Best of In The Fray 2012. With a pack, a duffel bag, and a handful of Spanish words, I had hitched my way up the road to Cuba’s northern coast. But now it was getting dark, no more cars were stopping, and I needed to find a place to sleep.
By Lita Wong
A fifties-era Buick parked on a street in Cuba’s westernmost province, Pinar del Río. October 1999. Alastair Smith
Today would have to be a lucky day for hitching. Waking up in San Diego de los Baños, an out-of-the-way resort town 130 kilometers southwest of Havana, I didn’t know exactly how I’d get back to the capital — only that I would.
The fastest way was the highway linking Pinar del Río, the eponymous capital of the province I was visiting, to Havana. But I didn’t want to miss the smaller towns along the northern coast.
I decided to head to Soroa, thirty-five kilometers to the east. Nicknamed the “Rainbow of Cuba,” it is known for heavy rainfall, orchids, and tall trees. Because there was no long-distance bus or train to reach it, and I had no car, the only way there was to hitch or take several buses.
People must have been looking out of their houses every minute, because I had hardly gotten far on my way to the bus stop before a young man appeared to help me with my bag. It was the same man who had given me a ride here on his bike the previous day. He carried my bag to the bus stop, then left.
After waiting forty-five minutes for a bus that never came, I left, too. “Lejos,” people at the bus stop said, as if I intended to walk all the way to Havana.
Soon a young woman carrying a pail came alongside me on the road. “Where are you going?” she asked in English.
“Candelaria,” I said, naming the larger town just below Soroa.
“It’s a long way,” the English student said.
A middle-aged man on a bicycle had stopped, and the two talked. She then turned to me and said, “You can go with him.”
I looked at him and the bike and pointed at my heavy bag and backpack. “Noooooo,” I said, shaking my head.
“This is my father,” she said, as if that would suffice. I almost started to laugh, thinking I would be the person who would give him a heart attack.
“It’s okay?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes,” she said. “He’ll take you to the next town.”
I positioned myself sidesaddle on the bike rack, but her father had trouble pedaling because I was tipping the bike over. “It’s better if you put each leg on each side of the bike,” the woman mused.
Would wedging my big duffel bag against her dad’s back make him uncomfortable? I asked.
“Don’t worry about it. No problem,” she said, without asking him.
With that, I put a leg on each side of the bike and held my bag between the two of us. Chug chug chug … we were off.
And the man’s daughter waved.
At one point, my bag fell, its strap nearly choking me to death until the man caught the bag and placed it in front of him. He told me I could hug his stomach to keep balanced. It occurred to me that this probably wasn’t his first time traveling this way.
The man took me to the next town. There was a slab of rock on the side of the road. As the day was beautiful, I lay down on it to nap, waiting for my first vehicle.
There were, in fact, two. A sputtering tractor pulled up just as a truck passed by.
I was about to tell the tractor driver where I wanted to go when he pointed ahead. The truck had also stopped for me, and it was headed for Soroa, the very town I wanted to visit.
It was barely one o’clock. I could not believe my good fortune.
When I arrived at Soroa’s Orquideario, home to 350 orchid species, a guard allowed me to stow my bags with him during my visit. Feeling particularly ambitious, I decided to climb a craggy hill for a view of the valley.
By the time I finally left the orchid garden, it was five in the afternoon. Now I just had to hitch nine kilometers south to Candelaria, where I could take a direct train to Havana, another ninety-five kilometers away.
Or — I could take the road north and travel a more scenic route along the coast. After all, I’d been lucky so far.
I decided to leave it up to fate. The decision maker would be the first car that stopped for me.
North or south. Coast or train.
It wasn’t long before a a car driven by a middle-aged couple came along. They were headed north, toward the coastal town of Bahía Honda. They stopped to pick me up — and then their engine died. As I sat in the back seat, the man took two wires near the steering wheel and crossed them to get a charge. He tried a combination of pedal work and gear-shifting as the engine groaned, then roared back to life.
We had not traveled far before I noticed the sky in the distance turn gray and stormy. Still, the land was beautiful, with palm trees scattered across the countryside, the road winding its way through the hills. The car often slowed down to avoid the potholes.
We passed the couple’s house, and within a mile we reached a crossroads: Bahía Honda lay to the west, Havana to the east. Any further north, and you were in the ocean. The couple told me Havana was far — lejos — and pointed to the setting sun. Sí, I said.
A tractor pulling a cart was waiting, headed east to a nearby village. I climbed in with two local men who were also hitching a ride. We all rode standing, gripping the sides of the wagon, as the tractor jolted along the road. The wind made the air nippy. Darkness was approaching quickly.
We got off at the village. A bus had been scheduled to depart further east but appeared to have broken down, its passengers heading home for the night. There would be no more buses for now. Some cars and trucks passed, and I waved at them futilely. At one point, my wave turned into an angry middle finger.
By now, darkness had completely fallen. Never again be ambitious after 3 p.m., I thought, as I sat on the road, resting on my bag.
A man passed several times, just staring at me. “What?” I wanted to snap at him. I felt like an alien dropped down from outer space, abandoned by its spaceship. Another person walked by and asked me where I wanted to go. “Havana,” I answered. “Lejos, lejos,” he said, waving his hand toward the horizon.
No kidding, asshole, I muttered. I was so tired of that word.
No more cars came by. At one point, my patience wearing thin, I yelled, “OH MY GOD!” After all, nobody was around, just a few houses nearby.
The first man returned. It was as if he had decided in the middle of dinnertime to take a stroll. He walked while he ate, his fork scraping food from his metal plate. He asked me where I was from.
“China,” I lied, not wanting to betray my American identity.
He asked me if I was hungry. When I said yes, he told me to come with him. “Brother,” he said.
We went a little ways down the road, and he knocked on the door of a modest house. He explained to someone inside that he had found somebody from China on the street. She was sola. Could she have some food? he asked.
The brother let us in. He and his young wife took me into their living room and turned on the television. “Siddown! Siddown!” the two men said, gesturing with large up-down arm motions for me to sit. To make sure I was feeling comfortable, the brother turned up the TV volume — even though it was obvious, no entiendo español.
Their mother came into the room and tried to communicate with me in sign language. You’d think she was mute or I was deaf. They asked me if I wanted to take a bath — the brother rubbing himself with an imaginary bar of soap to get the question across. I tried to tell them I didn’t need a bath, but whatever I told them made them laugh instead.
Meanwhile, the brother’s wife had gone all out in making dinner. I was ushered into the kitchen, where a bowl heaped with rice and plantains was waiting for me. On another plate were chicken and slices of cold ham on bread.
I was starving. I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. I began to shovel forkful after forkful until I noticed something black, with legs, in my rice. The ant was alive. And then, as I began to pick through the rice, I saw more. Ants were also on the chicken and crawling on the ham, perhaps two or three on each piece.
The brother looked closely at my plate and noticed an ant just when I did. He muttered something to his wife. Her back was to us, and she showed no reaction, but I think she was embarrassed. The eggs she was cooking for her husband were crackling in the oil, and they smelled good.
The brother pointed to the wall, where many ants were crawling. He laughed and told me that those ants were the same as the ones on my food. No problem, I said. The food was good. I didn’t want to eat the ants, but I wanted to seem as if I were cleaning off my plate. At the same time, leaving behind only those portions with the ants would make them all the more obvious. I did the best I could.
Afterwards, seeing me wipe my mouth with my fingers, the brother vigorously rubbed his hands together to ask me if I wanted to wash my hands. I said yes. He and his wife took me to the little bathhouse next door and brought a kettle of boiling water, which they poured into a pail for me to wash with. The wife gave me a soft, blue towel. Its newness contrasted with her sweater, which was tattered at the sleeves, and her husband’s T-shirt, which had holes.
When I needed to use the toilet, the wife gave me a shard of cotton from her bag. It did the trick. Later, I noticed in the trashcan that the same kind of shard also doubled as a sanitary napkin.
My hosts let me sleep in a big bed off the living room. The white sheets smelled like laundry, and I felt guilty about climbing into them with my dirty, dusty body. As tired as I was, the mosquito bites all over my legs kept me awake, long after everyone else had gone to sleep.
The young wife stayed up later than her husband. She was busy in the kitchen, probably preparing formula for their baby, whom I heard gurgling in the background.
Later, during the night, the baby cried. And outside, a man hollered, sang at the top of his lungs, and banged on pans. He chanted something indistinguishable, and I wondered if it was indistinguishable in Spanish as well. The husband stirred in the next room. I thought he would get up to tell the crazy man to be quiet, but he did not.
I wondered if this was normal. Perhaps it was a religious ceremony.
As I pulled the sheet over me and drifted into a fuller sleep, I thanked the man who had found me alongside the road and taken me to the home of his brother. Girberto Veltia and his wife, of the village Brail in Bahía Honda, had given me shelter, food, and a big bed, most probably their own.
We have added a link to our old site in the sidebar, so that readers have access again to the stories we published between 2001 and 2010. We hope to add the entire collection of past stories to the new site eventually, as soon as our volunteer staff finds the time. Thanks for bearing with us.
Best of In The Fray 2012. Long before he was a dissident or president, Václav Havel was a playwright. His plays offer the fullest picture of the late Czech writer’s moral vision, which cast aside ideology in favor of a more authentic, more personal “truth and love.”
Václav Havel in front of his favorite painting, Master Theodoric’s portrait of St. Matthew, at Prague’s National Gallery in 1992. Pavel Štecha
One has to be careful quoting Václav Havel’s plays: his characters lie through truths. The meaning of what they say invariably depends not on the words themselves, but who says them, in what circumstances. “The word is insidious,” Havel writes in his comments to the 1972 play Conspirators. “One moment it means a lot, an instant later it means nothing. There are people in whose mouths even the most beautiful word may mean the ugliest thing. The more a person loses his self, the more deftly he can transform truth into lie, and—paradoxically—through truth … deceive the world and himself.”
Havel’s state funeral last month at Prague’s St. Vitus Cathedral resembled, as the Czech foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg had anticipated, “a grotesque situation” from one of the writer’s absurd plays. Presiding over the memorial was none other than Václav Klaus, the current Czech president and Havel’s political nemesis.
Grief over Havel’s death had brought the country to a standstill, as anyone who approved of the changes in 1989—the Velvet Revolution that brought a peaceful end to communist rule over Czechoslovakia—suddenly realized the degree to which Havel personified those changes and the once inconceivable possibilities they had opened. Into this national outpouring of warmth and nostalgia stepped Klaus, who had not said a good thing about Havel in fifteen years.
The first words of remembrance spoken at Havel’s funeral came from the mouth of his old foe. “Undoubtedly much is leaving with Václav Havel,” Klaus said. “At the same time, and in particular thanks to his consistent attitudes in life, there is much that is not leaving, and it is now incumbent upon us not to let it go. What is not leaving is the idea that freedom is a value worth sacrificing for, and that it is meaningful to engage in a struggle for truth, when one is convinced of it, even if it includes personal risks.” (A reader of Havel could not help but detect in Klaus’s eulogy echoes of the death speech delivered in his 1987 play Revitalization, conventionally translated as Redevelopment, an allegory about architects charged with the task of bringing an unplanned historic town in line with ordered modernity. “For only we can breathe meaning into this death by interpreting it as a challenge,” goes the sincere but self-deluded lament of the chief architect, Bergman—an exceptionally dubious character on Havel’s long roster of loathsome protagonists.)
It was left to Karel Schwarzenberg, Havel’s former chief of staff, to question the ways that the playwright’s own “struggle for truth” was, in death, being twisted to fit other agendas. His eulogy, which followed Klaus’s, was a deliberate answer to the current president. “Václav Havel, of course, knew that the word ‘truth’ can have a very narrow sense,” Schwarzenberg said. “He also knew that truth, seen in a narrow, self-centered way as the one and only truth, is the cause of discord and intolerance. That is why he took ‘Truth and Love’ as his motto, as only love can make us listen to the truth of another person, to the truth of others. Such love teaches us to be humble, and Václav Havel had more humility than we all do.”
‘Truth Will Touch Us’
Ever since the Czechs came together as a modern nation, the significance of the word pravda—truth—has been pitched to the life and death of Jan Hus, a Czech priest and scholar who sought to reform the Catholic Church a century before Martin Luther. “Truth … will prevail,” the last words Hus uttered before being burned at the stake, became the motto of the newly born nation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 and are still inscribed on the presidential banner of the Czech Republic. While staring down the communist regime at the end of last century, Havel and his fellow revolutionaries took to the streets with the chant, “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred.” Unlike most of his compatriots, Havel knew firsthand of the martyrdom that came with speaking truth: in 1977, his mentor and fellow spokesman for the dissident Charter 77 movement, the philosopher Jan Patočka, died from a stroke following a protracted police interrogation.
Havel saw love and truth not just as political slogans, but as principles of everyday conduct. His ability to listen with empathy to people of divergent opinions allowed him to draw together disparate groups and individuals opposed to the collaborationist regime that enveloped Czechoslovakia following the 1968 Soviet invasion. The nonpartisan Charter 77 movement, which Havel unassumingly led, began as a defense of the right to freedom of expression— specifically, a defense of the Czech rock group Plastic People of the Universe, put on trial essentially for having long hair and being apolitical. In that campaign, Havel found a platform for everyone: when one person’s freedom is violated, everyone’s freedom is violated. Many of Havel’s associates at the time criticized him for reaching out to staunch communists, who, following a takeover by the more pragmatic members of the party, found themselves ostracized for their beliefs. Havel fundamentally disagreed with those beliefs, but some of the communists, such as the writer Pavel Kohout, became Havel’s closest friends. On the other hand, colleagues of a similar political persuasion who compromised themselves for the sake of career became “former acquaintances.” (For a generation that came of age in the 1980s, kariéra had become the Czech word tinted with the most negative of connotations.)
As his friend Schwarzenberg pointed out, love in this way allowed Havel the dissident leader to listen to the truth of other people and build a broad-based movement. But what did an abstract term like “truth” actually mean to Havel? His decades of published writings provide some answers.
“It has been eighteen years since The Memorandum was first staged. I have not read it since then,” writes Havel in a 1983 note on the opening of his play at Vienna’s Burgtheater.
The Memorandum is, of course, not a play about Czechoslovak history, but a broader parable that aspires to say something about the human being and society in general. It is, however, rooted in—what else than?—the experiences that its author had in this tiny part of the world into which he was born and in which he was destined to live. That he at the same time—without suspecting this—predicted the future is not the work of his clairvoyance, but issues from the very miracle of what we mean by art, literature, drama, in which the author is always only the medium through which—in certain fortunate constellations—something speaks that is beyond him: that is to say, truth. The author does not discover this truth; truth reveals itself. He only opens himself to truth’s revelation by serving his cause. He allows himself to be carried by its inner logic and does not attempt to brazenly dominate it. It is therefore not the gift of absolute confidence, but more of stunned resignation that gives us the chance that we will touch truth, or, to be more precise, that truth will touch us.
According to Havel, chance and humility determine whether an author will be touched by truth. The two coincide. Not only does a writer need to be blessed with “fortunate constellations,” he also has to be humble enough to surrender himself to chance, to give up the consistencies he imposes on his subject, to be instead “carried by its inner logic.”
Truthful art must also arise from experience. What Havel does not stress here, but what seeps through his early writings, is his belief in the authenticity of that experience. Havel the young playwright idealized the heroic artist who was uncompromising in deed, word, and character, living his life boldly, with a deep knowledge of self. (Not surprisingly, Walt Whitman was Havel’s poet of truth in his teenage years.)
Havel clarified what he meant by artistic authenticity in his 1957 remarks on Bohumil Hrabal, later to become one of the greatest Czech novelists, but at that time an unpublished writer. Hrabal had a law degree, but had gone on to work all sorts of industrial jobs—at a railroad, a steel mill, a recycling plant. Havel was among the first to discern that Hrabal was blazing a new path for other Czech writers to follow, and he credited it to Hrabal’s authentic way of life:
Hrabal is not a writer who lives a rich life so that he has something to write about, but, on the contrary, a writer who writes because he is living this life, and this life again and again urges him to write. Hrabal is an ordinary person who writes, not a writer who lives like an ordinary person…. What sets him apart from other railroad or steel mill workers is the intensity with which he lives his life…. And this intensity of existence demands that he be distilled to the grain [projadřovat, a neologism] through writing.… [Hrabal] is not a writer-spectator … not a social novelist … not a beatnik … not a Hemingway type who deliberately and at great expense seeks out dangerous, make-or-break situations so that he can verify in them the authenticity of art. He is a type of artist … who realizes all his singularity in the intensity with which he carries out his fate.
Havel, who was born into a family of daring and wealthy entrepreneurs penalized by the communist regime for their success, never had a chance to be an ordinary person. He was a child of privilege, a writer-critic at heart, propelled by circumstances into (not so) ordinary walks of life—in other words, precisely everything that Hrabal was not. But Hrabal’s intensity, a stark contrast to the timidity of the country’s establishment writers, made an impression on Havel and a few others of his generation. Twelve years later, when he had become an enemy of the communist state and public channels of expression were closed to him, Havel would recast himself as an ordinary (and herein lies a crucial difference) citizen who writes. The writer’s vision shaped—and fortified—the ordinary citizen seeking justice.
The Devil’s Truths
The conduit through which Havel opened himself to truth was absurd drama. In 1963, his play The Garden Party, hailed by critics as the first Czech absurd play, premiered at the avant-garde Theater on the Balustrade, where Havel then worked as a stagehand. In a postscript to the published play, Jan Grossman, the theater’s artistic director, explained the appeal of absurd theater:
Absurd theater unmasks evil in its wider context, as an evil that is more dangerous because it has become “ordinary.” It filters into life without warning, furtively; it works through, at first sight, trivial means—the habitualized template, stock phrase, convention, dogma.… Absurd theater is analytical, and, if you want, coldly diagnosing. By principle it does not provide solutions. But this adherence to principle, I would say, does not stem from the certainty that a solution does not exist, but more from the conviction that a solution will never and nowhere, by nobody and by no means, be given. If theater aims to be a physician, it does not want to cure through conventional recipes, but by confronting the patient in the most drastic way with his always feasible annihilation. Not to conjure this annihilation, but to prevent it.… It assumes the role of the devil’s advocate. It takes the devil’s side, so that it may uncover the devil “who has concealed himself.”
In Temptation (1985), Havel’s agonizingly personal variation on the Faustus legend, the devil hides in plain sight. Foustka, a scientist at a research institute, comes to suspect that Fistula, a limping pensioner, is actually a visitor from the netherworld—one clue is the old man’s stench. Fistula explains that he suffers from athlete’s foot, which he treats with sulfur, and on each visit to Foustka’s home ostensibly changes in and out of slippers, which he brings along in a paper bag. Foustka never fully accepts this explanation. Bit by bit he arrives at the conclusion that Fistula’s disturbingly detailed knowledge of his personal dealings is due to preternatural powers, rather than utterly mundane connections. Yet the true cause of Foustka’s eventual downfall is not the devil’s trickery, but his failure to recognize and hold onto the one true relationship in his life. He begins to suspect his lover Vilma, a colleague at the institute, of divulging details from earlier conversations to their boss, who is bent on destroying Foustka. By doubting Vilma’s loyalty, Foustka loses her, the game, himself.
In Havel’s plays, the devil deceives through truth. Characters fixate on the abstractions of various pedestrian “truths” while forgetting their moral obligations to themselves and other people. “These are all truths that have ceased to be human truths—somebody’s truths,” he writes in a commentary on his play Conspirators.
These are truths which are not the result of authentic human realization and of authentic human experience, and which are therefore also not existentially guaranteed by the credibility and identity of their carriers, and by their courage to stand behind them even when they are not in accordance with immediate interest. These are all simply deadened, conventionalized “truths in themselves”—that is to say, truths in which contact with reality has been replaced by something more important: contact with ideological convention.
For people who embrace these external truths, Havel continues, “life moves from the real world of human existence into the semifictional world of stock phrases.” In this politicized environment, “words do not serve reality; reality serves words.” Human communication deteriorates to become a soulless exchange of “ideological stands,” and the flesh-and-blood human being, Havel concludes, ultimately transforms into a “thesis.”
(While his analysis here drew from his experiences living under totalitarianism, Havel saw communism as only a particularly obvious incarnation of the kind of modern society that corrodes moral principles. Consumerist culture, too, was one of his targets.)
In Havel’s view, truth in its fullest sense does not reside in objective facts, or logical propositions, or political ideologies. It is deeply personal: a way of life that upholds the authentic parts of our identities. Love, in turn, is how we authentically relate to other human beings. It is therefore the foundation of truth, rather than a consequence of it. If we as individuals are not rooted in a stable core of belief and relationships, we become caricatures of human beings—not unlike the characters in Havel’s plays.
Their lack of a vital sense of self does not prevent Havel’s characters from seeking out other, ersatz versions of love and truth to sustain them. But these attempts only further their estrangement. In the 1968 play The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, Huml is an inveterate womanizer, married with a mistress and lusting after more, unable to be true to any one relationship. Like Foustka, he is a scientist, but he rejects the scientific validity of an experiment to isolate the essence of the human being. In Huml’s view, science cannot quantify the human heart:
And I am afraid that the key to a genuine comprehension of the human self does not lie in a better or worse understood complexity of man as an object of scientific inquiry, but only—and only—in his complexity as a subject of human approximation, because the infinity of our own humanity is so far the only thing that can—however imperfectly—approximate the infinities of others. In other words, the personal, human, unique relationship that arises between two human selves has been up to now the only thing than can reveal—at least partly—the enigma of those mutual selves, while values such as love, friendship, empathy, compassion, and the unrepeatable and unsubstitutable human resonance—or, conversely, dissonance—are the only tools that this human touch employs. Through everything else we can more or less explain the human being, but we can no more than partly understand it, and therefore, no more than partly comprehend it.
Huml understands that the only truth worth knowing about another human being must be found through love, and yet his flawed nature prevents him from doing so.
Havel the playwright also knew to take a break from serious truths, should they become an obsession. He poked fun at himself in his plays—for example, in Audience (1975), through his alter ego, Ferdinand Vaněk, a dissident writer forced to work at a brewery (Havel had worked for a year rolling barrels at a small-town brewery). The brewmaster promises Vaněk a better job if he will write reports on himself to the secret police in the brewmaster’s name. The absurd situation culminates in this exchange between the two:
Vaněk: Sir, I am really thankful for all you did for me. I appreciate it because I know how rare such a stance is today. You, as they say, pulled a thorn out of my heel. I really don’t know what I would do without your help. That posting in the storage room would be a bigger relief for me than you may think, but I—excuse me—I surely cannot report on myself—
Brewmaster: What reporting? Who the hell is talking about reporting here?
Vaněk: It’s not about myself—it cannot hurt me—it’s about principle! Out of principle I surely cannot participate in …
Brewmaster: In what? Just say it! In what can’t you participate?
Vaněk: In a practice that I disagree with.
(Short, intense pause)
Brewmaster: Hmm. So you can’t. In the end, you can’t. That’s great! Now you really showed yourself! Now you proved yourself! (He gets up and excitedly walks around the room.) And what about myself? You will dump me in this, won’t you! You will sneeze in my face! I can be an asshole! I can waddle through the mud, I am not important, I am only your typical brewery idiot—but his lordship, he cannot participate. I can dirty myself, so that his lordship may remain clean…. Principles! Principles! … You always have a chance, but what chance do I have? No one will look after me, no one is afraid of me, no one will write about me. I am only worth being the dung from which your principles grow, looking for well-heated posts for your heroism, and, in the end, being ridiculed for all this! One day you will return to those actresses of yours, you will be bragging there about how you were spinning barrels, you will be a hero, but what about me? Where can I go back? Who will notice me? Who will appreciate what I did? What do I have from life? What awaits me? What?
Havel recognized the privilege that set him apart, the talent that made him more than just an “ordinary citizen.” To the end of his life he railed against the dangers of an inauthentic, estranged existence: his last play, Leaving (2007), skewered the cloistered egotism of politicians.
The idea that so inspired the martyr Jan Hus and his fourteenth-century followers was the heretical realization that each human being has an intrinsic capacity to know what a just, free, and beautiful life is. Six centuries later, Václav Havel used the medium of absurd plays to explore what happens to a human being who rejects the guidance of this inner compass. That real people all too often come to resemble characters in those plays, while their author was catapulted by life into roles he had not scripted, “issues from the very miracle of what we mean by art.”
Correction, March 31, 2012: Revised several passages in the essay, to clarify and correct the descriptions of the plays Revitalization and Temptation, to remove a claim that Havel wrote the “truth and love” motto “in homage to Hus,” to insert a brief discussion of the anti-career sentiment of Havel and his generation, to correct the timeframe when Havel became an “enemy of the communist state,” and to improve a few word choices. We regret the errors.
A new year is a time for new beginnings, and in Girl’s Best Friend, Rebecca Leisher describes how friendship helped her to overcome a self-destructive lifestyle and learn to face life with an authentic confidence. In Rebecca’s case, her friends were dogs — first, her childhood companion Rusty, whom she turned to when she was a shy, lonely kid, and then Quilla, a dog she adopted from the streets of a Mexican beach town. Being content with life and those you’re lucky enough to love, it turns out, is as good as any philosophy.
Happy New Year to you and your loved ones (canine included).
UPDATE, 1/12: Changed “addiction” to “self-destructive lifestyle,” as the writer says she abused, but was not addicted to, alcohol and drugs.
I might not even exist if it weren’t for a dog named Mindy.
She was my dad’s golden retriever when he was in veterinary school at Washington State University, where my mom worked in the radiology department as a veterinary technician. When my dad brought Mindy in for an x-ray, my mom checked her in by playfully writing “10” instead of my dad’s name, referring to the popular Bo Derek movie of the time. He saw what she’d written and asked her out on a date. Soon they were married, and eventually they decided to start having children. That’s when I entered the world.
I’ve always been shy. My mom did her best to force me into situations that would push my limits, but it was a slow process. What other child would require coercion to attend a sleepover with friends? Grocery stores terrified me: way too many strangers. I was suspicious of anyone who gave me a compliment. In the sixth grade, a boy I had a crush on once casually offered me a piece of gum. “Umm, sure,” I muttered. I slowly extended my hand while glaring at him sideways in an attempt to see through his motivations. He must have spit on it or something — why else would he offer it?
Dogs were the one thing I could trust in life. I knew my little brown mutt Rusty had no secret agenda. All he wanted was to be petted, fed, and allowed to roll around in manure. Considering he smelled like horseshit, he was in no position to judge me, either. Rusty and I became best friends the moment I met him. I was six, and I was in awe of him and the life he led. Sometimes I wanted to be him; other times I longed for him to turn into a boy so that he could be my boyfriend. There was even a Rusty and Rebecca make-believe wedding. (Unfortunately, before my sister-turned-pastor could pronounce us husband and wife, our Boston terrier, Olive, started barking hysterically and drowned out the sacred ceremony.)
When I entered high school, I was sick of being the shy girl. I wanted more real, human friends. I wanted to be liked, I wanted to be cool, I wanted to be accepted — and not just in the canine world.
Turns out drugs are a really good way to meet people. I swear the day I started smoking pot twenty more people knew my name. At the end of freshman year, one of the cool stoner girls wrote in my yearbook: Becca, I always thought you were hella preppy but you’re actually pretty chill. Alcohol came next and helped mold a new “me” — a girl far from shy. The new me went to parties where she danced on tables and tantalized men with suggestive glances and an alluring confidence. Coke, ecstasy, and a slew of prescription drugs followed, making the new me even cooler.
That’s how I twisted it all in my mind. In reality, my table dancing was sloppy at best, and the men I was attracting were creeps and losers. But I told myself otherwise. I was running away from that image in my head of a timid, friendless girl who hung out with dogs. I rejected everything that the old me valued — including Rusty. Eventually, he learned to do his own thing.
By my senior year of high school, I had transformed into someone my parents barely recognized and struggled to connect with. I’d come home on Sundays feeling hung over and empty, dreading the five days of school that separated me from my next weekend escape. When I stopped waking up for school altogether, my parents decided to take me to a psychiatrist.
No more drinking and no more drugs, the psychiatrist told me. I wanted to feel better, but this was asking a lot. I cried. What was I supposed to do?
When I came home, my parents sat down with me at our computer — much like the days when we’d research colleges together. Somewhere far off in my mind I still dreamed of going to San Diego State, where I could take journalism classes, study abroad in Latin America, and be surrounded by palm trees and sunshine and some abstract happiness. Since then my grades had plummeted — I was even failing journalism, despite my teacher telling me I was the best writer in the class — and I refused to study for the SAT. Desperately wanting their daughter back, my parents suggested I take some time off after graduation.
“When the drugs wear off, you’re left feeling worse than before,” Mom said carefully. “But the feeling you get when you help someone in need is a natural high that keeps feeling good.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant and thought it sounded super corny. But I perked up when my parents broached the idea of doing volunteer work in Mexico. I’d fallen in love with the country on a family trip a couple years earlier. There I had met people who seemed so much more content than me — and yet had so little, from my materialistic perspective. It had been a simplistic and naïve realization, but nonetheless mind-blowing to a privileged sixteen-year-old.
Quilla.
My parents and I began researching volunteer programs in Mexico. But meanwhile, Rusty was getting sick. His coat became patchy and rough, his skin draped over his ribcage, and he wandered around disoriented. It had been a long time since I’d given him much attention. One day I sat down with him on the floor in front of the wall heater, a place where we used to love to relax. I stroked his coarse fur and kissed his muzzle and regretted neglecting him.
A few months later, my best friend slipped out of his frail body while nibbling biscuits from my hand.
The autumn after graduation, I found myself in Mexico again. I liked the idea of doing something meaningful, but the opportunities volunteering with orphanages and schools just weren’t calling to me. Then, in a small beach town called Los Ayala along the Pacific coast, I came across a free spay–and-neuter clinic for dogs and cats, aimed at reducing animal overpopulation in the area. The four-day-long mobile clinic was offered by a program called Ayuda a los Animales (Help the Animals). Coming from a veterinary family, I’d always known that sterilizing pets was a vital means of cutting the number of homeless animals suffering on the streets and neglected or euthanized in overburdened shelters. But the massive numbers of stray animals in Mexico brought the importance of spaying and neutering to a whole new level — and underscored the need for a more humane approach to the problem. (A woman from Indiana named Molly Fisher founded Ayuda a los Animales after her puppy was killed in a “dog sweep,” the local government’s version of animal population control.)
At the orientation I met a dog who reminded me of Rusty in his final days. She was a skeleton — her bristly fur in patches, too feeble to even bark, but her eyes, like Rusty’s, gentle and wistful. Rusty had been twelve when he became this sickly, but this little girl was only a few months old.
The clinic involved four long days of vaccinating animals, preparing them for surgery, assisting veterinarians during operations, monitoring animals during recovery, and discussing proper animal care with the owners. But at the end of the last sixteen-hour day, I wasn’t exhausted. I felt euphoric — rejuvenated. I finally understood what my mom had been talking about. This was ecstasy without popping a pill.
I decided to adopt the little dog I’d met at the clinic orientation. Based on her sweet personality — and my limited vocabulary — I named her Mantequilla, the Spanish word for butter. I poured my love and attention into her well-being, perhaps in an attempt to make up for neglecting Rusty in his final years. By the time I brought her home to the United States, Quilla had transformed into a beautiful, energetic, and playful dog, a process that resembled a film of Rusty’s life in rewind. In the years that followed, Quilla stood by me as I transformed my own life. I improved my grades in community college, transferred to the University of Oregon, and revived my ambition to become a professional journalist.
My life before had been a series of extremes: debilitating shyness that would give way to self-destructive overconfidence. Now, in my search for balance, I often look to my dog when I feel I may tip to one side. Her bright, wide-eyed enthusiasm for simply being serves as my little reminder that life is never something to run from.
Rebecca Leisher is a journalist who is currently wandering the world with Seattle as a home base. Her work has appeared in the magazines YES!,Ethos, and FLUX, among other publications. She has continued to travel to Mexico and volunteer with the Ayuda a los Animales program, but has resisted the urge to bring more dogs back with her.
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Here are words worth pondering from the recent funeral service for Czech president Václav Havel:
Václav Havel has departed this world or, as we Czechs say, “he now sees God’s truth.” What does this really mean? In old Czech language, “truth” was not just the way things stood, it was also justice and supreme law. That is the meaning of the Hussite motto “God’s truth will prevail.”
Václav Havel, of course, knew that the word “truth” can have a very narrow sense. He also knew that truth, seen in a narrow, self-centered way as the one and only truth, is the cause of discord and intolerance. That is why he took “Truth and Love” as his motto, as only love can make us listen to the truth of another person, to the truth of others. Such love teaches us to be humble, and Václav Havel had more humility than we all do. This is the deep meaning of the motto “Truth and Love,” a motto for which he was sometimes ridiculed and so much criticized. And yet, it expresses the very substance of human struggle. We all know that this struggle will go on as long as mankind exists. We know that we must never give up the fight for love and truth.
Ben Breedlove died on Christmas. The Austin teen suffered from a heart condition that brought him to the verge of death multiple times over his eighteen years. He described his near-death experiences in this two-part video, posted a week before the heart attack that killed him. (First part | Second part)
In the video he doesn’t speak, but tells his story with note cards, from time to time flashing a smile that hints at the things his scribbled words leave out.
In Ben’s telling, what he felt as he drew close to death was an overwhelming feeling of peace. “I had no worries at all, like nothing else in the world mattered,” he wrote of a near-death experience when he was four. “I can’t even describe the peace, how peaceful it was.”
The feeling returned when he collapsed earlier this month. His heart stopped beating and he wasn’t breathing for three minutes before emergency personnel revived him. While he was unconscious, Ben wrote, he had a vision of an endless white room. At that moment he felt utterly content with his life, and all he had done: “I couldn’t stop smiling.”
Ben saw his brush with death as a gift. It brought to my mind a nearly fatal accident I had a decade ago. In my case there were no visions, no white lights — just the visions of heavy narcotics, and the flashing lights of an ambulance. But I felt I could understand, in part, Ben’s gratitude for seeing a mystery that few get to approach before the very end. I recognized, too, this desire to remember a sacred memory that drifts away with time, in all the pettiness of our day-to-day lives and selves.
Watching the video also reminded me of a book by the late journalist Studs Terkel. In Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, ordinary men and women talk about death — their fears and faith, their experiences caring for the dying, their memories of lost loved ones. One section of the book is devoted to interviews with people who went through near-death experiences much like Ben’s. Some of the stories are comforting, some less so.
But these are just shadows playing on a wall — suggestive but inconclusive. Perhaps near-death experiences are just hallucinations of a blood-starved brain. Perhaps they are something more. Shakespeare called death the “undiscovered country,” and said that our inability to truly know what comes after drives much of the folly, and heroism, of our ordinary lives.
The skeptic in me thinks of hard-charging Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his recent death from cancer. A lifelong spiritual seeker, Jobs continued to doubt the existence of an afterlife up until his death. As his time ran out, Jobs said he was “believing a bit more” in the possibility, but he added, “sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone.” Yet Jobs, a man of tempestuous anger and energy, seemed to arrive, too, at a sense of profound peace in the very last moments of his life. The final words he spoke, on his deathbed, were almost exultant.
Watching Ben’s video, I found myself like Jobs — wanting to believe “that when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on.” I wanted to believe, in my doubting heart, that there was something behind Ben’s Mona Lisa smile.
When my mom went into labor, my father’s reaction was to be annoyed. He didn’t want a baby born on Friday night when it was busiest at the small-town pizza parlor they co-owned. My mom waited another day to go to the hospital; I was born at half past midnight on Sunday. After I was born, he composed a poem for me called “To My Child (II).” It hung on the wall of my childhood bedroom.
When I was six, my father crashed his car into one of Vermont’s many maple trees. In his hospital bed, in his months-long coma, he quickly became frail. The man who had once lifted me and swung me around and carried me on his shoulders was reduced to a sleeping phantom that grew more sunken and pale with each day. My mother took us to see the car, a black Lincoln Towncar, after the crash. I’d seen his denim jacket, dark spatters of blood on it, the smell of gasoline and alcohol imprinted in the fabric.
The twisted car was scrapped and shipped to a junkyard. His denim jacket disappeared from our house. The tree he’d hit continued to grow, undaunted, bearing a small scar on its trunk. My sister and I went back to school. Eventually my father woke up. I don’t remember much more of that year than that.
My parents divorced about two years after the accident. The restaurant they had owned together went bankrupt and closed. My sister and I stayed with my mother, and saw my father irregularly. Mostly, he served as a chauffeur, picking us up from school and driving us to art lessons and softball practice.
One day my father arrived early to pick me up from softball. He watched as my team wrapped up practice. He stood alone, away from the other parents. In the car he told me that winning wasn’t important; playing the game was. I nodded, embarrassed because he seemed so proud of himself, of us both. This was supposed to be one of those father-daughter moments. He thought he had imparted some life wisdom. To me, it sounded hollow, a sound bite from an after-school special, a line from a self-help book. Winning wasn’t important to me. Playing wasn’t particularly important, either. Strength was important to me. Smashing the hell out of a ball, watching it fly into the field, or even when it flew past first base and fouled — that was important to me. That brutal connection, that outlet for all my anger.
When I was ten, I started going to poetry readings and open mics with my dad. I would read his poetry. Middle-aged hippie men would come up to me afterwards, praising me for my courage in reading. I’d point them toward my dad, telling them that he was the author, and maybe they’d go to his table and try to talk to him. The conversations wouldn’t last long. My dad’s lasting speech impediment made it hard for others to understand him. More than that, it made him reluctant to talk.
That was also the first year I started keeping a journal. I mostly wrote lists: of things to do before I died, of secret crushes, of places I wanted to see. I wrote a series of packing lists for the day I would run away, editing them endlessly.
When I was thirteen, my father drove me to a film-writing seminar for teens. The seminar took place over four weekends in June, in a town an hour and a half away. That summer was full of thunderstorms. We would drive in the rain, listening to Ani DiFranco or Neil Young or Led Zeppelin or Bob Dylan, music we shared a common love for. He told me he’d always loved extreme weather; when he was a teenager, he’d drop acid and go stand outside in the rain. I’d roll down the window a crack, just to catch the smell of lightning and wet tarmac. When I hear Neil Young’s Harvest or Ani DiFranco’s Dilate, I think first of watery green fields and black skies, then imagine my dad as a teenager, staring up into dark clouds with dilated pupils, letting the rain pour down his face and beard.
When I was fourteen, my father dropped me off at school for the last time. He was leaving Vermont. He had decided to move to Oklahoma to live with his mother, who needed help around the house after a recent accident. At least, that’s what he told me. After he drove away, I walked into the softball field and cried. The tears surprised me. So did the lightness I felt afterward, as if I had let go of something.
When I was eighteen, I left my boyfriend to go traveling in Europe. I cried when I drove away from him for the last time, then felt that same lightness I had four years before. Life had become simple. I was running away, and it was the most freeing thing I had ever done. The first thing I put in my travel journal was a packing list.
When I left home, the poem my father had written for me stayed on the wall of my empty bedroom. I kept moving, further and further away, taking longer to return each time.
My dad and I rarely talk. He sends birthday cards, maybe a little bit of money when he can. My grandmother relays to him what I tell her in my emails — news about jobs, lovers, school, travel. Of my dad, she always says the same thing: “Oh, he’s the same as always.”
The smashed car rusted into the ground. The tree lived, and grew, and still stands by Route 118. My father chose exile. I chose movement.
Best of In The Fray 2012. Around the world, protesters decry the inequality and excess of free-market capitalism’s “race to the bottom.” But in East Africa, social entrepreneurs are planting the young roots of a new, cause-minded capitalism.
By Jonathan Kalan
For all their flaws, capitalism and its profit-maximizing private enterprises have created enormous prosperity and wealth over the past century, improving living standards around the world. Yet as globalization accelerates a global “race to the bottom”—as integrated markets push down on regulations and wages—the shortcomings of the free-market system have become harder to ignore: growing income inequalities, a stark clash of classes, exploited labor, exhausted resources, and permanently altered ecosystems. Today there are protests on Wall Street, riots in Greece, bailouts on both sides of the Atlantic—seemingly everywhere, political upheaval and social unrest.
Across national, social, and economic boundaries, the capitalist system is being cut open and exposed, criticized and amended. Couch surfers and Craigslisters alike build barter-based economies. Shoppers respond to “cause marketing” efforts and pay more for fair trade. Harvard academics propose new forms of corporations that “create shared value.” Corporations tout their social responsibility programs and social impact assessments.
While these are all noble strategies, they ultimately don’t change a simple fact: the fundamental motivator of the capitalist corporation is profit.
Enter the social entrepreneurs that are bringing about a rebirth of capitalism—this time, in the emerging economies of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. These “new capitalists” are pioneering private-sector solutions to some of the world’s greatest challenges in health, water, sanitation, and energy. They are following the blueprint laid out by the late professor C.K. Prahalad, who called for tapping into new markets and fortunes at the bottom of the economic pyramid, and drawing inspiration from recent success stories, such as “Banker to the Poor” Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank, winners of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
Social enterprises find profits in poverty, but their zeal for providing essential products and services to the poor—in parts of the developing world shunned by most major corporations—means that a much broader population benefits as well. By carefully balancing economic and social profits, these businesses—and their cause-minded, capitalist founders—are rewriting the global narrative of “pity” for developing countries, cultivating the potential even within formerly marginalized societies for intense levels of entrepreneurship and self-improvement.
For over a year, the (BoP) Project has traversed East Africa, exploring how these new models of private enterprise are addressing some of the most crucial issues in the region. From the slums of Kampala, Uganda, to the pulsing heart of Nairobi, Kenya, to the rolling green hills of Rwanda, these photographs and stories reflect the promise of the entrepreneurial energies at the base of the economic pyramid.
In Kitui, Kenya, I can still recall the emotion of the moment when Masaki John, a widowed Kenyan farmer, offered me a live chicken for taking a photograph of her and her three sons. Her eight beehives produce honey that is guaranteed to be purchased, at fair market prices, by Honey Care Africa, a social enterprise.
I still remember the shock I felt when Veronica, head cashier at an Ikotoilet facility in the central business district of Nairobi, Kenya, told me she once helped deliver a child in a bathroom stall. These high-quality, public, pay-per-use toilet and shower facilities, located in urban areas of Kenya and built by the social enterprise Ecotact, are not only the best option in town for a shave, toilet, and shower, but apparently on multiple occasions have been used by women going into labor, because of their highly sanitary conditions.
I remember the swell of excitement in the crowd as we pulled in just after dusk to the village of Musubiro in Central Uganda, with Ronald, a “solar entrepreneur” working for a social enterprise called Barefoot Power. As he set an array of home solar products on the hood of the car, the blue LED lights from these rugged little devices illuminated the faces of the children in front. For the cost of just two-and-a-half months of kerosene, a Firefly provides enough clean lighting for almost two full years. Across Uganda, there are over 160 solar entrepreneurs like Ronald, and collectively they’ve sold over 200,000 Firefly kits.
Each of these memories, illegibly scribbled in a stack of well-worn Field Notes Brand notebooks and buried at the bottom of an old rucksack, reminds me why these social enterprises exist. Behind that veil of poverty, beyond the images broadcast to the Western world of poor, helpless people in need of your charity, there is an incredible potential waiting to be recognized and rewarded.
Next year would have been the one hundredth birthday of Nobel Prize-winning economist and free-market apostle Milton Friedman. At this critical juncture for capitalism, it’s worth harking back to one of Friedman’s most important points: private enterprise is the foundation of economic prosperity. If private enterprise was the foundation of economicprosperity over the past hundred years, perhaps a little tweaking of the capitalist model will turn private enterprise into the foundation of social prosperity for the next hundred. Where multinational corporations and embattled governments have failed, social enterprises will hopefully find success.
Jonathan Kalan, founder of the (BoP) Project, is an internationally published journalist, photojournalist, and blogger specializing in social business and innovation in emerging markets. Based in Nairobi, Kenya, he is a staff writer for NextBillion.net, a regular contributor to Dowser.org, and a 2011 finalist for the Diageo Africa Business Reporting Awards.
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Big John plays chess for a three-dollar donation. C bets customers five bucks they can’t beat him. John plays days. C works the chessboard until 5 a.m. John has a family, an apartment, a job. C hustles to survive. These are New York’s street players.
He rocks in his chair from excitement, and it creaks under his weight. Finally, Cameron, a young man who goes only by “C,” moves his white bishop across the board. He takes his opponent’s knight, smashes the button on the timer with the same hand, and taunts, “How you like that?”
The opponent, Big John, calmly takes C’s bishop with a pawn. It is an even exchange in terms of the pieces’ values, but it leaves John in a better position, controlling more of the center of the board. C stares at the board intently, and — for a moment, at least — is quiet.
Big John about to make his move.
C has dark skin, bright eyes, and a neatly trimmed black beard. He is wide around the middle, and his loose-fitting clothes make him seem even larger. Every pound of C is filled with energy. He rattles off his words rapidly, and often berates opponents for poor moves (“What was that, what you thinking?”).
John Hill, forty-nine, who goes by “Big John” or just “John,” is a tall man with wide shoulders, whose grayish white stubble stands out against his dark face. He is soft-spoken and purposeful. He speaks unhurriedly, drawing out each of his words, even as he cracks lighthearted jokes. John reminds me of one of Tolkien’s Ents (the towering, mythical, tree-like creatures who are never rushed), while C brings to mind a 200-pound hummingbird.
John asks for a three-dollar donation for every game played, while C hustles, betting customers five dollars on the game’s outcome. John plays during the day, while C arrives in the park — New York’s Union Square — later in the afternoon, often playing until5 a.m.
John works the night shift as a security guard, his primary source of income. After work he might stop by home for a nap, but he then goes to the park to play chess, and does so on many weekend days as well.
C does not have a steady job, though he certainly does work. He plays chess in Union Square almost full-time. On days when the forecast predicts rain, C brings a large gym bag full of cheap umbrellas, which he hawks on the sidewalk. (“I got to get my money. It’s a recession! I got to get every nickel and dime. Every nickel and dime.”)
A few seconds pass before C decides on his next move — and is back to trash-talking. “You’re my fish, you’re my fish!” he yells, slamming the timer.
The under-the-table cash economy is vital to the street chess scene.
“No, you’re my fish.” John almost never goads an opponent, but C’s exuberance can be contagious.
“I’ve got you, I’ve got you. I’ve got you hooked,” continues C, moving a piece.
“Yeah, yeah — keep talking,” John answers, unruffled.
The onlookers, many of them street players or regular customers, watch with interest, grinning at the banter but keeping silent. Only after John wins do they begin commenting — “Oh, John, I thought you had him here when the pieces were like this,” or “Hey C, why didn’t you move here when he did this?”
After the game, C talks loudly about how in a real game John would have lost by a technicality — John had advanced his pawn to the last line of squares, but did not announce that he was promoting it to queen. John does not seem to pay C any mind. He just relaxes in his chair, triumphant.
The Game
Chess is one of the oldest board games in the world, originating in India about 1,500 years ago. In the centuries that followed, it was a game of kings, a pastime associated with high culture and martial strategy, played in royal courts in the Middle East and Europe.
But there is little that is regal about the men — and it is almost entirely men — who hold court today in Union Square and elsewhere, playing street chess for money. These men are public figures, who choose places of high visibility to sell chess games. In New York, they can be found in many parks or places of social gathering. They are a diverse group. Some are homeless, and some have jobs, apartments, and families. For some, chess is a vital — perhaps only — source of income. For others, the game is a hobby that provides additional cash. Some ask for straight donations. Others gamble, betting on the game’s outcome.
Big John has an apartment, a family, and a job, but he also spends hours every day outside, playing chess and smoking Newport cigarettes. He spends as much time in Union Square as one would spend at a full-time job. Street chess provides him with a small supplementary income, but he insists that he plays it in the parks because he loves the game. “Chess is the only sport — and I consider it a sport — that anyone of any height, weight, race, nationality, or even eyesight can do. It’s a level playing field,” he says. “Chess makes us all equal. It’s one of the things I love about it so much: that anyone can play.”
John has played chess ever since a childhood accident kept him home from school for a few years. As he grew up, he continued playing. For years he played in public parks — as a customer, playing against street players. As he began beating them, he decided to set up his own spot outside, to allow his “hobby to pay for itself.” He tried different places, including Washington Square Park and Times Square, but they didn’t have the right atmosphere. Finally, two years ago, John settled on Union Square.
The Cash Box
It is a sunny Saturday just before noon, the first clear day after a week of rain and snow. John has just arrived at Union Square and is setting up. He places a huge clipboard — the kind that art students use — on top of a cardboard box, to make a table. He drapes newspaper over upside-down plastic milk crates to make chairs. As he works, John leisurely starts to tells a story from his Brooklyn childhood, when he and some friends sneaked into an abandoned apartment building in their neighborhood.
Out of his gym bag John pulls a rolled-up mat with white and green squares. He straightens out the chessboard and clips one side of it to the clipboard. He takes a roll of tape from his bag, and slowly begins taping down his board.
It’s a new board, one that John recently bought from the Village Chess Shop, an iconic store in Greenwich Village that has catered to chess players for more than three decades. It is open all night and lets people play each other for $2.50 per hour. There you can find players of all kinds — grandmasters and children, street players and tourists. “It’s an equalizer — chess,” says Michael Propper, the shop’s owner. “You have a guy worth a million dollars, and you’ve got the guy with no home. And the big shot is the guy with no home, ’cause he’s a great chess player. And if he comes in here, he’s got authority, he’s got respect.”
Street players go to the chess shop mostly at night or when the weather is bad, especially during the winter. It provides a warm place indoors, but then their games are not as profitable, because they have to pay the house and because gambling is against the rules. (“There’s some subtle gambling that we overlook, that we know takes place, where they play for a couple of dollars against each other,” Propper says. “We have people who come here for thirty hours straight, and they’re clearly gambling.”)
Whether or not a street player chooses to play at the Village Chess Shop, he will still usually shop there. The chess shop, which also sells a $400 rosewood board, does steady business selling no-frills $8.50 chess sets to the park crowd.
John bought his new chessboard and set of pieces for twenty-five dollars, spending extra money to get heavier pieces that wouldn’t blow away in the wind and that wouldn’t break if stepped on. The color of John’s old set had also started to wear off, the white pieces turning beige from so much cleaning. Many street players make do with beat-up sets — one player uses a soda cap instead of a lost pawn, and C mixes pieces from different sets. But John says he’s aiming to attract customers. “Out here you always want to present something that’s desirable — new set, shiny pieces,” he says. “It just made more sense to go ahead and invest in a new set.”
Once his board is taped flat, John turns his attention to his cash box, the cardboard container that holds the day’s earnings. He tapes the bottom so it will hold, and he tapes down each of the four cardboard flaps so they will not be in the way. Then he reaches into his gym bag and retrieves yet another piece of cardboard. It’s a sign with John’s writing in blue pastel: “If you take a photo of the chess players please leave a donation.”
He tapes the sign to his cash box at an angle, so that the sign can flip down. That way, it can act as a lid and cover the contents of the box if a park ranger walks by. (While the authorities generally tolerate street players, gambling on chess is technically illegal, and players have been known to be hassled or fined wherever money overtly changes hands.) The cash box itself can be disassembled and reassembled fairly easily — if, for instance, skateboarders keep bumping against it.
John reaches into his bag again for a piece of purple checkered fabric, which he uses to line the bottom of his cash box. He dumps a handful of his own dollar bills into the box; this will encourage other people to donate. It’s one of the many tricks that John has picked up over the years to increase his chess income. But he does not live on what he earns in the park, nor could he. “I tend to do okay: maybe forty, fifty bucks,” he says. “A great day for me would be around eighty dollars.” But that’s just “once in a blue moon,” John adds. “This in no way is like a great windfall. You eek out a few dollars here or there.”
One reason that John makes less than some of the other players is that his prices are so low. Most players charge five dollars for games, but John charges just three dollars — to “make it inviting,” he says. “You make it affordable, where someone can actually enjoy the game if their game is not that good — someone who plays for, like I said, the love of the game.”
Finally, John pulls out his new set of weighted chess pieces, along with a sleek digital chess clock. As he meticulously puts each piece in its place, he nears the end of his story, too — this now twenty-minute chronicle of John when he was eight years old, exploring an empty apartment in Brooklyn with his friends. They were poking innocently around the rooms, John says, when suddenly his world turned upside down.
“I didn’t know what happened,” he says. “And then my friend looks at me, and he starts screaming.”
Putting down the rook he’s been holding, John whips off his cap. His silver hair is cut short, almost to the skin, making his head look like a grizzled coconut. He takes my hand and runs it along a deep groove in his skull — a scar from where a falling brick embedded itself in his head decades ago. After his accident, John remained housebound for a few years. Stuck inside, he would look out the window at kids playing outside and wish he could join them. This was the time of his life when he learned chess.
I find myself wondering where this story started: what question had I asked to provoke the twenty-minute tale? It was like John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, taking twenty minutes to answer, “Would you prefer coffee or tea?” Then I remember: earlier I had marveled that John was not tired, coming straight to the park from his graveyard shift as a security guard. His story, throughout which the mantra “enjoy life” was repeated, was an elaboration of his answer: “I like the sunshine.”
John finishes setting up his pieces. Nearby, other street players are yelling their catch phrase — “Do you play, sir?” — to passersby. But John just leans back on his crate. Behind him, the park’s performance acrobats have drawn a large crowd, their stereo blasting pop reggae. John bops his shoulders to the beat, grinning.
Chess players intentionally choose public places, like New York’s Union Square, to ply their trade.
The Players
A few hours later, John is still in good spirits. He has played a few games against the pedestrians who have dribbled in through the afternoon, and is now sucking a lollipop and playing Mike Koufakis. Mike is an eight-and-a-half-year-old whose feet dangle from his milk-crate seat, inches off the ground.
“Oh, heeeeey. He’s got me now. That’s not nice, that’s not nice.” John makes a show of mock defiance. “They sent me a ringer.”
Mike is playing well, but making mistakes. At one point he takes John’s bishop, leaving his own white queen in jeopardy. John slowly puts his bishop back where it was and taps the white queen to alert his opponent to the danger.
“How long has he been playing?” John asks Mike’s father.
“Two years,” replies Steve Koufakis.
“He’s good. He rushes, though.” As John waits, he scratches a lottery ticket with a dime. “Most of his mistakes are because he rushes.”
After John checkmates Mike and shakes his tiny hand, Mike’s father throws three dollars into the cardboard box by the table. As Mike gets up, a twenty-something man sits down. This customer is a regular.
“ I do now have a small gallery of repeat customers, ’cause I’ve been here a little while,” John says. “Most of them work in the office buildings, so they’ll take their lunch when their business is done.”
Regular customers are a vital part of street chess, but can also be a source of tension: poaching customers sometimes causes conflict. Once, another street player yelled at John for playing a steady customer. “He goes, ‘Traitor, traitor!’” John says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, you play with me.’ And it’s like, ‘Well, you know, you don’t own anybody.’”
Street players are protective of their regular customers and encourage them to come back. John asks a lower price of his regulars — two dollars instead of three. Another way that street players ensure steady business is to let their regulars win occasionally. Not everyone does this, but many do. John says that letting regulars win keeps up their morale, encourages them to keep playing chess, and ultimately teaches as well. “It’s a customer-by-customer judgment,” John says. “I enjoy this, so I try to make it enjoyable for the people I’m playing.”
For players like C who bet five dollars on a game’s outcome, letting a regular customer win once in a while is seen as a cost of doing business. After “I beat them enough where they get frustrated,” then C will consider throwing a game, he says. “Sometimes you have to give a little to make a lot. I give them five bucks, but I’ve won fifty, sixty from them.” On the other hand, some regulars are so good that they don’t need to be given wins. But hustlers like C cannot afford to play too many players like these.
Besides repeat customers, John also has repeat onlookers he recognizes. “He’s a professional watcher,” John jokes after one man refuses a game but hangs around anyway. Half-circles form around particularly intriguing or lively chess matches. These are mostly composed of interested street players, friends of customers currently playing, and customers waiting for a match. If a child is playing, this draws a particularly large crowd. John does not mind onlookers because they might evolve and “become customers,” and also because crowds cause curiosity and generate business. John compares having a crowd of onlookers to “advertising.”
The crowd is also good for any nearby street players. As Big John plays, the player next to him — also named “John,” but smaller — asks the onlookers if any of them would like to play. This is one of the reasons that chess players who are friendly with each other congregate together at the park. Another reason is security: John often asks adjacent players to watch his things if he has to run across the street to use the bathroom at Whole Foods.
Big John often teaches younger children the finer points of the game.
Rules of the Game
In the afternoon Big John is quietly engrossed in a match when a booming voice behind him announces, “The General has returned.”
“I’m back, I’m back!” C whoops, making his entrance.
“Heeeeeaaay,” John drawls, shaking C’s hand. “Where ya been?”
“Oh, you know, you know — around,” replies C, slapping hands and doling out one-armed hugs to the other players. C grabs a seat next to “Little John,” and the two begin playing.
C plays other street players, which is rare in their world. “It’s not that they have anything against each other, it’s just that some people don’t want to tip their skill level to the other player,” John explains. “If you have a bunch of people who have tables set up, one may be better than the other, a couple might be better than the rest. If you begin to play each other, then the other people know, ‘I’m better than him, I’ve played him.’ And a rivalry will begin like that. A lot of people can’t take a loss.”
When he was a street chess customer, John played all of the Union Square players. But after he set up his own spot in the park, the rules of social interaction changed — he could no longer play against other street players. “That’s like bothering someone’s other stand,” John says, motioning to the nearby Union Square vendors selling art and souvenirs. “You have a stand and you’re working. Tend to your business and let him tend his.” The only street player John will play is his friend C — and only when there are no paying customers. “Yesterday me and him played most of the day because it was real slow — I think I had like two participants all day.”
When C does play street players, he is very conscious of the difference in roles. If playing on his own board, he may stop a game at a moment’s notice if a customer shows up. But if C is playing another street player on that person’s board, he is even more hyper-aware of potential customers. Normally C might try to solicit a game from every fourth or fifth passerby, but when taking up a customer’s seat, C will ask almost every lingering pedestrian, “Do you play?”
“Do You Play?”
C looks up from his match with Little John. A young couple with cameras is watching the game.
“Do you guys play?” he asks them.
The woman shakes her head, and the man walks away. C shrugs and returns to the game. Less then a minute later an old man pauses as he walks by, and C immediately yells out, “You play, sir?”
As a means of soliciting customers, “Do you play?” is significant in that it is designed not to close conversation. If a passerby answers “Yes,” then the chess player invites that person to sit and only then — once it is more awkward to refuse — brings up money. But even if the potential customer answers “No,” the lines of dialogue remain open.
As a young woman in a college sweatshirt walks by, C asks, “Do you play?”
“No,” she answers, smiling.
“Want to learn?”
She shakes her head and walks away. But C’s follow-up question is fairly standard for street players. Dozens of times a day, the player switches roles — from a worthy adversary offering a challenging and fun match, to a patient teacher willing to impart his expertise.
Street players often do teach chess; during the summers John has parents who pay for weekly lessons for their children. But John points out that he is still learning, too. Even though they play chess for hours every day, he and other street players still actively try to improve their game. C says he occasionally pays for a chess tutor, and John keeps his skills sharp by playing bullet chess with one of his regular customers, for a reduced price. Bullet chess is an especially intense form of speed chess where each player has just one minute on the clock. (In most speed games played on the street, players have between three and ten minutes.)
When business is slow, street players pair off for a game of chess or cards.
The Endgame
It’s around eight in the evening, and John is putting away his set. He places all the black pieces in one Ziploc bag and all the white pieces in another, and wraps both baggies in a cellophane grocery bag that he stows in his gym bag. Then he slowly removes the tape holding his chessboard to the clipboard. He rolls up the mat into a tube, secures it with a rubber band, and puts it in another cellophane bag. He takes out his Walkman CD player, wraps the headphones around it, and places it in his jacket pocket. As he puts his things in order, John talks in his meandering way about how the cost of movies has risen since he was a child.
John turns his attention to his cash box. He scoops out all the dollar bills and stuffs them into his pants pocket. “I usually don’t count till I get home,” John says. “I find it’s bad etiquette.” But he guesses it was a fairly average day, netting about forty to fifty dollars.
John removes the cloth lining from the bottom of the box, and several coins clink free. (Some tourists, seeing the sign asking for donations in exchange for photos, drop loose change instead of dollar bills.) John sighs as he reaches down to pick up a nickel, a dime, and several pennies. “I used to have a dollar sign on the box,” he says. “I might put it back up.”
He folds the cash box flat, while keeping the sign attached to it. Then he lifts the clipboard off the larger cardboard box that made the table, and folds that, too.
He shakes hands with the other street players who remain, and gathers up the two folded boxes, the clipboard, and the two plastic milk crates. He walks to the west side of the square, and slides the boxes and clipboard snuggly between a wall and a recycling bin. He hides the milk crates behind a statue.
Big John adjusts the strap of his gym bag, then stretches out his large hand. “I’ll see you when I see you.”
As he walks away he turns and says, over his shoulder, “But, you know I’ll be out here tomorrow.”
We’ve been on hiatus for a while, and we’ve used that time to update the site, our editorial approach, and our nonprofit organization. We hope you’ll enjoy reading the new magazine. Ever since we founded ITF ten years ago, we’ve published stories that help readers understand other people and empathize with their struggles and triumphs. This will continue, but we’ve streamlined both the look and content of the magazine in ways that make our mission clearer and our work more compelling.
For our first installment of content on the new site, we’re featuring three stories. The first is a photo essay about cause-minded capitalism in East Africa. In Capitalism Reborn: An East African Story, roving photojournalist Jonathan Kalan gives us a ground-level view of how social entrepreneurs in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda are bringing essential products and creative solutions to poor families — from Avon-like networks that sell deworming tablets and solar-powered lamps, to fair-trade partnerships that employ local artisans and farmers. These promising social enterprises may be a third way between multinational corporations reluctant to enter these markets and foreign aid burdened with problems of politics and efficiency.
Playing the Streets takes us into the world of street chess players — those regulars in many a city park, some homeless and some not, who play for their pay. As Victor Epstein shows us, street players have their own rules and norms, and their unique culture mixes the most contradictory impulses: a cutthroat free market on the open town square, a fierce competition over a game that is rooted in the democratic principle that anyone — even a homeless man — can play and win.
Finally, In Exile remembers a childhood turning point that set a father and daughter on two different paths. Nicole Cipri reminds us of how fate and time conspire to separate us from the ones we love.
To fill in the lulls between posts of new feature articles, I will use this space to write a regular blog, starting this week.
As we take this magazine into a new phase, please consider donating to our nonprofit organization. Our redesign was a huge investment in time and energy, and we very much need your support at this time. Every donation is tax-deductible, and every small amount helps us to pay our writers and artists (as part of our revamp, we raised the rates we pay).
On behalf of all of us at In The Fray, thank you for your support over the past decade. Here’s to another decade of thoughtful, personal stories on the issues that too often divide us.
Tell us about those who have touched other people and made a difference — even if in passing. Describe your encounters with good samaritans as you were traveling, going through an ordeal, or just living everyday life. Share with us the kinds of stories that can turn a cynic's heart.
In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | November 2011: The Kindness of Strangers
Recently in China, bystanders walked by after a toddler was struck by two vans — whose drivers then drove away. Her death caused international soul-searching over the callousness and inhumanity of modern society. In The Fray wants to approach this topic through a more optimistic lens: the kindness of strangers. Tell us about those who have touched other people and made a difference — even if in passing. Describe your encounters with good samaritans as you were traveling, going through an ordeal, or just living everyday life. Share with us the kinds of stories that can turn a cynic’s heart.
We are currently accepting pitches for articles that relate to this theme or more generally to the magazine’s mission of understanding other people and encouraging empathy and tolerance. We are looking for profiles, interviews, reportage, personal essays, op-eds, travel writing, photo essays, artwork, videos, multimedia projects, and review essays of books, film, music, and art. If interested, please email submissions@inthefray.org with a well-developed, one-paragraph pitch for your proposed piece as soon as possible — along with up to three links to your previous work — NO LATER THAN DECEMBER 7, 2011. All contributors are urged to review our submissions guidelines at http://inthefray.org/submit.
As usual, we are open to submissions on other topics as well. Please see the instructions at http://inthefray.org/submit for instructions on how to send us a query.
We are also looking for writers, photographers, and artists who can take care of specific assignments, including interviews, book and film reviews, and accompanying photos and artwork. If interested, please follow the instructions at the bottom of http://inthefray.org/submit to join our contributors mailing list.
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