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BATMAN THREW THE FIRST PUNCH By Joe R. Lansdale Batman threw the first
punch. He performed the first throw. I think Robin may have tripped me, and Bathound may have bit me. Can’t say I minded much.
Batman started something that is still part of my life and hopefully will be
until they carry me out on a board, wearing my favorite blue jean jacket with
the outline of Batman’s cowl on the back. Mask-rimmed eyes looking out over
Gotham City. Batman’s punches and throws,
Robin’s trip, and Bathound’s bite were metaphorical.
Their impact was not. Here’s how the sneaky bat-devil
did it to me. As a child I was fascinated
with Batman. I couldn’t be Superman. I didn’t come from another planet where our
planet’s sun gave me superpowers. I didn’t have an alien power ring like Green
Lantern, and I wasn’t a good enough swimmer to be Aquaman. Running fast as the
Flash would wear out a lot of tennis shoes. Wonder Woman, was, well, a woman. And
so on. But Batman, he didn’t have
superpowers. What he was, was a curious guy. Studied everything and knew
everything. Sherlock Holmes in a cape. Chemistry. He aced it. He
knew about insects, fingerprints, astronomy, geology. He could note the
differences in one kind of dirt from another at a glance. I truly wanted to be like
Batman. He caused me to expand my interests. The problem was, when it came to
chemistry, with my kid’s chemistry set, I could only turn water blue, purple on
a good day. Once I mixed outside ingredients into my chemistry set, which it
instructed me not to do, and caused a fire. I had an insect collection, which
was a bunch of sad-looking bugs pinned to a board after being killed in a
killing jar containing a cotton wad soaked in alcohol. Beneath each of them I
had little signs with pithy information written on them. Moth. Butterfly.
Spider. Grasshopper. Cricket. Daddy Long Legs. June Bug. And so on. I collected minerals. Or
tried to. A lot of rocks looked alike to me, and if dirt wasn’t boldly a
different color, I couldn’t tell one kind of soil from another. It all looked
like dirt. I could identify a few constellations, but was never able to straighten out the
difference in the Big Dipper and the Big Bear.
My curiosity was strong in
all those areas, but the depth of my understanding sucked. Batman was also a master of
the martial arts. He was always flipping some villain or another over his
shoulder, throwing a right cross to their chins, using a variety of martial
techniques from an assortment of systems to conquer the bad guys. These were
human skills. I decided to keep the curiosity about all manner of things, but
to focus on something I might be able to do. Martial arts. My father, Bud Lansdale, was
illiterate. He was a hard worker and a mechanic. He became a mechanic by taking
an old car my mother bought him apart, and then
putting it back together again. Before long, he was aces
at the work and he loved it. Bud liked boxing, and he
would lie on the floor and watch it on TV. I would lie down in front of him and
we would watch. He would explain the punches, the foot work, body positioning, the
rules and so on. I didn’t ask for that, but he told me anyway. Fortunately, I
enjoyed the information. It’s odd that when I truly
wanted to learn something about self-defense, I didn’t think of my father, who
I had seen snap belts wrapped around his chest by taking in a deep breath of
air, or squash an apple in either of his thick hands. I knew he was strong, but
his prowess as a fighter I was unaware of. When I was eleven years old, and
wanting to learn self-defense, I went to my mother and asked if I could study
Judo or Karate. She didn’t know of any place that taught such things, but she
said, “You know, your dad boxed and wrestled for money, and he knows a lot of
things about self-defense. I’ve seen him in action a few times. You should ask
him.” Dad was the right guy to
ask. He was in his fifties then, or close to it, starting to wind down
physically, but he had done a bit of boxing and wrestling in carnivals for
money. He often won his bouts. He had used what he knew in a few real-life
situations. I had at this point seen one of those, when I was much younger, but
had never thought of him as a hand-to-hand teacher. He was just Dad. Fact was,
he had developed a reputation that I had totally missed knowing about. He also grew up in a tough
environment. He went to work in the fields when he was eight, and worked grown
men’s jobs picking cotton, plowing, etc. Think about it. My father was born in 1919,
a year before Mark Twain died. Wyatt Earp was still alive. As was Bat Masterson
and Annie Oakley. Cars and electricity were still considered new. Airplanes
were in their infancy. Indoor plumbing in the rural parts of the country was
rarer than hen’s teeth. A different world. Later, he went through the
Great Depression, but fortunately, could always find work. He supported his
family, which consisted of my brother, John, and my mother, O’Reta. Nearly
seventeen years later, I was added to the family. My mother had thought she
was long past child-bearing age. Surprise! This meant my brother was
grown and out of the house when I was a baby. He married in his teens, and is
still married to the same woman, who graduated High School with Elvis Presley in
Memphis, Tennessee. That’s another story. As for learning to protect
myself, even when I was young, a disagreement could often be
settled with straight talk, and if not, it wasn’t uncommon to settle grievances
by fisticuffs. Teeth
could be lost, bones could be broken, but mostly you just got a black eye, or
gave one. Perhaps there was a bloody or broken nose, or you might end up
temporarily unconscious, face down in a pool of blood, out back of the grade
school with a shoe missing and two of your teeth in a mud puddle. People
shot people less, and the guns they used weren’t designed to kill every human
being in a shopping mall. There weren’t any shopping malls. Self-defense was a
skill worth knowing. Turned
out my dad was knowledgeable, but a terrible teacher. This was partly due to he worked long, tough hours for a trucking company. A
trouble shooter who went out to repair broken-down trucks, wherever they were.
There were occasions, my mother told me, when he had jobs where he worked under
trucks in the cold, and would come home with icicles in his hair. “Tough”
was Bud Lansdale’s middle name. Dad did
decide to teach me. He had no idea he had awakened a dragon. I loved it. He taught
me when he could. No formal classes. Little sessions here and there. After
work, when his hours were reasonable. Even then, he was often exhausted. He
taught me the basics of boxing and wrestling, as well as Jujitsu tricks he had
picked up. What he taught me mostly was the difference between a schoolyard
fight and a real fight. He taught me confidence. I’m
sure he was elated when I discovered, while taking lifeguard classes for a Boy
Scout merit badge at the Tyler, Texas, YMCA, that they taught Judo there. It
let me continue to study martial arts, and it gave him a deserved break. Judo
became my new passion. Over time, other martial arts showed up at the YMCA.
There was a junior college in Tyler, and new people were constantly passing
through, a few of them with martial skills, and the YMCA provided teachers of
the arts as well as a place to train. Then, all of a sudden, there was an explosion of martial arts.
There was Judo, Hapkido, Tae Kwon Do, a bit of Thai boxing, an introduction to
Yudo, which was Korean Judo, a maverick form of Kenpo, as well as different
systems of Karate; they were all on the menu at least for a while. I studied
martial arts because they were fascinating and because I wanted to learn
self-defense. I wasn’t plagued by bullies, but they existed, and I loathed
them. If they did show up in my life, I wanted to be ready. They
did eventually show up. I was already by nature the kind of person that would
fight to the death, but just not well. At least not until I trained in
self-defense. In short time, at school, it was understood not to bother me. If
you did, you might end up with a knot on your head. For me, early on, this was
all martial arts was about. Protecting yourself. But things
changed. Being a
good martial arts student, I developed greater confidence. I felt I could
accomplish whatever I wanted, even things outside of martial arts. This, of
course, may have been a myth, but it was a concept that I could and did embrace. As the
years rolled on, I was able to study other arts beyond my YMCA introduction. I
spent hours a week on all manner of techniques. I began to learn greater life
lessons, as well. It
taught me greater patience, though I still would not be considered a patient
man. But as far as writing and martial arts were concerned, I could
compartmentalize and find my zone. In
times of personal stress, financial dips, sickness in the family, losing
parents, this ability to compartmentalize was a lifesaver. Instead of going
through all the stages of grief, I went from the first to the last. It was an
application of economy of motion, a fundamental element of martial arts
training. I
learned to stick to whatever I was doing, and not have
the false attitude I had mastered anything. In martial arts, you are always a
student. You may receive a black belt, be given the title of master or
grandmaster, but in truth, you have only learned more than you knew before. There
is still so much more to learn. It’s that way in life, as well. It’s the wise
person who realizes this, because now they have an opportunity to become wiser. Instead
of teaching you that you are invincible, a real martial artist learns you are
anything but all-powerful. You can be hurt, and worse, you can hurt someone
unnecessarily. You have to be able to instantly
measure a situation and come to a solution, and live
with your choices. That’s
a sort of guide for life in general. Trying
not hurt anyone, making choices, and living with them. As the
years have gone by, the actions of the martial arts have become a kind of
moving meditation. In the system I practice, which I founded some years ago,
based on all my years of studying martial arts, I practice the moves and teach.
It clears the head. It keeps the body flexible, improves endurance and balance. Balance
in martial arts is essential, as it is in life. And not merely physical
balance. Life balance. Moderation. As I
move into old age, I continue to practice, and as certain physical abilities
slip away from me, I alter my techniques, my mindset, to fit what will
accommodate bad shoulders, a slipped hip, strained back, shoulders that have
been dislocated numerous times, etc. Martial arts have been good to me, but
intense practice has taken a toll. That
toll teaches another important lesson. You are not invulnerable and you are not
forever, and neither are those you love. All things are born, live, and die.
Martial arts gives me the courage to accept and adapt. Even
with the injuries, I’d do it all over again. It took some things away from me,
but it gave me so many others that are much more important. Practice
keeps me in touch with my father who first introduced me to martial arts. It
keeps me in touch with my various instructors. It keeps me in touch with pain
and pleasure, the sorts of things life deals you. It’s
important to understand pain may not be craved, but it is often received. As I
always say, “Life is just full of little disappointments.” Allowing
whoever you are training with to throw you, and you to throw them, to spar
them, to practice a variety of techniques, teaches you to deal with adversity
as well as learning to cooperate. As a
martial artist, you have a lot more fails than successes before the successes
increase. That’s an important life lesson. Tenacity. Sweet
and sour, pepper and salt. The smoothness of technique, when your opponent
seems weightless, or you fly through the air knowing
you have the knowledge of how to fall correctly is an important skill. You have to learn how to get under the weight of life’s
disappointments. How to fall and roll with them. How to get up again. It’s
about not letting disappointment drown you. Kick your legs, move your arms,
swim back up to the surface until it becomes an impossibility and your life
passes, well-lived and well-intended. One of the
great things about the martial arts, is changing people’s lives as an
instructor. It starts out to be about
self-defense, but for those who stick with it, it turns into a lifestyle not
only for you, but for them as well. I
frequently receive calls from students, some who didn’t acquire a black belt,
or trained only for a short time, who tell me how much better their lives are
for studying the arts with me. Other
students who moved away are now studying other arts. They’ve retained their
love for learning, and have stayed curious, which is another aspect of the art.
Curiosity. The very thing Batman had and inspired me with. A thirst for
knowledge. A student for life. There
are a lot of different martial arts, but in my view, there is only one true art.
Martial art. They may have different flavors, like different kinds of tasty
soups or stews. Yet, they have common ingredients. It’s the spices of
environment and personality that give them different flavors. Not
everyone profits from its study, but those that do often have better lives. For
me, martial arts are at the core of my accomplishments, minor as they may be in
the greater scheme of things. In
life, take the gliding step, go with the pull, go with the push, control
balance, be in the moment. Batman
threw the first punch. I’m glad it hit me. "Batman
Threw the First Punch" was originally published in Italian as “Il cazzotto di Batman è una guida alla vita,” translated into Italian by Seba Pezzani. It
appeared in L’officina dello
sport. Le squadre, la ricerca,
la tecnologia, la passione
e i valori sociali (Marsilio Arte, June 2024). It first appeared
in English in The Sports Workshop: Team Work,
Research, Technology, Passion and Social Value (Artbook/D.A.P., October
2024). "Batman Threw the First Punch" © 2024 By Bizarre Hands, LLC.
All Rights Reserved. Be here
next week for another bit of Mojo inspiration … or risk a bite from Bathound. |
