“over + over” (2024)
Albert John Belmont
Oil on Canvas
I stood roughly ten feet up on a roof I intended to leap off. The flat roof belonged to an old brick school located near a picnic shelter where my family was holding a reunion. I hadn’t told anyone of my intention before climbing up. Other cousins, my older brother, an uncle or two, they were gathered at an adjacent playground. I wasn’t aiming to impress anyone. I was old enough to know the danger in jumping off a roof; this was the summer between my junior and senior year in high school. I was no athlete and had never seemed like a daredevil. I stood barely over five feet tall, and fought to weigh more than one fifteen. Yet, I had a reason for clenching my fists, for taking deep breaths, for placing one foot in front of the other as I ran toward the roof edge. The reason’s name: Jackie Chan.
I had first heard of him a few years prior. Jackie swept into our country like a swift kick to the head and dazzled US audiences with how he risked life and limb on camera.[1] The major difference between Jackie and testosterone-pumped Hollywood heroes is he did his own stunts. He leapt walls, dodged moving cars, and jumped from rooftops many stories above ground. He had spent his youth studying kung fu, and proved that if one worked hard enough at something, they could get lucky.
Rewind a bit though. Movies in general were always close companions for a quiet kid like me. A kid, who I admit, had taken to physically nerdy traits and found an escape from social barriers through movies. The action genre held my interest most. By age ten, I began to beg my dad to let me watch violent Stallone or Schwarzenegger movies. I’d join my older brother watching “tough guy” marathons on cable. These movies left impressions. In fifth grade, my teacher went around the room asking who we wanted to be like when we grew up. When I said Arnold Schwarzenegger, she and everyone in class laughed. As years went by and I started high school, I was the shortest boy in the school. I suppose I eventually understood their reason for laughing.
I had been interested in taking martial arts since I was young. I often looked for my own Mr. Miyagi, hoping I might meet some old master in an obscure place. Inquiries with my parents about karate classes always resulted in a concern over costs. When I started high school, I learned my gym teacher taught karate at an affordable rate.
I committed to training and by 1998, my junior year in high school, I had earned my brown belt. Shortly after, I decided to attend a karate tournament. Short and thin, yes, but I was dedicated. Like Daniel-san in Karate Kid, I was going to gain respect by digging deep and winning my bracket of the tournament. Alas, at sixteen I was grouped into the adult sparring category. I blocked a punch or two, threw a few strikes, but I clearly got last place.
If my loss had been a dramatic scene in a movie, maybe “Eye of the Tiger” or some motivational ballad would play as I returned with more dedication to karate. Instead, I wanted to quit. I’d always been content with mediocre grades. As for socializing, I had a perfect attendance of staying home every weekend. I continued going to karate classes at my parents urging, but I stopped practicing at home. As I went through a depressive slump I rented movies to fill the time. About a month after the tournament, I watched Rumble in the Bronx.
Prior to 1996, I never heard anyone speak his name. Within two years, he was everywhere: on MTV, in a Mountain Dew commercial, and in movies like Supercop, First Strike, and Operation Condor, that hit theaters faster than it seemed possible to make them. Jackie was an absolute sensation. Best of all, he stood of average height at most.
I instantly lost desire to be like a Stallone or Schwarzenegger, a Van Damme, or hell, a Macchio. From the moment I first began watching him, I wanted to be like Jackie. So I started practicing again.
I did find some things odd about Jackie’s movies. Music was often recycled. Jackie always seemed to have the same uncle.[2] Half the time his character was named Jackie, or another variation of his name—Kevin Chan, for example. I just assumed Jackie was a Hollywood stuntman who finally caught his big break; rumors suggested he started his career back in the 1970s as a stuntman for Bruce Lee.[3]
What I knew for certain: I loved Jackie’s movies. If I wanted to be like him, I needed to prove myself. Hence, I saw the school rooftop while at my family reunion and thought it looked like a plausible place to jump off. I got up there, and I knew I had to cross the threshold of going for something that terrified me. Wind rushed through my shirt. My heart drummed. I saw the edge of the school and a ten-foot drop looked a lot higher than I thought prior. A close-up of me might have revealed tears in my eyes, a grimacing mouth—all this on an awkward-enough, acne-marked, helmet-haired seventeen-year-old. Still, when I reached that roof edge, I leapt.
I stopped breathing. I waved my arms trying to slow myself. I knew enough to keep my feet below and to bend my knees. When I hit blacktop, everything flashed red and needles shot up my back. My lungs squeezed tight enough I feared I might have popped something. But I hit, I stumbled, and I stopped. A few nearby family members shouted, some at their surprise, some about how I could have gotten hurt. My older brother and my stout football player cousins seemed impressed. Their accolades didn’t matter. What mattered was that if I could perform a stunt like this, I could do others.
Starting that summer, I began practicing a gymnastic routine. The house thudded many times before I finally landed my first forward flip. I practiced rolling, eventually even walked on my hands. I jumped from the floor onto chairs first, then onto the kitchen table, then even kitchen counters. I’d prop my legs between walls and walk up hallways. Sure, all pretty dorky, but I did gain coordination and managed to add a few pounds of muscle.
When school started, I entered my senior year without much difference from prior years. I still only had a few so-called friends, but no one I ever saw outside of school. I talked with other students in the dojo where I trained. I still felt fairly alone, though, and no event showed me this more than what soon transpired. As big a star as Jackie Chan had become, he was about to get bigger.
On September 18, 1998, Rush Hour hit theatres. Commercial previews made the movie look great. I overheard people in my high school talk about seeing the movie on opening night. I wanted to go more than anything. Like everything else, school dances or sporting events, I couldn’t fathom going alone. I couldn’t picture going with my parents either. I fantasized someone at my school or dojo might tell me they had an extra ticket and wanted me to join them. As opening night came, though, I was well aware I had no one to go with. That weekend nonetheless was about to change my life.
On the Saturday after Rush Hour opened, a cable channel ran an overnight Jackie Chan marathon. As my family went to bed and the house grew quiet, I awaited movies with names like Dragons Forever, Wheels on Meals, The Young Master. These were films Jackie had made over the past decades, films that catapulted him to popularity in Hong Kong, Asia, and much of the world while the US remained mostly ignorant of him.
Some people can speak of epiphanies during high school where a teacher changed their life. Perhaps epiphany came from winning or losing a big game, doing something amazing at prom. My high school epiphany came when watching tolerably dubbed Jackie Chan movies on cable. The world suddenly grew bigger than my rural Ohio town. I got to see Hong Kong culture, got to see that Jackie wasn’t some new US phenomena. Watching movie after movie and seeing what was possible when one worked hard enough, the physical world changed too. For example, staircases weren’t meant to be stepped down; they could as easily be leapt. Brick walls could be used to jump upward or outward. A gate had many more options of getting past than simply, sluggishly, walking through.
Over the next months, if my growth played out like a montage, scenes would include many bumps and bruises as I leapt up and down stairs, hurdled fences, or dove over furniture. I lifted weights and began training at a second dojo, learning new styles, including how to properly roll and fall in aikido class.
My real challenge was finding what I considered more stunts to perform. Jackie dodged traffic, slid down electrified poles, even hung from a moving bus using an umbrella.[4] Though I considered heading to a busy country road, or trying to hang off a train, I wasn’t a complete idiot; I knew these things could get me killed or arrested.
For Christmas that year, I asked for more Jackie Chan movies. Even his long buried attempts at first breaking into the US had begun to surface. [5] Poor fight-choreography and cliché scripts helped ensure Jackie’s first Hollywood movies were quickly forgotten back in the early 1980s. My commitment to practicing had also caught my parent’s attention and they gifted me a stand-up punching bag that I set up in the garage.
I soon saw this bag offered a chance to attempt a new sort of stunt. Jackie was always leaping through windows or up into openings after kicking off something. Our garage had an attic door in the ceiling. The ceiling was around nine feet tall. My punching bag was about as tall as me.
The attic opening was two feet wide, four long. My plan was to jump off the bag-stand, grab the attic floor, and pull myself up. On my first attempt, I ran for the bag, kicked off, and slammed my shoulder into the attic opening’s border. I fell. Practice apparently helped enough that I got my feet below before the impact of garage floor buckled my legs and I tipped onto my back. Cement rolled down my spine like a countdown leading to my head smacking floor. So, leaping into something was harder than leaping down—lesson learned. Also, Jackie had good reason to show his injuries during end-movie credits.
Though not necessarily worried about my family finding me splayed out on garage floor, I knew I had to get up. Despite some bruises, days later I began the attempt again. This time I got a feel for the jump by leaping lightly off the bag stand and aiming my arms into the opening. I practiced for over a week. School resumed after winter break. Things went back to normal. Then one night I went to the garage and set up. Cold air fell from the attic as I pulled the door down. I ran for the bag, kicked up, and this time, I caught the inside of the attic floor and pulled my scrawny self up.
Light from the garage died inches inside the attic. The wood floor creaked. I sat for many minutes staring at cement floor below. That was the first moment when I believed I could become a stuntman like Jackie had once been.
This idea never seemed more relevant. The wave of Asian cinema ushered in by Jackie paved way for more martial arts. Jet Li appeared in Lethal Weapon 4. Sammo Hung starred in a primetime drama called Martial Law.[6] Even Hollywood blockbusters were incorporating martial arts—The Matrix, for example.
I knew I couldn’t exactly go to the high school guidance counselor and suggest I wanted to become a stuntman. I did apply to some local colleges for the sake of having something tangible to tell people about my future plans. The last months of high school, so adults often said, were a special time. I heard of parties, yearbook signings, prom and all that. As for me, I searched for bargain bin VHS tapes with Jackie’s oldest movies. His earliest movies from the 1970s had grainy texture and fairly terrible dubbing. The movies seemed set in some preindustrial time where one’s kung fu could mean life or death. I figured, let other kids at school have their college prep and parties; I had classical studies: snake and crane arts, tiger fist, monkey style, and best of all, drunken boxing.[7]
I kept pushing my training and good things happened. When I went to another tournament, I did better, actually even got a gold trophy. Weeks before graduation, I was awarded my first black belt—Shodan rank. When graduation came, I admit I did try inviting a few school-friends for the party my parents threw. I guess I hoped some might show, but well, I just had to keep moving forward on my solitary trajectory. If I wanted to be more like Jackie, I knew I had to train even more like him.
His old kung fu movies featured lots of scenes where Jackie underwent grueling training to learn new styles from old masters. I copied this as best I could, like hanging upside down for sit-ups—we had such a contraption at my dojo—balancing bowls of hot water on my limbs as I held postures—I broke several—and trying to crack a walnut between thumb and forefinger—surprisingly not impossible. The dojo had large floor mats and sometimes I set up stacks to dive over them. I wanted to get better at fighting too, and that summer I trained like a madman. I must admit, I didn’t know how to prepare for the future. Everyone kept saying go to college, and although I eventually relented and signed up for a few classes, I assumed I’d fail.
Rush Hour came out on VHS that summer. Once again, everyone talked up the movie. As for my opinion: Rush Hour was a great Chris Tucker movie, but only a decent Jackie Chan film. With Jackie in the Hollywood spotlight again, I found lots of magazine articles featuring him. Again and again, he spoke in interviews about his difficulty finding the kind of US stuntmen he wanted. Therefore, just like in Hong Kong, he planned to open a US branch of the Jackie Chan Stunt School. His stuntmen didn’t just help Jackie, they performed their own feats. The best stuntmen might even get a small role in a movie.
When I read this article, I cheered. It didn’t matter if I might fail in college. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have a girlfriend, or friends. From that moment on, I had something feasible to work towards. I still went through other motions. I got a job working in the produce department of a large store. I commuted to college, which with thousands of students, offered anonymity and a huge curriculum of classes.
As far as outward appearances went, I still wore glasses, was so unsure what to do with my hair that I buzzed it off. I peaked at the height of five-six. I didn’t weigh a lot, but I had muscle. I swear I lived a double life during that time.[8] Were my different sides to played in a movie, the scenes at work and school would show me with my head down, lackadaisical music in the background. My other life required much shifting of camera angles, starting with martial arts classes. And I couldn’t resist climbing fences near abandoned parking lots, jumping the hood of the minivan my parents let me drive, or flipping across the yard at home. These moments were the real drumbeats, the contrast to my social silence.
I took comfort knowing nothing would hold me back from trying to join Jackie’s stunt school once it opened. I got awarded another black belt rank. I began inching toward high ranks in other martial arts styles. So my life played out through my first year of college.
By spring of 2000, I yearned for news about Jackie’s stunt school. He was soon releasing his next big US film. Shanghai Noon was epic in terms of production. Settings ranged from China to the Wild West. This time around, I had no qualms about going by myself on opening night.
I liked the plot of Shanghai Noon, but I swore some stunts in it looked slightly fake. I later learned blue screens were used in some shots, surely only because Jackie didn’t yet have a trusted US stunt team. He was getting older, but he was in perfect shape and likely had a decade of intense stunts ahead.[9] In the meantime, I felt a longing to face something daring and dangerous again.
I had grown comfortable at my produce job. We had a giant walk-in cooler where I often leapt stacks of boxes, or flipped over wooden farm bins. In the warehouse, I often jumped off racks. What I really wanted to try was jumping over a moving car. I suggested that coworkers drive at me when the parking lot was empty at night, but they laughed and sarcastically said, “Yeah right.”
So I had to improvise. Our store was fairly empty in the early morning hours when we got deliveries from farmers. One day a farmer left several pallets in the warehouse and I volunteered to pull them up front. One pallet had corn stacked in mesh bags. It stood over three feet high. Our warehouse had docking bays and we always had a trailer for storing empty pallets. This trailer was parked at an incline. On this day, the trailer happened to sit empty too.
I pushed the corn up the trailer and turned the pallet-jack handle to the back. I was more nervous about a store manager coming in early than my makeshift stunt. The coast looked clear though. I got the pallet centered in the trailer and raised the wheels high. Then I let go and ran. Wheels squeaked and the pallet barely moved at first. It picked up momentum. I ran across the warehouse and ten feet from the docking door, I stood with my back to a wall of palletized dog food. My goal was to land atop the corn the same as if landing on a car hood that slammed into a brick wall behind.
When the rolling pallet hit the dock plate, metal clanged like a gong. Pallet jack wheels hit warehouse floor and a thousand pounds of corn tumbled toward me at fifteen, maybe twenty miles an hour. My instincts told me to forget this stunt and get the hell out of the way. I stood in place. As I smelled husks and felt the rumbling wind, I jumped with everything in me.
I landed on my back atop the pallet. I felt the punch of many bumpy stalks and scouring mesh that rug-burnt my elbows. I landed on the pallet and felt relief for one second before the corn slammed into the dog food. The crash knocked the wind out of me. Seconds later, I heard a spilling of pebbles as bags of dog food blew open from the impact. For the next few weeks I worried a manager would ask me about the broken bags, or say something about a hidden camera catching my dangerous act, but no one ever did.
Like the summer before, I trained and watched Jackie’s movies. I never got tired of his stunts and fights, but I was sadly, slowly, running out of new material from his twenty-five years or so of prior material. I was learning a thing or two in college, and I wondered if his desire to bring movie production to the US had something to do with Hong Kong returning to China. Not only did political situations change, so did the rights of movie stars who’d been a part of the former British colony.
Another semester of school started. I continued through college as an undeclared major, continued balancing work, school, and training. I continued watching couples walk around campus, while hearing about parties or friendships that all seemed just outside my reach.
There were movies where a character waits and waits for something worthwhile, right? Years of intense dedication can play out in flashes of summary in a movie, though, and waiting was tougher in reality. I knew I could have looked into other Hollywood stunt schools, but I specifically wanted to work with Jackie.
Besides, I found new hope in the fall of 2000. Despite the release of most Jackie’s older movies on VHS or DVD, Drunken Master II, or as it became known here, The Legend of Drunken Master, had yet to get a Western treatment. The movie was more traditional in Chinese time period and story, which perhaps caused hesitation with Hollywood producers.[10] I again went alone on opening night. Stunts in the movie looked dangerous and real. Fights were extraordinary. Even in our Americanized version, opening credits twice acknowledged Jackie’s Hong Kong stunt team.
I kept telling myself something had to happen by the year’s end. Jackie said Rush Hour 2 was set to begin filming. He planned for a Shanghai Noon sequel. As that fall semester neared a close, I didn’t even sign up for spring classes. I put tuition money into my stunt school fund. But I wondered how long I could keep waiting.
The holidays came and on a day near the end of the year, I again found a chance to try to prove myself through another stunt. In fact, I found a chance to attempt something more dangerous than anything I’d done prior.
The dojo where I went to classes was located on an old farm. The building was a short drive back on the big property. During summer, a cornfield nestled two outer walls, but we had a snowstorm around this time. I had backed my parent’s old minivan into the dojo parking area, partially under a roof for a tractor-port. I backed in because snow in the lot had been packed down to ice. The day was cold but sunny. Bright sky warmed the building roof enough that drops fell and created a concave groove in the ice. I’d been training alone all day and didn’t know of this until I got in the van that evening and tried to drive away. The van’s rear wheels were caught in that groove and spun out no matter how easy or hard I pushed the pedal.
My sensei’s house was within a few minute’s walk. Maybe he’d have some sand or salt, or he or I could push the van, especially getting leverage off a stone and iron pillar at the vehicle’s rear. But Jackie had chased or jumped on many moving cars in his movies. I looked at the van, looked at ice thick enough to shimmer even with graying sky. I could shift the van into drive instead of neutral. This would give the van some automatic acceleration. This acceleration likely had enough power to help me propel the van free. Once released of the icy groove though, I’d have to catch the van before it hit a stone fence about fifty feet across the lot.
Ice posed the biggest danger. On dry land, catching a car moving five to ten miles an hour would have been a cinch. I was wearing tennis shoes with half-decent traction. My thin sweatshirt offered little cushion in case the van fishtailed into me. The worst possibility was the chance of me falling next to the van, and some part of my body—my head for instance—getting run over. Plus I might get inside with too little time to hit the brakes, but enough time to hit the wall without a seatbelt on.
But I wasn’t good at anything else in my life; I needed to know I could do this.
I shifted the van into drive and kept the driver-side door open. Tires tried to spin. The minivan was heftier than it looked. I pushed from behind. Nothing happened. Then I got between the back of the van and the tractor-port pillar. I propped one leg onto the pillar and pushed again, pushed much harder. The van tilted forward, then rocked back enough that it nearly knocked me over. I put both feet on the pillar and both hands on the van. My legs were strong from holding stances, my balance solid, and I pushed with everything in me. Tires growled. The van pulled free of the slippery hold. I fell flat on the ice. When I looked up, the van drove away over slick ice far faster than I expected.
In the months that were to come, I learned some disheartening news when I read that Jackie signed contracts to do family-friendly movies with Disney. His first was going to be about a man who found a technologically advanced tuxedo. The movie would use special effects, and these, Jackie admitted, would help him perform in ways becoming physically difficult for him.
Could I blame him? Jackie had often risked his life for his stunts. The news was far more disheartening than the fact that amongst all future information I heard about Jackie, never again did I hear or read anything about a US branch of a Jackie Chan stunt school. Not once.
Maybe it was a childish dream to think I could work alongside Jackie. His stuntmen were extraordinary. Who’s to say I’d have been good enough? The truth of the matter was that like when I’d been a kid hoping for my own Mr. Miyagi, I still wanted a mentor.
Of course, such disappointments were still far off as that van sped away. I jumped up from the ice. My shoes squeaked as rubber slipped. I tightened muscles in my feet and legs for balance. I pumped my arms and soon ran parallel to the back corner of the van. I then saw another danger. The big gray box wasn’t driving straight. When tires hit bumps or divots in ice, the van rocked and swerved. The van’s metal creaked and craned. Might there be good excuses for backing down and finding a way to explain to my parents and Sensei why the van crashed into the stone wall?
In the near future, a time would also come when I didn’t watch Jackie Chan movies so obsessively. I gradually put my training fervor into working harder at my college classes. As news about Jackie diminished and my VHS tapes became obsolete, I somewhat even forgot about him. Then some years later, an internet hoax suggested Jackie died while filming. People were quick to believe the rumor, and I was surprised how devastated I found myself.
Even after revelation of the hoax, I felt a need to hunt down Jackie’s old and new movies. Though he had somewhat faded from popularity in the US, he never stopped making films. His newer movies were good, but nothing like those that shaped my youth. At this point, years after the time when I’d dreamt of doing stunt work alongside him, I realized something else.
Jackie had in fact been my teacher. Maybe it’s far-fetched, a form of disassociation, or a cliché, considering that he inspired so many people around the world, but Jackie Chan meant a hell of a lot to a young lonely kid who was unsure what to do with his life, who was unsure what he was good at, or what he could ever become good at. Jackie had been there to push me past fears and to become more independent. He wasn’t just a hero; he was a mentor in ways I hadn’t even realized.
Back at that moment when doubt entered my mind as I chased the van across ice, I thought about Jackie. He wouldn’t let the van crash. He wouldn’t give up if terrified. I pumped my arms harder. My steps got some traction on rough ice. I reached the open driver-side door, and right before I was about to grab it, the van hit a bump and the vehicle swerved toward me.
There was a buildup in Jackie’s movies leading to his most mesmerizing stunts. He didn’t just jump off or onto things. He’d push his character to the brink of desperation in catching a villain, in escaping from someone or something, and all this brought the audience into the excitement. He was a master at such technique.
The van swerved. The thing would have hit me like a metal bat tapping a wiffle ball. I jumped into the air. I jumped right into the open driver’s side. I slammed my chest against the steering wheel and kicked my right foot to the brake pedal. The van skidded and slid, gripping ice and eventually stopping about an inch from the stone wall.
Before I’d get out and check on the van, before I’d think to myself that I probably better ease up for a while on these dangerous stunts—wait for a more controlled setting in Jackie’s stunt school—I just sat there in the driver’s seat. The door was open. The air was cold. My quick breaths clouded in front of me. I smiled and laughed, and never more than in that moment did I at least knew one thing for certain: I swore I knew if only for a brief moment, something of how it felt to be like Jackie Chan.
[1] Rumble in the Bronx released in US theaters on February 23, 1996.
[2] Bill Tung played Jackie’s uncle in Rumble in the Bronx, and though he played his boss in many other films, lazy US producers just had Jackie call him uncle again and again.
[3] True actually. A teenaged Jackie first did stunt work with Bruce Lee in The Chinese Connection in 1972.
[4] All in 1985’s Police Story.
[5] The Big Brawl, The Protector, and due to a contractual agreement, The Cannonball Run.
[6] Anyone who watched Jackie’s older movies had already seen “big brother.” Sammo was of no blood relation to Jackie, but the two trained/lived in the same school for many years.
[7] From Drunken Master, 1976.
[8] Much like differing personas in Jackie’s in Twin Dragons, where he uses the Parent Trap trick to play himself.
[9] Jackie was in his mid-40s when Rumble in the Bronx released in the US.
[10] Drunken Master II’s minor success showed that Americans were interested in Chinese films, a fact validated months later with the release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Jeremy Schnee’s recently published stories can be found in Snarl Journal, Neo-Opsis, and The Main Street Rag. Aside from writing, he lately has been enjoying gardening, roller skating, and playing complex board games. For more information about his writing, and to read articles on random nostalgic topics, including a companion article about his favorite Jackie Chan movies, check out jeremyschnee.com.