I was sort of theatrically dark in high school and you probably remember me, or at least, you remember my edge-chick phenotype—black t-shirts and black tulle skirts with black boots, but Thursday Explorers instead of Doc Martens because Doc Martens are cliché. As a misfit, I was sort of the alpha misfit, and since I didn’t like boys in the syrupy Barbara Cartland way, I mostly hung around with femme boys who were beta misfits, the kind who got shoved into lockers or drifted around the periphery of the student hierarchy in search of social capital.


One such boy I’ll call Ricky Threlkeld, primarily because his name is Ricky Threlkeld—not only is he too trifling to warrant a pseudonym, he still owes me money. In the day, I rarely called him Ricky, though—I called him Baby Biter, a word I invented for gay kids so young they don’t even realize there’s a closet to come out of. ‘Baby Biter’ is based on the unspeakably rude redneck term for gay men. Unspeakably rude is something else I was in high school.


Ricky lived two doors down from me; when his family moved in, he was thirteen to my sixteen, and he quickly developed a sort of ‘I wish you were my big sister’ crush on me because—sheerly out of mercy—I hand-me-downed him a studded belt and a skull hoodie to save him from his complete douchebag wardrobe. It couldn’t save him from Dungeon & Dragons or the chess club, though, two of his favorite pastimes. Me, I hate both those games with pretty much equal fire and I generally shove people who like them into lockers. Mind you, during ‘club time’ after school I was throwing pottery in the community center and making funky little avant-garde figurines out of low-fire clay for my friends.


And that brings us to the chess board. In May, the year I graduated Penner Park High, little Ricky Baby Biter (who was still fanboying me and my style staples and my wacky artwork) hired me to make him a ceramic chess set using an assortment of dorky characters from Dungeons & Dragons, half of them glazed in white, the other half in black. I was not enamored of the theme of course, but he promised me $200 from his upcoming lawn-mowing summer jobs, and with me leaving for college in the fall, $200 was not scoot I wanted to turn down.


Plus, as a serious project, it was sort of fun. I had to learn enough about chess and D&D to put a credible face on it, and since it was my first paid commission, I wanted do it right—thank you, YouTube videos—a godsend, really, on a par with discovering fire or metallic magenta hair dye. I cut the board from plywood and used Thinset mortar to fix the mosaic tiles on top, and then, for the pieces, I used stoneware clay and modeled a fantasy army—on the white side of the board were Bahamut, King of Good Dragons and his noble children, while the black side was the lair of Tiamat, Queen of Evil Dragons and her spawn. I wound up making all the pawn pieces little identical Goth skulls partly as a personal statement but mostly because it was taking me so long that $200 broke down to about a buck per hour. Nevertheless, the set came out pretty fucking awesome, although not awesome enough for me to want to keep, which is exactly what I wound up doing after Ricky rolled off his roof while watching a meteor shower and broke his pelvis, thus putting a kibosh on his summer lawnmowing jobs. The chess set ended up under a tarp in my parents’ basement, because honestly, the only thing more gay than having a D&D chess set is breaking your pelvis.


So, we’ll ratchet forward to now. At twenty, with an associate’s degree in fine arts from Ferris State, I’ve become less unspeakably rude and not quite so dark, primarily because in high school I believed that the world was full of shit and that capitalism was evil and people were basically idiots who moved through life as pre-programmed automatons. Now that I’ve grown up and discovered how fucking true that is, I’ve decided that earning a living might require a more pragmatic outlook.

And that brings us to the Penner Park Art Fair. You probably remember this fair, or at least you remember the paradigm—the little local mid-summer festivals that allow wannabe artists to break out of their deep-freeze cocoons and display what they’ve been wasting their time on all winter. I say ‘display’ rather than ‘sell’ because nobody ever sells artwork at these things; everybody who attends is broke and attracted by the free, substandard entertainment. In point of fact, a very bad jazz combo is playing on the park stage, right beside a big dead pond, at the point where I pick the story up again.


 My booth was between the Fix My Feet Arch Support booth and All American Gutter Protection booth, because (in case I forgot to mention it) these summer fairs are also flames to moths of easy-payment-plan small businesses who vulture in on fat old women with husbands in shorts and polyester socks showing knees whiter than their chins, which are pretty fuckin’ white to begin with. Other than homeless people, this is the monoculture that habituates local art fairs, and who are, as us serious vendors soon discover, actually more interested in improving collapsing houses than decorating them with art. That’s why, to artists who can’t fix gutters or support arches, but who can throw mean earth-toned vases and super cool mugs for people willing to shell out eight measly dollars for something someone poured heart and soul into, art fairs can be pretty depressing.


And that brings us to Sabri, tripping the light fandango, a moon-glow of sultry neo-punk, blood-red pencil-skirt and black fishnet-stockings among all the ghastly white kneecaps. Flashy shock value couture. Normally, I sit near the rear of the booth, just visible enough to thwart shoplifting; it is meant to come across as subdued modesty, but it’s really to avoid endless chitchatting with strangers who want to know where I learned how to do this, how long I’ve been at that, and ‘isn’t this pretty’ or ‘isn’t that nice’ but never reach into their pockets to prove it. I don’t want friends, people, I want fucking patrons.


And along comes Sabri, aloof as an alpine peak, bold as Tiamat, Queen of Evil Dragons, as high-toned beautiful as Lady Alustriel Silverhand (I hate Dungeons & Dragons as a game, but I sort of dig the leitmotif) who didn’t even notice me as she said, “I love this chess board. How much?”


Me and memory, huh? I also forgot to mention that when I do depressing art shows, I always bring along Ricky’s chess set on the off chance that I can somehow get this geeky albatross out from around my neck.


“$200.”


“Are you open to negotiation?”


“Try me,” I answered, moving from the shadows toward her boppy light.


“I’ll give you $250.”


At that, I hove my carcass fully into view, frowning, “It has sentimental value to me, miss. I wouldn’t go any higher than $150.”


So then she noticed me, in what is, in all frankness, my JNCO jeans gloriousness. And my ‘Conniption’ t. She said, “Because I also love Conniption, you could twist my arm and I’d go $300 but that’s my absolute final lowball, take it or leave it.”


“I’ll take it. And where have you been all my art show?”


“Actually, I just wandered over from Blessington Terrace” she answered, pointing to a block of Deco apartments adjacent to the park. “And now I’ll wander back with my new chess board because everything else I see on this park is big yikes, the band especially.”


“Ain’t that the truth?”


She added, “... unless you’d rather close up for an hour and go grab a coffee with me.”

“Who are you?”


“I’m Sabri, short for Sabrina,” she said, extending an exquisitely formed right hand with purple holographic nails.


I took the hand. “Jax, short for Jaqueline, which is why I sign all my artwork with an ‘X’ like an illiterate person. You’ll find it on each chess pieces under the felt should you choose to peel it off. Yes, to the coffee. You represent my first and only transaction and I was thinking of packing it in since I am now officially out of chess sets—the only thing that sells.”


And that’s how Sabri and I met.


So I battened down the hatches and we headed over to Brown Out, a big warehouse space with a klatchy loft where they do some dope latte art when Dion is on duty, but not today; today it was a new barista named Gilles who didn’t even know that the froth and the hot milk in a cappuccino are supposed to be on different layers. Plus the coffee itself was way acidic; Sabri, who ordered a Java Lava, agreed, so that at least broke the ice.


Not that our subterranean tingles required much ice breakage, but we were civilized girls, not heathens, although we could have talked about fractional-reserve banking and it would still have been exponentially sexy. But no—we talked about the ironic camp of our favorite core music, the bubblegum metal we inherited from our father’s vinyl collections. Her father turned out to be a high-powered partner in a downtown law firm; mine a lowly middle-school art teacher in Sterling Heights; talk about mass cross-discipline subgenre appeal? We shared the sweet daddy/daughter moments we’d enjoyed by knowing all the lyrics to their favorite Deftones songs, after which we introduced them to renaissance nu metal bands like Conniption and Noid: “We are the keepers of the gate,” we assured each other.

She asked me about art and I gave her some academic spiel about the dichotomy of delicacy and sturdiness and expressed in terracotta, ceramic, stoneware and porcelain, and about underlining the life of the objects we create, paying homage to their capacity to shape humans in return. I explained the genesis of the chess set she’d just bought, how I’d made it for a neighborhood boy who’d stiffed me out of my commission by rolling off his roof and breaking his pelvis.


“How gay is that?” she gagged.


“Diet Vernors level, at least,” I agreed.


And that brought us around to chess, where I learned that Sabri had a million and a half followers on YouTube and TikTok and an Elo rating pushing 2000; she told me she was the top-ranking girl in Michigan, which meant squat until I found out that to earn that number, she had to beat a whole shitload of rated nerds in sanctioned chess tournaments. I confessed my private image of ‘chess champions’ as ambassadors from the distant galaxy of Geektopia, an underground world of basement-dwelling losers, sort of like gamers only with less muscle tone. To me, Sabri represented a stunning stereotype-buster, which I meant—and which she took—as a compliment.


“But what angers you so about the game?” she snorted.


“Dunno. All those rules. Rules don’t jive with my aesthetics. Rules are anti-art. I despise rules more than I despise Crocs or booger-eaters. It’s like some sadomasochist poindexter said, ‘Let’s invent a board game with a whole lot of stupid rules ...and then follow them!”


“But that’s the thing, Art Girl,” Sabri answered gently. “You are standing out in the cold. There aren’t rules in chess, only an allowable travel grid for the pieces. The rest is psychology, intellect and a killer instinct.”


“Isn’t there like this endless labyrinth of idiotic patterns you have to memorize?”


“Jax dear, it’s cold where you are and warm inside where I am.” Her butterfly lace-ups nuzzled my Thursday Explorers under the bistro table. “Chess is a language, and those patterns are finite, even with a normal memory. In fact, I’ve seen them so many times that they’re earworms.”


“If you say so.”


“I do say so, and what’s more, I’d love to show you. What are you doing tomorrow afternoon at four?”


“It’s the final hour of the final day of my final Penner Park Art Show.”


“After?”


“Packing up my ‘012 KIA Soul with unsold Falstaff mugs and soap dishes and pasta bowls and skulking back to my parents’ split-level in Sterling Heights, where I live.”


“Proposal, then. Or proposition, whichever sounds juicier: What if I came by at three thirty and helped you pack up your Soul, then stole your genuine soul away to the Wicked Wort Brewpub for our monthly Pints and Pawns chess rally? It would be a horrific honor if you would be my date, Art-Girl, and especially if you condescended to let me show you how many pre-programmed chess misconceptions you probably have. Other than the one about the basement dwellers, because that’s pretty accurate.”


“’Fess up. I live in my parents’ basement. Is it minor friendly brewpub? —I’m only twenty.”


“Totally—Hovanova, the Russian dude who runs the rally—a Candidate Master, by the way—he brings his teenage kid Anika and she hangs around and drinks high-sucrose coffee confections that are, incidentally, much better than these.”


“See you at three thirty,” I answered.


And that’s how I finessed myself into a first date with my main character, the only member of my own species with whom I have (thus far) been in total mind-meld love.


The next day, on time, Sabri turned up and I did not recognize her ...which is to say she’d undergone a major, not-unpleasant metamorphosis. Gone was the neon dazzle, replaced by Ripstop cargo pants and a floppy, recycled earth-saver hoodie with a honeybee silkscreened on the front; she wore white-framed, oversized librarian glass and had her hair tugged back in a braid. I asked her if these were her art-moving togs and she laughed: “Nah, this is what I play chess in. It sets my strategy ambience.”


“I’m sure. Speaking as a basement dweller, the sight of your legs in fishnets has an effect, mostly brain fog and heart flutter. Concentration goes out the window.”

She let loose another short bark: “Are you kidding? These dudes are way more intimidated by a smart girl that by a hot one—geek brain is the one hack where they figure they have an advantage. It’s a breeder-league thing. They assume I can out-fuck them, but when I look like I can out-think them too? This kind of outfit radiates predator energy.”


My turn to laugh; besides, I could be the breeder distraction since I had, despite a long day in the art trench, decked out in first date gear—second-skin shorts, a little Aqua Net up top, 80’s buckle boots below. Don’t even ask; I swear I won’t dress like this when I’m 35.


So, in her red Camaro (a gift from her dad somewhat more boujee than the KIA I got from mine) we crossed town chatting. I discovered she was twenty-three, worked at a vintage boutique in Royal Oak and was in a pre-law program at Wayne State.


And we had more in common; we’d both had our minds blown by Mushroomhead and Dope in the 7th grade, and we loved Orgy, Deadsy, Kissing Candice, XIII UnMetal and pondered the mystery of why more bands don’t wear masks.


I could have passed out a few masks in the hollowed-out warehouse that turned out to be the Wicked Wort. It smelled nice; sterile and clean, which makes sense since it wasn’t contaminated by many patrons. The chess club, for the most part, was it. And I had them pegged to the man, since Sabri was the only non-man present other than the chess board queens and one hyper thin girl in a corner scribbling away in a sketch pad; a kindred artist. Anika, the Russian daughter. I hoped she was capturing what I was seeing: A contingency of creeps, or at least dudes who might have been creepy had they ever crept out of their crypts and seen daylight. A pair of beard-picking brahs were hunched over a board, setting up pieces. So was the couple next to them, one compulsively eating Doritos while a young kid with thinning blonde hair and a goofy grin sucked from a mug of cloudy beer. At one of the café tables, a dude with incongruously-muscled arms poking out of a short-sleeved a Hawaiian shirt was exuding a Gary Bussey sort of weirdness. Nervous tics and finger wipers and neurotic snackers were everywhere.

But they all knew Sabri, and she introduced me around as her new bae “who knows shitloads about art and nothing about chess, so everyone should be on their A game. She’s gonna gawk and pick up tips so that we’ll have something to do in my flat’s postcoital lull other than surf Netflix”—an image heady enough to put everyone (including me) off our A game.


Speaking of games, I should point out that Sabri had warned me in advance that she would not be using my dragon board—she wanted it as a collector’s curiosity and that at her level of classical chess, play required simple vinyl boards and basic plastic pieces. She crooked a thumb at the Dorito eater and said, “First time here, he brought a Tolkien board. You know, all the pieces characters from the book, hobbits and wizards and orcs. That’s his life outside Pints & Pawns; other than chess, he’s impossible to reach, Tolkien this, Tolkien that...”


“Maybe he should try Tolkien to a girl.”


“Exactly. We’re not an outlet for any unhealthy obsession but the touch-move rule. But that’s it, my comely companion, the lay of the land. Let the games commence. Watch and learn.”


I did watch too, for a while and, in fact, I learned something: How a crook in the neck feels. I couldn’t make sense of any of it. There was no sound but the random thunk of killed pieces dropped back into a felt-lined box, and maybe a strangled grunt due to a throat-lodged Dorito. The balding blonde kid nodded ‘Nice’ whenever Greasy Fingers made a particularly adroit play—so much for a killer instinct, huh? Sabri herself dispatched Gary Bussey in under a dozen moves and a femme black dude was waiting in the wings to take up the challenge. She was lost in her moment, with scarcely a glance toward her comely companion. In a while, I gave up, bought a hibiscus green tea latte and wandered over to Anika’s corner. I was hoping she possessed a mad set of Strathmore skills; instead, she was in the middle of drawing the worst tree I had ever seen done by anybody over the age of three.


But she was the closest thing I had in the Wicked Wort to an artsy soul mate, so I said, “Ever try drawing with your right hand? It’s tons easier.”


She looked at me with filmy confusion and I could see that she was not all there; some sort of developmental disorder, I guessed. I didn’t want to be mean, but I suppose I was already off that diving board: “No, really,” I pushed. “I used to do it like that too, then I switched to my right hand and whoa! That had been my problem all along!”


She frowned at me. “I’m left-handed.”


“I know,” I said. “It’s a joke.”


What I didn’t say was that her art chops probably wouldn’t have improved even if she’d switched to her right foot.


She shook her head and went back to coloring in a green globe on top of a brown cylinder.


“Don’t you play chess?” I asked, adding a note of curious innocence to my tone.


“I can but I don’t. It’s mercilessly boring.”


I was about to concur when a shaggy bear approached from the bathroom; apparently he’d been in there this whole time. Based on his size and general slovenly façade, I assumed that they were gonna have to fumigate the entire restroom wing. But he’d overheard the last part of our conversation and now he said, “Anika has butterflies in head—it is chess database, unique lucidity, a gift, I assure you. Anika’s boredom comes not from dislike of chess, but dislike of chess players. She can beat anyone in room... except me.”


He then spoke to her privately in a thick, richly textured tongue and she responded thickly in the same tongue without looking up from her shitty tree. I assumed that this was Hovanova, the Russian Grand Master candidate, and I assumed right: Those engaged in various games nodded reverently as this looming, booming stentorian passed. And pass he did—all the way to the café table where Sabri had just dispatched the weenie-bird black guy in under twenty moves, and when Hovanova took his place and faced down my date, I figured that this was something to which a comely companion should pay attention. So, I excused myself from Anika’s table and wandered over.


The others gathered too, putting their own games on pause; voyeurism is one of the keys to chess appreciation, I found, and perfectly appropriate, although I had pegged half these specimens as fans of extracurricular voyeurism as well. Jax vs. Hovanova was today’s prize fight—physical opposites measuring intellectual superiority on a rarified plateau. They represented, in their own minds and the minds of everyone else present, each other’s only legitimate threat.


Hovanova went first, pushing a white pawn to the center of the board and the first time since I met Sabri I noted a whiff of uncertainty about her, a chink in her esoteric self-confidence. Her hand twitched nervously; she hesitated, took a sip of Fiji water, and took a full forty seconds before she nudged a black pawn to a square opposite Hovanova’s. I have no idea why that move took so long—it seemed to me like a no-brainer, exactly what I’d have done. But as the play progressed, I realized how little I could pick up about Sabri’s gaming motivations. I had obviously studied the physicality of each playing piece intimately before turning them into D&D-appropriate characters, but I had no idea what they did or how they were ‘allowed’ to move. Mathematics seemed to be at the heart of it, and math is as foreign a language to me as Russian; who knows why, but in school, when I tried to visualize arithmetic to help me understand it better I pictured taupe-colored haze that smelled like fish. The highest grade I ever got in math was a C-.


The neck crook came back and I was swimming against the tide; I could tell by the pace of breathing and Sabri’s winces and grins that momentum kept swinging, but I dared not ask. Final straw was Dorito Boy, who whispered taco breath in my ear: “You know, a perfectly played game like this will end in a draw.”


“How long does a draw take?”


“Three or four hours.”


Okay, so for me, that was that. I had an idea of how to better pass the time, and I returned to Anika’s table. She was now drawing purple spheres dangling from the green globe. “Plums?” I asked.


“Limes.”


“By nature, limes are green, Anika. Those are purple.”


She answered in an exasperated tone, as if it was obvious: “I used up all my green pencil on the leaves.”


“No, it’s madly cool, don’t get me wrong. Color is illusory, right? And I have no idea what color unripe limes are—maybe unripe limes are purple. Those can be unripe limes!”


More exasperation: “Unripe limes are yellow. If I wanted unripe limes, I have plenty of yellow pencil.”


“Makes complete and utter sense,” I nodded. “Anyway, carry on. But if I draw a chess piece, could you tell me what it does? How it is allowed to move? Because I really have no idea. I’m trying to learn.”


That seemed to catch her attention and she looked on sardonically as I drew a pawn on a bar napkin. “There. What’s that?”


“A pawn,” she said.


“How does it move?”


“Two squares straight head on an opening play, then one square ahead from then on. To take a hostile man, it does so diagonally.”

As I wrote this information under the pawn drawing, I said. “It’s like a different language. You speak Russian?”


“Yes, of course.”


“Dope. I wish I could speak something else. Well, never say never. I could learn.”


“No you couldn’t.”


“Why couldn’t I?”


“You need to learn language before the age of four—five at the most; after that, your brain solidifies. You will never be able to pick up nuances, accents, double-entrendres, and that is ‘true’ language.”


“Well, that’s depressing,” I frowned, handing over another napkin.


“Rook,” she said. “The rook moves in a straight line, along a row, for as many squares as it wants.”


“Does a rook know what it wants? Does it have individual agency? Is a rook a sentient being?”


“As many squares as the player wants,” she glowered in response.


“I know, I’m kidding. So, you learned English and Russian both before the age of five? Wow, impressive!”


“Not really. It’s what I heard all day. Children learn to speak by primitive phonemics, through texture and gestural interpretations of words. An adult can no longer do this. To learn a language as an adult, one memorizes dictionary words and consciously studies syntax. A child learns without consciousness, by tasting a word, by feeling a word inside the mouth, by scenting out abstract meanings, and this is the only method that works.”


“Sucks tailpipe. I guess Mandarin is out since I hate Chinese food. What’s this piece?”


“Bishop. Moves diagonally, as many squares as he...as the player wants.”


I wrote this down beneath the bishop drawing, and continued to draw and write. When I got to the queen, Anika said, “This is the most powerful piece, the queen can move like either a rook or a bishop. The king is more valuable, maybe, but a king can only move one single square at a time. The queen controls the entire board.”

“Fuckin’ aye!” I cried. “Chick power! Queens rule, king drool. If I invented chess, I would have made a whole shitload of queens. Fuck those wimpy little tweety-bird pawns—I woulda made an entire front row of queens.”


“That is totally stupid.”


“Well, I never claimed to be Einstein. On the other hand, Einstein probably couldn’t make a soap dish that reflects a collection of universal memories or a pasta bowl that represents the emotions and scars left by war and exile. And I can! Anyway, this has been quite the education. Anika. I learned a lot.”


“But why? Stick to checkers. You won’t learn to play chess any more than you will learn to speak Russian. You learn chess by the way the pieces modulate inside your body; you learn by feel, by concept, by the echo of shapes and their meanings when the brain is still forming, when you still think intuitively—you must learn the language of chess by the age of five or you will never be any good.”


Suddenly, Sabri’s voice sounded behind me, “Ignore the disinformation apocalypse, Jax. Anika is a traitor to the game and you are listening to commie propaganda. Chess is very beautiful, like you. Anybody who sets their mind to it can learn it.”


A draw might have taken two hours but Anika had lost the game after forty-five minutes, having folded under pressure and made a series of blunders that allowed Hovanova to trap her king in a gorgeous mating net—or so she explained to me.


“Never mind that, How old were you when you learned to play chess?” I asked.


“Five,” she shrugged.


But I didn’t want to belabor anything at that moment—my little bird had a broken ego wing, and to soothe her disappointment, I took her on a date, and afterward, she took me back to her apartment, where we constructed our own gorgeous mating net.


And later still, back in my suburban basement, I began to work on another project. Truth told, I was more hurt than I let on when Sabri had opted to relegate my chess board to the status of ‘collector item’—a non-functional display piece. This seemed to be opposed to the intrinsic nature of chess boards as well as to my own philosophy that art removed from function makes it way too passive—a thing should be both useful and beautiful. I made participatory art, not wall shit. Hence, my dishes for soap and mugs for pumpkin spice latte with eight shots of espresso and a pump of maple pecan sauce.


But if that’s the way a classical chess player with an Elo of two billion wants it, so it goes. Perhaps these dumbed-down forms simplified the whole convoluted clusterfuck of sixth-move sidelines in the Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defense (something Sabri went on about once when we were drunk) by removing any trace of glamor from the pieces themselves.


And when all is said and done, making chess pieces, not moving them, is the game where my personal Elo is through the roof. I found out that Sabri’s birthday is in November, so I picked up one block each of white sycamore and black hornbeam from Michael’s and began to carve a set of conventional chess players, sans flourishes, without ambition and certainly without great arching dragon wings. They embodied the rudimentary neoclassical symbols I had drawn for Anika and which she had easily recognized—the horse head knight, the split-top bishop, front-row pawns like the Italianate balustrade it is supposed to resemble.


I did research too, and learned the meaning behind all these branded identities. It went back to 1849, when the players were modeled into their familiar, standardized shapes and called ‘The Staunton’ chess set. I only broke a single convention: My king was still topped with his little cross and my queen wore her spiked crown and a ball, but it is normally the king who is tallest player, setting a metric for the height of the others. My queen was the tallest by far, and screw anybody who couldn’t figure out the motherfucking neoclassical symbolism in that.


I intended this to become my ‘signature’ chess set, as identifiable as the ‘X’ beneath the felt on the bottom of each piece.


And so the summer waned, and Sabri began her second year at WSLS. We saw each other less and less, and I began to experience a certain stomach-churning paranoia. Date nights were postponed, then cancelled, and our lovemaking was strained and accompanied—on her part, not mine—by increasing amounts of distraction. Of course, she could and did blame the unrelenting paper chase, but I sensed something more and I came to the dreadful conclusion that she might regard me as another item to add to some private collection: Her funky little trophy artist, more attractive than useful, and shortly to be relegated to the same closet as the D&D chess board. And so, we dissolved.


By this point, I had finished all the white pieces on my chess set. It would have been a shame to leave all that work in blue-balls limbo, but it seemed increasingly self-defeating to pour this amount of love-labor into a gift for someone who was so fucking fickle in love.


And then I had another brainstorm—a brainstorm even brainstormier than the last one. I remembered what I’d said to that skinny talentless blonde chick with the sketch pad about making an entire front row of queens. And my white figures were finished; these were the black players, the ones to which my personality had a natural affinity. So I did exactly that, and cut eight identical gigantic hornbeam monarchettes and populated the first line of black defense with them. Of course, I then had a queen square to fill, and logic might suggest that a carve a little dusky pawn to put in her place, but I had already gone off the logic rails, and it occurred to me that I might upset the whole idiotic game of chess entirely and assign every black player a new role based on where it was on the board. Rooks turned into pawns, knights became bishops and I whittled two cross-top kings to occupy the squares where the bishops once plied their saintly diagonality, putting a knight in the king’s spot. And whoever occupied the new squares took on the superpowers of the old inhabitant. To me, this was a genius variation on standard chess, anarchy squared—upend the whole royal court with a swipe of the X-acto, vive la revolution and power to the pawn-like people!


Because, hey—if these hypomanic geeks worshipped the patterns and strategies outlined inside their ‘chess database’ brains so much, this would add an entirely new level of intricacy to the approach. It would be totally familiar, and yet utterly brand new. All of chess theory would remain, but suddenly interspersed with surprises On this board—my board—they’d have to remember that white players did things according to the standard rules of movement and so did the black pieces: The only thing that changed was what they looked like. These queens were pawns and these pawns were rooks. Chess is deterministic, without dice rolls or card draws; chess is a game of memory, and any long-winded strategy—all the grand schemes and classical traps and gambits of chess masters—is based on superhuman memory and little more. So, in this version of chess, both participants had to remember not only how their own pieces moved, but how the opponent’s pieces moved; black bishops moved like honky kings; a black rook could move two squares straight ahead on an opening play, then one square ahead from then on and to take a hostile man, it had to do so diagonally.


And so on. So what if I had reduced my gigantic queens to front-line cannon-fodder. Sic transit gloria mundi; sic semper tyrannis. Off with her head, the uppity entitled twat.


It also tickled my firmly-held belief that we are all embodied beings, and what the world sees does necessarily match what we can do. To look at me in studded shit-kickers or dangling skulls, you might not think me capable of crafting delicate vessels or lacewing figurines. Yet I am. Our mental landscapes—our rules of play, our behavior—do not necessarily reflect our appearance. Heavy shit, mah nizzle: There may be a philosophy of chess, but until now, there has never been philosophy inside chess. This is my contribution to Sabri’s inner patina, her politics, her fixation. A variation on the theme inscribed with my inscrutable signature, the deadman’s eyes, the symbol that marks the spot on treasure maps. This was Jax chess. Better yet, this was... cheX.


Was this a pathetic attempt to re-insert myself into Sabri’s domain? Probably. Who cares? Being petty is a passive-aggressive birthright. I needed to run cheX by somebody who knew chess, so decided to resurrect little Ricky Baby Biter from whatever junior-year hijinks his broken-pelvis ass had landed in.


By then, Ricky had grown into an extremely weird (if somewhat studmuffin) adolescent biter; he had become the type with the physical mechanics to break hearts across multiple genders and numerous identities. But he retained a whiny aura of bitchiness and it did not help when he echoed Anika’s words verbatim, pronouncing cheX ‘stupid.’


And then I told him that whoever cornered the king/knight had to declare ‘JaXmate’ and if they slipped and said ‘checkmate’ instead, they’d forfeit the game,

He sniffed, “Even stupider. Aggressively so.”


Well, I hadn’t asked this flaming hard-on for a nasty critique, had I? I had expected only heaped praises for an innovative variation on a game that was born aggressively stupid. And truth told, I really didn’t give a rat’s ass what he thought about cheX—he was not the end game. He was just the opening move. Still... “Why is it stupid, Ricky?”


Shrugging blandly, he said, “It’s unchesslike. It’s pointless.”


“Fair enough. To me chesslike chess is pretty fucking pointless.”


“Sure. It’s just a game, something to get good at. Most things people get good at are games. Except maybe cooking. Don’t you like to get good at things, Jax?”

Fucking aye, pottery for one thing, and now, especially, for another thing, cheX. CheX is my game and every piece has my monogram etched into its heinie, so I guess I have a genuine stake in getting good at it ...unlike Sabri and her cookie-cutter Staunton non-art bullshit misogynistic swinging dick toy pieces. Ricky went on: “Chess strategies are heuristics anyway. I suppose it’s sometimes best to go against them.”


Mic drop. And there we had it; ‘it’s sometimes best to go against them.’ Everything else was blah, blah, blah except his definition of heuristics—strategies derived from pervious experiences. Having labored over new heuristics, I wanted to get good at cheX, and that was something that Ricky Teeny Biter could not only understand, but help me with. So I made him a proposal: He would teach me standard chess, and I would teach him my variant, and we would play at least one game of cheX every day after he got out of school until I got good at it. In return, I would remake the Dungeons & Dragons chess board, only even better than the first one, and not charge him a heuristic nickel for it.


But it turned out he had outgrown D&D, which actually raised his Elo Dipshit Avoidance rating by at least ten points. Now, he said, he was into Shakespeare LARPing. Evidently, him and his gang of dramaturgically-hip had found an abandoned ruin-porn hotel in Detroit and were performing Shakespeare adaptations while dressed in flamboyant homemade costumes. Each floor hosted a different play; each character had perfected unique, bugfuck-creepy schtick to accompany scenes; they’d upchuck theater blood and cavort around in the nude. It was an immersive experience worthy of a hefty admission, he said, but sadly, it was totally illegal to be there in the first place.


Talk about stupid and stupider; Shakespeare LARPing? But I let him flail, and once he was done, we struck our bargain: I would hand-carve a Shakespearean-themed chessboard for him, with the opposing pieces drawn from the plays; the kings would be Richard III versus Henry VIII, the queens Cleopatra versus Lady Macbeth, the bishops Shylock versus Cardinal Wolsey... and so on. And he would teach me how to play chess, how to navigate control of the center, and then the positional play and tactical traps, and he would try to gag down the aggressive stupidity of cheX and play me using my version until I got good enough to win a couple games.


How much grief Ricky’s role as chess coach caused him, I couldn’t guess, but I invested the whole kit ‘n’ kaboodle of my Jaxness into it—that much I promise. I won’t say that I was a quick study (and I doubt Ricky would say so either) but we agreed that I began with a distinct advantage: So much of his precious heuristics involved visualizations that he had a hard time adjusting mental images to a new cast of characters. Like when a soap opera has to replace an actor or actress playing a character, but keep the character. They hope you won’t notice or care, but of course, you always notice and you always care. The other possibility was that Ricky was not as good as I’d thought he was—I mean, he wasn’t even Elo rated or anything.


Anyway, I concentrated hard and honed my chops and managed to win my first game a month later. That same night, I designed a poster adorned with a close-up of my cheX board beneath a banner headline: ‘Quarts & Queens at Wicked Wort! An Introduction to cheX, the most awesome chess variant ever invented.’

Superlatives are a given in advertising, right? I chose a date—the Sunday before Sabri’s November birthday—and linked the poster to Wicked Wort’s Facebook page. Naturally, I first asked the owner if it was cool, as rhetorical as I knew the question must be: Something that might bring more street traffic into an vast, customer-starved brewpub on a Sunday afternoon? They also let me hang a 24” by 36” poster in their window. I chose the same Sunday as Hovanova’s monthly Pints & Pawns, where I’d already have a gaggle of geeks at my disposal. Would Sabri be among them? I could hope, but it was mixed hope, since if she really had that much school slog bogging her noggin down, she should be studying... like she claimed to be every time I asked her out. Unless of course, chess was worth more to her than I was.


Either way, Ricky had a final scene to enact in this drama, for which I had to bribe him with some additional pelf—a beer mug fashioned into the shape of that quintessential Shakespearian drunk Falstaff. He had to be my opponent in the cheX demonstration at Wicked Wort, and he had to pepper our play with quotes that I prepared for him in advance: About how his initial reluctance to embrace cheX had been supplanted by devotion after he discovered how much fun it was, how rich and interesting, and how it actually helped him improve at classical chess. All bullshit, of course, but acting is believing, bitch.


Having become somewhat accustomed to the behavior of the Pints & Pawns chess club, I knew that curiosity, and perhaps my perky nobility would make them pause their games and draw them over. I mean, not only was the game something novel, but between Ricky and I, we had something to tickle every frustrated libido regardless of orientation. Hovanova, in a rarefied atmosphere above hormones, loudly declared that such childish variants sacrificed the dignity and reduced the grandeur of chess. Anika—back in her corner with her sketch pad and preschool skillset, sniffed and worked on another tree.


But for good or ill, there was no Sabri, and that meant Hovanova was without an opponent, since everyone else was shortly peering between my cleavage and my queens. He harrumphed and spoke sharply in Russian to his daughter, and finally, she rose, sheepishly, reluctantly and obediently, and headed over to the opposite side of Hovanova’s chess board.


When she passed I said, “Sure you wouldn’t rather play cheX, Anika? This is me throwing down the gauntlet. You have been challenged.”


“I can’t. I have to play Papochka,” she frowned.


“Chicken shit,” I snickered.


By this point, I was capable of beating Ricky in about one cheX game out every five, but this was not that game. The little prima donna thrived under the arc light of attention, and here, under full illumination, he played his motherfucking boyfucker off. Fortunately for me, he was an excitable hypomanic geek like everyone else in Wicked Wort, and when he checked my mate, he screwed up and said “Checkmate.”


I cleared the pieces off the board and bellowed, “I win! Dude didn’t say ‘JaXmate’ and that means he forfeits! That’s how this fucking cookie crumbles, kids, just like the touch rule: One blunder, one lapse of tactical acumen and you screw the pooch, which is warmer flesh than most of you dudes are screwing.” Okay, so that was a bit over the top. Which I promptly compounded by adding, “Who’s next? I take on all comers, even the premature ejaculators!”


But it was Anika who sat down. Having quickly pissed away her own match by casting too many nosy peripheral glances toward mine, she quickly blundered into a Lasker trap and her father ate her lunch like a big old Russian bear devouring the Crimean Peninsula.


“You sure about this, Anika?”


“Of course,” she said. “You said I was chicken shit. I knew I would lose to Papochka because I do not dare win, but the last time I saw you, you didn’t even know how the players move. That’s the most elementary part of the game.”


“Until just now, you didn’t know how cheX pieces move,” I shrugged. “How do you say ‘It’s your funeral’ in Russian?”


Anika ignored the question as her brain went into overdrive; she surveyed the lay of the land like a Borg chick with a bio-chip and an ocular processing core. “It is not possible that I would lose to you,” she said firmly.


It was sort of scary; I pumped up a little bravado. “Au contraire, it is not only possible, it is a given. You know why you will lose, Anika? Because you learned classic chess when you were only four and all those wacky heuristics got locked inside that little toddler skull. You may know how to read and write in Russian, but you will forever be cheX illiterate.”


I was a cruel little strumpet, wasn’t I? But as a psyche, it worked. Still addled over her loss to her father, Anika began with a blasé opening, queen's pawn to d4. I followed up with my pawn, which was actually a queen, to d5. By now, nobody else was playing classic chess and had formed a furry semicircle of weird smells around our game.


“Queen’s gambit,” said the dude with the itchy beard.


“Pawn’s gambit,” corrected a noob, a mop-top Indian kid in glasses.


“Zamolchi!” growled Anika as she realized her own tactical misstep.


 As the game progressed, Anika began to stutter and stammer, repeating alternate moves under her breath and promptly berating herself for not making them. As I had predicted, she played clumsily—I had to say ‘touch rule’ so many times that I finally abbreviated it to “T.L., beeyotch! You touch it, you gotta marry it!”


White knights, honky bishops and ofay rooks fell, because she could not keep track of the various dangers my own knights, bishops and rooks posed in the game of cheX. In an attacky climax, I charged a pawn across the board and hatched it into a queen, by which I mean I charged a queen across the board and resurrected one of my pawns.


“I can’t lose, see? The more unimpeachable your chess pedigree the better. Your brain solidified around certain images and you will never learn cheX culture any more than you’ll learn to draw a tree.”


Over my left shoulder, Sabri’s voice whispered, “Go easy. You know, Anika is developmentally disabled.”


“Everybody in here is developmentally disabled,” I answered. “It’s why they are so good at this cybernetic hive-mind bullshit. Singular focus, OCD concentration. I have neither, so I invented a way to level the playing field. Yay, me. Fire the handicapped. Naturally, people are having a hissy fit about it. That was my whole point. I’m an artist. I slay the sacred cows to make heuristic hamburgers.”


“I’m not sure I like this side of you.”


“Sucks to be you then. This side of me is a cheX grandmaster and can talk Russian.”


“You can?” Sabri asked with a note of incredulity.


“Zamolchi!” I bellowed.


So Sabri shut up and watched Anika’s final meltdown. I made a flurry of rapid moves; instinct said that speed would throw her off any chance of recovery and it did. Ultimately I cried, “JaXmate!” and Anika burst into tears and fled to the bathroom.


I thought Sabri would go after her and soothe her, as I had soothed Sabri after Hovanova eviscerated her those months before. She didn’t. Delicately, she sat opposite me and drew me into a stare down. No fair; under the table I felt the same shivery tingly nummy-nums I’d felt in my art fair booth.

 “Should I set up the pieces?” I said, clearing a phlegm ball.


 “You should,” she answered; eager, horny, bloodthirsty noncombatants watched from the sidelines.


I set them up and said, “So, you go first.”


“Do I? I don’t know the rules.”


“Fuck if you don’t. The rules haven’t changed. White always moves first and right now, my dear, you are whiter than Hovanova’s left ass cheek.”

Her flecked irises flicked between my eyes and the board, the board and my eyes. Under the table was steam and storm coalesced.

“Is there time pressure?” she asked after three minutes of this. “A clock?”


“We can use a clock. Or else we can play blitz cheX. Either way, it shouldn’t be taking so long, Chess Girl. Opening move—you know a zillion of them.”


 “Ooh, look who learned the terminology.”


“I jaXmated the theory that you have to learn it by five. Now make your fucking move.”


 “Okay,” she said and knocked over her king.


“Do you forfeit? Should I say jaXmate?”


“Only if I can say that I want to jaXmate with Jax.”


I tried to suppress a sunbeam. ...and failed. “I might mate if we’re still mates.”


“We’re still mates, mate.”


“Then I do believe I might mate ...mightily, too. But did I win the game?”


“You fucking slaughtered me.”


So together, we left. Since the board had served its purpose, I retired aggressively stupid cheX on the spot and never had a reason to play another round. All games are silly, and if you want to get good at a game, get good at life, the most aggressively stupid game of all.


Until it isn’t. Sabri and I are still together, and that, my friends, is my artfully sculpted middle finger and my ultimate checkmate.