You've Been Fast-Bagged, Son (9-6-07)

As I mentioned last week, I have taken up the manly pursuit of Scrabble. Now, I know your first thought is that playing Scrabble is not that rough of a game. OK, you’re right. It is not a physical game. The hardest thing you do is move letter-tiles around the board. There are no linebackers in Scrabble. However, Scrabble is not for sissies. (UCLA football is.)

But Scrabble can wear you down and beat you up and humiliate you and degrade you and squeeze your buttocks so tightly that you emit little whimper yelps and make you want to go Michael Vick on your Airedale. Yes, it can do that. Trust me. I’m your Scrabble Daddy.

Like last summer, not this summer, last summer, I went over to Phoenix, Arizona, in August to play in the National Scrabble Association Open Championship. You play 28 games of Scrabble in four days. That’s seven games a day for four days. Each game lasts almost exactly an hour because you have to use clocks like in chess. So that’s 28 hours of grinding your brain-guts into kidney-stone-sized pellets of puke. And then you go outside to escape the pain and mortification of Scrabble shame, and you walk out into a 118 degree pizza oven they call Phoenix. Pepperoni, this!

I think I may be getting a little ahead of myself—and at my age myself is the only one I can outrun. Just a couple quick things to help orient you to Scrabble rules. You probably haven’t played Scrabble since you were trapped at a party your spouse or spousette wanted to go to ten years ago and your teeth are still gritted so shut you drink your Starbucks lattes intravenously. Yeah, that caliber of Scrabble is called living room Scrabble. That is not professional Scrabble. In living room Scrabble you still have fun.

I play professional Scrabble. I don’t believe in no stinkin fun. Fun is for living room Scrabble sissy men. When I find fun, I take it outside, and I take off my belt and I whip that fun until it becomes embarrassed and apologizes to me for ever even thinking it was fun. That’s what I do to fun. It takes a little time, but I’m committed. And I probably will be in the future.

I use professional Scrabble words like za and qi and carex and gharri and djebel and those are just the people I play with! Nope, those are real Scrabble words my friends. And you thought I was kidding about taking the fun out of the game. No. No. I’m as serious as a blood clot, baby. And not only are the words non-funnish, but in order to be a professional Scrabble player you have to join the National Scrabble Association, and be ranked and rated, and play in tournaments and pay dues, and get newsletters, and swear allegiance to the Scrabble Players Credo “I shall learn to hate all words and all letters and hereby renounce any and all thoughts of having any fun myself or of sharing the fun of Scrabble with others.” I think I have met this challenge.

So let’s get back to Phoenix. I’m in the National Championship. I’m better than you living-room sucks already. OK, I’m not that much better than you. I am entered in Division 6 and there are six divisions. Let’s just say I’m not in the best division. I’m playing along, singing a song, and my opponent is a woman of say, 80 years old. I am not implying anything negative about her age because she is one of my peers. It’s just a fact. She is 80, she has a cane, she can’t hear, she has little black-doily eyes like Hitler’s sister, and she has that little Hitler mustache, too. Only hers has some of her lunch in it.

So we’re getting right to the end of the game and I’m leading her by 70 points or so, a pretty good lead. And then she lays down all seven of her tiles to form the word ZADDOCK. And she lays this zaddock word over a Triple Word space and she also gets a bonus of 50 points for getting a bingo with all her tiles. So she winds up with 92 damn points on one play. So the peer-aged biddy is ahead of me.

And then I turn the board around to look at the word she put down. And I see the ZADDOCK sucker there and I’m really skeptical of this fake-ass garbage, and I say real gentlemanly, “I challenge.” When you challenge in Scrabble it means you think the other player is playing a phony, and you go up to the judge and he rules on the questionable word.

Well, miss cane-holding, Hitler face, says, “You can’t challenge me. I’ve already picked my tiles out of the bag.” And I thought for a few seconds and came up with, “Uh, what!” To which she replied, “You were too slow. You should have challenged me sooner.” And I said, “Like when? The 19th century?”

Anyway, we hit the neutral button on the clock, and stopped the game, and I went up to the judge to plead my pitiful case. I told him how she played the word and before I had time to spin the board back around to look at the word and challenge her, she had already drawn her new tiles. I said that was unfair. And he agreed that it was unfair. I sobbed two sniffling tear-soaked nostril sobs. And I said it just wasn’t right and he said no, it wasn’t right and then he put his hand on my shoulder and said like a deeply-caring father, “You’ve been fast-bagged, son.”

And you thought Scrabble was a fun game.