Tuff

15- YORI-KIRI

Although his stalwart expression didn’t show it, Oyakata Hitomi Kinboshi was enraged. Sumo wrestling, his cherished livelihood, was dying an ignoble death in Spanish Harlem’s White Park. Here in a small local playground, the fifteen-hundred-year-old traditions of his sport were being violated like fourteen-year-olds at sleepaway camp. Instead of the yobidashi sitting cross-legged high up in a tower and announcing the start of the tournament with the customary playing of the sumo drums, a spindly-limbed herald sat atop a basketball hoop beating on a white plastic janitor’s bucket. In fifteen centuries a woman had never set foot on the dohyo, but a Japanese-American woman stood in the center of the hastily constructed ring, yelling inanities into the microphone like a Communist screech owl. The Oyakata’s English wasn’t very good, but he understood something to the effect of “No justice, no peace.”

Sumo wrestling, once the sport of the gods, was now a Japanese minstrel show, the wrestlers no longer warriors, but entertainers. They were Japan’s goodwill ambassadors, sent out by the government to make amends for each administration’s invariable breach of ethnic etiquette. Last year it was Vancouver to make amends for the foreign minister’s calling Canadians “junior Americans.” This time the justice minister blamed the country’s growing crime rate on Japanese youths’ desire to emulate American culture, specifically the wastrel and violent attitudes of blacks and Hispanics, characteristics inherent in most nonwhite races, but not the Japanese. Three months later, in an attempt to appease the unquieted ghetto masses, the Sumo Kyokai sent the Oyakata and the wrestlers to East Harlem.

The strange Japanese-American woman gestured to the crowd and a large black man rose to polite applause. The Oyakata smiled. It was the same sullen-faced young man he’d seen in the poster on the bus ride from the hotel — the one he thought looked like the Delta bluesman Robert Johnson. Standing up in the crowd, a child on his shoulders, a stuffed tiger on the child’s shoulders, the black man looked like the bottom of a totem pole. “What did the Japanese girl say?” Kinboshi asked his translator. The interpreter bowed. “She introduced the young man as Winston Foshay, a politician who is running for public office. There’s a petition circulating through the crowd. He needs fifty more signatures and he’ll be on the ballot.” Kinboshi shook his head in disgust. The translator must have made a mistake. That boy a politician? Never. Any fool could plainly see the impudence festering underneath a warrior’s I-don’t-give-a-damn expression. This Winston Foshay never had a civic thought in his life. With the body and face of a bullfrog, he was born to be either a sumo wrestler or blues singer. “Did she say something about Chairman Mao?” The interpreter answered yes, fumbling for a way to translate “Mao more than ever” into Japanese.

One of the sumotori, a Yokozuna named Takanohana, was in the ring performing the traditional dohyo-iri. Rising from his squat, he clapped his hands; then, with a hand behind his knee, hoisted a massive leg high above his head. His foot stamped down on the clay surface with a resounding thump. Instead of responding to the demonstration of the Yokozuna’s uncanny balance with the customary shout of “Yoisho!” the audience answered each heavy stomp with a boisterous “Aiiight!” Under the searing New York City sun Oyakata Kinboshi reddened.

Ms. Nomura, how come they raising their arm to the side like that?”

“To show that they aren’t carrying any weapons.”

“Fair fight — I likes that.”

The ancient sport immediately appealed to Winston. Never had he been in the presence of so many men his size. And in the world of sumo, he was on the small end of the scale, as most of the rikishi outweighed him by fifty to eighty pounds.

“Look at them two motherfuckers, they huge!”

“That’s Akebono and Musashimaru,” Inez said, referring to the two largest rikishi, each of whom stood well over six feet tall and weighed over four hundred and fifty pounds.

“They black?” asked Winston, puzzled by the wrestlers’ swarthy skins and wavy hair tied into oily topknots.

“No, I think they’re both from Hawaii.”

“Hawaiians always looked kind of black to me. Big noses, grass skirts, and shit. They seem real African but more laid back.”

Two lower-ranked rikishi prepared to enter the ring. Each man stoically tossed a purifying fleck of salt onto the dohyo, before determinedly stepping into the circle of inlaid straw and assuming their starting positions. Crouched down in football-like four-point stance, the half-naked titans, without any visible signal from the formally dressed referee, fired into one another. The sound of a slab of meat landing on a butcher’s cutting board echoed throughout the park. The crowd, momentarily stunned by the ferocity, suddenly burst out in cheers, wildly applauding when one wrestler dumped the other unceremoniously out of the ring with a deftly executed leg trip. “Takanishiki, sotogake no kachi!” said the ring announcer.

Tuffy sat back in his seat, deeply impressed by what he’d just witnessed. “Man, I likes this. May the best and biggest motherfucker win. These niggers ain’t just fat. Look at the leg muscles. The goddamn pecs. These boys is yoked. It ain’t a whole lot blubber just jiggling around like I thought it’d be. Ms. Nomura, why you never told me you like this stuff?”

“It’s embarrassing. So old-fashioned. So feudal. You know how you get crazy whenever somebody mentions slavery? ‘Why you have to bring that up? That was in the past.’ Sumo makes me feel that way. Makes my insides itchy, but sometimes when nobody’s around I scratch the itch and watch it on NHK.”

Normally, Winston didn’t have much use for sports or the mob mentality of the sports fan. He found the events repetitive, pointless, and armchair analysis of the contests even more so. It didn’t take long for the residents of his block to learn not to approach him after one of his frequent street fights saying, “Tuffy, you kicked that fool’s ass, but when you had him in that headlock what you should’ve did was …,” because the speaker would find himself on the ground, holding a dislocated jaw in place, in too much pain to beg for mercy. Winston triumphantly straddled over his victim, taunting him like Diomedes sans spear and armor. “What you should’ve done is kept your fuckin’ mouth shut.” But sumo wrestling tugged at his corpulent pride. He soon found himself choosing a wrestler at the introduction for some indiscriminate reason — unusual sideburns, a gangster smirk, an especially serene countenance — then unabashedly urging him on until the bout’s all-too-quick conclusion. Sometimes his allegiances changed mid-bout, touched by a smaller man’s cunning and quickness overcoming the stronger, larger man’s plodding orthodoxy. By bringing his street-fighter mentality to the matches, it was simple for him to figure out the rules. First man out of the ring or to touch the ground with something other than the soles of his feet loses. If Winston saw an opening in a wrestler’s defense that wasn’t exploited using the vicious tactic he’d employ under similar circumstances, then he knew his way was illegal. “Man, all the shit I’d do is outlawed. Because if that motherfucker grabbed me like that I’d kick him in the nuts, punch him in the face, yank on his ponytail, choke him with one hand, and gouge out his eyeballs with the other.”

As the yobidashi introduced the fighters before each match, Winston strained to make out what sounded like a proper name among the slurring Japanese. “Takanohana? That’s that nigger’s name, Ms. Nomura?”

“It means Noble Flower.”

“Wakanohana?”

“Flower of Youth.”

“Musoyama?”

“Two Battling Mountains.”

“Akebono?”

“Rising Dawn.”

“Takatoriki?”

“Noble Fighting Sword.”

“Mainoumi?”

“Dancing Sea.”

“Kitakachidoki?”

“Northern Victory War Cry.”

Just as Inez translated Kitakachidoki’s name, the pint-sized Mainoumi picked him up and slammed him down onto the mat. Kitakachidoki hobbled out of the ring in pain, the fall having wrenched his knee. Fariq, gesturing to the limping fighter, suggested, “That man need to change his name to East Harlem I Just Got My Ass Kicked and Blew Out My Knee and I Can’t Stop Crying.”

Oyakata Kinboshi watched his son-in-law Kotozuma amble onto the dohyo. Currently ranked at Maegashira 6, the former Seiwake was in free fall, tumbling down the ranks since his arranged marriage to Kinboshi’s daughter. His weak taichi-ai and lack of fighting spirit were becoming an embarrassment to the entire Satogatake stable. Kinboshi thought he needed a kick in the ass. Arms folded tightly across his chest, he stared at Kotozuma’s opponent, Tochinaru, who, seated cross-legged on the east side of the ring, was slow to get up. When Tochinaru caught his eye, Kinboshi made a slashing motion past his throat with his finger, the signal for a wrestler to throw a bout. Confused, Tochi furrowed his brow, since these were exhibition matches and nothing was at stake other than pride. The Oyakata shook his wrist and Tochi’s face cleared with comprehension. Slowly rising from his seat, he bowed to the referee, reporting that he would be unable to fight due to injury. He bowed again and walked back to the mobile dressing rooms, shaking his wrist. The referee scurried toward Kinboshi, nodding his head as the Oyakata whispered in his ear, then dashed over to the ring announcer. The ring announcer, very plainly dressed in a black coat and gray Japanese knickers, walked to the center of the dohyo and raised his hand for quiet. “As a show of goodwill between America and Japan and Spanish Harlem, Kotozuma is willing to fight a challenger from the audience. Are there any takers?” Fuming, Kotozuma kicked up a cloud of clay dust. He wanted to leave, but knowing the fine would be at least a hundred thousand yen, he held his ground and spit on the dohyo. He’d pay the thirty-thousand-yen expectorate penalty.

So mad was Kotozuma that he didn’t hear the raucousness in the stands as a few hundred of Winston’s neighbors yelled his name and fifteen friends and family members pushed and pulled him out of the bleachers. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a challenger.” As some attendants escorted Winston to the dressing room, Inez stood up and shouted, “Gambate!” Without looking back, Winston punched the air with a fist.

“‘Gambate,’ you always sayin’ that. What’s it mean, Ms. Nomura?” asked Armello.

“It means ‘hang in that shit.’ ”

After a few minutes, Winston emerged from the dressing room. A sparkling white mawashi snaked around his body like a disheartened boa constrictor unsure of how to handle a victim whose girth was akin to that of a Parthenon column. The thick satin belt wound snugly around Winston’s waist, hoisting his paunch almost to his nipples, cleaving his buttocks, and firmly knotting itself behind his back. Winston strode toward the dohyo, his broad back and massive haunches lotioned to a shiny obsidian black. To his surprise no one in the crowd mocked him with diaper jokes or commented on how his thighs rubbed together. His boys trailed him like wizened corner men, clapping his back and massaging his shoulders as he climbed up the straw-bale steps dug into the side of the ring. Charles, looking across at the imposing Kotozuma, grabbed the nape of his friend’s neck and said, “Be careful, Tuff, this one look like he know karate.”

“But he don’t know me.”

Before Winston stepped into the circle, the translator approached him with a deep bow. He told Winston he must perform the ritual movements and to simply copy whatever Kotozuma did. He also assured him that he would be perfectly safe from harm; since this was a demonstration bout, the professional rikishi would take it easy on him.

The clay surface of the dohyo was warm and dry. On reflex Winston, with his big toe, scratched “Tuffy 109” into the light brown powder just outside the rim of the circle. The announcer’s voice boomed from the PA speakers, “Ko-o-o-to-o-zu-maaa!” Upon hearing his name, Kotozuma stalked into the ring, sprinkling a dash of salt on the dohyo and beating on the side of his mawashi with the heels of his hands. After a beat, a slightly garbled but deafening “Kuuu-rooo-ya-maaaa!” echoed throughout the park. The noble-sounding temporary shikona and the crowd’s cheers caused Winston’s left eyelid to twitch with nervousness. One long stride, a pinch of salt, and he was inside the ring of straw. The ring, about twenty feet in diameter, looked bigger than it did from the bleachers. Winston’s thoughts flashed to Musashi and the monk, but it was hardly time to contemplate oneness with the universe. Judging by Kotozuma’s glower, someone had forgotten to tell him that this was an exhibition bout. Facing each other, the two men squatted, clapped their hands, then swung their out-stretched arms to their sides, turning their palms to the sky. The wrestlers stood up, and the limber Kotozuma slowly raised one foot above his shoulder, then the other. Trying to balance on one foot was somewhat more difficult for Winston, but he gamely locked his knees and raised his legs till his thighs burned, doing his best to keep his planted foot from twisting and his body from wobbling. Kinboshi stared at Winston’s broad feet. “Like snowshoes,” he said aloud to no one in particular. “He’ll be all right.”

Smirking, Kotozuma exited the ring and reentered flinging one last offering of salt. Kotozuma’s cockiness relaxed Winston. Ain’t nothing but a fight. A little Friday-night scrap between men. Except that it’s Saturday afternoon and I’m butt-ass naked. He gazed into the stands; Yolanda was holding Jordy high overhead, Inez was staring at Kinboshi, and Spencer was furiously taking notes. At the foot of the ring Fariq, Whitey, and Armello were giving him a thumbs-up. Winston scooped up a handful of salt and tossed it high into the air. It fell to earth like a fountain of dying firework embers. He stormed into the ring ready to do battle. The crowd stood and roared its approval. “Wax that ass, Tuff!”

“Don’t start none, won’t be none!”

“Uptown!”

Winston and Kotozuma settled into the hunkered starting position, one hand on the ground, butt cheeks touching the backs of their calves. Kotozuma’s puffy face was less than two feet away. Goddamn, this motherfucker big, Winston thought. He so fat I can barely see his eyes. Eyebrows touching his cheeks and shit. Eyes look like apostrophes. I know this nigger don’t wear contacts. As they slowly raised their haunches, Winston blew Kotozuma a kiss and watched his opponent’s ears turn red. At a silent signal privy only to the two wrestlers, their left hands dropped to the ground and they launched into each other with a crushing impact force that might have been Enrico Fermi’s inspiration for nuclear fission. Winston’s lungs emptied like two fireplace bellows, and a shoving Kotozuma slid him toward the edge of the ring. Winston marveled at the hardness of his opponent’s stomach; it was as if a layer of rubbery skin had been stitched over a giant tortoise shell. Strangely, Kotozuma’s warm, clammy skin had a familiar feel to it; where had he felt it before? Splaying his toes and digging his heels into the ground, Tuffy stopped his backward progress. The beluga whale at the Brooklyn aquarium — this nigger feels just like that dirty white whale! Deciding to take the offensive, he locked in Kotozuma’s extended arms at the elbows, which forced him to straighten and negated his leverage. Winston marched him back to the center of the circle. Using his right hand he grabbed Kotozuma’s belt with an underhanded grip. With his left he vainly reached out for a grappling point as Kotozuma swiveled his hips, keeping that side of the mawashi just out of reach. With a sudden burst of speed and strength, Kotozuma freed himself and slapped Winston across his jowls so hard his vision doubled. If Kotozuma had done anything else — twisted Winston’s arm behind his neck and thrown him to the ground with a perfectly executed kubi-nage, or grabbed his wrist and kicked his inner ankle — Winston would have succumbed. But in the streets to be slapped in front of anyone who even remotely knows you is the ultimate insult. Mothers slap children, wives slap husbands, pimps slap hos, but nobody slaps Winston, and before Kotozuma could release a follow-up smack, Winston blasted him with a “What, motherfucker?” two-handed push to the chest that sent the rikishi reeling backward. Just as Kotozuma was about to regain his balance, Winston blasted him out of the ring with a well-placed shoulder tackle and belly bump. Kotozuma landed in a clump at his Oyakata’s feet. Unassisted, his jostled topknot resting over one eye, Kotozuma clambered back into the ring and squatted down. Winston did the same, returning Kotozuma’s slight bow. “Kuu-roo-ya-maa no kaa-a-chiii!”

After the day’s festivities were over and Winston had changed back into his street clothes, Kinboshi and a few of the wrestlers went over to congratulate him. The wrestlers greeted him with firm soul shakes, the two Hawaiians accompaning their grips with American street slang. “Yo, my man, you rocked Homeboy.”

“Thanks, yo.”

When the backslapping was over, the Oyakata began speaking and everyone stopped talking. Without prompting, the interpreter translated. “They tell me your name is Winston Foshay. I’m Oyakata Kinboshi, I trained the fighter you beat. They announced you won by yori-kiri, frontal force-out, but it was really yori-taoshi, frontal crush-out, a more powerful technique. Your style is unorthodox but effective.”

Unable to hold the Oyakata’s stare without smiling, Winston looked down at the ground feeling like the unassuming hero in a martial-arts movie: trained by wind, trees, and the monkeys, the country bumpkin makes a name for himself.

“Is it true you are running for political office?”

Winston nodded, wishing it weren’t.

“Then not only do you win the match, but you probably won a lot of votes today.”

“There is a loosely enforced ban on foreign wrestlers entering Japanese sumo right now. The Sumo Kyokai is afraid of big black men dominating the sport. I don’t know why they are afraid. Whenever Japan gets a chance to prove its superiority complex, we cringe in fear. If you were Mongolian, or even an Argentinian Jew, I could get you in.”

The translator whispered something in the Oyakata’s ear, and the coach’s eyes widened. “That’s right, I forgot Sentoryu,” remembering the mediocre Juryo rikishi, a half-Japanese, half-black wrestler from St. Louis. “You aren’t part Japanese, or that loud woman who introduced you wouldn’t want to sign an affidavit swearing she was your mother, would she?

“I’m sorry, I go too far. You are a politician. Obviously, your first thoughts are for your people and community, and a proud man like yourself wouldn’t abandon his mission for selfish reasons.”

Winston studied the expensive Rolex and Movado watches banded around the thick wrists of the Oyakata and the other sumotori, their fine silk robes, and the retinue of attendants shading their heads with parasols. Clearly there was big money to be made in sumo wrestling. Tuffy wanted to say, “I could give a fuck about an election. Man, put me and mines on a plane and let’s do this. When do I get a couple of slaves?” But he recalled a television documentary he’d seen on the rigors of the Japanese school system. He pictured a college-age Jordy, a mathematics whiz but unable to think for himself. To survive on the streets of Harlem knowing how to factor polynomials wasn’t going to help much.

Kinboshi took Winston’s silence for a refusal of his offer and handed him a small book, The Science of Sumo: The Seventy Techniques Diagrammed and Explained in Great Detail. Winston thanked him and asked if the other wrestlers were ghetto kids like himself. The Oyakata smiled and said most of the rikishi were the sons of farmers and steelworkers, a few were Japanese-born Koreans trying to pass as “traditional” Japanese, and there was a sprinkling of college boys who would do anything to avoid the business world. There was a long, awkward silence as the two men pondered alternative destinies: Winston, a chubby Japanese boy pushed into sumo by overbearing parents. The Oyakata, a running buddy of Tampa Red, hitchhiking from town to town swigging whiskey from coughsyrup bottles and playing a mean blues harmonica. He couldn’t get over how much Winston looked like Robert Johnson. Tuffy began to say something and Kinboshi expected the words to “Ramblin’ on My Mind” to tumble out of his mouth, complete with vinyl scratches and pops.

“Say, yo, what was the name they introduced me as?”

“Kuroyama.”

“What that mean?”

“Black Mountain.”

As city workers disassembled the ring and the bleachers, Winston was back on the stoop, listening to his friends rehash his bout with Kotozuma. “Tuffy said, ‘Blaw! I don’t play that, you Jap motherfucker. Remember Pearl Harbor. Bip!’ Even the police was clapping for you, son.”

“I ain’t seen Tuff that mad in a while. Nigger had on that berserko face. Tuff like to kill that nigger.”

Winston’s generic soda tasted funny and wouldn’t go down his throat. He spat the contents of his mouth onto the sidewalk and listened to the carbonation sizzle on the sidewalk. “Don’t call me Tuffy no more. I want y’all to call me Kuroyama.”

Fariq drew back. “What, son? ‘Kuroyama’? What the fuck that mean, ‘Fat Bastard’ in Japanese?”

The gang broke out in an avalanche of laughter that sent them rolling down the steps and into the street like brown boulders. Even Winston giggled, the paunch underneath his green shirt quivering like dessert gelatin. “Y’all not right,” he said, flinging his soda can out into the street. “Won’t even let a nigger dream. I could be in Japan tomorrow clocking mad loot.”

“You are dreaming.”

“Armello, like y’all ain’t dreaming with this bank robbery shit.” Winston’s voice took on a pouty tone. “We going to give tellers the potion, wave the magic wand, and we’ll be toodle-oo with the cash.”

Armello spread his arms to the side. “Tuff, I seen the documentary, it’s going to work.”

“Man, even if it don’t work, I think the shit will be fun,” Charley O’ said. “How many fools can say, ‘I robbed a bank with my moms’? That right there will be worth it.”

Fariq stood up on his crutches. “And even if it is a dumb idea, you supposed to be down for whatever. Until Brooklyn none of us ain’t never vetoed an idea by saying it was stupid. If you think about it, whatever we do is always stupid. So stupid or not, you supposed to be there.”

Winston opened his book of sumo techniques, saying, “Man, I’m on some other shit now.” On page one was a sketch of two entangled Buddha-esque wrestlers. Just as basketball is not only a matter of being tall, sumo is not simply about being fat and strong. The sumo novice often overlooks the mental aspects of the sport; a well-thought-out strategy and a level head will win more bouts than sheer brute force.