Mom Was Frugal

To keep us out of trouble, my mom put us in karate class. I hated the pajama pants and all the superstition. But before I knew it, I was lined up and bowing to some guy in a karate gi with an American flag design. Since Mom was frugal, we took classes in the recreation room of the church. Sensei Gomez only charged $20 a month. 

Over time, I enjoyed it. I made friends with Freddy, or Speedy as we called him. Like a champion chess player, he would predict your move, evade and strike you all in a blink. 

“Too slow, too stiff, no rhythm,” he would say while jabbing me cold in the face. “Loosen up, Jose.” 

And of course he fought dirty. Eye pokes and kicks to the kneecap. You never wanted to grapple with him. I almost beat him once, locking his arm until he pinched me in the manhood. 

While Speedy was elusive, flashy and dirty, I was cautious and technical. I liked to feel out my opponent. Take a couple of hits to gage the power and follow up with a counter. However, my style meant getting hit first and often receiving punches to the face, knees to the solar plexus and the occasional groin shot. I would take the abuse dished out at me until I cracked, responding with a flurry of punches, or if I was lucky, a nice round house to the head.

Sometimes when we sparred, I was scared of getting hurt; Speedy and some of the older guys had bad knees and shoulders from going too hard. I always feared long term injury. But, I was also scared of what I could do if my anger got out of hand. In fact, the first tournament I ever competed in, I was almost disqualified during my first match for using excessive force when I gave my opponent a hard hook to the jaw.

By senior year in high school, karate became a job. Sensei Gomez let me teach his Thursday class. And while college was in my future, a part of me dreamed about a career in martial arts, maybe teaching a class at some community college while becoming a cage fighter or a stuntman. 

One Thursday in late June, Sensei Gomez came up to me at the end of class. 

“How would you like to do an extra job for us tonight?” he asked. “A little security work?

“Where at?” I replied, puzzled. 

“Some frat party in UCLA. Let me know if you’re free”

Later that night, I was in a big house on Frat Row in Westwood guarding a tall fence in the back with Speedy, walkie talkies clipped to our belts, we rolled in deep with a couple of other guys from the team and Rashid, another instructor. The multi-story house was big, some guys covered the front, while other people positioned themselves in the living-room-turned-dance-floor. An hour in, we were bored, waiting for some kind of action to pop off. 

“Jose, you remember when I cracked you in the ribs?” Speedy commented. 

“Na, but I remembered when you tried to grab my nuts,” I said. “Hey man, why they got us back here? You think these white boys are crazy enough to jump that fence?”

I failed to realize that this party was by invite only. The guys in the front had a massive guest list. An hour later, out of nowhere, a swarm of drunk, chain-smoking and sexually active uppity college kids took over the house.

Unknown to us, two skinny kids with tight jeans and beanies tried to hop the fence. Freddy and I shouted at them and kicked the fence a couple times. Frightened, they came down. 

“Come on, let us in maaan,” one of the guys pleaded. “We got some Afghan Kuuush,” he continued as his red eyes bled. 

A small green baggie came out of his hand. In those times, I was so square that the thought of using pot was eternal sin. Luckily, Speedy yelled at them a couple of times and they gave up. From all the tension, I failed to recognize the irony of two Latinos guarding a fence used by white people to enter a place that they were not allowed into. It was as if in this small part of LA, an alternate universe was created 

As the night continued, things only got worse. About five other guys tried to jump the back gate. One of them even threatened to throw rocks at us. Along with that, some guys on the dance floor tried to provoke the other security guards.  

“Everyone to the main dance floor, everyone to the main dance floor now,” Rashid would shout through the walkie talkies every so often.

And several times, Freddy and I rushed through the pile of frat dudes, hands balled into fists. But as always, these guys didn’t really want any of what we were serving and backed down each time. 

This was the first time I saw so many drunk people at once. Since I got stuck in AP classes, I never had the idea to explore binge drinking. That would come later. In my puritanical mind, the stumbling patrons with their incoherent chatter disgusted me. Every other second, we were helping wolf packs of blond-haired girls sit down, as if the idea of pacing themselves or moderation were banned. 

Just when the night couldn’t get worse, one of the largest and hairiest beasts of a man began to terrorize the entire party, cracking terrible jokes and slapping people dead in the back while carrying a huge handle of whisky. One glance at him and you could tell that he was fed a steady diet of Midwest corn. Bearded and with patches of thick hair protruding from his muscle shirt, he walked around the party with his chest puffed and his chin confidently up. The bros throwing this party had a no glass rule, which meant that one of us would have to go up to this herculean specimen and tell him that he had to throw out his bottle. 

Now Speedy, being only 5’6”, walked away instantly. Everyone looked at my height, expecting me to handle this guy. The whole day, I practiced in my head how I wanted to fight in this exact scenario. “Elbow to the jaw, knee to the groin,” I repeated to myself.

I slowly walked over to him. 

In school, I never dared confront anyone, because I never knew who was who. Sure, you had some wannabe thugs, but you also had killers or people who knew killers, too scared to do their own dirty work. There were so many people I could never really fight because they would retaliate and I’d end up getting jumped or shot. 

So, the whole idea here was strange to me. I felt like I was flexing on him. 

I went up to the beast, my voice resisting, aware of my nerves and intimidation. 

“Hey man, hey man,” I said lightly, not wishing to startle my prey.  “Can you... Can you throw,” I whispered with my head slightly hunched as he looked at me. “Hey man, can you throw that bottle away?” I finally demanded. “We can’t have any glass bottles here. You got that man?” I lifted my head while puffing out my chest, forcing myself to seem bigger. Ready for a reaction.

“No problem man, I had no idea,” the giant replied to me, chugging his whisky and trashing the bottle. 

In one night, I’d become an authority figure, a mini customs agent, denying people access while policing their behavior. I had the sharp taste for authority and my notions of going to a college paused for just a minute. 

But, towards the end of the party, things started to die down. The dance floor and kitchen covered in god knows what. The kegs at crisis-level dry. 

We all hung out on the rooftop glaring at the nighttime sky. We’d almost gotten into several fights, taken care of drunk people, and seen a bottle almost crash into the face of Sensei Gomez, who dodged it with the grace of a matador. 

And this is when I had a complete change. I decided that I was not cut out for this type of work. There was no way in hell that my ultimate goal in life would be reduced to babysitting a bunch of drunk and high snobs from Beverly Hills. A part of me agreed that Mom went through too much crap for me to throw my life away trying to be the next Jean Claude Van Damme. 

I also decided that I would never drink alcohol or smoke marijuana, that I never wanted to let my guard down like the people that I had seen that night. I broke that promise a couple months later during the first week of fall quarter at UC San Diego. I ended up at some random frat party with my roommates. We drank vodka and got rowdy. We tried to fight a couple people and we made some outlandish threats. The night ended with all of us getting tackled and escorted off the premises, by guys just like Speedy, Rashid, and Sensei Gomez. Tackled and escorted off by guys just like me.

Ramon Jimenez is a writer and educator who resides in Seattle, WA. He teaches language arts and directs a summer youth poetry program. Jimenez writes poetry that focuses on immigration, culture and geopolitics. His work can be found in Rigorous Magazine and the Anti-Languorous Project.