When I was dressed, I walked across the dojo, carrying my karate bag. At the edge of the anteroom, I turned and gave one last bow of respect to the dojo. Then I walked out.
Lou had left already. Mike was sitting in the office behind his computer, typing up some notes.
“Thanks, Sensei,” I called in to him.
“Hey, chucklehead,” he said without looking up. “Get in here.”
I walked in and stood in front of the desk. Sensei Mike finished whatever he was typing. Then he sat back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, and looked up at me.
“How’s your gray matter?” he said. “That was a pretty good one Lou got in on you.”
“Yeah, it was a good shot, I gotta admit,” I said. I didn’t sound happy about it, and, in fact, I wasn’t. But the truth is the truth. It was a pretty good shot.
“You want to be careful with that head of yours,” Sensei Mike said. He hid his smile by bringing one hand around and smoothing his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. “Brains are more important than fists, you know. It’s no good learning karate if you get knocked stupid in the process.”
I tried to laugh it off. Sometimes you win in sparring and sometimes you lose, and you have to get used to that. But-again, the truth is the truth-I don’t much like losing. I don’t suppose anyone does. “I just forgot to duck, that’s all,” I said.
“Sure,” said Sensei Mike, still smoothing his ’stache.
“I guess you just got distracted by all your math homework.”
I didn’t know what he meant. “Math homework?”
“Yeah,” said Mike. He swiveled back and forth in his chair, smoothing his mustache, hiding his smile. “You must have a lot of math homework, seeing as you ran out of room in your notebook and had to start writing the numbers on your hand. I guess it was thinking about the numbers on your hand that distracted you.”
I looked stupidly down at my hand for a second. Then I got it, and I felt the color rising up into my face.
Sensei Mike laughed. “Don’t sweat it, chucklehead. I’m just giving you a hard time.”
I rolled my eyes, embarrassed.
“The fact is,” said Sensei Mike, “you’ve been distracted around here a lot lately. I guess I was just wondering: is that all about… your math homework?”
I shrugged. “I guess so,” I said.
“Nothing else.”
I shrugged again. “Well, there’s a lot of stuff. You know, school and whatnot.”
“You gonna tell me about it or am I gonna have to beat it out of you?”
“Well…” I wagged my head back and forth. I didn’t really want to talk to him about it. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it. But before I knew it, I heard myself saying, “There is one thing…”
I was sorry the minute the words came out of my mouth. I was sorry, and, weirdly enough, I was kind of happy at the same time. Because there was this one thing on my mind that I’d wanted to bring up to Sensei Mike for a long time. It was this secret ambition I had that I hadn’t told anybody. The reason I hadn’t told anybody was because I wasn’t sure it was possible. If there was anyone who would know, it was Sensei Mike.
Now the thing about Sensei Mike is: he tells you the truth. He’s not one of these happy-talk guys who’ll say what you want to hear or what he thinks you’re supposed to hear because he read it in some article or something. He’ll tell you his best opinion, flat out, without mincing words. So I was happy because I wanted to know his opinion. But I was sorry because I was afraid of what his opinion might be.
So I took a deep breath. I went into a side pocket of my karate bag and wrestled out a battered old paperback book I kept hidden there. I’d found it in a box at a fundraising book sale they’d had at the public library. I’d been reading it and reading it in secret for weeks now, cover to cover and back again. I kept it in my karate bag because sometimes my mother goes through my school bag to clean out the half-eaten lunches and so on. But she leaves my karate bag alone. I didn’t want her to find it because, like I said before, I knew it would drive her crazy with fear and I’d never hear the end of it. And I knew if I asked my father about it, he’d tell my mother, so I couldn’t talk to him either.
I held the book out to Sensei Mike. It was called: To Be a U.S. Air Force Pilot.
Sensei Mike took the book in one hand and glanced down at it.
“What do you think?” I said. “You think I could make it as a fighter pilot in the Air Force?”
Sensei Mike pulled the book close to himself. Leaning back in the chair, swiveling back and forth, he opened it, paged through it.
“Cool,” he murmured. “Cool jets.”
He glanced through a few more pages, then shut the book and held it out to me. I took it and stuffed it back down into my karate bag.
I stood there, nervous, waiting to hear the answer to my question.
“You wanna be an Air Force pilot?” he asked me.
I managed to nod.
“Really tough. Really tough training. Very selective, very elite. A lot of guys don’t make it. Even some of the best. Just not that many slots open.”
I went on nodding. I already knew all that.
Sensei Mike folded his hands on the knot of his black belt. “You know, a lot of guys, teachers and so on-they’d be happy to tell you that you can be anything you want to be, anything you set your mind on. You go to them, they’ll tell you you should feel good about yourself, that you’re special and all that stuff.”
“I know that, Sensei Mike. That’s why I didn’t go to them. I asked you ’cause I want the truth.”
“The truth is: you can’t be anything you want to be. All that talk is garbage. I mean, I could try till my ears smoked, but I couldn’t write a symphony-not a good one, anyway. I couldn’t throw a baseball ninety-five miles an hour or hit one out of a major-league park. I want to do all those things, but it doesn’t matter how hard I try-I just wasn’t given those abilities.” Sensei Mike came forward in his chair, leaned forward, and looked up at me hard. “But this is also the truth: if you try your best and better than your best, and work and push yourself until you think you can’t go on and then push yourself some more-then-then if you have a little bit of luck on your side-then you can be all the good things God made you to be.”
“Well, I’d do that,” I said. “You know I would. You’ve seen me. I’d bust my chops for this.”
“Yeah, you would, that’s true.”
“So what do you think? Could I do it?”
He turned it over in his mind one more second. Then he said, “Absolutely. With your brains, your reflexes, and the way you work… assuming you meet the physical requirements, the eyesight and all that… I think you got Ace written all over you.” He pointed a finger at me. “You’ll still be a chucklehead-but you’ll be an Ace chucklehead.”
“I don’t know, Mike,” I said. “You gotta get a congressman to nominate you and everything.”
“Don’t sweat it. I know plenty of congressmen. I know some Air Force brass too. Finish your education, pull down the big grades, and you’ll get your shot, I promise you. And hey… meanwhile, try to keep your mind on what you’re doing. You can’t fly jets if Lou Wilson splatters your brains all over the dojo.”
When I walked out of the karate studio that day, I felt like I was about ten feet tall, a giant among men looking down at the world from high above. My mind was racing over all kinds of things, over everything that had happened that day. The karate demonstration and the way all the kids shouted and applauded. Beth coming into the cafeteria the way she did, and the way we talked and she wrote on my hand and everything. And now, Sensei Mike: I think you got Ace written all over you…
I had this feeling-this incredible feeling-that it was actually possible that I could turn my daydreams into reality.
It was just like Sensei Mike said. My mind was totally in the clouds. I wasn’t paying attention. I was completely unprepared for what happened next.