Frankie: A Living Spirit

You gotta read the last handful of Friday posts to be up to speed on this series of tales on fisticuffs if you haven't yet. Week 1, Week 2, Week 3 and Week 4.

Some of the basic or essential qualities that one learns when involved in martial arts, if instructed properly, are: honesty, loyalty, integrity and being an upstanding citizen of the community. Without these, a few of the important tenets of any human being, especially martial artist, the power that one can wield through training and conditioning can be used for unsavory deeds. Often times you will see the group or individual oddball kid that knows martial arts and is a complete idiot. He thinks he's king shit and makes sure that everyone knows it. On a far worse and globally dominate scale underground kingpin factions like the Cobra Kai develop.. and well if Pat Morita dies anytime soon we're all fucked.

I won't get bogged down on the catastrophes that await the world for that day, instead I will stick to the original idea of the post. Sensei Clause did his best to instill these character traits into his students. All in all I think he did very well. The dojo I trained at was probably the only one that I have ever seen that lacked the one asshole guy that no one liked but happened to be good at martial arts. That could very possibly have been me tho, who knows.

One of the teaching tools he implemented regularly into his routine was mentioning his former sensei Frankie. Well not so much, I think HMT and I made up dozens of scenarios where Frankie injected himself into his teachings and made for hilarious consequences. You see, regardless of how a teacher is in their real life, one does not have to take the path of that person. If, for example, your father was brilliant at teaching you life lessons, morals, courage and principles and you come to find out at a later age that he enjoys a ladel of fetus soup from time to time doesn't mean that you have to a) discount the foundation of your character or b) follow in his footsteps. Every individual knows how to discern right from wrong and justifying odious behavior by pointing at odious behavior by someone like a father does not make it any less wrong than in the first place.

This is key when coming off of training with Sensei Clause. Because as oak-like as he wanted to come off as, he surely wasn't. He spoke of revelation in his life, change from gang member to good samaritan. On the surface, this is true but before the end it would be proven wrong time and time again as we have already touched on. This particular story is probably one of the most disturbing and all around memorable experiences HMT and I had with Sensei Clause.

On weekends, as bonus material offered to either gifted students or the entire student body, Sensei Clause would hold specialty classes. These specialty classes would range from animal styles, forms or new weapons. The best part of the class is that we were taught actual Shaolin forms that were not part of the regular class curriculum, it was additional knowledge. The other good thing is that it was traditional on top of all that. It costs $40 but its worth it when Clause's shit is together.

Depending on difficulty, certain students would be included or excluded from the classes. However, lately, Clause had been letting far too many unskilled people into the classes and the classes were downright boring. There was nothing really gained from them aside from a couple new strikes and what not but the application was average at best. The sense of knowledge gained from the specialty classes had become marginal. The better students were pretty pissed at this turn of events.

The last ever specialty class I attended and I hope HMT as well, was the infamous Bear Form class. Sensei Clause had been talking up the class all week and really getting the students hyped up for it. This was going to be a packed class and he knew it, the pressure was on to really come out with a good class especially since the buzz had been pretty negative on his performance lately.

The Saturday was like every Saturday. HMT and I show up at 8am with Sensei Clause arriving shortly after to start up the kids class, followed by the teens class, then the adult class and finally the specialty class. HMT and I were put in charge of just about every class that day, nothing out of the ordinary for the most part. Until the end of the adult class...

Sensei Clause had been missing for about 30 minutes, completely MIA. HMT goes out back and sees what could possibly be the most ridiculous thing, at the time, involving Clause. Sensei Clause doesn't see HMT so he is doing what he has been doing all frikkin morning: "practicing" the Bear Form he is going to teach us in the specialty class. Now, I'm sorry but when you know something, especially when you are an instructor, you don't practice shit. You fuckin know it.

The kicker is that he would change shit up, basically find something better to do in the form. In the end, HMT and I would deduce that he made up about 2/3 of the form before class and winged the rest of it. Total bullshit. The guy has no scruples I tells ya.

Now, I am sure that many of you are wondering why the title is about Clause's sensei Frankie. The obvious answer is that when you are "practicing" your form out back away from spying eyes you can always count on your sensei's ghost to "correct" you where you went wrong in the form. Frankie is everywhere, HMT knew it, I knew it and Clause fuckin lived it. So essentially, our good old Sensei Clause was in the business of teaching us bullshit forms for money. Something tells me if Frankie were around Clause would be having to jump over more than just limos.

Next week will be a series of shorts and some background on characters from the dojo. And hopefully more inspired, sorry I had a busy week. Average at best for me, sirs.