I have a series of stories about what I refer to as my “school-jew-fights” that I want to get down on paper for my daughters, for when they are older. I’ll be writing and posting them here from time to time. There were too many individual fights to chronicle completely, but three of them kind of describe a dramatic arc and come together as one big story. Here’s the first. More to come in the following weeks as I get around to them.

True Story:   Dimly-moonlit late October night. My  left fist was cocked and chambered by my hip, right hand out at an angle with fingers extended.  I reflexively shifted my center of gravity to distribute more weight to my back leg, with my lead leg touching the ground only with the balls of my foot.  The korean words “Hu Gul Chase,” spoken with martial authority echoed in my head. Cat Stance.

Two large, masked figures were rushing toward me across a vast expanse of grass that was painted in tones of deep blue by the thin light of the moon.

“There he is!” one yelled. “Get him!”

My eyes dilated by adrenaline and effort to take in the scene as it unfolded; I tried to calm myself and focus on the angles of their attack, the timing of the blow I would strike as they approached and how I would have to shift focus from one to the other in the fight that was only seconds away.

Hard to believe, huh? It gets harder.

Here’s a detail that makes the story more improbable, but nevertheless still gospel-truth: I was wearing a full ninja suit, from the hood and black mask which revealed only my eyes to the tabi boots which separated out the one big toe from the others on my feet.  The year was 1983. I was ten years old.

OK. So I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let me backtrack  to get you to this point of the story.

The town was Oxford, Connecticut and I was the only jew in its school system. I forget exactly how this fact came to light. I’m reasonably sure it was around first grade, when I was absent for Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashana and explained my absence the next day. Word got around after that, I suppose.

Not that we were in temple or anything. On high holidays, my dad and I would usually hang out together and go to a matinee movie and violate nearly every law of kosher by grabbing a cheeseburger and some ice-cream at a little restaurant called The Farm Shop.  He’d say, “Listen. Three thousand years of oppression have earned you a day of playing hookey.”

My father’s brand of non-practicing-but-prideful Judaism and the kind of fierce loyalty he had with the cultural identification was informed by both his childhood and intellect.

He was born in 1939 and raised in Brooklyn. The shadow of WWII and the atrocities of the Holocaust unfolded around him as a very small boy and tales of pogroms from the old country were things that living relatives of his had endured. He internalized a familiar narrative to young jews: be proud, but look out. At one point, they might come for you. They always have.

Also, as best as I understand it,  although his neighborhood was mostly Jewish, it bordered Italian and Irish ones, and identification among kids was largely territorial and “team” based moreso than on deeply held religious convictions.

At a certain point in Hebrew School (like many young thinkers) he came to the conclusion that the actual encoded beliefs of Judiasm were largely a “crock of shit” (as he would put it). But no matter; belief or no, he was a Jew.  He was a Jew as a matter of identity that had nothing to do with prayer or belief.  I remember a conversation once with him about how Hitler and the nazis had changed everything; you had to stand and fight for being a Jew even if you didn’t believe in any of it, because when they came for the Jews, they didn’t ask who believed or who didn’t.

This idea was instilled in me from an early age: that when it came down to it, people would classify me as other and different because of which family I came from so I might as well be proud of it. And I was proud; certainly proud of my father and proud to be whatever he was.

To the rest of the world, he was often an out-sized, larger-than-life figure. He was not larger than life for me, though. I just assumed that life was naturally that size.

I took it as a matter of course that he was as he was: he had  handled deadly reptiles for a living, he won trivia contests on TV, he gave lectures to paying crowds, he appeared on TV and explored the paranormal with a scientific mind, he was a local celebrity, he rappelled off cliffs, he knew more about insects and wildlife than anyone, he was deadly with a recurved bow and could throw a knife with eerie accuracy but he abhorred the idea of hunting for sport. These things did not mark him as extraordinary for me, though. They were simple facts of life. .  Yeah, that’s my dad. So?

(It wasn’t all Lord-Byron-style romantic heroics. He also made a great deal about farting and did bad Peter-Sellers Cleauseau impressions around the house. A lot. And heinsisted, as a sign of respect for the greatness of the movie, that whenever KING KONG was on TV, that we wear ties over our T-shirts and underwear on our heads. He wore many hats. Some of them were underwear hats. )

But I was aware that other dads weren’t quite that way. If kids ever engaged in a round of “I bet my dad could beat up your dad” conversation, I didn’t even get mad or offended at their boasts. I was like, “Um. Wait. You don’t understand. No, seriously. I don’t want my dad to beat up your dad, it would be too awful.”

So there was this notion that I had just accepted in the same self-evident way that you accept that the sun comes up: I am a Jew, because that is what my father is and I am proud to be as he is. To me, being the only Jew I knew  was  a rare  a mark of distinction more than anything else.

Another idea that was instilled in me (by osmosis, really, more than direct instruction) growing up with Joel Dobbin as my dad was the importance of being stand-up.

Being “stand-up” is a state of being, not necessarily an individual action, although being stand-up is evidenced by individual actions.  A guy who is stand-up can be relied upon not just to do the right thing, but to understand implicitly  what that thing is in a situation as it arises. That’s a key distinction.

And a stand-up guy does it, always, even when nobody is looking. Even  if  it is inconvenient or if he might get hurt.  Especially then.  Stand-up guys may not win, but they go down swinging.

It isn’t about being without fear or being tough or strong or looking for battles, but more about acting and doing even if you are afraid and not shrinking from  a battle if one becomes inevitable. It is about joining the good fight even if the opposition is tougher and stronger. Because that’s what you do. That’s being stand-up.

In my father’s philosophy, this quality  was more important than being smart or achieving honors or getting ahead. Not that being smart, achieving honors and getting ahead are to be dismissed as goals, only that without being stand-up, they are meaningless.

So these are the two things that loomed large in my awareness: that we were Jews and that a person should always be making sure that whatever’s going on, they’re being stand-up.

A third thing was a connection to Korea.  See, my dad had been sent to Korea as a young man, in the last years of the war and while he had hated most of being in the Army and the fact that people he did not know were shooting at him, he fell in love with Korea and its people and culture. He was a quick study and had an ear for language; his few years there found him able to speak pidgeon-Korean and understand conversational speech; he’d get me to hurry up with a quick “Idi-wah! Idi-wah, sipso!” He had a long-standing friendship with another old army veteran by the name of Robert Beaudoin, who had gone to Korea and come back with a love (and mastery) of martial arts.

Mr. Beaudoin was part of the crowd, along with Chuck Norris, who brought the style of  Tang Soo Do karate to the States. This is a little inside-baseball about the various sub-factions and politics of 1950s and 60s karate, but  Robert Beaudoin studied directly under a man named Hwang Kee, who was the grandmaster and founder of what was called “The Moo Duk Kwan” school of Tang Soo Do. His pedigree and training regimen were authentic and harshly Korean. In short, Mr. Beaudoin was no joke.

When I was about five years old, my father had a TV show on a local NBC affiliate (channel 20, then WATR) called Journeys to the Mind. He had featured his old friend in a show about the mind-over-matter aspects of martial arts and the concept of breath techniques and chi, or internal power. After the show, Mr. Beaudoin invited my dad to a demonstration seminar at some college gymnasium where his students performed choreographed routines and broke boards and cinder-blocks with their hands, heads and feet. I was hooked. The uniforms, the colors, the elegant control and power of the kicks and punches; it was all like real-life superheroes to me.

I begged my father to please, please let me learn all that. He had an in! He knew the head-guy! He told me I was too young but that if I still wanted to learn when I was six, then he would reconsider. I waited.

I had a rough time being five from that point on, as all I wanted to do was become six and learn karate. I pored over the magazines my father would get; BLACK BELT, INSIDE KUNG-FU, and study the break-downs of techniques their photos illustrated. (He too had returned from Korea with a fascination about eastern forms of fighting.) Eventually, the day came and I reminded my dad about the age-restriction he had instated that was keeping me from becoming a karate superhero.

He saw that I was serious and he did something that I still marvel at, to this day. He told me that karate was a very serious discipline and endeavor and it demanded a very serious and disciplined approach. He said that the only way he would allow me to learn would be if I went to the adult classes, not the kiddie-ones, and that he would take it with me. We’d walk in as white belts together. If and only if I treated it with the utmost seriousness and dedication would he allow me to go. As the only kid, all eyes would be upon me, so I would have to step up and show that I deserved to be there by effort.

I was taken aback. Go into a class full of big, scary adults? Strangers? I had watched a few classes, here and there, when my dad went to visit Mr. Beaudoin. They seemed formal and intimidating. Often people were broken up into small groups of two or three to practice techniques.  What if they were annoyed, if they had to practice with me?

But I wanted it; I wanted to wear that uniform with those patches and do those things. And my dad would be there; no matter what, if he was there, I’d be safe. I was scared, but I agreed. Thus began the best father/son experience in what would be a long run of them over the next thirty years.  My dad had also told me, once we began, that he had talked with Mr. Beaudoin and told that I was to be instructed “as if I were a little Korean.”

There is an eastern idea about “grandmotherly kindness” that is not the milk-and-cookies idea you might assume from a western sensibility.  It goes like this:

Once a student of Zen asked his teacher, “Who is the Buddha?” The master replied by picking up his staff and whacking his pupil hard against the head.

The student, as emotionally hurt as physically, left the teacher and went in search of a new master. Eventually he was accepted by an instructor who realized that the student had been exposed to Zen. The new teacher asked the student where he had studied, whereupon the student explained how his former master had hit him. The new master became indignant with anger.

“Go back to your former teacher,” he demanded, “and apologize for not thanking him for his grandmotherly kindness!”

The idea, roughly,  is that when a teacher cares about your instruction, he will treat you harshly when you need to be treated harshly and you should learn from that and appreciate it. As a student, you should trust that it is to a point beyond your understanding and that they have your best interests at heart. And thus it was. I wasn’t coddled.

If my stance was incorrect, it would be slapped into the correct form; no words to explain, just correction. An extended fist held too limply would be smacked aside as the instructor walked down the line, inspecting form and balance. It was stern, but that sternness was to a point and existed only from the time I entered the dojang and saluted the flag to the time the class ended. Before and after, Mr. Beaudoin and the other instructors were warm and encouraging. But during class, incorrect actions were not suffered gladly.

It went even further. According to the official sanctioning belt-ranking tests, I had to test with kids my own age, even if I did not train with them. On the test to acheive my orange belt, the next rank up from white, I was clearly more advanced than all the kids I tested with.

And I was failed. Mr. Beaudoin was holding me to a higher standard. He was grading me he would have been graded when he learned, under a more stringent set of rules.

Although that day stung, when I earned my belt at the next exam and he told me he was proud of my effort, I felt that I really had earned my belt.

Soon enough, I became the adult group’s mascot. I was “The Little Warrior.” I trained with my dad three nights a week  and we progressed together. After class, we’d hit my favorite restaurant (still The Farm Shop) for hot dogs, and all was well in the world.

Then it happened. The first of what would become a long, long line of jew-fights.

Someone in school, over a kickball dispute at recess, countered with, “What do you know, you’re just a stupid dirty jew.”

And those were fighting words. So we fought. Not for very long. In an age of google and facebook, I won’t name names, but I remember exactly who was the first and I remember the exact progression of the fight: I dropped him with spinning back kick  to the small target of his g’ranimal-clad stomach. This was the early 1980s. Fighting at school was not the expulsion-worthy thing it is now in the long-long-post Columbine, zero-tolerance world of education.

Fighting at school was something that happened with not a lot of fanfare; especially at recess. Some of them, if they were over quick enough, where a teacher didn’t have to come over and break it up, were without any official consequence at all.

I had a rule my that I had adopted from watching and listening to my dad and I lived by this rule concerning when and how I would fight.

Political discussions were a spectator sport at Passovers and Thanksgivings at the Dobbin/Wald family. I’d watch my father with pride as he defended his positions when they would be vociferously shouted down by my blustery uncle (his sister’s husband, Danny) or disagreed with by the family patriarch, my great Uncle Lawrence Levine, who had famously worked on the gyroscopic guidance system for the sub-fired Polaris missile alongside Nazi defector Werner Von Braun. (Old Uncle Larry refused to address Von Braun directly, but would always tell an intermediary, “Please inform Dr. Von Braun of this or that”). In the comfort of their own homes, however, behind closed doors in the midst of political discussions,  they could say some ugly things.

My dad had a policy about hearing racist terminology in the context of these (or any) discussions; if one of my uncles used a racial epithet for blacks or arabs, my dad would not allow it. He refused to be complicit by silence about it.  Every. Single. Time. It would shut down the conversation. I was never prouder than those moments.

He’d make it uncomfortable, he’d press the issue and make it pointedly uncomfortable; the same level of uncomfortable he felt at hearing it, he’d give back to them for saying it. Every time. On the car rides home, talking with my mother, I’d hear him say things to the effect that he knows he isn’t going to change their minds or make them better people. But what he can do is to make it inconvenient to say those words, to not allow them to get away with it without a consequence.  He also felt that when those words were used, if he didn’t speak up and just let it slide for the sake of the evening, he was complicit and maybe even worse than them, since he knew better.

My dad was a stand-up guy.

So, these are the kind of emotional and experiential givens I have walking into school when the words “dirty jew”  were lobbed at me on a playground. Usually it was within the context of escalation; a dispute over a kickball play, an argument over which Star Wars guy could beat which other in fight that would find my verbal opponent going to the ace-in-the-hole of “jew.”

Like, “No, IG-88 could not beat Boba Fett, you stupid jew.”

Or, “My foot was on the base when you tagged me, you dirty jew!”

So I fought. I did so instantly without hesitation or build-up; no pushey-shoveys, no chest thumping. I punched and if an opening existed, I kicked.

Using the same kind of logic I heard my dad talking about his taking a stand,  understanding that I was not going to change anyone’s hearts or minds, but just make it inconvenient for them to voice that sentiment. I would attach a consequence to its use. That consequence was a Ked sneaker in the gut and/or face.  They’d at least learn that it is sometimes dangerous to be a bigot out loud. I also figured if I was the one Jew they met, they’d think twice about the idea of them as wimpy Woody Allen types.

I’m not saying this is the best or most productive way to go about one’s business. But it is how I went about mine in grade-school.  I had a scorched-earth policy when it came to open-air antisemitic comments. I was trying to be what I thought stand-up was supposed to be.

If you wanted to use the word “jew” as an epithet around young-me, you’d learn quickly that you’d have to pay for the privilege by being inconvenienced with a fight, right there, that you may lose.

Win or lose,  I would fight.

But the fact was that I had been getting pretty rigorously trained by a  skilled, high-ranking master-instructor who was not sparing in his “grandmotherly kindess,” and I was fighting kids who were not…so pretty much, I won.

Not that this came up every day. But when it did, that’s what happened. Even if I was generally friendly with a kid, if he went there, I went to violence.

It kept me at a kind of distance with a lot of people in my class. I was aware, as the only other in a group of people that the card it was always on the table, even if it was not played. My strategy was to make it a costly option to play that card.

It was always possible, even if I was friendly with someone, that under the right circumstances, they’d drop that hammer and the rules would change with them.

I see a lot of these people now, as friends-of-friends on social networking sites, and while I truly bear them no ill will– we were little, tiny, tiny kids and they were no doubt just parroting things they heard at home, I still remember all of it. I’ll see some smiling face in a tiny profile picture commenting nicely about their kid’s little league team or whatnot and the first thought will be: lunchroom, 4th grade: jewboy. And I’ll remember the friends of his who cheered him on in the fight-circle that sprang up.

I had four friends who I was certain about, who I knew would not ever use that against me. And that was enough. Everybody else was potentially someone I would have to fight. It was sometimes a little exhausting, this business of being stand-up.

And in first, second and fourth grade (I took a brief hiatus from Oxford when my family moved to a farm in the even more rural Southbury, CT for third grade before they moved back), it became a kind of accepted given(Don’t call Josh a jewboy or anything, it’ll turn into a big thing)  and actually a governor on such comments. After a while, the kids who knew me got gun-shy of pulling that out of the verbal arsenal… in front of me, in any case.

Then we got to fifth grade and the shit hit the fan.

The way the Oxford school system worked then was grades K-4 went to Oxford Center School Elementary and grades 5-8 went to Great Oak Middle School.

I was suddenly one of the smallest fish in a much larger pool.

The fifth grade classrooms were directly after the entrance to the school, and for the year I went, I believe the fifth-graders were the only ones still given a recess period before lunch (a short one) , so you could go most of your school day without too much congress with larger, upperclassmen kids. Maybe passing by a table at lunch. But there was still lunch and there was still the bus and there was still the odd walks through the hallways for this reason or that.

Somehow, as best as I understand it, word on the grapevine among some sixth and seventh grade boys was that there was a fifth grader who would fight anybody if only they called him a dirty jew. I was being used, I think, as a kind of initiation rite or a prank, among older kids.

“Go call that kid a dirty jew, see what happens. I dare you.”

That sort of thing. Now I was suddenly called upon to be stand-up with a lot more on the line. Kids my own age, kids I knew, kids I understood would eventually go back to a kind of unspoken truce after a fight were one thing. But the difference between a fifth grade boy and sixth is often quite big.

I was now, by my own self-imposed rules, called upon to learn what being a fighting Jew was like when the opponents were more Goliath-y.

It got bad. Not a week went by where I wasn’t in some fight or another. Later on in the year, to make matters worse, I had blown the curve of a standardized test and there was some sort of consensus among the guidance counselor and school psychologist that my aggression was due to an abnormal I.Q. or something (This is a side-bar to the larger story here, which I promise, will return to that lawn with that ninja-suit on that October night… But the test score I had put me in the 99th percentile of scores. They made me re-take the test, alone, and then gave me a different one. This was when they formed the “he’s a freak of smart, it must be making him overly aggressive” theory.  I maintained that my aggression was due to the older kids who were egging one another on to see if the jew-kid would try a spinning hook kick if you called him a kike.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  What happened here, in this story, wasn’t so very far into the school year. This was around the beginning of October.

In the lunchroom, a blonde-haired, mean-faced boy who was a year older than me, got up from his seat and began to walk toward me.

His name was Gordon, and he had been in some sort of group huddle discussion with a bunch of older kids before he got up and came to my table. I saw this from a distance. He was accompanied by a larger friend; I never learned his name. Big goon-squad type, though.

I remember I was sitting across from one of my four trusted friends, a tough but stand-up kid named Frank Rinaldi. I was always glad that I had earned Frank’s respect and friendship and that I was pretty assured that even if we argued about this or that, the jew-card wasn’t in his deck. Not only because it would break my heart if he did(he was smart and honest and cool, in a River-Phoenix-y way, but also seemed kind of troubled, also in a River Phoenix-y way), but  because I didn’t honestly know if I could take him, if it came down to it. He was someone who wouldn’t stop swinging unless you killed him.

Frank had committed an entire Eddie Murphy comedy audio-cassette tape to memory, and he was replaying it for us at the table, in a reasonably good Eddie Murphy impression. The bit he was doing was “Talking Cars,” off of the EDDIE MURPHY: LIVE album.

I remember hoping that I was just being paranoid, that maybe this kid Gordon, who I had known by way of reputation as a tough kid and a bully, was not coming to do what I thought he was coming to do.

I never had met him, I only knew about him from word-of-mouth at Cub Scouts as a kid you don’t want to mess with. He was at least a year older than me (I remember having the thought, if he stayed back a year at some point, he could be two years older) and bigger than me. The friend behind him, black hair and goony, was even bigger.

There was a kind of split attention and juxtaposition; here was Frank, pushing his thick glasses up to the bridge of his nose as he launched into the routine, word-for-word, and here we were, enjoying the illicit thrill of hearing a fellow classmate totally unafraid to swear with reckless abandon right in school, and here was this vector of danger coming in on a straight line to me and I was just fed up. I didn’t want this.

Frank was saying, “I got in the car the other day, turned the key, car say- *dooo* Hey, man! Somebody stole yo’ batt-tree! I say we go get the muthafucka!”

And then Gordon and the Goon were there, standing right next to me. I was sitting with a half-eaten sandwich.  I knew it was coming.

“Hey. You’re a jewbag.”

I looked down at my sandwich. Frank stopped with the Eddie Murphy impression. It was like a big bucket of ice cold water was just dumped over our collected heads in the middle of a fun time.

“Hey, I said: You’re a jewbag. You gonna do something about it?”

And I took a deep breath.  Here it was. A big kid, with a bigger kid for back-up, and what was I going to do? To make matters worse, the principal of the school was walking around the room. His name was Mr. Spielberg, and he was an asshole. He wore a metallic-web-belt and walked with an odd bounce at each step; my friend Rich had described it as looking like someone had put a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in the heel of his shoe.

Time to put up or shut up with the “toughest-jew-in-town” business I had tried to convince myself — and everyone else– about.  I made a decision, and once made, I was committed.

I got up from my chair; Gordon and the big mook were to the side of me. I kept my eyes on the table, I didn’t look up at them. I pushed in my chair and without warning planted the best outside crescent kick of my career to the side of his head, accompanied with specifically loud karate “keyai” yell. He was expecting a parley of words, I suppose, so I had that advantage of the first hit.

And it was spectacular enough of a hit to give the back-up goon a moment of either pause or surprise. Gordon was bent over, holding  his hands to the side of his face and I picked up the lunch-chair and rushed him with the broadside of it, knocking him over and sending him spilling to the ground.

My idea was to overwhelm with a barrage of clattering, big-commotion things after the first hit. This was the lunchroom; there were teachers everywhere and the principal, with his peanut-butter-heel-bop and metal belt were present. The fight would get broken up soon enough, so the plan was to blitz and let it get stopped before he had a chance to throw any punches at all.

Sometimes, the poet Robbie Burns is correct when he talks about the best laid plans of mice and men oftentimes ganging aft-glay.  But sometimes, the world gives you more of a Hannibal-from-the-A-TEAM moment where your plan comes together.

This was one of the latter times. The plan was quite literally a smashing success, in that I managed to smash this kid pretty good and smash up the lunchroom in a few seconds and cause enough of a ruckus to send a cadre of teachers running to pull each of us away.

He was yelling and flailing, “You’re DEAD! I’m gonna kill you!  You’re friggin’ dead you little jew!” as a teacher named Mr. Tilbe held onto him. The big goon-kid had slunk back into the lunch-crowd, looking for plausible deniability in the “to the office with everyone involved” aftermath that was to follow.

I was lucky. Gordon’s verbal outburst in front of the teachers backed up my story so that he was more in trouble than I was. My dad was called, but I was fine with that. I would not get into trouble at home for this, not when I told him how it went down. I had tried to keep it a secret about most of the fights I was getting into; only the ones that escalated to the level of principal’s office. He was beginning to suspect there was more going on, though, as my ripped shirts and jeans gave him clues that there were more things going on than I was letting on.

The thing that had pushed the button that activated my decision there on what to do was the word this Gordon kid used. Jewbag.

Jew. Bag.

What the frig did that even mean? Was I being called a bag full of jew? Was Jew being used as a synonym for scum, and it was a kind of clumsy attempt at wordplay? It seemed less like an established pejorative and more like some sort of terrible MAD LIBS game for assholes.

(Name of an Observer of a Religion) (Common Noun)!

That this dumb ox of a kid who didn’t even know me could come over and interrupt a fun time where my friends and I were laughing, both at a joke and the giddy fun of employing forbidden words and playing at that kind of “adult” conversation; a good, honest, childhood experience, you know? It galled me. And to do it with “jewbag” made it even worse. I felt like I was in a box; the absolute lowest common denominator jackass could instantly change my day and not even use a real word to do it. I felt like I was carrying the weight of expectations for the assembled history of all the jews that ever were, along with my own expectations and aspirations to be that elusive brand of stand-up that I knew was the thing a person needed to be. I never felt like I was arrived at that position, but always in search of it.  I wanted to be someone my father was proud of, and someone that I could be proud of being, even when nobody was looking. But I also just wanted to be a kid and able to sit at lunch and try to play a quick encounter’s-worth of a module of Dungeons and Dragons or exchange comedy-recitations with friends, too.

Like another famous Jew once said, “Take this cup away from me,” you know?

But what choice was there, given those circumstances? I didn’t know. So I fought.

Now, you may have noted that the principal’s name was Spielberg, and thought, “Hey! You weren’t the ONLY jew in school! The head guy. He was on your team, right?”

Well, right and wrong. But that’s another story for another day. Now is the story of Gordon the Bully and what became of him and how I had the most movie-like experience of my life with an audience of one (a very important one) attending.

All of this thus far has been preamble and prologue. Necessary backstory to get you here to the point where this jew-fight-story begins in earnest.

My obsessive love of all things martial-arts put me inadvertently ahead of a cultural curve. In a few months time, the country would be crazy for ninjas and young juvenile delinquents of all stripes would be buying throwing stars from disreputable shops in the malls of America. But at that moment in time, not too many people were casually aware of what a ninja was or what he did.

But I knew. I had seen an advertisement in a martial-arts magazine for a full ninja suit that came in kid’s sizes. Not a “costume,” mind you, but a gi. The ad stated it was “professional grade.”  Seeing that ninjas were assassins by trade, I assumed this meant it was a serious bit of business, this suit.

I’m talking the whole shebang: tabi boots, which separate the big toe from the rest for stealthier and more agile movement, a jet-black set of sturdy karate top and bottom, with pants that had ties that attached to the boots; hand gauntlets to keep the sleeves in place, and a two piece hood system. There was a pull-over lycra ski-mask style piece and then a more traditional hood-cover, made from the same material as the gi itself.

I had asked my dad if I could get that for Halloween. Halloween was really a cover-story; I was just in love with the idea of having a ninja suit. I was sure the answer would be “no,” as it was kind of pricey.  But he saw how wide-eyed I was in the idea of having such a thing and I guess it struck some chord of remembered boyhood dreaming of his own.

So he said two things: “Yes” and “Don’t tell your mother how much it costs.”

The suit required four to six weeks for delivery, so we had ordered it well in advance of Halloween. My mother had asked about what I wanted to be and I said that Pop was taking care of it, I was going to be a Ninja.

She had no idea what this was. Assuming it was some kind of cartoon character, she shrugged and let it go at that. Then the suit arrived, just in time for Halloween.

Only a few days before Halloween, this lunchroom incident with blonde-haired Gordon and his bully-boy friend had occurred. But with the kind of compartmentalization that boyhood brings, once out of sight, those problems were quickly out of mind. Here, in the safety and comfort of my home, where I had an Intellivision gaming system hooked up to my TV, Dungeons and Dragons lead miniatures to paint, a growing collection of the newly released He-Man and the Masters of the Universe action figures and a brand-spanking new ninja-suit, things were good.

The only thing I felt was wrong with the ninja suit was that it came with a kind of oversized embroidered patch on the right-hand side of the chest that said “NINJA” in would-be Japanese-looking lettering and an embroidered picture of a ninja holding a kama, a sickle-weapon. It was a little bit colorful, which didn’t seem very professional at all for a profession that was all about murderous, late-night stealth.

But it was one minor complaint. Dude! I owned a ninja  suit! And had occasion to wear it in a socially acceptable venue! The world of my school and the increasingly frequent jew-fights was a separate circle on the Venn Diagram of my life from this circle of home-life and fun.

Or so I imagined. The two circles were about to overlap, in true Venn Diagram style.

Halloween night came. I know it was a school night; I want to say it was either Wednesday or Thursday night. The Gordon/Jewbag/Awesome Outside Crescent Kick  incident had happened on a Monday and Halloween was later on in the week. I had lost the argument with my parents about being allowed to go out trick-or-treating alone. I had told them that my friends went out without their parents. They had countered that those friends lived closer by each other and went out in groups and since I did not have any close-living friends, my dad would have to go with me.

I suited up, giddy with excitement that I will be dressed as a deadly assassin that stalked through feudal Japan. I am certain that to an objective eye I was a ridiculous spectacle but mine was not anything approaching an objective eye. I was darkness; I was a silent shadow with sinister intent! I was the night!

I was… NOT GOING OUT WALKING ON THE ROADS DRESSED LIKE THAT, my mother yelled at me, crashing all my dreams with a very prudent bit of parenting insight.

“There is no way I am letting you walk through these streets on a dark night dressed head-to-toe in black,” she said. “You can’t even see your face! What are you, anyway?”

See, we lived in a rural town, among windy roads with no sidewalks. Although our house was technically in a “neighborhood” of houses, it took some time to walk to each one. A Halloween night for any kind of respectable haul would involve a few miles of trekking and she was right; a lot of it on the side of some pretty narrow, unlit roads.

“I told you, I’m a ninja! They’re not supposed to be seen!”

“Are they supposed to get hit by cars?”

“But Pop will come with me,” I pleaded and whined. Ninjas were not supposed to have to plead and whine.

“Joel! How could you approve of this? Can’t he wear something else?”

My father was uncharacteristically silent and all shrugging. He offered up some small defense of the outfit, but he didn’t want to make a big deal about it and let her know how much it cost, so he kept pretty mum.

She didn’t understand! This was beyond cool; this wasn’t a costume; this was a uniform, a professional uniform of awesomeness and ass-kicking.  I think I may have started to cry. Probably.

Seeing how devastated I was at the prospect of not going out as a ninja, she came to a compromise. A lunatic’s bargain, to be sure, but one I had to take.

My mother believed in being safety-conscious, but she took it a step (or forty) too far.  My dad, at that point a sergeant in the Air Force, had come into possession of case of military-grade glow-sticks.  My mother would only allow me to leave the house if I had a series of these attached to me by way of rubber-bands and shoelaces.

She strategically strapped them onto me at the points of physical reference that one may interpolate human kinetics from seeing; I had them at my wrists, ankles, chest, back, and elbows. She had, years before it would be utilized by the motion-picture industry, invented the world’s first motion-capture-suit.

I was less ninja and more like some sort of low-rent TRON reject. But it was the only way I would be allowed out of the house. And so it was. The element of stealth was pretty much defeated. But hey! Tabi boots!

My father’s Halloween-chaperon modus operandi was  actually more ninja-like than I was, in my ninja-cum-radiation-victim costume. He hung back a goodly distance, always somewhere within view, but not alongside me at all. This allowed me the illusion of being a “big kid” who was out by himself. This was a concern for me at that time. The same year, I had read Stephen King’s Christine and Salem’s Lot, which I did as a challenge to myself to not be afraid and to be big and read and understand adult things. That was a spectacular failure. My nightly dog-walking chore saw me rushing back in the house when our dog had finished, certain that I was going to be devoured by a pack of ravenous vampires. Or perhaps  catch a glimpse of the rotting ghost of Roland D. LeBay from Christine,  coming out from the woods bordering our yard whispering, “You’re one of those shitters, aintcha, little boy?”

So my dad giving me all that space was greatly appreciated. Glow-sticks or no, walking there from house to house, virtually alone, gave me the opportunity for an internal narrative wherein I was a dangerous warrior on a mission.  The driveways and entrances to a lot of the houses around ours were pretty long, so there were times I didn’t see him at all. It kinda freaked me out a little, then I’d catch the orange dot of a cigarette somewhere in the dark distance and realize he was there, following along and I was safe.

Since the world-proper had not really caught the ninja bug as of this time, I found myself explaining, house after house, what my costume was. It was sort of annoying.

“What are you, son, a robot?” (This from the glow-sticks.)

“No, a ninja.”

“What’s that now?”

“A ninja. It’s a Japanese assassin trained in stealth and silent combat.”

I got a lot of funny looks.

We had ranged pretty far from our house and were in a well-to-do area. This meant the lawn-to-house ratio was growing larger which equaled less candy over time. A particularly huge lawn and impressive house loomed. The lights were on and there were decorations, so I made my way up the walk. My father was off in the distance. I pointed to the house and he gave me the thumbs up and waved me on. He would wait there, by the road, a considerable distance from the house.

When I got to the house and rang the bell, a very pleasant lady greeted me and asked me to come inside. I had a little trepidation; I grew up in the era of Adam Walsh and the MISSING kids on milk-cartons. Going into a house seemed a little odd, but these people were clearly loaded. Surely you couldn’t make this much money and be lunatic child-killers, I reasoned. And besides, I wanted to check out the cool stuff that I saw from the entrance.

I had stumbled upon the Klarides house. These were the people who owned the only super-market in town and the plaza in which it sat. I saw with amazement that they had a sunken living room, all decked out with rich-looking marble and leather furniture and everything. Art was on the walls in frames that looked imposing and impressive, the whole place was pretty breathtaking.

So this nice lady asked me what I was, and I mumbled my now-stock-ninja speech.  She humored me with a “Oh, how impressive,” and then I saw it. Their candy pile. These people were giving out GIANT candy bars. Charleston Chews, Twix, Mars,  Caramellos, Hershey bars, Tobelrones, everything. A cornucopia of sugary goodness.  Specifically larger-than-normal ones that would equal whole handfuls of the “fun-size” bars now rattling around the bottom of my bag.

“Oh, before I give you your candy, we’ve got to see your face; see who’s under there!” An eccentric request to be sure, but she’s giving out the mother-load of chocolate here; I’d have done  a soft-shoe dance routine if she had asked.   So I pull down my mask. Just the doorbell rings.

“Ooh, more kids!” she says and goes to answer.   I’m still staring at all the rich-stuff (and that big bowl of over-sized candy) when I heard her cooing over someone else, asking, “Do you boys know one another?”

“Yeah, we know him,” I heard. And I knew that voice.

Hey, I said: You’re a jewbag. You gonna do something about it?

Gordon.  I had wandered into his Halloween territory. Faaack. And he had his big friend with him. They both were dressed as generic monster/zombies, with green and black face-paint. It was an awful comedy of errors; I had happened upon this house at this exact time and just taken down my mask and hood at the old lady’s request.

But we were on hallowed ground; this was a stranger’s house– the KLARIDES house, for chrissakes! There’s no way he would start something here.

Mrs. Klarides told the two older, bigger kids to wait there in the entrance. She came back  to me and told me I could take a handful of the big candy-bars.  I was too nervous about the potential confrontation to be excited about this, though. I took my handful, deposited in my bag, mumbled a “thank you” and beat a hasty retreat.  She then called the two big zombies over, asking them what they were and giving them the same spiel she had given me as preamble to the big candy-drop.

We passed by each other and Gordon gave me a menacing leer. I returned what I hoped was an icy stare. But I’m not sure how it came across. Truth be told, this was out of my comfort zone. I was not in “school exists” mode,  the crashing of these two worlds had me all out of sorts.

When I closed the door behind me, I silently hoped that old Mrs. Klarides would ask them a bunch of questions and keep them there, and I started to run across the impossibly big lawn. I was never much of a fast runner. In the grand “fight or flight” construction of frames and muscle-make-up, I have pretty much been ‘”fight” by default, because my “flight” has always been kind of for shit.

They must have hurried through the process, because I had not made it too far when I heard the door open and close.  I made the mental calculations in my head. The Klarides family was in the middle of their living room and would not be looking out their windows until the next bell-ring, if one came at all. The lawn back to where my father was waiting– somewhere– was a long stretch and the grass was a little moist. I had no chance of running and not being caught up to. I thought madly for a moment that my ninja-garb would prove to be a fortuitous salvation; perhaps I could quickly hide in the shadows, but then remembered that I was glowing like a hound of the Baskervilles, thanks to my mother’s safety concerns.

So I turned around and assumed a cat-stance. Hu Gul Chase. I pulled my mask back up.

“There he is!” one yelled. “Get him!”

They had dropped their bags on the lawn and were rushing toward me. My  left fist was cocked and chambered by my hip, right hand out at an angle with fingers extended.

I had a few moments to plan as they ran. Here’s a thing about fights, if you’ve never gotten into one. The scary part is always before the fight. Once the fight happens, it becomes something that is a series of moments that flow and emerge and must be taken, to a degree, without thought. Not so much without thought entirely, but with a fluidity of thought; you can’t plan ahead so much as you can react to what is happening as it happens.  Bruce Lee had said something like “A fight is a conversation, spoken seriously.”

I can admit to you here and now that for me, as a kid who lived forever in his own head, always with a constant narrative, there was something almost liberating about the moment a fight began in earnest. All the thoughts got to go away and this new rule-set that had to be managed came into being. That’s how it had been at all the school-fights I had been in. After the initial heart-thumping lead-in to a fight, once it had resolved itself into a given that, yes, it is now a fight, it became a series of moves, a job and a task that demanded it be taken seriously. And with that moment-to-moment attention, it put all other thoughts away, at least temporarily.  Fights were a lot of things for me as a kid, but one of the things was a brief oasis of wordlessness in my head.  I could think in pictures and intentions, but words got to go away.

So when I made the decision that I was going to have to fight these two kids on this lawn, I calmed down. Here’s what my operating givens were: My dad was not present, but he was somewhere.  I had taken a while inside this house, this was now going to keep me here longer, at some point, he’s going to wonder where I am and come look for me.

At school, there was an assumed time-limit on any given fight depending on location, because if it went long enough, a teacher would be on-scene to break it up. A circle of kids would form and the mere fact of being in school acted as limiting factor to what a kid would commit to do to you. Even though the rule of not-fighting may get broken, a kid is not likely, in school, to do so much damage as to get himself expelled; there’s an awareness that on some level, the fight is a display.

But here, there was no unspoken set of rules. This was all free-form. This was two on one, with two bigger, stronger kids and no set limit on when or what constitutes the “end” of the engagement. They didn’t know what I did, that my dad was somewhere around. So what I had to do was not get beat up for as long as it would take for him to come looking for me.

And they were now closer, closing in. The big friend was a lummox and not half as fast as Gordon, who was a goodly length ahead of him.  Good, I reasoned. It will be one on one for a little bit, then two on one. And I suddenly realized something:

Holy shit, dude. I’m dressed as a ninja and I’m about to fight two guys. This will never happen again.

And a last second strategy comes into my head with this realization. Ninja are deceptive. They use subterfuge and cunning to prevail.  Sun-Tzu in THE ART OF WAR  had taught, “Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.”

I was going to ninja this sonofabitch.

I knew Gordon was faster than me, and I knew I was going to stay and fight, but I wanted him to be overconfident and get the drop on him. So when he was about 20 feet away, I turned and ran. Slowly.

This caused him to speed up and taunt me. “I’m gonna kill you, you fucking jew!” he was saying, now confident that I was easy prey. When he about 10 feet away, I stopped quickly and pushed myself with as much force as I could toward him, with all of his forward momentum coming in at me. I pushed forward and down, crouching myself into a ball and hitting him with my shoulder and elbow at the knee and shin.

It worked. He went sailing over me, landing on the lawn in a clumsy sprawl. I sprang up, yelling out with a fierce karate kiah, lashing out at the large friend who had now caught up. I did a skip jump kick, pistoning one knee forward to then kick with the other. It caught him unaware, and he threw up his hands, more out of confusion than fear. I was a yelling ball of fury, but I punched with straight-line blows and it backed him up. I didn’t really connect with too much, but that was good. I don’t think his heart was much into this; it was more his leader-friend’s fight and deal than his; better to just give him reason to hang back; if I hit him too hard, it could get him mad and he could have more skin in this game.

So, with the big kid backed up, I turned quickly to Gordon, who had gotten up, but was now a bit shy of straight out bum-rushing me. I circled around to his left, to keep him between me and his big friend and let him come to me. He was bigger but he wasn’t a great fighter. My biggest fear was to let him grab a hold of me and wrestle me down, where the two of them could then just start hitting me. My job was to keep him at bay; at any moment, my dad would arrive on the scene, and that would scare them off.

I just had to work all these angles and move them around until then. I managed to get in a good punch at Gordon’s face that had a satisfying thud to it. I did a jump front kick to push him back and circled again, this time engaging the big friend.

I fought dirty, doing a short sidekick to his instep and then threw two punches at his chest and head, then disengaged and focused back on Gordon. All the while, I’m kiai-ing like a lunatic, in the traditional karate way to give myself heart and take it away from my opponents, but also to summon the cavalry of my dad, who should be here any second, I thought.

That idea kept me grounded for a series of seconds that went on way longer than they should have. Keep working this system, circling, keeping it a series of one-on-ones and less a two-kids-rushing me affair, engage Gordon more and let the other kid hang back, as he seems to not have as much stake in getting hit. I can’t tell you how long this went on, because I wasn’t really thinking in words at that point.

There’s a zone that you get into; sometimes with ping-pong, sometimes with shooter-video games (like, flying shooters; ASTEROIDS or GRADIUS, things where there are a lot of things on the screen and you just have to keep moving without thinking. All hand-eye and no planning too far ahead.) where you settle into a wordless groove. That happened, there on the Klarides lawn. In my ninja suit. Covered in glow-sticks.

And at a certain point in that zone, this Gordon, who was essentially a bully, recalculated what he was willing to risk and told his friend, “C’mon, let’s get out of here before we get in trouble.” And they ran away, back up the lawn.

I was breathing hard, standing in a fighting stance, and sure they were just trying a variant on my initial feint that began the fight. They were going to get only so far away, for me let my guard down, then they would bumrush me. I kept my stance and raced to catch my breath.

And they kept on going. That was it. They ran away.

And where the holy fuck was my dad?

After they were gone and out of sight for at least ten seconds, I turned around and looked back and forth. Not so far away, by a bush, I saw an orange glow, going now from a fixed position to a moving one. It was my dad. He had transferred the glowing ember of his cigarette from his mouth to his hand, and the hand was moving and meeting the other.

It was a slow-clap. My dad was giving me a slow-clap, and the clapping got a little faster and I rushed at him, a blubbery mess.

“Whatwhereyou-whhere.. where WERE YOU? I was! I was fighting and there were TWO kids and I was fighting them all by myself! Where where you?”

“I was right here. If you were in trouble, I would have stopped it. But I saw the whole thing. You were never in trouble,” he said in his raspy voice.

I had started to shake. The tension of it all was now breaking and I just exploded in tears. And also laughter. It was kind of both. He stepped on his cigarette and knelt down and hugged me.

“Hey, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I gotta tell you, though. You were pretty magnificent there.”

I hitched and caught my breath. I was still so mad. But hey. That was something he said just there. That had just happened.

“I was? How could you tell?”

“How could I tell? You had glowing feet and wrists! I saw every technique you threw. Let’s go get your candy-bag, OK?”

I was still shaking and all of the sudden my legs felt rubbery and weak.

“Yeah, ok. They were bigger than me, you know, Pop.”

“I know,” he said. And he put his arm around me and everything was OK.

 

The End. For now.

(Next up in the Jew-fight Trilogy, when I get around to it:The Tale of the Yamaka Kamikaze and the Rightious Goy, a thrilling and true story about wearing a beanie in school and catching all manner of hell for it… and a surprise twist that makes you believe in the goodness of some people. Or at least my 5th grade English Teacher.)