Lost In Place (6 page)

I did not fare well in the Circle of Fighting. I had never participated in a contact sport in my life, much less ever been in a fight, so I had no experience to draw on at all. I was small, terrified of being hit, and far from my goal of being impervious to pain. Because I practiced so much at home my punches and kicks came to look pretty good, and after seeing me shadowbox, most people expected me to be a challenging sparring partner. But after hearing me throw up with anxiety before lessons, then watching me step into the Circle and have my anxieties justified in every conceivable way, these same people often wondered aloud what on earth I was doing in a kung fu school. I loathed sparring, not because I had any moral objection to fighting, but because I was so excruciatingly bad at it. Every time I heard Sensei give out the command, “Bow to me—bow to each other—fight!” I felt my will to master kung fu turn to jelly. I just couldn’t be aggressive, and to be any good at all at sparring you must learn to assert yourself. When an opportunity presents itself and your opponent shows an opening or weakness, you have to decide instantly to attack, and you must do so with total commitment. You can’t attack halfheartedly, just to see how it goes, and if things look good then follow through. You get hurt that way, for the same reason that a gymnast can’t do a backflip at half speed just to make sure it’s safe. I never fully grasped this principle, however, so I got hurt a lot and rarely scored any points. But after being punched or kicked, I always managed to recover my balance and strike a good-looking traditional posture.

“He gets the
living shit
kicked out of him every time, but he sure looks good, don’t he?” Sensei O’Keefe used to say when he was in a good mood, and everybody would laugh, including me. I much preferred ridicule to the other kind of critique he gave me, which he offered when he was in a bad mood or had been drinking or—which was the usual case—both, and it went something like this: “Listen, candy-ass, do you think if you’re jumped by three assholes who don’t give a shit whether you live or die that you’re gonna live if you fight like that? I don’t want to see any more of that
pussy
bullshit, I want you to do what I’ve been telling you every goddamned lesson, which is: Forget all your fancy book learning and your pretty technique and forget about protecting your pretty little face! All that doesn’t mean shit in the street! You live in real life, not some ivory tower! Real life is about life and death, goddammit! You’re just another momma’s boy smart-ass who thinks he’s too good to have to mess with real life, but it’s gonna stare you in the face someday, candy-ass, and what are you gonna do about it? When you can’t run home to your musical mommy and your
needlepointing
daddy”—my father had once worked on a needlepoint of an Edward Hopper painting while waiting for me in the parking lot of the Boxing Institute—“in your safe little house in the suburbs, huh? I’ll tell you what’ll happen, candy-ass! You’re gonna get ripped to pieces, and you’re gonna wonder just before getting your head blown off why somebody didn’t prepare you for it. So do yourself a favor and forget about being afraid to get hurt and fight, for Chrissake! There’s no room for pussies in this house.”

Occasionally, when Sensei O’Keefe decided we needed “a little kick in the ass” to move forward in the arts, he led
us through special training exercises, which included a kind of sparring where all the students stood in a circle and each one was assigned a number. One person stood in the center. When Sensei O’Keefe yelled out numbers, each person hearing his number called was to attack the person in the center and keep up the assault until he heard his number called out again. This meant that the person in the center could have as many as five people at a time punching and kicking at him, and if you got too tired to defend yourself, you just got punched and kicked more; no one dared let up because Sensei said that since no one lets up on the streets we had to prepare ourselves accordingly. Sometimes, especially if he’d had too much to drink before the lesson, Sensei would forget which numbers he’d called and it would take forever to clear the Circle. At other times he felt the person in the center wasn’t trying hard enough. In that case, Sensei would let out a horrifying scream, jump past the assigned attackers and give the student in the center a beating to remember. When he did that to me one night he hit me so hard on the side of the head that I crashed into a wall and brought a whole shelf of trophies down with me. I sustained a bruise on my temple so deep that it took several days to rise to the surface and form a scab.

Another special exercise was called Cemetery Sparring. We split up into two teams—those with shirts and those without—and left the school separately to hide at opposite ends of a nearby cemetery under cover of night. Practicing our stealth skills, we were to slowly converge on the field of honor and do battle. If we received a decisive blow we had to lie “dead on the field” until the end of the exercise. There was quite a bit of disagreement over what constituted a decisive blow, however, so many of the individual
battles went on until one of the parties could in fact do little else but lie on the field. The game ended when one team had been entirely eliminated; then that team had to do one hundred push-ups and run a mile as punishment for losing. Meanwhile, Sensei O’Keefe was a free agent, and wandered around the cemetery on his own to observe or attack as the spirit moved him. The angriest I think I ever saw him was the night he discovered a student hiding in a tree, hoping to survive the game without having to fight at all. That student did not return for lessons, needless to say.

The most reflective I ever saw Sensei O’Keefe was also during one of these cemetery exercises. He had been smoking pot earlier in the evening, which usually made him more subdued than the drinking did. As usual, I was one of the first to die on the field, so I’d had plenty of time to enjoy the crisp fall air and a lovely view of the night sky accompanied by the shouts, smacks and thuds of glorious combat all around me. By the end of the game Bill, the huge man I liked so much, was the only man standing. Just as he prepared to announce that the game was over and we could all stand up, Sensei O’Keefe came flying out from behind a gravestone and, with a bloodcurdling scream, attacked Bill with such ferocity that I thought Sensei might kill him. Bill was not a candy-ass like me, though; he took it all and gave nearly as much back. But exhausted from all his previous battles he finally fell, bleeding from the nose and mouth and with angry red welts rising all over his ribs and back. He went down fighting, and without uttering a single groan or complaint, which explained why Sensei O’Keefe respected Bill more than any of his other students.

Pleased with Bill’s example of courage and determination,
and perhaps a bit relieved that he had not lost the battle himself, Sensei O’Keefe called us all together for a little talk. We sat cross-legged in a tight circle around a nineteenth-century grave and Sensei said: “Listen up. You’re all here because you want to understand the Path of the Warriors who came long before you. You want to know what this is all about; you want to know what kung fu really means. I’ll tell you what it’s all about. It’s not about winning or losing or wearing a brown belt or a black belt—it’s about
learning to die well
. If you find yourself cornered in an alley someday and five guys are bearing down on you with baseball bats or shotguns, you might know you don’t stand a chance. You might know that you’re gonna die, and that there’s nothing you can do to stop those bastards from killing you. But you know what a warrior does then? He doesn’t give those bastards the satisfaction of seeing him flinch. He doesn’t whine or beg for his life; he dives
right the fuck in
and he takes at least one of those sons of bitches with him when he goes down—that’s what he does. If you train with that in your head, if you train like your life depends on it, and if you act like
everything you do
might be the last thing you do on earth, then you’ll become a master and you’ll wear the black belt like me. Otherwise, you’ll always be just another bullshit karate student who breaks a couple of boards on weekends, but never really understands what the Path is all about.”

We bowed to him and to one another, uttered our little prayer about kung fu being our secret, and then, without having to be told, ran the punitive mile at top speed, shouting one another on and feeling like gods. The winning team was so pumped up that they joined us for the run, and when we returned to the school we did our hundred
push-ups in the parking lot together, on our bare knuckles on a patch of asphalt covered with broken glass.

That was one of the high points of my experience at the Chinese Boxing Institute, partly because of the seductive mixture of fear, violence and male bonding, but mainly because of Sensei O’Keefe’s speech, which had brought me to a realization that I was convinced had to be enlightenment at last: when he said that kung fu was about learning to die well, it occurred to me that this must be what the
Tao Te Ching
meant when it said that one should become like a block of wood. Of course! It meant that you should act as if you were already a dead man and had nothing to lose! That, in turn, explained all the references to emptiness; an empty mind, I deduced, was a mind empty of hope for the future or of petty cares about one’s safety, comfort or possessions. That night, at home in the basement, I decided to test the strength of my realization by sitting up all night in the lotus position like the Buddha. I wouldn’t budge or relax my concentration until the first rays of sunlight came in through the window—I would sit as if it were my last night on earth before being executed at dawn.

I began my vigil at around 11:00
P.M
. By twelve o’clock my back was killing me and I was feeling exhausted. By twelve-fifteen I knew I was going to fall asleep, but I saved the evening by reminding myself that being in a sense already dead, I no longer had to care about proving to myself that I was enlightened or not, so I could do whatever I wanted. Much relieved, I crawled into bed, a kung fu master at last.

My father woke me up at six-thirty; even dead men have to go to school in our achievement-oriented society. I ate
some cereal and let him drive me that morning, reasoning that I no longer had to walk barefoot or do anything unpleasant now that I was enlightened. Within an hour my new spiritual status was in trouble, however. I had a crush on a girl in my biology class, so naturally I figured that this would be a good time to ask her out, seeing that I was living in the eternal Now and had nothing to lose. But when the opportunity came to approach her, I froze as usual and she walked right past me, unaware of my inner turmoil. How could I be enlightened and still be nervous about asking someone for a date? I wondered. My temporary solution was to decide that part of being enlightened meant ceasing to make distinctions between behavior that you formerly called “good” or “bad,” and accepting that whatever you did was an expression of your inner nature, or your “Original Face before you were born” as the Zen manuals called it. Being insecure was just the way the cosmos decided to manifest itself when I was born.

For two days I dwelt in this state of philosophical limbo, where I still wanted to believe I was enlightened but had to constantly talk myself into ignoring evidence to the contrary. My epiphany came to an end on the third day, when I went back to the Chinese Boxing Institute and got called into the Circle of Fighting. At the sound of my name my knees went weak as usual, I got beat up by my opponent as usual, and then got yelled at by Sensei O’Keefe afterward for being a candy-ass, also as usual. This couldn’t be enlightenment, I finally admitted to myself, because none of the Asian philosophy books I had read said anything about enlightenment’s being just as miserable as ignorance.

4
 

J
ust before entering the ninth grade at school, I persuaded my parents to let me give up my cello lessons. I’d started playing the cello when I was seven, after having already tried the violin and piano without much success. It was hardly surprising that I had shown an early interest in music, since my mother was both a concert pianist and a concert oboist who practiced a minimum of four hours a day, and who gave lessons every afternoon in our living room. She was the first person to major in two instruments at the Eastman School of Music, and was one of the founders of our town orchestra. She loved music, but what really made an impression on me was that she loved practice. Performing was fine, but practice was what it was all about for her, and being able to do it for hours every day meant she was happy for hours a day.

That really burned my dad up. “Don’t you ever get tired of playing the same passage over and over and over?” he would ask.

“Of course not! It’s different every time! Besides, you know the answer yourself. Don’t you love working on your paintings?”

“I like
having painted
, Martha.
Painting
is one big pain in the ass.”

“Really? What a shame! I think that’s the best part—the struggle!”