George W. Bush Plays Chess With Osama Bin Laden – Part Three

Continued From Yesterday.

“I heard that you were dead,” said President George Bush.

“The game has just started. There is no reason to think I will lose,” said Osama Bin Laden as he adjusted himself in the chair and moved the tubes that came from the dialysis machine that was being operated by Osama’s doctor.

“What is that?” asked Bush.

“It is called the Sicilian Defense. Very effective,” said Osama.

“If it so effective, how come you never used it before?” asked Bush.

“Oh, but I have used it. Many times. Not with you, though,” said Osama.

“Sicilian? That’s an Italian thing,” said Bush.

“I suspect the Sicilians do not consider themselves Italian. The world is filled with human beings trying to identify with a clan, trying to separate themselves from other clans. It makes them feel special. To us, Sicilians are Italian. To Sicilians, they are Sicilian” said Osama.

“Well, you think that silly Sicilian pawn is going to bother me? I control the center. I control the center,” said Bush.

“And so you do. And so you do,” said Osama.

“How come you never move your king pawn on the open? How come? It’s standard. It’s solid. It’s tested,” said Bush.

“It’s boring and everyone does it. Chess is a game to be re-discovered with each new game played. Should never go with what worked yesterday. Never,” said Osama.

“But it is the center. You avoid the center. You avoid it,” said Bush.

“Yes. I avoid the center. I do not need the center to win. The center is for suckers, no disrespect intended,” said Osama.

“This is why I will win, Mr. Osama Bin Laden,” said Bush.

“Yes. It is good you think that. Keep doing what you are doing with the center, and believe firmly that you will win. This is good,” said Osama.

“You’re damn straight it is good,” said Bush.

“Yes. It is good. It does not matter that I have won the first four games. I think you are right to be firm with your approach to the game. It is a good approach. In fact, it is a sign of weakness that I keep changing my chess strategy. It clearly represents that nothing is working, that I lack confidence,” said Osama.

Bush does not know if Bin Laden was being sarcastic. But it did not matter. Bush believed in his strategy. He looked down at his board and tried to figure his next move. Hey, why try to figure it. he will do what he always does. So Bush moved his queen pawn one space, proetecting his king pawn. Tried and true. Solid.

Bush smiled. Osama smiled. Everyone was happy.

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George W. Bush Plays Chess With Osama Bin Laden – Part Two

Continued From Yesterday.

As he sat there facing the bearded man who was studying the chess board, George tried to remember the Iraq War widow he met yesterday at the White House. She was young. And she brought photos of her two children, a son, 11, and a daughter, 7. The widow had long blond hair pulled back in a pony tail. She was in her thirties, George thought, and she was thin. Actually, she was quite cute. And the photos showed two beautiful kids, both with blond hair and big eyes. And of course the widow had to bring a photo of her husband, the one who died in Iraq three months ago nine miles south of Baghdad on a dusty road, a bullet to the brain. Unusual. A bullet from a sniper rather than a roadside bomb. The problem with the widow was that she was all emotional and came with a political agenda. George always risked this when he met with widows. They come to talk, he talks, he tries to make them feel better, and most do not bring up politics. But this one, though very nice and sweet, begged him to bring the troops home from Iraq. She asked her President nicely, George remembered, and she was crying at the time. She held the photos of her children and starting whispering to herself how it was hard to imagine that she would now have to raise the children without their father. She was babbling to herself about how she did not know what to tell her children. What was the death about? What was it for? Thankfully George did not have to address these questions because they were not really asked directly to him. The widow was more talking to herself, working it out with her herself. A personal thing she was going through. It was all very sad. But the thing that George noticed is that he did not cry. Oh at another time in his life he would have cried. Maybe even if he saw this scene in a movie he would cry. But not in the White House. In the White House, emotion was for sissies. He had heard that said by some teachers of acting. But this was not acting. This was not fiction. This was for real.

George’s thoughts of the war widow were suddenly terminated when the bearded man moved his black queen bishop pawn two squares forward.

What the hell? Every game the bearded man opened with something different. And George had never seen this before. Well, then again, George was not a chess player. So maybe this was a popular black opening. But heck, beardy keeps changing his style.

To Be Continued.

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George W. Bush Plays Chess With Osama Bin Laden – Part One

George W. Bush always played white. He felt comfortable with white. The board made sense to him that way. He liked the king on the right. The right was far better than the left. And so he stuck with white. And he made his first move. It was always the same move: e2-e4. for those of you who do not understand chess notation, that was George’s king pawn moved two squares forward. It was a classic move, a chess opening done over and over again by millions of chess players today and yesterday. It was safe. And George always opened with it. He told himself to do what felt comfortable, do it again and again, and stick with it. Even when it doesn’t work. The problem was George had not won a chess game against this opponent in the last four games. This was the fifth game, and George was down 4-0. But that is OK. George felt comfortable. George felt secure. The chess board was familiar, though a field of play he was losing, he did not care. The king pawn two squares. Over and over again.

George’s opponent’s had an odor to him. There was a doctor standing to his opponent’s side with a cart containing a medical device that had tubes coming out and going in, two of which were attached to George’s opponent. George’s opponent had long black and grey hair with a long beard. A long face, a tall man, who sat in a slumped position. George did not like this man. But he was playing chess with him. He had to. It was his obligation, so he felt. The bearded man looked down at the chess board, George wiped his nose because the stench from the bearded man was distinct. It almost smelled like asparagus, or the smell of urine after you ate asparagus. The bearded man had large eyes that seemed to glisten from too much tear. The man was not crying. He just had watery eyes, thought George. George was hoping the man would be crying. He liked to think of his enemy as being in tears. George would not cry. He knew this because he met with an Iraq War widow the other day at the White House.

To Be Continued.

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The Bush Administration Makes Love To The Big Fat Intelligence Report

John D. Negroponte sat at his desk with the thick report sitting in front of him. There was a red Parker pen on the face page which Negroponte placed there as if to keep the report closed. He was irritated with the report. The report’s writers had concluded that the war in Iraq had emboldened terrorists from around the world because Iraq had made it crystal clear to everyone that the United States had limits, to put it mildly. Limits mean weakness, and it is that perceived weakness that makes everyone want to be a terrorist. So, the writers stated, the United States is dealing with a far more dangerous situation than it otherwise would have been if it had simply limited its reaction to September 11th to the Afghanistan War rather than expanding it to Iraq.

Politics is politics, and Negroponte had to deal with this problem that sat in front of him. Nancy Pelosi was already running at the mouth about how the report reflected a flawed foreign policy. Adn of course Harry Reid was vomiting some nonsense over in the Senate about Bush. But Pelosi and Reid were the least of the problems. Republicans were not happy as well, and they were starting to get uncomfortable. Thank god the price of oil had slipped below $60 per barrel. That last bit of news might just keep the upcoming November election from being a blood bath. If oil could just remain on a downward trend, all Negroponte had to do was come up with some kind of response to this damn intelligence report.

The thick report sat on his desk like a big fat white woman on a beach soaking up sun, holding the light, attracting attention. But that was the point, wasn’t it. The report was huge. It ran to over 500 pages. OK, so everyone reads the last few pages to learn the conclusions. No one reads the whole thing. Except he did. Negroponte did. And it was not pretty. But that is not the point. No one fucks the big fat woman on the beach, either. But Negroponte would fuck anyone for his President. Negroponte would do anything for President Bush. And so, if he told the public that the big fat white woman on the beach was a real peach in bed, that no one could possibly imagine how great a lover she was unless you tried her yourself, then, well, it becomes a fact. At a minimum, it becomes an opinion. And that was the point, wasn’t it. It was a matter of opinion. It was a matter of taste. And Negroponte just loves big fat white women, because he would be the only one would actually make love to that large white thing.

So here was the political solution. The Bush Administration would say that the report, that big fat report that sat in front of Negroponte, was a complex assembly of facts which defied any simple conclusions. That the writers being writers wanted to simplify things, and try to seem smart, and certainly Nancy Pelosi and that idiot Harry Reid in the Senate would simplify things, but that the Bush Administration was smarter than all of them. The Bush Administration was sober, and would read that big report like it was making love to that big fat woman on the beach, and would report back to the world the truth. That the report was filled with joy for Bush’s foreign policy. And they would have to believe it, because no one was going to read this report. No one. That big fat white woman on the beach would remain untouched by anyone except for John Negroponte. And therefore, everyone would have to take Negroponte’s word for it. She was great in bed.

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Encounters In Grand Central - Part Two

Continued from Yesterday.

I took a breath, shook my head, and looked at the activity below as I stepped with the slowness of a sleepwalker down to the landing at the midpoint of the staircase. The atrium floor is always the same and yet always different. Today, there were many hats, all kinds, swirling about as if in the turbulent confluence of two rushing rivers.

I turned to proceed down the stairs to my right. At the next platform, at which point one is directed to the left down the last flight of stairs to the atrium floor, sat an elderly woman draped in her own hip-length grey hair, lips turned inward lacking the support of teeth, eyes sunken, wrinkles like cracks in pavement, and an outstretched slightly quivering right hand, grasping a crumpled wax paper cup adorned with a blue image of the Parthenon. There was a time when, out of guilt and compassion, but probably mostly guilt, I gave money, small amounts, to the homeless; but ever since Mayor Koch pronounced this was actually a disservice, I no longer place coins in open palms. This is not to say that my charity otherwise has increased. My reliance on this mayoral announcement as an excuse not to pass money directly to the needy is suspect for I do not listen to nor believe anything else the Mayor has said in the past few years. It is nothing but dishonest for me to cite him so I can justify the convenience of avoiding eye and hand contact with the less fortunate. So I turned away from her, my pace quickened, and I raised my head, trying to recover from passing shame. When I was three steps short of the bottom, I saw him.

He was shuffling in my direction, his journey appearing to originate at the round information booth. His hair grey with patches of black, long enough to cover both ears, and it was matted in sausage-like clumps, each was wide as a finger. His beige raincoat, open, was single breasted, and I could make out a wool liner, similar to my London Fog which I haven’t worn in years. The raincoat, with odd looking burn holes on its arms, was too large and it made him look small. His pants were brown, baggy, and held in place by a black belt that was not buckled, although it had one, but was tied in a knot resting high above his belly. The buttons on the pink vest that was tucked into his pants were obscured by the wide paisley tie which was loosened around the open collar of a white shirt. He carried in each bare hand a white plastic bag filled tightly with newspapers, and from the shape it made on the bag in his right hand I discerned a book. He had a funny walk. He didn’t exactly favor one leg, but with every forward movement of his right leg he would bend his knee and lift his right foot unnaturally high in a jerky motion as if he were bouncing a soccer ball straight up with his right knee. His upper body shuffled, but his legs moved like a bad dancer learning the polka. With each bend of his right knee, you could see a very tiny kneecap which betrayed the thinness of his leg.

What immediately struck me about him was his face and in particular his eyes. The faces of the homeless usually have an emptiness, with shallow colorless eyes, grey lips, veined noses, drawn long faces with vertical ravines, toothless, a void particularly concealed by hair fouled with urban soot. But this man’s face, on a little head, was porcelain white, clean shaven and looked as polished as Carrera marble. His nose, straight and thin, was of modest size, not bulbous and red, but sculpted around slender nostrils. His mouth crooked slightly down and was shaped with a narrow grey upper lip and a puffy dry lower lip nearly as pink as his vest. His jaw bone, clearly defined by tight paper-thin facial skin, came straight down from his ears and turned at nearly a right angle to form his chin, which was as flat as that of a schoolboy. But it was his eyes that preoccupied my attention. They were large and round, capped with long lashes, and his lids were drooped at their ends and continued onto his upper cheeks like delicate cracks in an antique china bowl. His eyes each boasted a fluorescent green iris, radiating like traffic lights. Although they motionlessly stared ahead, as if glued in placed, the eyes twinkled, burning with a strange internal alertness.

I did not notice that I had stopped frozen in the middle of the third step from bottom, with anxious commuters maneuvering past on both sides. But when he stopped suddenly and turned to his left, I instinctively moved to my right to not lose sight of his eyes. In so doing, I bumped shoulders with a tall woman wearing a dark blue wool coat that ran to just below her knees where emerged fitted blue jeans which hid the upper part of her black unheeled scuffed boots. She was carrying a Louis Vuitton briefcase in her gloveless left hand which was adorned with several diamond rings and a gold bracelet hanging loosely over the back of her milk white hand. Her thumb nail was long and glistened with clear polish. Our collision did not break her stride. She hurried past in double time and as a consequence I did not see her face, but only her left ear, which was burdened with a large single pearl pierced through a petite lobe. Her hair was cut short at the neck and rose into a golden patch of stalks, about two inches in height at the top. I thought of a field of wheat at sunset interrupted by the allure of a nude woman riding a white horse. I was amused that even when I collide with women, I cannot seem to meet them. As she passed, I noticed a jagged white scar that started at her left ear and ran down the back and around her neck, as if it were a chain of pearls pulled to hang on her backside. It was a faint scar, having healed well, but it could not have been medical in nature. The scar was strangely attractive and I wanted to run my finger along it. Someone no doubt left their signature with a knife.

By the time I recovered from this encounter, I observed that my man with emerald eyes had paused to look straight up briefly, turning as if his eye’s possession was the center of his twirl. His movement was languid and deliberate, but as smooth as a ballerina’s pirouette in slow motion. He then walked with his polka walk in the opposite direction. Two white plastic bags, flanking each side, seemed to act as counter weights assisting the old man in his gawky march.

I wasn’t in a rush home as there wasn’t much to rush home to except what was left of yesterday’s pizza which didn’t fit in the refrigerator and so was lying in its cardboard box on the kitchen table; nothing a microwave oven couldn’t cure. I took the last few steps and finally touched bottom, joining the confusion of people like a molecule in running water. I followed him, keeping my distance, taking a step with each of his. From behind, his walk appeared more sad than funny, and sympathy tempered my curiosity and search for amusement. He headed along the northern wall past the gates and the set of escalators to the Pam Am Building, uninterrupted by the streams of people funneling through the arched portals to their trains, as if the man had an anti-magnetic aura that kept the flow of commuters from hitting him. People didn’t seem to notice him, having become, I supposed, proficient at ignoring the strange and weird, particularly when their single focus is to get home to their houses on half-acre lots surrounded by white picket fences; where normalcy is the norm.

I wanted to see his burning green eyes again, eyes that seemed to contain his entire past, as if the eyes were his last embers of life. I quickened my pace to a cantor like gait, and passed him to my left, no more than a foot away. To avoid betraying my voyeuristic undertaking, I didn’t turn immediately but walked on heading for where the northern wall meets the western wall forming a corner of the Chemical Bank office under the Kodak photo-mural. Unlike the subject of my roving stakeout, no one cared to get out of my way. I felt like a ping-pong ball thrown in a rainstorm trying to reach its destination. After sidestepping several near collisions, I arrived at my reststop, turned and leaned my left shoulder against the wall, a move accomplished smoothly as if I did this everyday waiting for my train. I should have had a cigarette, but I don’t smoke. To mask my real intent, I looked to my left and slowly panned the atrium, past a group of children herded by an elderly woman in white pants and a purple coat, a card table from which pamphlets of some sort were being offered by two women, one sitting the other standing, and in the distance on the western mezzanine I could see my shoe-shine man, his body in the same position, and still no clue as to his physical condition. A woman in loose-fitting blue jeans, black athletic shoes that ran high over the ankles, and a brown leather aviator jacket, walked past to my right. Her brown straight hair was cut to her shoulder and she had a round face, big eyes, and a turned-up nose. She was not the most beautiful thing, and I hardly would have noticed her, except that she was smiling at me. When we made eye contact, her smile increased, as if to show her admiration. Suddenly, she became a rather attractive woman. A sensation appeared in my chest from the quickened heartbeat, a tingling in my face, and certain hormones began to flow. Of course, I stood there and watched her pass. I turned to look over my right shoulder and saw her walk away. She did not have the most graceful movement, and she was a tad short, but all of this was unnoticed, or irrelevant, at the time.

I turned back to find my man with the green eyes and the two white plastic bags. He was gone. I stood straight up and quickly turned in both directions. He could not have passed me. I thought, and he was nowhere down the corridor that led to Lexington Avenue. He must have ducked into one of the gates, and it could have only been the one immediately to my right. As I started to walk toward the gate, I thought, of course, this is where he must be going. I had read on several occasions that the homeless have taken to sleeping in the passageways and tunnels underneath Grand Central. I wondered whether I would be watching him getting on the tracks and walking off into the blackness of an underground alley. I raced along with a crowd of people who were embarking onto a train on the track to the right of the platform. I moved to the left to get out of the fray and a better view of the length of the train. As I was about to walk off in another direction, I saw him from behind.

He was four cars down walking away from me along the train. As sad as he looked, my curiosity took over. How was he going to get onto the tracks and into his homeless underworld without a security guard or stationmaster stopping him? I followed, but this time I moved with a speed greater than his.

When I was one car-length behind he did something that defied expectation. He got on the train. I felt cheated but amused just the same. I moved up to his car and saw him sitting in a seat facing my direction. He placed the two white bags to his left on the empty seat next to him, and proceeded to remove from one of his bags that day’s New York Times. It all happened so fast that I never saw his green eyes again. The doors to the train closed, and the train slowly started its journey to Westchester County.

Sure, I said to myself, the man with the emerald eyes, two white bags, funny walk, matted hair, oversized raincoat and pants tied above his belly with a pink vest tucked underneath was probably going off to a house on a half acre with a white picket fence, and here I was heading for the Lexington Avenue subway to go to a small apartment in Brooklyn. It roiled me. When I returned to the atrium through the gate, I noticed that the train wasn’t going to Westchester at all, but was headed for Greenwich, Connecticut. This aggravated me even more. So much more that I nearly chuckled. What was I doing wrong? I wondered why I pass through this station every night. I took a deep breath and thought of my pizza on the kitchen table and a couple of cold beers and the Knicks game on television that night. I smiled a little smile. I saw the short girl in the brown leather aviator jacket standing at the newspaper stand in the corridor that leads to Lexington Avenue. She was reading a magazine. I took another deep breath and thought for a moment. I then went home to my pizza, my beer and my television.

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