THE YEAR IS 2002 – AUGUST

Suppose you’re about to engage in a sparring drill. And suppose the one ground rule for this drill is body blows only. This means no face punches, no kicks, just punches to the torso. It’s a simple concept, one would think.

My fellow student, Alex, is six feet tall and burly, with a buzz cut and European accent. I’m an orange belt. He’s a higher-ranking green belt, so I figure it’s my right to go all out during this drill, which again, just to be clear, is a body blows only drill.

We begin the drill and Alex is quickly overwhelmed by my barrage. In what seems like a last gasp of defiance, he breaks the rules and punches me in the face. It’s not a hard punch, but it’s enough to startle me and end the drill. I’m thinking: “Idiot! What don’t you get about body blows?”

A few weeks later the instructor says, “Hey guys, you might not know this, but Alex is a great writer, he has a new book out.”

I think: So, the idiot who hit me in the face is a published writer. Interesting. I find his full name on the class roster: Aleksandar Hemon. Never heard of him. I google him and find a review of his book online, in the (holy shit) New York Times Book Review, and it says nothing about Alex being an idiot. Instead, it compares him to Nabokov.

I’m not a big reader, but the guy’s in my karate class, and he’s the only human being to ever punch me directly in the face. So that week I buy his books. I’m no expert, but even I can see the writing is beyond impressive. I’m entertained, moved, enriched, and even inspired to be a better person.

Here’s the mindfuck: a lot of Hemon’s fiction at this point is about Pronek, a guy who happens to be six feet tall and burly, with a buzz cut and non-descript European accent. Pronek, ingeniously introspective, at one point, roams a surreal Chicago, often mistaken for an idiot with a buzz cut and European accent. The people doing the mistaking in his stories are often depicted as soulless ghouls – grotesque, selfish, deadened caricatures of all that’s wrong with humanity.

After reading, I enter the dojo with new eyes, seeing Alex with near awe, and feeling stupid for having underestimated him. I’ve even convinced myself that his punch in the face – the once idiotic act – might actually have been a gesture of profound, literary import.

Soon I quit the class over a sore neck, lack of funds, lack of commitment, whatever, still never having said a word to Alex. The holds, grapples and combination techniques I learned would be forgotten, but the curiously rule-breaking punch from Hemon would reverberate for years.

* * *

THE YEAR IS 2012 – TEN YEARS AFTER THE HEMON PUNCH

I’m in another class. This time it’s a writing class, with several students decades younger than me. I remember that feeling, being a younger college guy, taking classes with older people. There was always that one true adult ruining the youthful homogeneity. It’s like: fine, you’re noble and all, pursuing learning late in life, but you’re also kinda creepy. Maybe even decrepit.

So now, rather than focusing on the lesson, I’m daydreaming about what my younger self would think about my older self. The Young Me might say: “Old Me is noble, pursuing learning, etc., but his balls are probably old, wrinkly and gross.” And in this daydream, the Current Me rebuts with a soliloquy defending my balls against Young Me’s misguided prejudice.

I find it entertaining, so I write it down, and mess with it for an unforgivable length of time. Here’s what it looks like:

“As a 41-year-old in a writing class designed for people half my age, I’m in NO DANGER of seeing myself as an old guy with wrinkly balls – albeit nobly pursuing personal growth – but with sloppy, old-man crotch, dragged behind me, a tattered leathery flask of prostatic spaghetti, embalmed in a casket-aged bisque of corduroy and decay, tracing a fool’s progress – a moist snail’s trail of cinnamon and sauerkraut brine – on the linoleum flooring of these hallowed halls. I repeat, in no way do I see myself like that. And I will continue to repeat this, as needed.”

I’m feeling stupid, but the class directive is: write something rather than nothing. The only major problem is the phrase “cinnamon and sauerkraut brine.” It’s plagiarized from Aleksandar Hemon in The Question Of Bruno. And this sucks me into the tractate about the punch from ten years ago, and Hemon’s weighty, profound writing.

For example, in Hemon’s story, “The Coin”, a character, while suffering sniper fire in the Bosnian war, sees “blood-streams spouting out of surprised children, and they look at you as if they’d done something wrong – broke a vial of expensive perfume or something.”

By contrast, the state of my balls seems a bit trivial.

Now derailed, my mind jumps whole-hog into the film-reel memory of the infamous punch that’s haunted me for ten years: the over-zealous, self-serious blows to Hemon’s midsection, his poetically succinct face punch, and my vexed & befuddled reaction.

I punch delete on “cinnamon & sauerkraut.”

The rest of my indefensible scribblings are saved as Defending My Balls.

I open a fresh new doc and title it: Punching Aleksandar Hemon, and that’s as far as I get. I once tried writing something in 2008 with this same title. It had amounted to a paragraph’s worth of paranoid questions and was instantly abandoned. Maybe this year will be different.

* * *

THE YEAR IS 2008 – SIX YEARS AFTER THE HEMON PUNCH

The American economy is fucked. My little one-man real estate advertising operation goes up in smoke. I have a wife, kids, a house, a dog, everything, and suddenly the money stops flowing. The year is erection-free and panic-filled.

In May, Hemon’s book, The Lazarus Project, is released. Needing a diversion, I buy the hardcover. It’s expensive, but so what? The credit card company will never see the money. May as well have something sturdy to read while the ship goes down.

I promptly read less than half, all the while drifting, thinking about the Hemon punch, and the fact that I’m broke and possibly dying. I bury Lazarus on the shelf.

I’m not a writer, but it’s around this time, the crash of ‘08, that I try writing about getting punched by Aleksandar Hemon. Not only would it feel cathartic, I reason, it could even get published somewhere. I figure anything with foreign stuff tends to catch on. I see foreign titles on cable, hear about foreign shit on NPR. South Sudan and Rwanda and Bosnia and Syria – stuff like that.

I punch out a few sentences on my laptop, print it out, kick up my feet, and review my strange manuscript:

“Why did he punch me? Was I a sniveling pig boy, transparently reenacting a Bruce Lee / Rocky Balboa fantasy? Was my self-satisfaction in punching hard and fast a manifestation of American gluttony? Was I seen by Hemon as narcissistic, self-entitled, blind to the plight and complexities of others' suffering souls? Namely immigrant souls? In Hemon’s geniusgrantian gaze, did I have the dull-eyed, blood-hungry whiff of a soul-dead Serbian sniper thug? Was I just another desolate, mindless, meticulously-unshaven consumerist grotesquery like Pronek might have witnessed on a death-rattle L-train heading for the dank emptiness of his studio apartment?”

While reading, there’s a vague sense that I’m blind to whether the questions I generated hold narrative potential or just amount to overwrought whining, and this blindness hurts and chafes against other blindnesses of ‘08.

Repelled by the stresses of the writing life, I give up, realizing I have more important things to do, like obtain foodstuffs for my family. My 112-word freshman effort joins Lazarus in limbo.

It’s hard to write and be an artist when the economy’s crumbling and I have three little kids and an angry wife looking at me like: WTF, dude? The atmosphere is not amenable to writing. The counterpoint, though, is that being marooned and broke in a strange city while your friends and family face ethnic cleansing in Sarajevo is also not so amenable to writing, one would think. Yet Hemon was able to do it.

Check and fucking mate. You win, again, Hemon, I think to myself in ludicrous comparison to a literary giant.

It’s become clear in ’08 that I deserved the punch.

* * *

THE YEAR IS 2001 – ONE YEAR BEFORE THE PUNCH

Days after my child’s first step, commercial airliners deliver crippling body blows to the World Trade Center, et al. my dad calls and says, “go turn on your TV.” I say, “What channel?” He says, “Doesn’t matter.”

Next, I’m barreling toward Best Buy in my SUV to get drums of water, scads of power bars, a metric ton of batteries, a heavy duty flashlight, a transistor radio, a pup tent, a Swiss Army knife, and exactly one 16 oz. bottle of Diet Coke. (Chilled.) Then it’s back home to whisk wife and kids to an undisclosed location: a sleepy park ten miles due north, outside the blast radius of downtown Chicago’s impending nuclear explosion. My beautiful boy gurgles and rides the kiddie slide while my wife and I look on stoically, enjoying our last moments on earth. Oblivious sparrows sing as if nuclear winter isn’t coming. Idiots.

Within a month I’m wearing a gi and learning how to kiai. Suddenly it’s really important that I know how to execute a roundhouse kick. At karate class orientation, I let staff know, “at this point in my life I want to be challenged.”

What I meant was: as a father and husband, it’s high-time for someone to beat the fuck out of me, make me feel something, change me into something different, stronger, heroic.

I’m in a beginner class with younger people, but there’s no time to ruminate on whether my balls are wrinkly and saggy and convey cinnamon and sauerkraut brine, because I’m too busy defending them.

Soon I have more strength, energy and confidence. I cultivate a permanent five-day-old stubble. Testosterone-rich blood circulates and tired synapses regenerate. I grow mentally sharper and possibly brilliant.

I stay up late feeding a ravenous mind: The History Of Western Philosophy, Wittgenstein’s Poker, Heidegger for Dummies, George Carlin’s Napalm & Silly Putty, Kant in 60 Minutes and The Idiot’s Guide To World Conflicts. I’m convinced around this time that if Al Qaeda wanders onto my plane, they’ll have their hands full.

A friend lends me a copy of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, with its cover of the twin Marina Towers. I hadn’t been a Wilco fan, but with my new karate brain, I’m now able to appreciate music on a higher level. Take the brilliant line: “I am an American aquarium drinker / I assassin down the avenue.”

Mondays and Thursdays I assassin down Lincoln Avenue listening to Wilco, en route to the dojo to learn how-to-kill-a-man-with-my-bare-hands-if-necessary.

Soon I’m an orange belt and ready for the big leagues: a class with green and blue belts. Hemon’s a green belt, and at this point he’s just some dopey guy named Alex. Not dopey looking, it’s just that, to me, everyone’s Some Dopey Guy until proven otherwise.

I’m the white dragon, and you’re all faceless extras in my movie. I’m juiced and jazzed and tough and crazy enough to drink directly from an aquarium, bitches, and it’s about fucking time.

* * *

YEARS 1970-1980: THE CHILDHOOD of the GUY WHO ALEKSANDAR HEMON PUNCHED IN THE FACE, a.k.a., GWAHPITF

Gwahpitf is born to a middle-class Jewish family in a verdant & affluent north suburb of Chicago. His life is a blur of cartoons, school, eating, swimming, Mom and Dad, his goofy older brother, babysitters, relatives, treehouses, boardgames, orange carpeting, holidays, Disney World, Star Wars, Happy Days, Hungry Hippos, camp, lunchboxes, and not much else, no relevant literary-grade memories until he’s ten, when he encounters a bully. (Future NHL hockey player.)

The bully’s proposition: either kiss my foot or I’ll break your arm. Gwahpitf opts for appeasement, logic being: a peck on a shoe is a small price to pay to avoid injury.

While Gwahpitf is kneeling, the future hockey pro breaks the rules and spits on the back of our hero’s head. The projectile pierces the late-70’s helmet hair, oozes down the side of the head, and exits behind the left ear.

Traumatized, Gwahpitf marches home and cries to Mom, who relays the event to her father, Hank, a Jewish ex-marine, ex-golden gloves champion who suggests to Gwahpitf that an uppercut “works good in doze situations.”

But killer instinct is not in Gwahpitf’s general wiring – the idea of smashing his bare knuckles into the soft-tissues of a human face is unbearable. Message received: the world can be cruel and unpredictable. How to deal with this fact: unresolved.

That winter Gwahpitf’s leg is maimed in a sledding accident involving the stone barrier of a hidden drainpipe.

WHOOSH. SNAP. STARS.

Lying on his back in the dusk, he hears himself screaming. Observe: halfway between his left knee and ankle, a pregnant lump of snow pants hangs at a right angle...his foot, still in rubber boot, dangles, numb, toe pointing in the wrong direction. The private bone of leg, once a million miles away, was now right there.

It was right there.

Even in this moment of shock, the idea registers he’ll now have to either live with a stump, or bleed to death where he lay. Billions of pre-adolescent synaptic connections shriek their primal chorus of loss, grief, terror.

Grampa Hank visits Gwahpitf in the hospital. He doesn’t need to hear about the primal shriek to know what the doughy, pacifistic ten-year-old had just been through.

Hank’s seen legs blown off in Saipan and Iwo Jima, seen men wailing and in shock. In Nagasaki, he’s seen a baby’s skin burnt to a silvery crisp, fused to its dead mother’s arms. Hank eviscerated “Japs,” with bullets, bayonets and bare hands, if necessary. He fought Hitler’s allies and had fragments deep in his flesh, jagged pieces, still surfacing decades later.

Gwahpitf, with his leg not off, just broken, thinks he now knows what “wounded in action” means. Thinks he knows exactly what his grandfather went through in the war.

Here, in a clean hospital, in a rich North Shore suburb, thirty-five years after the invasion of Normandy, the ex-marine sits with his broken grandson. Two grizzled comrades.

Grampa Hank is sixty and fat, with a bad 70’s hairpiece. A salt & pepper moustache frames his boxer’s nose, flattened by a thousand punches. Hemon would’ve had a field day describing Hank’s face, but he wouldn’t have been able to get a glove on it.

The old vet, an enlisted man, pins his only war medal, a Purple Heart, onto the boy’s gown, and never asks for it back.

FORWARD 18 YEARS TO 1998

OK, Hank asks for the Purple Heart back. Just to look at it until he dies.

FORWARD TO 2003

The Purple Heart returns to Hank’s grandson, who, at this point, sees it mainly as a reminder of his own shortcomings. It may as well have been engraved: For sledding in the manner of a dumbass.

Or more to the point: FROM a guy who would never, in a million years, kiss a bully’s foot, TO a guy who would, and, in fact, did.

* * *

THE YEAR IS 2012 – AUGUST

The directive is still to write something, so with Hemon’s punch in mind, I commit an afternoon to brushing up on Hemon’s writing, convinced it’s the only way to write Punching Aleksandar Hemon with any dignity.

I start with Hemon’s recent collection, Love & Obstacles, and skip to a shorter story, “The Noble Truths of Suffering”, wherein a budding young writer has a brief encounter with a Pulitzer-winning novelist, and much shameful, self-conscious ruminating ensues on the part of the young writer, clearly one of Hemon’s many alter egos.

Jesus, the irony – it’s dangerously close to what I was hoping to do with Punching Aleksandar Hemon, only, A) I’m not a writer, B) My piece is non-fiction, C.) I’ll never approach a fraction of his quality. In sum, I’m fucked.

I re-skim The Question Of Bruno and Nowhere Man, laugh again at the playful imagery, and feel dwarfed again by weighty topics of death and loss.

I note familiar Chicago geography in the Pronek storyline spanning both books. “Pronek went eastward down Jackson to Michigan Avenue, and then walked north, until he found the Boudin French Sourdough Bakery.” I’ve taken this path countless times. On a lunch break, Pronek, who works at Boudin, sits: “in bilingual silence, gawking at the people occupying Boudin tables.”

Long before I punched or read Hemon, I’d sit at Boudin tables on my lunch break. Bamboozled by the novelty of bread bowls, I once attempted to eat one, digging out what Hemon would later describe as: “shit brown spoonfuls of something from a round loaf of bread.”

One of Pronek’s customers at Boudin is labeled “meticulously unshaven.” Touché, asshole.

Later, Pronek describes a woman, “Her hair was platinum white, but pink patches were clearly visible under the fluff, and her skull was right under the skin, it was right there, Pronek thought.”

It was right there.

It’s easy to sympathize with Pronek. Deeply isolated in Chicago, he tends to see life as a series of disturbing metaphors. He clocks an old football as “soulless” an old lady’s gray hair as “bloated” and a woman’s eyes as “one size too big” for her face, a face “embroidered with gullies filled to the brim with powder.”

Pronek rides the same “Touhy bus” I’ve ridden, and notices the smell of “sausagey sweat.” He talks of “tuber noses” and the “yellowish faces of chain-smokers.” Often, the people who comprise this jaundiced, flat cast of extras don’t realize there are deep inner worlds beyond scalp and skull, right there, in all of us, and especially in Pronek.

Pronek tends toward solipsism, yet seems more aware than most that the world is made up of seven billion protagonists. The dichotomy is disarming and profound and feels like home.

I exhume The Lazarus Project. As feared, I’m still not able to agglomerate meaning from Hemon’s most critically-acclaimed novel – bad memories from ‘08 resurrect, making concentration impossible.

I hunt down a repository of Hemon quotes on goodreads.com, and find: “I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I'll read them when they call me from the shelf.”

Amen.

From The Guardian, 2008: “Hemon is uninspired by what he calls the memoir craze.” Hemon says: "I hate it beyond words. It's a crisis of the imagination."

Yikes. He’s gonna hate this.

From Chicago Tribune, 2002: “Hemon cracks a rare smile when asked about his T-shirt, which bears the name of rock band Wilco's new album.” Hemon says: “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot had the cover of a Chicago building; that's what made me buy it."

So maybe while assassin-ing down Lincoln Avenue, on his way to punch me in the face, Hemon was also listening to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. If so, surely he knew, unlike me, that an aquarium drinker is a guy who drinks enough to fill an aquarium, or a lonely guy drinking in a hotel bar next to a wall-mounted aquarium, not a guy who drinks water directly from an aquarium – only an idiot would think that.

With that in mind, I stumble upon Hemon’s essay entitled, “The Aquarium”, first published in the New Yorker in 2011. I’m hoping it’s about the Wilco song. Instead, Hemon shares, in devastating terms, the odyssey of losing his infant daughter Isabel to a brain tumor.

The “aquarium” metaphor is about being locked in a watery world of concern and despair. Others look in, you look out, but you’re separated by a membrane and may as well be a million miles away. Hemon brings us past the membrane to drink from his aquarium. To read it is to not breathe. It is to have saucer eyes. It is to sit in silence for a time afterwards, more afraid, and yet less alone, than you’ve ever been.

To make more of “The Aquarium”, to leverage it for Punching Aleksandar Hemon in any way, seems like sacrilege upon sacrilege.

One last search reveals something called Best European Fiction, an annual compilation edited by Hemon that I know I’ll never read. I feel a headache coming on.

TWO WEEKS LATER

I’ve heard of writers wrestling with drafts for weeks, months, years, scrapping sentences, sections, entire books starting over from scratch.

I’ve done this now eleven times. I’ve not only failed, I’ve given myself the flu. Now shivering and wobbly, teeth, hair and clothes ravaged by meth-style binge writing – losing time, emerging in a fried state with less than zero to show for it. My quadriceps ache like they’ve been clubbed in the night.

I’ve felt Hemon’s sniper eyes on me, as I clamor from Point A to Point B. As I punch the keys, hard and fast, an ever-dissenting bundle of neurons burbles a loop of worried footnotes:

Hemon might see this someday. Will he hate it beyond words? How dare I invoke his name in such a dilettante manner? Is this even legal? I just now found “The Aquarium.” What else did I almost miss? What am I fucking up without knowing it?

The eleventh draft is primped and pruned and riddled with bullshit. Because, fact is, I didn’t deserve the punch in the first place. Alls Alex had to say was, “ease up, bro,” and I woulda said, “my bad,” and it wouldn’t have become this big issue. If there’s a story to tell, I’ve failed to tell it.

Failed to find the tug in the throat, the tingle beyond skin and skull, the purple heart beating in my chest, the moment when swirling clouds thick with repressed humidity condense to a bead of proof, a liquid diamond, pooling in my lower lid, proving that sense has been made of all this nonsense. Failed the buzzcut idiots and tubernosed ghouls and oblivious sparrows and the Marines and victims of Bosnian war crimes and eviscerated Japs and future hockey players and victims of 9/11 and stoic wives on The Day The World Ends and Old Me and Young Me and all seven billion protagonists, and perhaps, most of all, failed my first-born son, who’s now the exact age I was when I kissed a bully’s foot. How to deal with a cruel, unpredictable world: still unresolved.

Plus I’m hungry.

I want to watch TV. (What channel? Doesn’t matter.) And go for easy jogs and take hot, long, mindless showers. I have to log more hours writing freelance ad copy. And if time allows, maybe, just maybe I’ll write stupid little diatribes about my balls that I can email to my goofy brother.

A decision is made: put Punching Aleksandar Hemon aside for a few more years. Let it gestate. Or, maybe banish the idea altogether. Never come back to it. Quit, over a sore neck, lack of funds, lack of commitment, whatever. It’s a small price to avoid injury.

Because I’m getting my ass kicked here. I’m done.

Alex, you win.