kicking and screaming
Other Jenny Columns:
Hating living in the Haight.
Jenny's neighbors. Neighborly attitudes in San Francisco.
Jenny and her roommate have a house guest from Texas.
Amanda tried out Yoga.
Restaurants along Polkstrasse:
The Grubsake, 1525 Pine Street
"The crowd is made up of everything from tired drag queens from nearby Kimo's, girl and boy hustlers counting their take, yuppies, skinheads, fixed eye and income seniors guarding their space, street crazies and a bunch of alcoholics in recovery before and after their meetings acting like drunks without drink." Stu Smith
Osaka Grill, 1217 Sutter Street
"The staff who actually prepare the food at each table is gentle and informative, inviting each guest to participate in the whole experience offered at the Osaka Grill." Stu Smith
I
would never have walked into the dojo on Polk Street if a sensei hadn’t
been standing outside. He had dark intense eyes, a tiny perfect nose,
high cheekbones, and long black hair with the wings pulled back. He was
the most beautiful man I had ever seen. I had just arrived in Russian
Hill for an internship my junior year in college and was exploring the
neighborhood. Before that afternoon, I never realized how interested I
could be in martial arts.
Jenny, I thought, taking out armed bank robbers with one swift kick to the head. Jenny, rolling children out of the paths of highway traffic and putting the managing editor of the magazine where I interned in a choke hold until she gave me something interesting to do (for anyone who is not aware, "LL Cool J" has no periods, and not every editor-in-chief writes the "Letter From the Editor" he signs his name to). With visions of imminent grandeur, and maybe some sex on the weight bench, I promptly enrolled in an evening class.
Where to begin. One of the major things they try to teach you in martial arts is discipline. This means that when your sensei has you lined up in rows and is lecturing to a class, you look straight ahead and don’t move. Your toes are supposed to meet on the red dot on the mat, which I could never do because I have a bunion on my right foot and those toes are forever pointing east. You can’t squirm or scratch, which immediately leads to the sensation of ants swarming over your body. I once spent an entire lecture concentrating as hard as I could on not farting, because besides the fact that standing in the middle of twelve well-spaced people would have identified me before long, I would have had to do knuckle push-ups for the rest of my life if I tried to fan a fart in the middle of a class.
But the worst part was the giggling. Giggling was not allowed, and as soon as I realized how greatly my expectations of a karate class differed from the reality of this one, I thought I would die if I didn’t laugh. But I would have died if I did, and in a far more painful way involving boy push-ups. So I began to keep notes for a story someday.
I soon discovered that my three senseis were not part of the spiritual Asian influence in San Francisco but were instead renegade tough guys from New Jersey who didn’t believe in waiting for someone to hit you before you hit them back. I saw The Karate Kid. I know that’s against the rules. For months after I left San Francisco for Chicago, I thought the area of a person’s sternum was the "solaplex," not the "solarplex," because no one pronounced the "r." The short bald one with the goatee instructed the white belts to practice like our "hair was on fire," and was so pleased with how clever he could be (he had no hair--get it?) that he repeated this during every class for three months. And instead of teaching the spiritual side of self-defense, our senseis played heavy metal and gansta rap during the power class to get everyone aggro before the white belts filed in, our names written in black marker on our uniforms so the senseis wouldn’t have to remember them.
Before long, the sensei of whom I had been so enamored was sleeping with another girl in our class, who received independent coaching on how to throw me over her shoulder with a screeching, "EEE-yah!" At one point, that sensei brought plants into the dojo in an attempt to decorate, but left them to die without care. I offered to water them before realizing that one of the walls was decorated already with long knobby branches. I suggested to the sensei that he was starving the plants deliberately to contribute to the interior design. I received no answer.
Finally, after three months of torturous workouts, our class tested and everyone received a yellow belt. With due reverence, we trooped down the street to a bar and got loaded. The guys in my class tried to set me up with a young buck in advertising everyone seemed to know, a man who mysteriously found even the most insipid parts of my life history fascinating. At the second bar, the yuppie-hell Savoy Tivoli in North Beach, I found out that he was the recently exxed boyfriend of the perky girl our sensei was bedding. My drunken response to this, exacerbated by the fact that he was making me feel like a basset hound being sniffed up the ass, was to corner him in the crowd and shriek, "So, you’re on the rebound?" Lack of grace is the number one reason I so often sleep alone, although another is that I recently discovered the girl I’ve been pining after for the past two months is transgendered, and, post-op, will be interested in straight women only. As with the dojo on Polk Street, which was gone by the time I moved back to the city after graduation, I say: only in San Francisco
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