In the Pinkberry Asian American History Archives at UC El Cerrito lives the only known audio recording of an interview with the 1981 International Chinese Checkers Champion. You don’t have to listen too hard to know he is on the stuff. Within weeks of the interview, the Post headline read: Lost His Marbles.
The interviewer asks him the standard questions:
His thoughts on his Japanese rival, the late Hiro “Toby” Kazuo, whom he scraped victory from in a pay-for-view televised showdown, freighted with the historical bric-brac of colonizer vs. colonized:
“He was like a very smart dog. A very smart dog led on a leash by an insipid master.”
On how he came to the game:
“My father had a gambling problem, fan tan, dog races, amateur kickboxing. Chinese Checkers was my mother’s solution for training his attentions to more p sport. It was also a way, she calculated, for my father to spend more time with me. My mother, a relentless immigrant, was never happier then when one task could be Venn diagrammed with another. She slurped her cereal in the shower. My father, of course, cleaned me out. I had to raise the caliber of my game in order to afford currency with the candies and entertainments that preoccupied my peers.”
His training regimen:
“Wake up at 7 am. Drink green tea and have a piece of buttered toast sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. Do tai-chi for an hour. Read the news and parse the word jumble. Cajole order from my papers. At that point one or two of my private students arrive for their session. We play a few games. My wife may come by with tea, at which point we discuss the world’s atrocities, then hoist ourselves back to the itinerary at hand. Nothing too rigorous, you see.”
His thoughts on the growing popularity of “Speed Chinese Checkers”:
“The more simple-minded among us will always find a way to extract pleasure from the wittling away of forethought. Why not shoot marbles on the playground and call keepsies?”
On his refusal to play the Chinese Checkers Super-Computer in 1993:
“I should no more want to play a computer, no matter how intelligent its mass of wires, than I should choose to have sexual intercourse with a robot with an ingeniously contracting vagina. There is nothing more complex than the human mind, just as there is nothing more devastating than the hand of a woman clinging to the back of your neck. Both are exquisite adversaries.”
At that point in the tape, a trombone of flatuence rears up on its hind legs, goes fugitive.
There follows some discussion about first his wife, a depressive who overdosed on Percocet.
The Champ, choosing his words slowly as though dictating a letter to an ESL student, describes the feeling of being lowered into a tub of numbness. He would not cry until months later, inexplicably while watching a public service announcement for the United College Negro Fund on late-night TV.
He agrees his second wife, a diminutive woman from the country with arms like cocktail weenies, was more felicitous. She drove him near-mad, however, with the way she presented him a bowl of rice or a pair of socks and slunk away with the piousness of a deaf person dealing out sign language cards for money.
He is asked to comment on the betrayal felt by many of his admirerers when he became the official spokesperson for a restaurant chain in the Midwest called “Chinkee’s Food Pavilion.”
“Some people will not be satisfied until I am pawning the jewels from my championship belt for beer money.”
His free-fall is all the more vertiginous given his later charge for resisting arrest at a Lucky’s in Colma, a T-bone steak shoved down the front of this pants and a king-sized Twix in his pocket of his sports coat.
The tape is damaged at this point: there is the sound much like being crumbled inside a ball of tin foil. The next thing we hear is the Champ in mid-rumination:
“…When you find yourself peering down from the ruined heap of decades, you start to believe that you have experienced the full conglomerate of emotions. Rage. Jealousy. Righteousness. Degradation. Schaudenfraude. Inadequacy. Triangulating emotions that only certain cultures have troubled themselves to define. In Portuguese there is a phrase that refers to the melancholy that settles over one when one has eaten too much. There should be a phrase, then, for the melancholy of having experienced, not too much emotion, but too many of its bastard, ingrown species over time.”
The tape ends when the International Chinese Checkers Champ yawns loudly and dismisses the interviewer and his “recording device.”
Seven months after this recording was made, the Chinese Checkers Champ was found dead in an Econolodge near the Oakland Airport. The toxicology report uncovered high levels of antihistamines, barbiturates and MSG in his system. On the nightstand: a ziggurat constructed of Doritos balanced on top of a paper napkin from the chicken joint around the corner, where the Champ had drawn an empty cartoon word balloon above the beak of the chicken mascot, who, as you may be familiar, holds a three-piece special aloft with the cannibalistic relish peculiar to his kind.
