Joe forwarded his list to a Scrabble player with whom he corresponds, who passed it on to Joe Edley, who printed it in the newsletter. Edley was told the words came from Leonard, who was still banned from the NSA. Regardless, they were included in the OWL. Leonard never received any thanks or compensation for his latest contribution.
Almost nine years after he was kicked out of the NSA, John Williams agrees to reinstate Joe’s membership on the condition that he doesn’t “vent all [his] frustrations” at the organization. Joe is perplexed by the statement, and mentions it in several letters to me.
11. Matt
MATT GRAHAM lives on the Upper East Side in a brownstone walkup so thoroughly subdivided it has more doors than an amusement park fun house. His low-ceilinged studio on the third floor is eight feet across at its widest and about thirty feet long: a crypt for Shaquille O’Neal. The contents make it appear even smaller, a claustrophobic shrine to Matt’s multiple interests.
His main passion is books. More than forty shelves groan under the weight of hundreds of them, maybe more than a thousand, stacked two-deep in some places and ceiling-high in others. There are, naturally, scores of books about words: more than a dozen standard dictionaries; dictionaries of etymology, slang, euphemisms, and rhymes; books about the history of language, semiotics, wordplay, linguistics, foreign tongues; The Esperanto Wordenboek; volumes by William Safire, Edwin Newman, Dmitri Borgmann, and just about anyone else who has written about language. There is a wall of books about games, how-to-win books on chess, backgammon, Othello, Go, Monopoly. A stack of books about smart drugs and the brain. A separate section of sports books, many of them about his first and second loves, basketball and Indiana University basketball.
Then there are the games, also stacked on the shelves, some unopened. There is Scrabble in many variations, of course, plus knockoffs like WRDZ and Word Wise. There’s Ipswich and Keyword, Qwink: The Quick as a Wink Word Game, Big Boggle, Quip Qubes.
Piled in netting suspended from a wall are dozens of stuffed animals, including some of the ones Matt totes to tournaments. Other animals crowd Matt’s bed, and when I sit down in one of the apartment’s two chairs a giant character from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are stares up from the floor beside me.
Matt’s desk occupies the narrowest part of the apartment, a short hallway leading to the entryway (where the sports books are, along with a newspaper box featuring the defunct early 1990s sports daily The National). On it is an old desktop computer, dozens of bottles of vitamins and smart drugs, some of which Matt acquires via mail order, more stacks of books, cassette tapes, a display for a Spiderman game, and a Scrabble board ready to be used.
The two windows let in little light, the bathroom is dirty, the refrigerator in the microscopic galley kitchen contains more vitamins than food.
Matt spends most of his time in this tiny warren. He’s never had a steady job. (“I had a paper route,” he deadpans. “And I was good. I was a good paper boy.”) He thinks jobs are part of society’s problem; if someone doesn’t want to work, he shouldn’t have to. Jobs are about money, and money is just about stuff. If he had more money, what would he have? A bigger apartment, nicer possessions, an easier time with women. Fuck all that.
Money for rent and vitamins—Matt’s two biggest expenses—comes mostly from his mother. An occasional standup performance or victorious one-on-one Scrabble session provides some walking-around money. Matt has chosen two virtually moneyless professions —if playing Scrabble can be considered a profession—and both keep him isolated for long stretches in his apartment, where he sleeps odd hours and studies words when he feels like it.
Matt is one of Scrabble’s best raw anagrammers. He has awesome word knowledge, which he attributes to an innate ability to retain words augmented by his warehouse of supplements. And he loves the words for their intrinsic beauty, going poetic with appreciation for words that display symmetry, balance, or other aesthetics.
“I feel like Salieri to his Amadeus,” Eric Chaikin says. “I feel like I can hang in there, but pure letters and anagramming, he’s just automatic. His brain just works that way.”
Matt’s most impressive trait is an imagination only a few other experts can match. He just finds mind-bogglingly creative plays. Late in a tournament game in Ocean City, New Jersey, Matt held a rack of EHIIPRT. But his opponent blocked the sole place for him to play the only bingo on that rack, PITHIER. The logical move would have been to play off HIP, keep EIRT, and hope for a good draw. However, Matt noticed an N and a C on the same row with seven spaces between them. He played NEPHRITIC. Almost no one else would have even considered the possibility of playing, forget about finding, a nine-letter word between two letters.
In a game at the Nationals in Chicago, Matt topped his Ocean City find. He was losing by a bingo with just one tile in the bag. His rack was DEEIOSW. But there is no seven-letter bingo on that ugly rack, and no eight was to be had on the board, either. So with the clock running down, Matt did the unthinkable: He produced a nine-letter bingo through a disconnected T and R, which required hooking OX to make SOX. It’s a feat of mental dexterity akin to juggling five balls and tossing in a flaming torch for the hell of it: STOREWIDE.
The sort of flexible thinking that produced his two personal favorites is what he is most proud of in his comedy, too. Matt could have been a star, he says, if only he had tailored his act for the lowbrow masses and landed a pushy agent to score a six-figure TV development deal. Instead, Matt stuck with his cerebral brand of comedy, full of offbeat images and knotty wordplay.
“I recently trained my dog to sit every time he hears a bell. And then I put a bell around his neck. Doesn’t get around much anymore. Not much of a watchdog—but a super gargoyle. Haven’t seen an evil spirit lately, and that’s upped my holiday mood.”
“Last Friday, my roommate sent me out to get some canned fish, because we’re having some Catholic survivalists over for dinner. Weirdest thing happened. I’m coming up the steps, I stumble, all the groceries fall down the stairs. Except for a can of salmon, which falls up the stairs. Bizarre experience, but it gave me an idea. Couple nights later I was driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Cop pulled me over. I told him I was spawning. He said, ‘Young man, I have reason to believe you’re DUI. You know what that is?’ I said, ‘Do I!’”
“As a child I was in and out of institutions—visiting my parents. My mother’s schizophrenic. Of course, I prefer to think of her as a ‘people person.’And my father, he’s manic-depressive. Has these terrible mood swings. Once he sent me a postcard. It said, ‘Having a wonderful time. Wish I were dead.’”
When I first see Matt perform, in a crowded SoHo bar, he bombs. He whines about feeling sick, mocks audience members in a hostile tone, and shifts uncomfortably on his feet. Later, though, he gives me a tape of his three appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien (his ex-girlfriend is a staff writer). In the first appearance, Matt is nervous and stiff. In the second, he is composed, relaxed, and connects with the audience. He kills. In the third, when the audience jumps on a punch line, Matt sarcastically thanks them for laughing in the wrong place, and someone boos.
Matt on stage is Matt in Scrabble: smart, sophisticated, extremely creative, but volatile, hair-trigger angry, easily provoked, self-conscious, paranoid. “Just one chromosome up from the guy in Silence of the Lambs” one Scrabble veteran says.
Pushed by a new girlfriend to be more responsible for himself, and helped by his old one, Matt in mid-1998 decided to find a job. Saturday Night Live was looking for writers, Matt knew one of the cast members, and a few weeks before the Nationals, he was hired for the fall season.
“This motherfucker go from two feet in the ground to this job with six figures,” Marlon Hill, my other penniless Scrabble genius friend, said. “I was, like, just lemme know when Toni Braxton be on that motherfucker.”
Still, Matt was down because his girlfriend had broken up with him. Matt had been dwelling on t
he breakup, and drinking a lot. A couple of weeks before the Nationals, though, he stopped. He said his anagramming was strong and his board vision had returned. “I’m just bursting,” he said a day before leaving for Chicago on the train with Marlon. “I was just so numbed out and drinking so much. I took one night off and I was finding all these dazzling plays. The mental focus, the focus that allows me to lead a more tranquil life, is in place. I’m psyched. I think I can play great Scrabble.”
It was like that before the 1997 Worlds: Matt had been on a partying jag, stopped two weeks before the event, studied round the clock, and finished second. But the success didn’t materialize in Chicago, where he drew poorly and couldn’t mount the charge he did at the Worlds in Washington, and Matt sat sulking in the rear of the ballroom as the bland, unflappable Brian Cappelletto collected his $25,000 check.
Matt started at Saturday Night Live in September. In October, he was fired.
More than a month after his firing, Matt told me what happened. He said he was cranking out twenty jokes a day for his segment, “Weekend Update,” but he couldn’t get any of them on the show—only one the first week, and none the second, third, or fourth. The segment producer told him it takes time, but no one was helpful and nothing he wrote seemed to be good enough. SNL had always had a reputation as a petty, high-schoolish place, where being in with the right crowd mattered more than what you did.
“It’s like you’re like the pariah,” Matt told me. “I’m not the best guy to deal with that. I’ve never had a job. I know people say, ‘What did Matt say? What did Matt do?’ so I haven’t talked to anyone about it. It stunned me beyond belief. It matters to me what other people think.”
For six weeks, he had holed up in his apartment, consumed with the firing. “Last night I didn’t even sleep,” he said. “I’ve slept one hour in the past forty-eight or seventy-two. I just think about it. Even when I’m in a good mood I think about it.
“But I have Scrabble to look forward to.”
Hanging around with Matt makes me wonder whether Scrabble isn’t a substitute—for work, for ambition, for confronting the realities of life. Any chess hustler or cardsharp or Nintendo junkie can testify to the seductive power of games. I feel it myself now, too; I’d need to be strapped to a mast like Odysseus to avoid the siren song of a Scrabble board.
On one level, the game I have chosen is just an intellectual pursuit, a compelling strategic challenge; Scrabble is one of the games played at the Mind Olympiad held in London every year. On another, though, it can’t not be a substitute for something, an escape. Matt once said that Scrabble “has been such a blessing. It seems like anything that means that much to you, even if you’re not religious, even if you’re atheistic...” His voice trailed off. He tried to make the game make cosmic sense in his life, to justify it. He noted that Hasbro was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Scrabble that year on February 5. His birthday.
But can playing the game, for however many hours and to the exclusion of whatever else in one’s life, be harmful, the way a drug addiction is harmful? Or is Scrabble somehow different? For Matt, for Marlon, for G.I. Joel—the most extreme players in the Scrabble subculture, for whom the game is the sun in their solar systems—there is a tangible goal: being the best at a competitive pursuit. Winning. Matt and Marlon and Joel don’t play Scrabble because they can’t stop and it makes them miserable. They play because they believe they are good at it and want to win—win money, prestige, respect, the label of being the best at something.
So I don’t consider Scrabble an obsession in a clinical sense: a disturbing preoccupation with an unreasonable idea. For Matt—or Marlon or Joel or me—I think of it as an obsession in the colloquial sense, a compelling motivation. As mystical as we may think the language is, none of us has as yet credited this word game with, say, extrasensory capabilities. We just love to play it. G.I. Joel has accepted that Scrabble is his life, and it doesn’t have to be remunerative. Joe Edley has accepted it, and has made it remunerative. Marlon has accepted it, too; he is unconflicted about living with his mother and studying Scrabble all day, and about quitting a perfect job—beta-testing computer versions of Hasbro games, including Scrabble.
And Matt? He’s never so secure. Having only Scrabble to look forward to, I thought at the time, might not be the best solution to his depression over losing the SNL job. Scrabble would be a temporary fix. But Matt was enthusiastic about playing in the team tournament in Hartford a few weeks after his firing.
Scrabble did serve its purpose there, distracting Matt from contemplating his career. He named our team “Compony Pyknic”—acceptable words both—and joked around all weekend. Despite my lame 1–11 performance (this tournament took place several months before my victory on Long Island), Compony Pyknic still managed to take first place, and Matt said, “We've got to decide whether you're getting a full share or not.” (I did keep my full $45 cut of the winnings.)
During the awards ceremony, there was more opportunity for laughter: a “Scrabble moment,” as Matt calls what happens when a Scrabble player demonstrates exceptionally inconsiderate or self-centered behavior, usually in pursuit of a game. Edie Berman, the game’s matriarch in the Boston area, was reading a heartfelt letter she wrote to her close friend and Scrabble partner, Muriel Sand, who had died recently. It was a touching moment embodying all that is good about the game—camaraderie and friendship, the love and loyalty and devotion that so many people find in a hundred tiles and a board. But the respectful hush in the room was broken by the castanet rattle of tiles in a bag. Jan Dixon was engrossed in a game with Marlon, talking loudly and shaking the bag vigorously, oblivious to the fact that a woman was reading a letter to her dead friend. “You've got to be the first Scrabble player to play through a eulogy,” Matt told Jan with a smile. “Have you ever played at a funeral?”
Back in New York, though, Matt began feeling increasingly paranoid. He freaked out on stage during a comedy set, telling the audience that “if I don't come back, here are the names of the people who did it.” Matt had been ingesting well over a hundred pills a day, maybe fifty or sixty different kinds. But the most worrisome addition to his arsenal was GHB, gamma hydroxybutyrate, a flavorless liquid that induces unconsciousness and recently had been banned in several states. Matt had been taking GHB—which he raved about in Hartford, showing me the bottle of lime-colored fluid—to help him sleep, increasing the dosage as his anxiety and depression over losing the SNL job deepened. Mixing GHB with alcohol is extremely dangerous, and Matt also had been drinking a lot.
Matt first began taking smart drugs and vitamins after he got good at Scrabble. When they met in 1992, Marlon remembers, Matt was taking just a few pills. At a tournament in early 1998, Matt decided not to join Marlon and me for lunch, saying, “I'll have an apple. I'm not hungry. I’ve taken so many damn pills,” only to change his mind and come, and then decide to sit in my car listening to a CD by the rock group Cake which includes a cover of the Gloria Gaynor hit “I Will Survive.”
Matt says he knows exactly what each pill and potion does to his body. He subscribes to nutritional newsletters, reads books about smart drugs, studies the side effects and contraindications. But now some combination of the drugs and his life circumstances had made him unsteady. At one point, he stayed in his apartment five straight days. A short time after, he called his closest friends, who took him to see a doctor.
The books, the games, the stuffed animals. The hyper behavior. The comedic frustrations. The Scrabble brilliance. “He wants to be the mad genius,” one of his friends told me. “But he’s going to be the dead genius.”
Marlon came up from Baltimore to visit. “He has some rainman qualities,” he said of Matt. “Somebody whose mind is so scattered that it takes him a long time to answer. That’s somebody’s mind that work on another goddamn level. It’s a fine line between genius and insanity. That motherfucker is tiptoeing on. He’s probably walking backward on it.” Marlon thought Matt should leave New Y
ork. “Too many fucking people, too much fucking time in that little apartment. Who wouldn’t go fucking crazy?”
What Matt had done to his body, countless others had before him and countless others would after. Like other expert performers, Matt had begun taking brain-enhancing drugs to improve his memory, sharpen his concentration, build up his stamina. Matt’s ex-girlfriend Janine DiTullio, the Conan O’Brien writer, took him to a doctor who has treated other expert performers who develop drug problems, including pool players and bodybuilders. “You took it to get an edge playing Scrabble,” Janine said the doctor told him. “You’re way past needing an edge.”
The doctor told Matt he had to flush out his body and brain, and the way to do that was to give up all the smart drugs; Matt told him about his life, told him he was taking up to 150 pills a day, and when Matt started rattling off the list of products, the doctor stopped him.
“You’re taking stuff that was made in somebody’s basement,” he said. But he added reassuringly: “You have a strange lifestyle. That doesn’t mean you’re mentally ill.”
All this for Scrabble. For a board game. For words. “Words are, of course,” Rudyard Kipling wrote, “the most powerful drug used by mankind.” They had come to dominate Matt’s life. At a comedy gig once, during a joke about female genitalia, Matt wandered off into a confusing digression about Latinate plurals. “That’s me,” he said. “Caught in the web of words.”
The audience didn’t get the reference to the title of the biography of James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, who devoted his life to words and died before he could see the work completed. Matt once told me that he imagined himself in old age like Murray, who is pictured in the book with a long, white beard like an Orthodox bishop’s, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of slips of paper stacked floor to ceiling and containing the word citations that formed the great book.
Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313) Page 19