Lost In Place by Mark Salzman Read Free Book Online Page A

goddammit! You’re just another momma’s boy smart-ass who thinks he’s too good to have to mess with real life, but it’s gonna stare you in the face someday, candy-ass, and what are you gonna do about it? When you can’t run home to your musical mommy and your
needlepointing
daddy”—my father had once worked on a needlepoint of an Edward Hopper painting while waiting for me in the parking lot of the Boxing Institute—“in your safe little house in the suburbs, huh? I’ll tell you what’ll happen, candy-ass! You’re gonna get ripped to pieces, and you’re gonna wonder just before getting your head blown off why somebody didn’t prepare you for it. So do yourself a favor and forget about being afraid to get hurt and fight, for Chrissake! There’s no room for pussies in this house.”
    Occasionally, when Sensei O’Keefe decided we needed “a little kick in the ass” to move forward in the arts, he ledus through special training exercises, which included a kind of sparring where all the students stood in a circle and each one was assigned a number. One person stood in the center. When Sensei O’Keefe yelled out numbers, each person hearing his number called was to attack the person in the center and keep up the assault until he heard his number called out again. This meant that the person in the center could have as many as five people at a time punching and kicking at him, and if you got too tired to defend yourself, you just got punched and kicked more; no one dared let up because Sensei said that since no one lets up on the streets we had to prepare ourselves accordingly. Sometimes, especially if he’d had too much to drink before the lesson, Sensei would forget which numbers he’d called and it would take forever to clear the Circle. At other times he felt the person in the center wasn’t trying hard enough. In that case, Sensei would let out a horrifying scream, jump past the assigned attackers and give the student in the center a beating to remember. When he did that to me one night he hit me so hard on the side of the head that I crashed into a wall and brought a whole shelf of trophies down with me. I sustained a bruise on my temple so deep that it took several days to rise to the surface and form a scab.
    Another special exercise was called Cemetery Sparring. We split up into two teams—those with shirts and those without—and left the school separately to hide at opposite ends of a nearby cemetery under cover of night. Practicing our stealth skills, we were to slowly converge on the field of honor and do battle. If we received a decisive blow we had to lie “dead on the field” until the end of the exercise. There was quite a bit of disagreement over what constituted a decisive blow, however, so many of the individualbattles went on until one of the parties could in fact do little else but lie on the field. The game ended when one team had been entirely eliminated; then that team had to do one hundred push-ups and run a mile as punishment for losing. Meanwhile, Sensei O’Keefe was a free agent, and wandered around the cemetery on his own to observe or attack as the spirit moved him. The angriest I think I ever saw him was the night he discovered a student hiding in a tree, hoping to survive the game without having to fight at all. That student did not return for lessons, needless to say.
    The most reflective I ever saw Sensei O’Keefe was also during one of these cemetery exercises. He had been smoking pot earlier in the evening, which usually made him more subdued than the drinking did. As usual, I was one of the first to die on the field, so I’d had plenty of time to enjoy the crisp fall air and a lovely view of the night sky accompanied by the shouts, smacks and thuds of glorious combat all around me. By the end of the game Bill, the huge man I liked so much, was the only man standing. Just as he prepared to announce that the game was over and we could all stand up, Sensei O’Keefe