and raised in Manhattan and was nineteen years old, as I suspected. I didn’t tell him my real age. Mack wanted to be a boxer, naturally. As I said, he’d become pretty good in the ring since I busted his nose. To tell the truth, the broken nose made him more handsome. For the first time in my life, I started having feelings for the opposite sex. In a way, I was relieved—the experience with Douglas hadn’t totally ruined me.

  The first time I let him kiss me was on Thanksgiving Day. Freddie cooked a big dinner and I helped. Freddie was a pretty good cook, but I was even better. I guess some of my mom’s ability rubbed off on me. Anyway, we invited a few of our closer friends from the gym—Mack among them—and Lucy and Sam.

  It was a grand day and we all stuffed ourselves. While everyone was sitting around, completely satiated, Mack helped me clean up the kitchen. I was about to put away a pot or something, turned around, and there he was. He put his arms around me, leaned in, and kissed me. I still had the pot in my hands! Anyway, it was nice, so I put down the pot and put my arms around him. I’d never kissed like that—on the mouth and, you know, with the tongue—and I really enjoyed it. We spent the rest of the afternoon “making out.”

  I guess from then on we were sort of an item. A couple of times we double-dated with Lucy and Sam. I still didn’t like Sam. He was a cad. He flirted with me behind Lucy’s back. Once I asked him, “Isn’t Lucy your girlfriend?” He answered, “Yeah, sure, but that doesn’t mean I can’t sample other items on the menu.” I wanted to break his nose. I almost told Lucy what he was doing, but I figured it would just hurt her. She liked him too much, although I still didn’t see why.

  It was New Year’s Eve, going into 1954, when I lost my virginity. Well, technically I lost it with Douglas, the bastard, but the first time I wanted to “do it” was after the party we had at the gym. Like at Thanksgiving, Freddie and I threw a small party, had a great dinner, lots of drinks—I was still legally too young to drink, but I did—and champagne. Okay, so I was pretty smashed when I took Mack up to my room. But I was perfectly aware of what I was doing. I wanted to. So did he—to state the obvious. What I remember of the event was nothing like the fireworks I expected.

  It was all right. I think I mostly just enjoyed the intimacy and the closeness more than the actual sex act.

  And then the weirdest thing happened.

  Mack didn’t show up for a week. He didn’t call or nothing. And would you believe—I didn’t have his phone number, and the one Freddie had for Mack no longer worked. I couldn’t call him. I didn’t even know where he lived, only that it was somewhere uptown in the East Twenties. Was he hurt? Sick? What the heck was wrong? He’d certainly acted like he enjoyed what we did on New Year’s Eve, so I couldn’t imagine that he might not like me anymore. I had a good cry with Lucy and she told me not to worry—Mack would come around. Maybe he had to go out of town or something and couldn’t get word to me.

  Anyway, I didn’t hear from Mack for two months. I was hurt and angry, but eventually I forgot about him. I went about my business, working at the gym, training, and trying to have fun. I didn’t date anyone else.

  And then in March, Mack showed up. He walked in as if he’d never been gone, started using the speed bag, and ignored me. I couldn’t believe it. I overheard some of the guys asking him where he’d been, and Mack told them he’d moved and just “hadn’t felt like coming.” Well, everyone knew we’d been dating, so they all figured it was my fault or something. I was furious. The famous Judy Cooper temper reared its ugly head.

  I went up to him and demanded to know why he hadn’t called or come to see me. Mack just shrugged and said he didn’t want to.

  “Why not?” I asked. I was near tears, I was so mad. “I thought you liked me!”

  He just looked at me with an expression of disgust—that’s the only way I can describe it—and he said, “Not after that night.”

  Then he walked away.

  I could’ve killed him.

  Instead, I went over to where we kept the boxing gloves for people to rent. I put a pair on, went over to Jimmy, one of my friends at the gym, and asked him to tie them. Jimmy was a big Negro who didn’t say much, but he asked, “What is it you-za gonna do, Judy?”

  “You watch,” I answered.

  I climbed through the ropes and jumped into the ring. I stood in the middle and shouted to Mack, “Get up here, you louse!”

  Mack just laughed.

  “What’s wrong, afraid a girl will beat you?” I taunted. That got him. Some of the men were urging him to get up there and face me.

  “What, are you scared?” I taunted.

  By then, Freddie had walked into the room. “Judy! Get down!” he ordered.

  “No, Freddie. This is between me and Mack,” I said.

  I guess he knew me well enough by then to know I was pretty stubborn. I wasn’t getting out of the ring.

  Finally, Mack couldn’t take the ribbing the other guys were throwing at him. He put on some gloves and got in the ring with me. Freddie climbed in to referee.

  “I want a real match,” I told Mack. “No pulling back because I’m a girl. I’m playing for keeps, so you’d better, too.” Then I turned to Freddie. “I mean it. Treat this for real.”

  “Judy, are you sure about this?” he asked.

  “Absolutely. I want to teach this coward a lesson.”

  That got Mack riled up. “Fine,” he said. “I’m gonna beat your ass, slut.”

  I couldn’t believe he called me that. I almost tore into him right then, but Freddie got between us. He pushed me to my corner and waited until Mack was in his. Then we started the match.

  Round one.

  I moved to the center of the ring and met Mack there. He swung at me hard and connected with the side of my head. I felt it, too, but it didn’t stop me from delivering a powerful right hook—right on his nose! Mack stumbled back, but I kept moving forward. A jab, a cross, another jab, and a second cross. All four connected. I followed this barrage with an uppercut and then a slam into his stomach, which he didn’t expect.

  He moved back, an expression of total shock and surprise on his face. We pranced around the ring for another few seconds, and then I took the offensive. I moved in close and delivered a hard right hook and backed it up with a jab. Mack swung at me but I blocked the blow, ducked, and hit him with another uppercut. I followed this with two hard jabs and then a powerful cross.

  Mack went down and didn’t get up. It was over before round two.

  Everyone in the room applauded and cheered for me. It felt great. Even Freddie gave me a huge grin and patted me on the back.

  Mack never came back to the Second Avenue Gym.

  Good riddance.

  6

  Judy’s Diary

  1958

  I spent the rest of 1954 training, keeping fit, working in the gym, seeing Lucy when I could, and, for the first time in my life, having fun. Life was good. Freddie was a great “foster father” and I loved him. We became very close that year. I learned that he had been an up-and-coming boxer in the late thirties and early forties, but the mob had shut him out when he refused to play by their rules. He told me the Italian Mafia had such control over professional boxing that it was impossible to avoid them. I didn’t know what the Mafia was until Freddie explained it to me. He said there were “families” that had a lot of money and basically ran most of the illegal activities in the city. Gambling houses, prostitution, drugs, protection rackets, bookmaking—that sort of stuff. And they had their hands all over boxing.

  It was a good thing I was a girl and didn’t have any aspirations to get involved with those guys. Little did I know, however, I would one day get in bed with them, so to speak.

  For the most part, I ignored what was going on in the world. I was well aware of the Communists and how everyone was afraid of them. President Eisenhower made that speech about the dominos. People talked a lot about the atom bomb. I tried not to think
about any of that. I was in my own little cocoon; my life took up a small section of a few city blocks of Manhattan. Every now and then Lucy and I would go see a movie. I saw my first Alfred Hitchcock picture that year—Rear Window—and it scared the bejesus out of me! I liked listening to the new records on the East Side Diner’s jukebox. I remember playing “Mr. Sandman” by the Chordettes over and over until Lucy wanted to scream, ha ha!

  Anyway, I’m skipping ahead to the spring of 1955, when I was seventeen. In February of that year, Freddie allowed a martial arts tournament to be held at the Second Avenue Gym. I didn’t know what martial arts were and neither did anyone else at the gym. When Freddie said a Japanese trainer had organized the event, everyone was suspicious. World War II had ended just ten years earlier, so anything Japanese was still not trusted. Freddie told me the man’s name was Soichiro, but he had recently become an American citizen. He was originally from Japan and had family that had moved to America in the thirties. Supposedly they experienced a lot of hardships during the war years because Americans didn’t like the Japanese—or the Germans and Italians, for that matter.

  According to Freddie, in 1953 the Strategic Air Command invited Japanese martial arts instructors to visit American SAC bases for training programs. This opened communication between the U.S. and Japan, instigating a migration of many more instructors who set up shop in Asian neighborhoods around the country. Soichiro was one of these and he opened a small studio in Manhattan that practiced Asian fighting techniques. They had funny names like judo and karate. I had no idea what to expect. None of us had ever seen this stuff before.

  On the day of the event, I helped Freddie with all the logistical and administration duties for the tournament. We rented a bunch of folding chairs and set them up, and I was in charge of collecting money and organizing the teams. Nearly everybody who participated in the tournament was Asian. Many couldn’t speak English. Their ages ran from really little—six or seven years old—to middle-age. Soichiro himself was in his forties, I think. It’s hard to tell with Asians. They always look younger than they are. But I think he was probably the same age as Freddie.

  Some of the gym’s regular patrons came to watch the tournament, too. Jimmy was there with a small entourage of colored guys. I think everyone was curious about this martial arts business. Apparently it had existed in Asia for centuries, but we were just learning about it in the USA.

  The tournament was a major revelation for me.

  These guys got in the ring without boxing gloves or any other protection—they all wore white robes that looked like something you’d wear when you’re having breakfast—and then they threw each other around like they weighed nothing! It was simply amazing. The stuff they called judo was like wrestling—that’s the only way I can describe it—but they didn’t really grapple much with each other; instead, the opponents would do a ceremonial bow to each other and then stand in a funny position, grab the other guy, and before you could blink, one was thrown over his opponent’s back! Wham! I didn’t understand how they did it, but they made it look easy. The other martial art, karate, seemed more brutal. In this one, opponents would hold their hands flat and spear-like—and they’d chop and jab with them, as well as kick with bare feet. The kicks were like circus acrobatics. Guys would jump really high, swirl around quickly, and bam!—a foot in the face. I’d never seen anything like it.

  Well, after watching that all day, I was hooked. I wanted to learn it. I told Freddie that and he shrugged. “I don’t know if they let girls, but you can ask Soichiro,” he said.

  “You don’t mind, do you, Freddie?”

  “I don’t care, Judy. I just don’t want you to get hurt. That looks like pretty dangerous stuff.”

  “I can handle it.”

  So I went over to Soichiro. They called him a “sensei,” whatever that was. I guess it meant “trainer” in Japanese. I introduced myself and told him I wanted martial arts lessons. Soichiro had an expressionless face. He didn’t smile. He didn’t frown. It was just blankly serious. He looked at me as if I were an insignificant bug.

  “You girl,” he said.

  “I am. Does that matter?”

  Soichiro blinked a couple of times, but his expression didn’t change. I could sense, though, that the wheels were turning inside his head. I also got a very nice feeling from him. My intuition confirmed he was a nice man.

  “All right,” he finally answered.

  I wanted to hug him but instead I held out my hand to shake his. He didn’t take it, though. Instead, he bowed. So I awkwardly did the same. He removed a business card from his pocket and handed it to me with both hands. It had the name and address on it. Studio Tokyo. In the West Village. That wasn’t far.

  “Great,” I said.

  “Arigato,” he replied. I later learned that was Japanese for “thank you.”

  So, for the next year, dear diary, I took martial arts lessons from Soichiro at Studio Tokyo. I continued my training with Freddie, too. It cost me money for the sessions with Soichiro, but I went twice a week at first and then increased visits to three times a week. I started in a beginners’ class and I was the only girl. Soichiro called it kihon and it was very basic. We learned fundamentals of judo and karate, and practiced extremely simple stuff. Lots of floor exercises and such. Mostly he taught us how important it was to be humble and polite to each other. That was why we bowed to our opponents before sparring.

  After six months, Soichiro moved me into a more advanced karate class because I was better at that than at judo. I started learning what the sensei called kata, which consisted of very formal movements representing attack and defense postures.

  Eventually I moved on to kumite, which was actual sparring with opponents. I had to practice at home, conditioning my hands and feet on blocks of wood and stone to toughen them up. It hurt like the dickens in the beginning, but I developed very hard calluses on the edges of my hands. Not very ladylike, but I didn’t care. I wore one of those white robes, too, with white pants. They were similar to pajamas, I guess, and in fact the word for them, karategi, means “karate pajamas.” In reality they are kind of a kimono and pants. Students advanced in rank denoted by the color of the belt worn with the karategi. I started with white, of course, which was the lowest rank. In six months I had gone through yellow and was working on green. It would take another year to get a blue. It was very hard work, but Soichiro told me privately that I was a better student than many of the males in his classes. I felt proud and pleased.

  I remember one class very distinctly. It occurred in January 1956. I was eighteen years old.

  For some odd reason, I was the only one who showed up for class. I found out later that Soichiro wanted to give me a private lesson, but at the time he pretended shock that no other student “bothered to show up for his honorable class.” Anyway, Soichiro wanted me to learn some advanced self-defense moves, specifically because I was female. He told me, “In this world, men take advantage of women.” Ha! I could’ve told him some stories about that. At any rate, he picked up a billy club and told me to think of him as an attacker on the street. How would I defend myself? I went through everything I’d been taught so far, but he always managed to break through my defenses and almost hit me, but he’d stop just before the club actually struck. It was very frustrating. Finally, Soichiro stopped the attack and told me to relax and breathe. He was very insistent on relaxing and breathing. I heard those two words a million times in his classes. Anyway, he asked me, “You know where one of most vulnerable spots is on man?”

  Dumb me, I went, “Huh?”

  “Kick him in private area.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Soichiro stood in front of me with his legs wide apart. “Look how I stand. Easy to kick between legs. Just aim and kick. You disable opponent.”

  “But, that’s against the rules, ain’t it?” I asked, embarrassed and not a little shocked.

  “No. On street you defend yourself best way you know how. In real situa
tion, no rules. Now try.”

  “What?”

  “Try kick me.”

  “Sensei, I can’t do that. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Do not fear. I will block. Come.”

  I prepared myself and he raised the club. He came at me. I eyed the apex where his legs met and lashed out with my long leg. Soichiro raised his right knee so quickly that I barely saw it. He slammed it into my calf, knocking my leg off target. It really hurt, but I got the idea.

  “No one on street know that block,” he said. “You not miss attacker on street.”

  Nodding, I rubbed my leg.

  “Lesson over. See you next week.” And he bowed.

  By the fall of 1956, I was a blue belt. That was pretty high. I just needed to get through brown and advanced-brown, and then I’d get my black belt. That was the highest you could get—except there were also ten levels of black belt, ha ha.

  One night after a lesson with Soichiro, I set out on the walk home to the gym from the West Village. I usually walked the distance between Second Avenue and Christopher Street, which was where Studio Tokyo was located. It was a nice hike. Anyway, it was dark but not very late, not even ten o’clock. I headed toward Washington Square Park, my usual route. Just before I reached it, three hoodlums appeared out of nowhere and confronted me on the street. They wore black leather jackets and looked like characters from that Marlon Brando movie, The Wild One. Probably in their early twenties. White guys.

  “Hey, baby, where you goin’?” one jeered.

  I tried to ignore and push past them, but they surrounded me and wouldn’t let me through.

  “What’s a pretty girl like you doin’ out so late? It’s dangerous on the streets. You might need us to protect you,” another goaded.

  “Get out of my way, please,” I said. My nerves were setting off alarms, that animal instinct of mine was going nuts. Danger, danger! I felt my adrenaline soar through my body—I was ready for fight or flight, and I knew it was probably going to be fight.