First Citizen Read Free Page B

was going to satisfy them, and flying face-first across that dirt was going to hurt enormously. And for what? A scratch game of football, the teams chosen and their loyalty bonded with the casual point of a finger. So I stepped out of bounds deliberately and, to keep the man behind from tackling me anyway, got down on one knee.
    “Coward!” yelled the first side blocker.
    “Faggot wimp,” tossed in the second.
    The one behind punched my shoulder as he ran by.
    It was just a friendly game.
    Given no strong directions, a poor boy will function as the economists’ Rational Man. That is, he will capitalize on his opportunities according to his nature—engaging either in dealing and light-finger if he’s a talker or strong-arm and territorial warfare if he’s a doer. A rich boy with no direction, however, will go precisely nowhere. And that’s where I was headed.
    That summer, I was hanging around a locksmith’s shop, going on calls with him, doing some cleanup, nothing he was actually paying me for. The training he gave me in return—just letting me watch, examine his tools, and occasionally try my touch—was probably a breach of his code of ethics and illegal to boot. He thought I was just a clean-cut kid from Asilomar, and I thought I was going to be an international jewel thief.
    That was the summer, too, that I started karate—another facet of my secret agent self. Just about everyone in my class at school took a six-week course in quote self-defense unquote. Some of us followed it up with a short-lived enrollment at Kan’s down on the mall. But I stayed with it four years, in the end becoming a part-time, unpaid teacher for Sensei Kan.
    Karate is the ultimate bore. You practice each move—which itself is made up of smaller, more precise moves of muscle and tendon—over and over until your arm or leg glides like a programmed robot. Then you combine the moves into sequences, and the sequences into extended imaginary fights, the katas. It’s more like ballet than fighting.
    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