Tough Talk From the Professor

He tries to beat the trouble out of them, sometimes by raising hell. You better get that bounce out your step or I’m gonna make your life miserable!

Sometimes he does it by grabbing them by the scruff of the neck.

Hey, now, you better check yo’self, chico. I got my b.s. detector on!

Sometimes you’ve got to treat the cocky kids a little rough, he says. You’ve got to humblize ‘em. Knock them down a few pegs. Then you build them back up--the only way, he tells you, “to change they evil ways.”

People call him the Professor. But he also goes by a few other names: Master Marvin, Professor Marvin and, to those who have known him awhile, Marvin E. Calmes.

The Professor is a 43-year-old former gang member who teaches discipline through martial arts to 100 inner-city kids each week in South-Central Los Angeles.

He’s a snake-hipped, legally blind black man, lanky, tall, with hair brushed back in a ponytail and a walking stick crowned with carved elephants, moving in a world of dark, shaking shadows.

In the past few years, between teaching LAPD-sponsored classes and running his own free karate school, South-Central Shaolin, the Professor has created an unlikely legion of admirers.

His students--mostly straight and narrow kids navigating a violent world, and a smaller number who have had scrapes with cops and gangs--follow his sometimes-harsh commands without question.

Mothers, fathers, grandparents, social workers and teachers, sometimes as many as 40, watch every class.

Police from the 77th Street Division help him find space to teach in local school auditoriums, pay him a part-time wage that is his subsistence, then sit back and watch him in awe.

“It’s amazing how a guy who can barely see can have some of the toughest kids in the ‘hood just eating out of his hand,” said Officer Richard Dixon, who hired Calmes three years ago to teach karate in 77th Street’s youth outreach program, Jeopardy.

“He makes you feel like he can see you,” says a 16-year-old boy named Lamar, who came to the Professor six months ago with a reputation for delinquency. “When you are in a whole other part of the room, 20 or 30 feet away, Master Marvin knows what you’re doing. He can hear you or something.”

The Professor’s students greet adults with a sharp “Yes, sir” or a “No, ma’am.” They look you straight in the eye and stand ramrod firm. Calmes tells them it’s how they have to be if they are going to make it out of the inner city and compete for jobs and college scholarships against “kids from the Valley.”

He teaches in the prowling manner of a football coach. Along with co-teacher Gerald Henderson, Calmes circles his students as they work through sets of routines before sparring, seemingly ready to pounce on them.

They practice moves from aikijitsute. “Aiki: I walk in peace,” he explains. “Jitsu: I can break you down, and te, I can do it with deadly empty hands.”

Fists fly, bodies are launched, feet rise and jackknife through the air.

Calmes will openly challenge his students to hit him in the chest. They do. He doesn’t flinch. “If you think you’re so tough,” he’ll say, “how come you can’t even hurt a blind man?” When they give him attitude, he’ll get physical: wrench them by the arm, put them in wrist locks, make them stand and take punches to the gut. If that doesn’t work, he makes the kids who don’t show respect--always the new ones--spar with black-belt-level students. In this manner the point is made: Obey. Get your act together.

Some parents flinch when the Professor verbally blasts a kid for disobeying his word, or when he grabs a young boy and parades him through a group of homeboys at a high school, making the boy denounce the very neighborhood gang that wants him to join.

Say it, say it. . . . C’mon now, boy, you got to get them off your back before they get you killed!

Let him be rough, the parents say. Down here, they reflect, timeouts and happy talk don’t work too well.

“I thank the Lord for sending him. . . . Six months ago I was about to give up on my son,” said Lamar’s mother, Glenda Brewer, whose son is now one of Calmes’ top students. “Without Professor Marvin my boy would be out there robbing, shooting, getting into gangs. . . . Now he’s got confidence, and he just believes in his future.”

Calmes “just cares,” says Lamar. In the mornings, the Professor takes the bus all over South-Central, checking in on his students at their schools, making sure they are minding their teachers. No one asks him to do it or pays him for it. In the evening he’s in Inglewood, running his free school. At night he sometimes sits in his bedroom, alone and in the dark, chain-smoking cigarettes, rehearsing the ways he can reach the students.

The Professor was born with atrophied optic nerves. He now suffers from glaucoma and acute astigmatism, which causes his eyes to shudder incessantly. Objects a few feet away appear as if seen through a hazy kaleidoscope.

The way he tells it, his bottle-thick glasses and gawky looks made him easy pickings for bullies during childhood. He vowed to be able to strike back. He could see a bit better then, enough to start learning martial arts. Got so good, he tells you, that soon folks around him paid wary respect. So good that by his early 20s he became allied with the very kind of gang members who had once taunted him. It would only be later, he said, that “I finally figured out I didn’t need them.”

Little escapes his awareness. When he notices a student doing something wrong, he scurries across the room, stiff and crooked from years of tough living, and launches into controlled minitirades. He tries to fill his students with the traps and pitfalls of “the life.” He wants them to know of the people he has seen die, of the permanent, hidden scars gang life leaves. He spoon-feeds them Eastern teachings with a South-Central flavor.

“If I go around here talking about ‘blend with the willows,’ these kids won’t get it. You got to take that Asian philosophizing and hit it with a snare, kick it with a bass.”

Everything has a beat, he tells them: the world, the ocean, engines, the way people dance on “Soul Train.” Line up next to that beat and walk with the rhythm. It’s what turned his life around. “I had to learn to feel the rhythm of my life.”

Alicia Gonzalez heard of Calmes’ reputation, so she brought her 14-year-old son, Chris, to see him.

The boy was angry and in trouble. He had been talking back to everyone--his mom, teachers, social workers--and trying to look and act like a gang member.

He walked into his first class wearing baggy green shorts that barely clung to his hips and a go-to-hell attitude.

Gonzalez sat, surrounded by a group of other parents in an elementary school auditorium, hands covering her eyes.

She couldn’t look.

Chris was flying through the air, courtesy of a throw from Lamar, who had been instructed to humblize the boy. Chris’ spindly legs whipping violently, he landed in a painful thud.

“Oh, Lord,” his mother said.

The Professor loomed over her boy and challenged him:

You still think you tough?

You still want to be in the game, boy?

C’mon, son, you better get real if you wanna mess with gang bangas.

Gonzalez sighed.

“He needs this,” she said.

“I brought him to the Professor to save his life.”