That's the trouble with games, I think: seductive as hell, but ultimately a big fat nothing. What's the point? What's the higher purpose? I can’t see any, especially while losing twenty-nine out of fifty-one. Scrabble feels sad and meaningless, its role in other players lives imbalanced and pathetic. I don't want to end up like them, obsessed with a game. So I take a break. I go to the library. I read about the history of games and dictionaries. I search for references to Scrabble in popular culture. I do anything but study or play. I tell myself I don’t need the game. Like Lester Schonbrun after he moved away from New York and his game-room lifestyle, I refuse to admit that the game is important to me.
In September, a couple of months after Reno, Matt Graham invites me over to play a session. I haven't seen him since the spring. Feeling trapped in his apartment, Matt left New York impulsively and took a train to Indianapolis to visit his parents. In Indiana, he was able to forget about SNL, his career, and his emotional troubles. When he returned, his old girlfriend Janine helped get him work as a fill-in writer for Conan O’Brien. We play three games at his apartment. Matt pulls all six blanks, and squashes me.
A few weeks later, Marlon is the trigger to play. He calls to announce that he’s on his way to New York and needs to crash at my apartment. On a brisk, sunny day on the border between summer and fall, we head to Washington Square Park. Matt arrives in a snazzy new pair of black Nikes with light blue trim and a T-shirt showing Curious George passed out next to a bottle of ether. He’s in a good mood, and when another expert, Avi Moss, shows up, we play doubles, Marlon and me versus Matt and Avi, five bucks per man per game. We split six games and tie one. I love the scene, the lessons, and the escape. I’ve missed it.
But I’m still not itching to study or play as much as I did before Reno—until I meet Matt in the park on an October afternoon at dusk. The games players are gone except for a few dallying parkies packing up their boards. This time, Matt’s wired. The Conan job has ended and there’s a possibility of a staff position. But Matt is angry at the world again, recalling slights and complaining about encounters that most people would quickly forget. I haven’t seen him this agitated since before he got sick, and I feed off of his emotions. I’m already a little antsy, in need of a Scrabble fix. I can’t wait to play a few games against Matt’s high-strung ass.
A few of us head to a diner on West 4th Street to play. But Matt is unhappy with the place. There’s too much light, the ceiling is too low, there are five of us, an uneven number for games. He wants to go to a bar. So Matt and I leave. When we hit the sidewalk, he removes from his jacket a tube that once held chewable vitamins and empties out a palmful of pills, which he dumps in his mouth like cocktail nuts. He then extracts a two-liter bottle of water and drinks.
We go to the Peculier Pub on Bleecker Street, a college bar with sawdust on the floor, wooden booths covered with graffiti, and playoff baseball on the televisions. Matt is a regular. We commandeer a booth and set up shop. I win the first game, and Matt is agitated. After I play XYST for 51 points on a triple-word line that he inexplicably opened, he tosses his final rack—AAEIIT?—disgustedly onto the board. In more than twenty games we’ve played against each other, it is the first time I have ever beaten him.
“You ready to play for money?” Matt asks.
“Sure.”
“Stakes?”
“How many points are you giving me? I'll take fifty. One and one,” I say jokingly, knowing he won't play for just a dollar per game and a penny a spread point.
“Two and two,” he says. “And I’ll give you twenty points.”
“Twenty points. Wow. That’s generous. Thirty-five.”
Matt wants to win, I can tell. He is ticked off after the loss and quickly downs his second beer. He has a crazy, shoot-up-a-McDonald’s look in his eye, the next, familiar step in his mood cycle. After Matt builds a huge lead, bingoing with TREPHINE and MISeVENT, he stops paying attention, not tracking or even keeping score. I bingo with SALTINE and, a few turns later, after creating a hook spot with YIN which Matt, inexplicably again, doesn't block, I play DOsAGES (making AYIN) for 84 to cut the score to 375–348. Matt forgets that the Q is unplayed, and doesn’t block a potential high-scoring spot. I play QAID for 34 to go out. With his tiles and the spread, I win by 20.
Now he glides from ticked to pissed. He wants to raise the stakes to five and five, which I point out is ridiculous, as he can easily win by 200 or more points, while I can't. We compromise at $3.50 and three and a half cents per point. I open with BENDY. He counters with AOUDAD, thinking I'll challenge, but instead I hook an S onto it and play JIGS for 42. He plays ETAGERE for 64. We’re close when I play JIMPS* to a triple. I announce the score as 59, but after picking new tiles I realize I've made an adding mistake and recount. It should be 61, I say. Matt flips out.
“Wait a minute,” he says, pausing the clock. “JIMP doesn't take an S. You announced the wrong score, and I was recounting and you flash-drew!” meaning I drew fresh tiles quickly before he could inspect the play. Once a player has removed a new tile from the bag, a challenge is no longer permitted. “I didn't even look at the word,” he complains.
Now he's really pissed. Matt wants me to retract the play—which, I point out nicely, is ridiculous, since he failed to utter the customary “hold.” (JIMP, meaning natty, is an adjective, so it can’t be pluralized. I didn’t remember that, and made the play honestly. Anyway, Matt sometimes flash-draws when he plays a phony, especially against weaker players, at least against me.) I offer to take it back because I don’t have the confrontational instinct or the financial incentive he does. Typically, though, Matt changes his mind and accepts responsibility, but in a fuck-you sort of way. He clearly wants revenge—and he knows he has psyched me out. After I play BLANKET to a T for 36, Matt whines that I’m lucky. I’m ahead 257–203, and Matt is in danger of losing his most precious commodity: money. So he does what any self-respecting expert taking advantage of a lower-rated player would do: He plays a phony bingo, STROVEnT* for 92. I hold the play but am too intimidated by Matt’s mass-murderer mien to challenge. Two turns later he plays ACRIDEST for 89. (It’s good.) Matt wins 501–353.
Matt thumps me in a fourth game, but by now I don’t care. He has drunk five bottles of Anchor Steam beer, which doesn’t seem to impair his ability to anagram and doesn’t diminish my satisfaction over having beaten him twice after two years of steady drubbings. I happily hand over the $10 he’s won. I got what I came for: games. And I got something I didn’t anticipate, too. I walk out into an autumn rain knowing that I need this game, and there’s nothing I can do to make that feeling disappear.
The compulsion to play, the game’s unavoidable lure, the testosterone rush of beating (and provoking) Matt—it all rekindles my competitive fire. Melbourne supplies inspiration of a different sort. I am glad to be there without having to face the pressure of tournament play. Just observing lets me enjoy the camaraderie and good sportsmanship, the artistic beauty of the performances, the high-stakes tension, and the Berlitz-class hallway banter. The game seems to make emotional sense. For the first time, I feel secure in my decision to live in Scrabble’s world.
After five months off, it’s time to rejoin the tournament scene. I pick up Matt and his three duffel bags—one for clothes, one for Scrabble paraphernalia, and one for his dozens of bottles of vitamins and smart drugs, plus a teddy bear and a Koosh ball—and we’re off on a three-hour road trip to Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, in the heart of Amish country.
Several hours from any big city, Bird-in-Hand seems an odd place for a Scrabble tournament. But then most Scrabble players aren’t like me. They come to see friends, to sightsee, and to shop, and Bird-in-Hand, with its arts and crafts stores and black-clad locals driving horses and buggies, always attracts a big field. To me, the tournament venues are all the same: Danbury, Chicago, Long Island, Hartford, Bird-in-Hand—one giant hotel conference room that exists solely so I can have a place to play this game. I’m on the road f
or rating points, money, and glory. I especially need the points: After Reno, my rating tumbled to 1416 from 1461.
Joe Edley has sent me a fresh batch of forty-two hundred seven-letter words, which I cut into neat stacks and study daily. From the Web, I download LeXpert, a word study program that allows users to create word lists of any permutation imaginable and quiz themselves using video flash cards. I print out all of the fours, and the top seventy-five hundred high-probability sevens—duplicating the cards, but the sheets feel easier to manage. John Williams reminds me of something he told me when I started playing: “It’s easy to get pretty good pretty quickly by learning a few tricks and playing a lot. Then you hit a wall—unless you start devoting yourself to this dubious proposition.”
The wall analogy is a good one. The term usually refers to the point between mile eighteen and twenty-five of a marathon, where a runner's muscles shut down because of a lack of glycogen. In other pursuits, it's come to mean the dividing line between proficiency and mastery, that indefinable point at which the accumulation of skill or knowledge stops being easy and requires deliberate, consistent effort. I probably hit my Scrabble wall at Reno. I had left the blue-hairs behind. But to reach the next level of competence, I had to start working diligently to break through the wall.
The week before Bird-in-Hand, I dispatched three experts at the club and lost to a fourth on the penultimate play. I called Joe Edley for a pep talk. I vowed to concentrate, play smartly, be sensible, and breathe deeply. Ten wins, I said aloud in the car before picking up Matt. Ten out of twelve. Ambitious, but doable. Nine would be okay. Eight wins is two out of three—a reasonable expectation. We leave New York in plenty of time, I figure, for a leisurely dinner and some downtime before play.
Five hours later, I'm standing in a shot-and-a-beer bar straight out of The Deer Hunter—pool tables, mounted antlers, John Deere caps—searching for Route 340. It’s 8:15 and we’re at least ten miles from the hotel. A guy wearing hunting fatigues points us in the right direction, and we pull into the hotel at exactly 8:30, when Game 1 is to start. Dinner consists of a Clif Bar, a banana, a clementine, and a handful of raisins wolfed down in the car.
Now I face three games on too little sustenance and the residual anxiety of tardiness. I don’t have time to compose myself, to take some deep breaths, to prepare mentally, the way Edley insists. I rush into the playing room, which I notice immediately has an unnervingly low ceiling, too-narrow tables, and glary, fluorescent lighting. I set up my board, and within two minutes I’m shaking the tile bag.
I’m overcome by uncertainty and ill-preparedness, an all-too-familiar sensation undiminished by my tournament hiatus. The first seven tiles out of the bag and onto my rack are BDOPRRR. When I drop down BRR for 10 points, some of the panic wanes, like a junkie who relaxes when the heroin begins coursing through his veins. I hang onto the third R to turn BRR into BRRR (even colder!). My opponent plays BOUND vertically from my B. I now hold ADEOPTR. Before even locating the possible seven-letter words (ADOPTER, READOPT), my brain instructs my hands to surround her N with my royal blue plastic tiles: PRONATED. The R and the D both strike double-word-score squares.
“Ninety-four,” I say, smacking my clock.
My mood shifts. I’m one with the board now. I win the game, 464294. I eat more food, but it doesn’t help my ability to pick tiles; I don’t see a blank or an S in Game 2, and write off the loss to the tile gods. An early blunder in Game 3 (missing the easy bingo ENRAGES) leaves me questioning my ability anew, but I recover (playing SERGEANT on the following turn). Then my Scrabble persona changes, I think maybe forever.
On my next turn, I dump off a W and a Z, making WIZ and saving ADHS?. Out of the bag come an I and a second S. A duplicate letter, even an S, is mathematically considered a hindrance, and when I see it I assume I’ll have to wait a turn to bingo. But before the idea settles—before even touching the tiles, before even considering the seven-letter bingo possibilities (and, it turns out, there are two, SANDHIS and SHAIRDS, neither of which I know)—for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, I think: I hope he puts down an I.
From my brain to my opponent's ears, he drops down the vowel-dump INIA in a wide-open quadrant of the board. What occurs next is an incomprehensible snap of recognition, an inexplicable firing of synapses, the pathways of my brain aligning for a moment in happy synchronicity to allow the retrieval of information whose source I will never be able to pinpoint. I put down the D. Then the A. Then an S. Then the H. My fingers dance over the existing I. Then the blank. Then my I. Then the other S.
“Seventy-four,” I announce. “The blank is a K.”
The satisfaction is not so much recognizing the word, or even knowing its meaning—a dashiki is an African tunic—but in feeling like a player who spots the uncommon word, makes the creative move, whose brain snaps to attention at the precise moment, unlocks the file drawer containing the solution to the puzzle at hand. I still don’t understand anagramming and memory. I still don’t feel prepared to ask the deepest questions of the masters. For now, I'm satisfied with knowing that DASHIkIS happens. I roll to a 387–277 win. Now I'm starting to believe.
Marlon has a new hairdo. He's letting it grow out. He's considering dreadlocks.
“You're all nappy,” I say as we exchange a quick soul handshake and a hug in the expert playing room.
“Nappy,” Marlon bellows, “is happy.”
In recent months, Marlon had occupied himself with his harassment lawsuit against the Giant supermarket chain and, naturally, with word study. Still living at home with his mother, he has ruled out conventional jobs. He is determined to expose America for its racism and classism. He’s been reading John Henrik Clarke’s Africans at the Crossroads: Notes on an African World Revolution and begun writing.
“I'm gonna have two books written before you finish this one,” Marlon tells me. “One of them, you know what it’s going to be because you know me: America with three Ks.” The other book, Marlon says, will be about the same subject—our unjust nation, AmeriKKKa—but written in a street voice. “I might have to do one in a pen name because they ain’t gonna believe it came from the same person,” he says.
If Marlon seems more dedicated to his cause, he has reason. A few weeks earlier, he tells me, he was harassed by a cop while sitting on a train en route to a Scrabble tournament outside Baltimore. Marlon was thinking about the previous night’s games when a transit officer “comes up to me and says something. I probably didn’t respond to him quick enough. He probably thought I was a drug dealer and could be high.”
“White guy?” I ask.
“Oh, yeah. It progressed probably because of the way I answered him. I’m ticked off. I probably said, ‘What?’ or ‘What you say?’ It immediately gave him something to jump on. It gave him even more reason to be a jerk.”
Marlon says the cop took his identification and said they were getting off the train to check Marlon’s record. It probably didn’t help matters when Marlon said, “If I had a record would I be going to a Scrabble tournament?” County police joined the transit cop when the train pulled into the next station, and they made Marlon wait while they conducted the background check. When it came up clean, “they apologize profusely,” Marlon says. “And then they talk about good luck in the tournament.” Marlon lost five out of six games.
The story is vintage Marlon: Victimized by his skin color, he provokes authority rather than walking away. I admire Marlon’s convictions, but I also wonder whether they don’t hurt him. In the Giant case, he could have simply showed the clerk his ID and bought his cigarettes rather than protesting. And he could have accepted the company’s $50,000 settlement offer. He didn’t. Marlon had sued for $250,000, and thought he could win a bundle at a trial in front of a predominantly African-American jury. It was about principle, and about his self-image. Matt noted that Marlon’s rejecting more cash than he had made in a year ran true to character. “The man who turns down bingos,” Matt said, referring to Marlon’s unortho
dox belief in passing up bingos in some situations. Marlon once threw a blank back in the bag when he held both of them.
“I had what I thought was a good jury,” Marlon told me after the trial. “I had six women—five of us and one of y'all.” But the trial in the Circuit Court of Baltimore City didn't go well. Seven people testified. The defense witnesses said Marlon began swearing immediately after the salesclerk asked to see his ID. Marlon said he didn't. The defense witnesses said Marlon cursed again when he was asked to leave the store. Marlon said he didn’t. They said Marlon pushed a security guard with both hands before he was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed. Marlon said he pushed only the guard’s hand away after the guard touched him.
“There were so many people who came in and testified that it happened. We had absolutely no witnesses but Marlon,” Marlon's lawyer told me. But Marlon blamed the lawyer for missing inconsistencies in the testimony. “One guy had me pushing the guard what would have been ten feet,” Marlon said. “Another had me pushing him one foot. Another lady had me pushing him and me going back ten feet.”
Marlon, I think, would make an excellent lawyer.
The jury awarded Marlon $10,000. “I thought it was a miracle I won the case,” said his lawyer, who received 40 percent of the award. With his $6,000, Marlon bought a computer. He says it's all he wanted. But the system, as usual, let him down. The lawyers let him down. The jury let him down. The criminal justice bureaucracy let him down.
“This was a wake up call for me,” Marlon wrote in one of his notebooks after the trial. “To remind me of how things are. This was a slap in the face: Wake up and handle your business.”
After the first three rounds at Bird-in-Hand, players gather in the expert room at midnight for a champagne-and-chocolate-cake reception. A few people set up boards to extend the Scrabble evening into morning. Others gather round the chart listing the expert division standings. (Matt won his first three games.) Others renew acquaintances, make plans to check out the Amish (or at least their tchotchkes), and relate their astounding plays, awful racks, and impossible blunders.
Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313) Page 32