The first thing I noticed was how big the complex was. There was an elementary school and a high school all on the same grounds. There were several soccer fields and a big outdoor field with lots of seating.
We walked into the building just before the final bell. The students broke free into the halls. They were all wearing uniforms. The boys wore khaki pants, the girls grey or plaid skirts, and everyone wore a white shirt and a striped tie. Some of the high-schoolers wore varsity jackets with gold letters. I was always the type of kid who found shopping for new school clothes annoying, so it appealed to me that here I wouldn’t have to think about what I wore each day.
I also noted the ethnic makeup in the student body. At Oakwood, a number of my friends were Lebanese, and I knew an Asian girl and a Tamil girl. But that was it for diversity. Here, there were crowds of Arab, Asian, black, and brown kids. It looked like a TV school cast by a director with minorities in mind.
The tour rubbed off on my mom. My dad had already made up his mind—he always wanted his kids to have the best, and he was already planning to start Manjot and Gurratan at the school once they reached sixth grade. My mom was less impressed by the perceived status that came with the school. What appealed to her was how eager to learn these students appeared. Many were loudly discussing class lessons as they moved textbooks and binders from their lockers to their bags.
As we drove home, one thing lingered in my mind. The entire time we’d been there, no one had said anything about my patka or stared at me for more than a moment. And when they did look at me, it was more, I think, to note that I wasn’t wearing a uniform than because I was wearing something different on my head. Until then, the feeling of being an outsider had weighed heavily on me, occupying a huge part of my mind. With that weight lifted, I hoped I would now be free to excel at academics and sports. Maybe, just maybe, I could make my dad proud enough that he’d finally feel satisfied.
Part Two
Chapter Six
POINT SYSTEM
Mr. Neilson gathered us together at the end of a practice to tell us the news. I had sensed something was up before he sat us down to make the announcement. The Bruce Lee posters were rolled up and set against the wall, and throughout training, he hadn’t called out strikes with his usual vigour. We sat cross-legged on the hardwood before him while he fidgeted with the ends of his belt.
“This is a little bit awkward for me,” he said. “But due to some financial difficulties, I’m not able to hold on to this place anymore.”
“You’re closing the gym?” I asked in alarm.
“No. No way. Not closing anything. Just moving it.” He paused. “To my house. For a while—just until I figure out the next move.”
I sat back in relief—we would still have a place to train. But I noticed other, older students looking at each other through the corners of their eyes. The idea of training out of a basement was a little disappointing. A lot of tae kwon do purists, valuing the prestige of a dojo and its instructors, would have stopped attending after hearing an announcement like that. Lucky for Mr. Neilson, his style of training was less traditional and more focused on street fighting, so most of us were looking for practical training more than prestige.
“We’ll continue with classes at the same times on the same days,” said Mr. Neilson. “I’m moving all the bags and equipment there. Your rankings, wherever you are, none of that changes. It’ll be just as good as this.” He laughed. “You know what? It’ll be better. Who needs a fancy place? The martial arts are supposed to be humble.”
We bowed to our instructor, and he bowed back. I could tell that he had lost a few students with the news. Not me, though.
When my mom picked me up, I told her Mr. Neilson’s dojo was moving to his house.
“What does his wife think of him bringing the class to their house?” my mom asked.
I shrugged. “I dunno.”
“Does he have any kids?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“How many people are in the club? Do you have any friends there?”
“They’re all my friends,” I said. She shot me a dubious expression as she turned the Volvo onto Santo Drive. “Bebey-ji,” I groaned. In two short years I’d watched my strength and speed improve manifold, and I was eager to see what more years of practice would earn me.
She grew even more suspicious the next week when she dropped me off at the new dojo. Mr. Neilson lived in a rundown, two-storey house off Tecumseh Road, around the corner from an auto shop and bottle depot. Mr. Neilson had asked us to enter through the alleyway and backyard, but my mom wasn’t having it. She parked on the street, walked me to the front door, and rang the doorbell.
A very old lady in a floral dress answered the door. “Hello?” she asked, her voice as thin as a ghost’s.
“Is this Mr. Neilson’s dojo?” my mom asked.
“My son’s downstairs, but you’re welcome to come through the front.”
“Mr. Neilson’s your son,” my mom noted. “This is your house?”
“Lived here for almost fifty years.”
“You and . . . your son.”
I pulled at my mom’s jacket to stop her pestering. Just then, Mr. Neilson popped his head around the corner of the back-door entrance. The baggy sleeves of his uniform swished in the air as he waved. “Hi, Mrs. Dhaliwal. We’re down here.” He disappeared around the corner. I gave my mom a look: Relax.
As I shuffled to the back of the house, I overheard the old lady offer my mom some tea.
“If it’s no trouble, thank you very much,” my mom said as she removed her shoes.
The dojo was an open basement with concrete floors and exposed steel support beams. Punching bags hung from the unfinished ceiling. Mr. Neilson had tried to make the place feel the same as it had in the strip mall, with martial arts posters on the walls and a big, rubber, blue mat covering the floor to protect our feet. But there was no way to disguise it: we were training in his elderly mom’s basement.
Mr. Neilson continued to try to make the place seem cooler than it was. Before our stretches, he showed us his pet piranhas in a big neon aquarium. “I think it’s just about suppertime,” he said, scooping a goldfish from a separate tank with a net and plopping it into the piranhas’. They attacked the goldfish, chased it, tired it out, and nipped at its fins until it flopped into a corner, and the piranhas set upon it.
We put on our uniforms and stretched together. Mr. Neilson held himself up on the ceiling beams to stretch his body, trying to make the exposed construction seem like an advantage. As we practised axe kicks, his foot flew over his head and hit the ceiling. He chuckled and said, “Must be a good day for me.”
By the end of the hour, the piranhas had chomped their prey to a skeleton, I’d forgotten about the weird scenario, and my mom was satisfied enough with Mr. Neilson’s operation that I was allowed to return the next week. I was relieved to know that I’d still have my chance to earn a black belt and to break more than a single board—maybe even with my knuckles, like my older classmates.
But with each practice, the class got smaller and smaller. None of the women had followed over to the basement, so we started changing out of our streetwear and into our uniforms in the open. Unfortunately for me, one of the students who remained was a boy who’d been picking on me and trying to ruin what was otherwise a great training experience: Eric.
Eric was a heavy-set teenager with long hair, and he had been mean to me since I had earned my first colour. I was incredibly committed to tae kwon do—I still practised every day at home. Sometimes, I’d get a slap on the back or a quiet nod of approval from one of the older students.
One day, Mr. Neilson overheard Eric calling me a loser as he held his sparring gloves high above his head where I couldn’t reach them. “Is that guy bothering you?” Mr. Neilson asked me as I took a break, my frustrations showing. Normally, I liked to handle those sorts of problems myself, but Eric had been bullying me more than usual all practice. I nodded
yes.
“Thought so.”
Mr. Neilson told the class that we’d be working on some new self-defence techniques for the rest of practice. We gathered around to watch him demonstrate.
Mr. Neilson picked Eric as a volunteer. “I want you to bear-hug me from behind,” he said, turning his back to Eric. “Tighter,” he said. “Tighter—don’t be afraid. I can . . .” Mr. Neilson gulped for air. “Uh-oh. How do I get out of this?” he asked.
Mr. Neilson threw his head back, surprising Eric with a whop to the nose. “First, head-butt—sorry, buddy. I should have called that out.”
Eric rubbed his nose on his shoulder to soothe the pain.
“After you’ve hit them in the nose, you want to get into a horse stance,” continued Mr. Neilson as he crouched forward, pulling Eric nearer to the floor. “You can grab his hair and yank it to help pull him down, but be careful not to lean too far, because if he’s a bigger guy, like Eric, then he’s going to put all his weight on you. If he takes you right down—you’re finished. Instead, make sure you got a good stance like this and—see, what’s right here?” Mr. Neilson nodded at the open space between his legs.
I stared in disbelief. No way, I thought. There’s no way he’s going to . . .
I watched as Mr. Neilson struck a quick blow between Eric’s legs and dropped him flat on his back, striking Eric once more in the stomach as he hit the floor.
Mr. Neilson released Eric and slapped his hands together. “Let’s try that—everyone grab your sparring partner. And be careful not to actually hit each other.”
When practice was over and we’d changed into our plain clothes, Mr. Neilson asked me to stay behind. “If Eric gives you a hard time again, let me know,” he said.
“Okay, thank you.”
“You know, Jagmeet, you’re getting really good at this. Have you thought about trying out for tournaments?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.” I was trying to play it cool, but inside, I could feel myself getting fired up—the idea of competing was really exciting.
“Think about it. You’ll need more training, but I can give you more training on the weekend, free of charge. One-on-one lessons so you’ll get better.”
“Really?” I asked, not believing what I was hearing. The idea of more training to get even better quicker was exactly what I wanted. “Yes, I think I would really like that. I mean, I want to be best. I want to earn my black belt,” I said.
At the time, a black belt summed up everything I wanted. It was the pinnacle that would mean I was the best, the toughest. What I wanted was to be so tough that bullies would think twice about teasing me or laying a hand on me. And, truth be told, I wanted to make my dad think twice about laying a hand on any of his family.
“Good—let your mom know and think about what I said.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Neilson.”
It didn’t take much convincing for my parents to agree to extra training. Since I’d started tae kwon do, my parents had noticed a change in my confidence, something my dad had tried cultivating for so long with activities I hadn’t cared for. Now that they’d finally found something that stuck, they were thrilled to hear I wanted to do more of it.
The first time I arrived for a weekend lesson, my mom dropped me off in the alley behind Mr. Neilson’s house. This was the usual way we entered the house to get to the basement—we’d walk from the alley through the backyard to the back porch, and then down the stairs to the gym in the basement. When I walked up the backyard gate, though, I noticed Mr. Neilson was already in the backyard. He was sunbathing on a reclined patio chair.
“You’re early,” he said, sitting up in his chair. I looked at my watch—not really, I thought, I’m just on time. I was more surprised to see that the only garment Mr. Neilson was wearing was a leopard-print Speedo. He looked down, registering my surprise, and laughed. “If I wore these in the winter, my neighbours would think I’m crazy.”
He stretched a little before opening the back door and gesturing me to head inside. Before I could take my first step downstairs, though, he stopped me with a hand on my back. “Nope, this way,” he said, pointing upstairs. “You’ll see—this is a very different program.”
As we headed upstairs, Mr. Neilson started chatting more.
“It’s interesting the way people’s perspective changes how they see something,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Take my swim shorts, for example. In the summer, if I was sunbathing or at a beach, people wouldn’t think much of me wearing these swim shorts.”
I nodded as though I understood, even though I had no idea where he was going.
“But imagine if I was walking around in my underwear. All of a sudden, people would think it was a little weird.”
“Okay,” I said, still confused.
“But if you think about it, what’s really so different about wearing swim shorts or underwear? Why should one be considered strange and the other accepted as normal?” he concluded.
In the back of my head, I knew that there was something off about this conversation, but he left it at that.
When we made it to the top of the stairs, I had the distinct feeling that his mother wasn’t home. It was the first time I’d been in any part of the house other than the basement, and the house was quiet as a vault. He walked into his bedroom and asked me to sit on the rug at the foot of his bed. As he rifled through some books and magazines at the bottom of his closet, I looked around his room. It was very tidy and filled with tae kwon do pictures, weapons, and memorabilia. There was another fish tank on the dresser alongside photos of his younger, more muscular self posing with his friends. A long bō staff hung above the headboard, and nunchuks were displayed on the wall beside other traditional tae kwon do weapons. On the bedside table, I spotted a black club about the size of his forearm.
“How much do you know about the body?” he said, sitting across from me on the floor, still wearing nothing but his Speedo. On his lap was a stack of books. He turned them 180 degrees so I could read the titles. They were about human biology and health.
“A lot, I think,” I said. “I want to be a doctor.”
“So you know about muscles?”
I nodded.
“Oh, yeah?” he asked, opening the top book to a spread of a front-facing and back-facing skinless man, nothing but muscle and tendon. “What do you know about them?”
I started naming out the ones I could point to—hamstrings, Achilles tendons, triceps—but he cut me off.
“No, no,” he said. “Not do you know the muscles—what do you know about them? About what they do?”
“They do everything,” I said. “They let me move, jump, pick things up. Whatever I need.”
“Nice. And minute things too, like blinking and chewing. You know that if you work them out they grow, right?”
I nodded.
“But muscle tissue gets help from a hormone called . . . do you know it?”
I shook my head.
“Testosterone. Now there are natural ways and unnatural ways to build testosterone. Unnatural ways are things like steroids. Guys will inject it right into themselves, but it’s terrible for you. It’ll kill you. Never do that. Natural testosterone, though, is great. Natural testosterone is something we can build every day, and it’s actually not that hard.”
“Okay.”
“You can take these home,” he said, setting aside the books atop the stack of his literature. Underneath the books, he was holding a magazine. I’d now recognize it as a Penthouse or a Playboy, but as a kid, it looked to me as though it might be a lingerie catalogue. He licked his finger and pinched the top corner. “Do you know the differences between male and female anatomy?”
“Kind of,” I said.
“Let me explain it to you anyway.” He showed me some pictures of naked women and then naked men and women together, named the private areas, and then returned to the male parts with more detail. “Any muscle can get stronger an
d healthier with more testosterone. When you get aroused, you get more blood flow, which is also great for muscle development.” He looked at me with a smile. “It’s probably working already.”
I looked away and adjusted the way I was sitting, embarrassed.
“Relax,” he said. “You’re about to go through puberty, which is when your body starts producing lots of testosterone naturally. Actually, you’re probably already there. Do you ever touch yourself? Does stuff come out?” I looked at him blankly. “Well, I can help you get through puberty faster, and puberty will make you taller, stronger, and faster.”
He waited for me to show some interest as I mentally assessed him. Mr. Neilson had a stern, unfriendly face with bushy eyebrows and coarse skin, so he didn’t naturally stir up feelings of trust and safety. But he’d protected me in class and taught me skills to fight bullies. I thought of him both as mentor and protector. After a long pause I said, “Okay.”
“Okay. I have a program that focuses just on enhancing testosterone and blood flow,” Mr. Neilson continued, making it sound like some “special ops.” “It’s kind of like a new medicine, so you won’t find it anywhere else. And, to be honest, it’s not something I offer to everyone. Just the star athletes. James—you remember James, right?” I nodded. “He was a part of this program.”
“He was?”
“Yeah, but don’t tell anyone. If everyone knows, then I have to offer it to all the members. I don’t have time for that.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, I’ll show you how it works.”
Mr. Neilson asked me to rub on top of his Speedo. I didn’t do it very long before he said it was now my turn. “It’s better if you take everything off,” he explained.
While Mr. Neilson rubbed me, he explained to me in medical terms what he was doing. He spoke as though I was doing it to myself: “You’re stimulating your blood flow,” “You’ll notice a difference in yourself almost immediately,” “Sometimes you might ejaculate—that’s normal.”
Love & Courage Page 8