Some fragments from the book
Fischer vs. the Rest of the World

Brad Darrach

The tanned and vigorous young man who boarded the plane at Los Angeles would stand out in any gathering. Bobby is tall and broad-shouldered; his face is clean-cut, masculine, and attractive. But on second glance, this impression dislocates into a number of odd parts. His head, for instance. That amazing brain is lodged in a small oval skull that does not reach very far above the ears. His low forehead makes his jaw look strange, at a certain angles almost Neanderthal. When he feels weak or uncertain he resembles the dopey kid Jerry Lewis used to portray. Yet there is a sense of danger about Bobby. When he is angry or confident his face is alert but unthinking, the face of a big wild animal that hunts for a living. His eyes are like a tiger’s, with the same yellow-green serenity and frightening emptiness. When he laughs, his wide, full-lipped mouth opens into a happy cave filled with white teeth. Most of his facial expressions are rudimentary displays of fear, hunger, anger, pleasure, pain, suspicion, interest-all the emotions a man or animal can have without feeling close to any other man or animal. I have rarely seen him register sympathy, invitation, acknowledgement, humor, tenderness, playfulness. And never love. Bobby wears a business suit about as naturally as a python wears a necktie. He stands six one, weighs close to 190, and a padded jacket makes his shoulders seem so wide his head looks “like a pea sitting on a ruler,” somebody said. His Torso is flaccid, his arms girlishly soft. But his hips and thighs are powerful and his movements vigorous. Sometimes they are comically awkward.  Bobby walks twice as fast as the average hiker, but he walks the way a hen runs-and this hen fills a doorway. He comes on head forward, feet wide apart and toes turned in, shoulders lurching side to side, elbows stuck out, fingers flipping. Fastening his eyes on a point about four miles distant and slightly above everybody else’s head, he charges toward it through the densest crowds. Bobby functions like Frankenstein’s creature, a man made of fragments connected by wires and animated by a monstrous will. When the will collapses or the wires cross, Bobby cannot execute the simplest acts. When he losses interest in a line of thoughts, his legs may simply give out, and he will shuffle off to bed like an old man. Once, when I asked him a question while he was eating, his circuits got so befuddled that he jabbed his fork into his cheek. (page 13)

Most of all, Bobby was afraid of women. "He was absolutely dying for an experience," says the actress, "but he was afraid that he might be physically injured in the sex act." (page 54)

A deep rumble jarred the Saidy residence. Big truck in the neighborhood? It came again. Tony and his mother looked at each other. Bobby was up. Tony glanced at the time - not quite twelve. Bobby in motion before noon? Practically unheard of. Was he ill? Ten minutes later Bobby was downstairs, smirking nervously. Tony and Mrs. Tony and Mrs. Saidy were all smiles as they said good morning. "Did you sleep well?" Mrs. Saidy asked, giving him a motherly once-over. He looked pale and strung out, and his eyes were jumpy. "Yeah, yeah," he answered. "Hungry, though." Hungry? After that 3 A.M. orgy? Ten minutes later, while the Saidys looked on in awe, Bobby was shoveling away a stevedore's dream of a breakfast that he probably considered skimpy. First came two large glasses of orange juice, fthen four poached eggs on toast, six or eight slices of bacon, four pieces of buttered toast, and two large glasses of milk. Mrs. Saidy brought him another glass of orange juice and he put it down in three gulps. "Good, good," Bobby said. His relationship with Mrs. Saidy was beginning to be reestablished. "It was the same relationship we had when he was thirteen, she told me. "I was maternal, he was puerile." Mrs. Saidy opened the door of the automatic dishwasher and stacked dishes inside. "Hey, what is that?" Bobby wanted to know. Mrs. Saidy said it was a dishwasher. "Hey, wow! I heard of those." He looked suspicious. "It really gets 'em clean?" Mrs. Saidy showed him how it worked. "Very simple, very practical," he said. "Tremendous convenience, I can see that. Wow, yeah. I want one of those when I get my apartment. ….. Mrs. Saidy sighed. She had been with Bobby off and on for the better part of three hours and she felt she had spent three hours picking her way through a minefield. "I'll make him a big Lebanese dinner tonight," she told Tony, "but tomorrow you're on your own." (Page 62)

"Bobby was drifting," Tony said later, "waiting for something to happen that would make the decision for him." Bobby in fact was doing what he usually did when he found himself in a mess: letting other people worry about it. He had learned at his mother’s knee and under his sister’s wing that passivity in himself produced activity in others. When a decision became too complex for him – and decisions often did – he would fly into a tantrum and announce something outrageously self-destructive. All sorts of people would then rush to solve his problem. In a way he enjoyed all of this; it made him feel important. But in another way it bored him. People bored him, especially when there was chess to play or a TV program to watch. (page 67)

“I’m writing this letter to Spassky, see?” Bobby went on. “I’m gonna read it and you polish it up, right?” He began to read in an excited voice, in love with his own prose. When he came to the part about giving up the prize money and playing for the love of chess, his voice skidded up the scale and hit a not of earnest lunacy. I got a fearful glimpse of what Davis and the others must have gone through earlier. But there was a difference. In New York, Bobby had converted fear into anger, telling himself that the was standing up for the principle and fighting evil men. But in coming to Reykjavik without winning the conditions he had said were essential, he had lost the feeling that he was in the right, and without it he was like Samson shorn. At the first test of his will he had collapsed. Take the money, he was saying. Take the stardom. Take the contracts I can’t understand and the sharpies who want to exploit me. Forget that I wanted to be rich and famous. Just let me be Bobby Fischer, the kid who loves chess and plays it so well he does not have to do anything else in his whole life, ever. (Page 144)

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