forty-nine times, multiples being a key feature. Thereafter, for reasons he did not reveal, he passed a few years in the Big House, though of course he was innocent.
This portion of the conversation, the portion relating to the episodic and hard-to-follow life of D. Tyrannosaurus, took a long time, in part because there were many silences, bringing us flush against the evening blackout. I still had to walk back into the southern part of the city, largely controlled by unsavory gang types, and I was a little worried about the forty-five minutes it would take, even though darkness is a beautiful thing. I was about to make my escape, therefore, when D. asked if I played chess.
“Isn’t it late? For fun and games?”
“We can play on the clock. Anyway, I got a car.”
“A car?”
“I siphon off a bit of this or that when I have to.”
As the entire remainder of this introduction, and indeed my entire future as a writer, is entailed in the answer to this rather strange question from D.— Do you play chess? —the subject deserves another brief side trip into my past.
Yes, I, Montese Crandall, was once the second-best under-eighteen player of chess in the northwestern division of the country. As a young person, I had few other passions. It’s a certain kind of genius, the chess genius, and it is the kind of genius I once possessed. The kind that sees ahead, that sees combinations. The kind that plays a completely conservative game, culminating in the meting out of total destruction. When I was young and ugly and could not hit the ball with the bat, I wanted to play chess. I worked at it. I read up. I followed Paul Morphy’s games, likewise other grand masters’. I pored over Big Blue’s machinations, that hulking supercomputer.
Chess was not a thing that was indulged at my parents’ ashram, as you might imagine. In fact, chess was considered by my parents to be elitist, proto-fascist, and dependent on phallic aggrandizement, and, in its imperialist, hegemonic, phallic structures, unsuitable for children.
Therefore, I practiced chess in secret. Apart from women and men. Often I played by mail. At one time, I had a dozen games of chess going by mail, with people whom I met briefly in furtive chess-obsessed conversations out in the world, in the rare instances I was permitted access to the larger world. I hated that my chess longing was secret, profane, and that my board was a folding cardboard one that I hid under my bed. On the other hand, I loved my chess-playing brethren. I loved the chess-playing girls with their gigantic braces, their scoliosis, and those homemade dresses that featured jam stains.
My parents, they of the alternative lifestyles, asked, when they found my chessboard: How did we raise up a chess-obsessed child? Why a fascist prodigy? Why a child who won’t wear hemp products, even under duress, who won’t work in the bulk section at the food co-op, who wants nothing more than to analyze positions on the board and stare out the window? Next he will want his own pocket calculator! Next he will be designing so-called computer games for the so-called computer community where no one touches anyone else and pedophiles run free!
I won my share of tournaments. I even won tournaments in which I had to play several games at a time. I once won a tournament in which I had to play several games on the clock. These tournaments were mostly against amateurs from the desolate towns of my youth. Then, at sixteen, in a statewide tournament, I played against a naturalized Indian, originally from Hyderabad. His name was Sashi, and his parents were in the movie business. He was a vain, self-centered Brahman, and I wanted to humiliate him badly. This was not my reaction to other boys, that I wanted to humiliate them, but Sashi believed he was the best at everything. I have a vivid recollection of his boasting of his sword-fighting lessons, which he needed in order to prepare for his vocation as a leading Bollywood man.
This portion of the conversation, the portion relating to the episodic and hard-to-follow life of D. Tyrannosaurus, took a long time, in part because there were many silences, bringing us flush against the evening blackout. I still had to walk back into the southern part of the city, largely controlled by unsavory gang types, and I was a little worried about the forty-five minutes it would take, even though darkness is a beautiful thing. I was about to make my escape, therefore, when D. asked if I played chess.
“Isn’t it late? For fun and games?”
“We can play on the clock. Anyway, I got a car.”
“A car?”
“I siphon off a bit of this or that when I have to.”
As the entire remainder of this introduction, and indeed my entire future as a writer, is entailed in the answer to this rather strange question from D.— Do you play chess? —the subject deserves another brief side trip into my past.
Yes, I, Montese Crandall, was once the second-best under-eighteen player of chess in the northwestern division of the country. As a young person, I had few other passions. It’s a certain kind of genius, the chess genius, and it is the kind of genius I once possessed. The kind that sees ahead, that sees combinations. The kind that plays a completely conservative game, culminating in the meting out of total destruction. When I was young and ugly and could not hit the ball with the bat, I wanted to play chess. I worked at it. I read up. I followed Paul Morphy’s games, likewise other grand masters’. I pored over Big Blue’s machinations, that hulking supercomputer.
Chess was not a thing that was indulged at my parents’ ashram, as you might imagine. In fact, chess was considered by my parents to be elitist, proto-fascist, and dependent on phallic aggrandizement, and, in its imperialist, hegemonic, phallic structures, unsuitable for children.
Therefore, I practiced chess in secret. Apart from women and men. Often I played by mail. At one time, I had a dozen games of chess going by mail, with people whom I met briefly in furtive chess-obsessed conversations out in the world, in the rare instances I was permitted access to the larger world. I hated that my chess longing was secret, profane, and that my board was a folding cardboard one that I hid under my bed. On the other hand, I loved my chess-playing brethren. I loved the chess-playing girls with their gigantic braces, their scoliosis, and those homemade dresses that featured jam stains.
My parents, they of the alternative lifestyles, asked, when they found my chessboard: How did we raise up a chess-obsessed child? Why a fascist prodigy? Why a child who won’t wear hemp products, even under duress, who won’t work in the bulk section at the food co-op, who wants nothing more than to analyze positions on the board and stare out the window? Next he will want his own pocket calculator! Next he will be designing so-called computer games for the so-called computer community where no one touches anyone else and pedophiles run free!
I won my share of tournaments. I even won tournaments in which I had to play several games at a time. I once won a tournament in which I had to play several games on the clock. These tournaments were mostly against amateurs from the desolate towns of my youth. Then, at sixteen, in a statewide tournament, I played against a naturalized Indian, originally from Hyderabad. His name was Sashi, and his parents were in the movie business. He was a vain, self-centered Brahman, and I wanted to humiliate him badly. This was not my reaction to other boys, that I wanted to humiliate them, but Sashi believed he was the best at everything. I have a vivid recollection of his boasting of his sword-fighting lessons, which he needed in order to prepare for his vocation as a leading Bollywood man.
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