Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313)

by Fatsis, Stefan

  Butts appreciated the long-overdue recognition. On his first tour of Selchow & Righter’s factory on Long Island, Butts saw four assembly lines cranking out Trivial Pursuit and one producing Scrabble. The company president, Richard Selchow, turned to him, and said, “Trivial Pursuit is a fad. When Trivial Pursuit is long gone we’ll still be turning out Scrabble.”

  In the fall of 1987, with the leaves still on the trees, a storm dumped a foot of wet snow on the Hudson Valley. The weight toppled power lines. Without electricity, Butts decided to drive over to his niece’s house in Poughkeepsie. Crossing the Taconic Parkway, his car was struck by another car heading in the opposite direction. Butts wasn’t wearing a seat belt, and his head rammed the windshield. He survived, but spent a month in the hospital, where he suffered bouts of delusion, at times thinking Nina was still alive. He had a small stroke, became depressed, and was eventually transferred to a nursing home. Alfred died on April 4, 1993.

  As he began to suffer dementia, Butts some days couldn’t remember the names of the people who visited him, including his nephew Bob. One day Bob suggested that they play a game of Scrabble. Bob stuck the rack to a table with window caulk, because Alfred’s hands would shake. Butts would recall that his wife was the better player; she had made QUIXOTIC for 284 points, he would say. He, on the other hand, was an indifferent speller.

  “Some days we’d play three turns. Some days we’d play a full game,” Bob Butts tells me. “Some days he’d put down four consonants and it would be complete gibberish. Some days he’d play OX and XI on a triple letter. When you become senile, you hang onto the things that are closest to you.”

  8. G.I. Joel

  YOU GET the big bed.”

  Well, I am the marginally bigger man, I think, as I drop my bags. It’s 12:30 A.M. and I have just played the first three games of another weekend tournament in the Catskills. This time, Eric Chaikin has moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, Matt Graham is out of town, and Marlon Hill couldn’t afford the trip from Baltimore. So I’m rooming with G.I. Joel Sherman.

  Joel has discovered an ant in a plastic bag containing a half-eaten box of Archway oatmeal cookies that he toted up from the Bronx. Joel spotted some ants in the room after checking in, secured the cookies in the plastic bag with a twist tie, locked them in his suitcase, and went to play Scrabble. An ant managed to infiltrate the bag, however, and Joel is worried that fellow ants have penetrated other key territories. He dumps out a box of Mike & Ike jelly beans onto a towel.

  “How do you find out if there are holes in a plastic bag?” he says. I suggest placing the cookies in the hallway or in my car, but Joel will have none of that. He’s determined to identify the source of the invasion.

  “Now I’m going to have to go through my suitcase to see if there are ants,” he says. “And turn down the bedding.” Which he does.

  Joel runs water through the plastic bag. “This bag has integrity,” he announces. He has changed from his customary G.I. Joel sweatshirt into his red-white-and-blue-striped flannel pajamas. “This is how my life goes every day,” he says. “Encountering idiotic obstacles and trying to find a way around them.”

  He returns the cookies to the bag, again trying to choke off any possible intruders with the twist tie. “Okay, damn ants! You just try it!” He repeats the process with the jelly beans. “Die, mo-fos!”

  Joel’s snacks should survive the night. I’m less confident about my own prospects. Joel arranges a 6:45 A.M. wake-up call. This is earlier than I’d planned, as the tournament doesn’t resume until 9:00 A.M. I want to sleep as late as possible and grab a quick breakfast. Joel doesn’t need nearly as much sleep. At home, he often stays up all night playing Scrabble on the computer or writing e-mails or watching television, and sleeps a few hours during the day. It’s no wonder he often seems groggy. But that could have to do with his eating habits, lack of exercise, or infrequent encounters with anyone other than his father and brother.

  “So do you want to sleep or do you want a lesson?” Joel asks.

  I want to sleep so that I can focus the next morning as I try again to raise my somnolent rating. But I also want to listen to Joel declaim about Scrabble. After all, he’s great at it—playing and declaiming. It’s his purpose on the planet, and as his roommate I see myself as an enabler. “A lesson,” I say.

  For the next hour, Joel proffers a blow-by-blow of that night’s games. In two of them, he scored 603 and 601 points, so he’s pumped. His voice leaps octaves, his arms flail about, he is virtually bouncing on his mattress as he recounts his conquests, reading off the plays from his score sheet. I love his strategic analysis and his arcane word plays, his acid commentary about opponent ineptitude, and even his goofy, obsessive, uncensored wonder at the most mundane happenings, like an ant crawling into a box of cookies. His body is a Superfund site, but that hasn’t stopped G.I. Joel from getting back at the world with his mind, through this game.

  Joel breathlessly explains how he worked his way through a troubling opening rack in the 603-point game, why he kept the three vowels IIO to go with a blank, how he saw that he would be able to turn the word BICES into IBICES (the plural of IBEX), how he drew the second blank and was able to play vICHIeS for 100 points. Now he’s on a roll.

  “I play SERIFED, the anagram of DEFIERS, I get eighty-two for that, and she challenges. I get a forty-point BOZOS, ENTAILER for seventy-seven, AXE for fifty-eight, JIGS for sixty, MANNITE for seventy-three. The total bingo count was actually only four, and not a triple-triple among them.”

  I steal a glance at the digital clock next to my bed: 1:15. But Joel isn’t through. Now comes the lesson part. “The trick is if you have good word knowledge like I do, you’re not afraid of any letter,” he says. “You know which are generally bad letters. The W you would be concerned with. U’s you would be concerned with. J’s and Q’s, obviously. But just about anything else you don’t have to be afraid of.”

  And when you don’t have a world champion’s word knowledge? I ask.

  “Anytime you’re on equal or superior footing to your opponent in word knowledge you don’t have to worry about closing the board. The main reason people in your division stay in that division for years is they don’t understand that there’s no reason to play scared. Making the best of your opportunities, even with much poorer word knowledge than I have, there are better ways of solving the rack problems and controlling the board than to just play three-letter ladders.”

  Joel’s referring to the common pattern in lower-division games in which players take turns overlapping or underlapping three-letter words, staircasing down from the center, usually to the bottom left corner. Expert boards, by contrast, can be freeform and rambling, quickly stretching from top to bottom and side to side.

  Of course, prodigious word knowledge allows for more adventuresome playing, but Joel’s point is less about tactics than style. Experts become experts not only because they study words, but because they are open to danger and are able to weigh risks versus consequences. Away from the game, they may not be skydivers or day traders, but their willingness to stare down a problem, fearlessly, before the knowing gaze of others is one of the things I admire about Joel and the other experts. They may be mild-mannered geeks or underachieving layabouts, but behind a rack, for fifty minutes, they are stone-faced killers. So what if I put a naked E in the triple-word column? Let’s see you do something about it.

  As with most games, this one says something about how we choose to live our lives. Scrabble players, even career hobbyists who don’t study words or crave expert status, are gamblers; not without reason are Atlantic City, Reno, and Las Vegas frequent tournament venues. Players are drawn to the long odds, and to the idea of risk. For the best players, the board is a place to lay it all on the line, to test one’s confidence, knowledge, and emotional mettle. As in poker, bluffing is part of Scrabble, playing a word you know to be unacceptable and seeing if your opponent bites. But you have to know when and against whom to bluff.
Otherwise you will be exposed as a fraud. In Scrabble, the least self-conscious are those who win the most. They aren’t afraid of the consequences. They can hide their fraudulence.

  “Do you have allergies?” Joel asks.

  “That was a yawn,” I reply.

  “Your yawn sounded like my mucus.”

  Rooming with Joel provides my first exposure to a portable expectoration cup, which he keeps bedside for his frequent mucoid needs. And to bug paranoia. That there are ants in a subluxury hotel in the woods in late spring should not be surprising, and neither should the discovery of a spider in the bathroom. But that serves as my wake-up call: Joel, in a Scrabble T-shirt and gray slacks held up by red suspenders, describing the scene.

  My late-night lessons from Joel notwithstanding, I once again play mediocre Scrabble. I don’t make three-letter-word ladders, but I violate cardinal rules: In one game, despite a comfortable lead, I burn a blank for 28 points early on so that I can play off a dreaded Q when I should exchange. In another game, I play four phonies, all of them challenged off the board. With a 78-point lead and the bag empty, I fail to close the only bingo lane, a triple-word column beginning with B, and, having failed to track the remaining tiles accurately, watch my opponent lay down BUNDLING for 80-something points and the win.

  It’s all the more frustrating because I am learning. I’m writing down racks with more frequency. I’ve begun studying all of the four-letter words, and they’re taking hold. Words like YEUK, GINK, TWAE, and DEIL all find a path from my brain to the board, as do OIDIA, ZAIRE, and OBEAH. I find OVERFISH for 101 points and BLATTER and MORGAN and FAKIR. But I seem to have an aversion to winning, as if I’m afraid of the very thing I say I want. I’ll amass a big lead and let it slip away. I’ll guess that some absurd arrangement of letters is good, or that my opponent will be too intimidated to challenge. Of course, she won’t be afraid, it won’t be good, and I will get mad, stalking out of the tournament room damning my name.

  After a three-win, four-loss day, I stroll to the lake that abuts the hotel to clear the anger from my head. The sun is bright, there’s a light breeze, birds are chirping, and I plop down on the grass and greet another player seated nearby.

  “How’s it going?” she asks.

  “Badly,” I say. “I’m five and five.”

  “Try oh and ten!” she replies. “I’ve lost every game!”

  She introduces herself as Roz Grossman. Roz is seventy-two years old, and she tells me she was one of the original tournament players in New York in the 1970s. After her children left home, she and her husband moved to Israel, where she plays in the Jerusalem club, which boasts that it’s the biggest in the world, attracting forty or fifty devotees a week. During the Gulf War, club members donned gas masks and played between air-raid sirens.

  Roz reminisces about using an old Merriam-Webster’s dictionary long before there were tournaments, about the early New York scene, when she was one of the top players, about how she once wrote a paean to Scrabble that was published in Games magazine. I ask her to recite it, and, with a little prodding, she does:

  I hate to play Scrabble with people who babble.

  My psyche gets balky when they become talky.

  I hate to play Scrabble with people who dabble

  In encyclopedias.

  I think they are tedious.

  I hate to play Scrabble with people who wabble

  All over the board until they have scored.

  But I love to play Scrabble with my kind of rabble.

  We’re not erudite but we keep our mouth quite

  Shut.

  We keep the game moving.

  Hell, what are we proving?

  “It’s very Ogden Nash-y,” Roz says with a laugh. It’s the nicest moment of the weekend, and it relaxes me enough to win four of the last five games for a 9–6 record, sixth place out of sixteen. My rating inches higher, to 1268, and when Joe Edley, who directed the tournament, posts the results to CGP the next day, he writes next to my name: “Going up a little; goal to be expert by the time the book is finished. Can he do it? If he stops playing phonies!”

  For a moment I wonder, like Roz, what my obsession is proving. Maybe nothing. Maybe more than I care to admit. With the board and tiles and word books splayed across my living room, and my regular circuit of tournaments, and leaving work early on Thursdays to get to the club on time, I have managed to reorder my life so that I can play a board game. This doesn’t seem healthy, especially because I still suck. But it doesn’t seem avoidable, either. I entered this world because it was a curiosity, a good story. Then it became an infatuation. I’m having trouble typing these words, but right now Scrabble is the most important thing in my life.

  “My asthma started in my early twenties. I pretty much had allergies as a kid. I’ve always had a runny nose or a sneeze. It’s mainly dust and animal hair. I don’t remember historically having that much reaction to pollen.” G.I. Joel belches, raises some mucus in his throat, and parts with it.

  We’re walking along busy Pelham Parkway in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx, taking a This Is Your Life guided tour of Joel’s neighborhood and his maladies. As usual, he’s wearing his G.I. Joel sweatshirt, and his big, sad-sack eyes peer out from under his G.I. Joel cap. Joel is in black Reebok exer-sneakers, his gray slacks, and a New York Rangers windbreaker. He carries a Scrabble tote bag.

  Joel points out the Jewish center where he studied Hebrew, the synagogue on the other side of the housing projects, his dentist’s office. “My dentist is probably the main reason I am not a rich man today,” he says. “I have had so much dental work over the years.” But his real problems are farther south. The cold air, Joel is explaining, “creates pressure against my pants and that starts an asthma attack or it starts a gas attack. Or it starts something else.”

  There’s the lactose intolerance, which Joel traces to grade school, when his daily milk intake was “three eight-ounce, seven-cent cartons and then another glass when I got home.” There are the food allergies, which seemed to emerge in his twenties. “I’m allergic to almost anything I put in my mouth in one way or another. Citrus fruits cause very thick, viscous mucus. Starches give me gas. So does lactose. Beyond gas, beer or wine causes very bad acid. Tomatoes also do the acid trick. Fried food does the acid. It doubles up back through my esophagus, through my throat, and it has to be spit out once it reaches here. And when it comes up this far, it’s got so much acid that it literally burns the tissue of my esophagus.” That was diagnosed as gastroesophageal reflux disease. Then there’s the postnasal drip, which requires frequent expectoration. For a while Joel suffered from the thyroid condition Graves’ disease, which caused him to lose 15 pounds in six months from his 130-pound norm.

  “At one point I was seeing this idiotic doctor who was a specialist in psychomedications. He diagnosed me as having anxiety that was responsible for my swallowing air,” Joel says. “He might have been right except that I never perceived it as anxiety. It was just somehow an involuntary physical response to nothing in particular. The medication did seem to help for a little while. Eventually I went off medication and I didn’t feel I was doing this involuntary gulping that made me go see that doctor. This was maybe four or five years ago.”

  I’ve seen Joel do the gulping.

  “The thing that bothered me about it was the idea that it could be mental.”

  “The building we’re standing in front of is a very important building historically in my life.”

  “A women’s clothing store, Joel?” I ask, smiling. It’s a mustard-colored shop at 2150 White Plains Road, under the Number 2 elevated subway line that bisects the commercial thoroughfare. Frishman’s.

  “It used to be the Washington Heights Federal Savings and Loan, where I worked for five years as a teller and head teller, which was before it was bought by a company from Florida called Ensign Bank, which actually owned the Carnival cruise lines. And then they got bought by Chemical Bank. When Chemical Bank bought Ensign
, this office was closed because there’s an office of Chemical on the next block. And then, of course, Chemical was bought by Chase and Manufacturers Hanover together. And now it’s just Chase.” Joel is nothing if not precise.

  Joel was an undistinguished student, first at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science and then at Queens College, which he quit after two years of mostly playing pinball. But he wasn’t incompetent. At the bank, where he started at age nineteen, Joel eventually was in charge of eight employees. He showed up early to open the vault, distributed cash to the tellers, and made sure they balanced their accounts. “The more aptitude I showed, the more I was asked to learn, which I didn’t mind. But once I learned everything, the more I was expected to help others. The more work got piled on me that eventually I was doing so much work of other people I wasn’t finishing my own. That became stressful to me.”

  The stress, Joel says, triggered his illnesses. He quit that bank to be treated for Graves’ disease, then took another bank job in midtown Manhattan, which he held for five more years. When his stomach distress became unbearable, Joel finally “retired.” He was twenty-nine. “I’d love to be able to work. All the problems I have are so debilitating that it’s ridiculous to even consider trying to stay on a job nine to five.”

  Joel points out the Off-Track Betting parlor where he misspent some of his youth. We buy knishes, fruit, and cannoli—all seemingly gastric no-nos, but then Joel seems to eat most everything despite his problems—and Joel bolts into a supermarket in search of calf’s brain. No luck. Then we’re off to the Rite Aid, where Joel buys fruit drinks. He checks the citrus content and settles on a blue kiwi concoction and Juicy Juice punch plus a bottle of water, which is for me. Water gives Joel mucus.