I was pulled off, swallowed in a parade. Bodies heaped upon me. I was grabbed, shaken by the shoulder. I heard my name as a growl.
“That’s my dog!” Wood said.
“Fucked that white boy up,” TYMER slapped my hand.
“Good shit,” SIKE smiled.
“I ain’t never seen a Chinese dude that quick,” CLUE said and swung viciously at the air. “You should see that dude’s face,” SHIM said.
One of the skater’s friends checked on him. The skaters in the plaza were all standing, eyeing me, as though waiting for my next move.
“Time to bounce,” I said. I kept my fists balled up as we swaggered across the plaza. I was so amped, it was hard to imagine the adrenaline leaving my body, where it would go.
I teach my students how to attack the king. I co-teach a course called Peaceful Warriors. We play chess. We box. We kick. We grapple. We roll. We write. We chase each other with paper knives in the school gym. “This is a real-world application,” the guest instructor says. I say, “Everything is related.” We bring in other guest instructors. One is nicknamed the Flying Lion. Another the Rhino. He trains us at a gym owned by The Pitbulls. We have the students the whole day for three weeks. We’re an obstacle, their last hurdle before summer break.
I use a projector to show my high school students the “Opera Game,” a chess match played by Paul Morphy in 1858 at an opera house in Paris. Morphy, a twenty-one-year-old sensation, hailing from New Orleans, had embarked to Europe to challenge their top players, to claim the title of world champion. Perhaps the opera was a break from his quest. His opponents, two aristocrats teaming up against him, the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard, were only casual players, albeit strong ones.
I push a button on my laptop, and the narrator of the chess program begins. He has John Madden-like enthusiasm. If a pawn promotes, he shouts “Touchdown!” If a king flees check, he yells, “Avoiding the sack!” The students laugh at the metaphors. They say it’s silly, but they pay attention. I show them the CD case for the program. On the cover the narrator is dressed in a white shirt and tie, his sleeves rolled up.
“This guy’s the first Black grandmaster,” I say.
“What that mean?” a boy with cornrows named Junior asks.
“There’s only a thousand grandmasters in the world.”
“Only? Sounds like a lot.”
“Can we play now?” the other students ask. One student’s eyes fix on the crate crammed with rolled-up chessboards and zipped bags stuffed with plastic armies.
“Watch how Morphy develops his pieces,” I say, “how they work together to ensnare the king.” I fast forward the game to a position we reach shortly after Morphy sacrifices his knight in exchange for something intangible, momentum. I ask the students what move Morphy should make next. They’re all wrong. Morphy castles queenside. His rook now covers the file adjacent to the enemy king. The Duke and Count line their rook up with Morphy’s. A flurry of exchanges ensues.
“White to move,” I say. “Morphy has mate in two.”
The winning move is White sacrificing its queen, but the students miss this. They hoard what they have. Their minds won’t consider a variation that begins with losing their strongest piece. But Morphy’s sacrifice involves no risk. I show them that the check- ing queen cuts Black’s king off in every direction. Black is forced to capture the queen with his knight, and White’s rook, on the next move, barrels down the file to mate the king. This two-move combination might be classified as an amateur-level puzzle, but my students have difficulty seeing even one move ahead.
We attempt to make connections between chess and life. Develop a plan. Follow through. Persevere. Get back up. Survive. We don’t discuss the dangers of devoting your life to attacking the king. Players have gone nuts. It’s rare but an undeniable phenomenon. Bobby Fischer’s the poster child. The biggest star in the history of chess, so big that to call him a star actually diminishes his impact. The Jewish kid from Brooklyn conquered Russia single-handedly, a tale from scripture. That’s when he quit. Holed himself up somewhere, studying conspiracy theories. Next time we hear from him, he’s got the beard of a bedraggled Santa and quotes Mein Kampf.
Vladimir Nabokov dedicated a novel to the mad-chess-player phenomenon, he himself a composer of chess problems, including ones requiring retrograde analysis, where the solver must work backwards to find how the present position was reached. In Nabokov’s The Defense, Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin, based on an actual player, begins as a child prodigy and rises to become a contender for world champion, only to suffer a mental breakdown, eventually going insane. He enters a room and sees chess moves “in every corner.” A champagne bottle is “a bucket with a gold-necked Pawn sticking out of it,” a drummer is a chess knight, his head “arched, thick-maned.” Luzhin lives in a chess puzzle and realizes that mating the king is impossible. A metaphor cannot be contained. He does believe, however, that he’s found the solution, the “key to the combination.” He leaps from his bathroom window and perishes.
Morphy’s life has a similar arc, though less dramatic. When he returned to New Orleans, he quit chess, at least professionally, and became a recluse. He believed someone was trying to poison him and would only eat food prepared by his mother. He’d roam the
