Jesse loved books. He was a bookworm, and a bookhound; one of his pastimes was to go to the local Goodwill store and pick up anything that looked interesting. The upshot of this was that he had a lot of books. When I first started training with him in Pioneer Square around 1998 or so, a heap of these books had accumulated in the basement where we trained. (For my entire time with him, Jesse's gung fu was literally an underground school.) If you could manage to throw someone into the pile of books while sparring, it was like bonus points or something.
After I'd been with him for a few years, training moved to the International District, where the group still works out today. Underneath an apartment lobby, a restaurant, and a Chinese tea shop there's a series of linked basements. We work out in the one under the tea shop, which sounds like the setup for a martial arts movie. The one under the restaurant held the overflow of Jesse's books.
There were hundreds, maybe thousands down there: in boxes, piled on tables made out of plywood and two-by-fours. At some point someone spread tarps over them, because the building's plumbing leaks. (It's an old building, like most of those in the ID. I really hope there isn't an earthquake while we're down there, because I don't like our chances.) And there they stayed, for years.
Then Jesse died. Through the occasionally contentious discussions afterward over what would happen with his students and the future of the space we were training in, the question of what to do with his books and the other stuff he'd stored down there more or less remained on the table. The person who probably knew him best and would have been the best person to go through it all had a certain reluctance to do so, which I really can't fault him for. Meanwhile the books, boxes, and papers sat there, degrading, helped along by what became a fairly epic infestation of rats.
Finally one of the guys took it upon himself to organize a cleanup, with the approval of the person to whom the task had originally fallen. So far we've spent two Saturday mornings going through books, throwing away anything obviously damaged or badly soiled (water, rat shit, rats chewing on the paper), boxing up everything else, and setting aside anything of archival interest or value.
Turns out there's been a fair amount of that. Old photographs of people I don't recognize; advertising flyers from the 1970s and 80s; a poster Jesse's brother Mike Lee used to advertise his martial arts classes (there's a scan of it on that page; it's the black one); dime-store-sized paperbacks about various martial arts, including one in Chinese printed on that pulpy paper from the early to mid 20th century. Finding this stuff makes me glad we're doing this, rather than leaving all that stuff down there until it rots.
We've also found an epic quantity of rat shit, as well as two dessicated corpses. (Yes, we are wearing masks and gloves.) When everything's cleaned out of that room we're bleaching the hell out of that sucker. Hopefully with all the paper and furniture gone, the rats will find that space less attractive. I haven't seen a live one in awhile, but I've seen where they've been, if you catch my drift.
I can't help but think of all the stuff, the physical stuff, we leave behind us when we go. I wouldn't envy whoever got stuck with going through my shit, particularly since some of it only Mr. P would understand, and Mr. Darcy would find the experience overwhelming. Since Jesse's passing, two of his students, people I trained with and knew fairly well, have died as well. We're getting to that time of our lives, it seems—you know, the part where we remember being young and immortal, and realizing what people the age we are now meant by that.
After today's cleanout, I worked out with the guys for almost three hours. One of them is moving next week, taking a job down in San Diego. One of the other students who died was a good friend of his. He's feeling the need to be somewhere else for awhile. I can understand that. I'll miss training with him.
Then I rode my bicycle home under an early spring sun, laboring up a series of steep hills. After dinner I got my fiddle out and played for awhile. Music of late has become devotional, which might just mean that I'm reading too much Nietzsche. But more and more, I find the everyday invested with the sort of significance I used to reserve for ritual and festival. Discarding what the time has come to discard is a sacred act.
I still do ritual. Yesterday I went down to Centralia to see Mr. P and we set up an altar in the field behind his parents' house and I played my fiddle for the gods because in that moment it was called for, and that's just one of those numinous things you're going to have to take my word for. Jesse never had much use for that sort of thing, as far as I can tell, but even though it's something of a cliche, if I'm being honest with myself that a lot of how I think and what I do concerning spirituality came from him.
It was how I knew to put certain things down when the time came, and how I could clean out a basement full of the things he left behind.
Riffing, Warning, Plumbing
3/29 '15
