When I was a boy, my family moved to a dilapidated old fishing camp, north of San Francisco and at the south end of the Napa Valley, called Cuttings Wharf. I never went back after we moved away, but I would guess the place is only a memory now. However, when we arrived there, in the early 60’s, it was a squat village of several dozen elevated white and green-trim cabins, strung out along the muddy and polluted Napa River. It was a fantastic place to spend some time, growing up—the roily, always flooding, turd-filled river at hand; the muddy, snake-filled reeds growing amuck; crawling beneath this or that thin-floored cabin to eavesdrop on the crumbling domains of other poor families; daily dog and kid fights; spitting, feline armies of abandoned, double-pawed cats, chasing about rats that looked like humping, overweight dachshunds; flocking water-birds of every size and description, but especially the vast squadrons of dive-bombing, shitting gulls, attacking the beleaguered line of fishing boats, scurrying to launch or trailer themselves; the obligatory and omnipresent snapping turtles and croaking bullfrogs; and—my personal favorite—the immigrant gangs that roamed the camp like salivating Huns and would chase you within an inch of your life, if you wandered too far abroad. Every kid should have such experiences, at least once in their life, if for no other reason, to maybe hone their appreciation for those finer things allotted them. In my novel American Warrior the old place is called China Slough, but the stench and poverty and real danger remain.
Some weeks after we arrived there, and I finally became brave or foolish enough to venture out, I discovered something. Someone. Out riding my handmade bike one day after school, I saw an old man, standing upon his wraparound porch that overlooked the river, doing some sort of strange, slow dance, like tai chi, but more menacing. His was the last cabin at the end of the main muddy road through the camp, and the first thing I noticed were all the brightly colored bottles—bottles of every shape and size, and filled with a Crayola-box variety of colored waters—sitting atop the porch railing. Then I saw him emerge from around the corner of his cabin and, closing his eyes, begin his weird, trancelike dance. I sat there on my bike, mesmerized, watching him until he was finished and went back inside. After that, almost every day, I would ride down the road and stash my bike in the nearby cattails. Then I would squat behind the rusted hull of an old abandoned car there and wait. Some days he appeared; some days he didn’t. But I would stay there, until near dark, waiting for him; afterward, riding my bike slowly back to my own cabin, wondering. This went on for several weeks, until, one afternoon, the old man suddenly looked over at me and motioned me to join him. It was the first time he had taken notice I was even there, that I was aware of.
In an interview I did with Dian Moore of BookPleasures.com I mentioned the old man, but I wasn’t entirely forthcoming about our relationship. While I knew him, he made me promise that I would never talk to anyone about him, his very existence, to a soul. He never told me why, but I always knew he was someone filled with delicious secrets, regardless, and that was playing at the back of my mind during the interview. So I left him out, mostly. But I’ve thought about it since then and wanted to reveal a little more about him. Not a lot. But he was such an amazing person, and I don’t think he would begrudge me too much, saying a little more. At least, I hope he wouldn’t.
As a similar scene that makes its way into the novel, we had tea that afternoon and talked. He told me he was a Dutchman, retired from the Dutch military and from the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, and now lived there alone—except, of course, for his enormous, foul-tempered, orange tabby named Mazy—on the bank of the river. He was enjoying his retirement, he told me, smoking his pipe. He enjoyed being left alone. And when I asked him about his strange dance—what was he doing there?—he only winked at me and said it was something from long ago, something from his “abandoned past,” as he put it, and didn’t want to talk about. So I let it go.
After that, I began to visit him often, at least, two or three times each week, and we would talk, and sometimes fish, sitting side by side on his sagging porch. And that’s where, one twilight evening, with the unseen frogs beginning to rise up in croaking chorus, he suddenly began to talk about this thing called Pentjak Silat, the martial art of the Asian archipelago the Dutch soldiers called Attack Dance. He told me he had learned it as a young boy, had practiced it for years, and that it was a dangerous, forbidding thing to know. To use.
Before my family finally moved away from the camp, some months later, I learned a few more things about my mysterious Dutchman, including how his wife and daughter died during World War II. It was something, he said, he had never been able to get past. He showed me the few bent and tattered photographs he had of them—holding them out before my young-boy’s face as if I might help him with something, help him understand something—and said he looked forward to the moment he could be with them again. And that’s the moment, I guess, I came closest to understanding how he had arrived at that point I knew him.
He did show me a few things before I moved away. That is, things about his secret, dangerous art. When together we would stand on his porch, with his eerie, exotic gamelan music playing through the open windows behind us, and go through the basic foot movements, called langkahs, and upper-body movements, called jurus. Like Paul Brett in the beginning, I wasn’t very good. But one of my schoolteachers did drag me down to the principal’s office one day, where they both interrogated me as to just exactly what was going on. Who was abusing me? They knew something was happening to me, they told me. They saw my black eye and bruises and the way I limped about, and they knew something was going on.
I never did tell them about my secret Dutchman. I just said I lived in a rough neighborhood and got into fights. In fact, I’ve never revealed a single thing about him, as I promised him years ago, until now. So, forgive me, my old friend, and fill your lungs.