Since freshman year, I’ve been taking karate classes at True Power Martial Arts. I take these classes because Mom makes me. She thinks it’s necessary for growing boys to have regular physical activity. I used to play soccer,* and before that, I’m sure I did some other thing.
The classes at True Power consist of stretching, punching, kicking, and performing complex self-defense techniques. I attend twice a week in the evenings. I could go in the afternoons, but the karate school has a very large window, and I’m afraid my friends will see me training as they walk home from school.
See, I hate karate. It involves physical confrontation, and physical confrontation scares the hell out of me. I’ll pass a guy my age on the street and panic for no reason—clenching and unclenching my fists in my pockets and yawning to try to appear cool. Sometimes, I dream that I’m fighting people, endless opponents, but I punch too slowly, as if I’m underwater. It’s a stupid phobia; I live with it.
Now, I’m not knocking my karate school. Jessica Green, who has been an Olympic competitor in martial arts, teaches the classes. “Sabunim” (her formal title) is constructive and patient with me, as she is with all of her students. Still, I just don’t get certain things, such as “rolling my hips.” In that stretching exercise, we sit on the floor, spread our legs, and lean forward—attempting to make our chests touch the ground. In every class, three or four people do this move perfectly. But my posture is so screwed up (all those hours hunched in front of the Nintendo) that I can barely get my hands on the floor.
“Ned, roll your hips,” Sabunim tells me. She comes over and pushes on my back to make me stretch lower.
My “focus” is also a problem. I tend to space out in class, humming some song or fretting over tomorrow’s test on cellular respiration; Sabunim has to jolt me out of deep thought.
“Ned! Are you focused?”
I nod, wiping sweat from my brow. “Yes, Sabunim.” Then I tune out ASAP until the next interruption.
My uniform causes problems, too. Called a gi, it harbors a deep-seated hatred for me and humiliates me whenever possible. Actually, the top part of the uniform isn’t so bad. But the pants, through some loophole in physical law, manage to be too tight and to fall off. During jumping jacks, I have to fix them constantly, or they’ll expose my boxers. Then, in response, the pants tighten up, forming a noose around my abdomen. So while everybody else is working out, I’m in a corner adjusting my clothing.
As if my own failings weren’t enough, every one of my karate classes includes seven- and eight-year-old Wonderkids. They started karate when they were, like, two. They’re always focused; their hips roll in directions that make me queasy. Their pants are perfectly ironed and don’t fall off.
It gets better. My sister Nora is one of the Wonderkids. She’s seven years younger than me, but her kicks and push-ups are better than mine—and she knows it. Thankfully, we don’t attend the same class, but every Saturday, she comes home wearing her gi and shows me some new, sadistic contortion.
Of course, Nora and the rest of the Wonderkids are around four feet tall, which gives me a fighting advantage. And they see me as a role model—they look at how I kick during class and give me high fives. So what? When I was eight, I looked up to all fifteen-year-olds, regardless of how spastic they were. Soon all the Wonderkids will be Wonderteens, and they’ll be smirking at my hip rolls like everybody else.
On Wednesday nights, we have sparring* classes. Everyone fights in rounds for an hour. There’s a guy named Brendan who only comes on Wednesdays. He’s about six feet two and two hundred pounds, with tree trunks for legs. Sparring with him is like taking on a swinging girder—at any time, he can just kick a leg straight out and topple me. Once or twice each Wednesday, as we rotate partners, he knocks the wind out of me. Sabunim has to rub my back until I can breathe again before she encourages me to keep fighting.
Jessica Green’s True Power Martial Arts is like my high school’s evil twin. Everything that I can do at Stuyvesant—concentrate, participate in class, keep my pants on—I can’t manage in karate. I’m pretty anonymous at Stuy, but in karate, everyone knows my name.
Maybe the real reason that I go to karate class is because I need something to be bad at. I’ve always been good at school stuff: math, reading, tests, obedience. Until karate, my only problem was talking out of turn in class. Now I have something to be bad at twice a week, over and over, without hope of improvement. The humiliation is becoming addictive.
*When I was eight, I played in a soccer league for a season. All the other teams had cool names (Tigers, Condors), but I got stuck on a team with an insane coach named Mr. Sack, who insisted on calling us “The Sack Attack.” The Sack Attack went 0–12 that season. I was the goalie.
*Sparring means “controlled fighting.” It’s two people getting together and beating on each other for two minutes.