Of course, Steph was immediately jealous of my friendship with Sarah when I told her about it.
She was always really strange about sexuality and flirting. Once, when her mother sent her a couple of presents for her birthday, Steph opened the boxes and threw them across the room in disgust, as they housed a shawl of sorts and some bad hippie jewelry, very much in contradiction to how Steph dressed.
I tried to assuage things by joking with her, and then wrapped the colorful, gypsy-style shawl over my head and did a Fiddler on the Roof–type shimmy, worthy of Topol.
This gleam came into her eye, as if she was turned on, and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I looked like Harvey Fierstein, without makeup. How could this turn her on? But it did, and we ended up having lots of gins and tonic and we messed around dancing to music from our youth—New Order, Joy Division, Sinead O’Connor, and the like—and she really let go that night, really let herself loose and danced and became incredibly attractive and fun and charming, and I thought, Finally, here you are. Thanks for coming up to the surface and playing, as we swirled around and giggled and danced and fell sprawling on my bed, which collapsed under us. It started a golden few weeks of intimacy and reminded me why we were together, and why the trouble was worth it, in the end.
Or so I told myself. Passively.
After four months of training at Kinesis, I invited my mother to Seattle for my green belt test.
What made it a bit pathetic was that the green belt was, as a friend of mine back then called it, a “rank amateur” standing. We weren’t friends very long after that.
Mostly, it was an excuse for my mother to fly up to Seattle and meet Steph, since we’d become engaged, so I asked my mother to come up and witness the test, as a way of passively giving me her blessing. “Just take a few days, meet my betrothed, and see what I’m doing, how I’m living. It’s important to me,” I think I said.
And miraculously, Mom took some time off work to visit me, and not while I was laid up in a hospital or in a psych ward. It was touching.
There was a deep, sincere part of me that needed the validation from my mother, after all this time. The test was nothing, really, except the only sort of accomplishment I’d reached in the last ten years, with my “career” as a designer taking the swirly path down-sewer, and I remembered how phenomenally good it had felt way back when to do these tests, to mark your progress as a martial artist, and have your friends and family come to cheer you on, and watch as you plied yourself valiantly through exhaustion and had your face kicked in once in a while by an overzealous dickhead who didn’t understand this wasn’t really combat.
So it was set, and I had been really earnest in my preparations for this test, remembering how it had been fourteen years ago when I was twenty-five or so, and how badly reductive it had been to me, both physically and emotionally, and had actually broken my fascination with karate and all martial arts: I knew, after that test, that this wasn’t for me. Going past green belt, in this system, required a level of subservience and compliance I was still incapable of giving anyone. And I will credit my instructor then with seeing that quite clearly, ten years ago, and how uncomfortable that test became to everyone watching because I wouldn’t break, and she wouldn’t stop trying to break me, barking commands at me like I was a proud recruit in a boot camp, or a dog in dire need of an alpha, or a shock collar.
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 he
rself 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.
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 grou
nd.
(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.
My Heart Is a Drunken Compass Page 13