Last time, I’d hit around eight in the evening, then again at about two o’clock. I was of course hoping to stumble on Jo-Jo—or should I say, José Munoz? I’d ordered my dinner in tonight, Chinese food that I ate with chopsticks while I listened to some Shostakovich violin concertos. Then I spent a little while limbering up in an exercise not unlike the one I used to teach my sword students to use in warming up for a match. At the height of my club’s enrollment, I’d had twelve pupils. It had remained an informal thing for the years I’d kept it active. It was a healthier social alternative to the bar scene. I never charged fees for my lessons, but I passed the hat whenever we rented equipment or fencing space. Mostly, we banged steel on various back patios around the Quarter, I imparted my knowledge of the sport as art, and we generally had a fun time. Yet I’d shut the club down. I’d backed a step further into a kind of self-imposed state of inactivity. Why was that? The limbering and breathing exercises, of course, helped to center my mind.
