straight. Try it again to make sure it isn’t luck.”
“Hiiiii-yaaaah!” Again, I was accurate. Applause came from the other students. Rubin, I noticed, clapped the loudest and encouraged others to put their hands together. Donnie clapped like a girl, only using his first two fingers.
Mr. Bollars had me punch over his heart and then the left side of his chest with my other fist until he was happy that my crooked punches were straightened out. He backed away from me and I saw that Rubin’s father and Dad were gone. I had finally done something right and Dad missed it.
“Now that you’re landing the punches where you want them,” Mr. Bollars said, “we have to make certain they pack a pop when they land.”
Again I bent my knees, and Mr. Bollars told me to rotate my torso when I punched, making sure I got all of my body behind the blow. Mr.Bollars stood next to me and demonstrated
one of his sleeve-snapping punches. I repeated the movement for the next few minutes, and Mr. Bollars slipped on a hand-mitt and held it at chest level in front of me.
“Use your size to your advantage,” Mr. Bollars said. “Put all your weight behind it and make my hand sting.”
Mr. Bollars wanted me to make his hand sting, and for this I did more yelling and lay into the leather. His hand went back.
“Good. Now again.”
I yelled and punched, putting all of my weight behind my fists. My teacher smiled with each punch I threw. Sweat from my fists soon smeared the mitt and my hands smarted, but when
I looked up and saw Dad standing at the door with his hands thrust in his back pockets and a crooked smile on his face I pounded the mitt harder.
“Slow down, Wesley,” Mr. Bollars said. “This is your first night, don’t go so hard. Your body isn’t used to it.”
I breathed hard and sucked wind through my mouth, not my nose, as Mr. Bollars had shown us, and sweat dripped on the floor, leaving little dark brown spots.
“You did good, Wesley,” Mr. Bollars said, taking off the mitt. “You’re going to come back tomorrow?”
“Yes, sir.”
Rubin called formation and we bowed to Mr. Bollars who said, “Class dismissed.”
Parents drove in front of the dojo to pick up their kids. Some of the kids, whose parents hadn’t arrived yet, waited on the sidewalk in front of the dojo. I wanted to thank Rubin for leading the applause, but I didn’t know how to approach him. After all, he seemed to be Mr. Bollars’s second-in-command, so he could have seen it as his role to drum up support for me.
Rubin’s father’s shook Dad’s hand, and then he led his wife and son out of the dojo. Mr. Bollars stood by his office door and Dad whispered in his ear; Mr. Bollars nodded and they walked into his office and shut the door. Donnie was the only person still waiting on the sidewalk, and though I was alone in the waiting area, I couldn’t make myself go talk to him. I knew if I approached him, he’d crack on my early troubles with punching and brag about his ability to stand and punch better than me. More important to me was what Dad and Mr. Bollars were talking about, so I eased up to the office door and was about to begin eavesdropping when a thunderous roar came from outside. Donnie, who had been sitting Indian-style on the sidewalk, jumped to his feet, and a rumbling Plymouth station wagon pulled in front of the dojo. A woman in a tank top with a blotchy tattoo on her shoulder that could be either an eagle or a scorpion was behind the wheel. All the windows were down and her reddish-blond hair shot off in every direction. The woman revved the engine, which shook the windows of the dojo, and I thought Mr. Bollars and Dad would run out of the office, but the door remained closed. One more awful rev and the station wagon lumbered off, its roar gradually diminishing.
I didn’t like Donnie, but now I no longer hated him as strongly.
I returned my attention to eavesdropping, and I was certain Dad was not apologizing for his outburst. If anyone else had screamed out like he did, I would have thought it out of character. Dad had initiated the talk with Mr. Bollars, and since an apology was not an option, Dad had to be talking about me. I pictured Dad inside the office, surrounded by Mr. Bollars’s trophies, asking if I had what it took or if I was a hopeless, uncoordinated fat-ass boy?
Dad walked out of the office alone and didn’t say anything as he walked past me and out to our car. We were out of the parking lot when Dad said, “How’d you like tae kwon do?”
“It’s ok.”
“Well, you better like it because I signed you up for a year. At the end of the year, if I don’t see any change in you, I’ll know I wasted my money.”
CHAPTER 3
Dad, simply by his presence, made me nervous. After the first few weeks of tae kwon do, once we moved past the proper way to stand and punch, we moved on to kicking. Balance, which Dad claimed I didn’t possess, was a big part of a successful kick, and as I learned the kicks, I had to admit that Dad was right.
Dad made another lone trip to the Curtis Mathes store and returned with a mini-movie camera that he held on his shoulder, shut one eye, and focused on me during tae kwon do lessons. Dad and a camera gave me performance anxiety to the max. I’d hoped Mr. Bollars wouldn’t allow Dad to videotape class—maybe there was some obscure rule about the sanctity of
the dojo. But there wasn’t.
Before the camcorder, Dad’s critical eyes caught my mistakes in class. With class on tape, and rewind and freeze frame at Dad’s disposal on the VCR, I was forced to see the occasional
weak off-line punch and the plentiful off-balance kicks projected onto the 52-inch screen in the living room. Dad sat in his recliner, the remote control wire running from his chair to the VCR, and I sat in Mom’s recliner.
Dad would say: “You kick like a monkey fucking a football in a snow bank. Can’t get them big legs off the ground.”
Videotaping class went on for a few weeks, and after each class, we watched the tape on the VCR as soon as we got home. Dad’s verbal assaults grew and I wished Donnie hadn’t been born.
“Why don’t you stand straight like Donnie? Donnie punches straight all the time. Donnie kicks high. Why don’t you?” After seeing Donnie’s parents’ car, I pitied him, but as these tape sessions continued, as far as I was concerned Donnie could go straight to Hell.
It was the beginning of my fourth week of tae kwon do and it was getting close to dusk, only an hour till class. I waited at the backdoor to make my way to the big greenhouse. Dad was
at the smaller one, and I didn’t want him to see me slipping off to talk to Mom.
Dad was getting ready to feed his exotic game birds: Ring-neck pheasants, pharaoh pheasants, bobwhite quail, and chukkas. The most interesting to me were the Japanese chickens,
snow white with feathers that resembled fur, and their meat was smut-black and inedible. When they pecked the ground, it always looked as if they were bowing, and somehow were more graceful than American chickens. We had some domestic chickens too, only ours laid colored eggs—pink, purple, blue—and they were supposed to be cholesterol free. That’s what Dad told customers and that was how he justified charging an extra dollar a dozen.
When Dad walked into the birdhouse, I quickly made my way to the big greenhouse. Mom was soaked in sweat and watering ferns that hung around the greenhouse in wire baskets. The air in the greenhouse was heavy, damp, and the floor was covered with wood chips and black mulch in which sprouts grew wild.
Mom didn’t go places after her day of work was finished, so I knew that asking her to drive me to tae kwon do was a long shot. Mom claimed to be “moon-eyed,” which, as she told it, meant she saw things at night that were not there. I was only inside the greenhouse a couple of minutes and already the humidity sapped my energy. How Mom stood an entire day of this six and sometimes seven days a week baffled me. But it did support my belief that Mom was part superhuman. All she had to do was put her mind to a task, and that task was soon completed. I hoped she would accept the challenge of taking me to tae kwon do.