Falafel knew little about Washington Square Park—a Hobbesian gaming arena in the center of Greenwich Village. “I called it Jurassic Park,” The Bone said. Some of the chess players were fast-talking charmers; some had learned the game in prison. There was Sweet Pea, Elementary, the Terminator. When well-known fish—players of middling skill with money to lose—would turn up, a frenzy would erupt to vie for their action. Falafel became friendly with a wizard at blitz chess named Russian Paul, who adopted a half-mentoring attitude, involving avuncular insults about Falafel’s game or his laziness or his self-destructive habits.
“I can tell you how I discovered him,” Russian Paul says. “I used to play at my favorite table, and one weekend morning I came, and there was somebody snoring, sleeping under it.” He hired Falafel—two dollars every morning—to hold his table for him. Before long, Falafel was playing too. By the standards of the park, where grandmasters sometimes stopped by, Falafel was in no way exceptional—“Stupid, stupid, that’s stupid,” Paul would mutter as he played him—but he enjoyed the camaraderie of the hustlers. Two dollars was enough to get him a falafel, which he ate every day, often for every meal. One night, Russian Paul found him passed out with patches of deep-fried chickpeas stuck to his face, and the park’s newest hustler earned his street name.
H. G. Wells once said of chess, “It annihilates a man.” But Falafel wasn’t seeking annihilation; he wanted a way out of his self-made chaos. On a good day, he might win $30, but he lacked the easy duplicity of the more ruthless hustlers. “He does not like deception,” Peter Mikulas, a former NYU employee who used to play in the park, says. “He’s a Big Daddy, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Mendacity, falseness—it bothers him.”
Some of the men in the park played backgammon, which, Falafel noticed, could be far more lucrative than chess. He once watched Russian Paul beat an NYU student out of $100. Falafel had no real understanding of the game, but he was cocky and insistent, and so he sat down to play Russian Paul, who told me, “I learned how to play backgammon two weeks before him, so I took all his money.” With other players, Falafel lost relentlessly. One told him, “Listen, you just don’t know stuff. For $30 an hour, I’ll teach you.” Falafel insisted on playing him for 50 cents a point. Soon he was 140 points behind.
Backgammon is sometimes called the cruelest game. In 2008, during a snowy November outside Moscow, two strangers played on a board that one of them had carved in a labor camp. When the match ended, the winner got up, walked out of the room to get a knife, and then made good on their wager: “We had agreed to play backgammon—whoever loses dies,” he explained at the time of his arrest. He was drunk-seeming, and probably a psychopath, but the story has come to serve as a parable in extremis of fortunes lost and won over the board. People have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in single sessions; one expert player lost his home. Bruegel painted the game into his apocalyptic panorama The Triumph of Death.
Unlike chess, backgammon is tactile, fast-moving, even loud, with checkers slammed down and tiny dice sounding like rattlesnakes as they traverse the board. Casual players who believe that they are good persist in the illusion because the element of chance obscures their deficits. At its heart, backgammon’s cruelty resides in the dramatic volatility of the dice. Even a player who builds flawless structures on the board can lose to a novice. The good players simply win more often. As a result, backgammon is often played in marathon sessions that reward physical stamina, patience, and emotional equilibrium. One notable match lasted five days, with both players getting up only for bathroom breaks. The loser fell to the floor.
Like many who have become hooked on the game, Falafel found the omnipresent possibility of winning seductive. After living in the park for half a year, he moved into a tumbledown gaming club near Wall Street, a no-name place run by a gambler called Fat Nick. Stock traders would come. An associate of Vinny “the Chin” Gigante would come. Falafel slept on a recliner, and played whoever would sit with him. He also began turning up at the New York Chess and Backgammon Club, in midtown, where hard men from the Colombo crime family mixed with working stiffs and professional gamblers, and a caged white dove called Squeeze Bird watched over them all. He kibbitzed and tried to hustle opponents into playing “propositions”—arrangements on the board that contain a hidden advantage. When he was not playing, he would collapse into sleep wherever he was, and snore loudly. “You couldn’t tell him, ‘It’s time to go home,’ because he didn’t have one,” a player told me. Falafel lost a lot, but he also improved, and began making a few hundred dollars here and there. When Fat Nick’s shut down, he returned to the street, or he slept at the White House, the last of the Bowery flophouses. One night, he recalled, “I was asleep, and a guy next to me was able to reach into my pocket. He took $1,500, and left me two $50 bills. Maybe he missed it.”