I Owe it to Bobby Fischer

 

by

Kathryn A. Kopple

 

           

Some years ago, I quit smoking. It wasn't the first time, or even the fifth time. It could have been the hundredth time. I’ve lost track, though recently I found a Styrofoam cup of smoked cigarette butts in my basement. I must have snuck into the cellar when no one was looking—or smelling. Cigarette stench gives a relapsed smoker away every time. Experts call this stubborn odor “third-hand smoke,’ which is the noxious chemical residue left by cigarettes. In terms of heavy-duty bad smells, only Gingko trees can compete. Given that a single cigarette contains some seven thousand chemicals—that’s a lot of residue--you would think that smokers would be repulsed by the very smell of themselves. We smokers, though, have no sense of smell. We rely on the disgust and disapproval of non-smokers to let us know how that we smell like an ashtray. And yet I did try very hard to quit—and failed. Worse each time. After my last great relapse (triggered by rise of Trumpism and the 2016 election results), I decided I had to stop for real. And that was when I discovered Bobby Fischer.

Robert James Fischer was born in 1943 in Chicago, Illinois. At the age of twenty-nine, Fischer was already a chess legend. Like all legends, Fischer was good and bad in unequal and disturbing parts. Fischer became World Chess Champion in 1972 after beating the Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky—and, in the eyes of the world, striking a blow for democracy against the Soviet Union. He returned to the U.S. to frenzied adulation, which over the years turned to dismay as he became more unpredictable and finally disappeared from public life. Still, he cast a long shadow and many would decide that, by the time he died of kidney disease in 2008, he’d become a pathetic-tragic figure—one of the world’s great chess masters turned vile anti-American Jew hater.

I’d never heard of this Bobby Fischer. Growing up in the wood lots of Connecticut, I scarcely heard of him at all. I had my own life/issues. At the earliest opportunity, I picked up smoking and drugging, and some drinking on the side. These extra-curriculars came my way via friends and neighbors. I remember the young mother next door who hired me to sit her three-year-old and tried to get away without paying me by inviting me to stick around after she got back from waitressing to get high with her. I guess she thought of pot as some sort of currency. I mean, what thirteen-year-old wouldn’t want a cool, suburban mom as a pot buddy? She could be quite philosophical when stoned, sharing life advice. Your trouble is you think too much, she would say, passing me a joint, a reference to the fact that pot had a sledge-hammer effect on me. She’d gossip about the neighbors—my parents included—while I would slip farther and farther down the rabbit hole. Sooner or later, I’d pass out. A total buzzkill for my employer who eventually terminated me. Around that time, I smoked my first cigarette from a pack my best friend stole from her mother. I remember getting caught too. My parents issued stern warnings, but it was too late. I was hooked.

To me, cigarettes were the perfect drug. Smoking took my mind off things without rendering me unconscious. They stimulated without interfering with cognition. I smoked a lot in college. My smoking doubled in graduate school, where I majored in Latin American literature. The way I smoked changed in grad school. It wasn’t a social thing. It was a tool. I used cigarettes to focus. I used them to stay awake. And I used them to settle my nerves. I lived entirely in my head by that point, as people do when parsing texts and configuring abstract puzzles.

Paul Klee      

In retrospect, a lot of my reading involved chess. Jorge Luis Borges excelled at creating infinite games of chess. The narratives of Julio Cortázar—who played chess with Marcel Duchamp—are filled with chess moves. Silvina Ocampo, Felisberto Hernández, Witold Gombrowicz and many others found inspiration in the game. Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari, who went by the name Xul Solar, famously invented a “pan-chess board,” along with a language to go with it. To keep up with these literary chess masters, I chain smoked from one end of the Cono Sur to the other.

Smoking and literature are like conjoined twins. Grombrowicz smoked until his teeth were black. Cortázar was regularly photographed with a cigarette hanging from his lips. I imagine Ocampo reclining on a velvet couch with a long cigarette holder. As for my own smoking, I had no excuse, but I did have a pretext (many of them).

In 1995, I graduated. Smoking had all but been outlawed across the country, so I went underground. I became a secret smoker. There were periods of tobacco sobriety, but I always fell back into old habits to work. And then, one evening, I tried swallowing a pill. Instead of going down my throat, the pill became trapped in my esophagus and would stay trapped while I sat on a hospital bed in the middle of the night gagging for hours. A nurse would peep her head through the door and ask if that darn pill had dissolved yet. She gave me soda to drink when I couldn’t swallow. Everyone shook their heads. They suggested it was all in my head. When the G.I. specialist finally showed up, I told him that, if he didn’t get the pill out of my throat, I wanted him to kill me. Just put me down, like a dog. He patted me on the shoulder and said something like, Well, well, dear, let’s just take a look. I’m sure it’s nothing. And with that, he had his team knock me out. I woke to bad news: I had stricture of the esophagus. I would need surgery. I would also need to quit smoking. It wouldn’t be easy. In fact, it would take years to finally quit smoking.

In the meantime, Bobby Fischer was suddenly back in the news. During the Bush years, he’d gone on the lam for violating U.S. sanctions when, in 1992, he traveled to an island off the coast of Montenegro for a re-match with Boris Spassky. As with most matches involving Fischer, the negotiations were a delicate affair that required certain demands of a technical nature be met or all bets were off. Draws were for Fischer a non-negotiable sticking point. He complained vociferously about “draw death,” or stalemates in which players neither lost nor won. For Fischer, drawing was cheating. Critics insisted that his objections came from his fear of losing. It was a constant theme in the press throughout his career. A sore loser. A bad loser. A hateful loser. The consensus: Fischer was a spoiled brat. If only Fischer could be more like, say, the charming boy chess prodigy of Searching for Bobby Fischer, the 1993 movie in which the protagonist, knowing he is going to humiliate his opponent, offers a draw before going on to wipe the board with him. It’s clear who the Fischer of the movie is, and it’s not the charming boy: it’s the obnoxious loser, the one who refuses to share the prize. Never particularly good at explaining his position—Fischer could be shockingly undiplomatic—his crusade against drawing became a morality tale about what it meant to be a decent human being. Oh, Bobby! Why not just accept a two-way split? Because Fischer—who became famous for, among other things, a twenty-game winning streak—understood that players used the draw as a way out, a pre-emptive strike against losing to a better player. Either you entered a match in good faith, or you didn’t. In the 1992 match, Fischer finally got his way. With five million dollars on the line, the player to win ten games with draws discounted would be declared the champion. That was how chess matches used to be played back in the old days—and Bobby Fischer was very much old-school when it came to chess.

While the Bush administration was bombing the hell out of Afghanistan and Iraq—setting the United States up for endless wars—the State Department was pursuing its own line of attack on Fischer. In December 1992, an indictment against Fischer was handed down for his defiance of a U.S. presidential ban against doing commercial business in Yugoslavia. Fischer had been warned. In a well-publicized refusal to comply with the Bush administration, which included a press conference in which he spat on a copy of the order, Fischer set himself up to be “checkmated in Yugoslavia,” as Attorney General Jay B. Stephens put it. Fischer risked a maximum ten-year sentence and $250,000.00 in fines, along with other penalties if convicted. But first, the State Department would need to have him extradited to the U.S. to stand trial.

Remarkably, Fischer managed to escape extradition. He died in exile in Reykjavik. Damning articles appeared, though always tempered with vignettes of a brilliant chess master cursed with a difficult past and mental illness. With respect to histories of family troubles and mental illness, we were not so different. I came from a brilliant and troubled family. My father was also Jewish, as was Fischer’s. And, like Fischer’s father, he also disappeared from my life for a time. He had a psychotic break. Even at his worst, Fischer didn’t strike me as psychotic. He struck me as angry and genuinely terrified. He might have escaped extradition to the United States but not before he was arrested and detained in 2004 by Japanese Immigration. He spent six months fighting the Bush deportation order. Considering what the Bush administration was capable of—these were the same people who justified waterboarding—he lashed out. He put the United States on trial. He put the world on trial. No one was beyond reach of his ire and disgust.

In 2017, after several surgeries, I had two choices: risk rupturing my esophagus or quit smoking for good. Unlike previous attempts, in which I stepped down only to step right back up when the going without cigarettes got tough, I went cold turkey. A terrible depression followed. Maybe death wouldn’t be so bad? Smokers play these games of Russian Roulette with themselves; maybe the chamber is loaded, maybe not. Maybe the gun will go off and the misery will end. I woke every morning thinking I couldn’t go on, not without smoking. It sounds absurd but it was deadly serious.

To put myself out of my suffering, I needed something to avoid triggers; and in my case those triggers were anything to do with books, words, letters, punctuation. I couldn’t go near my desk. I could scarcely hold a conversation. It occurred to me that I should teach myself to play chess. I pulled apart closets and rifled through cabinets to see if we owned a chess set. We did. A wooden set in a cedar box with a sticker that read “made in the USSR.” It was strange and wonderful, and really just so weird. Where had this Soviet chess set come from? I examined the pieces, each one carved out of wood and painted in nesting-doll colors. The opposing camps were red and orange. The Orange Queen had lost most of her hair. Her Pawns were badly chipped. The Red King looked like a forlorn version of Nicolas II, with drooping brows and bushy mustache. The Knights were the most comical of the bunch, ears like two horns sticking out of their heads and googly eyes. I felt a tremendous affection for each battered piece. They became my world. Three years of trial and error; and moves so wrong that my opponents (my husband and children) suggested I might want to forget about chess. I didn’t care. Persistence and stubbornness began to pay off. I improved. I went from seeing the board not as a confusing arrangement of dark and light squares but as lines, forks, sacrifices, and mates. I played not to win but to learn. Every day, something new, something to look forward to—and a kind of redemption. A release from destructive habits and ways of thinking.

At thirteen, Fischer traveled from his home in Brooklyn, New York to Philadelphia. He was the youngest player at the Franklin-Mercantile Chess Club, where he won the U.S. Chess Federation Junior Championship. Franklin-Mercantile, founded in 1885, was the second oldest chess club in the country. It’s about a fifteen-minute train ride from where I live. The club has fallen on hard times; it’s rumored that it has closed its doors forever. All around me are Fischer people, like Ed Trice, the inventor of Gothic Chess (who has taken a number of hard falls). Fischer enjoyed inventing new forms of chess, one of which involved setting up the back rank according to the whims of the players. I haven’t reached out to the local chess community except once online to see if I could find a teacher. We met at a Starbucks, where he unrolled his chess mat, laid out the pieces, and said, Play. I’d move a piece and he’d say, You sure you want to do that? or You’re in trouble now. I wasn’t ready for a teacher, and after three sessions I stopped. I began playing chess against the computer. About a year ago, I started playing my sister, who is a pianist and has a genius-level IQ. We are currently in a match in which playing for a draw is my only hope of survival, but I won’t. I owe it to Bobby.