A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (12 page)

Person B: Oh, absolutely.

Person C: I can’t wait to meet Trebek.

Person D: I miss the mustache.

Person C: Me too.

Person E: I wonder if he’ll sign my picture.

Person F: (hushed, reverent) I hear he hates autographs.

Person A: (fervently) I hear he takes all the contestant quizzes and the year he doesn’t pass it he’s going to quit.

Person B: I hear he sleeps in a golden box like a pharaoh and is made of magic.

Person D: When I was married we walked down the aisle to the
Jeopardy!
theme song and we named all our pets after Potent Potables and my son’s name is Portmanteau and sometimes Trebek comes to me in dreams and reads me facts from the future.

Person G: (grimly, with some satisfaction) I know everything there is to know about
sports
!

(Awkward hush)

The shuttle finally arrived at the studios. We showed our IDs to the guard and walked inside, to makeup and the waiting room.

There, we ate fruit from a tray, marshaling our favorite facts around us for comfort (“The World War I poet Wilfred Owen loved pineapple chunks,” I murmured to myself, as I loaded my plate with them) and listening to the instructions from Maggie, a hoarse-voiced, good-humored lady who was tasked with herding us from place to place.

In that room was the kind of frenzied camaraderie that I assume gladiators felt before rushing out to the arena. In a moment, we would be at one another’s metaphorical throats. But right now, we were all brothers in useless trivia. Overcome by nerd relief at being in a roomful of others of our kind for once, we thought it might be a good idea if we sang together, though I can’t remember what the song was. I want to say it was “The Elements” song by Tom Lehrer
(“antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium”). But it might just have been “One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others).” Maggie seemed used to the response. It was like if you were to go out into the wild and round up a strange beast that had believed all its kin extinct. “Oh my God!” we exclaimed. “You mean other people like me exist, out there, in the world?” “Yup,” they said. “And now, you must destroy one another, on television.” “Okay.”

They let us practice with the buzzer, but not for long. Then we sat down in the audience to watch to see if our names would be called to compete. The studio was freezing. Well, not quite freezing. It was like sitting in a meat locker. If I were a beer, I would have been very comfortable. Alex Trebek regaled the audience with corny jokes and the audience laughed hysterically just so they could move and warm themselves. “I went into the closet to get a suit,” he said, “and then I came out, out of the closet. Ha-HA!”

“Wahaahahaha,” we all laughed, nervously.

Then ensued several hours of waiting as they taped episodes with players who were not me, otherwise known as The Part of the Day Where Every Fact You Have Ever Learned Slowly Seeps out of Your Body. As I sat in the audience, I was suddenly struck by the realization that I knew nothing. “The beginning of wisdom is the knowledge of your own ignorance,” I muttered reassuringly. “As—what’s his name said.” I began panicking.

Finally my turn came, after a round hinging on English Castles, during which I realized that “English Castles” was one of the numerous areas of knowledge that had slowly melted out of my brain. I was beginning to have sincere doubts about my own name by the time they called it.

Breathing a sigh of relief that at least I had been spared the castles category, I stepped onto the stage. The stage of
Jeopardy!
looks like a spaceship designed in the 1980s.

Most people who compete on
Jeopardy!
are, if not in the prime of life, at least in the twenties or thirties of life. They have been informed that the studio is cold, and they are dressed accordingly in sensible dark suits.

I was none of those things. I was eighteen, wearing a pink sweater set that my mother had selected. My mother had the awkward habit of picking clothes and giving advice that was several years ahead of my stage in life. At fourteen, I already owned numerous Talbots pantsuits, and she was always advising me not to sign prenups.

Things got off to an optimistic start. The first category that greeted my eye was something called “Math Jokes.” It is no exaggeration to say that I had been preparing my entire life for this.

“What is the circumference of a pumpkin divided by its diameter?” “Pi,” I shouted. “Pumpkin Pi,” Trebek corrected. “That’s the joke.”

We tore through logarithms (why are lumberjacks such good dancers?) and what the chicken crossed to get to the same side (a Mobius strip) and the square root of 4 b squared (2 B, or Not (negative) 2 B).

I was ahead at the commercial break.

But then the dark times came.

One of the categories was “Cars.” I had no idea how many car companies there were. For the better part of my childhood, my family drove a 1979 Chevy Zephyr with no air-conditioning and a broken speedometer, and I thought that this state of things was typical. One day, we got pulled over. “How fast were you going?” the cop asked. My father looked gravely at the broken speedometer. “Zero miles per hour,” he said. The cop glanced at the car. “If that’s all you’re making,” he said, “I’ll let you off with a warning.” Although this was a vivid and cherished memory of my youth, it offered no clues for this category.

“The first logo of this sporty Italian car maker included the Visconti serpent, a Milanese symbol,” Trebek read. I had no idea. (It’s Alfa Romeo.)

“‘The relentless pursuit of perfection’ is the goal of this luxury automaker,” he tried.

“What is a Jaguar?” I suggested. The jaguar seemed like he was pursuing something or other with ruthlessness. (Nope, Lexus.)

I was still leading when we finished the Jeopardy! round, but only by a hair. And not a big hair.

There was a brief lull, during which Trebek asked us questions intended to draw out our personalities. I have no idea what I said. I remember opening my mouth. I remember closing it again after nearly a minute had passed. What emerged in the interim is an utter blank to me, as it was at the time. I think I said something about squirrels and camaraderie.

The Double Jeopardy! round offered such arcana as “Produce” and “Famous Duets.”

I remembered my time in the produce aisle. I tried to rifle through my recollections. There had been—apples there. And—also—potatoes. Or maybe those had been more apples. I fumbled blindly through the aisles of memory, overturning things.

My competition—Sara, a veterinary assistant from Connecticut, and Nick, a paralegal—were perking right up.

Paralegal Nick was all over the vegetables. He apparently had spent the better part of his life surrounded by loving, supportive produce. He knew all the varieties of apple. He identified lettuce correctly. When he found a Daily Double in the produce lane, he added two thousand dollars with ease. Sara, who had won the previous two games, chimed in with the French for green beans.

When Double Jeopardy! concluded I was several ells behind.

The other two were tied.

This is the point when the people who post often in
Jeopardy!
online forums determined that I made the Worst Final Jeopardy! wager of all time.

In retrospect, it’s obvious. When the players ahead of you are tied, you know that they are forced to bet everything they have, and you should just sit back and bid nothing and hope they get it wrong.

A man on the forum was so angered by my wager, in fact, that he Googled me and my entire family and posted lengthy, erratically capitalized screeds about what fools we were and how we had polluted the Great Game. (“THESE PEOPLE ARE RUINING THE COUNTRY WITH THEIR IDIOICY AND I AM SICK OF IT.”) Shortly thereafter, he suffered a bicycle accident. He attributed it to karma and posted an apology. This was the first and last time that a stranger has apologized to me on the Internet, and in some ways it is more miraculous than my appearing on
Jeopardy!
in the first place.

He was right about the wager, though.

They say that in high-stress situations like war and skydiving and landing planes in blinding snowstorms, there comes a point when your training just kicks in. “Ah,” you say, “just like training,” and you activate the chute, or start artificially respirating your companion under the foil blanket, or throw the plane into a splendid barrel roll. If only I’d been in a profession, “my training” might have “kicked in” at this critical juncture.

Instead, what kicked in was the sense that “In The News 2006” was a Final Jeopardy! category at which I was bound to excel. “I’m not betting on them,” I thought, with some totally misplaced satisfaction. “I’m betting on me!”

I am glad I have never tried skydiving.

To this day, I maintain that my answer was right, if not specific enough.

“Justice Peter Smith embedded a secret code into a 2006 ruling that said this author hadn’t violated a copyright,” Trebek read.

I blanked. I had just read an article on this very subject. I could visualize the article. I could see those tormenting black words on the page. I could see everything except who the article was about.

“Who is Dan Brown?” wrote my competitors.

“Who is that dude?” I wrote. This is technically correct, if lacking in detail.

You may know that during Final Jeopardy!, after that insanely catchy “thinking music” plays, the camera pans over you to show how satisfied you feel with your answer. Sarah and Nick exuded calm and confidence. I made the kind of face that you generally make when you accidentally walk in on your grandparents having adventurous sex.

In the end, I wound up with two thousand dollars, which just about covered the plane and the hotel.

My mother and I slunk away soon afterward.

Now what do I do with the rest of my life?

•   •   •

When you are a tall kid, they tell you to play basketball. When you hit a certain weight, people suggest that you look into sumo wrestling. When you hit a certain level of saturation in facts—well, why don’t you go on
Jeopardy!
?

Now that door’s closed.

Everyone else from that tumbrel is struggling alike. Sure, we make do. Bars have trivia nights. We can live off sliders and wings for the rest of our days. But there is more to life than sliders and wings, surely! What about glory? What about usefulness?

Ever since the advent of Google, our prowess has been on the wane.

I interviewed Ken Jennings for a story after he competed with the IBM supercomputer Watson and he was sympathetic. “Trivia geeks are not the public resource they used to be,” he admitted.

We drift listlessly around the watercoolers and dinner tables where we once held sway. Once, if you needed to know who Tom Hanks’ costars were in
A League of Their Own
, you called us. Now—any fool with IMDb and an iPhone can beat us to the punch.

Woody Allen summed up our predicament nicely. “My father worked for the same firm for twelve years. They fired him and replaced him with a tiny gadget that does everything my father does, only much better. The depressing thing is my mother ran out and bought one.”

Even as I type this, my iPhone hums in my pocket, capable of Googling almost anything just as fast as I can remember it.

The world is increasingly hostile to trivia. We require artificial environments to practice our skill: tournaments in pubs where everyone has to turn off his phone, game shows. The regular air does not support us. You know your skill is really valuable if, in order to practice it, everyone has to pretend that you are living in a different year without full use of modern technology. It’s like sewing clothes from scratch or healing people by letting out their bad humors. Maybe it works, but there’s a more efficient way.

I can’t help feeling a little like an appendix—both in the sense of that chunk at the end of a book that is full of unwanted information, and the useless body part that sometimes flares up and kills a person for no reason. Probably frustration.

It’s not just that my friends don’t need me and that Watson can take me on. I don’t need myself either. “Memory, my dear,” says a character in
The Importance of Being Earnest
, “is the diary we all carry about with us.” (I think that’s what she says. I’ll have to Google it, to be sure.) If I want to know where I have been, doing what, with
whom, my data can tell me. “Where were you last night?” an officer will ask. “Wait,” I’ll say. “Let me check my GChat logs.”

We store things on the outside that we used to store on the inside. Not just facts, but moments, memories.

As I write this, I’m struck by how little attention I have paid to my own life. I remember fewer of the details of this excursion than names of fifteenth-century explorers.

There is a point in the Sherlock Holmes books when Sherlock asks Watson (human Watson, not IBM Watson) how many stairs are in their apartment and Watson has to confess he has never counted. Upon reading that I went home and counted the stairs. There were nineteen. This piece of knowledge has never come in handy. But I know how Watson felt.

It’s not that I don’t notice things. I notice all kinds of things. I have an uncanny and frankly irritating memory for any actor who has ever appeared in anything ever, particularly if I have not seen the film in question. But the things I want most to remember—the isolated moments you know are Important—go sliding away. Graduations and weddings and funerals blur.

Memories committed to paper perish like insects pinned to cards. The moment writhes a little on the pen and that is it. I wish I could tell you what we sang before the game and what I said to Alex, and what-all happened, with precision, but I’ve given you all the shreds I have. Instead I can tell you about Ethelred the Unready and list all the characters in
Othello
.

I suppose the strange selectivity of memory is half its charm. Our lives are burning houses, and we come running out with whatever we can carry.

Sometimes I think the reason I don’t remember more about my
Jeopardy!
experience is that I know I could find it if I had to. There’s a tape somewhere. There’s an online archive of all games and players.
If I want to know exactly what questions were asked, I have only to Google it. It’s not like Ancient Greece, where if you wanted to know what happened to Achilles at the end of the Trojan War, your bard had to dredge it up from memory.