Karateman

Me and Johannsen, we're working out how to rob Karateman's house. Johannsen got a diagnosis and he wants to do something about it. We should pull off some heists, he says. Not being one to turn down a major crime I say hell yeah we should.

It'll be like when we crept out of the house at night with our backpacks full of snacks and smoke bombs assuming we'd come across guys up to no good or getting in fights and put a stop to it. We got around the corner and a neighbor's dog started barking. I lost my shoe in the snow running away.

Not this time. We've learned from our mistakes. Besides we're the ones doing the stealing so there's nobody around to put a stop to it.

Karateman's house has a motion sensor light over the garage. If he was as good at karate as everyone says he wouldn't need home security, is our thinking.

*

As children in Michigan we studied Sanchin-Ryu. Every masculine child of a certain age held at least an orange belt in this discipline. The form was developed by a guy who went around calling himself Grand Master Robert Dearman. The legend we were told started with him prowling around Okinawa learning self-defense techniques. Implication is he was probably a marine with an attitude problem, got his ass kicked enough he got curious and developed his own style of hitting back. When he returned home from his pilgrimage, the story goes, he tested the limits of his technique on the streets of Livonia.

Sanchin-Ryu held classes in every gym and cafeteria in mid-Michigan in the 80s. It was a requirement to have at least an orange belt by the age of ten or you were considered a pacifist and therefore to be beaten. The biggest enthusiasts I knew were a family of obese racists who lived beyond their means and were obsessed with brand name clothing. The younger son was a real-life Cartman; when South Park first aired I was shocked that two comedy writers from Colorado knew my friend from middle school. He was surprisingly quick and made sure everyone knew he had a black belt before he insulted them.

These were the days of Amway, of selling candy bars for little league, of selling magazine subscriptions to raise money for school. Belts were about $80 a pop and if you showed up to class and could do a star step without falling down you generally got one at the end of each course.

The practice itself was closer to Tai Chi than anything. There was a flow to it and when you were doing a complex routine it lowered your blood pressure. We never actually sparred or used our hard-earned abilities in the classroom. That was for the time under the streetlight we were waiting for someone's parents to come pick us up. And at the park when we got into organized gang fights. And for pretty much whenever we felt threatened.

Once in South Bend Indiana a friend who was getting his PhD in literature got into an obnoxious argument with a mathematician and they were on the verge of blows and when the mathematician stepped toward him aggressively I instinctively swept his feet and put him on the ground without hurting him. We were all pretty drunk but that was proof to me that somewhere the muscle memory of all those classes I took was still in me somewhere. The next day my friend tried to get me to go to confession with him even though I'm neither baptized nor a believer of any kind and thankfully the chapel was closed to the public for some arcane ritual.

*

So in this story Johannsen and me, we break into the Karateman's house. What are we doing here again? Let's say there's a ceramic dragon, blue, like the one my mom made in high school that has been in her office everywhere she's lived since the '60s. Let's say it contains something valuable, a heart made of pearl, and we're hard up so it's worth the risk.

We scramble over the fence and trip the motion light but we're already at the sliding back door which he hasn't locked. Pride and overconfidence are Karateman's weaknesses.

He's waiting for us. Not in a gi, not with arms akimbo, but in red sweatpants and a gray robe, feet up on the footrest in his recliner, pointing the remote control at us like a laser gun. We haven't planned this far ahead.

[to be continued]