My mom recently told me that reading Her Living Room Hero was her very own way of being able to visit Planet Brad.
I’d never really thought about it that way – what people think when reading my blog. Sure I want readers to like what it is I put into the ether. Yes, I want everyone to tell their friends that they’re missing out on the single-greatest undiscovered talent out there, but I’ve never given much thought to what goes through readers’ minds while taking in what I can really only equate to my written version of diarrhea of the mouth. I write, well, because it feels good. And because I don’t mind telling the world how dysfunctional I can be at times.
With classes starting back up last week, I’m not sure how often I’m going to be able to publicly out myself over the next few months in this forum I've so deftly created. I really want to write for you every week to ten days. I’m not going to even pretend like that’s going to happen. What I am going to do is try something different – at least for this posting.
What you’re about to read is a short piece I just finished for my Advanced Creative Writing Non-Fiction class. The assignment was to write about a place. Any place. A place that holds a special interest to us. A place that we hate. A place we’re indifferent to. We just had to write about a place. Of course I can’t do anything strictly by the book, so I added my own twist. Made it my own. Paula Abdul would be proud. Without further ado, I give you...
Temple of Ted
For Norm it was Cheers. Probably because everyone knew his name. For Clark Kent it was the Daily Planet. Most likely because it was one of the few places he could hide in plain sight. For me, I’d have to say it was in Fort Scott, Kansas at our neighbor Ted’s house, but not because everyone knew my name or because I could hide there in plain sight. I spent many hours of my impressionable youth watching psychotic events unfold in Ted’s front yard, and eventually participating in. I learned something of myself at an early age: who I wanted to be when I grew up, who I didn’t want to be, and maybe more importantly, about who I was capable of becoming.
It was at Ted’s house I’d learned karate. Sort of. Not really. But nevertheless, sort of.
Ted lived across the road from us, in a slightly rundown house. With its peeling white outer shell, ripped screen door separating Ted’s private life from the rest of the world, its multiple broken windows bandaged with duct tape in the hopes of minimizing further damage, Ted’s house had seen a lot of abuse, but this was rural Kansas, and a rundown house was often a sign of stature – it meant you had enough money to sparingly invest in maintaining your house, unlike those with dilapidated houses who could not. This particular rundown house was more than just a rundown house though. It was also a dojo. Ish. Funny to think that my new stepdad’s last name was Temple – which in some weird way made it my last name too for the time being - and yet it was at Ted’s house I religiously received most of my early education outside of elementary school.
Ted and my stepdad were best friends, which never really made sense to me because Ted was several years older than my stepdad, and my stepdad, unlike Ted, was pretty cool. Maybe they were friends though because they were both overweight white guys who sported the kind of crazy afros that any self-respecting black man in the 1980s would have been ashamed to don. Maybe it was because they both liked karate. Or maybe it was because neither of them lived in dilapidated houses. I don’t know.
Ted and my stepdad always met up at Ted’s rundown dojo on the weekends to watch old karate movies before recessing to the front yard where they’d proceed to practice the fine art of not killing each other while wielding nun chucks and kendo sticks. They’d see who could break the most stacks of wood with their bare hands. They’d dance around in an oddball cadence of high flying acrobatic leaps and jumps that really weren’t so high flying. Or acrobatic. Instead it was more like a two man circus of idiots, both of them wanting to be Bruce Lee. One would wear a white karate outfit while the other a black, signifying good and bad. Honestly, the only thing they were any good at was being bad at karate. If you lived in southeast Kansas in the early eighties and felt the ground shake, it was sure to be one of two things: The aftershocks of their acrobatorial fleet of foot landings or Bruce Lee rolling over in his grave. Probably both. The nuts and bolts of it were pretty obvious in that neither Ted nor my stepdad were Bruce Lee, and more importantly to me, none of the three came close to being Daniel Larusso.
Wanting me to have a better education than this, my stepdad introduced me to the Church of Miyagi, which is where I became friends with Daniel, despite our own difference in age. Daniel and his instructor, Mister Miyagi, made karate look unlike anything I’d ever known it to be. For once it made sense. Daniel and Mister Miyagi taught me that karate meant more than seeing who could beat the crap out of whom or who could break the most things that were probably better left unbroken…like hands. Karate was about finding within yourself the desire to be something better than you’d been the day before, knowing when to stand up for yourself and when to back down – that backing down didn’t make you less of a man, just a smarter one. That you didn’t have to use nun chucks or be overweight with an angfro to be awesome. Before long I too began practicing karate at Ted’s, minus the nun chucks, garb, and earth shaking stunts.
Perhaps the most important lesson I learned from my time spent at the Temple of Ted and its eccentric versions of karate was that fear only controls you if you let it. When I moved to Fort Scott in 1980 I was afraid of just about everything. I didn’t really know it at the time, but I had good reason to be. When I left in the fall of 1984, I was stronger. Maybe not physically, but mentally. I was better prepared. Better prepared to face what awaited me in an unknown world called Texas. An unknown world, where, a few years later, I’d find Ted again.
