A man’s hand came up over a woman’s face. Open palm. 6’1, 220 lb behind it. The woman was against a stucco wall on College Street, Los Angeles, July of 1970, and her own hand was already on her cheek, covering the place where the first one had landed. The man’s hand was coming down for the second. 12 ft away, a door opened.
A smaller man stepped out, 138 lbs barefoot. He was holding a cup of green tea in his right hand and he did not put it down. He just stopped. And what happened in the next 40 seconds on that sidewalk made a man who had spent his entire life around fighters say decades later that he had never seen anything like it. Not in a ring.
Not in a film. Not anywhere. Stay with me on this one. Because the smaller man didn’t throw a punch. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t take a full step forward. And the bigger man, the man with his hand in the air, froze like someone had cut a wire inside him. That smaller man trained 12 world champions in his lifetime.
He turned away more black belts than he accepted. There were schools across Los Angeles in 1970 with standing offers to anyone who could last 60 seconds against him in his own room. The offers were never collected. The bigger man on the sidewalk that morning had 3 in and 82 lbs on him. He worked construction.
His hands were the kind of hands that get that way from a decade of swinging hammers and pulling cable through walls. He had been arrested twice for fighting in bars. Neither charge had stuck. And by the time the LAPD cruiser turned the corner from Hill Street, the bigger man was sitting on the curb with his hands flat on his own knees because the smaller man had told him to put them there. Here’s the thing.
To understand what happened on that sidewalk, you have to understand how the smaller man got there in the first place because he almost didn’t. He almost stayed inside. And to understand why he almost stayed inside, you have to understand what kind of room he was inside of, what kind of school, what kind of city, what kind of summer it was, and what kind of man he had become by the morning of July 14th, 1970 at 10:15 in the morning when he heard a sound through an open window that he could have ignored.
He didn’t ignore it. That’s the whole story right there. He didn’t ignore it. But the way he answered it when he came down those stairs and opened that door and stepped onto that sidewalk, the way he answered it is what made Dan Inosanto 55 years later, the last living witness, sit at a kitchen table in another city and tell my father the entire 40inute version of what he had seen.
And my father told me and I’m telling you now believe me the chain of this story is short. Four people knew the full shape of it. Three of them are dead. The fourth one is me. And the morning belongs the way most mornings belong to him to the smaller man with the tea. But before we go to the sidewalk and we are going to the sidewalk in detail in real time in the exact 40 seconds you need the room because the room is why he came down.
The room is why the cup of tea was in his hand. The room is why his feet were bare. The room explains the man and the man explains the silence on the sidewalk. And the silence on the sidewalk is what stopped a hammer hand from coming down. So, the room it was on the second floor of a brick building at 628 College Street in Chinatown, Los Angeles.
The building had been put up in 1924. It had survived two earthquakes. The bricks on the south face were darker than the bricks on the north face because the south face had taken 46 years of afternoon sun and the north face hadn’t. There was a fire escape on the east side that had been bolted into the wall in 1948 after the city had passed an ordinance.
The bolts were rusted. Nobody had ever used the fire escape. The street door was painted dark green. There was no sign on it. There was no name on it. There was no number on it except for the small brass 628 above the lintil. And even the 628 had tarnished to the same color as the paint. So that from across the street you couldn’t read it without stepping closer.
You had to know what was behind that door to find it. If you knew, you knew because somebody had told you and the somebody who had told you had been told by somebody else. And the chain of the telling went back link by link to the smaller man who decided whether the link extended or whether it stopped. He stopped a lot of links.
He took 22 students at a time. Not one more. The number 22 was not a tradition. It was not a teaching from his own teachers. It was an arithmetic answer to a question he had asked himself in 1967 when he had opened the school. How many men can I watch closely enough that I would notice the same morning if one of them developed a flinch that wasn’t there the morning before? His answer was 22.
If he took 23, he said he would miss a flinch. And missing a flinch meant a student going home in a bad pattern. And a student going home in a bad pattern was a student who would eventually in some other room in some other city take a hit he could have avoided. So 22. He turned away more men than he accepted. The men he turned away were not amateurs.
They were national champions. They were professional fighters with records. They were black belts in styles he respected and styles he didn’t. He turned them away because he didn’t believe in their systems. He said it out loud. He said most traditional styles were rehearsals for fights that never happened.
He said the patterns they drilled were beautiful and useless. He said a real fight lasted 4 seconds and most fighters trained for the wrong 4 seconds of their lives. That kind of talk made enemies. Now, the martial arts world in Los Angeles in 1970 was not a quiet world. There were schools across the city that had standing offers to anyone who could come into the smaller man’s school and last 60 seconds against him.
The offers were sometimes posted on bulletin boards. The offers were sometimes whispered between students after class. The offers were never collected. The men who showed up to try lasted less than 60 seconds. The men who heard about the men who showed up stopped showing up and the smaller man kept teaching. 22 students.
No sign. Second floor. The room itself was 38 ft long and 22 ft wide. The floor was tongue and groove pine that had been sanded and resealed twice in the previous year because the smaller man had decided he didn’t like the way the second coat varnish had aged. The walls were plaster over wire mesh painted a flatoff white that he had picked because it didn’t reflect the overhead light into a student’s eyes when the student was on his back on the floor.
There were three windows on the east wall. They opened by sliding up. They had no screens. There was no air conditioning. Los Angeles in July, second floor. 22 men just finished training. The windows had to be open. They were open because the room would have been 96° by 10 in the morning. Otherwise, they were open because that was the only way the air moved.
The windows were open on the morning of July 14th, 1970. That is why he heard her. Now, here is something most people don’t know about that school and it matters for what happened later because it tells you what kind of man was holding the tea. The smaller man had a rule about the door. The street door downstairs, the dark green one with no sign.
The rule was that nobody, not a student, not a visitor, not a delivery, not the building owner, touched that door without him knowing. He had installed a small brass bell on a steel spring above the door in 1968. The bell was loud enough to be heard on the second floor. The bell rang every time the door opened. He had also installed a peepphole in his own door on the second floor.
The peepphole looked down the staircase. The staircase had 18 steps and one landing. From the peepphole, you could see the bottom three steps and the inside of the street door. He did not let students up the stairs until he had looked through the peepphole. He had been doing this for 3 years. He did this for every class, every visitor, every delivery, every morning.
He did it not because he was afraid. He did it because he had learned very early that the difference between a controlled room and an uncontrolled room was the difference between a long career and a short one. And the door downstairs was the only place where his room touched the world. So the bell, so the peepphole, so the discipline.
On the morning of July 14th, the bell rang 22 times between 5:55 and 6:03. 22 students came up the stairs. He looked at each one through the peepphole before unlatching the door. The class started at 6. It ran for 4 hours. He sent the students home at 10:05. The bell rang 22 more times as they went down the stairs and out onto College Street.
He stood at the peepphole and counted each ring. When the last ring sounded, he latched the inside door, walked to the small kitchen at the back of the room, and put the kettle on. He made green tea. He used loose leaves, not bags. He used water that was a few degrees off boiling. He let the leaves steep for 2 minutes and 40 seconds, which was the number he had settled on in 1968 after testing other numbers.
He poured the tea into a white ceramic cup with no handle. The cup had been given to him by his teacher in Hong Kong in 1958. The cup had a chip on the rim where his teacher had dropped it once. The smaller man had never repaired the chip. He carried the cup to the front of the room.
He stood at the window, the middle window of the three on the east wall. He looked out at College Street. The street below was a normal Tuesday morning in Chinatown. Three older men were standing at the corner of Hill in College talking. A delivery truck was double parked in front of the grocerers. A woman was pushing a stroller on the far sidewalk.
The sound of the city came up through the open window, engines, voices, a radio from somewhere, the small constant hum of a place where 11,000 people lived and worked inside six city blocks. He took a sip of the tea. The tea was still hot. Not boiling, but hot enough that he had to hold the cup at the rim, not around the body of it.
That’s when he heard her. Now, here’s the thing about the sound. The sound was not loud. A hand striking a face on a public sidewalk in summer is not the sound that most people would have picked out of the morning hum of Chinatown. Most people, even with the windows open, would not have heard it. The sound was inside the frequency band of everything else, the engines, the voices, the radio.
it would have passed. He didn’t miss it. He didn’t miss it because the school he was running was a school for not missing things. The whole architecture of the room, the 22 students, the people, the bell, the chip on the cup, the 2 minutes 40 seconds of steeping was a daily practice in noticing small things inside large hums.
The slap was small. The hum was large. He heard the slap. His head turned toward the window. He didn’t move toward it. He turned toward it. There’s a difference. Moving toward a sound is a commitment. Turning toward a sound is a question. He was asking a question. The question was, “Was that what I thought it was?” For one full second, he stood at the window with the cup in his right hand, and his head turned slightly to the right, and his eyes on the sidewalk below.
The sidewalk was 8 ft wide. There was a man on it. There was a woman on it. The man was big. The woman was against the wall. The man’s hand was already lifting again. The smaller man’s eyes went to the man’s hand. He watched the hand. The hand reached the apex of its ark. The hand started coming down. He had his answer. He didn’t put the cup down.
This is the part that Dan Inosanto, who would be in the doorway of the printing shop across the street within 90 seconds, would later spend years trying to explain to my father at the kitchen table in 1989. Dan said that anybody who watched the smaller man for any length of time understood that he did not waste motion.
Not a step, not a gesture, not a head turn. Every movement of his body was either necessary or it didn’t happen. He didn’t fidget. He didn’t tap. He didn’t pace. He had built his body over 15 years of practice into an instrument that did exactly what he asked of it and nothing else.
If he had put the cup down, that would have been a decision. The decision would have meant, I am going down those stairs as a fighter. I am going down to engage. I am going down to win. He didn’t put the cup down. That meant something different. That meant I am going down those stairs as a man who was still drinking tea. I am going down as the man who already lives in this neighborhood.
I am going down as the same person I was 30 seconds ago. The man on the sidewalk is going to meet the person who heard him through the window. He is not going to meet a fighter. This is what Dan said years later. He said the cup was the whole strategy. The cup was already the answer to the question of what kind of confrontation it was going to be.
But the smaller man on the morning of July 14th did not stop to explain this to anybody. He turned away from the window. He walked across the 38 ft of pine floor toward the door. He did not pick up his shoes. His shoes were in the back room 30 ft behind him. He did not go to the back room. He had been training barefoot since 5:55 that morning.
His feet were warm from 4 hours of working on the floor. The soles of his feet were the soles of a man who had been barefoot in some form for almost every day of his life since he was 4 years old in Cowoon. They were not soft. They were not the feet of a man who needed shoes to walk on concrete. He walked to the door. He unlatched it. He opened it.
He stepped out onto the landing. He pulled the door shut behind him, but he did not latch it. He left it half an inch a jar. This was not careless. He had a reason. The reason was that if he latched it, the key was inside and he would have to break the door to get back in. He did not plan to break the door.
He planned to come back upstairs and finish the tea. So, he left the door half an inch a jar. He took the 18 steps down. He took them at a normal pace, not fast, not slow. the pace of a man going down to the corner to buy a newspaper. Each step was the same as the last. His right hand holding the cup did not move relative to his chest.
The tea did not slush against the rim. There was no surface ripple in the cup that Dan, who came around the corner of Hill at exactly that moment with a stack of envelopes in his hand, would have been able to see from across the street. He reached the bottom of the stairs. He stood in front of the inside of the street door, the dark green door.
He looked at it for a quarter of a second. The peepphole was on the other side of this door on the second floor, looking down at where he was now standing. He had built the whole system to keep things outside from coming in. He was about to open it the other way. He put his left hand on the door handle. He turned the handle.
He pulled the door open. The brass bell rang once. He stepped through. He was on the sidewalk. The first thing that hit him was the heat. The pine floor upstairs had been warm. The concrete under his bare feet was a different category. It was 111° in the direct sun. It was the kind of surface that you could not stand on for more than four or 5 seconds at a time if you were not the kind of man whose feet had been trained over years into a different relationship with hot ground. He did not flinch.
The second thing that hit him was the geometry. He had stepped out of the door facing east. The man and the woman were to his right on the same side of the sidewalk against the brick wall of the building next door, a building that shared a stucco face with 628 College Street, and that from the street looked like one continuous wall.
The distance between him and the man’s elbow was 12 ft. He registered the distance in the first quarter of a second. 12 ft was a working number for him. 12 ft was inside his teaching range. 12 ft was a distance he had measured, marked, and worked from 10,000 times on the pine floor upstairs. He knew in his body exactly what 12 ft meant.
He knew how long it would take him to close it. He knew how long it would take the bigger man to react to him closing it. He knew the difference between those two numbers. The difference was favorable. He did not close the distance. He stopped. His left foot was forward of his right foot by maybe 3 in. His weight was even.
His knees were not bent. His shoulders were not squared. His chin was not tucked. His left hand was open at his side, fingers slightly curled, the way a hand is when it is doing nothing in particular. His right hand was holding the cup at chest height in front of his sternum. The way a man holds a cup when he is walking and drinking at the same time.
He was, to anybody watching, a man who had just come out of the door with a cup of tea, except that he had stopped 12 feet from another man, and he was looking at that other man’s hand, and he was not moving. The bigger man had not seen him yet. The bigger man was still in the ark of the second slap. The hand was at the apex.
The body was committed to the downward swing. The eyes were on the woman’s face. The woman saw him first. Her own hand was on her cheek. The first slap had landed 3 seconds before he came down the stairs. She had not screamed. She had not moved away from the wall. She had pressed her back against the stuckco and her hand against her face.
And she had closed her eyes because she had been here before. and she knew that closing her eyes was the thing that made the next 30 seconds shorter. She opened her eyes when the doorbell rang. She saw the smaller man on the sidewalk. She did not understand what she was seeing for a full half second. The smaller man was 12 ft away.
He was barefoot. He was holding a cup. He was not moving. He was not yelling. He was not running toward them. He was just standing there looking at the bigger man’s hand. She did not know him. She had lived in the apartment building behind the wall for 4 months. She had seen him twice, once on College Street walking, once in the grocerers on Hill paying for a small bag of dried mushrooms.
and she had not known who he was, only that he was a small Chinese man in his late 20s who lived somewhere nearby and who had a way of moving that made other people in the grosser step aside without being asked to. Now he was on the sidewalk. Her eyes went from him back to her husband. Her husband, the bigger man, who would in another life in Bakersfield die of a heart attack at the age of 61 without being arrested for domestic violence again, saw her eyes move.
He followed them. His head turned to the left. His arm was still up. The hand was still at the apex. He saw the smaller man. For one full second, the bigger man’s brain did the arithmetic that every confronted human brain does. It registered the body. It registered the position. It registered the distance. It registered the absence of weapons.
It registered the cup. It registered the bare feet. It registered the open hand at the side. It registered the fact that the smaller man was not yelling at him and not approaching him. The arithmetic told the bigger man that there was no threat. So the hand did not come down, but it also did not come back. It stayed.
This is the part Dan Inosanto, watching from across the street with the envelope still in his hand, would later describe as the moment he understood what his teacher had been teaching them for 3 years. The hands stayed in the air. The bigger man’s body did not know what to do.
Now, believe me on this, the bigger man’s conscious mind in that moment had concluded there was no threat. His conscious mind had looked at the smaller man and seen a guy with a cup. His conscious mind had decided to finish the second slap. His body refused. The arm did not come down. The arm did not come back. The arm stayed in the air, palm flat, 6’1 of weight suspended in the morning sun on College Street, frozen at the apex of a swing it was no longer going to complete.
His body had seen something his conscious mind hadn’t. Here’s what most people don’t understand about a fight that doesn’t happen. A fight that doesn’t happen is harder to win than a fight that does. In a fight, both men have agreed to fight. The rules are clear. The mathematics are clear. You hit him before he hits you, or you move so he can’t hit you, or you take the hit and give a worse one back.
That’s the whole equation. A fight that doesn’t happen has none of that. A fight that doesn’t happen has a man who hasn’t decided yet whether he is going to swing. A man who is bigger than you. A man who is angry at someone else and could become angry at you in less than a second.
And you have to make him not swing without giving him a reason to swing while standing in his line of sight, in his territory, in front of the person he was about to hit. Most men cannot do this. Most men faced with this exact situation do one of three things. They yell at the bigger man. They charge the bigger man.
Or they pretend not to see and walk past. If you yell, the bigger man hears a challenge. If you charge, the bigger man’s body reacts before his mind catches up. And the swing he was going to throw at the woman becomes a swing he throws at you. And now there are two fights instead of one. If you walk past, the second slap lands and the third one lands and the morning goes the way it was going to go.
The smaller man did none of those. He stopped 12 ft away. He did not move closer. He did not move back. He did not raise his voice. He did not raise his hands. He let his left hand stay open at his side. He held the tea at chest height. He looked at the bigger man, not at the bigger man’s face, at the bigger man’s chest, at the point right below the collar bone where the shirt pulled tight when the bigger man’s arm was raised.
and he waited. Across the street, Dan Inosanto had come around the corner of Hill Street with a stack of envelopes in his hand. He was on his way to the post office. The post office was two blocks east on College, past Hill, past Yale, on the corner of Bachce. He had a class of his own to teach at noon at his uncle’s school in Filipino town.
And he wanted to drop the envelopes before he drove over. He saw the smaller man standing on the sidewalk in front of 628. He stopped walking. The first thing he noticed was the cup. The smaller man was holding a cup in his right hand. Dan knew the cup. He had been drinking tea out of cups like it in that upstairs room for almost 3 years.
He knew the smaller man drank tea after the morning class. He knew the smaller man did not bring tea outside. The second thing he noticed was the geometry. The smaller man was facing east. The smaller man was 12 ft from another man. The other man had his hand in the air. There was a woman against the wall. Dan’s body understood what he was looking at before his mind did.
He stepped back into the doorway of the printing shop. He did not move further in. He did not turn away. He stood half inside the doorway and half on the sidewalk. And he did not move. And he did not put down the envelopes. He stood there because he was afraid that if he moved, the bigger man would see motion across the street.
And motion across the street would change the arithmetic on the sidewalk. and changing the arithmetic on the sidewalk would unfreeze the arm. He had been taught this by the smaller man in the upstairs room many times. The smaller man had said that a fight is decided by who moves first and how. He had said the first person to move in an undeclared confrontation almost always loses because they have given up the most valuable thing they own which is the other person’s uncertainty.
He had said this with his own body in the room demonstrating with a student or two students or three showing how a single shift of weight could trigger a response in another body that had not yet decided to respond at all. Dan had heard this. Dan had not understood it. the way you understand a thing by hearing it.
Now, in the doorway of the printing shop with the envelopes in his hand, Dan understood it the way you understand a thing by watching it. He did not move. Back on the sidewalk, four full seconds passed. The bigger man’s arm was still in the air. The smaller man was still 12 ft away. The woman was still against the wall with her hand on her cheek.
Dan was still in the doorway across the street. Nobody on College Street moved. The cars on Hill Street kept going. The delivery truck in front of the grocerers kept idling. The radio from somewhere kept playing. The three older men at the corner of Hill and College kept talking because they had not yet looked toward 628.
But inside the 8 ft of sidewalk between the door of 628 and the brick wall of the apartment building, time had stopped. My father told this part of the story the same way every time. He always paused here. He always put down whatever he was holding, a coffee cup, a cigarette, a screwdriver, and he always said the same thing.
He said those four seconds were the fight. He said everything after those 4 seconds was just paperwork. Stay with me because what happened in the fifth second is what made Dan decades later say he had never seen anything like it. The smaller man took half a step, not a full step. Half. His left foot slid forward maybe 8 in on the hot concrete and he stopped again.
He did not raise his hands. He did not put down the tea. He did not say a word. He did not shift his weight onto the front foot. He moved the foot only 8 in. That was the entire movement. And the bigger man’s hand came down. Not at the woman, not at the smaller man. It came down to the bigger man’s own side slowly, the way a hand comes down when its owner has forgotten what it was going to do.
The fingers stayed spread for another half second after the arm had reached the side. And then the fingers curled and the hand became a hand again. And the arm hung at the bigger man’s side. The way arms hang at sides when nothing in particular is happening. The bigger man blinked. He looked at the smaller man.
He looked at his own hand. He looked at the smaller man again. He took a step backward. Now, here is the part that people who haven’t studied this don’t understand. When the bigger man stepped back, he was not retreating. He was not afraid. He was not making a tactical decision. He was doing the thing that human bodies do when another human body has communicated without words that the situation has changed.
The smaller man’s 8 in forward had told the bigger man in a language older than language that the math on the sidewalk was no longer what the bigger man had thought it was. The math had been bigger man, woman, no witnesses worth worrying about. The math now was bigger man, woman, and a smaller man who had walked out of a building barefoot with tea and had not stopped walking until he was 12 ft away and had then moved 8 in closer and was not going to stop.
Believe me, the bigger man did not work this out consciously. The bigger man worked it out the way every animal works it out. He worked it out in his spine. And his spine told him to step back. He stepped back twice. He looked at the woman. He looked at the smaller man. He said something. Dan couldn’t hear what it was from across the street.
And the smaller man never repeated it. The smaller man didn’t answer. The smaller man didn’t move. He just stood there holding the tea. The bigger man turned half a degree to his right. His hands were at his sides. His shoulders had dropped about an inch from where they had been when the arm was in the air. His breathing was visible in his chest, fast and shallow.
The kind of breathing that comes after a body has been holding a pose it wasn’t built to hold. He was not looking at the woman anymore. He was looking at a spot on the concrete about 4 feet in front of him. The smaller man 12 ft plus 8 in away did not move. The woman against the wall did not move. Dan in the doorway across the street did not move.
The bigger man took another step. This one was to his right, not backward. He had decided somewhere in his spine that the way out of this was not to stay where he was and not to go back the way he had come. The way out of this was to walk past the smaller man on the open side of the sidewalk and keep going. He took the step. He took another.
He started walking north on College Street toward Hill with his shoulders down and his hands open at his sides and his eyes on the sidewalk about three feet in front of his own feet. He did not run. He walked. He was 30 ft away when the first LAPD cruiser turned the corner from Hill onto College and started south.
The cruiser had been called from a thirdf flooror apartment in the building behind the wall. The apartment belonged to a woman named Eleanor Reyes, 61 years old, a retired school teacher who had lived on College Street since 1953. Eleanor had been at her kitchen window watering the basil plant on the sill when she had seen the first slapland.
She had not seen the smaller man come out of the door of 628 because her window faced south and the door of 628 was to the north of her view. She had picked up the phone in her kitchen and dialed the operator and asked for the police. She had described what she could see. She had said a man was hitting a woman against the wall of her building.
She had given the address. The operator had told her a unit would be dispatched. She had stayed at the window with the phone in her hand. She had watched the rest of it from above. She had seen the smaller man stop on the sidewalk. She had seen the 4 seconds of stillness. She had seen the half step. She had seen the hand come down.
She had seen the bigger man back away. She had not understood what she was watching. She had only understood that the small Chinese man from 628, she knew who he was in the way that everybody on the block knew who he was without quite knowing what he did, had come out onto the sidewalk and had ended the thing without touching anyone.
She had stayed at the window. She would stay at the window for the next 11 minutes. She would be the only person on College Street other than Dan Inosanto across the street and the smaller man on the sidewalk and the woman against the wall who saw the entire event from beginning to end.
She would tell no one about it for the rest of her life. The cruiser came down College Street at 20 m an hour. The driver was Officer Raymond Carell, 38 years old, 11 years on the force. His partner was officer Michael Stavveris, 26, two years on the force. They had been one block east on Hill when the dispatch had come over the radio. Carell saw the bigger man first.
The bigger man was walking north on the east sidewalk, hands at his sides, eyes down, and Carell had been a cop long enough to recognize the gate of a man who had just decided to leave a place faster than was natural, but slower than would draw attention. Carell slowed the cruiser. He pulled up to the curb 6 feet ahead of the bigger man.
The bigger man stopped walking. He did not run. He did not turn. He did not try to cross the street. He stopped because running from a police car in 1970 in Chinatown when you were the bigger of two men in a confrontation was not a thing a thinking man did. And the bigger man, whatever else he was, was a thinking man in that moment.
Carell got out of the driver’s side. Stavis got out of the passenger side. Stavis walked past the bigger man and continued down the sidewalk toward the wall, where he could see the woman with her hand on her cheek and 12 ft from her, the smaller man with the cup. Carell stayed with the bigger man. He said, “Sir, stay where you are.
” The bigger man stayed where he was. Stavis reached the smaller man and the woman. He looked at the woman first. He saw the hand on the cheek. He saw the red mark under the hand. He saw the way she was pressed against the wall. He understood what he was looking at. He looked at the smaller man. He saw the cup. He saw the bare feet.
He saw the open left hand at the side. He saw the way the smaller man was standing. Not aggressive, not afraid, not anything in particular, just standing. He said, “Sir, are you all right?” The smaller man said, “Yes.” Stavis said, “Did this man assault you?” The smaller man said no. Stab said, “Did this man assault her?” The smaller man looked at the woman.
The woman did not speak. The smaller man looked back at Stavveris. The smaller man said, “You should ask her.” Stavis nodded. He turned to the woman. He said, “Ma’am, did this man hit you?” The woman did not answer. She was looking at the smaller man. Stabber said again more gently. Ma’am, did he hit you? I need to hear you say it.
The woman moved her hand away from her face. The red mark was a full handprint, four fingers, and a palm on her left cheek. She nodded. Stavis said, “I need you to say it out loud, ma’am.” For the report. She said, “Yes.” Stavis said, “Yes, he hit you.” She said, “Yes.” Stavis nodded again. He took a small notebook out of his shirt pocket. He wrote two words on it.
He looked back at the smaller man. He said, “Sir, did you witness the assault?” The smaller man said, “I heard it through the window, second floor.” He nodded up just slightly with his chin toward the middle window on the east face of 628. Stavis looked up. He looked at the window. He looked back at the smaller man. He looked at the cup in the smaller man’s hand.
He looked at the bare feet on the concrete. He looked back up at the window. The window was 16 ft above the sidewalk. The door of 628 was 8 ft to the left of where the woman was standing. Stabris said, “You came down?” The smaller man said, “Yes.” Stabis said from the second floor. The smaller man said yes. Stavis said barefoot.
The smaller man said yes. Stavis wrote three more words in the notebook. He looked at the bigger man 20 ft up the sidewalk standing in front of Carell with his hands at his sides. He looked at the smaller man. He looked at the cup. He said, “Sir, what’s your name?” The smaller man looked at him.
He did not answer for one full second. Then he said, “I’d rather not give my name. I am not the one who was hit. I am not the one who hit. I came down because I heard the sound. The woman against the wall is your witness. The man up the street is your suspect. My name is not in your report. Stavis looked at him. He had been a cop for two years.
He had taken statements from 40 or 50 witnesses in those two years. He had never had a witness refuse to give a name at the scene with this particular kind of calm. Witnesses who refused to give names usually refused because they were afraid or because they had warrants or because they didn’t trust the police.
The smaller man was none of those things. The smaller man was just declining. Stavis looked at the cup again. He said, “Sir, I’m going to need something for the report.” The smaller man said, “Put down.” Male, Asian, approximately 5’7, barefoot, declined to identify. Stavis looked at him for another second. Then he wrote it down.
He wrote it down exactly that way, word for word, because something in the smaller man’s voice when he had given the line had not been a request and had not been a refusal, but had been the simple level dictation of a man who already knew what the line in the report was going to say and was saving Stavveris the trouble of inventing it.
Stabis wrote, “M Asian, approximate 5’7 in barefoot did not provide name. He closed the notebook. He said, “Sir, stay here. We may need you for a followup.” The smaller man said, “I’ll be upstairs.” He nodded at 628. Stavis walked back toward Carell and the bigger man. The smaller man stayed where he was, 12 ft plus 8 in from where the bigger man had been.
tea in his right hand, bare feet on the concrete. He did not move. He was waiting for something. What he was waiting for was the bigger man to look at him again. The bigger man, 20 ft up the sidewalk, was standing in front of officer Carell. Carell had his hand on his service revolver, not drawn, just resting on the grip.
The way a cop’s hand rests on a grip when the cop has not yet decided how the next minute is going to go. The bigger man had his own hands at his sides. He had not been told to put them anywhere yet. He was looking at Carell. He was answering questions. His voice was low and his answers were short. The smaller man was 12 ft plus 8 in from where the bigger man had been when the bigger man had been hitting the woman.
The bigger man was now 30 ft from that spot up the sidewalk by the cruiser. The total distance between the smaller man and the bigger man was 42 ft. The smaller man did not move. He held the cup. He kept his left hand open at his side. He kept his feet where they were. He kept his eyes on the back of the bigger man’s head.
He was waiting for the bigger man to turn around and look at him. This is the part Dan Inosanto would decades later describe to my father as the part most people would not have understood even if they had seen it. The bigger man’s body had agreed for seconds and a half step ago to stand down. The bigger man’s spine had told him to step back.
The bigger man had walked north on College Street with his hands at his sides and his shoulders down and his eyes on the concrete. But the bigger man’s mind, somewhere underneath the spine’s decision, had not yet fully accepted what the spine had done. The smaller man knew this. The smaller man had watched men’s bodies do this for 15 years.
He had stood across mats from hundreds of men whose spines had said one thing and whose minds had said another. And he had learned very precisely how long the gap between those two answers usually lasted and what could happen inside the gap. The gap in his experience lasted between 60 and 90 seconds. If the bigger man was going to recover from the spine’s decision and reassert the mind’s plan, it was going to happen inside that window.
The smaller man was going to be standing where he was when the window closed. That’s what he was waiting for. Up the sidewalk, the bigger man finished a sentence to Carell. Carell wrote something in his own notebook. Carell looked past the bigger man down the sidewalk at the smaller man. Their eyes met. Carell was a Los Angeles patrolman with 11 years on the force and he had stood in front of a great many men on a great many sidewalks and he had developed the habit of taking the temperature of a scene by looking at the person at the
scene who was not currently speaking. The person not currently speaking in Carell’s experience was usually the person who knew the most. He looked at the smaller man. He saw the cup. He saw the bare feet. He saw the way the smaller man was looking past him at the back of the bigger man’s head with the patience of a man who had decided to stand on a sidewalk for as long as it took.
Carell understood in that look that the smaller man was not finished. He nodded at the smaller man very slightly. The smaller man did not nod back. The smaller man’s expression did not change. The smaller man’s eyes went back to the back of the bigger man’s head. Carell turned to the bigger man. He said, “Sir, turn around.” The bigger man turned around.
He was facing south now. The smaller man was 42 ft south of him on the sidewalk, holding the cup. The bigger man saw him. For one full second, the bigger man’s eyes locked onto the smaller man’s eyes. The smaller man did not look at the bigger man’s face. He looked again at the point right below the collar bone where the shirt pulled tight.
He had been looking at that point for the entire encounter. He had not looked the bigger man in the eye once. Not when the hand was in the air. Not after the half step. Not now. This was deliberate. Dan would later explain at the kitchen table that the smaller man had taught them a specific thing about eye contact and undeclared confrontations.
The smaller man had said that looking at a man’s eyes during a non-fight created an argument. Eyes against eyes was a contest. Eyes against chest was a measurement. The smaller man had said, “Do not have an argument with the man you do not want to fight. Measure him. Keep measuring him. Let him understand in his body that he is being measured.
” The bigger man, 42 ft up the sidewalk, looked into the smaller man’s face and saw a pair of eyes that were not looking back at him. The eyes were on his chest. The eyes had been on his chest the entire time. The bigger man’s shoulders dropped another half inch. Whatever had been gathering in the bigger man’s mind, in the gap between his spine’s decision and his mind’s plan, stopped gathering.
The window closed. The smaller man saw it close. He spoke for the first time since he had answered Stavis. He did not raise his voice. He did not move, he said just loud enough to carry 42 feet on a quiet Tuesday morning in Chinatown. Sit there. Hands on your knees. He did not say it to Carell. He said it to the bigger man.
He did not point. He nodded very slightly with his chin at a spot on the curb 6 ft from where the bigger man was standing. The bigger man looked at the spot on the curb. He looked at Carell. Carell looked at the smaller man. Carell looked at the bigger man. The bigger man sat down on the curb. He sat where the smaller man had nodded.
He put his hands flat on his knees, palms down, fingers spread. He did not look up. He looked at his own hands. Carell looked at the smaller man for a long moment. Carell had never in 11 years on the force been in a situation where the man who had stopped the violence was giving instructions to the man who had started it and the violent man was following them.
He had been in situations where bystanders had tried to give instructions. The instructions were almost always ignored. The instructions were almost always wrong. The instructions were almost always the kind of thing that escalated a scene rather than deescalated it. And Carell had spent a good portion of his 11 years telling bystanders to step back and let him work. This was different.
The smaller man had not given the instruction to him. The smaller man had given it to the bigger man. And the bigger man had complied without looking at Carell, without checking with Carell. The way a man complies with an instruction when his body has already decided that the person giving the instruction is the person whose instructions are going to be followed for the rest of the morning.
Carell walked down the sidewalk toward the smaller man. He stopped 6 ft from him. He looked at the cup. He looked at the bare feet. He looked at the open left hand at the side. He said, “Sir, are you the one who called this in?” The smaller man said, “No.” He said, “The woman in the apartment building called it in.
” He said he came down because he heard the sound through his window. He said the bigger man had not touched the woman a second time. He said the bigger man was going to sit on the curb until the officers were finished talking to the woman, and then the officers could decide what to do. Carell looked at him.
He said, “Sir, do you know this man?” The smaller man said, “No.” Carell said, “Has he threatened you?” The smaller man said, “No.” Carell said, “Very carefully, sir, why is he doing what you tell him?” The smaller man looked at the bigger man sitting on the curb. The bigger man’s hands were still flat on his knees. His head was still down.
His shoulders had dropped another inch since he had sat. He looked like a man who had been sitting on that curb for a long time and would be sitting on it for a long time more. The smaller man looked back at Carell. Then he said the only complete sentence he had spoken since he had come down the stairs that was longer than four words.
because I haven’t told him he can stand up. Now, believe me, Carell did not know what to do with that answer. He stood there on the sidewalk for what Dan watching from across the street said felt like a full minute. Dan said later it was probably 10 seconds. Dan said that Carell looked at the bigger man and looked at the smaller man and looked at the bigger man again and his face did the thing that the faces of men do when their training and their experience are giving them two different answers and they do not know which
answer to follow. Carell’s training said this is the witness. Take the statement. Move on. Carell’s experience said the witness is the one running this scene. find out why his experience one. He said, “Sir, I need you to explain that to me.” The smaller man took half a sip of the tea. The tea was still warm. He had not lifted the cup to his mouth since he had come down the stairs.
A half sip was the first one he had taken in almost 4 minutes. He swallowed. He looked at Carell. He said he has not decided yet what kind of morning he is going to have. If I leave, he will stand up and finish what he was doing. If you arrest him without speaking to her first, he will tell you it was a misunderstanding and she will not contradict him because she is afraid of him and because she lives in his apartment.
If she does not give you her statement before he stands up, she will not give it after. The only way she gives you her statement is if he is sitting on the curb with his hands on his knees and she is talking to your partner and she can see that he is not going to stand up. He took another half sip.
He said, “He is sitting on the curb because I have not told him he can stand up. I will not tell him he can stand up until she has finished her statement. Then you can decide. Carell did not answer for several seconds. He looked at the bigger man on the curb. The bigger man had not moved. He looked at the woman who was talking to Stabis now, her hand still on her cheek, her voice low.
He looked at the smaller man. He said, “Sir, where did you learn to do that?” The smaller man did not smile. His face did not change. He said, “Upstairs.” He nodded slightly with his chin at the middle window of 628. Carell looked up at the window. He looked back at the smaller man. He nodded once. He said, “Stay where you are, sir.
I’ll let you know when we’re done.” The smaller man said, “I’ll be here.” Carell walked back to the bigger man on the curb. He did not draw his revolver. He did not put his hand on the grip again. He stood 5 ft from the bigger man with his notebook in his hand, and he asked the bigger man a series of questions that the bigger man answered in short, low sentences without looking up from his own hands.
Down the sidewalk, Stabis was finishing with the woman. She had given her name. She had given her address, the apartment behind the wall, third floor, the unit next to Eleanor Reyes’s. She had given the bigger man’s name. She had given the date of their marriage. She had given the date of the first time he had hit her, which was 4 years before this morning.
She had given the approximate frequency of the hitting which was three or four times a month and the approximate severity which had been escalating for the last 6 months. She had given all of this in the same low voice without crying without raising her voice without looking at the bigger man on the curb 30 ft up the sidewalk.
She had given it because the smaller man was standing 12 ft plus 8 in from where the bigger man had been and the bigger man was sitting on the curb with his hands on his knees and she could see from where she was standing against the wall that the bigger man was not going to stand up until the smaller man let him stand up.
She had been waiting 4 years for that condition to exist. She told Stavis everything in 11 minutes. When she finished, Stabis closed his notebook. He thanked her. He told her she could go upstairs if she wanted to. She said she would stay on the sidewalk until they took him away. Stavis said that was fine. He walked back up the sidewalk to Carell and the bigger man.
He showed Carell the notebook. Carell read it. He looked at the bigger man. He said, “Stand up. Hands behind your back.” The bigger man looked up. He looked at the smaller man 42 ft down the sidewalk. The smaller man was looking at the back of Carell’s head, not at the bigger man. The bigger man understood. He stood up.
He put his hands behind his back. Carell put the cuffs on him. Stavis opened the back door of the cruiser. Carell walked the bigger man to the cruiser. He put his hand on the top of the bigger man’s head, the way cops do when they put someone into the back seat, and he guided the head down, and the bigger man sat in the back of the cruiser.
The door closed. Carell walked back to the woman. He gave her a card with a phone number on it. He told her to call the number if anything happened in the next 24 hours. He told her there would be paperwork at the station and that she might be asked to come down later in the day or the next day. She nodded. She held the card in her hand.
Carell walked back to the smaller man. He stopped 6 ft from him. He said, “Sir, thank you.” The smaller man nodded once. Carell did not ask for his name again. He had read what Stavveris had written in the notebook. He had read M Asian approximate 5′ 7 in barefoot did not provide name. He did not write anything more.
He turned and walked back to the cruiser. He got into the driver’s side. Stavis got into the passenger side. The engine, which had been idling the entire time, dropped into gear. The cruiser pulled away from the curb. It turned right on Hill Street. It disappeared. The smaller man stayed where he was for another 20 seconds.
He stayed because the woman was still on the sidewalk against the wall and he wanted her to see that he was still there and that he was not going to leave until she did. He stayed because Eleanor Reyes on the third floor of the apartment building behind the wall was still at her window with the phone in her hand and he had felt without looking up that there was a witness above him and he wanted the witness to see the shape of the ending as well as the shape of the beginning.
He stayed because the bigger man’s hands were no longer on his knees. But the bigger man’s hands had been on his knees, and the morning needed 20 more seconds of stillness to set. After 20 seconds, the woman moved. She moved away from the wall. She took one step forward, then another. She turned to face the smaller man.
She did not walk toward him. She stayed where she was. She said, “Thank you.” The smaller man did not answer. He nodded once. She said, “How did you know to come down?” The smaller man said, “I heard you.” She said, “Through the window.” He nodded. She looked up at the middle window of 628. She said it was open. He said, “Yes.
” She nodded. She did not say anything else. She turned. She walked to the door of her own building, which was 8 ft to the south of where she had been against the wall. She opened the door. She went inside. The door closed behind her. The smaller man stayed for 10 more seconds. Then he turned, walked the 12 ft plus 8 in back to the door of 628, opened it with the hand that wasn’t holding the cup, and went inside.
The brass bell rang. He climbed the 18 stairs. The door at the top was still half an inch a jar, the way he had left it. He pushed it open. He walked into the room. He latched the door behind him. He walked across the 38 ft of pine floor to the front of the room. He stopped at the middle window. He looked down at the sidewalk.
The sidewalk was empty. The woman was inside her building. The bigger man was in the back of a cruiser somewhere east on Hill Street. Eleanor Reyes was no longer at her window. She had set the phone down and walked into her kitchen and was now making coffee because she had decided in a way she did not yet have words for that the morning had required coffee.
College Street was a normal Tuesday morning. The three older men were still talking at the corner of Hill and College. The delivery truck was still double parked in front of the grocerers. The radio from somewhere was still playing. The smaller man took a full sip of the tea. It was still warm. He drank the rest of it standing at the window, looking down at the sidewalk, where 11 minutes earlier, a man’s hand had been in the air over a woman’s face, and he had stopped it without touching either of them. When the cup was empty,
he carried it to the small kitchen at the back of the room. He rinsed it. He set it upside down on a folded cloth to dry. He did not wash it with soap. He never washed that cup with soap. He had used the same cup for 12 years. He sat down on the pine floor at the front of the room with his back against the wall in the place where he sometimes sat between classes.
He closed his eyes. He breathed. That was when the brass bell rang again. He opened his eyes. He stood up. He walked to the door. He looked through the peepphole. Dan Inosanto was on the bottom step. Dan was holding the envelopes. He had not gone to the post office. He had walked across College Street after the cruiser had pulled away and he had stood in front of the door of 628 for almost a full minute and then he had opened it and walked up.
The smaller man unlatched the door. He opened it. Dan came in. He stood just inside the door. He looked at the smaller man. He looked at the empty room. He looked at the cup upside down on the cloth in the small kitchen at the back. He said, “How did you know he wasn’t going to swing?” The smaller man walked back to the front of the room.
He sat down again on the pine floor with his back against the wall. He gestured with his open left hand at the spot of floor across from him. Dan walked across the room. He set the envelopes down on the floor next to the wall. He sat down across from the smaller man, cross-legged, the way he had sat across from the smaller man a thousand times in the past 3 years.
The smaller man looked at him. He said, “I didn’t.” Dan said, “Then why did you walk out?” The smaller man did not answer immediately. He was looking at a spot on the pine floor between them. He was breathing slowly. His hands were resting on his own knees, palms down, fingers spread in the same position the bigger man’s hands had been on his knees on the curb 20 minutes earlier.
He had not noticed this. Dan had noticed it. Dan did not mention it. After about 10 seconds, the smaller man spoke. He said, “If I go closer, I have to do something. If I stay where I am, he has to do something.” I let him do it. Dan said, “What if he had swung?” The smaller man looked at Dan. He said, “Then I would have done something.
” That was the whole answer. They sat across from each other on the pine floor for another 20 seconds without speaking. Then the smaller man said, “Were you across the street?” Dan said, “In the doorway of the printing shop.” The smaller man nodded. He said, “Did you move?” Dan said, “No.” The smaller man nodded again.
He said, “Good.” That was the whole conversation about Dan’s part in it. They sat for another minute. Then Dan said, “I need to go to the post office.” The smaller man nodded. Dan stood up. He picked up the envelopes. He walked to the door. He stopped at the door with his hand on the handle and he turned back. He said, “Sefue.
” The smaller man looked at him. Dan said, “What was the half step for?” The smaller man looked at him for a long moment. He said, “I needed him to step back, so I gave him a reason to.” Dan said, “That’s it.” The smaller man said, “That’s it.” Dan said, “Why 8 in?” The smaller man said, “8 in is the smallest distance a man can register his motion at 12 ft without registering it as an attack.
” If I had moved 6 in, he would not have noticed. If I had moved 10 in, he would have flinched. Dan said, “How do you know that?” The smaller man said, “I have measured.” Dan stood at the door for another second. He nodded. He opened the door. He went down the 18 stairs. The brass bell rang as the street door opened. The brass bell rang as the street door closed.
The smaller man sat on the pine floor with his back against the wall. He closed his eyes again. He breathed. The morning was over. But the story wasn’t because the smaller man, when he sat on the pine floor with his back against the wall and closed his eyes and breathed, did not know yet that the morning he had just spent on a sidewalk in Chinatown would still be in motion 55 years later.
He did not know that Dan Inosanto going down the stairs with the envelopes was already beginning the slow work of carrying it. He did not know that a woman on a third floor across the street had watched the whole thing through her kitchen window and would never tell anyone what she had seen.
He did not know that a Los Angeles patrolman named Raymond Carell would 8 years later tell the story to his own son at a dinner table in Glendale and his own son would tell it to a friend and the friend would tell it to a colleague and one branch of the telling would surface again in 2004 in a documentary that nobody would watch. He did not know any of this.
He sat on the pine floor and he breathed. The morning was over for him. For the story, it was just starting. Here’s the thing about a chain of telling. A chain of telling is fragile in a way that most people don’t understand. Most people assume that if a thing happens in public, on a sidewalk, in front of witnesses, it will survive.
Most people assume that the world keeps the events that the world has watched. The world does not. The world loses most of what it watches. The world loses it because the witnesses die or move away or forget or decide that the event was not the kind of event you talk about or talk about it once to the wrong person and then never talk about it again because the wrong person did not understand what they were being given.
The morning of July 14th, 1970 on College Street, almost died inside the first six months. The woman against the wall, whose name was Helen, though I will not give her last name here because Dan never gave it to my father and my father never gave it to me, moved out of the apartment building behind the wall 3 weeks after the morning.
She moved to a town outside Sacramento. She did not tell her neighbors where she was going. She did not leave a forwarding address with the post office. She told no one about the morning on College Street. She lived for another 41 years. She died in 2011. Her obituary in the local paper said she was a retired nurse, that she had no surviving family, that services would be private.
The obituary did not mention College Street. It did not mention a small Chinese man with a cup of tea. It did not mention a sidewalk in Chinatown in the summer of 1970. The bigger man, whose name was on the arrest report Stabis filed that afternoon, and which Dan looked up years later in a public records search, was booked on a domestic assault charge.
He posted bond the next morning. The case went to trial in October. Helen did not appear to testify. The case was dismissed. He moved to Bakersfield in 1972. He did not get arrested for domestic violence again. He worked construction in Bakersfield until he retired in 1998. He died in 2003 of a heart attack at the age of 61.
Dan never tried to contact him. Dan said at the kitchen table in 1989 that he had thought about it once in the late 70s and had decided that whatever the bigger man had become after Bakersfield was his own to keep and that going to find him would have been a violation of something that the smaller man had set up on the sidewalk that morning and that nobody had the right to undo.
Eleanor Reyes on the third floor watched the whole thing through her kitchen window. She put the phone down after the cruiser pulled away. She made coffee. She drank it standing at the sink. She did not tell her sister who lived in San Diego and called her every Sunday. She did not tell her doctor. She did not tell the priest at St.
Bridget’s where she went on Sunday mornings. She lived in the apartment on College Street for another 23 years. She moved to a retirement home in Pasadena in 1993. She died there in 1997. A volunteer at the home going through her personal effects found a small spiral notebook in the top drawer of her dresser. The notebook had three pages of handwriting.
The third page was dated July 14th, 1970. The third page described in seven short sentences what Eleanor had seen from her window. The notebook was donated along with the rest of her papers to a local historical society. It sits today in a box in a storage room in Pasadena. Nobody has read it since the volunteer who packed it.
Officer Raymond Carell retired in 1981. He moved to Glendale. He told the story to his son once at a dinner table in 1978. His son was 19. The son did not understand what his father was telling him. The son thought his father was describing a strange call from his beat in Chinatown. The son did not understand that his father was describing the only call in 11 years of service where the witness had been the one running the scene.
Carell died in 1994. The son, by then in his 30s, remembered the story but had forgotten the details. He remembered a small Chinese man, a cup of tea, a husband sitting on a curb. He remembered that his father had said at the end of the story that he had thought about that morning for the rest of his career.
He did not remember why. Officer Michael Stavveris stayed on the force until 2003. He never told anyone the story. He had written it in the notebook. The notebook was filed at the station. The notebook is presumably still in a box somewhere in an LAPD archive. Nobody has looked at it. Dan Inos Santo carried it.
Dan carried it for 19 years before he told it to my father. Dan told it to my father in 1989 because the smaller man had been dead for 16 years and Helen had been gone for 19 and the bigger man was in Bakersfield and Carell and Stabis had moved on and Dan was by his own count the last person walking around in the world who had seen the entire 40 seconds with his own eyes from a position close enough to understand them.
My father met Dan at a seminar in San Francisco in 1986. My father had been studying martial arts since he was a teenager. He had cycled through several styles. He had ended up in his late30s in the lineage that traced back through Dan to the smaller man. He had attended Dan’s seminars for 3 years before Dan invited him to dinner at the kitchen table in 1989 in a house in Marina del Rey where Dan was living at the time.
The dinner was small. There were four people at the table. By 11:00, three of them had gone home. My father stayed because Dan asked him to stay. They sat in the kitchen. Dan made coffee. My father drank water. Dan said, “I’m going to tell you something I have told two other people in 19 years.” I am telling you because the two other people did not understand what I told them. I think you will.
My father said, “All right.” Dan told the story. He told it for 40 minutes. He started with the open windows. He explained why the windows had to be open. He explained the bell. He explained the peepphole. He explained the 22 students. He explained the cup. He went down the stairs with the smaller man.
He stepped out onto the sidewalk. He stopped 12 ft from the bigger man. He waited 4 seconds. He took the half step. He measured the 8 in. He told my father about the conversation with Carell. He repeated the line because I haven’t told him he can stand up. He repeated it the way Dan said the smaller man had said it, flat level without emphasis.
The way a man states a fact about the weather. He told my father about coming back upstairs. He told my father about the question he had asked. He told my father about the answer he had been given. He told my father about the second answer. then I would have done something and he stopped for a moment after that line and he looked at my father across the kitchen table.
My father said he was making the bigger man write the next page. Dan looked at him. Dan said that’s it. Dan said that’s exactly it. Dan said the two other people I told this to, I had to explain it to them after. I had to explain why he didn’t move closer. I had to explain why the half step worked.
I had to explain why he stayed on the sidewalk after the cruiser left. They listened. They nodded. They did not understand. Dan said, “You understood it without me explaining it.” My father said, “I have been thinking about that kind of thing for a long time.” Dan said, “I can tell.” They sat at the kitchen table for another two hours. Dan told my father a few smaller stories from the upstairs room.
My father wrote nothing down during the conversation. He had been raised to believe that taking notes in front of someone who was telling you a story was a way of telling them you did not trust your own memory. And he had never broken that habit. He left Dan’s house at 1:00 in the morning. He drove home. On the way home, he stopped at a 24-hour diner on Lincoln Boulevard and ordered a coffee.
The waitress brought him a check with the coffee. He paid. She gave him the receipt. He sat in the booth. He took a pen out of his pocket. He wrote on the back of the receipt the two sentences the smaller man had said to Dan on the pine floor. If I go closer, I have to do something. If I stay where I am, he has to do something. I let him do it.
Then I would have done something. He folded the receipt. He put it in his wallet. He drove home. When he got home, he took the receipt out of his wallet. He put it in an envelope. He wrote on the outside of the envelope in his own handwriting, Bruce, College Street. Dan, 1989. He put the envelope in the top drawer of his desk.
He kept it there for the rest of his life. That was the first time my father wrote the name down. That was also the first time in this story that the name has appeared. The smaller man on the sidewalk that morning was Bruce Lee. He was 30 years old in July of 1970. He had not yet made Enter the Dragon. He had not yet become the face that the entire world would recognize.
He had been working in films for years, but the work that would three years later put his face on a poster on the wall of every 14-year-old in the Western world had not happened yet. In July of 1970 in Los Angeles, he was a martial artist running a small school on the second floor of a brick building at 628 College Street.
And he was the most quietly feared technician in his city, and he was not yet famous. He died on July 20th, 1973 in Hong Kong at the age of 32. He never told the story of College Street publicly. He never wrote about it. He never mentioned it in an interview. The line because I haven’t told him he can stand up does not appear in any of his published writings or recorded talks.
The morning on the sidewalk was not part of his public record. The only people who knew the full story were Helen, the bigger man, Eleanor Reyes, Carell, Stavvers, Dan, and Bruce himself. Six of those seven are dead. The seventh is Helen, possibly. If Helen is alive, she would be in her late 80s. Her obituary appeared in a small paper outside Sacramento in 2011, but obituaries are not always correct.
And Dan, the last time my father spoke to him about it, said he was not entirely sure Helen had been the woman in the obituary. The dates lined up. The general biography lined up, but Dan said he could not be 100% certain. Dan said it is possible she is still alive. It is also possible she died 40 years ago and no one knew.
Dan said she walked away from the morning and she was supposed to walk away from the morning. Whether she lived for another year or another 50, the morning belonged to her in a way that the rest of us do not get to follow. That’s what Dan said. My father told me this story for the first time when I was 19 years old. We were in his garage.
He was rewiring a lamp. He had a soldering iron in one hand and a piece of copper wire in the other. And he stopped in the middle of the sentence and looked at me over the top of his glasses and asked me if I understood what the smaller man had meant. I said I thought I did. He said I didn’t. He said most people when they hear that story think the smaller man was being modest.
They think he was saying that he wasn’t sure he could win. My father said that wasn’t it. He said the smaller man knew exactly what he could do. He said the smaller man could have closed 12 feet of sidewalk in less than half a second and he could have done it before the bigger man’s hand finished the second arc downward and the bigger man would have been on the concrete before he understood that he had been moved.
The smaller man wasn’t being modest. He was telling Dan something else. He was telling Dan that the most powerful position on the sidewalk that morning was not the position of the man who could win the fight. It was the position of the man who could choose whether the fight happened. He held that position by standing 12 ft away.
The moment he moved closer, he gave it up. The moment he stayed where he was, he kept it. The half step was 8 in because 8 in was the smallest distance that registered as motion without registering as an attack. The half step was a message, not an action. The message was, “I am closer than I was.” The message was not, “I am coming for you.
” The bigger man’s spine read the message. The bigger man’s hand came down. That was the entire fight. My father in the garage said, “You understand?” I said, “He was making the bigger man write the next page.” My father said, “Yes.” He said, “Dan said the same thing to me.” He went back to the soldering iron. That was the first time I heard the story.
I have heard it in pieces many times since. My father told it again when I was 24. He told it again when I was 31. He told it once at his 65th birthday to a small group of his friends in the backyard. And he stopped halfway through because his voice caught. And one of his friends, a woman named Margaret, who had known him for 40 years, said, “Go ahead, Tom. Finish it.
” And he did finish it, but he finished it more quickly than he had in the garage. And he did not look at me while he finished it because by then I had heard it five or six times and we both knew it was for the friends in the back yard and not for me. He died in 2020. I found the receipt 3 days after the funeral. It was in the top drawer of his desk in the envelope exactly where Dan had told him to put it.
The envelope had four pieces of paper in it. The receipt from the diner on Lincoln Boulevard with the two sentences on the back. A photograph of Dan taken at the kitchen table in Marina del Rey that Dan had given my father in 1991. A folded piece of yellow legal paper with my father’s notes from the dinner with Dan.
Notes he had written when he got home in his own kitchen at 3:00 in the morning. and a small white card, the kind that comes in florists arrangements with three words on it in my father’s handwriting. He let him. I read the receipt. I read the legal paper. I read the card. I sat at my father’s desk for a long time.
Then I put the four pieces of paper back in the envelope. I closed the drawer. I went home. I put the envelope in the top drawer of my own desk. It is in the top drawer of my own desk. Now I have not added anything to it. I am telling you this story because Dan told my father and my father told me and the chain of the telling is fragile and Dan is gone and my father is gone and the chain has one link left and the link is me.
I am telling you because the morning on college street did not survive on its own. It survived because seven people knew what happened and one of them after 55 years decided that one of the people he was telling needed to be a person he had not met. That person is you. There is one thing I never asked my father. I never asked him why Dan told him the story in 1989.
I never asked what made Dan, 16 years after Bruce had died, sit down in his own kitchen and tell a man he had known for 3 years a 40minute version of something he had carried for 19 years. I think about that. I think Dan told it because Bruce was gone and Helen was gone and the bigger man was in Bakersfield and Eleanor was on the third floor of a building Dan didn’t know about and Carell had retired to Glendale and Stavveris’s notebook was in a box at the station and Dan was the only person walking around in the world
who had been close enough to the sidewalk that morning to see the whole shape of it. I think Dan told it because if he didn’t, it would die. I think my father wrote the two sentences on the receipt for the same reason. And I am telling you the same way. Here’s what I think about when I think about that morning on College Street.
I think about the open window. The school had no air conditioning. If the school had had air conditioning, the windows would have been closed and the sound of a hand striking a face on a public sidewalk would not have come through them. and the smaller man would not have heard her and the morning would have gone the way it was going to go.
I think about the cup. He did not put it down. He carried it down two flights of stairs and out onto the sidewalk and held it through 40 seconds of the most controlled non-fight of his life. And he did not spill it. And he drank it afterward, standing at the window, and it was still warm. I think about the bare feet.
He did not go back for shoes. The concrete was 111° in the sun. He stood on it for almost 12 minutes. His feet were red when he came back upstairs. He did not mention it. I think about Dan in the doorway with the envelopes. I think about the 8 in. I think about Helen, possibly alive, possibly somewhere outside Sacramento, possibly in a small house with a garden, possibly remembering a morning 55 summers ago when a small Chinese man came down a flight of stairs with a cup of tea and stood on a sidewalk and did
not move. I think about the bigger man in Bakersfield, working construction for 26 more years, going home every night to whatever life he built after the morning, never arrested for the same thing again. I do not know what to make of that. I do not know if the morning on College Street is the reason he was not arrested again, or if the morning is unrelated, or if some quieter version of the morning kept happening inside him every time he raised his hand and his spine remembered what it had been told on a sidewalk in Chinatown.
I will never know. The bigger man did not write anything down. The bigger man took the morning with him. I think about Eleanor Reyes and the notebook in the storage room in Pasadena and the seven sentences she wrote on the third page in July of 1970 and the fact that I have never seen them and probably never will.
I think about Carell telling his son at a dinner table in 1978 and his son not understanding and Carell never telling him again. I think about Stavveris and the line in the report. M Asian approximately 5’7 in barefoot did not provide name. I think about my father in the garage with the soldering iron. And I think about the door, the door of 628 College Street, the door the smaller man came out of.
The door he went back through. My father said once that he thought the whole story was about the door. He said most fights start when someone opens a door they shouldn’t have opened. He said this one stopped because someone opened a door he didn’t have to open and then went back through it like it was a normal Tuesday morning. I did not understand that when I was 19.
I think I understand it now. The receipt is in the top drawer of my desk. The envelope is with it. The handwriting on the envelope is my father’s. The handwriting on the receipt is my father’s. The handwriting on the card is my father’s. The story is Dan’s. The morning is Bruce’s and Helens and the bigger man’s and Eleanors and Carells and Stavverises and a cup of green tea that did not spill and a half step of 8 in on hot concrete and a hand that did not come down.
The chain has one link left. I am giving you the link. Hold it. It is yours now.
