First Citizen (3 page)

Don’t think that, because I could put up with all this minutiae, I was obsessed with karate. No, it was just part of my tender self-image. Mastering finicky details like keeping my wrists straight and my feet parallel in a step-and-punch seemed like little enough to pay for my internal fantasies.

I never gave myself one hundred percent to anything. Not to any discipline, any ideal, any art, any person, any love. It was all just a friendly game, remember? And none of it mattered more than my personal integrity and my own sweet hide. That distancing, that distinction between myself and the world around me, was the secret of my strength in the years to come.

You may not like that. You don’t have to. This is my life we’re talking about here.

Sensei Kan was a tiny man, all muscle. He taught about one class in four himself, the rest going to senior students while he walked the
dojo
floor, observing, correcting tiny flaws, encouraging. Of course, he taught the advanced course in the evening for brown belts and above. To me he was just this presence, a small smiling shadow, until I earned brown—in about three years—and was invited to join those evening classes.

What I remember most about Sensei Kan was his movements. They were so fluid, like water over a stone. Sensei seemed like a middle-aged man to us—at least forty—and although he was Korean he spoke perfect English without an accent. He wore a belt, a black one with red Chinese writing down the end. The school brochure claimed him to be an eighth degree in karate and a fourth in judo, but Kan never talked about his belt. Only about his teachers and their lessons.

He ran a tight class and made you sweat, which was okay, but we thought he was a little heavy on the bow-and-smile, respect-for-all-living-things crap. Or we called it crap.

Once two boys went out on the floor to settle a grudge in full-focus sparring and started throwing for-real kicks without the padding. Sensei Kan was on the other side of the
dojo,
sitting cross-legged with his back to them, watching a
kata
group go through their exercises. In two seconds, he crossed the distance to the sparring square in a white blur and waded into the middle of a murderous bridge-kick and back-hand exchange. He tripped both of the angry boys onto their asses as if they were just standing around. And for the next free period he lectured the whole class about how we were brothers upon the Way and should have no animosities among us. And we all thought: yah-yah, yack-yack.

The first time Kan sparred with me, I believed it was because he had seen how really good my feet were. I had practiced a roundhouse and back-kick combination until I could lift a flowerpot off a six-foot wall and crunch it before it hit the ground. I was puffed up, touchy about my skills, a real brat.

It was his head fake that caught me.

We were sparring in the warmup before class. I was in a modified straddle stance, Kan in a tight side stance with his hands cocked at the ready.

“Don’t look at me,” Sensei whispered—for the second time. Being new to the advanced section, I didn’t know that two warnings were Kan’s limit. In the next instant, the young-old man’s eyes locked with mine and his head started to unscrew.

The eyes never lost their focus, just panned left, out across the floor with the same seeing-but-not-alive gaze that a department store dummy has. Sensei’s head was held as level as a white china teacup. I watched, fascinated, as the cords of his neck twisted and overlapped, until the chin was pointing back over his shoulder. It was the same smooth, sinuous flow that a snake makes in the sand.

Sensei’s arched foot was suddenly tucked under the lapels of my white
gi
jacket. The breath went out of my chest like cream poured out of a pitcher. The clacking in my ears was my own knees striking the hardwood floor.

Putting it together later, in afterimage, I saw how the head fake had blended into a shoulder fake, a body fake, and a 360-degree roundhouse kick that had caught me in the solar plexus.

Perfect.

But the admiration came after; right then, the problem was oxygen.

With gentle hands Sensei supported me under the arms and forced my head forward to help me breathe.

“You believe me when I tell you not to look at your opponent?” Sensei asked with a lilt that I heard as a smile. “You aren’t fast enough yet to look at him. Look past his shoulder. Use your peripheral field to see
movement.
Not eyes. Not hands. Not feet. … Movement.”

When I could stand, still hunched over, the young-old man walked me to a sideline bench and sat me down, directing my weight and balance as easily as pushing a cart.

“You are quick.” Sensei squinted at me with those Asian eyes that belied the English voice. “Good coordination. Good moves. When you learn to see without looking, you will be as fast as your body promises.”

Right at that minute, with the ache in my chest still blossoming like a gong tone, I began to realize something. The sensei had just called me a brown-belt asshole, a pizza-breath kid, and not such hot shit after all. Hell, he had
shown
me that. And it hadn’t hurt, not inside, as a rebuke from any other adult would. From Sensei Kan, I could accept it.

Then the sensei had said something nice about me. Not extravagant praise, but an acceptance, an honest appraisal. As if I were a horse we were both admiring but didn’t particularly plan to ride or buy. It was just true and no reflection on either of us.

With the gong fading now, I had put a few of the pieces of my cocky, sixteen-year-old life together. I still held a handful of puzzle parts with tabs and hollows, colors and shapes that in no way fit together. But I had made a start.

Chapter 2

Granville James Corbin: Personal Kill

The year I made brown belt at Sensei Kan’s karate studio was also the year I met Alice Wycliffe and lost my heart.

A number of rapes had scared the women at the high school and everyone was thinking self-defense again. Alice came into the
dojo
with two of her girlfriends. They were all from the cheerleading squad, but alongside them Alice was like a gold sovereign tossed in with two old nickels.

They all had pretty faces but, compared to Alice’s, the others were out of focus, with a nose too long or a chin too short. They all had slender legs, tight asses, and jutting breasts but, compared to hers, the other two were lumps and bumps, fat calves, and callused elbows. They all had clean, layered blonde hair, but Alice’s made the other girls’ seem like old bird’s nests.

Today I can still remember what she looked like.

Sensei let the girls observe a class and they walked along the edge of the oak-plank practice floor with their leather pumps making tappity-tap sounds, like a team of horses on cobblestones. Everyone else in the room was barefoot.

Seeing this absolutely beautiful girl from across the room, I suddenly felt foolish. The white cotton
gi,
even when it’s freshly washed and pressed, is a loose-fitting pair of pajamas, like something worn by a walk-on from
Lord Jim
or
Gunga Din,
with sagging knees, short coat, loppy lapels. The belt ties just under your navel, above the second
chakra,
which is your sex. The loose ends flap around your groin. And all I was wearing under this baggy suit was a jockstrap with a nut cup. We’d been working hard, I was sweating, the cotton was sticking to my ass, and it was definitely two days too long since I’d had the whole rig washed.

And here came the most beautiful girl in our high school, probably the most beautiful on the Monterey Peninsula, maybe in the State of California, into the
dojo
where I happened to be class leader that day. Sensei Kan brought the girls over toward me and, with his twinkle, introduced them.

Alice actually put out her hand, a slender, clean hand with four beautifully shaped fingers and even a nice-looking thumb. She was standing close enough that I could smell her scent, something-lemon, which meant she was close enough to smell me, overworked-horse.

Mother once told me that as a baby I was a knockout. But all babies have the same sweet-Buddha face: rounded cheeks and forehead, clear eyes, gentle smile—at least when they are sleeping well.

With the years, however, I got to watch in the mirror as my face changed to the contours of a painted wooden puppet, something crafted in Europe for the sophisticated New York art market. My blue eyes had pinched up, I thought, above ruddy apple cheeks. My chin and nose had sharpened—one like the point of a ballerinas toe slipper, the other like a knife blade. My lips and mouth grew wide and worked constantly between a rubbery smile and a bowed pout of anger. I had red hair that thickened and curled until, under some lights and all summer long, it looked like a clown’s string wig.

As my voice and vocabulary developed, my brat self began to come out with flashes of wit, malice, and occasional wisdom that Mother and Father heard with uneasy tolerance. For many of the things I mouthed, they could probably find no root in themselves. Like any boy, I was full of cheap enthusiasms and echoes of my environment. And that—abetted by the Cannery Row scene and with fantasies of being an international jewel thief, secret agent, kung fu master swirling in my head—wasn’t exactly
their
environment. I also read a ton of books and watched people. I judged people, if I remember rightly. I was a brat, really self-centered. But I’ve since learned to live with myself.

“How do you do?” said the future Salinas Valley Lettuce Queen, lightly pressing the fingers of the grinning puppet who smelled like a horse.

“Okay, ’n’ you?” I mumbled.

The two other girls giggled, Alice smiled faintly, and Sensei Kan nodded and adroitly wheeled them away across the floor. Right then I could have killed him—if I’d had a hand grenade and room to throw it.

For the rest of the hour they stood on the sidelines watching the class, talking among themselves, and occasionally pointing and giggling. At me, or so I believed.

It turned out that the other girls thought karate was too much like work and decided to take the mace course instead. Alice, however, had found something graceful and meaningful in the movements. She bought a
gi
, signed up for the beginners’ eight-week course, and I taught her.

For two months, I gave that girl personal attention. I held her beautiful feet straight while she practiced stances, steadied her hips while she kicked, braced her shoulders as she punched. In sparring, I even let her kick me—hard—in the stomach. And I only occasionally peeked between her lapels. Because the
gi
jacket tends to fall open in a side kick, most girls wore a tee-shirt under it, but Alice always wore an iridescent leotard with an interesting neckline.

No one was more patient with her, no one more loyal and devoted. She smiled, nodded at everything I said, and still learned nada, zip, zero. Alice was graceful, all right, and worked hard, but she had absolutely no spatial sense, no timing. She also confused left and right. She must have made cheerleader on her smile alone.

And yes, for those first two months I thought about asking her out for a date. But every time my internal ear could hear her saying no, she had to wash her hair, study for a test, catch up on her letter writing, et cetera—just like every girl I had ever wanted.

I was still a virgin at sixteen, at least as far as girls were concerned. Boys didn’t count. I had played my share of grab-ass in the showers, had explored my section of the sand hills, and made the obligatory jokes about it. All the time we were also talking about girls and how to get to them. Whatever we boys might do, it wasn’t “balling.” The official thing was Doing It With a Girl.

After two months of positioning Alice’s feet, fists, and elbows during class, I finally got up the nerve to ask the future runner-up Miss California for a date. Right away she let me take her to Fleur de Lis on Cannery Row and later, in her father’s car, let me manipulate her limbs in other ways.

During the year and a half that we went around together, Allie showed me that girls worry just as much about impressing boys as boys do about girls. Sometimes more so. It’s just that boys are like weasels in their curiosity and their pleasure, being wired directly. Girls are more like kittens or butterflies, being wired obliquely.

Alice also taught me that a beautiful girl needs love and companionship, just as much as a plain one. Often more so. You see, a heartbreaker like Alice, even if she’s never done a thing, soon gets a reputation among the boys: She is at once a whore and unattainable. A whore because sex is all they can think about when they see her. Unattainable because they are intimidated by her and by the others they are sure compete for her attentions. A truly beautiful and sexy woman frustrates—and so angers—the average man, who usually thinks himself homely and unworthy.

After a couple of months of straightening her feet and uncrooking her wrists on the twist punches, I was seeing Allie as just another goofball white belt who had a long way to go before she’d be any good at karate, if ever. Then I could love her: She had become a definite person, not just a beautiful face and body in the abstract.

I soon discovered that Allie also had a head, as well as a cutting sense of humor. With her, boys and boyish conceits were all presumed to be just a little absurd. So when I told her about becoming an international jewel thief, she just laughed.

“You’d be caught in two minutes, Jay. You’re too basically honest, aren’t you, to creep into people’s houses and take their things? Besides, if you were
really
interested in becoming a jewel thief, you’d study gems, not locks, because you don’t know a thing about diamonds or emeralds. You don’t know much about being a thief, either, because nobody locks up her jewels with a padlock, f’gosh sakes. It’s either a safe with a combination, or a bank vault. So you’d have to study dynamite and demolition. Risky, dear. … Study business or law instead. With your wits and quick mouth, you’d be good at them.”

And then she would show me what else a mouth was good for. That was a nice summer.