They’ve been herded into a conference room in the bowels of the building, into a line behind dozens of people, all waiting to be funneled into an adjacent room for pictures with the senator. They’ve been told to keep the noise down, out of respect for the senator, but the argument about the twenty-seven dollars is still raging and Sal is complaining (“I haven’t eaten in like, ten hours and twenty-three minutes,” he says) and the Weisses’ two children, who have accompanied them to this photo op, who accompany them to most of the team’s tournaments, are growing restless.
It’s not that they haven’t grown accustomed to these types of events by now. It’s all part of the process of winning. They’ve met their local congressman so many times that it’s become a dull postseason routine. They’ve had proclamations issued in their honor and they’ve been feted at City Hall meetings.
Feb. 8, 1996, press release, “Mayor Honors New York City champions”: “Applauding the team, Mayor Giuliani said, ‘I am pleased to extend my congratulations to the Edward R. Murrow High School Chess Team for your outstanding achievements in the international chess community. Your commitment to the game, your self-discipline . . .” blah, blah, blah, etc. . . .
May 18, 2000, Brooklyn city proclamation: “Whereas, the Borough of Brooklyn has produced some of the best chess players in the world, and it is most fitting that we recognize these individuals and groups that have risen to the highest ranks of success in competition . . .” and so on, and so on. . . .
May 5, 2004, City Council proclamation: “Whereas: Under the astute direction of Coach Eliot Weiss, the team was led to victory by players Dmitry (sic) Minevich, Olga Novikova, Alex Linderman (sic), Ilya Kotiyanskiy (sic), Oscar Santana, Willy Edgard, and Nile Smith . . .”
But now, thanks to the persistence of Mr. Weiss, after phone calls to a congressman named Anthony Weiner (who, a few months later, would make an unsuccessful run for mayor) and follow-up calls every two weeks to the scheduling people in Washington, they’ve attained a new watershed in political photo-ops: In five days, they’re going to the White House to meet the American president, George W. Bush, who will honor them for their 2004 national championship. So the Clinton meeting is a mere warm-up. And it is taking far longer than they would have liked. Because, in truth, these meetings are as much for Mr. Weiss as they are for the team. As far as Sal is concerned, he’d rather be at McDonald’s.
Five more minutes, says one of Clinton’s handlers, once again urging them toward silence.
“They said five more minutes ten minutes ago,” Sal says.
“Listen,” Oscar says. “It’s simple. I give Willy fourteen dollars, and you give me thirteen.”
“Oscar,” Willy says. “Just give it up.”
And then the line begins to move. They can see the flashbulbs popping in the other room. The assembly line is created: A photo, a handshake, and then move on. When it is Murrow’s turn with the senator, they pose for a group photo, and for individual photos, and Hillary Clinton expresses her pride, and Mr. Weiss tells the senator they’re heading to the White House the next week. “Any advice?” he says.
What she tells them, according to the officious young woman who aids Hillary Clinton in her public affairs, is supposed to be off the record, as are all comments uttered by the senator to her constituents on this day. But since she does not mention this until after the fact, here is the advice Hillary Rodham Clinton imparts to seven teenaged boys who represent her constituency, seven teenaged boys who are regarded as a spectacular photo-op by the political establishment (who can go wrong posing with a chess team?), seven teenaged boys who have just spent the past hour arguing over outstanding poker debts and reciting R-rated rap lyrics and negotiating sleeping arrangements at a hotel in Nashville in April:
“Challenge him to a game of chess,” she says.
When they’ve been swept from the room, when Eliot Weiss’s latest crusade for political recognition has been fulfilled, the arguments rage on. Facts remain malleable; it’s as if nothing at all has happened in the interim. Oscar’s versions of past events and Willy’s versions of the same event vary wildly from what Nile and Ilya and Sal might have seen. In the lobby, Alex Lenderman gets a call from his parents, who would like him to come home as soon as possible. And out on the sidewalk, amid the wind and the drizzle and the last miserable dregs of a December afternoon, Oscar takes a brief respite from pleading out of his debts to ask something else of Willy.
“Yo,” he says. “You think George Bush even plays chess?”
Oscar Santana
SIX
THE ORANGUTAN
THE FACTS ARE THESE:
Oscar Santana is seventeen years old, and he is in the twelfth grade at Murrow High School, and he lives in a fourth-floor apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, near the G train station at Classon Avenue, above a mini-market and across the street from the Lafayette Houses, a sprawling complex of city projects. Oscar Santana should not be confused with Oskar Santana, who is twelve years old and in the seventh grade at Intermediate School 318 in Williamsburg, and lives in the same apartment, and happens to be Oscar Santana’s brother. Both have registered in separate divisions for the upcoming Right Move tournament at Brooklyn College, which is held on a brisk Sunday morning inside an expansive cafeteria on the school’s Flat-bush campus. Furthermore, neither Oscar Santana nor Oskar Santana should be mistaken for their father, Oscar Santana (or “Big Oscar”), who lives in the same apartment, along with a wife and a daughter (whose name, mercifully, is Talitha) and several varieties of domesticated birds, who roam freely about the kitchen and living-room floor.
The Santanas are Puerto Rican, and this whole name thing is in keeping with a Hispanic tradition, according to Big Oscar, who is built like a freezer, short and rectangular, the type of man who looks as if he could strangle a bear but is so genial that it’s hard to imagine him stepping on a cockroach. “It’s like how George Foreman named all five of his sons George,” Big Oscar says one day while sitting in his modest living room, waiting for Oscar (and Oskar) to come home from school. (That George Foreman is actually from Texas does not seem to bother him.) The confusion is mitigated through nicknames: The littlest Oskar is referred to as “Machi,” which means “little man” in Spanish, and the midsized version of Oscar is referred to by his mother as “Osky.”
Oscar (that is to say, “Osky”), who has a plump face and wire-rimmed glasses and a grin that exposes a mouthful of dental work, tends to make an indelible impression on the adults who negotiate beyond his reticent veneer. This is not always easy. Once, when his parents found out Oscar hadn’t been attending one of his classes at Murrow, they asked him what was wrong. “I don’t think the teacher likes me,” Oscar told them.
“At times, Oscar can close himself off to people,” says his father, wringing a pair of massive hands. “He has to know you. If he don’t know you, he’ll close up like a nutshell. That’s when he can get in trouble. He’s extremely smart, but I tell him, I say, ‘Oscar, sometimes you gotta talk.’ ”
Oscar shows up at the Right Move tournament in Brooklyn wearing his typical school uniform, an untucked blue oxford shirt and ridiculously baggy jeans and white sneakers, with a pair of Sony headphones draped around his neck. His brother, who is thin and hyperactive and almond-skinned and looks only vaguely like Oscar, is hanging around with him, trying desperately to look cool, which is funny, because Oskar is a handsome boy, and this is, after all, a chess tournament. Oskar is not a particularly talented chess player (he is far too hyperactive), but it is immediately apparent that Oskar idolizes Oscar, who with a victory in his fourth and final game of the day against a lower-rated junior-high schooler, can finish with three points and in a tie for third place in the open division. It should be an easy victory, but Oscar tends not to do things the easy way, which is what has prompted him to embrace an opening known as the Orangutan.
“People don’t know how to play the Orangutan,” Oscar says. “People fear the Orangutan.”
The Orangutan is, in fact, as odd and loopy an opening as its name suggests (other unconventional and more recently developed openings named after zoo animals include the Hippopotamus, the Elephant, and the Hedgehog). A conventional chess opening begins with white moving one of the two center pawns, known in chess notation as 1.d4 or 1.e4, in order to gain control of the center of the board. This is the first theoretical tenet every chess player learns: The opening is a fight for control of the center squares of the board. Whoever wins that fight has a distinct advantage, which is why nearly every serious opening for white begins with one of those two moves.
In the Orangutan, white opens the game by moving the knight’s pawn from b2 to b4:
A single opening move like this, something as radical and unexpected as 1.b4, changes the entire dynamic of the game. The balance of the board is upended, the center remains wide open for one’s opponent, and chaos and confusion ensue, which is the way Oscar would prefer it.
This name, the Orangutan, traces its roots back to New York in 1924, to an idiosyncratic Polish grandmaster named Savielly Tartakower, who was visiting the Bronx Zoo on a day off during a tournament called the New York International. Tartakower passed the monkey cages, where an orangutan moved closer as he approached. This orangutan’s name, according to Tartakower, was Susan. It was then that he had a brainstorm: He showed Susan a chess set. He asked her what opening he should play in the next round. Somehow, Tartakower insisted, the orangutan told him to play b4, and because the climbing movement of the pawn to b4, and eventually to the b5 square, reminded him of Susan’s movements, the name stuck. Tartakower played the Orangutan to a draw, and while other masters and grandmasters have dabbled in the possibilities, the opening remains a novelty, an irregularity, its strength lying largely in the element of surprise.
Oscar used to rely on the Ruy Lopez opening, which begins with 1.e4 and makes perfect theoretical sense and allows for early castling (another basic theoretical tenet), but then he learned the intricacies of the Orangutan from an international master named Yury Lapshun, and he now plays it virtually every chance he gets. Often, it will get him into trouble, but this is Oscar Santana we’re talking about, and Oscar has a way of squirming out of even the most serious kinds of trouble.
The biggest mess Oscar ever happened into came earlier this fall, when he realized he was about to face up to a subpar report card during his first cycle of classes at Murrow. By all accounts, Oscar has a sharp intellect, but his grades have never reflected that, and this is not something his father has much tolerance toward. Oscar also has a certain aptitude toward computers; at one point, he was given a very old Dell desktop, and with the help of his next-door neighbor, he dismantled it, incorporated parts of it into his current computer, and souped the whole thing up into a superior machine. His parents couldn’t quite understand how he did it, but when they came home one day, there were the Dell and Oscar’s old computer on the living-room table, melded into a single formidable machine, capable of running the latest Windows incarnation at full speed and logging on to the World Wide Web at all hours of the night.
So after Oscar realized his upcoming report card would not play well with his father, he hatched a scheme worthy of a Hollywood film. (In fact, it was a scheme worthy of a Hollywood film, back in 1983, several years before Oscar’s birth, when a teenaged Matthew Broderick did the same thing in War Games.) Somehow, Oscar hacked his way into the New York City Board of Education’s computer, and he changed his grades manually. Then he brought home a perfect report card: Straight As. His parents were shocked. They had no idea what had happened. They thought maybe Oscar had finally applied himself. They thought that maybe their constant admonishments, their insistence that Oscar do his homework before falling into hours of online chess and poker games, had finally been heeded.
Problem was, Oscar hadn’t thought out his plan to the end. His parents insisted on attending the next open-school night, to verify the causes of this miraculous turnaround, this little gift from the heavens. Oscar went with them. When they got there, he told them none of his teachers were around that night. So they went to the principal’s office, which is about the time that Oscar’s scheme finally unraveled altogether. When school officials found out what Oscar had done, the Santanas say, they didn’t just want to expel Oscar. They wanted to charge Oscar with a felony. But Mr. Weiss put up an argument for Oscar, and Oscar’s parents put up an argument for him, that he was on the chess team, that he was a quiet boy who didn’t mean to hurt anyone, and somehow, because this is Oscar, because he has a magical ability to wend his way out of trouble, the school decided to give him another chance. His parents didn’t know what to feel. They wanted to knock him around and shake him and hug him, all at the same time. They wanted to know how someone so demonstrably smart could do something so unbelievably stupid. They wanted him to use his powers for good, instead of using them to subvert the system, just this once. “Look, Oscar,” said his mother, Rosa, a thin woman who offsets her husband’s formidable physical presence. “If you’re able to break into the Board of Education’s computer, you should be able to do your classwork. If you’re able to break into the Board of Education’s computer, then you’re not dumb.”
For his part, Oscar won’t say much of anything about it. It was a gamble, after all, and it didn’t work. Sometimes, in chess, in school, in poker, in life, that happens.
Big Oscar and Rosa first met when they were still children growing up in Williamsburg. Years later, after Oscar had divorced his first wife, he met up with Rosa again, and now they’ve been married for eighteen years. They lived in Florida for a short time but then they came back here, back to New York and to the apartment on DeKalb Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant where they’ve lived for the past nine years. It’s not much, but it’s home. There are no locks or buzzers on the building’s front door. The address is written by hand in what looks like a black permanent marker above the entrance. The stairs are steep and unforgiving, but the apartment itself, in a neighborhood that is slowly giving way to gentrification, is a bargain: seven small rooms, set up railroad-style, including four modest bedrooms, for slightly over one thousand dollars a month, with just enough room for a computer desk, atop which lies Oscar’s Frankensteinian creation, and a leather couch in the living room. It’s tight, what with five people and four birds, but given that the only income is from Big Oscar’s disability checks, this is about the outer limit of what they can afford. And they’ve come to like it here, as the neighborhood has changed.
In the old days, they could look out the living-room window and watch people getting held up in the middle of the street, and there was a steady spate of shootings and drug deals taking place at the Lafayette Houses. Now, just recently, a man had come and bought the old factory across the street and turned the whole thing into luxury lofts. The Santanas aren’t worried about the gentrification of Bed-Stuy forcing them out of the neighborhood. At least, not yet. They figure as long as their rent stays steady, these changes can only be positive for their children. Talitha is only nine years old, but a teacher has already singled her out for her artistry, telling the Santanas she has a keen eye for detail. On Saturdays, she takes classes at the Pratt Institute, which happens to be near their apartment, which is another blessing that Rosa says a prayer of thanks for every day.
“The Lord is good,” Rosa says, and she says it as often as she can.
The Santana family disease is called osteonecrosis, which means, literally, “dead bone.” It’s what happens when the blood stops flowing to a joint, and the cells within the bone and the marrow begin to die, and an almost unbearable pain sets in and doesn’t go away. Big Oscar got osteonecrosis in his knee, and was honorably discharged from the Marines because of it, and his body hasn’t been the same since. He started taking cortisone injections, which he says triggered diabetes. The only cure is a joint replacement, but Big Oscar can’t exactly afford to splurge and buy himself a new knee. He used to work for a bank, and then for a brokerage firm
, and then he was a supervisor at Mount Sinai Hospital, but now he has trouble doing much of anything, so he lives off the disability.
And then the younger Oscar somehow contracted this disease, as well, in his hip, early in his teenage years. Oscar, who used to love playing handball, would start coming back from the courts in so much pain that he’d have to pop several painkillers and coat his hip in Icy Hot in order to make it through the night. The doctors told him he’d probably need a hip replacement at some point, but not yet, Oscar says, not while his body is still developing. So he deals with the pain by remaining mostly sedentary, by mastering those things that don’t cause his hip any further pain. His parents have told him to go on disability when he turns eighteen, but Oscar insists he wants to work.
Around the time his hip fell into its slow and inevitable demise, Oscar started playing chess. He was in the sixth grade, in his first year at I.S. 318, and he asked his parents to take him to a tournament at a Catholic church on Stuyvesant Street. Chess? His parents had no idea what this was about, what the game entailed, or how Oscar had picked up the habit. Chess? They figured it had to be a phase. “We didn’t hardly pay no mind to it,” Big Oscar says.
So they dropped him off, and when they came to pick him up, one of his friends came over and said, “Oscar got first place.” And then Oscar started bringing home trophies on a regular basis: A half dozen, a dozen, twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, until the Santanas no longer had any idea what to do with them, until they had no space for them in their living room and had to start storing some in garbage bags and throwing the others away. Oscar started staying up all night, logging on to chess Web sites, playing against faraway opponents on Yahoo! and on the Internet Chess Club, studying tactics and positions and attempting to improve his game for reasons even he couldn’t begin to explicate. It all made sense, though. Oscar has a personality suited for the game. Not only is he a risk-taker, he’s also a singular philosopher, a font of charisma, the kind of kid who does his math homework and marks down the answers and refuses to show his work, and when the teacher asks why, he tells his mother, “Why should I show them how I did it?”
Game of Kings Page 8
