They say that everyone in the world is unique. That's undoubtedly true, but some of us stray further from what our society would consider "normalcy" than others. Under that standard, my friend Max Chiswick was the most unique person I knew.
Max passed away in the middle of January and it shook my world. I was far from alone in that sentiment. Tributes to his life started popping up all over the internet, so much so that this one seems superfluous several weeks after his tragic death. Here are some eulogies, each of which are beautiful and come from someone I've never met (except one, briefly).
https://oldjewishmen.substack.com/p/bhif-old-jewish-men-loses-a-friend
https://collive.com/max-chiswick-39-obm/
https://www.thefp.com/p/my-friend-max-suzy-weiss
https://blog.rossry.net/chisness/
https://andrew.gr/stories/chisness/
These stories, along with the beautiful eulogies at Max's funeral given by his parents, sister, and friend Mike Fishman, painted a wonderful picture of how remarkable Max's life truly was, both the parts I knew and the parts I didn't. He touched so many lives, which is a thing that's common to say about those who pass away, but for Max, touching lives and forging connections was something he seemed to have a passion for as much as any of his many, many individual goals, which is to say that he threw himself into it completely. No matter how many new connections he made -- and he made many, all over the world -- he never abandoned his old ones. He was always checking in and texting (particularly during the COVID pandemic, he would use the very odd but very Max monotone greeting of "are you fine"), and I'd rarely go a long stretch without hearing from him in some form, even if he was living in a different hemisphere.
I'm using this space to remember my personal friendship with Max and the many ways he has influenced -- and continues to influence -- my life.
I met Max sophomore year of high school. He had joined the math team that year and sat in the desk behind me at lunch while we worked through problems. It didn't take long in our discussions to realize how many mutuals we had -- friends for him, acquaintances for me, primarily from playing league sports. Max had a wealth of information about everyone, owing to his never-ending curiosity about people and things. There was no subculture in our extremely large high school that was off-limits to him, because virtually everyone is welcoming to someone who takes a genuine interest in their life.
Speaking as someone who might have taken second place, Max was easily the strangest person I came across during school. He ate so many carrots that his skin took on an orange hue. He had an odd manner of speaking, including inflection, diction, and syntax, that became weirdly addictive to those in the know. By the end of high school, entire groups of friends had adopted Max' lexicon, to the absolute bewilderment of others who didn't know him. He hated gum chewing and pencil tips; just having the latter face-up on your desk was enough for Max to squint and put his hand up to block his view of the offending object. When Facebook became a thing, Max was among the first people I knew to create a profile (Max was very good at the internet). It was supposed to be a place to put the best parts of yourself on display, which is why it was stood out that Max put in his bio "I eat very few foods and they're almost always very plain."
Of course, people made comments, and if Max were more like me, it probably would have bothered him. But Max was unflappable. Every one of his idiosyncrasies was a feature, not a bug. He had some sort of force field around him that made him immune to the judgement of others. What was more important for me is that Max himself wasn't judgmental of people for their bits of weirdness, which I had in spades. I was drawn to him because I was never worried about being myself around him. It helped my confidence that this person who was well-liked and entrenched in many different circles felt like I was worth his time.
Max had a website (chisness.com, now in its umpteenth iteration) where he wrote about his life. He was an avid photographer and documented his experiences long before Facebook photos were a thing. I always felt somewhat honored when he included a photo or description of something we did together on his website. This is a very high-school sentence, but he typically did this with people much cooler than me, so it was fun to be included. Max also sold chisness.com merchandise online, which is something most high schoolers wouldn't have had the motivation to figure out how to do. One girl from school even purchased a chisness.com thong.
Junior year, Max started qualifying to go to math team meets with regularity, and his presence transformed those trips from something I wasn't very keen on to enjoyable experiences. We'd sit together on the bus playing Pai Gow Poker for dollars and would strike up card games with the other team members at the hotel or at down times during the day. Max was famously always ready with a deck of cards wherever he went, and just setting these games up made for positive interactions that empowered me with a sense of social normalcy. I'd be remiss not to mention that Max took 6th place in the state individual written competition at the University of Illinois our senior year, which, after not qualifying to represent our school all that frequently as a sophomore, was a huge testament to his drive to become good at things.
Speaking of becoming good at things, Max was uncommonly motivated to master anything he'd set his mind to. Early in his life, that was often video games. He became the most elite Mario Kart 64 player you'll ever meet as a kid, and later in life made a nice score betting against someone for $1,000 per race. Nintendo 64 gave way to Counter-Strike as a high schooler. Max would most often show up at school with tired eyes, having played the game until midnight and started on his homework shortly after.
While being elite at video games (especially back then) wasn't particularly useful, Max soon channeled his game-mastering energy into something with much more value -- poker. Max and I both loved poker, but we generally played in different circles. Max's games were of much higher stakes, and I was fascinated by high schoolers betting so much money. As a junior, I thought my world was ending if I lost 20 bucks. As soon as Max turned 18, he started playing online and was already quite good at it. I didn't have the aptitude for it that he did, but he often let me split tournaments with him and I learned a great deal from watching alongside him.
I became obsessed with poker and began playing more seriously online as I moved into college. Max was a constant mentor as I got better and started making some money from the game, which I really needed to pay for school. During college, Max would eventually help to teach me how to play in cash games, and we'd spend many nights on breaks from school just having a poker grind session in his basement. The culmination of my poker "career" was playing in the World Series of Poker Main Event in 2008, to-date one of the coolest and most fun things I've ever done, even if I didn't make it to the money. It doesn't happen without Max.
I eventually stopped playing poker when I needed to focus on my actual job, but Max kept right on going, opting to play professionally. He did very well and amassed a small fortune. The story of his bet of playing 3 million poker hands in a year, during which he set the world record for most poker hands played in a month, is fascinating and worth visiting. It speaks to his determination...and also one of his noted lesser-good qualities, procrastination, but ultimately it's a story of him pulling off something in December 2009 that almost no one else would have a chance at doing.
Max's poker success allowed him to live an unconventional lifestyle, detailed much better than I could ever do by the people who knew him on his travels, linked above. This person who rarely left the basement in high school and college underwent a total transformation that would smack as surprising to anyone who met him as an adult. Not known as an athlete early in life, he would get on the CrossFit train and become "built like a Marine" as described in the Old Jewish Men blog eulogy. He became a world traveler, increasingly spending his time in parts of Asia and Africa ("the African continent", as he called it), even biking the length of the latter from Egypt to South Africa. Arguably the most sheltered person I've known became the one with the most world experience. And yet, he was always popping back into town, ready and eager to meet up with his old friends. He was always messaging, always present, everywhere and nowhere all at once.
That last bit was particularly true during the COVID pandemic, as my personal interactions with Max once again increased in frequency. He was a frequent participant in the "Quarantine Poker Tour," the online poker league I created when the world shut down. Eventually, Max decided to live in the Central African Republic during COVID, which was an obstacle to playing, but he'd still hop on Zoom calls on his phone from some settlement in the middle of the desert, just to check in on everyone.
Max visited me a few times during the pandemic years to face off with me in a new passion of his -- tennis. I'm not much of a tennis player, but I was in great physical condition circa late-2020, which was enough to be dangerous. The first time he visited, he eked out a win. Much like the other things he poured himself into, however, Max was dedicated to getting really good at it. The second time he visited, he beat me more convincingly, but still commented that games with me were fun and competitive. The third time, he absolutely blew me off the court. I think the games stopped because I was no longer a match for him.
My more recent addiction has been playing competitive trivia, and while that's never been something Max wanted to get into seriously, he and I played plenty of matches online on PAR Trivia and like anything else, was very curious about how the trivia world worked. He began watching Jeopardy! frequently (this became a tradition for he and his mom when he visited home) and we'd often talk about contestants and results.
While it wasn't a major passion project for Max, his natural inquisitiveness and ability to forge connections led to a significant development for me. He learned that he had another friend, Greg Shahade, who was similarly grinding trivia and getting pretty obsessed with it. Most people would have reacted to that knowledge along the lines of, "Oh cool, I have another friend who does this too." Max took it a step further and put us on a text chain so we could talk to each other about it. Simply because Max had no reservations or social inhibitions about putting complete strangers in touch, Greg has become something of a trivia mentor for me, sort of like Max was for poker.
***
Max had a great fondness for specialty objects and works of art that aligned with his interests, often things that involved carrots, chicken, tennis, or his favorite TV show, The Wire (note: it's also mine, yet another gift that Max gave to me). He would often have to go to great effort to acquire these things, whether that meant meeting up with some stranger from eBay that lived nowhere near home, significant logistical difficulties, or even bringing things in from overseas. The latter led to one of my favorite conversations I had with him from recent years, which epitomized much about his personality.
His determination to "get it to a 10" was as on-brand as it comes.
***
Max passed away in Israel in January from an acute case of malaria, which he contracted while traveling in Senegal. His funeral took place shortly after our 20-year high school reunion, which was fitting in that attending felt like a high school reunion in of itself. Names and faces were gathered together, many of whom hadn't seen each other in person for 15 years or more. It was a testament to how people from all sorts of different cliques felt connected enough to Max to this day to participate in celebrating his life. Our particular group of friends was sporting ties that were dotted with carrots in honor of Max' favorite food, thanks to coordination from my friend Jake. The room was very crowded, and yet one got the sense that the gathering was just a mere subset of Max's circle, and that many more would have loved to be there had they not lived thousands of miles away.
Max left behind many brilliant ongoing projects ranging from as complex as building a poker AI to as simple-but-relatable as documenting the frustrating inability of hotels to make quality eggs. He led the most interesting life of anyone I know; explaining Max to a couple friends once resulted in them believing he was made-up, which resulted in an instant FaceTime connection to prove his existence and confirm the stories.
In the days following his death, a flood of memories took over my mind, ranging from the extremely mundane ("I enjoyed meeting your father yesterday, it was a very warm greeting.") to the time his eccentric mannerisms helped get me in trouble in math class. My wisdom teeth had been taken out and I was taking vicodin for the pain, which put me in a very loopy mood. I was sitting next to Max, who would not stop saying strange things under his breath and making odd sounds to make me laugh. I was completely unable to control myself, he knew it, and he encouraged all of it. My even-tempered teacher, Mr. Bettina, snapped at me for the disruption in a way I never knew he could. I had no real way to explain myself. Sorry sir, I physically can't stop laughing during your directional derivatives lecture? Thanks a lot, Max.
I found myself listening to podcasts and videos of Max, several of which were sent along by friends. It was comforting to still be able to hear him speak to keep his mannerisms and sayings in my memory. The words "event" and "stone" will remind me of Max whenever I hear them, but one of Max' more recent catchphrases is one I hope sticks with me the longest. In recent years, he had taken to saying "not a problem" in response to virtually any inconvenience, and I'm making it a goal to have that echo in my mind when I face difficulty.
That's just one of many lessons that I can take with me from Max' life, as I paraphrase a bit from a very well-written card by my friend Joe. Max's endless curiosity and inquisitiveness are traits that I need to gravitate towards. I want to forge connections with strangers the way that he could and break down the walls that keep us socially distant. I don't see myself having quite the transformation of basement-dweller to world-traveler as Max did, but I do need to improve at pushing myself outside of my comfort zone the way Max was able to. And I need to be better about approaching life with the confidence to be who I am, and knowing that's enough, regardless of how the world may view it. An intricate picture of a carrot drawn by my friend Zack (a bottomless source of creativity) now hangs next to my desk as a reminder to carry these lessons with me throughout my day.
I had some reservations about publishing this. After all, I wasn't Max's closest friend. I never lived with him or traveled with him. Mine is just one story of the many, many friends he made whose lives were better for knowing him. In the end, I followed through because self-consciousness doesn't seem like much of a good reason not to do something you want to do. A remarkable friend's life taught me that.
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