My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (21 page)

On the mat, when you're sparring, it's a number of conversations, of nonverbal discourses. You can have the most violent, damaging exchanges with someone you adore and trust, and it's out of a shared, mutual admiration of one another's gifts and athleticism. Complete nonverbal bonding, through affectionate pummeling. I've engaged in this many, many times.

Other times, it's a polite exchange with someone you loathe, mostly because the last thing you want to do is exchange perspiration and let that person know how much you genuinely disapprove of them.

And the more tired you become, the less you're able to disguise this.

So at the two-thirds mark the day of the test, one of the more ambitious members of the school started in on my reduction, started pushing me into that part of despair that truly tells a man, and I wasn't handling it well.

Earlier, it had been grand: I'd sparred with the house giant, who was my friend and remarkably agile for a man of his size, about 280 pounds, and could kick and punch with surprising frequency and acuity, utterly unexpected from a guy who was shaped like a Klondike grizzly. He'd actually bloodied my nose, when I had leaned away from him and thought I was out of reach from an extended kick, and sonofabitch if his foot didn't come right up at me when I was turned totally in the opposite direction.

BOOM
. Right away, my nose sprayed red, mingled my biota onto both his karate suit and the mat. (Some part of me felt completed at this moment, seeing that my blood had mingled with the school, ritualistically, like I was no longer an outlier, but included in the symbiotic whole, just another pair of hands helping tow a nautical rope in a Patrick O'Brian story.)

He and I stopped right then—and I'll always love the big guy for this—and he grabbed my face in his mitted paws, tilted my head back, and looked up into my nose and said, “Yeah, you'll be all right. Come over here,” and then someone handed him the medic kit, in which he found a tampon and a pair of scissors; he cut the tampon in half and stuck it up my nose, with the string coming out of my right nostril.

I never felt so goddamned tough in my life as at that moment, with half a tampon sticking out of my nostril.

And back at it we went.

Two big, heavy fuckers going at it like George Foreman.

It was great. That's love.

A bit later, exhausted and stripped of my ability to hide my better self, my fresh opponent stepped in front of me to really test my control.

And
BAM:
Off we went, and he immediately started targeting my nose.

I should mention here that besides my mother and Steph, two of my closer friends, Andy and Kim, were in attendance, shouting their support from the sidelines. Dimly, I could hear them from their seats just off the mat.

I was a bit off in a corner, and they were behind me and to my left, so they couldn't really see what was happening as my new opponent kept tagging me with popcorn-like agility on the nose. I was depleted at this point, exhausted and somewhat incapable of stifling or blocking his little, insubstantial Orville Redenbacher–type
pop-pop
jabs going right at my bloody nose. I heard my mother from the sidelines saying, “He just had that sinus surgery a year ago!” and I said, I think for the fourth or fifth time, “Sir, please watch the nose,” because it was, in all sincerity, a very good nose, large and Aztec and a pretty easy target, but finally I just lost it entirely and I grabbed him by the do-back after he hit me again, and I lifted him up off the ground and slammed him on his back, into the ground, and stopped myself before I hit him square in the face, on the ground.

(Again, point made about the higher flourishes of karate.)

Right at that moment, Brenda Brown, who had magically appeared immediately to my left, called the round because she'd been monitoring me. I was aghast at my loss of control and helped pick up my opponent off the floor with apologies, and he brushed himself off in a persnickety sort of way and walked off in a huff. I sheepishly made my way to the next station in the circuit, utterly ashamed that my mother and friends had seen that and feeling quite horrible, and then things really went bad.

Again, I should mention, this is what this test is designed to do—reduce you to your baser impulses so that you meet yourself, know yourself in such a way that you're able to understand your limits and triggers, in the hopes that in the future, when you're able to beat someone to a pulp, you're also able to keep from doing it.

And at this next part, I met someone I didn't know, not just in myself.

She was standing at the final station.

She was an older, gray-haired lesbian, wearing a red belt in the Kinesis style—from this school!—and patches from a series of other women's karate schools in Seattle.

A red belt, which was two belts higher than—no, scratch that, three belts higher, since I was just high yellow at this point, testing for green—me.

And I'd never seen her before.

After all the fucking money and time and promotion and SHIT that I'd put into this school's survival, this ostensible “student” showed up to the test, which is considered the “cream” of the student experience, to enjoy the sparring, to show her karate plumage to an audience.

To “test” the testees, if you don't mind the double entendre.

Something switched over in me.

And I heard Brenda behind me shout, “GO!”

Right away, it was George Foreman and Michael Moorer.

I started thudding her—
thump thump!
—with big-mitted left jabs right at her face, keeping her from gauging where I was and then bringing the big right straight down the middle and hitting her square in the mouth, to get the conversation started on the right foot. So to speak.

BAM.

She responded with nothing in return.

Now, I should emphasize, this is all
perfectly
acceptable and legal on the mat, in this “conversation” with a student of her status as a red belt and as an opponent of mine at high yellow: I was doing
nothing
wrong here.

Duck, dodge right, and a low right hook to her ribs.

Step back and wait for her to recover her breath.

Shift stance, lead with two right jabs—
fump fump
—and a left hook to the head, and the support I had been hearing from my mother and Andy and Kim went totally quiet, off to my right.

I didn't care, at this point. I was too exhausted for higher functions, like sympathy.

I was locked in, like a terrier who's noticed a squirrel scampering up a tree.

And still, there was this thought in my head:
This is all perfectly legal. This is the fight game. She's a red belt
.

She kicked, responded with a “fancy” quick turn, and I saw it coming and moved just off to her left, where I would be just out of reach, and I dug the ball of my right toe just under her ribs. And I followed it with another combination to her face that went right through unanswered.

I started pummeling this sixty-year-old woman at about 10 percent more than I should have. Maybe 12 percent. Here and again, a 15 percenter would slip out. And this was all taking place not ten feet from my mother, my girlfriend, and my two best friends.

And I didn't care.

I was telling her, nonverbally,
You're a fraud. Stop pretending
.

Then I'd hit her again.

I was asking her, nonverbally,
Where the fuck have you been, in helping this school? You wear this school's red belt, and this is the first time I meet you, in five months? How do you like your patches?

Some more hits.

It went on for about two more minutes.

I was a real asshole.

And that's why I never made it past green belt.

I just couldn't play at that level.

My mother never really looked at me the same way again, after seeing me for who I really was.

I realized I was much more like my brother Dan than I admitted to myself, had been trying to deny, and that I only liked a good boxing match where I was winning. I saw that, at a fundamental level, I was competitive and unyielding, unwilling to compromise when it meant something to the other person who was creating a fiction of him or herself. I wanted to be the one who pointed out where they were wrong, when it meant something. I saw that I needed to be, quietly, right. Correct. I was stripped down once again, and I didn't like who I saw there. And I thanked the karate school, much later when I was able to think about the experience honestly, for showing me that. And that I needed to change, if I was going to grow up and be an adult. That sometimes, I needed to let the other person win, in tug of war.

I know we tried, but in the end we were just too polarized.

There was too much of ourselves in the way.

I remember, for example, one time when Steph and I were having dinner at a Thai restaurant near the rental house, and she caught me tracking the slim-hipped Thai waitress but misread what I was thinking. Sorta. I was quietly wondering if I would be willing to consider an extreme conclusion and admit I was gay if I was attracted to slim-hipped Thai chicks, because this girl was quite attractive, but she looked like a teenage boy, which is how my mind works sometimes. I figured I'd have to think about this one later.

But Steph was not upset, not in the way she could get when we first met. I'd never been with anyone with such a short fuse, when it came to jealousy.

We'd been neglected at our table for some time, and I looked over her shoulder in search of that waitress, then muttered something about “Halley's waitress,” under my breath.

It took her less than a microsecond, but then Steph realized the joke—the waitress that returned every seventy-six years—and a mixed expression seized her face.

“Did . . . did you just make that up?” she asked, and I wasn't sure if she was impressed or annoyed, competitive.

I was caught short, halfway tempted to take credit, but instead I said, “No, no; it's a song title from an album I just bought,” and her expression changed again, this time comforted, perhaps even relieved.