Marc Romano - Crossworld: One Man’s Journey into America’s Crossword Obsession

Acknowledgments

I want to thank the score or more people who generously shared their time and expertise with me as I wrote Crossworld; all those who are mentioned by name, but especially Brendan Emmett Quigley, Will Shortz, Helene Hovanec, Stanley Newman, and Michael Shteyman. I'm grateful to Doubleday's David Phethean for his early comments on the manuscript and to Debby Manette for her sharp copyediting eye. My particular thanks go to Jin Auh of the Wylie Agency and to Sarah Rainone of Doubledayas formidable a combination of agent and editor as any writer could hope to have on his side. None of these individuals bears any responsibility for errors of fact or infelicities of style that appear in the bookblame for those lies almost entirely with Mrs. Gladys B. Ambacher of Fond-aw-Lac, Wisconsin, and to a lesser extent with me.

Chapter 1

I am hopelessly addicted to the New York Times crossword puzzle.

Like many addicts, it's taken me time to admit I have a problem. The hints I was heading for trouble came, at first, only occasionally. The moments of panic when I realized that for whatever reason I might not be able to get my fix on a given day. The toll on relationships. The strained friendships. The lost hours I could have used to do something much more productive.

It gets worse, too. The high no longer lasts as long as it once did; what initially could occupy me for a whole afternoon now takes me twenty minutes or less to get through. I have become increasingly alarmed that the supply of the thing I need is limited. The Times publishes only one puzzle per day, and when that's done I find myself rooting about for substitutesthe Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer, and New York Sun puzzles, to name just a fewthat are somehow less satisfying. Sure, there are a couple of thousand puzzles in the Times's electronic archive. But a puzzle you've already done being something of a dead letter, falling back to that recourse is something like accepting an herbal cigarette when you're a smoker plumb out of Camels. There is no substitute for the genuine article, and a sort of panic sets in once it's no longer available. To badly paraphrase the British novelist C. S. Forester, it is prospect and not possession that affords the greatest pleasure, and the delicious agony of the twenty-four hours between completing one puzzle and starting another makes up the circadian rhythm by which my life has been regulated for nigh on two decades now.

If you've ever been to or listened in on a meeting of any of the twelve-step groupsAlcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymousyou may have noticed the pattern that emerges from the narratives of the people who get up to publicly confess their addictions. These men and women all seem to be describing, in their own ways, how they were caught blindside by their particular object of desire. At an AA meeting, it may be the woman whose parents owned a tavern; all those surreptitious sips of liquids from colorful bottles as a little girl transmuted, for her, into a spiral of inebriation and promiscuity that ended only six months before in this very room. At an NA meeting, it may be the regional salesman whose toots of cocaine on the road, originally just to help clear his head, paved the way for divorce, petty theft, and finally grand larceny and imprisonment.

What these stories say, in essence, is that all addicts go through a lapsarian event of some sort or another, which may be why so many twelve-step meetings take place in churches: It's comforting to explain one's own fall from grace in an environment where the fact of being out of grace is dwelt upon so constantly. Addicts seem to fetishize the fact of their own fall, even though the process of falling is, in the end, rather the same whether you happen to be the reformed floozy, the now reemployed and sober salesman, or Adam and Eve. Only the substance changes: alcohol, cocaine, knowledge of good and evil. Or crosswords.

My own fall was right down the pipe, in addiction-narrative terms. Along with a few friends from my hometown at the northernmost end of Boston's North Shore (white-clapboard public buildings, preppies, gulls wheeling in the deep, snug, boat-filled harbor), I was invited down to New Canaan, Connecticut, for a house party hosted by a friend of ours whose parents had, the year before, moved from the Bay State to the Nutmeg State. This was late summer 1985; I was between my sophomore and junior years in college. The six of us drove down in two cars at far too great a speed, with me at the helm of a Ford F250 pickup whose nervous owner sat beside me, constantly doling out advice about the way I was handling his beloved truck.

Apart from the nagging, which occurred both on the way down and the way back up (and which I resented from someone who not only regularly treated his friends to hundred-mile-an-hour dirt-road horror shows, but who also needed me to do the piloting because the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had suspended his license for drunken driving a month before), it was really a perfect weekend. New Canaan was in its late-summer torpor, the hired band was unexpectedly decent, the cold beer flowed, and our friend's new Connecticut crew was so much like we six in thought, dress, and background that everyone seemed to have known one another for ages. We had, in short, a ball.

I went to bed late but woke up, as I generally did then and still do now, early. No one else in the house was stirring except the mother of the family. When I appeared in the kitchen, seeking coffee after a dip in the pool, she said the newspaper hadn't appeared and wondered if I'd be good enough to pick one up at a store in town (or village, really, at the time).

Or two, she added. With so many of you kids in the house, someone else is bound to want another magazine.

I drove into town and bought, as specified, two copies of the New York Times. When I returned, coffee was ready, no one as yet had emerged from the bedrooms upstairs, and my friend's mother was dropping a celery stalk into a Bloody Mary. With a grunt of thanks, she took one of the papers, extracted from it the New York Times Magazine, and flipped it open to the puzzle page.

Then she sipped her drink, examined the black-and-white grid, and set to work. The house was silent but for her sipping (Bloody Mary), my sipping (coffee), and the rapid-fire scratching of her pencil. I didn't know yet that it's perfectly acceptable in Times-buying households to say nothing to a houseguest, even if the guest is your daughter's and not your own, until you've finished at least half the puzzle and a Bloody Mary.

Feeling vaguely offended, I reached for the spare magazine out of sheer retributive spite. The next moment, I became a puzzler.

This is not to say that I'd never done a crossword before. I had, in spades: the Boston Globe puzzle, most of the time, or the puzzle in TV Guide, or any other puzzle one picks up at moments when one needs distraction. The one common denominator is that they were easy, pastimes rather than challenges, so at the time I preferred reading to puzzling. I still do, except for when a fresh Times puzzle is to be had.

Ten minutes later, my friend's mother mixed herself another Bloody Mary and returned to the kitchen table. After maybe another twenty minutes, she sighed contentedly. Then she mixed herself a third Bloody Mary and rummaged through the other sections of the paper. My coffee was cold and barely touched and I'd completed less than a third of my puzzle when the daughter of the house appeared, with the other houseguests more or less in tow, if two hours later counts as in tow. My friend said good morning to her mother and then drifted over to ask me how I was doing with the crossword. I grunted by way of answer. I had begun, you see, to understand.