Photo by Leslie Jones on Unsplash
My father and I are at a karate tournament. We’re sitting in the stands and waiting for the next fight to begin when the guy next to me leans over and says, “I’ll give you six-to-one odds on the guy in the blue.” Six to one is pretty good, but I’m not sure what I should do because I’ve never seen either guy fight. My father was the one who wanted to go to this tournament, so I ask him what he thinks. And as soon as I do so, I realize that I’ve made a mistake. Instead of giving me a simple yes or no, this is what my father tells me: “When I was a young man, I saw these two guys get into a fight. It was clear from the outset who was going to win. The one guy was being real cocky, but not in a confident way, in the way that people act when they know they’re screwed. So they fight, and as I expected, he loses the fight. But apparently the guy who won isn’t satisfied. He’s about to kick the guy who’d been acting real cocky while he’s down, and at this point, I can’t help myself. ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘he’s had enough.’ I don’t think the guy even realized that I was standing behind him, but he spins around in his fighting stance and tells me that if I know what’s good for me, I should move along. And you know me,” my father says, pausing so that I can acknowledge that I do in fact know him. “I’m not the type of person to go looking for a fight, but I wasn’t about to stand there and let him threaten me. So I stick around and he comes at me and tries to sweep my legs. I’m too quick for him though. I dodge the sweep and box his ears, and once I do that, it’s game over. I jab him two or three times and he goes down. I don’t yell anything as I stand over him or anything like that. I’m just watching the way the blood that’s trickling out of his nose is being blown into little bubbles every time he exhales, and as I’m standing there, someone behind me says, ‘What do you think you’re fancy?’ As soon as I spin around, the guy’s already in a fighting stance. I know I’m in trouble because he’s wearing a headband. That was one of the first things my sensei taught me: ‘Look out for the guys who wear headbands around,’ my sensei said. ‘They’re bad news.’ So I try to talk my way out of it, but the guy isn’t having it. And I’m not going to lie. He completely destroys me. And then another guy shows up, who’s also wearing a headband, and completely destroys him. I didn’t realize it at the time,” my father says, “but there were two rival karate schools nearby.” This is the end of the story. Both the guy who asked about the bet and I have just been sitting there and patiently listening to this whole thing, and now that my father has finished the guy asks, “So what do you want to do?” “I don’t know,” I say, and turn back to my father and ask what I should do, because both the guys who are about to fight are wearing headbands. What I don’t say is that we’re at a karate tournament, so just about everyone, including the guy who offered me six-to-one odds, is wearing a headband. My father, for his part, looks at me in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look at my older brother, Ronny, and sighs one of those big, disappointed sighs. “Take the bet,” he says, and then leans in a little closer to me and whispers, “I’ve seen both these guys fight before,” so I take the bet and end up winning big, which is nice for a change.
Of course when we’re leaving the guy who lost the bet confronts us in the parking lot and accuses my father of having some kind of inside knowledge. The logic of his argument isn’t exactly sound, but either way, since he seems adamant and I don’t want any trouble, I offer to give him his money back. My father won’t hear of it though. “You lost fair and square, buddy,” he says. “So I suggest you walk away while you still can.” I can’t say that I’m surprised to hear my father talk like this. While it is technically true, as my father claimed earlier, that he doesn’t go looking for trouble, he also never seems to walk away from it. As such, I’ve seen him get into a number of fights over the years. Some of them he’s won, others he’s lost. The common denominator, however, is that in almost every instance the fight seemed completely avoidable. To make matters worse, in this particular situation, I’m also a little worried, because like I said, the guy is wearing a headband. But when I try to point this out to my father, he just brushes me off. And so they get into it, and as luck would have it, my father dominates the guy. Afterward, I can’t help but feel like I misunderstood that story he told back inside, so I just outright ask what the whole point of it was supposed to be. “That’s a good question,” my father says, smiling, but he doesn’t elaborate. All he says is that we’re not going to tell my mother anything about what just happened. I tell him that I don’t care. We don’t have to tell her, and even though I keep prodding him for an answer, he refuses to say anything else.
What you have to understand is that I love my father. I really do. And I think that in his own way, he loves me, even if I’ve always been a disappointment to him when compared to my older brother, which isn’t the end of the world. Is it unfortunate? Yes, it most certainly is, but whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, most parents play favorites. My mother, for example, seems to prefer me, which seems to bother my younger sister, Elizabeth. The catch here is that even though he’s my father and I love him, I’ve never been crazy about how uncompromising he can be. He doesn’t seem to understand that in order for him to act the way he acts, everyone around him has to eat shit. It’s irritating, to say the least, and yet, it’s something I’ve learned to live with. What I’m getting at is that although I readily acknowledge that the fight at the karate tournament has me annoyed, the thing that puts me over the top is that my father won’t just answer my question. Thus, after about an hour of this seemingly never-ending back and forth, we’re at the grocery store, standing in the aisle with all the cleaning stuff, when it occurs to me that if there is a point, which you can never be sure that there is one with my father, the point is that sometimes you need to figure things out for yourself. I’m still not exactly sure though, so I ask him if this is correct. “In a way,” he says, but again, I have no idea what he’s talking about. “What does that even mean?” I say, losing my temper and grabbing ahold of him. “It means,” he says, looking simultaneously both angry and disappointed. “That you shouldn’t place a bet unless you know exactly what you’re betting on. Now let me go.” He tries to break free, but I hold on, you know, just to let him know that I can. It feels good to stand up to him for once, even if doing so will almost certainly lead to a karate battle, and when it comes to karate battles, there’s always a chance you’ll lose said battle, which for me at least, has always been the biggest reason why I usually just go along with whatever my father says. While we have sparred a few times, we’ve never straight-up fought, but apparently today is going to be the day, because when I do eventually let him go, as predicted, a karate battle ensues, a battle from which, to my own great surprise as much as my father’s, I emerge victorious. Nevertheless, I’m careful not to go too far, because even though this has been a long time coming, there’s still a certain etiquette to beating your father’s ass.
When everything is all said and done, I have to admit that I feel pretty good about myself, or at least that’s how I feel until we get back to the house and Ronny finds out what happened. My mother tries to be the voice of reason. When he gets all up in my face, she tells him to back off, but he refuses to back off and we end up fighting, a fight that I unfortunately lose. My mother, bless her heart, steps in and defends my honor. As my brother is standing over me and running his mouth, she kicks him in the face, then proceeds to choke him out. And I couldn’t really tell you why Elizabeth attacks our mother, even if you take into consideration what I said earlier. On most days Ronny and Elizabeth can’t stand to be in the same room together, but after Mom chokes Ronny out, Elizabeth beats the shit out of Mom. By this point, things have spilled out into the front yard, and after Elizabeth has beaten the shit out of our mother, Mom’s friend from down the street, Mrs. Doyle, beats the shit out of Elizabeth. The whole thing just keeps going and going, which isn’t very surprising given how many of our neighbors know karate. I mean, it’s no big secret that most of them have trained under my father, who converted our garage into a dojo years ago. And if you’re wondering what the point of all this has been, similar to the way I wondered what the point of my father’s story was, it’s really pretty simple. It doesn’t have anything to do with gambling or headbands or finally standing up to your father. The point here is that you need to be careful because a lot more people know karate than you probably realize.
Wayne McMahon’s fiction has previously appeared in Literary Orphans and Hypertext Magazine (both online and in the print version, the Hypertext Review).