Ukemi into Blue

There’s this obsession whether aikido is street creditable. Heck, I know of an aikido club amongst correctional officers in one of the most hardcore prisons in America, and they tell me aikido has been more than useful.

So did I ever use aikido on the street? Yes, I did. Back in the early 70’s, I used to train at Terry Dobson/Ken Nisson’s Bond Street Dojo and also Yamada Yoshimitsu’s New York Aikikai (known to some as as 18th Street). I was a member of the former (I lived in the dojo) and a guest at the latter. I subscribed to Terry’s patchwork ideology: “Aikido is an art of love that will save the world, and if you are concerned about self-defense, you have to ask yourself, what is this ‘self’ you are concerned about, and how can you protect a ‘self’ without love . . . and if you piss me off,  I will probably f*ck you up, given the right provocation.”

Well, there was a young woman at the 18th Street Dojo, and she had blue-eyes-for-days. She was beautiful, and I lusted after her with a pure incandescent flame. But she had a boy friend. He was kind of a squashed-down short guy, who looked like he was sequentially dipped in library paste and then steel wool. (I’m biased, he was probably a very nice and handsome fellow, but he was in my way). One day the three of us were walking back from training,  (that was as close to next to her as I could get, just happened to be going in the same direction). and I was giving her a line over his short wooly head about aikido is love and power all at once, and one learns to be so potent that attackers are dispensed with the efficiency and control of a demigod bowling duckpins, at least at Bond Street, where I, a genuine uchi-deshi just happen to sleep on the mat, a wide, expansive mat with room to r-r-r-r-roll. And the guy is sighing in irritation, he knows where my ushiro-dori is headed, talk about a behind-the-back technique, and he disagrees, trying to cut the philosophical legs from under me, and suddenly a drunken street guy lunges out of a doorway towards blue-eyes, probably just asking for some spare change, but she gasps in fear, and I step smoothly in front of her and in a gentle kokyunage, send him wafting to the side like dandelion fluff – “Don’t have no time for that, brother!”, he doesn’t even fall, and in the same move, I put a hand under her elbow, we move on, and I turn to her boyfriend, nod back at the bewildered drunk standing dazed like a clubbed ox in the middle of the sidewalk, and say, “See. That’s how we do it down on Bond Street.”

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