indiscriminate even then but it was an optimism and I never
understood that there was a difference with men, they didn’t
take the oceanic view; they didn’t want whole, just pieces. I
thought it would be a small bed like mine, simple, poor, and
w e’d be on our sides facing each other, the same, and w e’d ride
the long waves o f feeling as if we all were one, the waves and
us, w e’d be drenched in heat and sweat, no boundaries, no
time, and w e’d hold on, hold on, through the great convulsions that made you cry out, and time would be obliterated by
feeling, as it is. Facing each other and touching we could get
old and die; then or later; because there’s only now; it didn’t
matter who, only how it felt, and that it was whole and real
past any other high or any other truth; I wanted feeling to
obliterate me and love to annihilate me; don’t ever make a
wish. There weren’t religious icons in a Jew ish house; only
movie stars. Sensei says it’s paying respect to her karate
tradition to kneel down in front o f the Korean flag and her
picture on the altar but I always wonder what the Koreans
would think about it; if they’d like a woman elevating herself
so high. She’s not really a woman, though; and maybe they
saw the difference and gave her permission, because she’s got a
male teacher, a karate master, a blackbelt killer as it were, and
he w ouldn’t brook no vanity. If she were a girl per se she
couldn’t be so square and fixed, so physically dense, as if
there’s more o f her per square inch than any other female on
the planet, because anatomically she’s female, I’m sure,
although it seems impossible. She’s like a thousand pounds o f
iron instead o f a hundred pounds o f some petite, cute girl. You
expect lethal weapons to be big, six feet or more, towering,
overpoweringly high, casting long, terrifying shadows, with
muscles as big as bowling balls; so you notice she’s small and
you can’t figure out how she got the w ay she is except that
once she must have been a real girl, even in dresses, and so
maybe you could stop being so curved and soft and flimsy.
Each inch o f her uses up the space she’s in, introducing weight
where once there was air; she dislocates space, displaces it, it
moves and she takes over, she occupies the ground, as if she
was infantry with a bayonet and the right to kill. She’s nothing
like a girl. For instance, her shoulders are square, they take up
space, they are substantial and she don’t make them round or
underplay them or slump them, they don’t look soft as if you
could just walk up to her or in a conversation put your arm
around her, everything’s an edge or a hammer, not a curve.
She reigns, imperial; butch, m y dear, but transcending the
domain o f a bar stool, it ain’t role playing, or a pretense, or a
masquerade; if she were a girl she’d be a little doll; petite; and
there’d be a bigger male one whose shadow would fall on her
and bury her alive. She’d live small in perpetual darkness next
to him. Instead, she’s a certifiable Korean nationalist with an
altar and a flag who considers a hundred sit-ups an insubstantial beginning, foreplay but, in the male mode, barely
counting, and she don’t care about the pain. I m yself pretend
it’s coming from a man, because I know if he was on top o f me
I w ouldn’t stop; so I try to keep going by turning it into him on
me; you fuck w ay past pain when a man’s fucking you blind. I
can do maybe fifteen; I put him on top o f me and I get near
thirty, maybe twenty-eight; I put him in the corner o f the
room laughing and I get to thirty-five; after that, Sensei just
keeps you m oving and you don’t get to stop even if actually
you think your heart is contracting along with your abdomen
and it will convulse and cease, still you move, and she sees
everything, including if you hesitate for half a second or stay
still for half a second, or try to rest halfw ay between up and
down because you think she can’t see the difference but she
sees the molecules in the air and if they ain’t m oving you ain’t
m oving and her eyes nail you and she’s firm and hard; finally,
she will say your name to humiliate you; or assign you thirty
more; and so you keep m oving, the muscles are cramped, all
twisted up inside, swollen and twisted and convulsing, and
your heart’s collapsed into your stomach or your stomach into
your heart and there’s only a bed o f pain in the middle o f you
that moves, it moves, a half inch o f space over a period o f
minutes while the others have done five whole sit-ups, six,
seven, and you feel stupid and weak and cowardly but you
m ove the teeny, tiny smidgen, you keep m oving, you bounce
yourself, you use your breath, anything you can get to make
you m ove so it looks like yo u ’re m oving, and the muscles are
stuck stiff with pain, swelling in hardened cement, but you
m ove; barely, but you move; and o f course with m y intellect I
try to see i f she’s getting o ff on it because if she is that lets me
o ff the hook, I can walk out self-righteous because she ain’t no
better than I am, she’s just the other side o f m y coin, m y
decrepitude, and it’s dominion she’s after, tormenting the
likes o f me. But she don’t get o ff on it so I keep m oving even
though I’m barely m oving and you reach a point where if you
shudder you feel the muscles move and a tremor is distance
covered; if you shake, the muscles move; and helplessly you
do shake. Sensei learned to count to a hundred in a school
pioneered by Stalin; she don’t allow for human flaws, which is
mental, as he would have agreed; she fixes defects in the mind
that are expressed as incapacities in the body; it’s right
thinking that makes the abdomen strong enough to shatter a
normal man’s fist should he deliver a punch at the top o f his
form; you can punch Sensei in the gut with everything you got
and she stands still, straight, tall, she don’t feel nothing in her
gut but the hitter is hurt. Push-ups is different because women
can’t do them, because all we get to do in life is carry our
breasts and shopping, and from childhood they make us stay
weak in the shoulders but we don’t even know it; and so
push-ups take forever to learn; and even the best students take
forever to learn them; to do one is an achievement, and you
burn with fury that they incapacitated you so much. Sensei can
do butterfly push-ups, a hundred or a hundred and fifty; it’s
push-ups but you do them on your fingertips instead o f using
your whole hand; your hands don’t hit the ground, only the