by Sasha Chapin
But my baseless reverie crumbled. Without anyone I could sort the diverse new sensations with, or find shelter from the buttery light with, it all seemed a little wasted. Shortly, I wanted to fall off the earth. Bathed in soot, I bought pomelos in solitude, watching happy Thai couples chit-chat.
Like many white people before me, I was becoming bored in Asia. And I wasn’t writing much of anything. What I found out, almost immediately, was that it’s hard for me to write if I don’t have people around whom I might delight or dismay. I live for approval. I’m just a dancing bear, fundamentally. But being in Bangkok was all about being on a Skytrain shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of people who couldn’t read my stupid little thoughts even if they wanted to. There was a big empty in my head. Days crawled, somehow not only large with boring white minutes, but also small as they disappeared without a trace. Barely understanding Thai, I floated in a sea of incomprehensible murmurs; occasionally I overheard one of the maybe one hundred words in my vocabulary. “Oh,” I would think, “someone is discussing pork.” In January I was writing six pieces at once, but in February I was barely writing one. My credit card balance crept up; I observed it with no particular emotion. And as I predicted, there was no sign of Courtney.
That’s when my troubles really started. Or not then exactly, but right after, when Elena got back from a trip to Nepal. That’s when life as I now know it began. Not that I knew that at the time. The future never announces itself. Your destiny is quietly prepared offstage, until the hour when it emerges, saying something like, “Knock knock, motherfucker.” Elena arrived in the apartment bearing a contagious excitation about the most recent leg of her travels.
“Nepal is so interesting,” she said.
“What’s going on there?” I said.
“There’s a blockade, gasoline isn’t making it over the Indian border, nobody can do anything, and, like, everything is paralyzed.”
“That sounds good.”
“The weather is really good right now, too.”
“Should I write a story about it?”
“Totally.”
So I did—a story about the incredibly complicated domestic tensions there, which I barely understood, even after extensive research. Essentially all I knew was that reporters should talk to people, so from the moment I landed in Kathmandu, I began a conversation with everyone who engaged me in more than a moment of eye contact. During this ungainly process, after ambling down an arbitrary lane, I found myself in a rubble-strewn square presided over by a group of chess hustlers—strong players who make their salary on small wager games with suckers like me. Around the board stood a small, silent crowd, which I immediately joined, attempting to be inconspicuous. Despite my efforts, though, everyone noticed the presence of a non-Nepali, so the crowd’s focus shifted towards me. After the conclusion of the game I’d interrupted, they all wondered aloud whether I might join in. I said, “Um, golly, uh, sure, okay, why not?” then sat down on the dusty stone across from my opponent, whose name was Tenjing.
He opened the game in the most common fashion, by playing e4.1 This was the only opening move Bobby Fischer enjoyed playing: he called it “best by test.” In response, I played the move e6—the first move of the French Defense.
The French Defense was an old friend of mine that I hadn’t seen since I was a teenager. I hardly recognized it when I saw it on the board, although we had once been intimately familiar. It was my weapon of choice when I played on my hippie alternative school’s chess team, the Pawnishers.
1 This is how chess moves are abbreviated: “[piece] [destination square].” The squares are denoted by a number and a letter, which refer, respectively, to their vertical and horizontal—the board stretches between a1, at the lower left, and h8, at the upper right. When a capture happens, the word takes is inserted—e.g., “bishop takes h3.” If it’s a pawn move, only the destination square is included: “e4,” for example. Also, this is the last footnote in this book, I promise.
2
THE PAWNISHERS
To get at what chess meant to me as an adolescent, unfortunately I have to tell you a little bit about my childhood. Specifically, there’s one piece of information I should convey, which is the fact that nobody liked me, and that they were probably right not to like me. I was an annoying and abrasive person, constantly ranting and raving and demanding attention from others, and whining and crying when I couldn’t get it. Prepubescent me was notable for two things: an expansive vocabulary and the way I irritated people by spraying my surroundings with it.
As much as it might have seemed so, I didn’t want to be disliked. What I wanted was to communicate my constant excitement about all the slivers of reality I could touch and gather with my overactive mind. Nearly everything thrilled me. Sometimes I would become so possessed by my private thicket of thoughts and associations that I’d start sprinting down the street, chased by some fulminating notion, and would often collide with a mailbox or a stranger. Like instantly blooming clutches of bougainvillea, refractions of the world sprang all over my insides, and I wanted to get them out. But the only result of this instinct was my social unacceptability.
At a very young age, this meant I didn’t have much fun on the playground. Nobody wanted to play with me, so I dug through soil on the edge of the schoolyard and watched insects squirm through my fingers. A few years after that, my isolation was replaced by vicious, constant bullying, administered by beautiful young men who were finding their manhood through the enforcement of pubescent tribal boundaries, outside of which I always fell. Each day at school was a long torture, during which every one of my outward behaviors—the way I chewed, talked, or walked—was cruelly mimicked by the most popular children. At one point, I happened to inhale as a boy named Troy was passing in front of my chair. He accused me of trying to smell his butt, and for the rest of that year, I was “the butt-sniffer,” and I was greeted by exaggerated sniffing noises every time I entered a room.
This gave me a pervasive shame: a feeling that the project of my very being had been given failing marks by some invisible and final council. And this shame never really disappeared completely, and in fact only abated slightly, even as my social standing improved.
Which it did, considerably: as my teenage years continued, I pieced together something of a halfway-acceptable personality, by imitating public radio hosts and the more charismatic neurotics in Woody Allen movies. After doing well on some standardized tests, I was placed in a class for the academically gifted, which was slightly less dominated by jocks. Thereafter, I slipped further towards the margins, to an alternative school called Inglenook, which was filled with hippies and eccentrics and stoners, among whom I wasn’t considered totally malformed. In fact, by the time I was sixteen or so, some of the boys thought I was interesting, if trying, and some of the girls thought I was cute.
But the shame marred all of this completely. During any social situation, I was constantly suppressing the silent terror that, at any moment, the ruse of my charm would disappear, and that the friendliness or toleration displayed by my peers would become menace. When a pretty young woman deigned to take my pants off, I managed to enjoy what followed, but would often afterwards be seized with the certainty that she’d subsequently realize that I was completely disgusting and that our sexual encounter was a mistake.
From the outside, it would seem like I was having fun. My nerdy nature had been corrupted by an aspiration towards delinquency. An evening spent pursuing my preferences might end with public indecency committed with a near-stranger atop an unmoored train car. Frequently, I trespassed for recreation—I loved traipsing around abandoned buildings, or swimming in public pools after hours, or sneaking around fancy hotels. And I was getting cozy with a few drugs. But it was all an attempt at filling an extremely durable void. Nights spent chasing novelty and the opposite sex were what I had instead of self-esteem or a purpose.
That’s when the Pawnishers, the Inglenook chess team, came in.
Th
e Pawnishers were brought together by Liam, a boy who could bend the world to his will. Everywhere he went, a situation began. This is perhaps best exemplified by the fact that he somehow had an Internet fan base who held a real-life convention in his honor. They, a dozen or so people, flew him out to Virginia, just so they could get him drunk and make out with him in shallow, cold water. He was influential like that. So, when he informed the bookish contingent of the school that they were in his chess club, we basically all agreed to this interpretation of our lives.
I think, at first, I did it just because I wanted to belong to some kind of cadre. Having a ready-made, highly ostentatious identity was socially useful, especially in a school composed of total freaks. Our school, as previously mentioned, was an asylum. The most popular girls, a trio of charming blondes with outrageously colorful outfits, would announce nonchalantly that they were on LSD during lunch break—excuse me, one would say, I can’t really pay attention to what you’re saying, because the walls are melting. Our most popular boy, meanwhile, took breaks from meditating in the courtyard to inform everyone who’d listen about the benefits of drinking their own urine. Briefly, I sat next to a young schizoid genius who would rattle off long monologues about Nikola Tesla before announcing his intention to masturbate all over the far wall. He was expelled because of something horrific we were never told about. I saw him last on the steps of a downtown halfway house.
In this druggy, chaotic context, where people were constantly starting bands with names like “Skullfucker,” being a chess player was cool and conspicuous. It was counter-counter-culture. However, after the first few weeks of practices, being a Pawnisher started being way more than a self-imposed quirk, because chess was starting to take over my mind.
It had a profound effect on me. I lost interest in all of my other typical activities. The brief thrills of breaking the law or almost breaking a condom felt like shallow flutters compared to the sustained joy of playing over one of Bobby Fischer’s masterpieces. Skipping school lost its appeal. Every day, I eagerly awaited the chance to show the other Pawnishers what I’d learned about the game from Wikipedia or an online skirmish.
And when I played chess, I felt, like, different. On the chessboard, the shame that plagued me was temporarily dispelled. It had something to do with how the game involved both self-expression and self-effacement. When I was playing, I was both myself and not myself. My style was driven by my personality, surely—simply for the sake of being strange, I was drawn to esoteric, weird strategies, preferring to be a tricky counter-puncher rather than a straightforwardly assertive attacking player. But despite that, the game sort of had nothing to do with me. None of my superficial attributes, which I so hated, translated onto the board. When I was checkmating someone, I shrank in importance compared to the pieces before me. It was as if I had temporarily lost my clumsily foaming mouth, and my nervously searching eyes, and my long greasy hair, and the perfectly normal body I had, which struck me as perfectly repulsive.
But in this ecstatic flight from myself, where was I going, exactly?
Psychologist and author Steven Pinker says something about music that I really like. He calls it “auditory cheesecake.” Just like cheesecake is so satisfying because it’s more sugary than the foods the taste buds were evolved to experience, music overwhelms eardrums that were merely designed to track the movements of predators and the grunts of our loved ones.
It seems like there’s something similar going on with chess. Chess pours pure sugar down cognitive pathways that were originally forged for the sake of simple survival. Our sense of pattern recognition, crucial for making our way under the stars, is tickled when we see lethal potential lurking in an innocuous-looking pawn structure. Our sense of geometry, crucial for anticipating the flight path of a potentially delicious bird, is pushed to its limit when we calculate a complex tactic. And perhaps most importantly, our sense of social status, evolved for the wearying task of navigating the pecking order, finds satisfaction not only in the competition itself but in the hierarchy of the pieces—in the thrill we feel when our queen savages its inferiors on our opponent’s team.
Also, life has so much waiting in it, know what I mean? You’re always waiting for somebody to call, or waiting to fall asleep, or waiting to see whether any of your little plans will ever work out. In chess, though, from the very first move, the players present each other with bold impositions and insane demands, making choices of instant consequence. Fully half the board is occupied by the pieces at the start of the game—there’s really no empty space to speak of. Inexorably, the players immediately create a convoluted havoc.
I wasn’t great at that havoc, to be honest. I lost almost every competitive game I played. Most of us lost almost every competitive game we played. We were up against kids who’d been playing since they were seven—terribly serious children in unwrinkled school uniforms who said markedly little. They beat us perhaps 80 per cent of the time. We just weren’t trained the way they were. They were the glossy, efficient nerds, and we were the other kind—scrappy, messy, and precocious in our attainment of bad habits.
We didn’t particularly care. Winning was good if it was available, but since it wasn’t, we took pleasure in simply being obnoxious. Our signature attire was black-and-white chess-themed war paint with black-and-white vintage clothing, but we sometimes varied our attire, such as during our match against Upper Canada College, the city’s snottiest private school for boys. To that game we wore fairly convincing drag. When we arrived, just as class was letting out, we stood on a snowdrift in front of the main entrance, all in colorful gowns, staring salaciously at the student body as it entered its parents’ cars. Later, our team’s best player, Isaac, absentmindedly fondled his huge prosthetic tits after sliding his bishop through his opponent’s defenses. His psychological warfare was remarkably effective—he scored a gigantic upset on his opponent, who was otherwise undefeated that season.
Isaac was a stoner who was a fierce, efficient player when he wasn’t stoned, which was almost never. On weed, he was still the best we had. Being beaten by Isaac was especially infuriating because he seemed like he didn’t really care about winning. The only sign he gave of preferring a specific outcome was occasional, low-key trash talk delivered with a terrible Russian accent. “Take the pawn, comrade,” he would say, in situations where you really shouldn’t take the pawn. He had a little catchphrase that became the whole team’s mantra: “It’s mostly fine.” He said it when his game was going terribly, when his opponent was approaching absolute triumph: “It’s mostly fine.” To this day, in my most hapless moments, when I’m helplessly watching one of my trivial enterprises fall apart, I think, “It’s mostly fine.”
Though my team’s conduct at the board was sometimes dubious, my love of the game became increasingly serious. Along with being emotionally comforting, chess let me display what I felt was my obviously superior mind. Back then, although I still didn’t like myself, I was sure I had one redeeming feature: being smarter than everyone else on earth. While I had spent my life up until that point displaying my intellect indirectly—by carrying around big stacks of books or using Latin abbreviations on Microsoft Messenger, that kind of kabuki approach was a little indirect. However, in chess, I could effectively smash my brain directly against someone else’s and enjoy the resulting explosions.
* * *
Learning serious chess is, at first, an exhilarating, emboldening experience. Early on, the novice rapidly conquers conceptual plateaus, easily doubling their skill level, then redoubling it. You start beating players who were equal competition just recently—maybe your cousin, or your podiatrist. They become fearful of your wrath.
After you get a sense of how the pieces move, you then proceed towards an overall understanding of the game’s architecture. Generally, each game possesses three stages—however, like life, which is made up of the tripartite sections of kid, old person, then really old person, the categories are porous and their progression may b
e prematurely halted by stupidity.
The opening is where you maneuver your forces such that you might effectively endanger your opponent—think of the way war used to be fought, with smelly men in big heavy coats arranging themselves before a corresponding row of similarly miserable people, preparing for attack. You place your pieces so they can move effectively—while bishops on their starting square do nearly nothing, when properly led, they slice easily across the whole board. Here, you get an edge by studying “opening theory,” which is just a fancy way of saying that you learn how people have begun chess games before, and then move the same way. It’s a little bit like learning common chord progressions before you write a song.
Many of the openings have intriguing names—there’s the Sicilian Dragon, a century-old standby, or maybe the quirky Réti Opening, if you feel like being a little eccentric. You might learn the Flick-Knife Attack if your opponent has opted for the risky Benoni Defense. If you’re crazy, you might attempt the Halloween Gambit, where you give up your pieces so you can play in a scary-looking but frivolous fashion. You get deeply involved in the lines of play you might enjoy, so that eventually you might say, as I did, “I’ve been studying some lines in the accepted Poisoned Pawn Variation of the Winawer French Defense.”
Unless you perpetrate a truly grand fuck-up in the opening stages—which is easily possible—you then enjoy the middle-game. During this phase, there are many active pieces on the board, which dance around each other, presenting threats and counter-threats, or perhaps simply murdering each other off the board in pairs. The grand dramas of the game usually take place here, and the personalities of the players become manifest. Aggressive players search for a swift ending, imposing threats both serious and empty, dancing with demoniac energy across spaces they rip open by force and putting their pieces in harm’s way with glee. More strategic players, so-called “positional” players, cramp their opponents, seizing little packets of space, asking a series of uncomfortable questions to which the only answers are more or less effective forms of wriggling.
