The Gentlemen's Hour Read online

  Yeah, okay, maybe it wasn’t such a dip into the real world—the kid was taking in eight bucks per plus tips, but going home to a three-mil house with a stocked fridge and a cleaning lady. Maybe Bill should have thrown Corey out, tough love and all that crap, and he thought about it, but, like he said, you blink and . . .

  Your kid gets in a scrap. A stupid, drunken case of testosterone gone crazy. He throws a punch that kills someone and wrecks his own life. Because, let’s be honest here, Corey’s life is over. What do you think prison—even a few years of it, if Alan pulls the rabbit out of the hat—is going to do to Corey? You think he can hack that? The kid isn’t tough, he isn’t hard, he’s just going to become . . .

  Bill stops there and stares out the window. A lot of window gazing, Boone thinks, when you’re talking about Corey. Then Bill chuckles bitterly and says, “That punch? First time in his life that Corey ever followed through on anything.”

  His phone buzzes and Bill hits a button. Over the speaker, Boone hears Nicole say,

  “You wanted me to remind you that you have a meeting with Phil at the site?”

  “Got it,” Bill says. “I have to go.”

  “What gym?” Boone asks.

  “Huh?”

  “You mentioned a gym,” Boone says. “What gym?”

  36

  Team Domination.

  What the gym is called.

  Set next to a Korean hair-and-nails salon in a strip mall in the PB flats, Team Domination is your basic dojo, one of probably hundreds in Southern California. It had started life as a karate studio and morphed into a franchise American

  kenpo

  school; then, when the mixed martial arts craze hit, shifted its emphasis to MMA.

  Boone is aware of MMA, having seen some of it on TV. He has his own informal, casual relationship with the martial arts from hanging with Dave—who is really into it—and going to some classes with him. He’d had to do self-defense and hand-to-hand at the Police Academy, of course, and with Dave he’d gotten the basics of kenpo and a little judo, a couple of the funner kung fu kicks, and a little

  krav maga

  when Dave was into that. But Boone was never really into the whole dojo scene, with the white or black

  gis

  , the incessant bowing, and the “Master” this and “Master” that routine. Besides, any time put into kicking bags or sparring is time he isn’t in the water, and priorities are priorities.

  But Boone has a good sense of the San Diego martial arts scene because of its close relationship with surf society. A lot of the martial arts instructors are also surfers, a lot of surfers are martial artists. Guys go back and forth from the beach to the dojo, which makes the localism of certain breaks all the more edgy.

  See, most surfers are hyperkinetic, adult ADD types who need constant movement—and all the better if the action has a little edge to it, like someone trying to put a fist through your nose or a foot upside your head. And as both sports rely mostly on balance, timing, and instant risk assessment, there is some crossover effect.

  All the more so because both began their American lives as Pacific phenomena. Chinese and Japanese workers on Hawaii sugar and pineapple plantations brought their traditions with them and later opened schools. They were pretty much an Asian-Hawaiian thing until the Vietnam War, when guys from the “forty-eight” had layovers in the islands, picked the sport up, and brought it home, a lot like their dads had with surfing during World War II.

  Once that happened, a lot of Asians in California who had been teaching the arts secretly in the Chinatowns and Little Japans, pretty much thought, “What the hell? The cat’s out of the bag,” and opened schools of their own. Guys who might have taken up boxing started putting on gis and sandals, smattering their conversations with bits of Chinese, Japanese, and Okinawan. Tournaments started everywhere.

  That touched off the Great Debate.

  What would happen if . . .

  A boxer fought a

  karatega

  ?

  Yeah, but under what rules? Could the karate guy use his feet or only his hands? The Asian martial arts guys were pretty arrogant about the hypothetical match, sure that their guy, with his lightning, long-range kicks and devastating punching power, would easily knock out the one-dimensional, plodding boxer.

  Didn’t happen.

  First time someone got one of these apples-and-oranges matches into a ring, the karate guy got off his kick, the boxer took it on his shoulder, waded in, and knocked the surprised karatega right out.

  It sent the martial arts community reeling. The dojos fell on hard times as the common wisdom dictated that the “arts” were great for kids to learn discipline and women to tighten their glutes, but if you were planning on being in a street fight or the classic dark, empty parking lot confrontation, they were basically useless, the triumph of style over substance.

  A real fight was going to be won by the bigger guy.

  Then came the Rise of Bubba. The professional martial arts scene was soon dominated by the atavistic advent of “cage fighting,” basically two jumbo-size crackers in a cage, beating the hell out of each other until one of them dropped. It was bloody, brutal, and wildly popular enough to get banned in several states. Real martial artists watched appalled as fighting’s center of gravity shifted from the West Coast to the Deep South, and guys with names such as “Butterball” became renowned champions and folk heroes.

  But the “art” had been taken out of the martial arts.

  Salvation came from Asia, but through an unlikely conduit.

  Brazil.

  Enter the Gracies.

  Here’s what happened: The Japanese master who pretty much invented judo got fed up with his countrymen thinking of it as a game instead of real fighting. He sent a group of disciples out to spread the word throughout the world. One of them, a cat named Maeda, ended up in Brazil, where he hooked up with two teenage brothers, Carlos and Helios Gracie.

  The Gracie brothers took the judo and morphed it into something that came to be known as Brazilian jujitsu. What Brazilian jujitsu basically did was to take the fight to the ground. The Gracies would get their opponents on the mat and roll around until they got them into complicated, intricate armlocks, jointlocks, and chokes, and it was all about technique.

  The “art” was back in martial arts.

  In the nineties, Helios’s son, Royce, accepted an invitation from his older brother to move to California to help him teach the art. In an old California tradition (see Alter, Hobie) they started in their garage.

  But it wasn’t until the family issued the “Gracie Challenge” that the form really took off. The Gracies offered a hundred thousand dollars to anyone who could knock out the relatively slight, 175-pound Royce. Nobody could. He beat everybody, taking them to the ground and making them give up before he snapped their arms or ankles or choked them into unconsciousness.

  Thus was born the UFC, the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

  It was a revival of the old debate—which form of the martial arts was superior? The Gracies organized a single-elimination tournament and invited boxers, kickboxers,

  muay thai

  fighters, wrestlers, even the Neanderthal cage fighters.

  Royce beat them all.

  On television.

  Everybody saw that you

  could

  do something when a three-bill gorilla got ahold of you—Gracie jujitsu. A lot of the fighters started to learn the system and incorporate it into their repertoire.

  The UFC thrived as a television, DVD, and Internet empire. It got away from the cage-fighting image, established weight classes and rules, and attracted serious martial artists.

  But now there was a new question—could anything beat Gracie jujitsu? Yeah, maybe, if you could keep the fight on its feet—that is, knock out your jujitsu opponent before he could take you to the ground.

  The answer came with the generic term MMA—mixed martial arts.

  �
��It makes sense,” Dave the Love God said to Boone one night as they were watching a match on television. “Really, it’s what the old Asian masters always said: ‘You do whatever works at the moment.’”

  So the dojos started teaching a little of everything. The new kids coming up wanted to get into the UFC—they wanted to study jujitsu, boxing, wrestling, kickboxing,

  muay thai,

  in a combination that made sense. More and more studios that once offered only one discipline were changing over to MMA to survive.

  Team Domination, for instance.

  It seemed as if all the new dojos called themselves Team this or Team that, on the theory that it took a team of instructors, each with his own specialty, to train a mixed martial artist. Also, all the students trained with each other—a team of sorts for an individual sport, a “band of brothers” out to conquer the other teams.

  So Boone walks into Team Domination.

  37

  A real dojo smells.

  Badly.

  Mostly of sweat. Rank, stale sweat.

  Team Domination reeks.

  A circular ring dominates the center of the studio. As Boone walks in, two guys are rolling around on the mat in the ring, practicing their jujitsu. Heavy bags hang from the ceiling, and three other guys are banging away at them, alternating punches with low kicks and knee strikes. Another two guys straddle heavy bags on the floor and slam elbows into their downed “opponents.” In one corner, a student hefts kettle weights while another skips rope.

  There are none of the trappings that Boone would recognize from the old-school Asian-type studio—no gis, no belts, no Chinese paintings of tigers or dragons, no single white chrysanthemum in a vase. Instead, posters of UFC stars are pasted to the walls, and slogans such as “No Gain Without (Other People’s) Pain.”

  The students don’t wear gis but are decked out in a variety of Gen X gear, mostly cammie trunks and T-shirts. Some sport black “Team Dom” ball caps. A few are in plastic “sweat” suits, trying to cut weight. Most of the guys have tattoos, lots of them, all over their arms, down their backs, on their legs. The guy supervising the jujitsu practice looks up, sees Boone, and walks over.

  “Hey! What brings you here?”

  It’s Mike Boyd.

  38

  Which makes two points of contact.

  Rockpile and the dojo.

  And two points of contact always make a cop or an investigator kind of edgy. Two points of contact is another way of saying “coincidence,” which is another way of saying “Easter Bunny.” You get the chocolate and the jelly beans and stuff, but much as you’d like to, you don’t really believe that a rabbit brought them.

  “Corey Blasingame,” Boone answers. “Again. Funny you didn’t mention this yesterday, Mike.”

  Funny and not so funny, Boone thinks. Pretty understandable: if you ran the place where the kid maybe learned how to throw a lethal punch, you might not like to talk about it either.

  “You didn’t ask,” Boyd says.

  “I’m asking now.”

  Boone says it with a smile and Mike smiles back, but the look in the man’s eyes says he doesn’t like it. Doesn’t like Boone showing up here, doesn’t like questions about Corey. Boone asks, “Aren’t I welcome here, Mike?”

  “You’re welcome,” Boyd says. “But it’s not the water, you know?”

  Boone gets it. This is Boyd telling him,

  You may be the A male out in the surf, but this is

  my

  world.

  “Corey was one of your students,” Boone says.

  “Not really,” Boyd answers. “He hung out a little. Corey was . . . how should I say this . . . more about the ‘about’ than the ‘the,’ if that makes any sense?”

  “Yeah, it does.” You get it in surfing all the time—the dismos who like to put on the wet suit, carry the board around, paddle out, but don’t like to take the wave when it comes. It’s a good expression—“about the about,” Boone thinks.

  “Corey didn’t like to get hit,” Boyd says. “And that’s what you do in MMA. You get hit, you get cut, you get your nose busted. You gotta be kind of a freak to enjoy that kind of fun, and Corey wasn’t that kind of a freak.”

  “I’m just trying to get a sense,” Boone says, “of what this is all about.”

  “‘This’?”

  “MMA.”

  Boyd goes into a speech that sounds practiced and a little defensive. MMA is a highly technical combat art that requires high levels of training, conditioning, and practice. Although it certainly can look bloody, it has a fine safety record—unlike high school football or professional boxing, there has never been a fatality in a sanctioned UFC bout.

  “You wanna work out,” Boyd says, “I’ll show you a little. I know you can handle yourself.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  Boyd says, “You’re the sheriff over at The Sundowner, right? I heard you can take care of business. You and your crew.”

  “I don’t have a crew.”

  Boyd smirks at this. “There’s that lifeguard, the big Sammy, the Jap cop.”

  The “lifeguard” is okay, Boone thinks, but “Sammy” and “Jap”? He says, “I have a Samoan friend, who is, yes, big, and a Japanese friend.”

  “I didn’t mean any offense,” Boyd says, still smiling.

  “See, it sounded like you did.” Boone isn’t smiling.

  Some of the activity in the room stops as the students sense an impending conflict. They have a nose for this kind of thing, an unerring radar that tells them of imminent violence. They’re into it, wanting to see what their teacher will do to this guy.

  “Where are we going with this?” Boyd asks, feeling their eyes on him. He knows he can’t even look like he’s backing down. If he shies from a fight, or loses, half his devoted team will find a new school. The other half will stay and eat him alive—they’re pack dogs.

  Boone has no such worries. “We don’t have to go anywhere with it.”

  He hears a guy in the back of the room mutter, “Pussy.” A few of the others are smiling and shaking their heads. Boyd feels the momentum and doesn’t want to let it go. He says, “You came into

  my

  place, my friend.”

  “I’m not your friend.”

  “Tell you what,” Boyd says. “Strap up, get into the ring with me, and I’ll show you what MMA is all about.”

  Maybe because it’s been a sad day, or because he’s pissed off about a lot of things he can’t do anything about, maybe even because he let that kid at Rockpile mouth off to him, Boone decides it might be a good time to throw a little.

  39

  Five minutes later, he’s stripped down to just his jeans, is wrapping the MMA gloves around his hands, and one of the students is handing him a mouthpiece.

  “This

  is

  new, right?” Boone asks.

  “I think so.”

  “You

  think

  so?”

  “I just took it out of the wrapper.”

  “Better.”

  The guy looks at him funny and then says, “I’m Dan. I’m your corner.”

  “This is a circle.”

  “Huh?”

  “There are no . . . Never mind,” Boone says. “What does a corner do?”

  “Coach,” Dan says. “Yell out advice and encouragement. Help carry you out of the ring if you, like, can’t walk.”

  “Great.”

  Dan explains the rules. They’re going to fight one five-minute round. You can kick, punch, wrestle, grapple, but no kicking in the balls, eye-gouging, biting, or kicking or kneeing the opponent in the head when he’s down.

  “If he gets you in a joint lock or a chokehold,” Dan says, “and you feel something about to pop or break, tap him three times and he’ll stop.”

  “Okie-dokie.”

  “We have a saying.”

  “What’s that?”

  “‘Better to tap a second
too soon,’” Dan recites, “ ‘than a second too late.’”

  “Good saying.”

  If a guy were to have a crew, Boone thinks, this would be a most excellent time to have one. It would be really nice to see Dave, Tide, or Johnny walk through that door. If I feel something about to pop or break—

  “You ready?” Boyd shouts.

  Boone already has his mouthpiece in, so he just gives a thumbs up and shuffles into the center of the ring, trying to remember some of the wit and wisdom of Dave the Love God, the chapter on fighting. If it’s a big guy, Dave said, try to take his legs away from him early. Those pegs are holding up a lot of weight and wear out easily, especially with a little assistance from you.

  So Boone comes in and shoots a quick, slapping, low roundhouse kick that hits Boyd in the low left calf. It makes Boyd wince a little, so Boone does it again right away and then moves off to the side.

  Boyd comes forward, shooting two left jabs that Boone sidesteps. The teacher looks a little surprised—Daniels has a few more skills than he thought. But he keeps coming forward—two more jabs followed by a right hook, then a straightforward kick to set up a spinning backfist that whizzes just past Boone’s nose as he jumps back and gets a collective “Whoo!” from the crowd.

  No shit, whoo! Boone thinks. If that had connected I’d be on queer street until next week. He tries another low kick to the calf but Boyd is ready and moves his leg out of the way, throwing Boone off balance. Boone tries to recover with a straight right punch, but Boyd ducks under it, grabs him around the ribs, lifts him over his head, and walks him toward the edge of the ring.

  Boone feels it coming, but even if he didn’t, there’s plenty of time to hear the onlookers groan in happy anticipation, and one of them narrates, “Slam!” Boone’s being carried along like he’s backward on a wave, and he looks down to see Dan looking up at him, wincing.

  “Any advice?!” Boone asks.

  “You’re kind of fucked!”

  “Encouragement?!”

  “Uhhhh, hang in there!”

  Yeah. Then Boone feels himself going over backward, there’s a second of that awful falling feeling, and he tries to remember what Dave told him.