"Just indulge him."
"I'm just there for the game."
"How much trouble would it be? You play with the kid for two minutes. He's satisfied. He goes away."
"That's just it. Your kid doesn't go away. He wants to do it over and over and over. It sets a bad precedent."
"You know what a cold fish is? Don't you remember what it was like when you were his age?"
The kid's dad came with a small group to play the game called go. Go players love to tell you how this is the board game that requires the highest degree of skill and intelligence. A world where the element of chance is reduced to a minimum. This didn't sit well with their fellow chess club members.
Go players use small stones to surround other small stones using strategies applicable to non board-game life. The collected works of Confucius was but a subset of the many aphorisms and battlefield metaphors the game provided. Life lessons. The threat is stronger than its execution, for example. Ooh! Ahh!
The Go people met at the chess club at noon on Saturdays. The dad brought the kid along. The kid was there perhaps in lieu of a babysitting service, or maybe it was scheduled Dad-kid time, either inside or outside marriage. Nobody asked.
The kid spent a good three hours in the club, bored. Our Cold Fish had tried gaining the kid's interest in chess, teaching him the rules, which he soaked up like a sponge. But no interest in anything further.
He would read a little (precocious for a six year old), James and the Giant Peach being the most recent. He watched a little; maybe this would motivate him to play chess in time. He complained a little, first verbally but after his dad insisted on quiet, then through body language: a dance kids do when an adult drags them along shopping, a dance that says I wanna go home (or at least elsewhere). Bouncing and twisting like somebody who needs to get to the bathroom. Fast.
And of course the kid had his gun. No, it wasn't registered, as far as Cold Fish knew. Close up, it looked and sounded like the Swiss Army Knife (or transformer) of guns, becoming different sizes and shapes and with differing ammunition-all as needed.
The chess club was in a penthouse suite with indoor and outdoor (rooftop) space on the 1600 block of Walnut Street in Philadelphia, donated for the club's use by the Pew Trust. It was just across the street from several five star restaurants including the world renowned Le Bec Fin and about a block from Rittenhouse Square.
The building was Temple University's Center City satellite location, and their classrooms and offices occupied about ten of the twenty five floors. The rest was mainly law and accounting firms.
No ID or chess club membership card? You don't get to ride one of the three elevators, with a chance to see the often very well dressed men and women. And not just on weekdays. Typically, chess players were, by contrast (let's be kind), less formal or polished in their appearance.
There was one big room with sixteen sets on eight tables, and two small rooms with eight sets each. A few old photos on empty walls. Stark. One of the smaller rooms gave you access to a big bathroom with a stall and a urinal, 95%+ of the members being male.
A door just outside the club before you came in led to the surrounding roof with its gravel path and a tomato garden. Tall windows in the big room gave you a half panoramic view of not just this rooftop, but others in the meager yet always growing city skyline, Philly having a reputation for preserving a small town feel, yet always fighting this by trying to be more cosmopolitan.
Surely the kid would bring out his gun at some point, Cold Fish predicted as he waited for his opponent-- a retired gym teacher some forty years his senior-- to move in their clock-free game. The kid usually relied on his trusty finger model, but lately he'd taken to a more powerful weapon, one that required the left hand bracing the right wrist to handle the kickback.
