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extra black.
    “What do you want?” he demanded, startling me, moving in close, giving me a good look at a mouthful of decaying teeth.
    “I want to play point guard for the Minnesota Timberwolves, but I’ll settle for speaking with the administrator.” I backed away and dug in my pocket for the photostat of my license.
    He glanced at the ID. “Smart ass,” he said.
    “People keep calling me that.”
    “Fuck you.”
    “C’mon pal, no trouble for either of us, okay? Just tell the guy who runs the place …”
    He poked me in the chest.
    “Don’t do that,” I told him.
    “I don’t like you,” he said and poked me again. I tried to swipe his hand away but caught only air as he quickly pulled it back. He gave me a playground-bully smile and said, “You wouldn’t last fifteen minutes in the yard.”
    I believed him. I took another step backward.
    “You’re a fuckin’ pussy. I’m gonna kick your ass.”
    I took still another step backward and went into a free-fighting stance, weight evenly distributed, feet at forty-five-degree angles. I took a chance and kept my hands low. My left leg began to tremble slightly with anticipation. Or was it fear? It always does that, even when I’m just sparring, my groin protected with a fiberglass cup, my hands and feet encased in foam rubber.
    I’m not a big man. I barely passed the minimum height requirement for a police officer in St. Paul and several veteran officers refused to ride with me for fear they’d continually have to save my ass from various surly and much larger miscreants—small cops are challenged a lot. During my second week on the job, a dis. con. dribbled my head on the asphalt four times before I subdued him with the butt of my Glock 17. Soon after I began studying a combination of judo, karate and aikido. I pulled eighteen separate muscles attempting to master the basic kick and what I did to my hands, plunging them in and out of pea gravel to toughen their edges, I’m amazed my wife ever allowed me to touch her.
    Still, I learned fast. I do not have a belt; I have not attempted to earn one. Nor am I interested in the virtues that martial arts are supposed to instill: control, courtesy, discipline, respect. I am interested merely in survival. When I had first approached the sensai at Dragons, my dojo in Minneapolis, he asked me why I wanted to master the arts. “So I can beat the hell outta people without getting hurt myself,” I answered. He looked at me like he felt sorry for me. He told me the arts must be used only as a last resort; he told me, “When hand go out, withdraw anger; when anger go out, withdraw hand.” I have tried to live by that philosophy ever since. Mostly, I’ve failed.
    “Pal, I’m the last guy you want to dance with,” I warned the convict. He didn’t believe me. He grabbed the lapel of my sports jacket. I grasped his hand with my left and pushed up on his elbow with my right. When his back started to arch, I pulled down hard on his hand and pushed the elbow straight up, flipping him on his back, his head thudding loudly on the porch floor. Nothing to it. If the PI gig didn’t work out, I could always get employment as a bouncer at a high-class strip joint.
    “This wasn’t necessary,” I told the convict calmly, listening to his pain and applying more pressure to his shoulder joint whenever he tried to move. “This did not need to happen.”
    Eventually, another man appeared at the door. “Stop it, stop it!” he screamed in a high, effeminate voice.
    “Are you the administrator of this facility?” I asked.
    “Yes.”
    I released the convict and stood up. “Hi. I’m Holland Taylor.”
    He ignored my outstretched hand and demanded to know what was going on.
    “Nothing,” my attacker told him, massaging his shoulder.
    “I told you what would happen if there was any more trouble, J. T.!” the administrator yelled.
    “No trouble,” I said, taking J. T.’s side. “We were just putzing around. I was