By Ed Staskus

   When Matt Lavikka and I slowly but surely stopped playing chess and started playing Go we didn’t know we were sitting down to the oldest board game played continuously to the present day. The game was invented in China 3,000-some years ago. It is a contest for two players in which the goal is to capture more stones and surround more territory than your opponent. The way of the game is inexorable. The way anybody plays is one’s own choice.

   The playing pieces are called stones. One player uses the white stones and the other one the black stones, taking turns placing them on the vacant intersections of the board. The stones can’t be moved once placed, but are removed from the board if it, or a group of stones, is surrounded on all adjacent points, in which case it is captured. At the end the winner is determined by counting each player’s surrounded territory along with captured stones. 

   Games can and do end when one player is very tired or has gone brain dead. Our games usually went for two to three hours. The longest game ever played was played in Japan in 1938 between two Go masters. It lasted 54 hours. Shusai Meijin, the older of the two masters, died immediately after the marathon due to the aftereffects of the ordeal. He played the game with life and death determination. 

   The chess board starts with everything on it. The last man standing wins. The Go board starts with nothing on it. Whoever is the more ruthless and determined ends up on top. It’s the way of the world. Even though the rules of Go are simple, the play is complex, especially the longer the action goes on. It has a larger board than chess with more scope for play and more alternatives to consider. The number of board positions in Go has been calculated to be greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. The Japanese believe no two matches have ever been or ever will be the same. They deem the game to be a microcosm of everything everywhere all at once.

   If we had known that we probably would never have started playing. By the time we found out it was too late. We had been sucked into the black hole of Go. Getting out of the hole meant going down to the Harbor Inn for a pick-me-up. It was another hole, on the west bank of the Cuyahoga River in the Flats. It either was or wasn’t the oldest bar in town. Either way, the place wore its reputation on its sleeve.

   “The place was always shoulder to shoulder with bikers and their molls,” said Dan Coughlin, a sportswriter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Wally had a virtual armory behind the bar. He had pistols and shotguns. One night in the middle of the summer we stacked up cases of beer bottles and fired at them from the hip, with shotguns blasting away. I put a hole in the stop sign in front of his bar.”

   Wally was Vlado Pisorn, an immigrant from Slovenia who had taken over the Harbor Inn sometime in the indeterminate past. We called him Vlad the Impaler. He had the kind of beer we liked, the kind from Germany and Czechoslovakia. The wine came from a hose and died on the tongue. After a couple of near deaths, we never drank it again.

   Matt had served a tour of duty in the armed forces, was on a prolonged stretch of R & R, and in the meantime was boning up for the entrance exams for mailman, fireman, and policeman. He was hedging his bets. He finally found employment with the Bay Village Fire Department, which was like working at a posh nursery school. There were hardly ever any fires anywhere near the lakefront suburb. There were, however, lots of old folks having heart attacks and strokes and the EMS trucks kept up an endless shuttle to St. John West Shore Hospital.

   One night Matt and his duty partner Chuck were called to a house where the man of the house was having chest pains. He was on his back in bed, his eyes closed. When they stepped up to him in the bedroom his wife whispered that she thought he was dead. “The poor dear man,” she said. Chuck was in the lead. As he walked up to the bed, he slipped on a throw rug and went head over heels on top of the man, body slamming him, the bedsprings recoiling.

   “If he’s not dead yet, he’s dead now,” Matt thought. 

   “Is he OK?” the woman asked, alarmed. 

   “Your husband will be OK,” Matt said. 

   “No, not him,” the woman said. “I meant the other fireman.” 

   “What the hell is going on!” the dead man suddenly spat out, jolting awake. “Get your fat ass off me.” He rolled Chuck off the bed, who fell to the floor. From then on, Chuck was known as Lazarus back at headquarters. It took years for the sobriquet to fade away.

   Virginia Sustarsic introduced me to Matt. How they knew each other was beyond me. She was Slovenian and a hippie through and through. He wasn’t, not by a long shot. He was a cool customer and Finnish on top of everything else. He played chess, like me, and we got to know one another playing now and then. I had moved out of the Plaza Apartments, where Virginia still lived, and was living on a forgotten street in North Collinwood, a couple of blocks south of Lake Erie. I lived upstairs in a two-bedroom Polish double. Ray Sabaliauskas, a fellow Lithuanian, owned the house and lived downstairs with his Southeast Asian wife and a prize German Shepherd. He had come home safe and sound from the bright shining lie that was the Vietnam War.

   I found my Go game at a garage sale in the neighborhood. It was practically brand new, the instruction sheet still in the box. I paid a dollar for it in pocket change. Reading the rules took less than five minutes. Explaining the rules to Matt took less than one minute. Our first game took five hours. We played on the front porch. The contest was suspended due to darkness when the sun set.

   “The best strategy is to spread the pieces far apart and stretch them out, to encircle and attack the opponent, and thus win by having the most points vacant,” Go master Huan Tan said nearly two thousand years ago. We were both bug-eyed after our first game. We didn’t know the game’s strategy from a seesaw. It was like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t quit when you’re tired, you quit when the gorilla is tired. Go is considered the most difficult board game in the world. Sleeping became my new go-to after a long match.

   I started jogging on Lakeshore Blvd. west out of North Collinwood, where everybody was a working man in one way or another, through the village of Bratenahl, where everybody was tall, trim, and filthy rich. They oozed pride in their state of being. When I was running in their neighborhood I hesitated to even spit on the tree lawns. I had put exercise on the back burner in my early 20s. I never thought I would be working out again to be able to sit quietly hour after hour staring at a square board of intersecting lines.

   When I was a teenager I ran track and field as part and parcel of Zaibas. It was a Cleveland Lithuanian sports club formed in 1950. In 1951, at the 1st North American Lithuanian Games, members participated in basketball, volleyball, and table tennis. The next year the club hosted the games in our hometown and fielded a full team in track and field. 

   In the 1960s I ran around in circles encouraged by Algirdas Bielskus. He was a small man with a round face and a championship head of hair. He was the director of a men’s vocal ensemble, co-founder of a choir, and concertmaster of the Ciurlonis Ensemble. He was also the Zaibas track and field coach for sixty years. He had the voice to make himself heard loud and clear from the far end of any quarter-mile track. Every weekend fair or foul all I heard was “Go! Go! Go!”

   He always carried a briefcase, briefcases he was always losing, stuffed with notes about how we were progressing. Rita Kliorys, one of his top-notch runners, made him a Christmas gift of a new one in 1966. “It was the accordion kind,” she said. “I remember it cost $100.00, and I collected one dollar from many people. He actually did not lose it, either.”

   He coached thousands of youngsters who ran hundreds of thousands of miles. “I thought of him afterwards whenever I saw a turquoise and orange Howard Johnsons and would remember how he took us there for ice cream sometimes,” Regina Thomas said. “Although I was a klutz at sports, he never made me feel like one. I never thought much about it as a kid, but what a commitment to youth and sports.” The small man with the big voice was seemingly tireless, championing fitness among Cleveland’s Baltic off-spring.

   “He worked for my dad’s company, Transmission Research, in the basement of our house,” Dalia Nasvytis said. “Sometimes we would hear strange noises downstairs late at night and realize he was still down there running off schedules for the next athletic meet he was organizing.” He was unrelenting about the fettle of immigrant kids.

   Once we started playing Go, Matt and I made a commitment to it. We played all that spring, summer, and through the winter, two and three games a week. It wasn’t an obsession, although it was. We played on the front porch until it got too cold to play outside. After that we played in the living room at a coffee table, sitting opposite one another, all four of our eyes glued to the board.   

   The game demands concentration, which is born out of silence. Some of our best moves and long-term maneuvers were made quiet stealthiness. I found out the more time I spent noiseless, the more illumination lit me up. We hardly talked, going for a half-hour without saying a word. Every so often Matt smoked a Marlboro. Before long he would tap another one out of the red and white flip-top box. Whenever I joined him, the living room filled with smoke, a gray-white cloud stewing over the entanglements of Go.

   When we first started playing our plan of attack was capturing stones. We both saw that surrounding other stones and taking them prisoner yielded points. It was like taking a piece in chess. After a while we discovered the object of Go is not to surround and capture the opponent’s stones. The object is to surround empty territory on the board. The way to do it is by building walls around empty intersections. If your territory includes some opposing stones, all the better. Then it’s grab and go. From then on it became a contest to capture territory rather than simply capture stones.

   In the Eastern world Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” reads as an introduction and exposition to the game. Real life warlords back in the day of every stripe were always big on blockading their enemies and capturing territory. The times they were not a-changing, not anytime soon. The Vietnam War was over, but there was always another war on the horizon.

   There’s an old saying, “Chess is a battle. Go is a war.” The more we played the more we discovered it was a war of attrition. It was like breaking stones in the hot sun. Both of us knew how to make the other guy sweat. There was no fighting the commandments of Go.

   Oskar Korschelt, a German chemist, brought the game from Japan to Europe in the 1880s. Even though it was slow to catch on, by the 1950s championship-level tournaments were being organized. By the early-70s it was filtering into the United States. I never met another Lithuanian who played the game. My kinsmen are instinctively suspicious, somewhat superstitious, sometimes curious, usually sensible, always pragmatic, hard-working, conformist, and punctual. They are often reserved except when they get together. Once they establish their bona fides it’s time to pick up a drink and run off at the mouth, getting communal. They play volleyball and basketball like nobody’s business. They probably couldn’t stand the prolonged silence of Go.

   One night after a long back-and-forth on the board we drove to the Harbor Inn. We were looking for some downtime. The two-story building was a home-away-from-home for dockworkers and salt-miners. A lonely man who didn’t mind a lumpy mattress could even grab some shut-eye upstairs. It might have been a dive way back when, but it was no ifs ands or buts about it still a dive, slinging suds to third shifters in the morning and anybody else who had a buck the rest of the day and night. There was a coin operated bowling arcade game downstairs and battered dart boards upstairs. We ordered bottles of Pride of Cleveland instead of imported European brew, being short on ready cash, and picked up a handful of house darts.

  Nobody knew how long the Harbor Inn had been there, but we thought it had to be from the day after Moses Cleaveland settled the land centuries before. It reeked of smoke from long-gone cigars and cigarettes. The shadows smelled even worse, like ammonia had been set on fire. Looking around there was no doubt some of the men at the bar only bathed once a month.

   The beer was cold and refreshing and playing darts was fun. We played 501 Up. Both players start with a score of 501 and take turns throwing three darts. Bullseye scores 50, the outer ring scores 25, and a dart in the double or treble ring counts double or triple. The tally is calculated and deducted from the player’s total. The goal is to be the first player to reduce the score to exactly zero, the only hitch being that the last missile thrown must land in a double or the bullseye. 

   Darts are front weighted for flight and are several inches long with a sharp point. A big part of playing darts is the throwing part. The rest of it is mental toughness, staying on the button, stinging the cork like a bee. It was like Go except we could let ourselves go. We wrote our names in chalk on the brick wall, adding them to the hundreds of other names reaching to the ceiling. After a couple more Pride of Cleveland’s we got sloppy, but it was no matter in the juke joint that was the Harbor Inn.

   When I took a good look at the dart board, there weren’t a hundred-or-more darts crowding it, like all the stones on a Go board. Every throw was always at an empty target, every throw a new chance to get it right, unencumbered by the past. Go was all about the past, the past of all the carefully placed stones on the board. Playing darts was right now. It was a relief to see the target and hit the target, except when we completely missed and the dart bounced off the brick wall. When that happened we yukked it up, not like the game of Go, which was never a laughing matter.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

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