The Quest for New Blood

Around now, Arol and Tim have departed, fooled into thinking I had quit, so they quit too. Probably unknowingly controlled into the decision by Mike.

Time is passing and I feel good. As I said before, at the time I had no idea they wanted to be rid of me. I was happy as a clam. Part of the group, learning Ba Gua, working towards improving my health situation. I was waiting.

During this time, Mike's constant refraid during the weekly talks was patience, loyalty and doing what you were told. I would ask questions from time to time about breathing exercises or some more concrete help with my health problems. Something more than just the generalized training everyone else would receive.

I would be talked to like a child and told I needed to be patient. I need to trust them. That I would get healthy and everything would be OK. From hindsight, I can now see what I was getting was a patented speech by a medical professinal. Go to any medical professional, nurse, doctor, paramedic. Act panicky. They will all give you the same "calm down, be patient, everything will be OK" speech.

I did what I was told just as I was asked. I was an adult who trusted these people. If they said to me I needed to be patient and trust them, they were intelligent people who were more skilled and more knowledgable than I. Of course I would act as the suggested.

A few months might have gone by in this manner. During this time a man by the name of Brad was mentioned. Brad was also a medical professional in training. He was taking western medicine classes. He was also a martial artist. He apparently also trained in Ba Gua. He trained in a different style. I believe his instructor was a man named Adam Hsu. Brad was a friend of Jeff's or Mike's or perhaps both of them. I think he might have been a fellow student of Jeff's at Berkely. Or I could be wrong. I can't really remember.

The discussion of Brad was not complimentary. He was described as a deceptive person who could not be trusted. I have a memory of generally feeling like he was a bad person. He would come up in conversation so they wanted to talk about him. But they had negative feelings about him. I think it revolved around the issue of Brad learning Mike's style of Ba Gua and stealing it.

That sounds right. There was something about Brad that made the people think he was a thief kind of person. Being nice to people and sucking up so he could take their stuff, then walking away with it. That was it exactly.

These conversations would pop up out of nowhere for no reason. Just something to talk about while taking a break.

The men's group was now down to Jeff, Lonnie, George, Me, Chris, James and Steve. 7 people. The loss of Arol and Tim must have had more impact than I thought. I thought that everyone was glad they were gone. After all, they had engineered their leaving.

As is usual with most things in life, you don't realize what you have until it is gone. Even though Arol and Tim were kind of goofy and not dedicated to martial arts, they were fun, enjoyable, likable people to have around. They broke the monotony with their lightheartedness.

In the current group, I was abosultely silent. I was still hiding so as not to give anyone a reason to notice me. Jeff was basically a silent hermit kind of guy. Lonnie and George would not breath unless Mike gave them permission. Lonnie and George were both friendly and likable people. The minute Mike came around though, their personalities changed instantly into servile puppies. James was a loner kind of guy. He was a friendly and talkative person. For as long as he was there, James never really fit in. Steve was an outspoken and joking kind of guy like Arol and Tim.

That means that overall, the Ba Gua men were a silent and lifeless kind of group. The spark or life had left with Arol and Tim. Steve was only one man in the group of 7. He could not lift everyone up. This is why I think that people began to either regret Arol and Tim leaving, or miss the lightness they brought to the class.

That information was necessary to understand why there suddenly began to be talk of new blood in the group. Someone, must have been Mike, was talking about how we needed some new people. I mentioned the interviews that people had to go through to be accepted. As the discussion went on, everyone volunteered that, no, they did not know anyone they felt was dedicated enough to join the group. We all felt we were the only people we knew that could handle the demands of the class.

I was literally stunned when it was suggested that Brad be asked to join the group. I thought to myself "they can't mean the deceitful possible bad character thief Brad they were telling me about. Can they?".

That is exactly who they were talking about.

I was totally confused. I had accepted these men were intelligent, skillful, my betters. That is why I was with them. So I could learn and hopefully be healed. To see them discussing taking in a person they themselves described as a bad apple made me doubt them. In my opinion, only a person with some kind of mental problem would openly go looking for a possible thief to come and join their family.

Then they sat their and openly discussed that, yes, they all thought it likely Brad was a thief. But they still thought they wanted to ask him to join. Because they could not think of anyone else they could get to join.

To me, the warning alarms should have been going off full blast. When I, Steve, and Jeff's friend had joined, we were all put through the wringer. Made to feel we were lucky to know these people and if we measured up, they might just possibly let us join. This attitude made me feel I was lucky to be there. I do not know how Steve felt. He still knows Mike to this day so I imagine he too felt he was lucky to be in the group.

To my way of thinking, going out to a person and asking them to join is making them look like they were powerful. They had something that the people in the group wanted. It was a settting for disaster. If the group was right about the man being deceitful and untrustworthy, making him believe they wanted him for some reason was only going to encourage his ego. Which I would think would make him even more likely to be deceitful or unstrustworthy. He would not respect the group because they needed him.

I did not participate in the discussion. My attitude was the one above. If I had voiced it, I would have received unvoiced rebuke and censure for being negative. All I could do was sit there thinking "how can these people make such a big mistake? And I can't even tell them because then they will have bad feelings towards me".