Old Stories Two - I am a wonderful father.
3/23/02
It’s a month later and I am in a bus driving to southern California surrounded by people armed with swords and hell bent on hurting someone before the weekend is over. This is my kind of church group, I feel right at home here. These people are screaming violent maniacs with bloodlust in their eyes. The meek may inherit the earth, but this weekend they are going to get their pansy-asses kicked in, old school, with bamboo swords.
I am in this stink hole because the young boy I use as a beard when I'm cruising for married women has decided he wants to participate in a Kendo tournament. If you have never seen or heard of Kendo, it is a sort of Japanese fencing. Combatants use a bamboo sword called a shinai to whack away at each other until their eyes cross. The pads/armor they wear looks like some sort of medieval inquisitionist uniform, with helmet with cage/mask, gloves and a long flowing ceremonial robe that has to be put on in a very particular way.
To call it fencing though, is to understate the savage nature of the sport. The scoring alone is a kind of study in pain and suffering. The two armored combatants jockey for position, screaming and yelling at each other as they attempt to strike what amounts to a killing blow. There really is no other way to describe it. A point is earned when a quality hit is made with the end of your sword on the opponent’s head (men), hand (kote) or stomach (do, pronounced doe).
Not just any hit will do, it must be a quality hit, one with the edge of your sword and with the proper follow-through. The point being if you were a samurai fighting with a real sword you would either be cleaving open your opponents head, hacking his hand off at the wrist or slicing open his gut so that intestines were now sitting on top of his shoelaces. The first person to two points wins. Two points may not sound like much, but in real-life most knife fights end as soon as somebody slices his pinky, so this kind of scoring assumes a high tolerance for pain.
Normally, I show no interest in any of the boy’s hobbies, however I want him to develop into full-on maniac someday so I can use him to rough up the local junkies. Besides, interests in blood sports must be encouraged and nurtured. So off we go on this overloaded tour bus to Torrance California for the annual North/South kendo tournament.
We are barely half way through our trip when things start to go sour. The toilet on the bus, basically a port-a-potty on wheels, has begun to stink up the entire cabin. This unit, it seems, does not deal with feces well and makes no attempt to cover up the foul smell. So rank is the odor drifting through the bus that we don’t even notice driving by cowschwitz. Properly known as Harris Ranch, cowschwitz is one of the biggest meatpacking and dairy facilities in central California. Acres and acres of cows, stretching as far as the eye can see, all standing on mounds of their own shit. As all of these animals are destined for slaughter the place has earned the name cowschwitz honestly. The concentration camp parallel is heightened by a night-time drive-by as the place is lit with an eerie orange glow and the clouds of methane and cow shit look like a layer of poison gas floating over some World War I battlefield. A vegetarian’s nightmare located conveniently next to the freeway, cowschwitz is a landmark associated with gasps for air, watery eyes and an increase in speed from the limit of 70 to the limit of your cars engine. The air is so filled with methane that there should be warning posted about smoking in the area. The smell is enough to make a shithouse bat go crazy.
Except on this trip. The smell from the bathroom is so powerful and so foul that it makes me want to stop and have a picnic next to the killing room at Harris Ranch. I don’t even notice driving by the place because my eyes are too filled with tears to even see out the window.
The rest of the trip into the valley went smoothly and without incident. The only excitement was driving by the scene of an accident on the highway. A fire department helicopter was about to lift-off to take the casualties to the closest burn center. The car in this accident (and, strangely it seemed to be the only car in the accident, making it more of a fuck-up than an accident) had burst into flames. There were other charred bodies littering the median and of course traffic slowed to a standstill so tourists could get good pictures.
We arrive at the hotel to find that, in addition to our group, the place is overrun with toga-clad teenagers celebrating something or another. There were also some very well dressed people attending a wedding reception. And a hooker, Of course, there’s always a hooker and there was nothing special about this one, so we’ll skip the details. Since we had an early wake-up coming, and I wanted the boy to be in prime fighting shape and decided not to mess with the hooker and get some sleep.
Morning comes and we find ourselves at the Wilson Sports center for check-in. As I walk into the lobby I see that brackets are posted for the tournament. Brackets. Why did it have to be brackets? I had just lost a ton on March Madness betting. I was victimized by my own arrogance. This year I was just like millions of fools who don’t follow the college basketball until the NCAA Championships, then just bet the conventional wisdom. Gonzaga cost me my first parlay card. These jokers were #6 in the COUNTRY and they get bounced out of the tournament in the first round by a bunch of hayseeds from who-gives-a-shit University. Fucking Gonzaga. Had I been paying attention during the season I would have noticed that Gonzaga was due for an ass-savaging in the tournament due to the fact that they played what amounts to a bunch of stiffs in their conference. The first round loss ended a string of four consecutive seasons in which they made the sweet sixteen. They were no longer underdogs, people bet them like favorites and got screwed big time. Lots of people screwed the pooch on Gonzaga; Duke cost me money as well. Aren’t they supposed to be the Yankees of college basketball? I thought the fix was always in on them because they draw big ratings in the Final Four. Indiana went deep into the tournament proving that maybe Bobby Knight was a bigger problem then people thought.
But once again, I am digressing. I looked over the brackets and fought back the urge to start some action in the lobby on the thirteen and under category. My kid, despite being a beginner, has the heart of a killer and the soul of a madman and could wreak havoc on the brackets. I settle into the bleachers to watch the action. My kid is off hanging out with his kendo-thug friends. Good, I think to myself, he’s setting up a network. It’s good to make these kinds of connections early. You never know when you might need a gang of maniacs to roust a crack house.
At any rate, the first brackets are the women’s and senior brackets. I joked to myself that they were polite and letting the women and old folks go first. But a few minutes of watching the action told me that this was some pretty serious shit. The women were particularly savage, going at each other like banshees screaming at the top of their lungs. The seniors fought like experienced old warriors. They put on game faces that said, “I have seen death a million times, I will lose no sleep over yours.” The older men fought without fear, without hatered, without malice. The blows were decisive and there was no gloating, only the look that said “ I will briefly mourn your death before I add it to the list of stories I tell at the local pub.”
Soon after the women’s divisions came the division which included my kid. Rankings in Kendo are done sort of numerically. The lower rankings are called Kyu (pronounced Q), and are numbered six through zero. A beginner, like my kid, would be a six kyu. You would work your way up in practices and in tournaments until you reached zero kyu. After Kyu comes Dan. These are numbered ascending starting from one and going as high as the participant can go. You could have a 10 dan if someone was that good; The highest at this tourney was a 7 dan.
When they divide up the divisions, they further divide up by age. When you get to lower ages, under the age of 13, they tend to lump all of the skill levels together. So a 6 kyu could end up getting matched with a 0 kyu, which is kind of what happened to my kid. While younger than my kid, the opponent he drew was more experienced. My boy had the whole murderous heart thing going for him, but he still had not developed a strategy. Still, he fought his opponent to a standstill in the three-minute regulation bout, not giving up a point and ending in a tie. He fought almost the entire two-minute overtime period before losing in sudden death from a savage blow to the do (stomach.)
Had this been feudal Japan, the boy’s innards would now be piling up in the sand while his opponent watched stoically and small children laughed.
The boy took his defeat with grace, style and class. This is in direct contrast to my frantic ravings of “Fix! Fix!” from the grandstand. Having watched the sport of Kendo for almost two hours I now considered myself an expert. My kid made at least one decisisve blow to the head and maybe another to the hands. He had the other little creep beaten and should now be shoving his head on a pike. I was about to claim racism (all of the judges in his match were Japanese) but then thought better of it since everyone around me was carrying a big stick and would probably beat me to a pulp. While I was armed myself and could probably shoot my way out of any trouble I got into, I decided that it wasn’t worth messing with the police in Southern California. The police here are like storm-troopers and the swat teams are trained by the Delta Force to be extremely cruel and destructive.
Anyway it turns out that I did not understand the scoring system as well as I thought as the boy explained that in order to get a point you not only have to make a killing blow, but you need to call it out as you make it to prove it was not a lucky hit. Not only that, but you have to be moving in a forward manner so that the hit, the call and a forward stomp with the foot all have to happen together. I think that's where things sort of fall apart for me in the scoring. I have survived many a bar-fight by getting a lucky punch in on some much bigger, stronger, dumber drunk. That's how I wound up with the boys mother, actually. I do like the idea of calling your shot though, not so much for proving you intended to make the hit you made, but to encourage taunting of your opponent.
The trip back home was uneventful. There was much swapping of war stories and screams of "we'll take em next year!" All in all this was a good trip.
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