Why I Love Her
Herbert Foster Kaufman Part 1: Angry dog in the corner WHEN I WAS 14 I studied Hapkido. The goal of Hapkido is to create a saftey zone, an invisible ring, four feet in any direction, where you are always safe—“safe” meaning any person entering that ring is immediately brought down and broken. For the four years I studied, and for much of my life after that, I worked on perfecting the ability to render helpless anything that came into reach. How you chose to protect your safety zone was up to you. You were taught over 300 different joint locks and throws, then given opponents until you discovered what worked best for you. Aside from the first rule about protecting your circle, there was only one other rule: always finish with your opponent face down in front of you. My instructor was Master San, a short, wiry Korean man somewhere past 50 years old. It was very hard to tell how far past because he moved like a young man—not like a spry older person, but loose and relaxed like a teenager. His hair was jet black, but his face had many fine lines. Despite his youthful demeanor, he was every bit a nasty, angry old man. He was not an inscrutable oriental, but quite direct. “You do that wrong. All wrong. Where head? You thinking paycheck? Paycheck? Or dick? You thinking dick? Not thinking martial art.” Master San‟s wife was Turkish. As a result, Master San had many Turkish nephews, and those between the ages of 14 and 18 were his students. They were also the only other Turks I knew in Los Angeles. Master San was openly racist with them and me. Unbelievably, the nephews took all his hostility in complete silence. It was clear that Master San was very important in their family. It so stunned me that I also stopped myself from questioning his abuse. Despite my obviously being half-Turkish, he referred to me as the American. This always got the most smiles from the class. “Oh boy. More day with big stupid Turks and big stupid American. Wonderful. Very wonderful. God make you grow tall in the sunshine, oooh lovely and tall in the sunshine, grow tall and pretty, and first storm BAM! Fall over die like great big daisy. God make Master San solid, close to the ground. Strong in sun, strong in
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storm, too. Keep kicking! Damn you! Where head? Get head out of pants!” He was very direct in his execution of technique as well, or at least in presenting the options. He would always demonstrate the entire technique, then while demonstrating it a second time he would present a quick, painful alternative. “Then wrist lock here and elbow go up. See elbow go up. Try to put elbow down. Try. Hurt, right? So from here we snap down, you fall on back, I break, twist and you on stomach. Or … get up, get up … Or when elbow go up, see, here, small bone, break like pencil. You break pencil, you can break this bone. Sharp pieces of bone go up here, tear into nerve, into nexus. Lotta pain, no more shoulder, no more fight. Enemy lie down on face all by himself.” He kept us all thoroughly preoccupied with not falling into disfavor. Each day the student who had singled himself out for the Unlike Master San Award was chosen to be his assistant for the techniques demonstration at the end of the class. He would instruct you how to attack, sometimes with a real weapon. As soon as you entered his safe zone, Master San would be all over you, there would be sudden pain and you‟d drop to one knee, then another pain, always in the neck and belly, and you‟d be flopping around silently in pain like a fish on a dock, while Master San held you there and lectured on your pain. It was somehow understood that to scream would only interrupt Master San and slow down the lesson. Then he‟d help you up and would deliberately pat you on the shoulder. The only way to be in favor again was to not flinch when he patted you—to be rock solid, even if your arm was useless at your side, a side effect of his neck jab. Even if he patted you more than once. You could tell how much you‟d pissed him off by how long your arm was dead. Once my arm stayed completely useless for ten minutes; it just flopped at my side. I would have panicked if I‟d been allowed to rest. “Nathan? Still no left punch? Okay, do right punch two times.” The throwing demonstration was worse. Over and bam!, over and bam!. On your feet, on your back, on your feet, on your back, until you needed his help to get back up. “You throw up now? Up? Up? No? Good boy.” Over and bam!, over and bam! On the plus side, Master San was so fast and good at what he did that you never got hurt during these lessons, brutal as they might be. On the minus side, he took too much pride in being able to balance you just on the edge of injury without going over. We were not a great challenge for Master San. When he had planned retirement, he had not taken into account that he would need challenges. This was why he suddenly started teaching again.
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Evidently his wife‟s extended family provided his first class. His wife, it seems, had died recently and the family was doing whatever possible to keep him from leaving. I wandered into the class the first day he held it. “No. Come in. Sixteen good number. You stay. Fifteen very bad number. Sixteen students very lucky.” It was the most exhausting and insulting hour of my life, but as I was leaving Master San came over and told me, “You come back tomorrow.” “Yes, sir.” “You not back down?” “What?” “Tomorrow.” The fifteen nephews had to keep coming to practice, out of respect for their aunt. The majority of his nephews seemed to feel Master San was insane, but indispensable to the family. Two of them realized that an actual master was dispensing his wisdom, and they kept everyone else in line. I discovered all this after our first class. I couldn‟t fail to see my excellent timing. I returned. Master San completely reinforced my obsession for independence. He hooked right into my most crippling adolescent fears and offered an engrossing distraction to being powerless, one which even promised a cure. Self-control in exchange for obedience. It was the unspoken contract, so binding that my pain could not deter me and my failure could not deter him. It held us for four years, ending abruptly the night Charity and I left Los Angeles. Part 2: Pale dog in the corner Charity was white and blonde and completely American. She was naturally energetic, naturally happy, and very needy. I was none of these. The only things we had in common were being 16, having a furious sex drive, and the instantly calming effect we had upon each other. From the very first look on the first day, we liked each other. She was my first for everything: sex, love, jealousy. Part 3: Mad dog in the corner Despair becomes tangible when I think about being in love with Charity. Were she not in my life, were she to be gone and my love for
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her still remaining—even the thought of forever missing her, and the air becomes thick and difficult to breathe. My chest aches. A prelude to the real pain. If Charity were truly gone, my body would become a house and home for despair. And despair‟s offspring. Outwardly different but always mindful of their parents, the original despairs. Even if I “got over it,” every new fear would blaze a trail right back to them. The Sufis say all men torture themselves with the same fears all their lives until one day, suddenly, they realize what they are doing, and add “fear of torturing oneself” to the pile of uncontrollable, never-absent fears. After I met Charity, I felt as if I‟d received a new hole in my head and, instead of an eye or ear coming out, a new organ appeared. And all this new organ could sense was whether she was there or not, and when she wasn‟t, it screamed. Everything I am changes in her hands. The purest elements of my soul become unrecognizable, bitter, and brutal. Part 4: Nomad in the corner I trained with Master San after school Monday to Thursday every week. Master San still complained that we did not practice enough. “Three day and destroy all Master San hard work. No, no, two day, two day destroy Master San hard work and one day get hair done. You get hair done every Sunday, American? You not doing martial art every Sunday. Very pretty flower need push-up. No, no, on finger, on finger. Start count over.” In reality we did need three days to recover from what he put us through. His classes made homework and school seem simple and mundane. The real reason we only trained four days a week was that he couldn‟t stand to see us any more frequently. Given the combination of testosterone, bad will, and brutal fighting techniques, it is amazing there were not more injuries. We had a room full of hyperextended wrists, ankles, and knees, but as far as trips to the hospital, in four years we only had one broken bone: a cracked rib, mine. I also suffered a bruised testicle in the same fall, which involved another student falling on me and driving one knee into my groin and the other into my ribs. I saw one doctor for my ribs and a different doctor for my balls. They both gave me lots of pain medication. Even Master San gave me some. “Doctor say okay to have baby. Hurt dick but dick okay, can still have baby boy.”
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Suddenly he laughed, something which always unnerved me. “You so scared at hospital. Not rib, not internal bleeding, but dick. „Oh no, not dick. Whole life dick.‟” He laughed again, a dry, hollow laugh. “But doctor say dick okay. First must find girl you can hold down.” He gave me two small dried roots, each about the size of my little finger. “Hot water, one herb, no pain all night.” They were the first remedies I tried, because, unlike the American doctors, Master San seemed aware of how important my dick was to me. One root not only succeeded in knocking me out for twenty hours, it also helped heal my ribs and balls tremendously. Another good night‟s sleep and I found myself with no pain, plenty of pain medication, and an excuse to lie in bed all week. It was the most fearless time in my life. The day after the day I ran out of medication, I was sick with a constant, gnawing hunger and an unshakable sensation of dread. These were not unfamiliar feelings to me, so I simply waited until body and mind set itself right. When it was over I cried again, because I knew I would always know a simple way to feel better at every step of the day, but never have it. This was before I met Charity. Good day or bad, it was always better with Charity there. I was stronger, not quite fearless. I feared her. Part 5: No man in the corner If you had asked me at the time, I would have said that I felt no different before I killed him. This was not a lie, but with the distance I have now I can say that I was completely freaked. I wasn‟t in denial so much as experiencing a side effect from the trauma, mainly that I had a constant voice in my head telling me everything was alright. Part of this was from killing, but part of it was from simply witnessing a man‟s death. “Everything is okay.” “Everything is alright.” But I was crazed. Rather than the sensation of detachment I expected to feel, I felt like I had unleashed a permanent state of terror upon myself. There had to be consequences to what I had done. It was not guilt or remorse but selfish terror.
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Part 6: Last dog in the corner “Special day today. Today, I teach you how to kill. Special day. After today …” Master San allowed himself a dramatic pause. We were enrapt. We had sustained a lot of abuse with the same faint teenage-boy hope that he would teach us how to kill. It was clear there was a reason men were recruited to war during those years. “After today Master San have to count students at end of class, too.” Once Master San had stopped laughing and caught his breath, he berated us for having no sense of humor. “The way you fight, you need very good sense of humor. Or maybe you learn to cry. Waaahhhh. Very loud. Waaahhhh. Maybe you cry so loud you not get ass kicked. Can‟t tell joke, can‟t cry, you get ass kicked all the time.” I discovered there was a very important reason Master San singled me out as The American. He needed someone big for the other boys to hate. Since all the other boys were related in some fashion there was already old hate amongst most of them, but that kind of hate is difficult to work with. That sort of hate runs in a cycle controlled by mothers and screwed up even more by fathers. Master San needed a target, someone they could all hate. I don‟t know if Master San was lucky in getting a goat like me who worked so hard for four years, or if he had a Plan B, so if I turned out to be last he‟d simply let the others kill me. Most of the kids were lazy and Master San was abusive to them from the moment they entered to the moment they left. And it was clear that they hated Master San, too, except when Master San would go after me; then their losing power struggle was replaced by group hate. “The one problem for USA is Americans. Without Americans, USA great.” I fought some very mean and pissed-off guys. For the first two years I could do little else but survive my bouts. However, by the end of the second year there was not a nephew in the place I couldn‟t bring down hard. Once I had an opponent on the mat, I quickly worked my way to his back and with one arm wrapped under his chin and the other arm locking it in place across the back of his neck, I would cut off his windpipe—one of the 300 sanctioned techniques. Once he was unconscious it was pretty easy to roll him onto his face in front of me. My circle was safe.
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Part 7: Mad man in the corner I landed on her lover‟s back like a crab, neither of them saw me, my arms slid instantly around his neck and into the lock, he instinctively rose up, allowing me to wrap both legs around his waist. As Master San had explained it, you could hold the choke for three minutes, completely vulnerable, until your opponent suffocated or was rescued, or, you could lock your legs on as well and curl over his back, like a tortoise shell around a tortoise, then suddenly straighten your body so every muscle in your back stretched out against your opponent‟s spine, allowing you to snap his neck between the fourth and fifth vertebrae with a simple, sharp twist of the shoulders. Death. The way I had imagined it, I would rip off his head and his neck would spit blood all over Charity, who‟d still be frozen in terror, naked on her back. Three screams and then a lot of messy shit. But he twisted and we ended up on our sides on the floor. Fortunately, the technique works from any position. I straightened and twisted and the resistance was minimal. His neck made a dry snap, like very thin wood. I felt the sound throughout my entire body. His head didn‟t come off, and Charity was hardly frozen on her back. She was out of the room before the snap even happened. At least I was able to pop my head over his shoulder before we fell, so that Charity got a sudden look at my face. I‟m sure my expression was priceless. When I got back to the apartment Charity was waiting for me. “Let me see if I understand this correctly, because I‟m afraid I do,” Charity said instantly coming toward me as I closed the door. I noticed that both our bags were packed and ready. “When you said it was okay if I slept with other men, just as long as I told you ... when you said that to me, you fully intended to kill whoever I slept with, and now that you have, you are okay?” That she got it on the first guess is why I love her.
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