Lost In Place

Epilogue

Dedication

Other Books by This Author

About the Author

1
 

W
hen I was thirteen years old I saw my first kung fu movie, and before it ended I decided that the life of a wandering Zen monk was the life for me. I announced my willingness to leave East Ridge Junior High School immediately and give up all material things, but my parents did not share my enthusiasm. They made it clear that I was not to become a wandering Zen monk until I had finished high school. In the meantime I could practice kung fu and meditate down in the basement. So I immersed myself in the study of Chinese boxing and philosophy with the kind of dedication that is possible only when you don’t yet have to make a living, when you are too young to drive and when you don’t have a girlfriend.

First I turned our basement into what I thought a Buddhist temple should look like. I shoved all the junk to one side, marked off boundaries with candles and set up a shrine on a coffee table. I outfitted the shrine with objects
from a cookware shop, the only store in town that carried Oriental gifts: a bamboo placemat, a package of chopsticks, a sake cup, which I turned into an incense burner, and a plastic Chinese kitchen deity with the character for “tasty” painted on his stomach. Next to the shrine I placed my sacred texts: the
World Book Encyclopedia
volumes containing entries for China, Buddhism and Taoism and Bruce Tegner’s book
Kung Fu & Tai Chi
, seventh in a series of manuals by Mr. Tegner, a crew-cut ex-marine and our country’s most prolific authority on hand-to-hand combat.

Back in those pre–smoke alarm days I was able to burn as much incense as I wanted, and as far as I was concerned a kung fu temple wasn’t a kung fu temple if you could see more than five feet in front of you. Sadly, the only place in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where one could buy incense was a store called Ye Olde Head Shop, which specialized in black-light posters and rolling papers, and their incense display didn’t feature traditional Asian scents like sandalwood or frankincense. Ye Olde Head Shop carried Apricot, Watermelon, Passion Fruit and something called Black Love, which came packaged in a long cardboard pouch illustrated with the silhouette of a naked man and woman, both with huge Afro haircuts, having sex. I did not dare ask the brooding hippie behind the counter for a pack of Black Love or even the more temperate-sounding Passion Fruit, so I stuck with the sexually neutral varieties, which did remind one of apricot and watermelon when you sniffed the box but as soon as you lit the cones smelled like burning cardboard.

There were other details. I needed an outfit for my training sessions, but the kung fu uniforms advertised in the martial arts magazines were too expensive. I settled on
dyeing my green pajamas black, but the dye did not fix properly and my uniform came out an olive-purple. Tying it with my father’s red bathrobe sash, I looked like an eggplant wrapped for Christmas. Trickiest of all, however, was what to do about my hair. Real Zen masters shave their heads, as anyone who has watched the
Kung Fu
series on television knows. My father had never liked my long hair, and had often said that he wished he could shave it all off, so I went directly to him and asked if he’d like to have a wish come true. His response was to raise one eyebrow, which I understood from experience to be a no.

As an alternative I ordered something called a Surprise Bald Head Wig from the back of a comic book. If, as advertised, it was good enough to surprise one’s friends, I figured it would be good enough for my basement training sessions. When the wig arrived by mail four long weeks later, it turned out to be a disappointment. It was floppy, dimpled and a sickly gray color. I modified it by painting the reverse side of it with pink and orange Magic Markers, then powdering it with something out of my mother’s cosmetics drawer. Eventually the wig did take on a fleshy appearance, but then I had to figure out what to do with all the hair my father had insisted on protecting, which stuck out from under the back and sides and hung down over my shoulders. My little brother, Erich, two years younger than I am, happened to wander into the bathroom before I had worked this problem out and declared that I looked more like Ebenezer Scrooge than “any of those bald guys on TV who wear dresses and kick people.” My sister, Rachel, two years younger than Erich, thought I looked like a giant fetus. Not everyone felt about kung fu the way I did.

In the end I scrunched the extra hair up into a ball and stuffed it under the back of the wig. When I looked in the mirror I saw a determined young acolyte prepared to go through anything to achieve physical and spiritual mastery, but my parents, catching glimpses of me when I had to run upstairs to the bathroom, saw something else. The lumpy powdered head, the purple pajamas and the clouds of smoke that appeared behind me whenever I opened the basement door convinced them that I was headed for a career as a finger-cymbal player in airport lobbies.

That first summer of kung fu, while our family was in western Ohio visiting my mother’s parents, Bruce Lee died. We were all having breakfast in the kitchen and my grandmother was calling my grandfather a “BB-brain” for having burned the toast yet again.

“Hold on,” my father said, interrupting them and turning up the sound on their old black-and-white kitchen television set. It was on a tray with wheels so my grandmother could watch the news while she peeled potatoes, shucked corn, kneaded pie crust dough, washed the dishes or ironed clothes. “Look at this, Mark,” my father said.

“The King of kung fu is dead at thirty-three!” the local newscaster announced. “Asia’s biggest movie star died under mysterious circumstances in an actress’s apartment in Hong Kong, on the eve of the release of his first American feature film. Here is a clip from one of his earlier movies.” It was the famous scene from
The Chinese Connection
where Bruce jumps straight up into the air and kicks a wooden sign to pieces. That sign, a version of which actually did hang at the entrance to a park in foreign-occupied Shanghai earlier this century, had warned,
NO DOGS OR CHINESE ALLOWED
. That one scene
made Bruce Lee a symbol of Chinese national pride overnight. It didn’t matter that his character got executed by a firing squad at the end of the movie; the scene where he demolished the sign brought millions of ecstatic Chinese filmgoers to their feet and rocketed Bruce Lee to massive superstardom in Asia.

I couldn’t believe he was dead. I went out to our car and sat in it all day, crying. My father felt so sorry for me he offered to take me all the way to Dayton to a drive-in movie theater that, by coincidence, was showing
The Chinese Connection
. We watched the movie together in the VW bus, my father trying to conceal his boredom while I burst into tears of joy and sorrow every time Bruce Lee started fighting. That night, after everyone else was asleep, I put on my wig and practiced in the dark living room, making silent but impassioned vows to my dead hero that I would never ever give up until I was an enlightened kung fu master myself.

Tutorials in Asian mysticism were not offered at East Ridge Junior High so I had to design my own course of study. From my research in the
World Book
I learned that the Buddha, while meditating under a tree just before dawn, happened to look up and see Venus rising in the eastern sky. Somehow this vision of the shining planet helped him to achieve nirvana, a state of mind described as the emancipation from all suffering. I interpreted this literally and became convinced that Buddhism was all about becoming oblivious to pain. Building up an immunity to discomfort became my spiritual goal, and toward this end I made my Zen and kung fu practice as uncomfortable as I could. On sunny days I meditated in the crawl space; on rainy days I sat outdoors in the mud. I
made sure that all of my stretching, punching and kicking exercises hurt, which any good athlete could have told me was a bad idea, but I hadn’t asked any athletes for their advice. Meditation for me involved trying to concentrate on “emptiness”—a squirmingly unpleasant challenge for any thirteen-year-old—while my crossed legs ached and my nose itched.