Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness

5

The Cold War Gladiator

MIKHAIL TAL’S STARE was infamous, and to some ominous. With his deep brown, almost black eyes, he’d glare so intently at his opponents that some said he was attempting to hypnotize them into making a vapid move. The Hungarian-American player Pal Benko actually donned sunglasses once when he played Tal, just to avoid the penetrating stare.

Not that Tal needed an edge. The twenty-three-year-old Latvian native was a brilliant player. Twice champion of the USSR, he’d won the 1958 Portorož Interzonal, becoming a front runner to play the incumbent title-holder, Mikhail Botvinnik, for the World Championship in 1960. Tal’s style was filled with wild, inspired combinations, intuitive sacrifices, and pyrotechnics. Handsome, erudite, and a packet of energy, the Latvian was a crowd-pleaser and the darling of the chess world. His right hand was deformed, but it didn’t seem to diminish his self-assurance.

Fischer was growing more self-assured, but his style was strikingly different: lucid, crystal-clear, economical, concrete, rational. J. H. Donner, the gigantic Dutch grandmaster, noted the contrast: “Fischer is the pragmatic, technical one. He makes almost no mistakes. His positional judgment is dispassionate; nearly pessimistic. Tal is more imaginative. For him, overconfidence is a danger that he must constantly guard against.”

The European crowds who were watching preparations begin for the Candidates tournament liked Bobby too, but for different reasons: Americans weren’t supposed to play as well as he did. And at sixteen! He was a curiosity in Yugoslavia, a chess-obsessed country, and was continually pestered for autographs and interviews. Lanky, with a loping gait, and dressed in what some Europeans thought was Western or Texan clothing, he was described as being “laconic as the hero of an old cowboy movie.”

Bobby had tolerated Tal’s stare when they first met over the board in Portorož. That game had ended in a draw. More recently, in Zurich, three months before this Candidates showdown, they’d drawn once again, with Bobby coming in third, a point behind the first-place Tal. But now the stakes were much higher—the Candidates results would determine who played for the World Championship—and Fischer wasn’t going to let an obnoxious eye-jinx keep him from his destiny.

The Candidates tournament, spread throughout three Yugoslavian cities—under the beneficence of the dictator Marshal Josip Tito, an avid amateur chess player—was a quadruple round-robin among the world’s best eight players, meaning that each would have to play everyone else four games, alternating the black and white pieces. It was a grueling schedule and would last more than six weeks. Four of the players—Mikhail Tal, Paul Keres, Tigran Petrosian, and Vasily Smyslov—were from the Soviet Union. Three others—Gligoric, Olafsson, and Benko—were indisputably among the world’s best. Fischer was the only American, and to many he was the tournament’s dark knight. In a moment of youthful bravado, though, he declared in an interview that he was counting on winning. Leonard Barden, a British chess journalist, claimed that Fischer was asked so often what his result would be that he learned the Serbo-Croatian word for “first”: prvi.

During the contest, Fischer habitually dressed in a ski sweater and un-pressed pants, and left his hair matted as if unwashed, while the other players donned suits, shirts, and ties, and were scrupulous about their grooming. With thousands of spectators appraising each player’s sartorial—as well as strategic—style, the match moved from Bled to Zagreb and ended in Belgrade.

Bobby’s second, the great Danish player Bent Larsen, who was there to help him as a trainer and mentor, instead criticized his charge, perhaps smarting from the rout he’d suffered at Fischer’s hands in Portorož. Not one to keep his thoughts to himself, Larsen told Bobby, “Most people think you are unpleasant to play against.” He then added, “You walk funny”—a reference, perhaps, to Fischer’s athletic swagger from years of tennis, swimming, and basketball. Declining to leave any slur unvoiced, he concluded, “And you are ugly.” Bobby insisted that Larsen wasn’t joking and that the insults “hurt.” His self-esteem and confidence seemed to have slipped a notch.

But that made him no less combative.

Still enraged from the disrespectful way he felt he’d been treated during his visit to Moscow a year before, Bobby began acting the role of a Cold War gladiator. At one point, he declared that almost all the Soviet players in the tournament were his enemies (he made an exception of the redheaded Smyslov, who displayed a gentility toward him). Years later, records released by the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, indicated he was right. One Russian master, Igor Bondarevsky, wrote that “all four of [Fischer’s] Soviet opponents did everything in their power to punish the upstart.” Tal and Petrosian, close friends, quickly drew all of their games, thereby conserving their energy. Although not illegal, indulging in the so-called grandmaster draw—in which neither player strives to win but, rather, halves the point after a few inconsequential moves have been made—bordered on unprincipled behavior.

Bobby, for his part, was livid at the seeming collusion: “I will teach those dirty Russians a lesson they won’t forget for a long time,” he wrote from the Hotel Toplice. That resolution would become a lifelong crusade.

At his first game against Tal, in Bled, Bobby was already at the board when the twenty-three-year-old Mischa arrived just in time to commence play. Bobby stood and Tal offered his right hand to shake. Tal’s hand was severely deformed, with only three large fingers appended, and since his wrist was so thin, the malformation resembled a claw. Bobby, to his credit, didn’t seem to care. He returned the gesture with a two-stroke handshake, and play began.

Within a few moves, though, Bobby’s mood soured. He became annoyed at Tal’s comportment at and away from the board. This time “the stare” began to rankle him. Tal, in a seeming bid to increase Bobby’s irritation, also offered a slight smile of incredulity after each of the American’s moves, as if he were saying: “Silly boy, I know what you have in mind—how amusing to think you can trick me!”

Fischer, deciding to use Tal’s tactics against him, tried producing his own stare, and even flashed Tal an abbreviated, sneering smile of contempt. But after a few seconds, he’d break eye contact and concentrate on more important things: the action on the board, the sequence of moves he planned to follow, or the ways to counter the combination Tal seemed to be formulating.

Tal was an encyclopedia of kinetic movement. All in a matter of seconds, he’d move a chess piece, record the action on his score sheet, position his head within inches of the clock to check the time, grimace, smile, raise his eyebrows, and “make funny faces,” as Bobby characterized it. Then he’d rise and walk up and down the stage while Bobby was thinking. Tal’s coach Igor Bondarevsky referred to his charge’s movements as “circling around the table like a vulture”—presumably, a vulture ready to pounce.

Tal chain-smoked and could consume a pack of cigarettes during the course of a game. He also had the habit of resting his chin on the edge of the table, peering through the pieces and peeking at his opponent, rather than establishing a bird’s-eye view by sitting up straight and looking down, which would have provided a better perspective on the intricacies of the board. Since Tal’s body language was so bizarre, Fischer interpreted it as an attempt to annoy him.

Tal’s gestures and staring infuriated Fischer. He complained to the arbiter, but little was done. Whenever Tal rose from the board, in the middle of the game, when Fischer was planning his next move, he’d begin talking to the other Soviet players, and they enjoyed whispering about their or others’ positions. Although he knew some Russian, Bobby had trouble with the declensions and usage. He’d hear the words ferz’ (“queen”) or lad’ya (“rook”), for example, and he couldn’t tell whether Tal was talking specifically about his position. All he knew was that it was maddening. Bobby couldn’t understand why the chief arbiter didn’t prevent this muttering, since it was forbidden by the rules, and he told the organizers that Tal should be thrown out of the tournament. That Soviet players had for decades been talking to one another during games with no complaints didn’t help Bobby’s cause.

Fischer was also perturbed that when a game was finished, many of the players would immediately join with their opponents to analyze their completed games, right on the stage, just a few feet from where he was playing rather than in the postmortem analysis room. The buzz distracted his attention. He wrote a complaint about the chattering and handed it to the chief arbiter:

After the game is completed, analysis by the opponents must be prohibited to avoid disturbing the other players. Upon completion of the game, the Referee must immediately remove the chess pieces from the table to prevent analysis. We recommend that the organization prepare a special room for post-mortem analysis. The room must be completely out of earshot of all of the participants.

Robert J. Fischer, International Grandmaster

As it turned out, though, nothing was done. No other players joined in the protest, because most were guilty of doing the very thing Fischer was opposing.

Bobby was fast gaining a reputation as a constant complainer, the Petulant American, a role most of the players found distasteful. They believed he’d invariably blame tournament conditions or the behavior of the other players for a loss.

Whether or not Bobby was hypersensitive, he did suffer from hyperacusis—an acute senstivity to noise and even distant sounds—and it was clear that Tal, in particular, knew just how to rattle him. The Russian would look at Bobby from near or far, and begin laughing, and once in the communal dining room he pointed to Bobby and said out loud, “Fischer: cuckoo!” Bobby almost burst into tears. “Why did Tal say ‘cuckoo’ to me?” he asked, and for the first and perhaps only time during the tournament, Larsen tried to console him: “Don’t let him bother you.” He told Bobby he’d have an opportunity to seek revenge … on the board. After that, a local Bled newspaper published a group of caricatures of all eight players, and a souvenir postcard was made of the drawings. Bobby’s portrait was particularly severe, with his ears akimbo and his mouth open, making him look as if he were … well, cuckoo.

Sure enough, in the drawing, next to the portrait of Bobby was a little bird perched on his board. It was a cuckoo.

Spectators, players, and journalists began asking Bobby how he could take two months off, September and October, during the school year to play in a tournament. Finally it was revealed: He’d dropped out of Erasmus Hall. It had been crushing for Regina to have to sign the authorization releasing the sixteen-year-old from the school. She hoped she could talk him back into classes somewhere, someday, after he finished playing in the Candidates tournament. As an inducement to get him to change his mind about dropping out, the assistant principal of Erasmus, Grace Corey, wrote to Bobby in Yugoslavia, telling him how well he’d done on the New York State Regents examinations. He’d earned a grade of 90 percent in Spanish and 97 percent in geometry, making for “a really good year.”

Good grades or not, an image began to attach itself to Bobby. As a result of the publicity about his schooling, or lack thereof, Fischer was beginning to be thought of as a nyeculturni by the Russians, unschooled and uncultured, and they began to tease him. “What do you think of Dostoyevsky, Bobby?” someone queried. “Are you a Benthamite?’ another asked. “Would you like to meet Goethe?” They were unaware that Bobby had read literature in high school, and for his own enjoyment. He liked George Orwell’s work, and for years held on to his copies of Animal Farm and 1984; he also read and admired Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Voltaire’s Candide was a favorite, and he’d often talk about the comic parts. Tal asked Bobby if he’d ever gone to the opera, and when Bobby burst into the refrain from “The March of the Smugglers,” from Bizet’s Carmen, the Russian was temporarily silenced. Bobby had attended a performance of the French opera with his mother and sister at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York shortly before going to Europe. He also owned a book that told the stories of all the great operas, which he’d dip into from time to time.

Unfortunately, cultured or not, Bobby played poorly in the tournament at first. He was frustrated at being down two games to none against Tal, who never passed up a chance to annoy his younger opponent. Just before Bobby and Tal were to play a third time, Bobby approached Alexander Koblentz, one of Tal’s trainers, and said sotto voce, as menacingly as he could: “If Tal doesn’t behave himself, I am going to smash out all of his front teeth.” Tal persisted in his provocation, though, and Fischer lost their third game as well.

It was a situation where a youthful player like Bobby could spiral down irretrievably, playing himself into an abyss. But he took momentary charge of his psyche, despite his losses, and began to feel optimistic. After defeating a cold, he placed himself in the abstract world of Lewis Carroll and the universe of reversal and wrote: “I am now in quite a good mood, and eating well. [Like] in Alice in Wonderland. Remember? The Red Queen cried before she got a piece of dirt in her eye. I am in a good mood before I win all of my games.”

“Let’s go to a movie,” Dimitrije Bjelica said to Bobby the night before he was to play Vasily Smyslov. Bjelica was a Yugoslavian chess journalist; he was also nationally known as a television commentator on soccer. He’d befriended Bobby in Portorož and was sympathetic to his complaints, and he thought a movie might take Bobby’s mind off his problems. As luck would have it, though, the only English-language film being shown in Belgrade was Lust for Life, the lush biopic of the mad nineteenth-century Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh.

Bobby agreed to the outing, and right after the scene when Van Gogh cuts off his ear in despair following a foolish quarrel with Paul Gauguin, Bobby turned to his companion and whispered: “If I don’t win against Smyslov tomorrow, I’ll cut off my ear.” Fischer, playing brilliantly with the black pieces the next day, won his first game ever against the Russian, a former World Champion. The parallels of Bobby’s life to Van Gogh’s go only so far, however. Bobby’s ear remained intact.

For Bobby, an unfortunate pattern emerged after that. If he managed to win a game from an opponent, on the next day he’d often lose to someone else. He defeated Benko then lost to Gligoric. After a win against Fridrik Olafsson, he lost to Tal again. Bobby saw his chance at a title shot fading away, and he didn’t want to end up like Terry Malloy—the character played by Marlon Brando in one of Bobby’s favorite movies, On the Waterfront—with “a one-way ticket to Palookaville.”

Bobby lost games he should have drawn and drew contests he should have won. He dropped ten pounds, and not because he wasn’t eating. The hotel doctor prescribed a tonic that did nothing to improve his condition. His pocket money was running low after he lost seven traveler’s checks, and he was having trouble extracting more from his mother, at one point calling her a “louse” because she wouldn’t make up the shortfall: “You know I am very good with money,” he complained. Larsen, whom Bobby described as “sulky and unhelpful,” kept discouraging him, telling him that he shouldn’t expect to place higher than the bottom rank of those competing. When Larsen repeated this line publicly and it was published in the Belgrade newspaper Borba, Bobby was enraged and humiliated. Larsen was his second, he was being paid $700—equivalent to about $5,000 today—and Bobby expected him to be something of a cheering squad, or at least not a public Cassandra.

He was losing to Tal, but some of his other games won accolades. Harry Golombek, the chief arbiter, said that Fischer was improving as the event progressed, and he surmised that “were the tournament [to go] 56 rounds instead of the ‘mere’ 28,” Bobby’s best days would lie ahead. “He is no match for Tal but his two victories over Keres and his equal score with Smyslov are sufficient in themselves to prove his real Grandmaster class.”

World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik misdiagnosed the young American’s struggles when he wrote, “Fischer’s strong and weak points lie in that he is always true to himself and plays the same way regardless of his opponents or an external factor.” It’s true that Bobby rarely altered his style, which gave his opponents an advantage because they knew in advance what kinds of openings he’d play, but Botvinnik didn’t know of the rage that Bobby was experiencing because of the disruptive atmosphere being created by Tal.

Bobby began to plot. Tal had to be stopped, if not on the chessboard, then in some other way. Tal, he said, had purposely made him lose three games in a row using unfair tactics, robbing him of first place: “He actually cheated me out of a match with Botvinnik,” he wrote in a letter to his mother.

Whether it was a clinically paranoid musing, malice aforethought, or merely a boyhood fantasy, no one can know, but Bobby began to wonder and scheme and penned his plan of reprisal against Tal: “Should I poke him in the eye—both beetlely eyes, maybe—with my pen? Perhaps I should poison him; I could gain entrance to his room in the Hotel Esplanade and then put the poison in his drinking glass.” Despite his dreams of revenge, which he never put into effect, he played valiantly in the fourth game, a contest that he vowed to the press he’d win, no matter what sleight of chess Tal would deliver on or off the board.

Bobby tried a psychological tactic himself during that game, despite his oft-quoted demurral, “I don’t believe in psychology—I believe in good moves.” Normally, he’d make his move on the board, punch his clock, and record the move on the score sheet. In this game, though, on his twenty-second move, he suddenly altered his sequence, and instead of first moving a piece, he went to his score sheet and, in recording the move he was contemplating, switched to a Russian system of notation. He then offhandedly placed his score sheet on the table so that Tal could see it, and while the clock remained running, he watched Tal to gauge his reaction.

Tal, wearing an atypical poker face, recognized what he thought was a winning move for Fischer, and he wrote later: “I would very much have liked to change his decision. So I calmly left my chair and began strolling the stage. I joked with someone [Petrosian], took a casual look at the exhibition board and returned to my seat with a pleased appearance.” Since Tal looked as if he were comfortable with the impending move, Fischer momentarily thought he might have blundered. He crossed out his move on the score sheet, made another move, and checked Tal’s king instead. It was a mistake.

Bobby closed his eyes to counter any further Talian shenanigans—he didn’t have to see his position, since it was imprinted in his mind—and tried to block out any other distractions. He concentrated his energies on finding a single move, or a variation, a tactical feint that would help him emerge from the dark waters of his position, all the while trying to avoid the temptation to move a piece or pawn to a fatal square.

Alas, nothing worked. He was lost. Tragically, emotionally, existentially, it was chess death. He cried, and didn’t attempt to hide his tears. Tal won the fourth and final encounter, and with it the tournament. It would lead to the Championship of the World.

“I love the dark of the night. It helps me to concentrate,” Bobby once remarked. With his sister now married and his mother off on a peace march from San Francisco to Moscow, the Brooklyn apartment was all his—deliciously so, he felt. He only had his dog, Hoppy, a quiet mutt who limped, to keep him company. Alone, the teenager could think and do whatever he wanted, without familial or social constraints. So that he didn’t have to change the sheets in the apartment’s beds so often, and to give himself a different perspective, he rotated where he slept. Next to each bed, resting on a chair, was a chess set. Flopping down on the selected bed of the evening, he’d glance at the board and muse: Should he look into the Four Pawn attack against the King’s Indian, which presented him with difficulty in speed games? Should he study endings, especially deceptive rook-and-pawn configurations? Maybe he should just go over some of the thirteen hundred high-level games played at the 1958 Munich Olympiad.

Questions like these arose every night before he fell asleep, only to be interrupted for forty-five minutes on most nights when his favorite radio program was being broadcast.

“The Bahn Frei Polka” by Eduard Strauss—with the trumpet call to the racetrack starting gate that blasted as a preamble—would jolt him awake if he’d begun to nod off. This Jean Shepherd Show theme song had been recorded by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops orchestra, and the equestrian feel to the piece made Bobby feel good the instant he heard it. “It sounds like circus music,” he once said in a joyful mood, and it was one of the liveliest dances ever composed by Johann’s son. But it wasn’t the music that was so important to Bobby. It was the cantankerous, curmudgeonly talk show humorist Jean Shepherd who entranced him.

More than a loyal follower of the show, Bobby was a fanatic. When the broadcast—variously described as part kabuki, part commedia dell’arte—started in 1956 on WOR Radio, Bobby listened to almost every show when he was in New York. Shepherd was an acquired taste: He told tales in novelistic form about his childhood in the Midwest, his life in the army, and his adult misadventures in New York City. He cracked jokes, wailed old barroom songs (he had a terrible voice), and played the toy kazoo, the lowliest of musical instruments. Most of his shows were hilarious, others so dark that they sounded maniacal, and he had a studied laugh, not quite a cackle—more a pseudo chuckle—that made him sound deranged. Still, he emerged as if he were a modern-day Mark Twain or a J. D. Salinger. His tales had a bite and a message and could be delivered over and over again.

Bobby sent Shepherd notes, attended live performances that the radio host gave at a Greenwich Village coffeehouse called the Limelight, and visited him at his studio at 1440 Broadway. After the show, the two would engage in a New York City ritual. They’d walk two blocks north and eat hot dogs at Grant’s on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, at the edge of “the Crossroads of the World,” Times Square. Shepherd remembered that they didn’t converse much, just ate. Once, Bobby did talk about a player he was to face in a tournament and kept saying over and over again, “He’s stupid,” without revealing who the player was or explaining why he felt that way.

Sporadically, Shepherd would mention Bobby on the air. While Shepherd didn’t play chess, he admired the idea of Bobby Fischer and what he was accomplishing. “Bobby Fischer,” he’d whisper conspiratorially as if he were just talking to one person, not tens of thousands. “Just imagine. This really nice kid, this great chess player, maybe the greatest chess player who ever lived. When he plays chess he is … mean! I mean, really mean!” On a few occasions Shepherd helped fund-raise for the U.S. Chess Federation, the non-profit membership organization. He did it for Bobby.

Bobby preferred listening to the radio rather than watching television. One advantage of the former was that while he was listening he could also be glancing at a board. He’d also heard that television emitted possibly harmful electronic rays and he was skittish about spending too much time in front of the ubiquitous tube. He loved the intimacy of radio. When Shepherd was on the air, Bobby would darken his room and have a one-way conversation that eased his loneliness. There, beside the glowing yellow night-light of his radio dial, chessboard at his side, chess books and magazines spread around the room, he’d let his thoughts drift.

When Shepherd went off the air, Bobby continued to twist the dial searching for other broadcasts and shows. Sometime he’d settle for pop music, which, if the volume was turned down low, still allowed him to concentrate on his board analysis. At other times, he’d hear late-night preachers, often of a fundamentalist bent, giving sermons and talks, usually about the meaning and interpretation of the Bible.

Intrigued, Bobby began listening more and more to religious radio programs, such as the revivalist Billy Graham’s Hour of Decision, which featured sermons calling for listeners to give up their lives and be saved by Jesus Christ. Fischer also followed The Lutheran Hour and Music and the Spoken Word, a performance by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir that contained inspiring messages. On Sundays, Bobby made a habit of listening to the radio all day, flipping up the dial and back. During one of these electronic perambulations he found what he was searching for: a broadcast by the charismatic Herbert W. Armstrong, on what was called the Radio Church of God. It was a condensed church service that included songs and hymns as well as a sermon by Armstrong, often about the naturalness and practicality of the scriptures. “He seems so sincere,” Bobby later remembered thinking. “He has all the right principles: dedication, hard work, perseverance, never giving up. He’s dogged; he’s persistent.” These were the same qualities Bobby brought to the game of chess. He wanted to know more.

One of the tenets of Armstrong’s creed was that you can’t trust the role that doctors have assumed. In one of the sermons in which Bobby became engrossed, Armstrong preached:

We take the broken bread unworthily if, and when, we take it at communion service and then put our trust in doctors and medicines, instead of in Christ—thus putting another god before Him! So, many are sick. Many die!

If God is the Healer—the only real Healer—and if medical science came out of the ancient heathen practice of medicine-men supposed to be in the good graces of imaginary gods of medicine, is there, then, no need for doctors?

Yes, I’m quite sure there is. But if all people understood and practiced God’s truth, the function of the doctor would be a lot different than it is today. Actually, there isn’t a cure in a car-load—or a train-load—of medicine! Most sickness and disease today is the result of faulty diet and wrong eating. The true function of the doctor should not be to usurp God’s prerogative as a healer, but to help you to observe nature’s laws by prescribing correct diet, teaching you how better to live according to nature’s laws.

Taken by Armstrong’s argument, Bobby sent away for copies of the sermon and distributed it to his friends.

Armstrong’s Radio Church of God grew into an international undertaking, the Worldwide Church of God, and eventually claimed more than one hundred thousand parishioners and listeners. Bobby felt comfortable with the church since it blended certain Christian and Jewish tenets such as Sabbath observation from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, kosher dietary laws, belief in the coming of the Messiah, keeping of Jewish holy days, and rejection of Christmas and Easter. In very little time, he became almost as absorbed in the Bible and “the Church” as he was in chess. On Saturday nights, after his Sabbath devotion, he’d usually go to the Manhattan Chess Club or to the Collins home and play chess all evening, and though he sometimes didn’t return home until nearly four a.m., he still felt that he should pray for an hour. He also began a correspondence course in “Biblical understanding” that had been created by the Church and was often tied in to world events as interpreted by Armstrong. There was a self-administered test at the end of each week’s lesson. A typical question was:

What is the basic cause of war and human suffering? A. The inordinate lusts of carnal man. B. False political ideologies such as Communism and Fascism. C. Poverty. D. Lack of educational and economic opportunity.

The correct answer: “A” [Bobby’s answer as well.]

Eventually, Bobby sent 10 percent of his meager chess earnings to the Church. He refused to enter tournaments whose organizers insisted he play on Friday night, and he began a life of devotion to the Church’s tenets, explaining: “The Holy Bible is the most rational, most common-sense book ever written on the face of the earth.”

He began carrying a blue-covered cardboard box wherever he went. When asked what was in it, without answering he’d give a look that said in essence, “How can you possibly ask me that question? I’m deeply hurt and insulted.” Week after week, wherever he went—be it chess club, restaurant, cafeteria, or billiard parlor—there was the blue box. Finally, in the mid-1960s, at a restaurant off Union Square, Bobby went to the restroom and left the box on the table. His dinner companion couldn’t resist. Despite feeling guilty at invading Bobby’s privacy, he slid the top off the box. Inside, was a book with a title embossed in gold: Holy Bible.

During this time, owing to his newfound piety, Bobby used no profanity. One evening when he and a friend were having ice cream sodas at the Howard Johnson’s restaurant on Sixth Avenue and Greenwich, a woman in her late teens kept coming in and out of the restaurant. Either drunk or high, she kept up a continuous babble of four-letter words. Bobby became very upset. “Did you hear that?” he asked. “That’s terrible.” He couldn’t bear listening to her any longer. “Let’s leave,” he said. And the two friends walked out, leaving their sodas unfinished.