Shortly after the car accident, I’d gotten into karate, inspired by the movie “The Karate Kid.”
I loved kicking and punching people. I’d look forward to karate like it was Christmas and would practice my moves, my kicking and punching every day. Air kicks, air punches, punching invisible men in my bedroom. It was all I wanted to do, punch and kick!
I remember an older boy in my karate class. Named Michael.
He’d always wear Adidas everything and was tall, dark and handsome. A Black Panamanian.
I’m not sure why, probably to toughen me up, but our sensei would pit us against each other in sparring.
Michael would kick my ass, literally, every time. No matter what I did, he’d always win, beating on me, kicking me, his body too large, his strength too much.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent But I had heart. I’d keep coming, take his shots and not back down until sensei pulled us apart.
The upside of taking Michael’s beatings was that it did toughen me up. When I’d go to school, and any kid my own age, size would start to bully me or tease me, I’d handle him quickly, aggressively, making many a snot-nosed brat run to the teachers crying.
I’d fight fair, but I admit that there were times I’d fight unfair as well. Such as the time I’d sucker-punched a kid named Atari in the hallway.
I’m not sure why I did it. He was one of those people I didn’t like but couldn’t tell you exactly why. Maybe it was how he looked, talked, dressed or smelled.
Whatever it was, he’d been alone in the hallway, bent over, digging into his Transformers backpack, and I silently crept up behind him, clutched my hands together, raised them high in the air like I was holding an ax and then I chopped down, violently, cracking the poor bastard on the spine. I still remember him screaming “ah, man!” and me darting off, turning a corner and hauling ass down a stairwell…
There was another kid about my age, an annoying little blabbermouth shit who lived around the corner. I don’t recall his name, but I remember him being a total bitch, a whiner, and an annoyance. I remember he’d said or done something that angered me, and I remember having a girl, Alice, talk him out of his house. As he stepped into the street, I jumped up from behind a car and crept up behind him, locked him in a full-nelson and flung him around, like a ragdoll.
I can still hear him crying, whimpering as I throttled his weak writhing body and pressed the back of his neck with my interlaced hands and then threw his bitch ass to the ground, where he rolled around the asphalt, wailing like a wounded animal.
His parents called mine, threatening to call the police if I touched him again.
My parents decided it was karate’s fault. They considered karate a vitiation, that it was corrupting me, making me violent, and they withdrew me from karate, prohibited me from partaking in any martial arts...
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent During my last days at the dojo, the sensei let us watch the film “Dawn of the Dead.”
I had nightmares for months after that, thinking zombies would eat me, hallucinating that zombies were everywhere. I’d pull the covers over my head at night and pray to God the zombies wouldn’t eat me.
My fear of the zombies made me even angrier that I’d been taken out of karate because I figured that if I knew how to fight, maybe I could beat the zombies away before they ate me.
To this day, I wish my parents hadn’t withdrawn me from karate.
I believe, more so now than ever, especially with how fat and weak so many of today’s children are, how undisciplined and listless they are, that martial arts are highly beneficial for kids, teaches them discipline. In fact, after I left karate, I got in even more fights, and lost more of them, being out of practice, knowing less of how to defend myself.
School bullies are the worst of zombies.