The Kimura Kid

Raphael Norwitz

I remember hearing the door slam shut. I can still hear myself screaming and banging on it over and over again. When no one came, I lay down and curled up in a ball. I closed my eyes so tight that the tears stopped. I could have been in there for a few minutes. I could have been in there for three hours. All I know is that I was six years old when those kids locked me in that pitch-black stairwell, and I haven’t cried since.

My mom remembers a call she received from my elementary school that day, saying something about me locking myself in a closet. When she tried to ask me what happened, I pushed past her like I always did and went to pace along the rocks on the edge of our yard. I would walk up and down for hours, thinking to myself and playing with my fingers.

She would watch from afar until it was time to go to therapy. At the time, I was working with a sweet old lady named Ellen who had an office full of toys and games. With my mom’s ear pressed to the door, Ellen would ask me what I wanted to talk about. She never tired of hearing me whine about how much I wanted a dog. I’d go on until she promised she’d make the strongest case she could when it was her and my mom’s turn to talk without me. Then I would start talking about dinosaurs.

“But Raphael, why don’t I get a turn to talk?” she would say with her false, disappointed voice. “Remember, I have feelings too.”

As time went on, Ellen became more certain of her diagnoses, citing my obsession with dinosaurs and inability to pick up on social cues. She lectured my mother on their dire consequences. For some reason, neither she nor any of the other people in my life ever picked up on what else was going on.

I grew up thinking that bullying was just a normal part of being a kid, like homework or bedtime. My dad had always told me that sticks and stones could break my bones but names would never hurt me. My mom often read me the book Simon’s Hook, in which the protagonist, Simon, is teased for a hideous haircut his mother gives him. He then seeks the advice of his grandmother, who compares teasing to fishermen’s hooks, trying to bait him. She gives him a list of five strategies to avoid the “hooks.” First, “do little or nothing,” second, “agree with the hook,” third, “change the subject,” fourth, “laugh or make a joke,” and fifth “swim in another part of the sea.” One day, our bus received a stern talking to because someone complained about the bullying. Everyone assumed it was me, and naturally, I was given my own stern little talking to, mainly by Avi. Avi was a fourth grader and thus one of the oldest kids on the bus. I remember how his globular, pug-like face was scrunched in, how his nose looked like an Everlast speed bag dangling between his dark and beady eyes, which stuck out from his freckled face. A buzz cut always kept his red hair short.

At first, he only commented on how long it took me to get out of the house or how lame it was that I let my mom kiss me goodbye. I just thought about Simon’s hooks. When I ignored him, he would tell me how ugly my glasses were and how stupid I was. He began making fun of the way I pronounce my name, repeating it again and again, each time in a more mocking tone. To this day, my tongue stumbles over my name when I introduce myself, as if the very sound is repugnant and sour. To contain all those emotions bullies love to see, I moved on to strategy two. Somewhere in the middle of strategy three he first said he was going to kill me. When the time came for strategy four, he had already come up with a detailed plan for how he would complete the execution. First, he would shoot me in the stomach so that I wouldn’t die quickly. Then he would shoot me in my legs or something like that (he could never quite make up his mind). Finally, he would put one in my head just to finish me off. He detailed every element of it to me with such ferocity that there was no way I could laugh or make a joke (even though I knew he wasn’t serious). As I sat there silently he got more and more desperate, pleading like a junkie for a hit of reaction. When I refused, he forced a laugh from his chest that always came out crackling and broken. Finally I moved on to strategy five and began curling up over my Game Boy in the front seat of the bus. At recess I would go off alone. I talked to the only person I could—myself—and played with my fingers.

I switched schools after that year, and thought it was all over.

***

“Welcome back Kimura kid,” I heard a familiar voice say. I looked behind me and saw Jason, sitting at the desk. I was surprised because, last I heard, he’d gotten an offer from a top football program. Later, he told me that he couldn’t get the grades. He was wearing a shirt that said “Fighting solves everything.”

I laughed. “Nah man,” I said. “Not anymore.”

***

In third grade, I had a big red trampoline in my back yard. On Saturdays all the neighbors would come and play. One day, I saw a group of older kids approaching. I climbed down to introduce myself and saw a familiar scrunched face and frizzy red hair. Before Avi could climb on the trampoline, I got in his way and told him to get off my property.

“Who’s going to make me? You?” he said as he forced his way up, grabbed me by my shirt, and threw me off the ledge.

I went back to pace along the rocks. Watching him play broke me. I swore on my life that I would never let myself be thrown like that again, not without a fight, not without some serious scars to show for it.

***

The first time I finished someone with a Kimura joint lock, I was fourteen years old. I had seen people use it plenty of times. I was drawn to it because, in addition to being very effective, it was so candid and clean. I remember being in the guard position, on my back with my legs wrapped around my opponent’s torso. I grabbed one of his wrists and used my other arm to push his head away, isolating the limb so that it lay across my body. I rolled on my side, facing away from his head and shot the hand pressed against his face over his shoulder, then back under his arm and secured the lock by grabbing my own wrist. From there I drove back as hard as I could, ripped his arm free, and pulled it behind his head and sure enough, he tapped out.

From then on, whenever I ended up on my back, I went for it relentlessly.

They would drive their elbows into my legs, trying to pry them open or jump up and flail this way and that, but I refused to let go. Sometimes, after I had locked it up, they would connect their arms underneath me and from there it was always a battle. I would use the blade of my wrist to splice into the center of their arms and press my elbow into their faces and yank as hard as I could. They would use all their strength to pull me in and drive me into the mats. I became well acquainted with cartilage grinding and ligaments trembling and tendons threatening to tear. Sometimes my back tweaked, but I ignored it. I didn’t dare unhook my legs to finish it properly because that gave them the chance to explode out. There were some behemoths that were just too strong to finish, but I could still use the lock to roll them over onto their backs and spend a few minutes in top position. Jason is a state wrestling champion standing six four and benching over twice my weight, but he never broke my guard and almost always ended up on his back. I wasn’t naïve, though. I knew that my game was too one dimensional, but in the heat of contest, I got used to falling back on the Kimura.

***

Few appreciate how hard it can be to forget. It’s a tedious process that can take years of diligence and hard work, but by the time I reached eighth grade I had done a pretty good job. I was a good boy who, albeit quiet and reserved, did his homework and listened to his parents.

“When I look at you, I just can’t believe it,” my mom would always say.

As she began to tell me all about Ellen’s diagnoses, other memories came back. Soon afterward, I had a sudden urge to take up boxing. At the time, I was enamored by Bryce Courtenay’s The Power of One, but there was something deeper. Something that made me start watching Mixed Martial Arts when my mom wasn’t around. On the outside, I acted proud, laughing and talking about Ellen’s false prophecies like a beaten opponent, while somewhere inside, I had just been given missing pieces to a puzzle I had long since given up on. Slowly, more and more turned up. They formed the border of a dark silhouette. The outline of a face.

***

I won my first grappling match on points. I had locked up an Americana, but I couldn’t bring myself to deprive my opponent of that little bit of pride that comes from finishing a fight, so I let go of the submission and stayed on top till the bell rang. They handed me a bright red katana as a trophy and asked if I wouldn’t mind stepping up to fight a bigger guy who didn’t have an opponent.

They had me fight that guy four times in a row. Each time he slammed me on the floor and kept me there until time ran out, and then on the last time my will finally broke and he finished me with an arm-bar. I think about it every time I see that katana. How the hell could I have let that happen?

***

When I was eleven, I walked into my bunk at summer camp and saw two kids from another group huddled in the corner. One had a dark, Mediterranean complexion and greasy black hair. He wore a Jimi Hendricks T-shirt and had dark eyes. The other had a chunky face and an unfortunate mushroom cloud of curly brown hair.

“Get out,” the darker one said. I just ignored him. “Listen up fat ass, I want you out of here before I turn around or else.” I kept ignoring him. “So you think you’re tough? You think you can take us both?” I said nothing. They looked at each other and then charged at me. I got into my cute Tae- Kwon-Do stance and prepared to prove myself.

The dark one picked me up and threw me to the floor like a wrestler. He proceeded to pin my shoulders to the floor while the other boy kicked me in the ribs. I moved wildly, desperately trying to break free, but no matter what I did, I was stuck looking up at rotting wood of our ceiling. When I finally stopped moving, they got off me, gave me the whole “don’t tell on us or else” talk and left. I wished I had let them break my ribs. Instead I lay there, completely broken.

Since the stairwell incident, I had always slept with a light on. I used to let Mom and Dad snuggle up next to me in bed. When I got back that summer, I turned out the lights and wouldn’t let anyone touch me. I became quiet and didn’t make friends at my new school for a long time.

***

In ninth grade I finally convinced my mother to let me go to a boxing gym. I was only allowed to do non-contact classes, which were mostly for middle-aged women, but I made like it didn’t matter. I would hit the bags as hard as I could until the blood from my hands had soaked through the cloth wraps. This went on for a few months until, after numerous arguments with my mother, I left the real housewives of Westchester behind and started training at Fight Club.

I remember the first time I opened that ignominious door, in a back alley of downtown New Rochelle. There’s a sign far above street level that says “Westchester Fight Club.” It’s fairly inconspicuous but I had done the research. I knew exactly what I was looking for. Over the next three years, I spent countless hours rolling on the mats, numb to the smells of bleach and sweat, and fighting among shadows of the cage.

During our conditioning sessions, the album Hybrid Theory, by Linkin Park, would often blare over the constant clamor of weights crashing to the floor. One song in particular, “Papercut,” became so deeply ingrained in me that I stopped hearing the words. It felt like a heartbeat, something so vital that I could not do without it. The track begins with a soft synthetic beat and then a loop resonating like a siren starts playing in the background. It keeps rolling, as if to keep the pounding of the electric guitar in check. Then the words start:

I know I've got a face in me,

Points out all my mistakes to me

They carry on from there but keep coming back to the same chorus:

It’s because everyone has a face that they hold inside,

A face that awakes when I close my eyes,

A face that watches every time they lie,

A face that laughs every time they fall,

And watches everything,

So you know that when it's time to sink or swim,

That the face inside is watching you too,

Right inside your skin

When I hear it now, it feels strange. If it comes on when I’m training, I get a rush, a burst of energy as if my blood came to a boil, but if I’m doing something else it makes me feel indignant and angry. I usually fast forward to the next track.

***

I kept asking my parents for permission to spar even though I was secretly doing it. We had agreed that I could go to Fight Club to work out and grapple, but I soon discovered that I could get away with anything as long as I didn’t come home too messed up. I got good at protecting my face, developed a rangy Muai Thai style and learned to keep the distance with leg kicks. My skin doesn’t bruise easily, and I’m pretty good at hiding scar tissue.

Still, I wanted nothing more than to stop lying. At least in my mind, I was a still a good kid. I never smoked or drank. I was fairly polite, studied hard and earned good grades. Morals aside, lying made me paranoid. I worried every time I stepped in the cage that my overbearing mother or, worse yet, my father, would barge in and see. Every cut, bruise, and drop of blood had to be accounted for. It didn’t matter if something hurt. I would never ask to see a doctor.

It didn’t take long before fighting was the only thing that mattered to me. I began training compulsively. It got to the point where I was training three to four hours a day and still wanted to spend more time at the gym. I remember joining in on their fifteen round Muai Thai sparring sessions. Thirty of us would pack into the cage, blast some heavy music and go. By the tenth round, we were all past the point of pain, past the point of giving a shit about anything. We swung at each other like zombies, not really caring if either our or our opponent’s punches landed. By the end I wouldn’t feel any pain. In fact, I wouldn’t feel much of anything. In the morning I’d wake up with this deep soreness all over, so deep that it went past all the superficial flesh, and into the deeper parts that no one ever sees. The stuff you often don’t know you have.

I convinced myself that the pain meant nothing. That it was a temporary affliction. I took more pride in the beatings I endured than those I dished out. I took issue with the idea of a martial art because fighting is not a stylized Hollywood dance. It’s dirty, ugly and unpleasant, but in that, it’s about the most authentic thing there is. It’s the truth: fighting solves everything. It numbs you to your own insecurity and self hatred. It doesn’t leave you feeling warm and happy, but it gives you a sense of purpose that gets you through the week. That may be the reason I was so drawn to it as a disillusioned teenager. I never acknowledged the degree to which I had mastered the art of suppression. I was a cage fighter, laughing at my pain.

***

The only person I ever told about the incident at camp was my father. I can’t remember what he said. All I remember was the incredulous look he gave me. He told me once that if I was serious about all this bullying nonsense, I should just find the culprits, fuck them up and get it out of my system once and for all.

He could never understand why I have absolutely no desire to fight anyone from that part of my life. First off, as a rule I have no interest in fighting anyone who has no chance of beating me. That would never bring me peace. More importantly, the damage is done, and now they are nothing to me. In fact, I pity them. All bullies were bullied.

***

Ivan came to Fight Club a few months after I did. The Croatian wrestler had a long face and short, cropped black hair. We were together a lot, but never had much to talk about. We just stared at each other like reflections on a lake, rejecting any recognition of ourselves in each other’s eyes.

One day, just as we touched gloves to start sparring, Ivan leaped forward and punched me in the face before I was ready. I remember feeling like a door had just been slammed in my face. He took me down and I immediately went for the Kimura. After I ripped his arm behind his head, we got back up and touched gloves again. This time I was more careful. I drove forward to establish the clinch and then used an inside leg trip, pulling one of his legs out from under him as we both slammed onto the mat. He tried to cover up his face, but I climbed up higher and crossed my legs underneath his back so that he couldn’t escape. From there, I rained punches down. He tried to squirm away, but I wasn’t about to give him anything. I didn’t stop until I felt his blood spatter across my face. At that point, I tried to look away. Watching him curl up like a swatted insect made me feel ill, as if the consequences of some inevitable prophecy, long dismissed and forgotten, were to finally come to fruition.

At Fight Club, things rarely got that bloody, but when they did, it didn’t matter whether it was your blood or someone else’s. First you would clean up the mats, and then cover the whole area with bleach so that no visible trace remained. Then all parties involved would head to the bathroom and wash.

I stared at the mirror for a moment, and then turned the tap on. The basin turned red as the blood trickled off my hair and skin. The clothes were another story. I scrubbed and scrubbed, trying to wrench the blood from the fabric. On the one hand I knew I needed it gone. What if they saw? But then there was always that little part of me that wanted some marks. I suppose I didn’t want bloodstains, but a black eye or a cut or something that someone could see and ask about. Maybe a person whom I’d never spoken to or perhaps even a girl I liked. I’d start thinking to myself about what I’d say if such a conversation were to come about, but then I'd realize how badly things would go and how false and pathetic I'd sound. I’d scrub furiously until I had removed everything possible. No matter what, though, there were always traces woven deep into the fabric, impressions that would never come out.

***

One night in the summer before I turned sixteen, I was grappling with a guy who was much bigger than me. When I tried to go for a Kimura, he picked me up and slammed me on my shoulder so that my back compressed and twisted. There was a loud crack. He asked me if I was OK. I said I was and kept going. I refused to take time to heal and kept training for months. I only stopped when I was in so much pain that I couldn’t walk. I was still thinking about that Kimura the third time I entered the MRI machine eleven months later. Herniated discs aren’t the kind of injury that gives you a massive cast for all your friends to sign. It’s constant grinding pain, gnawing at you every moment of every day in a place so deep that no one understands it.

That year was a very formative one. I knew my body wasn’t healing, and I thought about it constantly. Months and projected recovery dates flew by. Different doctors’ opinions ranged from “you’ll be fine in a few weeks” to “you’ll never be able to do any physical activity for the rest of your life.” I had plenty of time to think, so I thought. I reviewed myself from top to bottom. I thought a lot about fighting. I would visualize it as I shadowboxed around my room until a pinched nerve brought me back to the floor. I thought about what kind of fighter I’d be if I ever recovered. I promised myself that I wouldn’t care at all about winning or pride or anything but fighting for the sake of fighting, brawling my heart out for nothing other than the peace it brought me. I would also fight smart. If something hurt I wouldn’t try to push through it. That was how I got hurt. I would tap out, or go get help. If I got rocked, I would call it a day. I would open up my game and throw caution to the wind. Most of all, I promised myself that I would never use a Kimura again. I thought it would put too much pressure on my back.

I started running, then lifting, and then boxing, and gradually it all began coming back. Eventually, I felt good enough to try grappling. I started working with my instructor privately and was amazed. I was fifty times better without the Kimura. My instructor, who used to tear me apart, struggled to control me. I began trying moves and doing things I never would have imagined doing before.

Then the time came for me to start going against other people. The first guy I rolled with caught me in a guillotine choke. At first I had his back, but then he threw me off and somehow he ended up in mount. It wasn’t long before he was pulling the blade of his wrist straight through my windpipe and jugular, but I didn’t tap. I couldn’t bring myself to. I just looked at the clock and told myself I had to hold on until the round ended. Dizzy and despondent, I moved on to my next opponent.

It was like I suddenly forgot everything. All I saw was the Kimura. I didn’t just see it, I felt it. It was impossible to resist. I locked it up but managed to hold out from finishing it. My third opponent finally cracked me, leaving his arm dangling so carelessly to the side that I locked it up and half consciously pulled his arm behind his head. What worried me was that it felt absolutely fine, as if I had totally healed and gone back to the same place I was in before.

That night, I dreamed I was climbing the stairs to Fight Club and when I reached the top, I opened the door and I saw that the cage had been moved to the center of the gym and rows of black chairs had been placed around it. Dozens of people were walking around, some professional fighters, some friends, and some people I had never seen before, chatting amongst themselves but when I tried to listen, I couldn’t hear them. All I could hear was the music blaring in the background while I watched my mom talking to one of my first grade teachers, as my dad opened up a beer looking into the cage and then I saw Ivan beckoning me to come with him so I followed him into the changing room which had become my chiropractor’s office, and started wrapping my hands. Out of the corner of my eyes I saw the kid who kicked my ribs in stretching his legs out on a foam roller, and I tried to say something but no words would come because my mouth and mind didn’t work. The music died down for a moment and then the familiar beat of “Papercut” came on and something told me it was my time so I got up and began my walk out to the cage. I saw a dark figure in a hoodie and sweatpants come out from the weight-room toward me and once he was inside he began to take off his clothes and my heart started racing when I saw those indignant green eyes and bulky build and it took me a moment to recover from the shock as I realized who I was about to fight. It was me, not the person I was at the time, but the adolescent I had been just over a year and a half before. While Jason, dressed as the referee, took the center of the cage and gave our instructions, I watched that pathetic version of myself look down to avoid eye contact, mumble softly to himself and bite his fingernails. In his face I saw something deep and dark and dim. I felt something fiery burning that I never noticed before. Something my subconscious had tried to draw out and wash away. It had been there for a long time, hidden right beneath my skin.

As soon as Jason said “fight,” the old me rushed in for his predictable leg kicks. At first, I ate them, and bided my time. When I had his timing down, I caught a kick just as his shin touched my thigh and threw a huge overhand left that caught him on the temple. He stumbled backwards, unable to tell down from up and I swarmed him with a barrage of huge punches.

The whole place was silent. My dad had fallen asleep and my mom was on the phone and only Ivan looked on with tired eyes. I began hitting hard, so hard that I busted his nose open and blood began to pour everywhere. From there he didn’t put up much of a fight but this time I hit him and hit him and hit him again. It wasn’t enough so I had to do something drastic. As he held on to the last sliver of consciousness he had left, I stepped over his arm, putting him in a crucifix and threw a few knees to his ribs. From there, I locked up a top side Kimura, stepped over his head, sat down, pried his arm free and ripped it around the back of his head. I chuckled at the irony: the Kimura Kid, finished with his own move.

Yet again, it was silent. I looked outside the cage and felt a sick feeling creep over me because the place was completely deserted and I went to open the cage door, but when I began to fumble with the latch, I saw that it was locked from the outside and I began to panic and I tried to shout but for some reason my tongue wouldn’t listen and I tried to pull the latch, kick down the door, but I had no strength to do it and then the lights went out. I turned to the battered body still on the floor and watched the outline of his face fade away with the echoes of my laughter.

I woke up from that dream in a sweat and started pacing up and down my room until a crimson glimmer caught my eye. I looked up and saw the red katana on the shelf behind me. I took it down, moving my hands across the smooth scabbard onto the hilt and gently curled my fingers around the Dragon talisman on the pummel. The steel hissed as I wrenched it from the sheath. The blade had been tainted with ink stains since I had used it to make a giant skewer of all my 11th grade homework. I scrubbed and scrubbed but couldn’t get the marks off.

I remembered hearing somewhere that it was a Samurai rule that if a katana was drawn from its sheath, it had to draw blood. I decided to give it a touch of authenticity and nicked the corner of my palm. I watched a few drops of blood make their way down the blade. As they neared the end of their journey, I noticed the short inscription near the pummel. A Chinese friend of mine told me it said something cheesy and trite, but I could not accept that, staring at my reflection in the tarnished steel. I began spitting out contrived proverbs and cheap adages until I came up with this:

Scrub on Kimura Kid

But know that face is right

Right beneath your skin.