"Midnight By The Morphy Watch"

I hadn't been reading too much scifi for a while (I'd just graduated from junior high and I imagined that I was on to sterner Literary Stuff!) when I spotted a new Fritz Leiber story at a bookstand (actually, my mom was off in the supermarket shopping while I hugged the magazine rack and got in however much page-turning I could).

It appeared to be something about chess too! This was 1974 and the Fever was still running high, so Bobby got mentioned (or at least alluded to) right off the bat: "Being world's chess champion (crowned or uncrowned) puts a more deadly and maddening strain on a man even than being President of the United States. We have a prime example enthroned right now." (And all this while Nixon was in the midst of resigning.)

For Fritz Leiber Jr was in fact also a player. Holder of a USCF expert rating and winner of the Santa Monica Open one year, he knew what he was talking about in the field. And not just the hosts of weirdly hyphenated names and wacky peccadilloes, but all the paranoia and that sort of thing which the chess world can stir up.

Incidentally, the guy was even in the film Camille! I'm serious--the one with Garbo. He played a messenger who hands her over a messenge (and yeah, I never could quite figure out why those two words don't seem to match up).

His dad was in a bunch of films too; for example, he played Franz Liszt in the 1943 version of Phantom of the Opera (the one featuring Claude Rains as the masked avenger).

Much much later--long after Leiber Jr had died--I played in the weekly marathons at the fabled Mechanics Institute. I lived not too far from downtown back then and so every Tuesday night I would head over there on foot. Past some car places and a few offices. And more car places (seriously, tons and tons of car places).

By then I had found out what his last address had been in the city. An old, more or less rundown highrise (back when that still meant five or six stories) right in the midst of things. I was soon able to locate it. The place that was the focus of his oddly rambling "Button Molder," for he became increasingly autobiographical as he went along (as in "Morphy Watch," where Stirf is one might say a rather moth-eaten ploy--I'm just relieved the guy's last name didn't turn out to be Alucard!). :D

Anyway, I remember walking along there--on the way to a tourney myself--and looking up at it. Wondering if he had still been living there back then (when he had written "Morphy Watch"). The guy who gave us "Coming Attraction" and "The Man Who Never Grew Young" and "The 64-Square Madhouse" and "Pail of Air." Not to mention Conjure Wife.

It was oddly inspiring, I suppose one might say; and a bit disconcerting as well. To think that all that inspiration sprung from such a threadbare environment.

In a way a bit like the Morphy watch itself (or its incarnation in his story, at any rate): a rare conduit of genius found at the back of some little hole-in-the-wall store. A store owned incidentally by someone with an elusive yet strangely familiar face... ;)