EPTA lot of people here at have asked me, "So just how close were you and Bobby?" And I honestly have to reply, "Bobby said I was the little brother he never had."
From 1978 until around 1984 we traveled the world together. Most people thought he was just hiding away in L.A. playing chess with himself, listening to jazz music, eating potato chips and pop-tarts, sipping NeHi Grape, watching TV, but it was not true. We had adventures that would curl your hair, if you have any.
I first met Bobby in 1978 at a party in L.A. at some producer's house. Bobby was sitting in a chair with some big chested blonde on his lap. Her hands were busy and he was drooling like Pavlov's freakin' dog! I went up and offered him a "cigarette", and he just said, "No thanks, that might just bring me down." After his lap puppet removed herself, we began to talk and began to bond together, when he finally said, "You know, sometimes I just want to drop out. Do new things. I am tired of chess. I'm World Champion you know?"
"That's nothing, man. I am the world champion at Ha! Ha! Herman." It is an understatement to say that he was very impressed, but he was, and added, "Oh, yeah? I am also the best in the world at 15-puzzle. I was even on Carson doing it." It is an understatement to say that I was even more impressed with that. After all, anybody can be a world champion at chess...these days. Thank you, FIDE!!!
"Bobby," I said. "Why don't we just take off to Katmandu?" "What would we do there?" "We could spend a year in silence in a monastery in order to appreciate the sound of a whisper." "I'm in," he said. "Do you still got that "cigarette"?"
The next day, we began working as deckhands on a slow boat to anywhere West. The clean ocean air was good for us and our days were filled with adventures - smugglers, pirates, cannibals, native girls on every island we stopped. Heck, we even got marooned for a few days on a deserted island after being swept overboard during a storm. Lucky for us, the ship found us, but not before he drew out a chessboard in the sand and began using coconuts as pieces.
We jumped ship in Manila. Wonderful country - the Philipines. I recall beautiful Filipino girls, the slums, a knife fight in an alley in Baguio City (Thanks for having my back, Bobby!!), partying with the Marcos'. Man, oh, man! That Imelda was still so beautiful back then. Gotta go back there some day.
Next stop was the beautiful country of Thailand. The most gorgeous women in the world! And the food! There I learned that a full-body massage meant that some pretty little thing would lay on top of you and massage you with her whole body. When we left there, we both cried for days. Some of the women cried too!
Part 2
During a night of drinking fermented horse piss (hey, it was the only beverage you could get a buzz on), we decided to just walk across Asia until we got to Europe. In China, we rode with some desert warlord, ambushed some Commie soldiers, worked as rickshaw coolies in Shanghai, taught Tai Chi and Bruce Lee's jeet kune do to some monks near Tibet, walked along the Great Wall. Bobby left some graffiti on it, too - "Mao can suck my Red Book". Boy, did we have a good time there. We were finally escorted out of the country after one too many times of Bobby saying in every restaurant, "Can I get some flied lice with my cream of sum yung gao?"
In Vietnam, while drinking cobra wine, and hallucinating (HELLO!! It was the only beverage you could get a buzz on.), Bobby declared, "You know, during the Vietnam War, I tried to get in the Army. I told them I wanted to go and kill Commie bas***ds, but they would not let me join." "They probably wanted you to kill them over the board," I suggested. "Yeah, maybe you are right. Still, I would have enjoyed wasting some of them, maybe burning up a village, killing a water buffalo. Have you ever eaten water buffalo?" "Yeah, it tastes like beef." "I bet they don't have them in Argentina. Argentina has the best steaks in the world. You know, there are no vegetarians in Argentina. It's against the law or something. Argentina actually means "Beef-eaters" in Portuguese." And so we moved on.
We rested at the foot of Mt. Everest when Bobby decided that we should work as Sherpas. I asked him if he spoke any Sherpese, and when he said no, I said he would have to work as a mute. He was the tallest guide there and he must have climbed that hill a couple of a dozen times until he was scared by a yeti (probably drank too much yak wine - Again, BUZZ ON). So, off we set across the desert until we arrived in Moscow. Have you ever ridden a camel across a desert? Sand gets in everything. Oh, yeah, even there.
