It didn’t take us long to settle back into life at home, even knowing it would only last a few weeks before the final leg of The Downfall’s tour started in Santiago, Chile. This allowed plenty of time for the Castro family to join us in Los Angeles, even if it would only be for a week or so.
I had some serious catching up to do, too- both with work and for my classes at UCLA Anderson. I’d tried to keep up while out on tour, but I’d slipped a bit behind. This meant long days in the office, followed by long evenings in the home office or in class, but at least I was bringing myself back to where I would have been if I hadn’t skipped out to accompany Emmy and Angela on tour.
The Castro family brought a pleasant warmth to our home when they arrived a few days after we got back to Los Angeles. I felt a little bad that Mamá spent so much time in the kitchen, but when I tried to suggest that she should relax a bit, she told me that cooking for our big family was relaxing to her, so I didn’t push the issue.
It isn’t as if all she did was cook, though. Angela and Emmy took the three Castros sightseeing to the Santa Monica Pier, for example, even though none of them wanted anything to do with the cold ocean water. They also went to Disneyland, but Emmy stayed home for that one. There’s simply too much standing in the sun for her to be able to enjoy a day there.
I was surprised when Angela insisted that we go out to meet the boys for a Saturday morning drive, but when she explained that she needed a little break from her parents, I understood completely. Angela wanted to take the Porsche 911 Safari, even though I pointed out that it was going to be the slowest car in the group by far.
“That’s O.K.,” she replied with a smile. “You will just have to drive harder.”
“You and your cars,” Stein said, shaking his head in amusement at the gas station meet-up point. “There’s no knowing what you’re going to show up in next.”
Driving the 911 Carrera Safari on the roads of the Malibu Hills was an interesting experience. Yes, the car was way down on horsepower compared to, well, every other car I had, but it was probably fifteen hundred pounds lighter than the M6, so that made up for some of it. The light weight allowed the car to transition from side to side really well, but getting used to the quirky handling took some time. The car had a certain amount of understeer diving into turns, but it would immediately swap to heavy oversteer if I let it get out of shape at all. In fact, I spun us out on Latigo Canyon at the first left-hand hairpin, but we didn’t actually hit anything, so it was fine. Angela laughed it off with an admonition that if I did that too often the other guys would leave us behind, so I just dropped it into first gear and brought the car around, gunning it to make up for lost ground.
I can’t say it was the easiest car to drive fast- in fact, it was the biggest handful of any I’ve ever driven- but it was wildly entertaining, and Angela seemed to love it. She whooped with glee every time I stepped the back out or lifted the inside front wheel on hard acceleration out of a turn, encouraging me to drive like even more of a hooligan than I usually do. ‘Slow in, fast out’ was the name of the game, and using the throttle to rotate the car was all about feel.
“I have no idea how you avoided running off the road any number of times this morning,” Geoff said when we stopped at the Rock Store. “You were so outta shape it was ridiculous.”
“How many times did you spin out this morning?” Jimmy asked.
“Just once,” Angela told him, her smile lighting up the overcast day. “That was pretty wild!”
“Leah’s motto? ‘Life is short- take chances’,” Stein said.
“Yeah, something like that,” I agreed.
Returning to the fight gym in Santa Monica was good, too. My fitness had taken a hit from the inconsistent workouts I’d managed out on tour, so it took a little while to work the rust out. Of course there was a certain amount of friendly teasing for having been gone so long from the gym and a lot of speculation about what had taken me away, but somehow the regulars still didn’t seem to know that I was married to one of the biggest rock stars out there, much less put it together with the idea that I might have been on tour with her.
Heck, maybe they did know, but were just having too much fun with the stories about me being a secret government assassin. In any case, it was well over a week of regular workouts before I felt ready for any sort of sparring.
I mentioned to Joey that I’d done some special training in Singapore when he asked what I’d been up to, and his eyes got big. “Really?” he asked. “Like, Muay Thai training?”
“No, not… Well, I mean, I guess I shouldn’t have said anything, since it really has nothing to do with what we do here in this gym,” I said.
“Like what, then?” he demanded.
“You know what escrima is? The fighting they do with two sticks? I guess it’s from the Philippines?” I asked.
“You went there to learn that?” Joey asked, surprised. By this point another couple of the regulars had come over to find out what we were talking about.
“Dude, I’ve seen that shit on Youtube,” one of the guys said. “That’s fucking brutal.”
“No, I didn’t go to learn how to do that,” I said. “That would take a lot longer than I had. No, actually I worked on how to defend myself against it.”
“Why?” Joey asked, puzzled.
“Why did I train to defend myself against guys waving sticks around?” I asked, trying to clarify what the question had been.
“Yeah,” Joey said. “I mean, it ain’t like you’re gonna run into many guys like that in the ring."
“Dude man,” the guy who had spoken before said. I know I’d heard his name, but I couldn’t remember what it was. “You gotta remember, she doesn’t fight in the ring.”
It took Joey a moment, but then when he realized what the other guy had meant, his eyes went wide.
“Is it fuckin’ true?” he asked.
I sighed and let my shoulders drop. “Yeah, it’s true. I don’t fight in competition.”
“I done told you, man,” said the other guy. “She’s goddamn hardcore. That’s why Eddie don’t want none of us in the ring with her. We all seen it, man. She’s like some sort of super soldier or something. Nobody moves that fast, man. You saw it when you sparred with her. She played with you, man. All this?” he said, indicating the gym, “This is just her getting a little sweat up. That’s all we are to her.”
“Is this true?” Joey asked, wide-eyed.
“Yes,” I admitted. “It’s true. I do get a little sweat going.”
“So, um, Leah, why did you train in Singapore with an escrima master?” Richie asked.
Seeing my opportunity to run with it, I said, “Well, you know, sometimes when I have to do a hit in Southeast Asia, my targets’ll have bodyguards trained in some of these techniques, you know?”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
I couldn’t help but break out in laughter at the looks on the guys’ faces at that.
“No, seriously, I didn’t go there to train with dudes with sticks. Since I was there for a while I found a local fight gym to work out at, and one thing led to another… You know how it goes,” I said with a shrug.
“No, I really don’t,” Richie replied.
I shrugged again, holding my hands up in a ‘what can you do?’ posture. “Hey, if you ever find yourself needing a good workout when you’re in Singapore, I can hook you up. Just… Don’t be in that neighborhood after dark."
“I really have no freaking idea what to believe,” Richie said after the other guys went back to their workouts.
“About what?"
“Did you actually train with an escrima master in Singapore? At a fight gym in a sketchy area?” Richie asked.
“Yeah, I did, but really, like I said, that was just sort of a side thing to the real training I was doing there,” I said, looking him in the eyes.
“And what was that?”
“Knife fighting,” I said, knowing that it would spin Richie up. “It was good to get some edged-weapon combat training in with a different teacher, you know? I felt like I learned a lot.”
“Is anything… I have no idea, ever, if you’re being serious or not,” Richie said, throwing up his hands.
“Hey, you have a few minutes?” I asked him. “I wouldn’t mind some- well, not sparring, because I won’t be hitting back… I guess I just want you to try punching me for a bit.”
“You just want me to punch you?” he asked, puzzled.
“Well, I want you to try. And I mean, really try. I did learn some new deflection techniques and I’m interested to see how they’ll translate to fist-fighting,” I explained.
“Translate from…?” Richie asked, with a look that said that he wasn’t going to like the answer.
“Knife fighting,” I said. “What else?”
“Of course? What else could it be?” Richie said, a sardonic smile on his face.
We didn’t bother with a ring, just found a corner of the mats. I told Richie to not worry about defense, since I wasn’t going to hit back. Richie put his sparring gloves on but I didn’t bother. We stood an arm’s length apart and he started throwing punches, a bit slowly and uncertainly at first.
I wanted to try Mr Han’s soft deflection technique, and Richie was good practice for me. He was reasonably fast but didn’t put a whole lot of power behind his blows, and this allowed me the room to fine tune the concept.
The big challenge for me was that the escrima sticks that I’d practiced against swing in on arcs, so deflecting them was a matter of redirecting the blows to the outside, away from the body. Punches, on the other hand, came in straight.
I took a few hits working with Richie that morning, sure, but that really wasn’t why I could feel that I was trying to reinvent the wheel. The more we worked, the better I understood the mechanics and saw that it just wasn’t a real winning strategy when it came to boxing.
We had to quit when Richie ran out of steam, unable to muster any speed or force at all. That was fine, since I was about ready to give up on the concept anyway and write it off as something that wasn’t going to work for me when punching was involved.
After Richie recovered enough to hold a conversation, he asked, “So, and I’m being serious here, what really is your story? I mean, what you were doing just now, that looked like, I dunno, Tae Kwon Do or something. You weren’t doing that last time we sparred- did you really learn that in Singapore?”
“Yeah, I really did, and yeah, it’s how to fight an armed kali fighter and not get beaten to a pulp. I was hoping I could use the same basic concepts against fists, but I just don’t think it’s going to work,” I said, sipping from my water bottle.
“Kali?”
“Kali, escrima, same thing. Two batons, clubs, sticks- whatever you want to call ‘em,” I said.
“I still don’t get why you’d train against that,” Richie said. “Seriously- when are you gonna run up against a guy that just happens to have a couple of batons with him?”
“Maybe never,” I admitted. “But my trainer wanted me to try something new, something outside my comfort zone, you know?”
“And was it? Outside your comfort zone, I mean.”
“Yeah, at first it was, but once I understood the way they work and I could see the patterns, it got a lot easier. I feel pretty confident that if I went up against a kali fighter and all I had was my knife, I’d come away bruised but he’d be dead,” I said.
“Fuck!” Richie said, mostly to himself. Then, a bit louder so I could hear it, “There you go again. I can’t tell if you’re yanking my chain or not.”
Mamá looked concerned about the bruise on my cheek but didn’t say anything at lunch that day. She did stop me on my way back to my upstairs office, though. She put her hand on my arm and gave me a concerned look.
“I know mi Angela can get angry sometimes, but you should not let her treat you this way,” she said, indicating my cheek.
She said it so seriously and with such a straight face that it took me a moment to realize she was joking with me.
Trying my best to not laugh, I said, “I’m afraid of what she might do one of these days, Mamá.” That was all it took, and we both broke out into laughter.
After we settled down, she asked me if I was going to be stuck in my office all afternoon. “Angela wants to take Cecy shopping, but Rafa and I, we do not want to go. We hoped we could spend some time with you.”
“Do you have anything in mind?” I asked, surprised and pleased. I could blow off work. After all, I was the boss, right?
“No, we just want to talk. To know you better,” she replied.
At a loss for what to do or where to go, I stood there like an idiot for a long moment before something came to me. Finally, I had an idea. “Do you like history? We could go to the old part of Los Angeles, or maybe to the mission over in the San Gabriel Valley. I’ve never been to either one, so it would be new for me, too.”
“Old?” Mamá asked.
“Well, old for California, anyway,” I admitted.
While the Castros were getting ready I found Emmy in one of the rehearsal rooms with the rest of the touring band. I gave her a kiss and told her I was going out with Mamá and Papá.
“I am pleased that you are spending time with them,” she said.
Since we had time and were in no hurry I stayed off the freeway and took us through Koreatown and Westlake, then downtown and finally to the old plaza.
“This is the oldest part of town,” I explained. “It’s about two hundred and fifty years old. Somewhere around here is the oldest house in LA- I think it’s two hundred years old, something like that.”
“That is not very old,” Papá said.
“When was Cartagena founded?” I asked as we walked through what had been the old town square.
“Almost five hundred years ago. Of course, there were indigenous settlements before then,” he replied.
“There were native villages here, too, that date back who knows how long- thousands of years, but as far as Western civilization, the Spanish missionaries were the first in the region, back in the seventeen hundreds. Of course, it’s all relative. I mean, compared to Baghdad or Cairo or someplace like that these are all freshly built, right?” I said.
We walked up and down the rows of little stalls selling all sorts of touristy stuff, then into the Catholic Church. While we walked, we talked about more or less inconsequential stuff like the relative history of California as compared to Colombia, or why the weather was so gray, things like that. Back in the plaza in front of the church we stopped to watch a mariachi band and dancers perform.
Mamá suggested we find someplace to sit down and have a drink, so we made our way to one of the Mexican restaurants in the area. After ordering drinks and chips with guacamole, our conversation turned to more personal matters.
“Angela has told us that Emmy has a genetic infirmity,” Rafael began, not sure how to phrase his question. “She said that Emmy might not have very many years in her future.”
“This is true,” I admitted. “Her people call the condition ‘Moon Kissed.’ Everybody who is born like her, with the light-colored eyes and the white hair, they die in their early thirties. Angela and I, we’ve tried to get her to see if there is some treatment, but she flat-out refuses to even consider it.”
“She has twenty-four years now, no?” Mamá asked.
“Her twenty-fifth birthday is coming up soon,” I replied.
All three of us were silent for a while, thinking about the ramifications, when the waitress brought our chips, then set down our drinks. I’d opted for a paloma, Mamá had ordered a margarita and Papá a michelada.
“What will happen when Emmy…” Papá said, stumbling over his words in his discomfort at even talking about the eventuality.
“Angela and I will have our marriage made official, and we’ll raise the girls,” I said. “We’ve talked about this a lot, actually.”
“That is what Angela has told us,” Mamá said. “It is good the nenas will have you and Angela, even if they cannot have Emmy.”
“It’s really important for the three of us that the girls be raised by all three families, and in all three cultures,” I told them. “We want them to spend time in Cartagena with you two when they get old enough, and in Paris with Emmy’s parents. Even after Emmy’s gone, we’re going to keep Emmy’s parents involved. Of course, you, too. We want them both to learn Spanish and French, and be comfortable in both environments.”
The two looked at each other, communicating in that way that old married couples seem to have.
“We would like this very much,” Papá said. “It is an amazing gift, for us to have two granddaughters the same age. Angela has told us everything that had to be done to make this happen, and it is a miracle. Modern medicine is capable of so many wondrous things.”
“Please keep it quiet that I’m the biological father,” I said, looking around to make sure nobody was listening. “The process wasn’t approved for human trials yet.”
“We understand,” Papá answered. “I don’t think very many people in Colombia would understand what the three of you have, or be supportive of it.”
“I don’t think very many would here, either,” I said.