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110 C H A P T E R 8 Gaman I wrote to him at least twice. While I was up there with him, he was talking about going to school in Japan, and I was encouraging him to do that. When I came home, I tried to tell him to find more ways to educate himself there, living there and gaining skills there. I told him that a year before that, two of my other friends—one of them was murdered and one committed suicide. One of them was a Hawaiian kid who actually became my friend at Oregon where I went to college, ironically—not here—he had followed his girlfriend up there to go to school with her. I wrote him the same kind of letter: I just said, “Don’t come home, man.” He had a similar background to Percy, and he came home and he died. So when I told Percy about that, I was pretty serious about it. —Kevin Chang of ‘Āhuimanu, January 2, 2009 The roar coming from Yokozuna Akebono’s room made Percy jump, suddenly ready to rush in and open the windows, or run downstairs for a cold drink, or head out to the video store—whatever he was asked. He almost got to his feet, too, when it hit him just as suddenly that he was now alone, also in his own room, and that someone else would attend to the yokozuna. They had promoted Percy to jūryō, and now his practice mawashi would be just as white as Akebono’s. On formal occasions his dress robe would be just as black as the one Boss wore. At the tournaments, he too would fight the full fifteen days, and help consecrate the dohyō by filing in with the other sekitori and clapping his hands to alert the gods, dressed in the most beautiful piece of clothing he’d ever seen: his keshō mawashi— the royal blue apron hemmed in gold, stitched in front with a snow-white 111 Gaman Pegasus in flight, and the two kanji characters spelling out “Daiki.” And right now it hit him that he could let out a roar of his own and have one of the boys walk all the way over to McDonald’s and bring back a bag of Big Macs while he sat in his own room and watched whatever he wanted on the TV he’d just bought with part of his bonus for taking the July 1995 makushita championship. “The attitude was changing towards me,” Percy told me. “‘Oh, sekitori! You made ’um. Arrite!’” He thought back to that first day he’d met most of the local boys, back on the sumo train to Kyūshū when they laughed at the sight of him trying to balance on those wooden slippers. Four and a half years of cooking stew and rice, cleaning toilets, hanging out thirtyfoot lengths of canvas mawashi. Now he’d blown past Tyler, George, John, and Kaleo, while Fats, Bumbo, and Troy had already gone home. As for the rest of his brothers in Azumazeki Beya, Percy could see how most of them had been trying to make him stronger and more disciplined over the years. But he could also see when senpai had abused their power. Usually it was the senpai who were never going to make it who staked their identities on being above anyone else. The one Azumazeki Beya brother fitting such a bill was Tsuji—he of the swinging frying pan. “I neva whacked him back,” Percy told me. “He came up to me and grabbed my head and went, ‘Poom!’ So when I came jūryō, I gave him the kawaigari of his life. I pushed him one hour straight. I beat his ass up so bad. And when I was finished I went up to him and went, ‘Poom!’ Ever since that he gave me respect.” Thentherewashiswallet,nowbulgingwithbrown-tintedten-thousandyen notes, over seven grand worth. He’d be getting that much every month, that and more: the phone was ringing three or four times a week, his sponsors or Boss’s sponsors or Akebono’s sponsors inviting him to this party or that restaurant opening. Weary and full of pain from a day’s practice, he would lift his aching body from the futon, put on a nice kimono, and take one of his boys along with him to the party, where they’d feed him all the high...

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