Excerpts of a Memoir: The Fool’s Mate

I could smell the ammonia leaking from a box on the wobbly pallet from two aisles away, and I knew it would be one of those nights. Four months into my first real job, I worked the graveyard shift on the stock crew of my local Kroger supermarket in Duluth, Georgia. I was the youngest on the crew at barely 18, and I already felt like a seasoned veteran of slinging new stock up on the shelves, facing, and ordering product. Even though it was my first job, I had this feeling and attitude that it was the worst job I’d ever had. Each night was an exercise in dragging myself out of bed at the last possible moment before sprinting through the shower, throwing on the t-shirt and jeans from the previous night, and barely making it the half mile to the store on time to clock in for my shift.

I was still “on” aisle eleven, detergents and cleaners, the newbie aisle assigned to every new member of the stock crew, but was fast enough that I’d also inherited aisle one, a half-length set of shelving that housed all of the canned vegetables and beans right next to the bakery and the door to the back room and time clock. As much as it sucked being responsible for two aisles of the store on my nights on shift, I loved working aisle one because of the proximity to the clock and the back room. It might sound silly, but being only a few steps away meant maximizing my 15-minute breaks and half-hour lunch as walking to and from the time clock was part of our breaks. Those first two to three hours though were brutal as every single item on the detergent aisle was its own little hell to stock, thus why it was assigned to the new kids on the block.

As I sized up the pallet of boxes parked at the end of the aisle, I could see the cardboard box of Parson’s Bo-Peep ammonia that was wet and leaking on the larger, sturdier boxes of Kroger store-brand bleach underneath. “Wonderful…” I mused to myself out loud, wondering if this would be the night when I might die from inhaling chlorine gas at the job where I was still only making $4.60 an hour ($4.25 plus the kingly $0.35 nighttime differential.) “Fucking pieces of shit…” I muttered as I slipped on a pair of work gloves I’d shoplifted from aisle twelve the week before as Kroger didn’t provide us with extras like gloves or box cutters, and I stepped up to the pallet to start breaking it down onto a couple of L-carts I’d managed to snag from the back.

L-carts were sort of like currency we all hoarded and traded on the night crew, like what I assume cigarettes are in prison. They’re these sturdy brown, metal carts that are low to the ground, but have a backing piece that rises up to elbow height with a chrome handle. When working the stock crew in a grocery store, these carts are essential if you want to save time and energy (or your back), loading them up with the boxes for a specific section of the aisle so that you’re not having to lug stuff one box at a time up and down the length of the store all night. Our Kroger consisted of sixteen interior aisles of dry goods, along with two aisles of frozen foods and one small, isolated section of over-the-counter drugs and personal aids. The stock crew consisted of around 15 employees divided into three sections: Dry Goods had 10, Frozen Foods had 2, and Drug/GM (general merchandise, or all the small items like shampoo, toothpaste, and baby food) had 3. The store itself had a total of ten L-carts, meaning they were worth their weight in gold most nights.

On this evening I’d grabbed two of them, and the key to making sure I kept them was loading them up quickly. The detergent aisle sucked for a number of reasons, mainly the bulk and weight of the stuff you had to stock, but for me, the worst part was the smell. The mix of the extra floral, powdery boxes of Tide and All Temperature Cheer that mingled with the astringent, noxious fumes from the bleach and ammonia always left me light-headed and queasy. It was impossible to go through a shift without getting bleach on my t-shirts or scratching up my forearms on the sharp, waxed box corners of the laundry detergent. And no matter what, I’d end up smelling like the floor in a laundry mat every evening. The boxes of Clorox bleach were the worst as they came packaged in six jugs to a case and weighed about 40 pounds. At least the store brand variety came in boxes of four. There was also, inevitably, a bottle with a cap that was loose with a broken seal underneath, so there’d be bleach on the bottles and inside the box. So having an open bottle of ammonia on the pallet directly above the boxes of bleach freaked me out. I knew it probably wasn’t enough of a mix of the two chemicals to actually cause issues with breathing or, you know, death, but it still pissed me off at the possibility.

But that night wasn’t about dying in a cloud of mustard gas, though it would end in a strategic battle of trench warfare. As I was finishing up stocking the aisle and had begun the process of facing the shelves (where you bring all of the product forward, stacking boxes, and straightening the items to form a wall that makes everything look fully stocked and neat), Frank strolled by my aisle and snatched up one of my L-carts. In the four months I’d been working in this store, Frank was by far one of the most annoying co-workers I’d had to deal with. He was one of the two guys working in the frozen foods section, a mini crew that made it very clear every night they were the top dogs who worked harder than anyone else because of the nature of what they were stocking. They had to be fast so the products they were stocking wouldn’t thaw, and their pallets were delivered separately on a refrigerated truck so they felt like they were their own little fiefdom within the grocery stock crew.

Frank carried himself like he was a prized stallion in a breeding house, though he was barely five feet, five inches tall, and had a pot belly under his barrel chest. He chewed tobacco on shift and would carry an empty bottle of Gatorade around with him to spit in, but when he was working, he was fond of just spitting strings of thick, brown goo into the frozen foods cases, just inside the doors near the grates with the compressors at the bottom of the shelving so it would instantly freeze. It was like he was marking his territory.

Frank was as full of shit as he was himself, and even at eighteen, I could clearly see through his Walking Tall façade. He claimed that he was only working this gig to make extra spending money while he was on leave from the Navy Seals, and he was fond of holding court in the break room, regaling anyone who would listen with his stories of aquatic raids on foreign ships and his in-depth knowledge of plastic explosives. He loved telling stories about helping to build artificial reefs off the coast of Florida by rigging old ships with bombs, blowing the hulls, and watching them sink to the ocean floor. Or that one time he took part in the battle of Paitilla in an effort to unseat Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989, and was amazing at the collection of his wife Imedla’s shoes when they were raiding their estate. Except, again, even at eighteen I knew he was full of shit because Imelda Marcos’ wasn’t Noriega’s wife, she was the wife of Ferdinand Marcos, the despot in charge of the Philippines in the late 80s. He couldn’t even get his dictators straight. I can’t fully explain why, but something about this bravado, especially his obvious bullshit claims of valor, really pissed me off. It’s not that I’m particularly patriotic, it probably stems from feeling like an outsider and inadequate for most of my life to that point, that it bothered me to see someone who was so polar opposite to being humble. I was always looking for a way that I could do just that, humble him.

As Frank snatched one of the L-carts he chuckled and asked me if I was going to play chess later on my lunch break. I’d started bringing my travel board to work a couple of weeks back when I discovered that one of my co-workers, Phil, a wiry, chain-smoking guy in his mid-thirties who had taken me under his wing when I was first hired, liked to play. I was hardly a chess savant, but I could hold my own in normal circumstances and enjoyed learning strategies and moves. Phil was a brash player who enjoyed playing his opponents more than the game itself, and he’d been teaching me ways to get under the skin of other players while playing the game. There were two main things I learned from him, the first was to play fast, using the opponent’s turn to devise my next move instead of my own so that I could whiplash out a move and then stare at the other player when they tried to process the move I’d just taken. The second lesson was The Fool’s Mate.

Phil didn’t call the maneuver The Fool’s Mate, but he basically taught me how to checkmate an opponent in the first three moves as a sort of parlor trick you could use to piss them off. Like any kid with a new trick up their sleeve, I couldn’t wait to try it out on someone, and as Frank looked at me expectantly, obviously wanting to join Phil and me for some Chess later that night, I knew that I was going to get my chance. Frank was not shy about wanting to sit in on our break-time games. You could tell that he wanted to show off his “Navy Seal”, battle-honed skills to school me in the game. So I nodded and told him I was taking my lunch at 1:00 am, and to meet me in the break room. I’m fairly sure that everyone working the night crew figured Frank was a pathological liar, but I was really hoping that a couple of the other guys would be in the break room that evening so that I’d have an audience when I attempted to take him down a peg. I knew if no one else, Phil would be there and I hoped he’d get a laugh at my attempt to pull off his humiliating parlor trick.

I finished facing the aisle and then I quickly pulled my remaining L-cart over to the canned veggie aisle and loaded it up with a metric ton of baked and barbecue beans so that nobody would walk off with it. It was nearly one o’clock, so I jogged the few steps over to the timeclock, punched in my three digit employee code and then wandered off into the back room towards the break room and bathrooms. Phil and Frank were already sitting in separate booths waiting for me to grab my game board and small box of wooden chess pieces. My father had passed down the set to me after I beat him in a match for the first time a few years earlier. the board was a standard sized board, but instead of just folding down the middle, it was also cut into fourths, so it could be folded up into a quarter of the full size. The checkered side was deep brown and tan, and it felt like it had some age to it. I’m guessing my father had this same set as a kid, as the wooden pieces were also well worn in places, and were stained in a pale yellow and deep chocolate for the white and black sides. Each piece had a thin sliver of green felt on the bottom, though there were a few pieces that were missing them. I grabbed the set from my locker and started setting it up in front of Frank, taking care to offer him the black side.

This is the first step in setting up the Fool’s Mate. “Fire goes before smoke” as my dad always said, twisting the old saying “Where there’s smoke there’s fire”, when he taught me to play, meaning the player with the lighter pieces goes first and the darker player follows. In order for the prank to work, you have to play the lighter side because of how the board is arranged. If you’re unfamiliar, in Chess the board set up has the player’s king on it’s opposite color in the center back row, so light king on a dark square, and dark king on a light square. The queen is then placed on the other center square next to the king, always on their own color, then these two are flanked on either side by first the bishops, the knights, and finally the rooks. The front row is all pawns. So this set up always has the kings facing off, but depending on the side your king can potentially be very vulnerable at the first diagonal square on the opposite side of the queen. So in the Fool’s Mate, the key is playing white so you can go first in order to temp your opponent to move their critical pawn, opening up their king to attack. This gambit is a series of moves that any seasoned chess player will see from the outset, but the fool hardy won’t see, thus The Fool’s Mate.

As I finished setting up the pieces, Frank’s frozen food co-worker came in along with a couple of the women from Drug/GM department. I didn’t know these folks as well as the dry goods crew, but I was happy for the audience none-the-less. “Fire before smoke” I said as I opened up my play by moving the pawn in front of my king in a double jump forward to the e4 position. Frank’s response to this first move will let me know whether or not this whole idea will work. I needed him to move the pawns in front of his left side bishop and knight to open an unblockable, diagonal path to his king. Offering up my pawn is sort of bait, both exposing my king a bit and getting him to think about moving the pawns on his left side. Surprisingly, he took the bait and moved the pawn in front of his bishop up two spaces to f5, leaving me to quickly take his pawn with mine. I slapped down his pawn on my side of the table for emphasis trying to needle him. With a false sense of opportunity and after a bit of consideration, he moved the pawn in front of his knight up two spaces to g5, safe from my pawn. But he was playing exactly into my my hand, and as fast as I could with my third turn, I moved my queen to h5 on his side of the board, slamming her down and announcing “CHECKMATE!”

Phil started laughing out loud, causing the other folks to chuckle and I had a shit-eating grin on my face, trying my best not to start laughing too. I couldn’t believe how perfectly this had all unfolded. And the best part was that Frank was dumbfounded. And then I realized he was also pissed. He got up and quietly walked out of the break room, and I knew I’d probably pay for this later, but I couldn’t help gloating a bit. I knew full well that pulling off this prank was not a sign that I was smarter then Frank, but it did feel great to knock him down a bit in front of our co-workers. I didn’t have a lot of “wins” growing up and that made this all the more delicious.

Frank didn’t last long at Kroger after that night. A couple of weeks later he’d tried to playfully get back at me when we’d both arrived at work.I was walking back to the time clock are like my typical zombie self, having just ripped myself out of bed at 10:00 pm, when he came running up behind me. He whipped his arm out to put me in a headlock and as if I’d practiced this move a thousand times I instinctively grabbed his arm behind my head, stepped back and using my weight and momentum, flipped him over my body and pinning him onto the hard linoleum floor with a dull thud. I was as surprised as he was that I was able to pull off a maneuver that I know I must have learned by watching the Karate Kid Part II multiple times throughout the 80s as a kid. “Step back Daniel-san!” This was a weird moment for both of us. I honestly think he was just trying to get us back to status quo in terms of easing the tensions of the working relationship, but I was apparently harboring some hefty anger management issues stemming form a lifetime of insecurities. While he was probably planning to give me a noogie, I wanted to break something in him. This was the first time I’d let out my anger at work like that, and luckily there was no one around to witness it. It was pretty dead in the store that night we were the first two from the night crew wandering in to start the shift. I let up on Frank and extended a hand to help him up, but he just got up and moved past me to clock in.

For the next two weeks we didn’t say a word to each other, and finally on what would be his final night at that Kroger, he came up to me and offered me his pocket knife. “No hard feelings” he said as he showed me the mechanism to unfold the wicked-looking long serrated blade of the knife. “It’s the kind we use in the Seals…” he said chuckling. “Wow, thanks”, was all I could muster as he walked away to the frozen foods back-stock freezer. I knew it wasn’t a military grade knife, just some cheap thing he probably picked up at one of the local flea market stands that specialized in fake samurai swords and ninja stars. I didn’t know until later that it was his last night on shift and within another month I’d end up taking his position working frozen. I spent the next six months using that knife to chisel off the frozen tobacco spit from all of the compressor grates in an attempt to remove the remnant of him from that department. I kept that knife and had it in my back pocket for the next decade though.