Today’s soundtrack: shadrach, mesach, abednago
Today at 8:02pm: trying not to hit the floor with the staff (I suck at it)


Well, I put the Russian kid in his place, a couple weeks ago in Hapkido. (Just verbally, none of that Gordon Liu shit for me.) Turns out what I had mistaken for uppity-ness was just overenthusiasm, and ever since the guy has been very polite and respectful.

Anyways this guy--let’s call him Anatoly, since I was just reading something in Newsweek about Kissinger and Anatoly what’s-his-face, from 1973--was in the lockerroom today. Earlier I’d observed him having some difficulty with a couple of the kicks, so I was trying to give some helpful advice as we dressed to leave.

“Anatoly, where ya going?” said Mark, a cheerful orange belt, entering the lockerroom. “You’re not gonna stay for the groundfighting class? What are you, a pussy? C’mon!”

“I have to go to hospital,” said Anatoly, in his Russian accent. “My brother is there.”

“Oh shit,” said Mark, his face turning ashen. “I’m sorry to hear that. What happened?”

“He was, stab. Stabbed,” said Anatoly, miming a knife in the chest. Now he had everyone in the lockerroom’s attention.

“Holy shit,” said Mark, putting his hand on Anatoly’s shoulder. “Is he okay?”

“Yes, he is fine,” said Anatoly. “The knife, it goes between his heart and his spine, just missing. But lung is, collapsed.”

“Jesus christ,” I said.

“What happened?” a third person asked. “He was just standing on the street and some guy stabbed him?”

“No,” said Anatoly, almost...smiling, but I wasn’t sure if it was out of discomfort or what. “He and other guy had, you know, meeting. Other guy has knife. My brother has--” Here Anatoly put one fist on top of the other and mimed like he was hitting a home run.

“A pipe? A bat?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “So he swings--” Anatoly swung his arms again--“but other guy does, like this.” He mimed a looping stab, like a hook punch. Again he delivered the descriptions with a creepy sort of grin.

I gave Anatoly my condolences and left, suddenly disturbed. Not so much that his brother was stabbed; I don’t mean to sound like a jerk but people get stabbed all the time. But was Anatoly or his family mobbed up?

“Meeting” in the street with a bat and a knife could be the result of a simple fender bender pushed to the next level by traffic-frayed nerves, or it could be the result of something more...organized. Perhaps I’m buying into Brooklyn-Russian stereotypes, but I started to worry about what kind of person I was instructing.

Let me point out that I am far from a martial arts expert, I'm purely intermediate; but the knowledge even an intermediate acquires is dangerous. I’m not saying I could pull it off in the street, but I know (at least theoretically) how to cripple, how to separate the knee, put a shin in two pieces and a smattering of other nastiness.

Me, I’ve practiced this stuff in the hopes that the crazy guy who tries to push me off the subway platform is going to get a free ambulance ride instead. But here I am helping someone else acquire dangerous knowledge when I don’t have any goddamn idea what they’ll do with it.

Anatoly smiling while he recounted a tale of distasteful violence could have been some cultural thing I simply wasn’t up on. (I discovered people in China and Vietnam will often smile when they’re uncomfortable, so if, say, a hotel clerk lost your reservation and you started arguing with them, they might suddenly break into a cheeky grin, and if you didn’t know better you’d maybe think they were laughing at you and start to get pissed off.) Or maybe violence is integrated into his, er, lifestyle.

A modern dojang is nothing like in the old days, where people were carefully screened, slowly taught, and scrupulously observed. Anybody with the green can walk in and sign up; this is reality.

I like to think that by being an assistant I’m helping people, and I’ve naively assumed people who walk into our doors are seeking to better themselves, lose the spare tire, achieve spiritual peace and all that Deepak Chopra stuff. It sounds dumb but I never really considered people might sign up just so they could learn to fuck other people up.

My Master has ejected people from the school before and barred them from returning. In particular there was one ex-military walking time bomb of a man I wasn’t sorry to see go.

Another guy was an ex-cop with one fucking eye. I think he enjoyed hurting people and he was one of the first to show me the knife disarms. I will never forget his scary-ass, eyepatched face pointing a wooden knife at me and saying, “The first thing to remember in a knife fight is that you are going to get cut the fuck up. You are going to get cut.”

“Martial arts always attracts some crazies,” my Sabumnim explained to me, after I’d watched him explain to Army Time Bomb that he should come back two weeks after Never. (Cyclops got the boot too.) Another lesson I should have paid more attention to, I’d almost forgotten it.

Maybe he’s harmless, but I’m going to stop focusing on Anatoly’s kicks and drill him in the disarms, and maybe I’ll be doing both of us a favor. I don’t want him wearing an eyepatch and mopping the floors with some wide-eyed white belt.