When Everything Goes Black

This may be something you can't understand...how I could just...kill a man.

This is the crisis I knew had to come...(Photo by Martin Galinski)

Efficacy.

It had started to be framed by an almost totemic significance for me as for me, as for must of us, early life experience is framed by our limitations. What we’re told we can’t do, what we start to believe we won’t do. But to set out to have an idea of something, if not that thing in and of itself, and aspire to its full embrace? Well, we’re not geared for this and asking a five-year-old boy if he wants to be a race car driver or an astronaut is largely for shit. The province of adults who saw something like this on TV and it seemed like it made sense to say to a kid.

Bruce Lee said nothing. To ME, I mean. Directly. But at the age of four years old the language he spoke was missed by no one with eyes to see. There was language and the limitations of language and beyond that there was the somatic slang that only servicemen steeped in what was flowing through the Far East had really seen before. To wit: making a point by way of a punch. What they called “karate” back then.

And I’d head out to the spaces between the houses and the suburban spread of Elmhurst, Queens and reenact what I had seen with some of the neighbor kids. With a script that was nothing but stage direction.

“Then he went like THIS…” and a kick would be thrown.

“Yeah, yeah. Then like THAT…” collapsing into a struggling puddle of mock anger and zero ability.

In the intervening years there was looking at pictures in Ring magazine with my grandfather. It was watching Cassius Clay become Muhammad Ali. Then in 1973 it was a birthday trip to see Enter the Dragon, again with Bruce Lee, and the die was cast.

I had wanted to take karate lessons around in the basement of a church on Fenimore, in Flatbush, Brooklyn now.

“Why?” My mom would sign on to anything if it was anything that made sense to her.

…[I]n a surprising move to certainly me, as well as Serao, my eyes welled up with tears and I started sobbing.

“WHOA,” he said, genuinely surprised. “I was only fuck joking.”

“Because I want to know how to fight.”

“Oh. You don’t need to know how to fight. Only angry people fight.” My mom hadn’t noticed that it was 1973 in Brooklyn. The city had 10 million angry people in it. “You’re smart enough you should be talking your way out of trouble. Not fighting.”

Soundly reasoned but impractical for the life I was likely to be leading, loudmouth that I was. And a pretty kid to boot. So I went anyway.

“By the time you’ll finish here you’ll have done these kicks thousands of times,” Coach Howard had said. “It will become second nature to you.”

I couldn’t wait. Neither could he. For the cash to keep teaching me. Which I didn’t have at 11.

I tried again with high school wrestling. While my mother was OK with me being a high school swimmer, wrestling seemed strange to her and she nixed it as something likely to interfere with my studies. Then there was boxing at the Boy’s Club, Japanese jiu jitsu with Charlie Nelson, a headlong rush into bodybuilding and a steady diet of getting my ass handed to me in street fights in my late teens.

Punk rock changed things since as a culture it swung a wide variety of people who deserved to get their asses kicked your way and gave you license to do so. Though this was less about skill and now about just a willingness to realize, like Brad Pitt said in the movie Kalifornia, “oh…it’s coming…”

So 10 years of Kenpo karate now that I was old enough to be able to pay for it, then a year of Muay Thai when I realized that I had wasted my time with Kenpo (not really though…kicking things thousands of times make me unconcerned about kicking them again). Ultimately working as a bouncer I realized that I need something else. That ne plus ultra that could counter the chaos of conflict with the only thing that made sense: control and the equanimity that comes with that control.

It was introduced to me as “combat wrestling.” It was introduced to me at American Kickboxing Academy, which sponsored some of the earliest Ultimate Fighting Challenge champions. My oldest daughter took her first steps on the mats there and she’s almost 26.

But coach after coach (special nod to Marcus Vinicius, and later the Machado brothers whose competition offered the crushing wake up call I needed to stop thinking training twice a week was “killing it”) left, or moved on, and I’d just start pushing heavy weight again being a heavyweight now myself (265 pounds at my most muscular). Figuring that strong was going to have to be good enough to help the world make right this evil wrong.

Then I found Leopoldo Serao.

“THAT guy,” said grappling champion Jake Shields. “I used to tear his ears off.” I’m not sure whether he did or didn’t, but what I was sure of was that Serao was close by and proximity was sometimes the key to just getting the thing done. And Serao was enough of a routinely hostile presence that he perfectly matched the tone and timbre of my general approach to…well, just about everything now.

“I hate to tell you this Eugene…” Serao had approached me on the mats one day. I was now training four days a week and still feeling, largely, and incorrectly, that I was killing it. “…But I’m leaving. Going back to Brazil. I thought you should know first.”

I was in my 40s and in a surprising move to certainly me, as well as Serao, my eyes welled up with tears and I started sobbing.

“WHOA,” he said, genuinely surprised. “I was only fuck joking.”

Like the poet Bukowski said in a poem about a suicide he knew, “now I’m not saying he was any good…”

I don’t cry easily or often — unless we’re talking about my kids then it’s easy AND often — and certainly not at jiu jitsu but this was different.

“You don’t understand, man,” I tried to explain. “Like the blues song says ‘this is my last go around’. I have no clocks at home that run backward. Next stop for me here? A cold and moldering grave.”

That was 12 years ago…12 years of IBJJF wins, losses, a stint doing amateur Mixed Martial Arts at some Fight Club-inspired deal in a basement in San Francisco’s red light district, a Grappler’s Quest belt, a wall full of medals and a body full of injuries of any and many varieties.

Like the poet Bukowski said in a poem about a suicide he knew, “now I’m not saying he was any good,” I’ll say here that I’m not saying I am any good. But at least I know, going seven days a week like I have been for the last 10 years, with time off for a pandemic is still not really killing it. That’s not what I am gunning for. I’m not even gunning for sucking a little less tomorrow than I do today.

Where I am today and will be until I breathe no more is here: a black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. And, according to Serao, Francisco, and anyone else who trains me with me during any one of those seven days that I am doing so, STILL I suck.

Which is just fine. Everyone’s jiu jitsu journey is different. But I don’t have to be faster than the bear, like the old saw goes…I just have to be faster than YOU. And given how different Brazilian jiu jitsu is, as a martial art, from almost any other excepting judo and wrestling, that’s almost singularly a guarantee.

But to quote founder of the CroMags and Renzo Gracie black belt Harley Flanagan, “jiu jitsu is something I do with my friends.” By which he means FRIENDS. And today, hours ago, when Serao suddenly appeared on the mats, noticeable because of his now highly prominent bald spot, and threw the black belt in my face, I knew one thing: I gotta make some new friends. Especially as THESE vipers will all be trying, justifiably, to kill me now. Me, a 60-year-old GRANDFATHER. Who is INJURED, I might add.

Too bad they will not be able to do so. Largely on account of how poor their own jiu jitsu is, followed by their consistent record of failure and underachievement.

So if I haven’t said it before, I’ll say it now: you all SUCK and I love each and every one of you.

Well, except for Ian. But that’s largely on account of the penis videos he keeps sending me.

Now. Where was I? Oh yeah: GET BACK TO WORK. And we’ll see you on the mats.

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