Knowing Mr. Choi, I’m sure he enjoyed the work. But he realized that it wasn’t anything you could call a career. So, with his wife, he moved to the US. She opened a real estate business, and it did well. Mr. Choi ran his dojo.
I didn’t meet Mr. Choi right away. When I walked in, the only person there was a big Italian guy with a thick black beard on his face and a black belt on his gi. He was on the mat, doing some stretches, when he saw me. He stopped what he was doing and grinned at me.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey. What’s up? You come to take a class?”
“Yeah, maybe. I just saw the sign, and I want to work out.”
“You can do that, all right.” He held out a hand. “I’m Bob.”
“Andy.”
“You got a gi?”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t know what it is, I guess you ain’t got one.” He pointed to his outfit. “It’s this. Martial arts pajamas. I’ll lend you one, okay? But if you’re gonna join the class, you’ll have to buy one.”
When Mr. Choi and his other students arrived, I was wearing an old gi and a white belt. Bob introduced me around before the workout started. The class was made up of blue-collar guys who lived locally. Everyone was known by their job description. Bob was Bob the Pepsi Cola Guy, because he worked installing cans of soda in vending machines. Oil Man Larry worked in a garage. Don the Bartender was precisely that. Mike the Writer worked as a janitor while trying to make a start as a journalist. I was quickly named Andy the Gas Pump Guy.
The workout started with a half-hour of calisthenics. Then the students began practicing techniques. Most of them had black belts, and a couple had blue belts. All had been studying with Mr. Choi for years. Bob was assigned the job of giving me my first lesson.
“Okay,” he told me. “Let’s start with this. It’s called ‘two-finger takedown.’” He took one of my hands in one of his. “Now, this doesn’t look like much. But I just do this...And this...And it really hurts...”
Then I was on my knees, trying not to yelp, unable to move, my wrist feeling like it might break if I even took a deep breath. Bob took the pressure off and pulled me to my feet. “See?” He cackled. “I told you, it really hurts.”
After class, as we changed into street clothes, Bob said, “Hey, there’s this restaurant me and the guys go to after class. You want to come?”
I did.
I had never known that people could like other people so much, or laugh so much. We sat in the bar, ate pizza and drank beer. No one seemed to realize or care that I was under age. Mr. Choi stopped by briefly, just long enough to have one beer. When he arrived, we were watching TV, leching at a Korean anchorwoman. Mr. Choi grunted. “Okay...I tell you something,” he said. “In Korea, she is not considered good-looking gal.”
“Yeah?” said Bob.
“Yeah.” Mr. Choi nodded. “I tell you something else. You not believe this, but...in Korea, I am considered good-looking guy.”
Nobody laughed. They’d been Mr. Choi’s students long enough to know what he could have done to them. When Mr. Choi had left, we all looked at each other. Everyone sipped beer. Then Oil Man Larry spoke. Larry had a shiny bald head, a moon face, huge ears and tiny eyes.
“Okay, I’m gonna tell you guys something,” he said. “You ain’t gonna believe this, but...in Wyoming, I’m considered a good-looking guy.”
Beer sprayed over shirt fronts and high-fives were exchanged across the table. The waitress overheard it all, and grinned at us. “You better tip me right, or I’m gonna tell Mr. Choi,” she said.
We stayed till closing time. Then Bob invited me back to his place, a clapped-out rented house in the neighborhood. I sat in his yard with him, drank a beer and told him what I was doing in LA. As I left, he gave me his phone number and said, “Gimme a call anytime you need anything. Remember—the day Bob Perone lets a friend down is the day he’s got something better to do.”
I laughed. “Thanks.”
“No problem. I’d rather hang out with you than with the finest people I know.” He lightly kicked me in the ass as I headed for the street.
After that night, I was a dojo rat. I was there every night it was open, except for when I had to work. I could have lived in the dojo. I felt like there was nothing else I really needed. A good dojo is a microcosmos. What you learn isn’t just about physical combat—it’s about conflict of every kind. Everything that can happen to you in your life will happen to you on the practice mat. You unlearn all your conditioning—instead of running away from fear, pain, insecurity, as you’ve been taught to do, you move toward it. Rather than feed your ego and improve your self-esteem, as therapists and best-selling books tell you to do, you realize that your idea of who you are, the idea that you are anything, is an illusion. An opponent isn’t an opponent—he’s a teacher whose attacks on you teach you things about yourself.
The first time I watched students throw each other, it looked terrifying. When Mr. Choi told Bob to throw me, I dug in and resisted. It was useless; Bob damn near pulled my arm out of its socket, then drove me into the mat.
“You made it easy for Bob,” Mr. Choi told me in the restaurant after class. “You tried to fight his energy with yours, and so he used yours as well as his...Tell me something. What shape is water?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t have a shape.”
“You’re right and wrong. Water is formless, but it takes shape.” He pointed to a glass of water on the table. “This water, shape of glass. I drink it, shape of my mouth. Water flows, and it also crashes. Am I true?” He winked at me, but I didn’t get it.
And then I did.
I got it when I realized that I liked being thrown. I realized that if I relaxed and didn’t resist, but went with the current of the throw, then it couldn’t hurt me. When you’re stressed, being thrown repeatedly is as soothing as a massage.
I learned to block hard blows with a soft motion, immediately, but not fast, to redirect the force of the blow without giving it my own energy. To meet hard strikes softly, and to strike hard at soft and vulnerable areas of the body. I learned to keep my body relaxed as I struck, to use ki energy, not muscle tension, for force. I almost jumped up and down with excitement the first time I kicked a striking pad and felt the power I had when I wasn’t hung up on trying to hit hard.
Mr. Choi gave me a yellow belt, then a green belt, then a blue, then a brown. Finally, I received a black belt, which meant I was ready for serious study. During those years, I attended a community college. But my social life was centered around the dojo. It was like nothing I could have imagined, a bunch of guys from the neighborhood all studying a Korean art based on principles of yin and yang. When we weren’t training, we’d hang out in a bar or on somebody’s stoop.
But, after a while, we realized that things were changing. Mike the Writer got a gig freelancing for a national magazine. He wrote an article about Mr. Choi, and before we knew it the dojo was invaded by yuppie scum. I had signed up for the army and would soon be leaving town. I think Mr. Choi realized that an era had come to an end when Bob the Pepsi Cola Guy metamorphosed into Bob the Computer Program Sales Guy and moved to the suburbs. The last time I talked to him, he was driving in his convertible and calling me on his cell phone. “All the dagos have them now,” he said. “I’m dago lite.” I asked him how it had happened. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just woke up one morning and I had a wife, three kids and a mortgage.”
Sixteen years old, abandoning a car in LA and sleeping in a park. And now, more than sixteen years later, back in Phoenix, living in a car. Staring for an hour at a time at the building where the trailer park used to be. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to be water anymore. I didn’t know anything about anything. I seemed to know less every day.
Late on a Saturday night, I came out of the Denny’s on Camelback and 16th. Arizona State University had just won a major football game, and the city was crawling with frat boys out celebrating as o
nly they know how. When the bars closed, they sat around Denny’s and traded reminiscences of successful date rapes. I found a bunch of them ritually pissing on the hood of my car in the parking lot.
I walked up to them. I was so fucking tired. I didn’t want this, anything like this. “Get away from my car,” I said.
“Or what?” one of them said, still pissing.
I counted five of them. My choice was simple—I could take one or take them all.
I hit him twice in the face, not too hard, and then, as his hands came up to protect his face, I drove a front heel kick into his midsection. He collapsed against my car, his breath gone and unwilling to come back, his cock dangling like a hose, spraying piss over himself. Some of it got on me as I grabbed him, threw him across the hood of the car and got him in a head-lock.
“Leave him alone, you stinking fuck,” one of his friends yelled at me.
“Yeah? You want me to? How about I break his neck first? You want to see that?” I lifted him off the car and threw him at his friends. It cost me all the strength I had left, but I managed it and didn’t show my exhaustion. They jumped away from him instead of catching him, and he hit the ground so hard I thought it might kill him. But he didn’t even pass out. He lay there, crying with fright, trying to breathe.
I looked at his friends from a hapkido stance. “Anybody think that was just luck? Any of you want to try it?” No one did. I got in my car, started it and drove out of there before they could get over their shock. Your worst nightmare, boys. Smelly homeless guy with a black belt. Choose your victims more carefully.
About five minutes later, as I neared the junction of Camelback and 40th, the flashing lights of a pigmobile appeared in my rearview. I pulled over, hoping that I was just speeding a little or had a light out or something. But, as the cops got out of their car, one of the frat guys got out with them.
He identified me, and they told me I was under arrest for assault. I tried to tell them what had happened, but my clothes were stained and I hadn’t washed, and my accusers were well-dressed and odor-free. The cops handcuffed me and put me in the back of their car.
If it hadn’t been for the cuffs, and the belligerence of the cops, it would have felt almost good to be driven to Madison Street Jail. The cop car had a clean, rich, bureaucratic smell, a smell that was reassuring to a guy who’d worn a uniform and driven official vehicles. And it was a relief not to have to sleep in the car for a night, and to be guaranteed some food.
But I felt so helpless with my hands fastened behind me in the back of their car, and the cops talking to me in their sarcastic, condescending way, asking me questions and then repeating my answers. When we got to the jail, one of them pulled me out of the car and held me by my bicep as they led me inside.
I’d never been arrested before, and I thought—from movies I’d seen and books I’d read—that I was entitled to make a phone call. I asked about it, and they told me that it had to be a collect call. I couldn’t think of anyone I’d feel okay about calling collect in such circumstances, so I told them to forget it. But I kept my tone polite. That jail was a legend in its own time. It was the scene of the kind of human rights violations you expect under a military junta rather than a police force. Prisoners were strangled or beaten to death. Sick people were denied their medication. One paraplegic guy was denied a catheter and strapped into a restraint chair so violently that his neck was broken. Then they left him there for six hours. Most of the prisoners hadn’t been convicted of anything—they were awaiting trial on minor charges, and the crime they were in jail for was the same as mine—not having enough money for bail.
They took the cuffs off me and put me in a cell with some other inmates. One of them was a WASPish-looking guy a little older than me. He was standing near the cell door and he looked terrified.
I went over to him. “You okay?” I said.
He nodded, didn’t look at me.
“You nervous?”
He looked at me. “To tell you the truth, I’m shit scared. I’ve never been in here before.”
“Me neither. What’re you scared of? That these guys’ll hassle you?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think they will. They seem pretty harmless. I don’t think they want to be here either. But don’t worry. I won’t let them mess with you.”
“Thanks,” he said, without asking what made me think I’d be able to stop them.
“What’re you in for?” I asked him, criminal-to-criminal.
“I was supposed to go to traffic court, and I forgot.”
“They put you in jail for that?”
“Yeah. I have to stay here until I go up in front of the judge, unless I can make bail. But I’ve tried to make the collect call, and nobody’s home.”
I held out my hand. “I’m Andy.”
He shook it. “Tim.”
We talked for a while. I didn’t feel like talking, but I could see how scared he was and I wanted to help keep his mind off it. He asked me how I came to be homeless and I told him.
“So you’re a veteran, and you’re left on the street.”
“Yeah.”
“There might be an article in that,” he said. “I edit the Phoenix Weekly.”
“Hell, you’re Tim Wolvern.”
He smiled. “Yeah.”
The Weekly was a free newspaper, distributed in coffee-houses and convenience stores. It was progressive—by Arizona standards, anyway—and covered local politics, art and music.
Tim said he’d like to interview me sometime. I said okay. He tried again to make his collect call, and this time he got through. Within an hour, someone had bailed him out. Before he left, he asked if there was anyone he could contact for me. I said there was.
Mara was there about twenty minutes later. The cops disliked her on sight. Her green hair was fiercely spiked, and she wore a T-shirt that read PHOENIX, ARIZONA—VALLEY OF THE FUCKING SUN. Rather than let her spring me, I think they’d have liked to lock her up as well.
She was furious with me. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” she said as we walked to her car after she’d posted bail for me. “What do you think gives you the right?”
“Okay, I’m sorry I called you. I’ll pay the money back—”
“It’s not that. Jesus. Are you really so fucking stupid? I mean, how dare you just disappear and not call me. I was so worried about you. I could have helped you.”
“I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Well, you bothered me plenty, asshole. I’ve been out of my mind with worry. I’m supposed to be your friend, and you have to get arrested before you come to me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, you should be.”
I started to say something, then my voice caught. And then I was choking, trying not to cry, covering my face with my hands, trying to hide as I sobbed like a little kid.
Mara put her arms around me. “Andy. Andy, it’s okay. It’s okay, honey. It’s okay. I didn’t mean to get mad at you. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m so sorry.”
“I know, baby. It’s okay.”
“Don’t be mad at me.” I was crying harder, really losing it.
She held me tight. “I’m not mad at you. Shhh.”
We got into her car. I was shaking badly, and she sat there and held me until I was calmer. Then she started the car. “Do you need to eat something?” she said.
“No. I’m okay.”
“Have you eaten?”
“No, but I’m okay. I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat. I don’t have much in the house, but I’ll take you home and leave you to rest and I’ll go to the store, okay?”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Her apartment was off of 20th Street and Highland. It was a fairly big place, but so cluttered that it seemed small. Guitars, amps, microphone stands, CDs, tapes and books were everywhere. She had two cats, and the place smelled slightly of their litter tray, the smell mas
ked by the fragrance of incense. The living room was softly lit by a lamp in one corner.
Mara led me into the bedroom. “Go to bed,” she told me.
“Can I take a shower first?”
“Yeah, of course. Anything you want.” She headed for the front door. “I’ll go get you some food.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Shut up and get in the shower, you fucking juvenile delinquent.”
I laughed. “Okay.”
She left. I stripped off my clothes, went into the bathroom and showered. It felt so good. I stood under the warm spray for so long that Mara had come back by the time I’d finished. I dried myself, then wrapped the towel around my waist and went into the living room.
“Feel better?” she asked me.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Is pasta with pesto okay?”
“Yeah.”
Although I wasn’t hungry, I got hungry as I ate, and ended up eating the entire pot of pasta. I’d expected to be sleeping on the couch, but Mara told me to get into her bed, and I did as I was told. She gave me a pair of surfing shorts to sleep in. They’d have been baggy on her, but they fit me snugly. She changed into pajamas and got in the bed with me.
I never knew whether she wanted me. Looking back now, I think she probably did. I would have wanted her too, but at that time it would never have occurred to me that anyone might want me. Mara put her arms around me and held me close. I curled up against her, my face pressed to her breasts. As she stroked my hair, I realized, for the first time ever, how lonely I was.
Loneliness can take you to strange places, and it might make you stronger. Then again, it might break you, and there’s no way of knowing in advance. No one would choose it if they had the choice. I hadn’t chosen it. I just suddenly had nowhere to go. The army didn’t want me, and I didn’t want it anymore. My parents were dead, and they hadn’t wanted me when they were alive.
How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy? (Phoenix Noir Book 1) Page 4