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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  The transformation of Scrabble from Flea House hustle to ritualized hobby took place in the early 1970s, when new games parlors opened in New York and a younger crowd of players was drawn to the game. It’s not clear why. Maybe it had to do with the coming of age of the first wave of baby boomers, college educated, disaffected, uninterested in the social crises of the day. Maybe it was because competitive Scrabble was an outsider’s game, appealing in a way that chess no longer was amid the locust swarms that followed the Fischer-Spassky match in 1972.

  For whatever reason, a regular Scrabble night sprang up at the Bar Point House of Backgammon in the East Village. There were games at the Olive Tree, a Greenwich Village coffeehouse. And you could play daily at the Chess House on West 72nd and Chess City at 100th and Broadway, which later moved to 75th and Broadway and was renamed the Game Room.

  Where the Flea House had been the games-playing equivalent of a Wild West saloon—all bluster and braggadocio—the game rooms were goofier and more egalitarian, and the game itself approached more studiously. The new Scrabble experts weren’t cranky old-timers who lacked jobs and happiness and decorum. To be sure, some of the old ne’er-do-wells helped fill the Chess House and Chess City, and hustling was still the code. But there were others for whom the games were a healthy supplement to life.

  Jim Neuberger, a lawyer in the state attorney general’s office, headed up to the Game Room most nights after work. A dishy former actress named Ann Sanfedele, who had had three husbands by the time she’d reached her early thirties, found herself unexpectedly drawn to the quirky games parlors. “For the most part, people who came to the clubs did not expect to develop friendships,” Ann tells me. But they did. For the best players, the clubs conferred respect. “When I walked into the Game Room, I felt like John Travolta walking into a dance club,” Neuberger says. Which is funny, because the Game Room in the late 1990s was the trendy China Club, a hangout for pro athletes and models; if only they knew.

  Ron Tiekert also went to the games parlors every night. He lived in a single-room occupancy hotel on West 73rd called the Commander and worked as an editor for an educational publisher (a job he still holds). He requisitioned a copy of Funk & Wagnalls and combed through it, making lists of short words. Ron quickly became the best player in New York. He was regarded as gentlemanly, never hustling easy marks, making no more than $40 playing as many as fifty games a week.

  The de facto Scrabble director at Chess City and later the Game Room was Mike Martin, a short, squat Greek American with a slushy, Donald Duck voice who gave everyone a nickname. Ron Tiekert was the Head Brillo. (Ron says the name referred to his centurion’s helmet of curly hair; everyone else says it referred to the fact that he was a brilliant player.) Ann Sanfedele was Fancy Deli. Jim Neuberger was the Head Lobster.

  If you got stuck with the Q, you had to pay Martin 50 cents; if you made a bad challenge, you had to put a quarter in the “goo-goo,” Martin’s term for the kitty he amassed for monthly prizes in categories he announced at random. He would hand out candy to unsuspecting players who had made a bingo using a particular letter. “It was part of the craziness,” Neuberger says. “It was fun. It was great fun.”

  So when Joel climbs on his chair, or distributes 50-cent prizes for getting away with a particularly stinky phony or a British-only word or e-mails his regular commentaries on our play—lauding low-probability finds and triple-triples and discussing anagrams and interesting words—he’s continuing a tradition. And I think Joel likes that, too.

  The more my game has improved, the more regularly I’ve shown up at Club 56. It hasn’t hurt that my prior Thursday-night commitment —group therapy—ended recently. Scrabble is my new group therapy. I have grown to like the collection of characters who frequent the club; they’re not the yuppies I work with at The Wall Street Journal or any of my other more conventional friends.

  The club members run from the clinically crazy to the socially inept, but the bulk are friendly, smart, and functional New Yorkers. There’s Pam Grazette, a dental hygienist who always wears a floppy white hat, and Jean Lithgow, a teacher and ex-wife of the actor, and Steve Pfeiffer, the New York Scrabble veteran, a fire-safety consultant who speaks with a slow, guttural Brooklyn voice that sounds like an idling car.

  Paul Avrin is a bushy-haired, retired high school math teacher with aviator glasses who looks like a character from an Edward Koren cartoon in The New Yorker. He’s trying to play in more than four hundred tournament games this year. Sal Piro is president of the Rocky Horror Picture Show fan club. He bickers endlessly with the schlumpy, barrel-gutted Mark Berg, who sells ads for those coupon books that clutter mailboxes. Mark’s wife, Verna Richards Berg, is a nurse from Jamaica with a singsongy Caribbean lilt. They met playing Scrabble.

  There’s a bookie named Josh Silber and a piano teacher named Laney Berel. Judy Kass has written biographies; Jack Eichenbaum is a geographer who also guides tours of Queens neighborhoods; Mark DiBattista, the NYU post-doc, studies geophysical fluid dynamics; and Woody Chen is a mailroom clerk in a bank who screams his high scores excitedly. There’s George Warnock, a buff guy with tattoos who serves as a guinea pig for drug company tests. There’s Diane Firstman, whom I’d played in the park so long ago, a budget director for a city government agency who turns out to be smart, caring, and witty, not at all the gloating clock-whacker I’d first imagined.

  Then there’s Steve Williams, the Harvard grad with psychiatric problems. Steve started playing Scrabble in 1973 when he was hospitalized during his junior year at Harvard. He nearly flunked out because of his Scrabble preoccupation but did complete his undergraduate degree in American history. Steve later was diagnosed with manic depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and has been on a diet of antipsychotics and antidepressants. For years, he wrote columns for a now-defunct African-American newspaper, The City Sun, but his last full-time job, in a Medicaid office, ended in 1981. He lives with his father in the house in Queens where he was raised.

  Steve was a daily player at the game rooms, staying all night and sleeping all day. He won the New York City championship in 1977, and was rated as high as 2030. But over time he began playing a claustrophobic brand of Scrabble. Steve shuts down the board with words that cannot be pluralized or extended in any way; to do so, though, he makes plays worth only a handful of points and often winds up outscored. His rating has fallen steadily into the 1400s.

  Steve is a tall, bearded man with a downcast head and hunched-over, shuffling gait; his sense of humor is dulled or nonexistent. He remembers scores of games from ten and twenty years ago, remembers his records and point spreads at long-gone tournaments. He insists on counting the hundred tiles after every game. Steve takes an antianxiety pill thirty minutes before playing. Once, when he forgot to do so, he scored a total of 97 points in a game against G.I. Joel; Steve went over on his clock by nineteen minutes. “Some days when I’m practicing at home, my brain goes to pieces and I have to calm myself down after playing,” he tells me. The game, though, is Steve’s center. “Without Scrabble, I’d be doing serious time in the hospital,” he says.

  If I wanted to be We Are the World about it, I’d say the Club 56 denizens are a cross-section of society. Black, white, Asian. Single, married, divorced. Straight and gay and unclear. Sane, less sane, not sane. Most are over forty. The gender split is about even. Some study and play Scrabble twenty or thirty hours a week. Some never study at all. Some have graduate degrees, some have high school diplomas. A couple are still in high school.

  I circulate a questionnaire among the regulars to find out who they are and why they play. “I feel guilty about all the time I devote to Scrabble,” a single mom, a children’s textbook writer named Christine Economos, reveals after recounting her best plays, UNEVENEST and EIDERDOWN.

  “It has been one of the most wonderful things to have happened to me,” writes a sixty-two-year-old retired cop named Nancy Okolsky. “My parents brought me up to believe that games are for children. It fee
ls so good to have grownups play with me. I feel like a teenager because I am still rebelling against my parents.” John Scalzo, a forty-six-year-old city bus dispatcher, calls the game “a mission.” A writer named Jim Piazza says it offers “the illusion of accomplishment” and the “camaraderie of nerds.” Sharp and sweet sixty-nine-year-old Lois Kahan tells me she first played in 1948, when her father bought what must have been one of the original Production & Marketing Company sets.

  Some of the players say Scrabble has given them a social life (the club in Queens meets on Saturday nights). “Without being corny, it is like having another set of family,” says Jeremy Frank, a thirty-one-year-old court reporter. Some cherish the competition, others the words. “I love having unusual words at my disposal,” Susi Tiekert writes from Atlanta, saying she misses the club “like C-R-A-Z-Y!...I like the different racks opening each game. I take pride in the fact that there is SOMETHING I can do better than the general public. And last but not least I have Scrabble to thank for a terrific husband.”

  Joel’s brother, Larry, jokes, “I play strictly to meet chicks. The game itself sucks ass.” And G.I. Joel responds, too, even though I know enough about Joel to diagram his large intestine. On the questionnaire, I ask what role Scrabble plays in people’s lives, and Joel replies: “It made me a media sensation ... for a few seconds. It consumes my life. It is my life. What’s a life?”

  Gambling is encouraged at the club. So when Joel shouts “Matchups!” on this particular night, and follows with “Mark Berg versus Stefan Fatsis!” he adds, “The windows are open!”

  Joel, a former OTB regular, means the betting windows, and everyone loves to bet against Berg. His rating fluctuates between 1650 and 1800. Berg is a games dilettante, good at many (he whomps me at table tennis one night), master of none—but he is renowned for his shaky word knowledge. He spells conventional words wrong. He is an inveterate player of phonies. He challenges words that he shouldn’t. Joel calls his weekly 50-cent awards for the “best” phonies that go unchallenged “Berg Prizes.” When you bet against Berg and win, you collect “Berg Bucks.”

  Berg, a tireless trash talker with a New York accent, decides that he is a 50-point favorite against me and welcomes all action. The betting —on me—is heavy. Diane wagers $3. Jack lays $2. George drops $5. Sal adds $3 to the pool. Ann Sanfedele lays down $1, in quarters. I bet a buck on myself. Berg can win $15 if he beats me by more than 50 points, or lose $15 if he doesn’t “cover the spot.”

  “Wow,” Berg says. “A lot of action on Stefan.”

  “Yeah,” George says. “He’s smart.”

  “He may be smart,” Berg says. “But is he a good player?”

  “He’s a good player,” George says. “I’ve seen him in the park.”

  At this point, I’m not yet a fixture at the club—still considered just a reporter and not a real player. My rating is low. I haven’t earned the respect of the experts, or even the expert wanna-bes.

  I go first. QUODS. Fifty points.

  “Stefan’s winning a hundred to nothing!” Sal announces gleefully.

  On my fourth turn I find DERVISH for 93 points, giving me a lead of 173–128, not including the spread.

  “You sure you don’t want a draw?” Berg jokes. “Against a player of my caliber, take the half point.” (In tournament games, ties are worth a half point to each player.)

  “I’m up three dollars in Berg Bucks!” Sal gloats as the game nears its finish.

  “Mazel tov,” Berg says. Then he starts whining about his tiles. “This sucks. Early upset. Big upset in this round.”

  Without the spread, I win 412–361. Sal calls me the man of the hour. Players applaud.

  “Where’s my two bucks?” Jack demands.

  “Show me the money!” Ann says.

  “You the man!” Sal shouts. “You the man all night!”

  I win three out of four games, and $15 as the evening’s best intermediate player. Plus one Berg Buck.

  I’ve started dreaming about Scrabble.

  I’m playing in the Nationals. There is one long table of players, like a prison mess hall. It turns out that two high-school friends, Frank and Dave, and a couple of college acquaintances also are in the tournament. They’ve entered because I’ve entered, and I’m excited. But none of them has played Scrabble before, so I rattle off some basics. “Try to identify prefixes and suffixes,” I say hurriedly. “Keep a balance between vowels and consonants. Don’t play an S for less than thirty points unless you have more than one. Don’t play a blank unless you can bingo or score an equivalent amount.”

  Then I realize that I’m late for my first game. I run to the table to find that my opponent—one of the middle-aged fat ladies who populate the intermediate divisions—has started my clock. I draw tiles, but they are the tiny wooden ones used in travel Scrabble. I can’t get a good grip and keep dropping them. (In my recurring baseball anxiety dream, I can’t open my glove to catch the ball.) Then I realize that I’ve drawn twelve tiles, eight on my rack and four on the table in front of me. But when I look on my rack again, there’s a fish. It’s a perch, wet and scaly, but clearly identifiable because PERCH is spelled out on its side. I can’t find the tiles, though I think they’re still on the rack. I call over the tournament director to decide what to do. End of dream.

  I dream that I lose eighteen straight tournament games.

  I dream that I’m playing another middle-aged fat lady. She lays down QUIZ at position H8, and simultaneously forms two other words, one using the Q and the other the Z: QUATING* and ZEATINER*. She announces her score: 300 points. She hits her clock. I should challenge because I am sure that ZEATINER is a phony. Then my mother appears and starts coffeehousing. I tell her to go away, but now I’m totally flustered. I forget to challenge.

  I do have one happy Scrabble dream. After playing in the park one afternoon, I dream that I’m totally accepted there as a great player. Aldo Cardia, the subdued, chain-smoking restaurant owner, is smiling and laughing and joking with me as I explain the hierarchy of the park to a newcomer. This park is more sylvan than grimy Washington Square. I explain that when I first arrived, none of the top players would let me play. Aldo tells an inside story about my early days in the park. We share another laugh.

  The down-at-the-heels chess players, with their speed games and low-stakes hustles and barker mentality, had controlled the southwest corner of Washington Square Park for decades. Other games were unwelcome. A Parks Department sign even said so: THIS AREA RESERVED FOR CHESS AND CHECKERS.

  In the early eighties, the park was a tough place. There was a killing near the corner one summer night. The bathroom was considered off-limits because it was used as a gay pickup scene. Stabbings, fights, and thrown bottles weren’t unusual. Drug deals proliferated. An addict nicknamed Flash would rip off unsuspecting players. Chess clocks were a popular target. One player whose clock was stolen saw it being used by another player a few days later; he had to buy it back.

  “All you had to do was breathe deep to smoke crack,” a parkie named Arnie Weisburg tells me. “So many people just laying around wasted all over the place.”

  When Arnie brought his little travel Scrabble set to the southwest corner in 1985, he couldn’t get a game. No one played Scrabble. His first regular partner was Jerome, a homeless man who said he had worked as a microbiologist in a hospital lab specializing in scatology before he was convicted of murder in Pennsylvania and released on a technicality. But Jerome vanished after an old Flea House regular who had joined Arnie’s Scrabble game cleaned him out one day.

  Then others wanted to play, and Arnie, a retired chemicals salesman, started coming down daily. The park was getting cleaner. The cop in charge of the Washington Square Park detail, a lieutenant named McKenna, was clearing out the crackheads and junkies; one time the police used water hoses to roust the druggies from park benches. But the sign still limited games to chess and checkers, even though the city parks commissioner had ruled otherwise; he sent a
letter to a group of backgammon players who had complained when the chess players tried to have them evicted, noting that the sign should have read BOARD GAMES ONLY. NO GAMBLING. And when McKenna was away, an overzealous substitute ordered a cop to ticket Arnie for playing an “unauthorized game” at a table reserved for chess and checkers.

  Arnie pleaded not guilty. A parkie made him a T-shirt that spelled out FREE WEISBURG in Scrabble tiles. “In the interest of justice,” Arnie told the judge presiding over his hearing, “I ask for a dismissal.” He produced the letter from the parks commissioner to the backgammon players about the erroneous sign. The judge laughed. “What was the game you were playing?”

  “Scrabble.”

  “Case dismissed.”

  The game gradually drew a bigger following. Players from the Manhattan club began showing up, like Matthew Laufer, the poet, and Jimmy Young, an ex-Flea House regular, and Alan Williams, the contractor who switched over from chess. There was a cab driver who would park nearby and play because he hated driving a cab. There was a Latino guy who wore a plumbing company shirt. After a few years the Scrabble players moved away from the chess players and colonized the park’s northwest corner, beneath the towering elm known as the “Hanging Tree,” where from 1790 to 1819 convicts from Newgate Prison were hanged and then buried in an adjacent potter’s field.

  The more I visit the park, the more I recognize how Lester Schonbrun must have felt climbing the dank Flea House stairs, his heart racing in anticipation. When I bike to Washington Square, my pace gradually quickens as I pedal up Sixth Avenue and turn right on West 4th Street, then left against the traffic on Washington Square West. When I take the D train instead, exiting at the front of the train and making a left on Waverly Place, I jog the last block. If no one is there, I’m virtually inconsolable. If I have to wait to play, I’m antsy. If I can sit right down, I’m blissful, though I never show it. I come to the park to get lost in the game, as addicted as the druggies who stagger around wailing about the need to legalize marijuana.