The Jujitsu Artist

BY BILLY SNEAD

To call yourself an artist of any sort, I have always thought to be a little bit presumptuous. If you paint, call yourself a painter and the viewers of your paintings will decide whether or not you are in fact an artist. The same with writing, only the readers may decide whether a person is a writer or not.

But if somebody tells me they are a jujitsu artist, I will readily accept and believe that, because I simply don’t care. You hardly ever hear about jujitsu anymore, have you noticed?

There’s karate and kung fu and I think something like tai chi, but the art of jujitsu seems to be a lost one. These other arts might disappear too if the adversaries ever get together and decide to all rush the artist at once instead of one at a time like they do in the movies.

Anyway, what I’m saying here is that "artist" is an earned title and before you can call yourself one, somebody else has to call you one first.

I learned all I needed to know about jujitsu in the late spring of 1954 about a month before I was to graduate from TJ High School.

Now in those years at TJ, smoking was allowed in the back bathrooms, but not in the front ones. The reason for this was that it would be unsightly for the general public to see smoke pouring from the front bathroom windows. They could not see it in the back as the windows faced the school yard surrounded by an eight-foot concrete wall.

Also in those days no one had even heard of a Surgeon General or any of his or her warnings. The teachers didn’t even know. No students went into those back bathrooms unless they smoked, for obvious reasons, they knew what second hand smoke smelled like even before it had been discovered.

One day during recess after lunch, I headed for the first floor bathroom for a smoke and there was a guy in there who introduced himself as Aubrey. He was a little guy; even I towered over him.

Aubrey was not a student. He was 25 years old, about 5’2", weighed in at no more than 120 pounds with all of his features being proportionally small.

Aubrey was talking and everyone was listening. He made these three claims – he was a Korean War Veteran (we didn’t doubt him because we didn’t care), he was a jujitsu artist (again we didn’t doubt him because we didn’t care), he was "intimate" with a TJ girl (this we doubted and we cared).

Aubrey proceeded to give us a demonstration, a dry run, of his "art."

His most heard line was "a good blow here could kill a man".

And with that said, he would, in slow motion, spread his little hand and give a mock chop to one of the guy’s neck or temple. Quite convincingly!

Now Aubrey said that he would only use his abilities in a defensive posture.

"All I want to do is keep you from hurting me."

He then demonstrated how to render an adversary helpless by flipping them over his shoulder. He would ask one of us to "come at me with a knife" and I, as his chosen mock attacker, would raise my arm and try to stab him, again in slow motion.

He would reach up and grab my right wrist with his right hand, then grab my fist with his left hand, step between my legs, turn his back and pretend to flip me over his shoulder. It looked like it would work. He gave us several reasons, secrets, as to why it would in fact work using words and phrases like momentum and centrifugal force. "

Use the other man’s weight and speed to your own advantage."

We liked Aubrey and no body messed with him, besides you could always bum a smoke from him.

Several days later again during recess, I walked into the bathroom and noticed it was extra noisy and soon discovered why. Aubrey had produced a photograph, black and white, from his wallet and was passing it around the room. I was astounded. It was a clear picture of Aubrey and sure enough his TJ girlfriend sitting on a sofa, stark naked, and grinning at the camera and Aubrey was pointing with a bayonet at one of her "zones" that we weren’t to read about until the seventies.

Aubrey’s credibility skyrocketed! We no longer doubted any of his claims and believed and cared about everything he said.

He was not just an ordinary Korean War Vet, he was a decorated war hero having single handedly captured several of those hills in Korea named after meat cuts. He was the world’s greatest jujitsu artist, but best of all, Aubrey was a proven lover!

Now it is time to introduce the other main character into this drama – one-play Dave, as he was known in school, and not endearingly so, as I will explain. Dave was six foot tall and weighed almost three hundred pounds. Most of his weight was around his mid section and even in the wintertime he had wet side burns and ears, and there always seemed to be beads of sweat on the sides of his rosy cheeks.

Dave was about third string on the football team. Back in November when TJ was playing John Marshall at the stadium, the left defensive end for JM was just wrecking TJ’s offense.

Play after play, he was in the backfield before TJ could execute, causing general commotion and havoc with our boys. Nobody could stop him.

The TJ coach, in search of a remedy, was pacing the sidelines in front of the bench when his eyes focused on Dave. An idea came to the bewildered man, which should work. Put Dave opposite that end and by the time the end negotiates Dave’s girth, the play would long since have developed. The plan was brilliant – on paper.

Dave, astonished, was inserted into the game. They were out of the huddle, Dave was set, the ball was snapped, but the end didn’t cooperate. He came straight at Dave, elbow first, crushing his nose. Down went Dave, out went Dave, onto the field came a stretcher and he was laboriously whisked away to the hospital. Hence the nickname – one-play Dave.

Now it’s another day and we are all back in the bathroom listening to Aubrey expand on his favorite and by this time pretty worn out subject to some latter day smokers, when in walks Dave.

Dave didn’t smoke, but this day he was in a trot, with zipper already down headed for the urinal. Dave had to go! Bad! An ominous silence fell over the room. All you could hear was Dave’s now final trickle.

All of us were staring at Dave’s big backside, including Aubrey. All of us were thinking the same thing, except Aubrey.

What better situation could an "artist" conjure up to back his boasts. One of the bigger boys had the temerity to express our collective thoughts.

"Think you could flip Dave, Aubrey?" Aubrey winced and I thought I could see cold beads of sweat on his upper lip.

"Hey Dave, come here. Aubrey’s a jujitsu artist and he wants to flip you."

"Huh", said Dave pulling up his fly and noticing us for the first time since his hasty entry.

"Aubrey here wants to flip you over his back."

Aubrey didn’t speak. Now you see poor Dave’s dilemma here?

If he says no, it will only add to his already tarnished image from the football thing; on the other hand, if he agrees, and Aubrey succeeds, he will be even more of a loser, adding to his tarnish. Perhaps, one-flip Dave.

He had no choice and he knew it.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Wait a minute," another now emboldened guy said, "we can’t do it in here, this is a marble floor, somebody could get hurt."

To the school yard we shouted. Aubrey was not looking good. His reputation thus far had made him seem larger, but now he looked like what he was, a real little guy.

Rolling out of the boys’ room, we turned left down the hall pass three classrooms to the back door and by this time about fifteen more guys had joined the march.

When we exited the back door and went down the three or four steps, everybody sitting on the steps followed. We were drawing a crowd. It was like a rolling snowball.

Out past the concrete, we started looking for some grass, but found something even better--the pit where the track guys did their long jumps. It was filled with sawdust. Perfect!

Now Aubrey and Dave were standing face to face. Dave, of course looking down at the "artist."

Both of them wanted this thing over. I felt sorry for them with the pressure of their large audience.

"Now what do I do?" Aubrey explained it all to Dave and they did three or four dry runs. "Come at me with a knife", he said. Now it was time and the crowd held its breath. Aubrey and Dave didn’t look like they had much breath, but their pulses were almost visible.

And then it began. Dave was slightly crouched with his "knife" hand raised menacingly. Aubrey was braced for the thrust. Dave lunged. Aubrey’s right hand clasped around Dave’s big wrist, his left hand expertly grabbed Dave’s big fist, he planted his feet and turned as he had demonstrated to us so many times before.

Dave came on – momentum!

Now daylight could be seen under Dave’s shoes. It was happening and Dave could sense it as his eyes widened in woe. And now Dave was completely off the ground and rising fast — centrifugal force!

And now he is up in the air on top of Aubrey’s back. And here is where the theories all went wrong. Aubrey’s knees were vibrating and his legs looked like a small set of parenthesis. His little feet were sinking into the sawdust. Down came Dave and Aubrey disappeared beneath him — gravity !

Aubrey knew about jujitsu, but he was no artist.

It was over. The smokers all strolled back to the bathroom for one last puff before the recess bell rang. It was hard to light up because we were all laughing so hard.

A couple of the physics class guys said they knew what was going to happen but didn’t want to spoil it for us. Even Dave came back and took a puff or two, his reputation now somewhat restored.

By graduation, he had lost his ill-gotten nickname. As for Aubrey, the last look I had of him was a quick glance back before we went into the school. He had his shoes off, cleaning out the sawdust.

No one ever saw or heard of him again, but his girlfriend suddenly became real popular, and probably never knew why.