Practicing Martial Arts

This weekend was two for two.

ONE

I've slid through most of my life without habitual physical confrontations, which I attribute largely to my demographic attributes. However, for two days in a row now, I've had the dubious pleasure of putting my training to use. In fact, the first thing I did at martial arts practice this morning was to ask my classmates' opinions about how I had handled an assault situation I encountered in a Berkeley park the previous day.

I was helping out the SF Mime Troupe by guarding their stage setup; they were doing back to back shows in the same park over the weekend. I had the late afternoon/early evening shift on Saturday. A white homeless guy saw me reading all by myself near the stage and started harassing me. I was more annoyed and angry than anything. I mean, I knew I was going to be spending time in a Berkeley park; of course I came prepared. Still, I didn’t want to have to hurt anyone.

I told Homeless to go away. He went off to sit with another homeless guy about 30 yards away, where he kept talking about me in a loud voice. His hapless audience – who had, until then, been napping in the sunshine – eventually got irritated (judging from his tone of voice), picked up all his stuff and left the park to his more irascible counterpart. A short while later, Homeless returned in my direction with a different homeless man in tow. They were headed directly for me as I sat on a bench near the stage, reading my journal. Homeless was talking loudly about how I needed company and how he and his friend were going to provide it.

All this took place in daylight in a park full of people hanging out on the grass or playing with their dogs, right near a playground full of children and parents. While I felt like I could effectively prevent things from escalating to actual assault given those helpful conditions, the insensibility Homeless demonstrated to taking such factors into account did make me think of him as more dangerous than his physical appearance would otherwise suggest. In other words, he might not know karate, but there seemed a good chance he was conversant with ka-ra-zy.

Ladies and gentlemen, I wanted to stand my ground. Dude was a sexually harassing, misogynistic asshole who was violating the sanctity of the commons and MOREOVER did not recognize me as a badass who would show him a thing or two about what women are really like. In order for the world to be a better place, he needed to be taught a lesson!

But here’s the thing. The journal I had been reading while sitting on that park bench was from ten years ago when my life was very different. I was basically reading about how much of an asshole I had been due to the fact that I thought I was right all the time. Even when I had actually been right, I had managed to significantly misread the situations I wrote about in the journal, and ended up paying the price for that. I know this because, of course, I know how the story turned out now! Back then, I just knew that I was right, and I thought that was all that mattered.

I train in Filipino martial arts and had at this point supplemented the items I was carrying on my person that day with items that I had put in my backpack that morning “just in case” and other items I always keep in my car and had retrieved from there. I also had the keys to the SF Mime Troupe truck parked a few yards away; when the volunteer coordinator gave them to me, she had said, “If there’s any trouble, lock yourself in the truck and call the police.” I decided those keys were my best weapon in the situation.

Going to the truck, getting in and locking the doors was sort of difficult. I knew that I was right and Homeless and his sidekick were wrong. It felt wrong to retreat, but it also felt like the right thing to do.

Once I was inside the truck, I realized another thing. I had been very angry at Homeless and, from a Buddhist perspective (I’m a Buddhist), you don’t want to let yourself be driven by feelings of anger. In this case, I had successfully not reacted to feelings of anger, but it dawned on me that this is the kind of thing guys, and particularly my martial arts brothers (because they are ones who care enough to make the effort) have to deal with all the time. It was a revelation to me, because when I get angry it’s mostly self-directed (which is a common Western female pattern).

TWO

So when we convened for our usual morning martial arts practice in a local park the following day, I was interested to get feedback from my training partners on how I handled the situation. The males immediately commented that this kind of slow-moving assault is not how confrontations happen between males; guys just walk up and hit other guys. There’s no slo-mo, there’s no stalking and talking, there’s no trying to hide violence behind the verbiage of intimacy.

Interesting, I thought. The day before, my focus had been primarily on not letting anger and/or pride drive my response. I wasn’t thinking as much about the gendered aspect of the situation, fraught although it was with gender power dynamics. I briefly wondered if telling Homeless he was exercising White Male Privilege would’ve made him feel better about himself and his position in society. It was Berkeley, after all. There was a good chance homie was a fellow sociology doctoral dropout.

We had a nice, late-summer-morning class featuring mainly wrist locks and stance drills. Towards the end of class the teacher put each of us through our paces on a six-count spada y daga (sword and dagger) drill. Spada y daga typically involves a short rattan stick and a large training knife, but we dispense with the knife so as to practice the trap hand instead. Not long before the end of class, an angry, older white male approached us.

We knew there was a Hostile Neighbor very upset with us for using the local park for our martial arts practice. Our interaction with him had started earlier in the year, when he began screaming at us from his yard across the street. The stick part of our practice made too much noise and woke him up, apparently. HN called the police, but after chatting with us the officer who responded to the call assured us that we were using the park legally. To be courteous to HN, though, we started delaying stick practice to the second half of class, typically after 10 am, and moved the class to a part of the park where hopefully the sound would not carry so much.

Today when the angry, older white male approached us, it was pretty clear this was Hostile Neighbor in person. He asked to talk whoever was in charge of the group. Me being always right, I’m thinking analytically, “Well, that’s either Rey, or I suppose me . . .” and then I start reading the situation. By then, we all turned from the drill we were doing to look at the guy, standing together. This is, after all, Filipino Martial Arts.

Hostile Neighbor started ranting, barely feinting at making a rational argument. In fact, his goal seemed to work himself up into a further state of quaking rage, and he succeeded. I’d seen the same thing years before when I took shelter with family members who turned out to have a secret history of domestic violence. Back then, I theorized that this kind of shaking rage was a precursor to actual physical attack, but I hadn’t stuck around to test that theory. I wasn’t particularly interested in testing it today, either.

There were enough squirrely things about Hostile Neighbor’s behavior in this encounter that I think we all arrived independently at the conclusion that he posed a real threat. For instance:

Instead of approaching our group directly from where his house was across the street, he took a circuitous journey around the park, indicating fear and anxiety, as if he wasn’t sure of the ground he stood on.

He asked to speak with the group’s leader (wait . . . Filipino martial arts groups have leaders? Come on! You must be thinking of Aikido!) but, instead of starting a conversation, he launched into a harangue. The only time he listened to what anyone else said was when he demanded to know where each of us lived, insisting if we weren’t residents of Pinole (the city in which the park was located) we didn’t deserve to use the park. HN being an angry white male and our group, reflecting local demographics, being diverse in terms of skin tone and cultural heritage, I couldn’t help thinking we might be talking to a Trompette. (Trompe (Fr.) meaning deceived, deception; Trompette being a play on words)

After several attempts to speak with Hostile Neighbor, we finally started telling him to go home. It seemed the best possible outcome. He began to walk away, ranting back over his shoulder. Then he took exception with one of us smiling, turned around and started walking back toward our group, verbally asking for active conflict.

I do not know what script was playing in that guy’s head, what twisted, dumbed-down, 21^st century version of James Thurber’s Walter Mitty. That some shred of logic was still working in HN’s head was indicated by the fact that when he approached the group again he walked past the teacher (1975 Lightweight Karate Grand Champion of the Philippines) and basically anyone who was tall and/or holding a stick to go chest-to-chest with the shortest member of our group. I know this because I was standing three feet away, flipping my stick. Seriously, dude? You think I’m not gonna fuck with you if you touch my friend?

Fortunately, we were martial artists, half a dozen people with some pretty significant training between us, which in this case resulted in doing nothing. There were no karate chops, no leaping kicks and or ki-ai’s. We stood, waited and watched as Angry White Male deflated his chest and went home, possibly to run a loving hand along the length of his gun cabinet. After a brief consultation, we decided that Meadow Park in Pinole had become too dangerous to use for recreational purposes.

It was just like the day before. Dude walks up full of incoherent anger. It’s messy and illogical and it’s not doing him any good, but if I have to hurt him I want the reason to be right. I want it to be a form of skillful means inspired by some bodhisattva who had perfected all the wisdoms and all the techniques and is also perfect in appropriate use of force. I want to be like Kanzeon, Kuan Yin and Avelokiteshvara, just whipping that frond of mercy out of a vase filled with the waters of compassion and waving it around to making stuff all right. But instead I have nothing, and can only get into the truck where at least it’s less likely I’ll harm another person. And next week we’ll be practicing in a different local park.