If you’ve ever joined a dojo for any reason, you’ll know that it is sort of like being on a reality TV show where you are forced to live with a bunch of randomly selected people that you ordinarily wouldn’t have anything to do with… people whom you eventually want to destroy.
I started doing Aikido because I heard it was a great way to channel aggression. Because I was having miserable experiences with my agent and editor working on my book, “Fear and Clothing,” I was seething and fluorescent yellow with barely-contained violence. I was having regular fantasies of curb-stomping the pair of them like Ed Norton in “American History X,” in a wife-beater shirt with veins sticking out of my neck. So, I figured having a regular group of people beat me up a few times a week was a good idea.
The Sensei, “Billy,” was a particular type I have come to mistrust over the years. He was a short fireplug of a man with an elvish face, and a high, somewhat squeaky and girlish voice. When men have voices like their testicles have never entirely dropped, I immediately find them suspect — in my experience, they compensate for this lack of vocal manliness by being sneaky, manipulative little shits.
On my first day, I saw a guy who immediately struck me as one of the handsomest men on earth — so jaw-droppingly, Disney Prince handsome I immediately disliked him. No man that good-looking amounts to anything good as a basic human being — people, especially women, fall all over themselves to do things for any man so beautiful, and they turn into fussy babies and entitled jerks. Naturally he was also a saxophone player, which made his chances of being a remotely decent individual about 80% less likely.
In my early days at the dojo, I was paired to spar with this handsome guy, “Jeff.”
Since I had no idea what Aikido was — like ballroom dancing, only less violent — I started off by attacking him full force, like I would an attempted rapist, figuring that since he was a brown belt and considerably larger than me he could fend off my wild attacks with ease. My violence only saddened and confused him, however, because this was Aikido, which is nothing like actual fighting. It’s more like a series of choreographed trust exercises, like you’d have in a beginning drama class. He sat down angrily in the middle of the mat and urged me to sit across from him.
“What are you doing?” He demanded.
“….Fighting?” I asked weakly.
“What is your problem with me?” He whined.
I wasn’t about to tell him that he was so attractive I wanted to hit him, so I told him I was merely ignorant of Aikido…which was true. But I also wanted to hit him, and I got to.
The core group of students at this dojo, I would find, were a pack of disgruntled Aikido practitioners who had seceded from a different dojo, for unspecific reasons. I would later discover it was because they were all disgruntled misfits. (I almost called them “twats” but that is going a little far. )
(Which is probably why I was with them as long as I was, being another disgruntled misfit, and worse.)
The Sensei’s girlfriend was one of the top students. She was a mousy, bespectacled Harvard grad with a concave posture, who looked like she’d been reading tax law in dim light for all of her thirty-something years with a cruel father over her shoulder, browbeating her. Now the Sensei was literally beating her up — it was some kind of strange, mutually agreeable sadomasochism which took place during the class period. He would hurt her, and she would turn beet red, cry a little, and then fight like hell. His abuse was the engine driving her impressive accumulation of belts at Billy’s somewhat sadistic hand.
All things on the mat are about the physical power to deflect.
Aikido, as well as I remember this history now, was about these prisoners in Yokahama who needed to defend themselves from constant physical harm by the Japanese. The charismatic O’ Sensei can be found on You Tube, pirouetting like a falling cherry blossom through a roomful of men attacking him, peering upwards with his arms outstretched almost in joy.
Now, admittedly — because I have ADHD, I find some things difficult — like learning the Japanese name for a movement while doing it. I have difficulty learning long movement combinations. So, I wasn’t exactly an ideal student. But I was doing alright, chipping away.
Then “Melissa” joined the dojo.
“Cintra, you’re killing me,” said Melissa, because I was so incredibly stupid, once, about which direction was the right one to sweep the tatami mats.
Killing you? I’m killing you? I want to kill you.
And at that moment, in my mind, Melissa became my mortal enemy.
I liked “Cliff,” a heavyset guy who moved furniture for a living. He tried to coach me on the side for the blue-belt exam, which required an enormous amount of Japanese language recognition. My brains were too fried and scrambled by my book rewrites, and I couldn’t retain anything.
I found that the dojo was demanding more and more of my time. We were now drinking together after class. The class members became more and more social with one another.
“We’re all getting in Cliff’s moving van and driving to Chicago to see Jeff get his black belt!” One of them told me once, with a kind of veiled expectation that I be there, to see Jeff’s fine moment.
This was not something I was about to be doing. I’d come to believe Jeff was alright, but I didn’t want to go to another mass Aikido event in an exotic location.
Billy had gotten test-happy, because Melissa, with her grad-school aptitude, was sailing through the belts. Just whizzing by me in terms of aptitude and raw talent.
And then suddenly, we were supposed to both take the blue belt test at the same time. Melissa had caught up to me and surpassed me — in mere months, she picked up which it had taken me about 2 years to figure out.
I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt I wasn’t ready for my blue belt test. I didn’t know the Japanese. What’s more, I knew that Billy was pressuring me to take my blue belt test because he knew I would fail, and it would enable Melissa to take her seat as Dojo Queen along with his long-suffering girlfriend. He wanted to publicly humiliate me - he wanted to make me look stupid next to Melissa — and I knew this.
So I just refused to go back. Something about years of abuse. It makes you psychic. I knew that the minute I went back, I’d have to take the Blue Belt test, and I was going to suck next to Melissa, and I was going to get thrown into the Aikido penalty box of shame and I’d be forced to learn humility or something.
So I didn’t go anymore. I’m learning to avoid humiliation. It has not been an easy road.
The last straw came when Cliff’s moving company was supposed to help me move out of my apartment. I was downsizing from my DUMBO loft into an illegal apartment in downtown Brooklyn. Days before the move was scheduled, Cliff came to my house to size up the job.
I suppose I had no idea how much shit I had, back then.
Anyway, he took one look at the job….and politely rejected it.
Leaving me with a hard move-date and no backup plan. It was a dirty, unsportsmanly, unbrotherly thing to do, and a bind I certainly wouldn’t have put HIM in, living up to something that I imagined was a dojo code. Finding movers with no advance time is no cakewalk in New York City.
But I did learn how to break a person’s fingers. The End.
Artwork: “Zoom,” oil and wax on canvas, Cintra Wilson, 2020
WHY I QUIT THE DOJO
Oh Cintra, after all these years since high school, I still want to be you!
All your baubles give “good shine” in one direction or another, here in the stack, but this is up there with the most intriguing. You’re conveying vulnerability and (speaking strictly for myself) I have—how shall I put this?—always had a difficult time glimpsing Vulnerable Wilson, at least in your non-fictional works and journalistic forays. I can sense it in your fiction, without doubt, but there’s such a preponderance of the non-fiction Cintra that the voices remain beautifully distinct.
Otherwise, you command the page. You command live performance. You command screenwriting and productions. Your publicity photos are calculatedly gorgeous.
This piece shed a veil or two. Like many of your fans, I knew you were adventurous, but … Aikido?
“Cintra Wilson actually ventures into such obscure corners and puts herself on the line, and sticks with it for months, to improve her everyday outlook?”
Is it wrong that I laughed when you employed San Francisco Drag Queen Warrior Street-tactics against Prince Charming? He had to sit you down on the mat and say, “Cintra, what the fuck?”
I loved that. That dingo had no idea about the hovering angst caused by La Belle Clang Clang Clang Went the Trolley (+ Editrix)
“Melissa” is a villainess who made me hiss. Good work. My God, did she ever live for Aikido casting-couch sensei approval. Yeah, she would have creamed you in the playoff encounter, but I still wouldn’t have bet against you if, in the midst of a hammering, you went primeval and reverted to drag queen tactics and defenestrated her. We’d be writing to you in prison, now, but your fans would smuggle all sorts of resort-level amenities into you. No worries.
It’s a piece with a different vibe, Wilson, but just as funny and more striking in some ways. I did not know that you extrude yourself so often beyond the comfort zones behind which we all tend to loiter. Then again, you are a comet hailing from the Enigmatic Nebulae Cluster. (I mean that in the most laudatory sense.)
The only thing I don’t get is your beef against men who are exceptionally handsome or even particularly handsome. What gives? You tend to paint yourself as gawkward but the truth is that we’ve all seen you—book jackets, online pics, publicity photos, interviews, IN PERSON. You look like a slightly punk Marlene Dietrich, and that ain’t no exaggeration. Pretty damn glam, and no lack of charisma, either.
Should handsome males ring automatic alarm bells, a priori, that sizzlin females should not ring?
You rule the roost again, Lady.