We are incredibly impervious to what befalls us when it is not in
harmony with that innate “character” which, in the final analysis, we are.
Ortega
y Gasset
“Ted
Williams got into my cab last night.”
Pinson
was sitting on the couch watching the Mets game.
“No
shit dad. I hope you said something
intelligent to him.”
He
grinned at me and put his hand on his big, faded, ocher Organic Chemistry book,
patting it affectionately. He carried it
around with him but rarely opened it.
I
took a swig from my third cup of coffee.
I said, “Actually they just went
to the Edgewater Inn. I was listening to
them talk mainly.”
“What? Did you take the whole team?”
“No. Denny McClain was with him.”
“Denny
McClain! You really struck paydirt dad.”
“Well,
he only tipped me a lousy thirty-five cents.”
“No
shit. It’s really fucked when a really
big cat like that’s ungenerous... It’s
probably because he knows he’s not going to win thirty games this year.”
“No,
Williams paid. It was really ironic
because I think I just didn’t stroke their egos enough. I mean I was so overwhelmed by Williams
especially that I was afraid to say anything.
I think he thought I was being hostile or something.”
“You
didn’t ask for their autographs?”
“I
couldn’t say anything to them. Every
time I thought of something to say it sounded juvenile. Like Gee whiz Ted...”
A
Met hit a long ball high into the bleachers at Shea
stadium and the crowd roared and blew horns and waved pennants in the air. The Mets were still in second place behind the
I
said, “I guess I wanted to be a major
league baseball player pretty bad when I was a kid. I was really stupid enough to believe that I
had a chance. And then it was taken away
from me by a lot of improbable occurrences and...”
I
left the sentence dangling. I had known
for a long time that no one was interested in my excuses for not playing
baseball in the Major Leagues. He didn’t
seem to hear the words.
The
sound of the crowd droned over the speaker.
I said, pointing to his Chemistry book,
“Don’t you ever open that thing?”
“Huh? Yeah, I look at it when it’s time for an
exam.” His face brightened up with a
good-natured smile that said it was too early in the morning to be aggressive.
I
continued, “I used to love
Chemistry. I scored third highest on the
state Chemistry exam at
He
looked at me with an emotion that I couldn’t decipher and I thought maybe he
couldn’t either so I decided to continue, “I mean I was third out of about three hundred
students who took the test at
“So
what happened?” He sounded irritated.
“Well,
I have a step-brother who moved into the house at about that time, when his
father and my mother got married. His
father was an alcoholic. He was a
General Contractor and went bankrupt about three months after the marriage. He hadn’t paid withholding tax for his
employees, for about five years, and the Government threatened to put him jail
if he didn’t come up with $10,000. My
mother had to pay it. There was a lot of
fighting and arguing and I blew it. My
grades fell and I didn’t make it into
He
blinked.
I
went on, “My step‑brother was the
most competitive human being I’ve ever encountered in my life. He was so competitive that I can’t even
describe it.
Question
to Bobby Fischer:
Would
you consider yourself the greatest player that ever lived, even better, say,
than Capablanca, Steinitz
or Morphy?
Well,
I don’t like to put things like that in print, it sounds so egotistical, but to
answer your question, Yes.
“I
couldn’t deal with that kind of competition.
I don’t know why, but I just quit studying and I never did any homework
all year.”
His
absorption in chess, often so absolute that he would not hear when spoken to,
troubled his mother.
“My
step-brother never did anything except study.
When he went to
His
attitudes progressively soured his relationship with other chess players and
the chess organizations too. He was fond
of saying that he played chess because “I like to see them squirm”, a phrase he
later modified to “I like to watch their egos crumble!”
“He
graduated in Engineering Physics with the highest grade point average recorded
at
Bobby Fischer is a chess phenomenon, it is true; but is also a social illiterate,
a political simpleton, a cultural ignoramus and an emotional baby. There are no vibrations of humanity from him;
when you look at him, his eyes are blank and staring, since he only has eyes
for chess. He is a machine... He does
arouse the most tremendous hostility in people surrounding him....
“He
must be one smart son-of-a-bitch.”
“Do
you want to know why he got a B?”
“I’m
game. Shoot.”
“The
professor, Emilio Segre, said that he, Emilio Segre didn’t understand quantum mechanics. My step-brother raised his hand in class and
said that HE understood quantum mechanics.”
He
said, “He must be one smart son-of-a-bitch.”
“He’s
no smarter that you are Pinson. You work
at the gas station forty hours a week and you’re taking a full load at
He
didn’t protest.
“The
funny thing is, I scored higher than he did on the National Merit Scholarship
test. I scored in the 99th percentile on
the Natural Science Reading section and on the Social Science
I
knew that my truth seemed to him like unbearable pride, debilitating
self-absorption and ridiculous self-aggrandizement, so I said, “Hell, you yourself scored higher than he did
on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.”
He
looked uncomfortable, as if he hadn’t been truthful about his scores. I added,
“Jake scored 750 on the math aptitude but a little below 700 on the
verbal. You scored 750 on both of
them.” I didn’t look into his eyes.
He
said, “Well, actually my combined score
was less than 1500. It was about 1480 or
something like that. I forget.”
“Well,
that’s high enough. His English teacher
actually devoted every Friday to studying one of those books, you know the ones
that are used to raise your score on the
We
felt the tension that accompanies the telling of truths that are better left
unspoken or, at least, not spoken of without disguising them first.
He
said, after a silence, “My old man was
an alcoholic. That’s why my mom divorced
him.”
I
knew that he was trying to rescue me from my unseemly self-pity, and unresolved
anger at my fate. I didn’t know what to
say. I said, stupidly, “Well, then you know what I mean.”
He
continued, “When I was going into junior
high school they couldn’t deal with me at all so they shipped me off to a
military academy.”
I
remembered that my mother regularly threatened me with military school when I
was in junior high school but I didn’t say anything.
“He
was the president of the
We
watched the Mets game in silence. I
said, really just trying to break the silence,
“Well, at least Billy comes from a stable family.”
“No,
he’s fucked up too. I’m not supposed to
tell you this, but he was a big Eagle Scout and he went hunting with a younger
kid and he went through a barbed wire fence without putting the rifle down, you
know like they teach you to do?”
“Yeah.”
“He’ll
tell you about it but don’t tell him that I told you first.”
“No
problem.”
“Anyway,
the gun went off. It killed the
kid. He went to a psychiatrist for five
years to get his shit together. I first
met him when he went to work in my uncle’s gas station. He was still riding a motorcycle and wearing
a black leather jacket. He really had to
work hard to get into
“I
noticed. He seems to study whenever he
isn’t working.”
“He
went to the community college first. He
had all D’s and F’s in high school.”
“How
does he do at
“Nothing
spectacular. I think he gets mostly B’s
and a few C’s.
We
turned towards the television. The Mets
had been the laughing stock of baseball for seven years and now they were,
inexplicably, in second place.
“Be
sure not to say anything to Billy about it.
Let him tell you himself if he wants to.
He will, sooner or later, because he doesn’t want to hide it from
anyone. He doesn’t want to feel guilty
about it. It’s what his shrink tried to
convince him of, that it was an accident and it wasn’t his fault.”
“Does
he have a girlfriend?” I asked, rather irrelevantly, thinking of my lunch date
with Florence.
He
paused before answering. “No. He’s never had a girl friend as long as I’ve
known him. He’s not a homosexual or
anything like that. I guess he just
doesn’t have time for women. Women take
a lot of time.”
We
thought about that for a few seconds and then I said, “I’ve got a lunch date with Florence today.”
“Congratulations. Give her my best.”
“I
told her you like Tilly’s legs...” He looked surprised. I said,
“Who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky and get to stroke her legs.”
He
grinned and said, “I can’t wait.”