Lost In Place (13 page)

Early in the morning on the day the camp was to begin, we all met in the parking lot of the Boxing Institute. It was just Sensei, Bill, Michael and me, but another group from Bridgeport was going to meet us at the campsite. Michael and I packed our sleeping bags, raincoats, swimsuits and extra clothes into Bill’s blue van (it had a big decal in the
back window of a guy wearing a beret and smoking a joint, the same zigzag design as the tattoo on Bill’s arm), and Bill let us sort through his box of eight-track cassette tapes and put together a musical program for the ride up. Michael and I were arguing over whether we should start with Black Sabbath or Creedence Clearwater Revival when Sensei walked over and asked, “Any of you guys wanna ride with me?”

We were stunned. An invitation to ride for several hours with Sensei, in his sleek Mercury Cougar with the vanity license plate that read
KUNGFU
, was like a dream come true. There was so much we wanted to ask him but had never dared; by always seeming aloof and vaguely angry, he effectively discouraged most attempts at friendly conversation. One night during a lesson an “old buddy” of his burst into the Institute, jumped into a parody of a karate stance and with a huge grin on his face yelled, “Hey, Timmy! Look who’s in town after all these years!” Without a moment’s hesitation or so much as a word of warning Sensei jumped over the little wooden bridge, grabbed the man, sent him flying out the door and into the street and chased him until he was well out of sight. “Don’t
any
of you fucking people ever make the mistake that man just did!” he fumed when he returned, his eyes black with rage.

So when Sensei asked if either Michael or I wanted to ride with him, Bill read the situation perfectly and said, “Hey, why don’t both of you guys go in his car, because I have to make a couple of stops anyway to pick up food and lighter fluid and all that other crap. I’ll meet you up there in a couple of hours.” Once again Bill saved the day.

Michael and I were so excited that we could hardly speak as we climbed into the Cougar. Sensei put on his
leather hat and aviator sunglasses, and roared out of the parking lot leaving twin streaks of rubber on the road practically all the way to the entrance ramp to the highway. He drove just the way we’d imagined he would.

After what we thought was a polite amount of time—we didn’t want to seem desperate—Michael and I couldn’t wait any longer and started asking Sensei questions. What was he like when he was our age, how did he first get interested in martial arts, and could he tell us any stories about his own master, a Hawaiian-born Chinese who had supposedly killed dozens of North Korean soldiers with his bare hands during the war? Michael and I saw this enormous man only once, at a martial arts convention where he stole the show by shattering a six-foot-high stack of ice blocks with his palm; to do so he had to stand on a folding chair, which got knocked out from under his feet when the huge chunks of broken ice came tumbling down.

Sensei answered most of our questions by saying either “Yeah” or “Nah” or by shrugging. After a few minutes of this he frowned and turned on the car radio, signaling the end of our interview. We spent the rest of the ride feeling terrible, convinced that we had blown our one opportunity to connect with the Master.

When we got to the camp Sensei set up his own tent and ate a lunch he’d packed for himself. Our food was in Bill’s van. A few hours later the group from Bridgeport showed up and we started working out. More time passed, but Bill was nowhere to be seen. By nightfall Michael and I were getting worried, not to mention hungry and a bit cold. We had worn our uniforms on the ride up, including our flimsy cloth “Bruce Lee” shoes, which had gotten soaking wet as we exercised in the dew-covered fields.

At ten o’clock at night everyone got up from the campfire and went to their tents except for Michael and me. We hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, and we were freezing. The only bright side to this that we could see was that Sensei would probably have to let us sleep in his large tent with him, giving us a chance to redeem ourselves somehow for our poor behavior on the ride up. Suddenly a pair of headlights appeared on the dirt road leading to our campsite. Michael and I practically leaped for joy, thinking it was Bill, but as the headlights got closer we saw that it was a compact car driven by a young woman.

It was one of Sensei’s girlfriends. As soon as she got out of the car she and Sensei disappeared into his tent, and Michael and I knew we wouldn’t be sleeping indoors. Then it started to rain. We thought about sleeping on the ground under Sensei’s Cougar, but then saw that it was parked on a hill and that a small torrent had already formed between the wheels. We didn’t even consider asking the Bridgeport group if we could squeeze into their tent; they were inner-city black men—utterly mysterious and therefore frightening people to us—whom not even Michael dared look straight in the eye. When we sparred with them we always stared at their hands so that we wouldn’t become paralyzed with fear. Out in front of their tent they had set up a little plastic bucket with a sign taped to it that said
DONATIONS TO HELP “TINY” RAISE BAIL
. Just as we began to despair, Sensei stuck his head out of the tent and threw us his car keys. We spent the night trying to sleep sitting up in the bucket seats, but the sound of the rain on the windshield was a constant reminder that we were soaking wet and cold. At one point Michael said that if he could live his life over again, one thing he would definitely change was his decision three
years earlier during our BB-gun war to keep that boy who had fallen through the ice a prisoner in the abandoned Chevy. “No wonder that poor bastard was so mad,” he kept saying, his teeth chattering the whole time.

We agreed that the glow on the eastern horizon the next morning was the most welcome sight of our lives. The rain turned to drizzle, and at eight o’clock Sensei began our training. The exercise made our bodies feel warm except for our feet, which were kept frozen by our soggy cloth shoes. At noon, when everyone broke for lunch, Michael and I built a fire and made a rack over the flames with a few long sticks. We hung our shoes and socks from the rack, hoping that the heat would dry them out, and left them there momentarily when Sensei, taking pity on us at last, offered us some of his own lunch. Suddenly we heard gales of laughter from the Bridgeport group and ran back to our fire to see that our shoes, which had cheap plastic soles, had melted. They hung like long strands of chewing gum, with the cloth parts slowly burning. We had to spend the rest of that day and that night barefoot.

On the third and last day of the camp Bill finally showed up. When he saw Michael and me pale, hungry and shivering in our wet uniforms and wearing no shoes, he apologized profusely, but his disappearance hadn’t been his fault. His transmission had given out on a lonely part of the highway and he didn’t have enough cash with him to have it fixed by the local mechanic; nor did he have enough cash to pay for a tow truck to take him back to Danbury. He tried to hitchhike back, but got picked up by the police in some small town, and when they saw his tattoo they busted him and held him overnight.

Michael and I changed into dry clothes and spent the next hour eating everything in Bill’s van. Then Sensei announced
that the camp was over, and this time he did not offer to let us ride with him.

“Well, at least now we can listen to Black Sabbath,” Michael said, trying to look at the bright side.

“No, we can’t,” Bill said as we climbed into his rental car. “This car doesn’t have a tape deck.”

8
 

I
disliked the ninth grade nearly as much as I’d disliked the seventh and eighth grades, although being Michael’s friend meant that at least I didn’t get beaten up in the hallways anymore. Why did the subjects have to be so boring? Did adults do this on purpose? They made the world the way it was, and then made us learn the rules so we would make sure not to change anything! If I’d had to sit through a class five days a week called “Plucking All of Your Hairs Out and Arranging Them in Stacks of Prime Numbers,” it wouldn’t have seemed any better or worse than my actual classes. I still thought Lao-tse had the right idea when he said that if you stopped learning, your problems would be solved.

When I entered the tenth grade, however, I began to feel differently about academics. For this I must thank an enthusiastic but professionally doomed world history teacher who saw my interest in China and ran with it. His
name was Richard Rowland, but the students knew him as Rick der Stick, a tribute both to his angular physique and the vaguely Germanic atmosphere of discipline that he insisted upon in his classroom.

At the end of our first day of class he called me aside for a moment. “I understand from Coach Anderson that you’re
extremely
interested in China,” he said. He had a severe crew cut, a prominent Adam’s apple, a slightly frenzied look in his eyes and a habit of emphasizing key words with bold, choppy strokes of his right hand, which always held a piece of chalk between the index and middle fingers.

When I said that I was indeed interested in China, he asked, “Well, what are you
doing
about it, Mr. Salzman?”—chop.

I told him about the Boxing Institute, but he seemed unimpressed. “You can’t grasp another culture just by learning an art form out of context like that. First of all, you’ve got to learn the language. You’ve
got
to learn Chinese if you’re serious. I’ve heard that you
are
serious, but I want to hear it from you. How willing are you to
work
, Mr. Salzman?”

Now it was my turn to look frenzied. “You know Chinese?” I asked.

“I didn’t say that, but that’s not important. I want to know if you’re willing to work this year, because if you’re willing to work, and I do mean
work
”—chop—“then I might be willing to help you. But what I’m talking about would be in addition to the regular classwork in my class. I’m
not
”—chop—“talking about letting you substitute the curriculum.”

“I understand.”

“All right. Give me a few days to think about this.
There are a few people I want to talk to, and then we’ll see what we can come up with. But let me emphasize that if I’m going to do this on my own time, I’ll expect you
not to let me down
”—chop chop chop.

What Mr. Rowland came up with was this: first, he gave me the title of a book,
Speak Chinese
, published by the University of Beijing Press, and told me to buy it right away. He knew someone who had used this book and persuaded the man to lend him the set of flash cards and audiotapes that went with it. Mr. Rowland let me borrow the tapes, while he kept the flash cards. He suggested that we meet once a week after school in the teachers’ lounge, where he tested my progress by flashing the cards with the Chinese characters on them at me and helped me wade through the chapters, supposedly written in English, explaining the rules of Chinese grammar.

Second, Mr. Rowland told me that he had just completed a summer graduate course in Chinese history at Trinity College to help get his master’s degree. He had all the books and the syllabus for the course, and would be willing to lend me all of that, along with his classroom lecture notes, as long as I was willing to report to him weekly on my progress and write the two required papers for the course, one short and one long.

Third, and most exciting of all, Mr. Rowland told me about a clever and highly sophisticated game that had been invented by Dr. Robert Oxnam, the professor at Trinity he’d been studying with. Called the Ch’ing Game, it was a complex re-creation of the Ch’ing-dynasty government that required more than twenty players and took a week to play. Mr. Rowland had been using the game as the climax to his world history classes for several years, but always lamented that the student playing the emperor
had never been sufficiently prepared to make the game truly dramatic. He promised me that if I completed the work for the graduate course he would let me be the emperor, guaranteeing that it would be the most memorable experience of my high school career.

Once I started learning how to speak Chinese I wanted to learn how to read it, and as soon as I began studying those characters I wanted to write them. I wrote them all over my notebooks during my other classes, all over my desk, and all over my pants. There was something deliciously addictive about trying to make them look just right—balanced and yet free, correct and yet unselfconscious, as if the strokes had fallen onto the paper instead of having been carefully drawn.

For the first time in my life I was reading real books, not textbooks prepared for adolescents. At first I was shocked by how much reading the course involved, and I was discouraged when I found out how difficult the books were to understand. Happily for me, Mr. Rowland did not allow me to stay depressed for long. Apparently he had decided that it was already a foregone conclusion that I would finish the course. “What, you think other people just pick up these books and read them without any trouble?” he asked me, waving his arms and rolling his eyes. “Everybody has to face this kind of complex thinking sooner or later—
everybody
!”—chop—“that is, if they plan to ever really
understand
anything. Of course it’s hard work! That’s what we’re here for, hard work! Didn’t I tell you that already? Sure I did, that’s old news. What passages did you have trouble with?”