Saturday's Storyteller: "Honestly, I'm just doing the best I can to get by."

by Belinda Roddie

Honestly, I'm just doing the best I can to get by. Selling board games. Making cigar box guitars. Baking pies big enough to hide hacksaws in them in case my good old man in Quentin needs to bust out to buy a pack of smokes and then waltz right back in like nothing happened. Hell, I've taken up so many hobbies to make extra money that I don't even know what my real hobbies are anymore. Passion. That's a word for another day.

They call me the Chess Count here by the bay. It's an innocuous enough name, given the weekends I spend trading away cheap knock-off card and strategy games for cold cash. To the left of me, there's usually a guy spray-painting pictures of the hottest baseball team or celebrity. To the right, another dude pretending to be a gold-coated, sequined statue. He's pretty damn good at it. Scared a few kids one time by only slightly twitching his right ear. If I could do that, I could probably rake in an extra two hundred dollars a day.

Tonight is my one night off every week - Tuesday night. I like this because the bars are clear. There aren't any dumbass final year college students or tourists or financial district snobs demanding overly expensive cocktails, jamming up the stools so I can't sit down. Tuesday night, there's always a place for me, front and center, by the tap. I order the same beer for the most part. When I'm a little more worn thin, it's whiskey. Anything to wake me up so I can make small talk with the good trivia folk finishing up their rounds. I chat with the regular barkeep, too. His name's Oliver. You're familiar with him, I can tell. He likes you, you know. He makes gawky eyes at you every time you walk in.

Here's the thing, kid - if I'm talking to you so openly about my day-to-day life, it means I trust you. Don't take that lightly. I grew up in a household where trust was hard to salvage and way too expensive to hold onto. It was kind of like being expected to balance a crystal vase on your head and not have it break while you were jumping down several flights of stairs. My dad - I told you, he's in the slammer - was a car dealer. And by car dealer, I mean a dealer in everything except cars. Behind his auto shop, he sold shoddy handguns, shitty marijuana, cheap-ass cocaine, hugely contaminated heroin. I'm surprised no one wound up dead from an infection, jamming that sticky mess into their already bruised forearms. My dad, he was a real businessman. As in he was good enough with trust that he made it last as long as he needed for the deal to be struck. After that, it didn't matter if that client's trust was broken - there were plenty more suckers waiting to be reeled in by his rusty fishing pole. Oh, he sold fishing goods, too. Pretty random, but at least legal.

Look, they don't just call me the Chess Count for no reason, you know. I am pretty fucking smart when it comes to chess. My mom, well, she loved the game. She played it with her grandfather, and when he died, she played it with her father, and when he died, she played it with me. And here's the thing, hon - she always won. Always. It didn't matter if I beat everyone else in my ghetto high school. It didn't matter if I knocked out the angry pros on Hyde Street. You know, the guys who are mostly homeless and huddle around tables and mess with rooks and bishops for the sake of recreation. I killed them all at chess. I murdered their queens with pawns, their little imaginary spears ripping the ladies' tiaras off their heads along with their bloody scalps. But I could never lay a finger on my mom. Hell, she even let me move a pawn all the way to the other side of the board one day. All the way. And I was foaming at the mouth in greedy glee. Turns out, recovering my queen didn't save my king from being snagged by a treasonous clergyman and a horse pretending to be a vassal. She got me good.

After she died, well, I didn't exactly have very many people to challenge me. Like I said, most of the people I face are, well, they're laughable. I can knock 'em over with a slight breath, if you know what I mean. After my dad went to jail, I was hauled off to my uncle's house, and when I played chess with him, I knew he didn't take it seriously. Who the Hell doesn't take chess seriously? I mean, thank Christ he wasn't a war general, because imagine him staring at a map, getting bored out of his mind. I tell you, with a braided cap on him, he would've sent our country to the Confederacy if he had taken Ulysses S. Grant's place in the civil war. So there was no rivalry, you know? No sense of competition. And it bored me. Soon enough, selling the games almost appealed to me more than playing 'em. But I know better, kid. Yes, sir, I always play. Even if they always lose.

But you, there? You with the fancy stout and the confident glint in your eyes? You seem different. I heard the way you solved all those trivia questions. You certainly knew your shit about Bobby Fisher. Most people just remember him as the scummy anti-Semite he devolved into. But you knew all his moves. All his little tricks. And I find that intriguing. The only puzzle left is whether or not you actually play chess. And if you do play, I wonder if you take it seriously.

Like I said, I do what I can to get by. And sometimes, the only way I can scrape through an afternoon without wanting to murder a caricature artist nearby is if I can play a good, long, healthy game of chess. Not the timed bullshit, no. Pure, patient strategy. So how about it? Do you play?

You think you can handle a cranky old Chess Count?

This week's prompt was provided by Arden Kilzer.