August, 2011

I had come to dread Fridays. Specifically, the end of the workday when we were just about to head home. Because if Tom was going to drop a bombshell, that's when she preferred to do it. It didn't happen a lot; just enough that whenever I made it to my car without having a serious discussion about Tom's transition, it felt like a jailbreak.

"Can I talk to you, real quick?" Tom said, affecting a casual air belied by the now-familiar crack in her voice.

With my back to Tom I silently mouthed the word shit, then turned towards her. "Sure," I said with something approximating a smile.

"We're working at my house tomorrow, right?" Indeed we were. Tom and I spent our weekdays working in a managerial capacity. If we wanted to do writing of our own — which, frankly, had become our least favorite part of the job — we needed to work weekends.

I nodded.

"Well, I was thinking that when you came over, I'd be... dressed."

"As opposed to...?" I wasn't being a smart-ass. It just took me a moment to understand what she meant. Dressed. As a woman.

"Oh. Right," I said, embarrassed by my obtuseness. "Duh."

"I just think it's time to move forward," she said. "If that's cool with you."A beleaguered breath escaped my lips, taking both of us by surprise. She cocked her head in confusion. "What?"

"Nothing, I—" I tried, but failed to articulate what I was feeling. "Can we hold off a little longer?"

She frowned. "Why?"

"Because," I said, an icy edge creeping into my voice, "I'd like to hold off a little longer." After all the unqualified support I had given her I was offended that she would begrudge me this.

Tom, it seems, came to the same conclusion. "Sure," she said. "No problem."

Looking back, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that I was being a dick. And sure, yes, guilty. But every step of the way, the decisions, and timing, were Tom's. As it of course should have been. But in that moment I wanted — and in this sense I find me very sympathetic — to gain some semblance of control. Tom was hurtling towards womanhood at what felt to me like breakneck speeds while Operation Man Shit still was mired in the mud.

My gun — now languishing, lonely and unloaded, in the darkness of a gun safe — had not accomplished what I wanted. Which begged the question, What exactly did I want?

It was hard to say. Although I had a pretty good grasp on what I didn't want, starting with the most ubiquitous form of Man Shit, watching sports. Which was, in a sense, a shame because it would have been a tremendous help with my corollary quest of acquiring male friends. (And, as a bonus, I'd finally have something in common with my father-in-law.) Because sports talk was the conversational adhesive that bonded men.

Did you see the game last night?

Yeah! Can you believe that call?

I know! Worst call ever!

Definitely! (They kiss.)

Whereas, with me it generally went like this:

Did you see the game last night?

No.

Whatever, faggot.

OK, no one actually said those words, but boy was it implied. They reacted to my disinterest in televised athletics with a strange mixture of shock, revulsion and condemnation, as if my name had just popped up on a registry for sex offenders. I didn't understand, honestly, what watching sports had to do with masculinity. It was an entirely passive preoccupation and yet I so frequently heard guys using the word we when they were talking about their favorite teams.

We pulled off an amazing comeback.

We are going all the way this year.

We were brought up on assault charges because we punched our wife in an elevator. We are very sorry about that.

Of course, we didn't do anything. Watching football doesn't make you a quarterback any more than watching Cirque du Soleil makes you a Macedonian contortionist. All of which is to say that watching a sport does not qualify as Man Shit; playing a sport does.

(Unless, of course, that sport is golf.)

But conventional sports — basketball, softball, tennis — didn't hold a lot of interest for me. There was nothing wrong with them per se, but for me they brought back unhappy childhood memories of uncoordination and merciless mockery, the worst of which occurred during Little League where my only real function was to let myself get hit by the pitch. My coach once yelled at me for ducking when a pitcher threw at my head.

Of course, there was an argument to be made that the unpleasantness of my baseball experience was precisely the reason that I should play it again. Facing one's fears was, for some men, the quintessence of manliness. But I had some personal experience with fear-facing and I had learned that not every fear needs to be confronted. Some of them, yes. If there's something that interferes with your quality of life, like, say, pogonophobia (fear of beards) — which is especially problematic nowadays with all those dipshit hipsters running around — you'd better see a mental health professional.

On the other hand, I have a fear of heights. A co-worker learned about this and he kept pestering me to go skydiving with him. "It's how I got over my fear of heights!" he boasted.

"I get that," I said. "I just think it'd be easier to get over my interest in skydiving."

There were a fair number of other things that I applied this principle to. Among others: Surfing, motorcycling, inline skating, snowboarding, scuba diving, caving, quiddich. Basically, I avoided anything that involved heights, depths, water, ice, air, speed, balance or wizards. It limited my options considerably.

I knew a surprising number of seemingly sane people who in their forties or even fifties suddenly decided to run Marathons or even Iron Mans (Iron Men? Iron Persons? Ferric-Americans?). I rejected all of these out of hand because I really didn't want to deal with the elements: The heat, the cold, the rain, the bugs. (That was something else I avoided: Going outside.) But in a similar vein, there were the people who gravitated towards the extreme workouts that had come into vogue. Crossfit, PX90X, Insanity. All of them could be done indoors and all of them offered versions of the same thing: Pushing your body to its limits, playing through the pain, mind over matter. Unquestionably, this was extremely manly. What I didn't understand, though, was the point.

The point, one of the extreme fitness zealots explained to me while downing a protein shake, is to push yourself.

And after you push yourself?

You push yourself harder.

And then?

Even harder.

A quick anecdote: When I was working on Love & Trust I used the studio's gym. My workouts weren't particularly ambitious — twenty minutes of cardio on a stationary bike and a smattering of weight machines — it was less about getting and shape than minimizing the bloat.

One day, I sat down at the lat pull station. I selected the weight (let's just say it was not very impressive) and started doing my reps. I was halfway through my set when someone sat at the other lat pull station, directly across from me. I glanced up at the newcomer and froze. He was, I think it's fair to say, the actual, literal worst person in the world that anyone would have to compare themselves with at the gym.

Arnold.

Fucking.

Schwarzenegger.

I shit you not.

The Terminator and I were facing each other, doing the exact same exercise at the exact same time. (The weight he was moving was, let's just say, somewhat more impressive than mine.) I couldn't look him in the eye; instead I stared submissively at the floor like a beta chimpanzee. Arnold, as far as I could tell, didn't even register that I existed. Which was fine by me.

But here's the really interesting part, for our purposes. After he finished his lat pulls, he approached another guy — a stuntman on the shitty Batman film Arnold was on the lot to shoot — who was doing chin-ups.

"What do you think are you doing?" Arnold shouted at him, apparently thinking nothing of berating this man in public. "Where is the form? Where is the breathing? Where is the fun?"

The fun?

He thought working out was fun?

I found that idea even more impenetrable than his Bavarian accent. Working out was never fun. Being done with a work-out, that was fun. Skipping a work-out was more fun. Skipping a work-out and going back to sleep was funner still. Especially if it was followed by a breakfast of pancakes and bacon and drinking Irish coffee while watching Cupcake Wars on The Food Network. That would be so much damn fun.

But that, in a nutshell, was the difference (well, a difference) between Arnold Schwarzenegger and myself. For people like him, working out was something to be enjoyed, to be savored. And it stands to reason that if I felt that way, I would have worked out all the time, too. But I didn't. So I didn't.

Don't get me wrong, I very much wanted to do something physical, just not exercise for its own sake. I didn't even mind the idea of pushing myself or enduring a reasonable amount of pain. But I didn't want something that would just get me in better shape or make me a better athlete. I wanted to be engaged, I wanted to be mentally stimulated, and I wanted all of this to happen indoors.

"Why don't you take up the martial arts again?" Samantha suggested. She was equal parts supportive and amused by Operation Man Shit. Mostly, she just thought I should get out of the house more. "You used to really like that."

"Yeah, but I also was young and thin and flexible."

"And you had a mullet."

"Yes," I nodded. "The source of my power."

She laughed, but then became concerned. "You're not thinking of growing it back, are you?"

"God, no."

"Good."

In Southern California, you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a martial arts instructor. Which was an excellent reason — if you happened to be looking for one — not to swing a dead cat. Next to liquor stores and medical marijuana dispensaries, they were probably the most popular non-food-related consumer establishments out there.

Given my dizzying array of choices, the question became: How could I decide which martial art was right for me? Did I want the practicality of Krav Maga? The spirituality of Aikido? Kung Fu antiquity? MMA modernity? The flow of Capoeira? The staccato of Shotokan? The tranquility of Tai Chi Chuan? The brutality of Muay Thai? Did I want to ground-fight? Or spar? Fight with sticks? Swords? Knives? Did I want to compete in tournaments? Break boards and bricks? Did I want to do katas? Learn joint locks? Pressure points? Choke holds?

None of that mattered to me.

All I wanted, honestly, was someplace that fit into my schedule and was also — and I could not stress the importance of this enough — close to my house. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but spend enough time in Los Angeles traffic and you learn the importance of proximity. Over the years I had given up on hobbies, friendships and romantic relationships because the drive was just too grueling. I even turned down paying gigs — back when I had the luxury of options — if they were on the other side of the hill.

At the nexus of convenient hours and acceptable distance was a place with the nondescript name of Sherman Oaks Martial Arts. It gave no hint as to which particular style they taught, although the English letters on the awning had been printed with an ideogrammatic flair, suggesting something Asian, which didn't narrow things down very much at all.

What I did know, though, was that it had convenient parking and — bonus! — it was three doors down from my dry cleaner.

The dojo itself was a mostly drab affair. Three of the walls had been painted a listless off-white, with a few weapons racks of wooden swords and staffs, a yellowing certificate written in Japanese, a diagram showing the ideal striking points on the human body and the occasional black-and-white photo of a gaunt, decrepit-looking, bespectacled Japanese master. The fourth wall was lined with eight-foot tall mirrors that reflected the gray training mats that covered the rectangular floor.

The only bursts of color were on what appeared to be a small shrine — a shelf over the mirror that had some unlit candles, a few brightly painted dolls, a small green leafy plant — and the patches on the uniforms of the students, an orange tiger and a green dragon chasing each other in a yin/yang circle.

I was dubious at first. It wasn't so much the decor — who cared, really? — as the students. Not one of them was Asian. I know it sounds racist, but bear with me. If you wanted an authentic Japanese restaurant you'd look for one where Japanese people were eating, right? And you'd definitely expect that the chef would be Japanese. You would surely think twice if you met a Sushi chef who was a white guy from Minnesota named Gilbert, wouldn't you?

Well, the Sensei of Sherman Oaks Martial Arts was a white guy from Minnesota named Gilbert. To his credit, he had methodically eradicated his Wisconsin dialect (although an occasional you betcha or side by each would occasionally slip out) and, thankfully, he was pretty old. Because if you must learn a martial art from a midwest caucasian named Gilbert, he should at least have the gravitas of age.

I had signed up for a free introductory class and after signing the obligatory waiver giving them permission to murder me or whatever I was handed off to Sensei Gilbert's top student, an African-American second degree black belt named Darian. Darian was probably fifteen years younger than me (I was, I would eventually realize, one of the oldest students in the dojo) and almost my height, but solid. He got me a gi that more-or-less fit and helped me tie my white belt.

"What made you decide to come here?" he asked as he pulled the belt's knot tight.

"It's close to my house," I said candidly.

Darian laughed. "That is the best answer I've ever heard!"

I shrugged. "Glad you enjoyed it."

"Do you have any previous martial arts training?"

"A few years of Tae Kwon Do way back when, if that helps."

"Not really." It was my turn to laugh. "This is very different."

The art, somewhat ironically I guess, was taught in the traditional Japanese style. A lot of bowing, a lot of kneeling, a lot of Japanese words. Whether those Japanese words were being pronounced correctly, neither I, nor any student in the dojo, could say.

Like anything in life, I had to start at the beginning. And here, that meant learning to roll. Darian explained how to do zenpo kaiten (front roll). I was told to make a "T" with my hands and look over my shoulder as I pushed off with my rear leg. Darian demonstrated, the roll smooth and quiet, like the faintest rustling of silk against silk.

Then I tried and it sounded, to me, like a metal filing cabinet falling down the stairs. I managed to hurt my neck, shoulder and face. I was supposed to finish with my back straight and one knee up, but instead I toppled sideways.

"OK!" said Darian, his upbeat tone warring with the dismay in eyes, "That's a good start!"

"Was it?"

"I've seen worse."

"Have you?"

"Let's try it again."

We spent maybe twenty awkward minutes on rolls and break falls. "We roll at the beginning of every class," he explained. "I know it's tedious, but the truth is you'll probably never get mugged or find yourself in a bar fight, but everyone slips and falls at some point."

I nodded at the logic, but he could sense my disinterest. "OK, let's do something more exciting."

He took me through the basics of their movements, which were called "The Eight Directions" even though there were actually ten directions. He taught me the basic punch (fudo ken), basic kick (sokiyaku geri) and the basic block (shuto uke). It became clear from all of the minute corrections Darian gave me that this was a very refined and detail-oriented art. He kept stressing the importance of relaxing, of doing the movements slowly and with flow, of relying on body mechanics rather than size and strength.

I felt like I had no natural aptitude for any of this — and by the way, that wasn't my imagination; months later, Darian would tell me that his original assessment of me was, Oh, God! What am I going to do with this guy? — but it also occurred to me that maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. Maybe I didn't need something that played to my strengths. Maybe I needed something that played to my weakness. Of course, there was also the distinct possibility that spending a lot of time doing something I was really bad at would suck.

Truthfully, I was on the fence about whether or not I would sign up. But then Sensei Gilbert came onto the floor for a demonstration, using Darian as his "victim." Sensei Gilbert was astounding. Astounding in a way that is hard to explain. OK, my Tae Kwon Do teacher was also astounding. His power, his speed, his timing, all unbelievable. He could easily kick you across the room. But with Master Choi I could clearly see the correlation between cause and effect. It was, for lack of a better word, very Newtonian.

With Sensei Gilbert, the effect was so much bigger than than the observable cause. It's hard to describe his movements, especially because I couldn't always see what exactly he was doing, but they were subtle, deceptive, effortless, precise. And the impact on poor Darian — who somehow managed to survive this abuse — was tremendous. Cheesehead or not, this guy was the real deal.

When I told Darian I wanted to sign up, he briefly registered surprise (and not in a good way) and then told me that I needed to talk to Sensei.

Sensei's office was small and fastidiously neat. There was a picture of him taken in the eighties (judging by the cheesy mustache he had at the time) with two Japanese masters. They all looked very serious. There was also a picture, this one from the late sixties or early seventies, of him in Vietnam, with a cigarette and a rifle. On his desk there was a more recent picture of him on a couch smiling while holding two toddlers, twin girls, one in each arm.

"So what made you decide to come here?" It was the same question that Darian had asked and I gave the same answer.

"It's close to my house."

Silence.

Unnerved, I said, "I don't know. The usual reasons, I guess." I gave a little nervous laugh.

"Believe it or not," Sensei Gilbert said, leaning back in his office chair, "this wasn't a trick question."

"I know. I just..."

"Nothing you say here leaves this room. Believe me, I've heard it all before." His tone was more impatient than reassuring.

I had not divulged Tom's secret to anyone outside of my family, but there was something about this guy I knew I could trust. So I just said it. "My best friend is becoming a woman."

A smile tugged at the corners of Sensei's lips. "Well," he said. "You got me. I did not see that coming." I'd be lying if I said I didn't take some perverse pleasure in that.

"Neither did I," I said.

Sensei then turned philosophical. "One of the things I've noticed in the thirty-something years I've been teaching this art is that people walk through my door for one reason, but they stay — if they stay — for a completely different reason." I nodded. "I'm going to need a credit card. Anything but Amex."

I fished a Visa card out of my wallet and handed it to him. He swiped it through his machine.

"Do you have any questions for me?" he asked, while waiting for my card to be approved.

"Yeah. What is this art called?"

"It's Ninpo," he said.

"And Ninpo is...?"

"The martial art of the Ninja."

"The Ninja? I'm going to be a Ninja?"

"No," he said, irritated by how long it was taking for my card to go through. "There are no Ninjas anymore."

"But I'll be learning Ninja stuff?"

"Some. Eventually."

"That's so cool!"

"Uh-huh." He wasn't even listening to me any more, the uncooperative credit card machine now absorbing all his attention. "What's wrong with this stupid thing?"

I didn't know. What I did know, though, was that Operation Man Shit was a huge success. Nothing — not a gun, not Crossfit, not Arnold Fucking Schwarzenneger was manlier than a Ninja.

And the next morning, I told Tom that I was ready to see him dressed.

I was ready to meet Tamara.