Lost In Place by Mark Salzman Read Free Book Online

all of that is out there! We all think we’re so important, so special, but then you look up and you realize,
Who do we think we’re kidding?
” Then he would laugh quietly to himself.
    I, on the other hand, liked feeling small because it made my failures insignificant. The gap between who I actually was (a tiny eighth-grader who couldn’t impress girls) and who I wanted to be (a perfect kung fu master living in a mist-concealed valley) seemed much smaller under the night sky than it did in any of my school classrooms or in the Circle of Fighting at the Chinese Boxing Institute.
    The Circle of Fighting was an area marked off with masking tape on the floor of our kung fu school. Whereas any part of the floor could be used for stretching, drills, forms (choreographed sequences of moves) or weapons exercises, the Circle of Fighting was special; it was where we either got beaten up by Sensei O’Keefe or tried to beat one another up. Since kung fu was an ancient and respected art form invented by nonviolent Buddhist monks, however, we learned that fighting practice was really all about learning respect for others, so we usually stopped short ofinjuring each other seriously and kept our temper under control most of the time. Actually the circle itself was a square, but the Circle of Fighting has a nicer ring to it than the Square of Fighting, so that’s what it was called.
    I did not fare well in the Circle of Fighting. I had never participated in a contact sport in my life, much less ever been in a fight, so I had no experience to draw on at all. I was small, terrified of being hit, and far from my goal of being impervious to pain. Because I practiced so much at home my punches and kicks came to look pretty good, and after seeing me shadowbox, most people expected me to be a challenging sparring partner. But after hearing me throw up with anxiety before lessons, then watching me step into the Circle and have my anxieties justified in every conceivable way, these same people often wondered aloud what on earth I was doing in a kung fu school. I loathed sparring, not because I had any moral objection to fighting, but because I was so excruciatingly bad at it. Every time I heard Sensei give out the command, “Bow to me—bow to each other—fight!” I felt my will to master kung fu turn to jelly. I just couldn’t be aggressive, and to be any good at all at sparring you must learn to assert yourself. When an opportunity presents itself and your opponent shows an opening or weakness, you have to decide instantly to attack, and you must do so with total commitment. You can’t attack halfheartedly, just to see how it goes, and if things look good then follow through. You get hurt that way, for the same reason that a gymnast can’t do a backflip at half speed just to make sure it’s safe. I never fully grasped this principle, however, so I got hurt a lot and rarely scored any points. But after being punched or kicked, I always managed to recover my balance and strike a good-looking traditional posture.
    “He gets the
living shit
kicked out of him every time, but he sure looks good, don’t he?” Sensei O’Keefe used to say when he was in a good mood, and everybody would laugh, including me. I much preferred ridicule to the other kind of critique he gave me, which he offered when he was in a bad mood or had been drinking or—which was the usual case—both, and it went something like this: “Listen, candy-ass, do you think if you’re jumped by three assholes who don’t give a shit whether you live or die that you’re gonna live if you fight like that? I don’t want to see any more of that
pussy
bullshit, I want you to do what I’ve been telling you every goddamned lesson, which is: Forget all your fancy book learning and your pretty technique and forget about protecting your pretty little face! All that doesn’t mean shit in the street! You live in real life, not some ivory tower! Real life is about life and death,