I had to graduate boxing class today. But the best I could manage was dragging ass to this key board, canceling, and reminding the host instructor that this old crumb is drooling into the bathtub, but proud of our boxers. I recall that this man, this pleasant Japanese-American, was introduced to me by Sifu Gabriel.
I recall getting to know Arturo Gabriel, my neighbor, through training in his basement, and over watching Paul Vunak training videos in my wife’s living room. Gabe brought these Panther videos four doors down to the house the bank would take back after I got hurt at work. I have warm memories from my early prime, from that time before I knew that the world was not for me, back when I thought that maybe one day I’d own a little brick hut with a reading room in it, packed with cool books, and would be able to peacefully drift into wonder.
That was a similar innocent feeling to that which I had felt when I read my buddy Rick’s copy of the Tao of Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee, when a teen and was so thrilled to find that this actor, who seemed to be regarded as the best fighting man on the planet, was a reader like me, seeking in old books after the secret to success in combat.
While visiting Electric Dan this past June 2024, barely able to walk and ruing old age, and viewing two Vunak videos, one a recent interview, I was reminded of my misguided first half of life: optimism, hope, faith, can-do eagerness—all washed away down the crooked stairs of life. Seeing young Paul Vunak, then the old one, seemed like a mirror of sorts. Recalling that some of my coaches had expressed, as early as A.D. 2000, a virulent criticism of Vunak, I mentioned this. Electric Dan said, “It’ really has become cool to hate on Vunak, to judge him for lifestyle choices, to kick a guy when he’s down and blame it on him. But he’s kind of coming back in some corners. That’s good to see.”
I said something like, “That is very American, makes me want to do a Planetary Romance with him as the hero, like a John Carter of Mars. I mean, he is an outcast martial artist, which is the trope of the Planetary Romance. Why not have an outcast writer, an actual bum, write a hero tale about him?”
Electric Dan gave a big muscle-head grin, “Nobody ever accused Vunak—back in the day—of not being able to fight. That would be so cool—I bet he would like it.”
Last week, doing this video skype thing about other projects, I brought this up to Jeth Randolph, Casting Darts Publisher.
Going over the idea with Jeth, another untrained writer and uncertified fight coach, we two goons who simply learn by doing, in fighting and writing, grinned at the sure knowledge that almost everyone we knew on the fighting side and on the writing side, would hate this book. That is the greatest writing test, isn’t it?
(I so wanted to use a semicolon there! Brackets, really? I’ve over done that to death!)
To write something with a premise distasteful to the reader, and yet convince them to turn the page! Kind of like kickboxing a wrestler, which was what Bruce, and Vunak after him, worked so much on.
Erique thinks it is a terrible Idea and is pretty certain it will end badly.
Last night, at dinner, Doc Dread and The Brickmouse were horrified at the prospect, mostly on legal grounds. They both stridently declared that Paul Vunak would sue me over this book.
I defended, “But it will be his book, to do with as he chooses. He will be the hero!”
“What about the money?”
“There is no money! Jeth and I will produce two portfolio proofs, a manuscript and a PDF, assign it to Paul, ship it, and leave it to him to print and sell that work, should he see fit to, to the only audience who would buy it—his fans. If anyone sues us it will be Bruce Lee’s people, since he will be in it too, as Paul’s recruiter into a galactic gladiator school.”
“Change the names, at least the spelling,” they say.
“Look, anyone who wants to sue me for my vast fortune and deprive me of my weekly canned corned beef feast, is welcome to it.”
These men saw me throwing my life away—which I will be in effigy, for I will appear as a patterned character in the novel and I will be defeated in that fantasy as I have been defeated in real life—a bad end for a bad actor!
There are some things I will not write about, thought spaces my words fear to tread. But getting beat up by Paul or one of Bruce Lee’s disciples would be an honor of the magnitude rarely visited upon this here wordhead.
Hell, and if some of the celebrity martial arts folks want to take me to court, I’ll bring everything I own in a small kitchen trash bag and let them have it.
I have a martial arts friend that wrote an excellent history of his guru and that book was stolen from him by the estate. Martial artists, are in general, a pack of thieves, just like boxing people.
Well, I will not write certain books for fear.
But having nothing but a 4-figure income stream and having lost more fights than any human alive, I refuse to fear writing a novel about some other crumble-down cracker, which gives a nod to the notion that a single mistake does not make us forever a dope or that a failure to thrive in this meat drone hive does not render us beyond all hope.
Doc Dread finally offered, “All of these men have embarked on the search for the truth in combat, so dedicate it to them!”
Boom! Doc!!
-Thank you Dan and Jeth for encouraging and helping me in my only heroic writing act, and for Erique, Doc Dread and the Brickmouse for offering the obvious good faith observation, that I am retarded and Jeth is my willing accomplice
