Unknown - The Genius

Calling the place “High Street” could not mask the fact that it was a shithole: a grimy room four floors above a bail bondsman, up a vertiginous stairwell, to which you gained admittance by hammering on a metal door until someone came to fetch you. I arrived fifteen minutes early. A painfully thin man in a flannel shirt and hideous corduroys came down and demanded to know if I had a reservation.

“I didn’t know I needed one.”

“Aahhh, I’m just messing, har har har. I’m Joe. Come the fuck on up.”

As we mounted the stairs, he apologized for the lack of access.

“Our intercom’s broken,” he said, wheezing. He had a slight limp that caused his hips to swing aggressively behind him, like he was trying to shake free of himself. “The rest of’m work, just ours is screwed. Landlord’s not interested. We have to keep it locked cause there’s been some breakins. Somebody got aholda the fire extinguisher and sprayed down the carpet. I don’t know what the problem that is, piecea wet carpet never hurt a man, har har har.” He took out a hankie and blew his nose.

I said, “I was actually hoping to ask you about one of your players.”

He halted, one foot on the top stair. His whole demeanor shifted; I saw him withdraw. “Oh yeah? Who’d that be?”

“Victor Cracke.”

Joe scrunched up his face, scratched his neck. “Don’t know him.”

“Do you think someone else might?”

He shrugged.

“Is it all right if I come up and ask around?”

“We’re about to play,” he said.

“I can hang around until after you’re done.”

“It’s not a spectator sport.”

“Then I can come back,” I said. “What time do you finish?”

“Depends.” He drummed his fingers on the banister. “Could be an hour, could be four.”

“Then I’ll play,” I said.

“You know how?”

Who doesn’t know how to play checkers? “Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Reasonably.”

He shrugged again. “Okeydoke.”

Taken as a whole, the checkers constituency of the High Street Chess and Checkers Club made the Brooklynites look positively trendy. Queens, I gathered, drew a more diverse crowd: a jittery man with an immense Afro and Coke-bottle glasses; an obese man wearing Velcro sneakers and purple sweatpants; twins who stood against the far wall, steadily consuming Coca-Cola and mumbling to each other in Spanglish.

Joe was clearly in charge. He made announcements, reminded them about the Staten Island tournament, and then went around the room pairing people up. I was shown to a rickety card table where my opponent sat in a fully buttoned parka, moonface luminous from within his hood. “This is Sal. Sal, meet new guy.”

Sal nodded once.

“You might as well play,” Joe said to me. “Without you there’s an odd number. Five dollars.”

We took out our wallets.

“Thaaaankyou,” he said, plucking the bills from our hands and moving on.

Despite the room’s mounting heat, Sal continued to wear his parka. He also wore mittens, making it hard for him to pick up my pieces when he captured them, which he did with dismaying frequency. As a courtesy I began handing them over.

I said, “What happens—” “Shhhh.”

“What happens when you have an odd number?” I whispered.

“Joe plays two at once. King me.”

The game took about nine minutes. It was the checkers equivalent of an ethnic cleansing. When we were done, Sal sat back, grinning. He tried to put his hands behind his head in a pose of casual triumph, but, as he was unable to lace his fingers together, he had to content himself with cupping his chin and staring at the board, now free of any pesky black pieces. The rest of the room played on in silence, save the click of a plastic disk or the occasional King me.

I whispered, “Did you ever meet someone na—” “Shhhh.”

I took out a pen and a business card and wrote my question on the back. I handed it to Sal, who shook his head. Then he motioned for the pen, and with his paw loopily wrote out a response.

No but I only started

He motioned for another card. I handed it to him. He waved impatiently and I gave him three more. As he wrote he numbered each card in the corner.

(Ă) coming here a few months ago so I don’t know

2) everyone’s name, Joe knows everyone though did you

3) know he used to be a national champion

I took out another business card. I was down to three.

Is that a fact I wrote.

)4) Yes he was the nat champ in 93, he is also a master

(5) in chess and backgammon

On my final card I wrote Impressive.

Then we endured an awkward silence, both of us nodding at each other, having established just enough of a connection to make our lack of ability to communicate excruciating.

“Next match,” Joe called.

I played and lost eight more games. The closest I came to victory was making it past the fifteen-minute mark, a feat I achieved largely because my opponent, a veteran with hearing aids in both ears, fell asleep midway through. By the end of the night only Joe had gone undefeated. When it came time to play him, players groaned as though they’d been kicked in the crotch. My own game against Joe was my eighth and final. I pushed a piece into the center of the board.

“Twelve to sixteen,” he said. “My favorite opening.”

He then proceeded to wipe me out in calm, steady strokes. It was as if we were playing different games. In a sense, we were. I was playing a game from childhood, when the goal is to entertain oneself, and my decisions must have seemed to him random or nonsensical, achieving no more than short-term gain, if that. He, on the other hand, was engaged in self-analysis, which is what any activity becomes at the highest level.

Watching him, I felt a kind of thrill similar to what I felt the first time I saw Victor’s drawings. That might sound strange, so let me explain. Genius takes many forms, and in our century we have (slowly) come to appreciate that the transcendence given by a Picasso is potentially found in other, less obvious places. It was that old reliable provocateur, Marcel Duchamp, who showed this when he abandoned object-making, moved to Buenos Aires, and took up chess full-time. The game, he remarked, “has all the beauty of art, and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer.” At first glance Duchamp seems to be lamenting the corrupting power of money. Really, though, he’s being much more subversive than that. He is in fact destroying the conventional boundaries of art, arguing that all forms of expression—all of them—are potentially equal. Painting is the same as chess, which is the same as rollerskating, which is the same as standing at your kitchen stove, making soup. In fact, any one of those plain old everyday activities is better than conventional art, better than painting, because it is done without the sanctimony of anointing oneself “an artist.” There is no surer route to mediocrity; as Borges wrote, the desire to be a genius is the “basest of art’s temptations.” According to this understanding, then, true genius has no self-awareness. A genius must by definition be someone who does not stop to consider what he is doing, how it will be received, or how it will affect him and his future; he simply acts. He pursues his activity with a single-mindedness that is inherently unhealthy and frequently self-destructive. A person much like, say, Joe; or a person like Victor Cracke.

I will be the first to admit that I swoon in the presence of genius, the burning pyre onto which it throws itself in sacrifice. I hoped that, standing beside the fire, I would feel it reflected in me. And as I watched Joe capture my last piece and set it down among the pile of victims, the little plastic corpses that used to be my men, I remembered why I needed Victor Cracke and why, now that I’d lost my ability to create him, I had to keep looking for him: because he was still my best chance, perhaps my only chance, to feel that distant heat, to smell the smoke and bask in the glow.