My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (20 page)

A month later, I'd quit, had given up that school, and I wandered around for a few years starting other systems, but never committing fully, like a series of karate one-night stands. I was a karate slut and hated all the schools I slept with after that. They just weren't Kinesis.

Kinesis was a magical place, back then. It was the Island of Broken Toys, from the
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Claymation film. The deeper, more committed the student, the more broken the toy, if you get the metaphor. Seriously. But there was real magic there, because of or in spite of it.

I returned to Kinesis because I'd never again been so fully committed to anything, after.

Not a person, not a career (except my haphazard conviction to writing), not a single thing, and certainly not a routine or a workout.

Early John Irving, from
The Hotel New Hampshire
, would shout at me in my head (
You have to get obsessed and stay obsessed!
), but I could find nothing that would compel me into a reasonable argument for obsession.

(Later John Irving would also shout at me,
Why aren't you picking my blueberries?! You can't go to the same school as my kids if your combined household income is under $750K!!
I'm kidding, of course. But just a bit.)

Taking the same test again at thirty-nine certainly flashed me back to taking it at twenty-five, and this time I was far more able to concentrate on the parts that displeased me, far more capable of reining in my body language and visible displeasure and disagreement with the bits of the test I felt were onanistic and idiotic, useless in the larger language of weaponless combat. By this point in my life, I had been in enough fistfights to know what was useful and what was television. I was in a graduate studies program with violence, actually felt peace when my amygdala switched to “flood” and my blood turned into a river of cortisol. My eyes no longer dilated, my breathing went deeper, my shoulders automatically squared, and I had a full 360-degree awareness of a room, all in less than a second, as soon as I felt threatened.

I had every marker of a combat veteran, of PTSD, after being in so many stupid fights growing up, or waiting to get hit by my dad, or someone else.

So the mat, in karate, felt like home. There was peace in it.

But there were other exercises in karate, the katas and the one-steps, and I had to get through those. Take orders, respond with compliance, bow my head to suggest my place.

So I did. Or so I tried.

When I came back to the school, it needed help. Lots and lots of help. Within a couple of months I was a part of the administration, and then I found myself trying to get it advertised and mediated and mentioned out of my own shallow pockets. I did everything but show up to class more than once a week. I seeped capital to get it healthier, but like anyone who's tried to help a slipping 501(c)(3), I was completely disappointed when it was simply not coming out of the death spiral it had been in, when I had first been reintroduced.

Which was difficult to watch, but also satisfying, in a schadenfreude sort of way, if I can be fully transparent and confessional.

Continuing with the metaphor of the lover, when I rejoined the karate school, it had been uncomfortable, awkward, an experience like meeting an ex-lover in a coffee shop and being incapable of acknowledging an odd sense of competition, like, “Aha! I've been thriving since we split and you've been dwindling! I win!” And, admittedly, because I have such deep rivulets of abandonment and pettiness, there was indeed that moment, which turned quickly to shame, in accordance with my Catholic programming, and so instead I set about helping and building it back up as much as I could.

But to very little avail. Sadly, karate schools really aren't worth much more than the sweat and the blood left on their mats.

At any rate, this had been my near-obsession for my thirty-ninth winter, and Steph had been very supportive. I didn't slim down like I had hoped, made it nowhere near slipping back into my size 34 pinstripe trousers that I'd been wearing when we'd met, because try as I may have, I never did quite give up the drinking. So I remained fat, and as the deadline to the test drew closer, I tried dieting and jogging and wishing and praying. I was still a big fat man in a white karate suit, and I looked ridiculous.

But still, I persevered, as I kept hearing John Irving's voice yelling in my head.

You have to get obsessed and stay obsessed!
Or maybe that was Garp.

I could sense that Steph was nervous, teeming with a weird anxiety about meeting my mother for the first time. I told her, “No, no, you don't understand my mother. She's not like your mother, what you've described.” Still, I could sense that Steph was preparing herself for a fight.

“Mom's an incredibly on-the-level and kind woman, and she's dealt with a lot in her life. She's not in the least bit judgmental or hostile, to anyone. Mom's . . . I dunno. Full of love, I think is the only way to put it,” I said to Steph.

“I mean, really. I've yelled and screamed and been a complete shit to her for a very long time, and she's never given up on me, and I've swung back around and now I'm her little Elvis. That's why I sometimes call her, ‘Momma,' like Elvis did with his mom. You don't need to be
en garde
for passive judgments or double entendres,” I said.

En garde
she was, though, from the very beginning, from the moment we picked up Mom from the airport until we drove her all the way north to that rambling rental in that shithole neighborhood. Mom was exactly as I'd described her and entirely sincere and genuine in her affection in seeing us both, seeing us, at the time, happy, and she even loved the damned stupid dog, Cleo.

But Steph was on edge, uncomfortable, even after she realized who my mother was and had calmed down, on the second or third day. I'd taken us all to lunch at our favorite Thai restaurant, and we were talking about the upcoming test, and Steph said something to the effect of, “Domingo really likes sweating with all those boys; I wish he'd like sweating like that with me more often.”

I gave her a look that said, “Are you fucking serious? You're talking about this in front of my mother?”

To be perfectly honest, I'd been far more brutal and vulgar in front of Mom, back when I was much more bitter, but I immediately became defensive, standing guard over her, thinking,
What the fuck, Steph? Seriously? I treated your parents with respect
.

But Momma, in her divine innocence, heard nothing of what Steph had indicated, and the moment passed. Still, I was unnerved and annoyed.

The day of the test, I had to leave them alone for the day while I did martial artsy things, and they spent hours downtown, at Pike Place Market, which is Mom's favorite destination in Seattle because of all the flowers. She loves the flowers and takes pictures of the window boxes downtown to send back home to Texas. It's actually quite adorable.

But I was nervous that Steph's neuroses would prevail and she'd take something Mom said badly, and the situation would implode, or explode. So it was with some sense of doom that I awaited their arrival at the karate school for the test, see how their interaction went.

When they walked in the door, I could immediately discern that my worry was without foundation; Steph was beaming, and my mother was carrying flowers. My mother's simple sincerity and genuine personality had penetrated all of Steph's defenses and laid them to rest, and Steph, who was expecting the sort of interactions she'd had with her own mother—slights mostly imagined on her part—was now perfectly at home with my Momma, the way I was, too.

It's healthy to love your momma, when you're past thirty-five.

For the test itself, I was able to make it through the first part with the katas and the barked commands and the compliance of will with very little to report.

It was the sparring that was concerning me, which occurred at the end.

Sparring for green belt, in this style, was the gateway into the upper belts and the geometrically more complicated strikes and arm bars and kicks, so your green belt test was a way of really testing your commitment, testing your mettle and your ability to survive a full-on ass-kicking.

This was why, at twenty-five, it was the brick wall that I hit, stopping my advancement into the upper echelons, the more whimsical and insubstantial of martial flourish. And also because I felt anything beyond there was utter, useless bullshit in a fighting style: Most fights never get beyond a few thrown punches and a sprawling pindown or submission hold; I just couldn't get past that, internally, and it showed, externally.

And if there's something indisputable about sparring, it's that your fatigue will show your true spirit, will drop your pants and show your soul to anyone watching.

In sparring veritas.

And so, about two-thirds into my test, when I began revealing the first signs of fatigue, I also began getting sloppy and lowering my guard, dropping my head forward and encouraging my opponent to get fancy so I could throw a fat, slow lead right down the center at his or her throat, lazily, like a howitzer, retreating into my comfort zone of a heavyweight boxer just come out of retirement for a huge Las Vegas payout, the way George Foreman beat the fight out of Michael Moorer.