Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (23 page)

With about thirty seconds to go, I am $600 behind. But in the moment, I am playing the game, enjoying the fight, not looking so much at the score. Relaxed. My state-dependent timing returns.

What is badminton?

What’s the Moral Majority?

And finally, in the category
FEDERATIONS:

IT WAS FOUNDED IN COLUMBUS, OHIO IN 1886 BY WORKERS WANTING AN 8-HOUR DAY

My father lifted boxes almost as big as he was, as a member of the United Auto Workers, for over thirty years. Our corner of the Snow Belt was big on labor unions. And so, thanks to Dad, I knew about the American Federation of Labor.

What’s the AFL?

Three in a row to end the round. I didn’t know this until I looked at the videotape: it was only on the very last clue that I finally got control of the lead.

If I had known it at the time, I’m sure it would not have happened.

This was the first time I did not win in a runaway. Instead, I would be forced to make an enormous wager and then respond correctly to Final Jeopardy.

In a few moments, one clue would be the fulcrum around which would turn a large pile of money, a sports car worth almost as much as all the cash winnings combined, and possibly a trip to the Tournament of Champions. This one final response, by itself, would be worth as much as the small white house in the Snow Belt, where I used to sit with Mom and Dad and watch the show.

The Final Jeopardy category—
p-TING!

20TH CENTURY HISTORY

Well,
that
narrows things down,
I thought.
That could only be anything that happened anywhere to anybody over the course of a hundred years. Piece of cake.

The final commercial break had arrived.

I tried to relax. I tried to relax. I tried to relax.

Snappity-snappity-snappity-snappity.

Before the last break is over, long before the Final Jeopardy clue is revealed, the wranglers always tell you which interrogative to write. As I scrawled down the word “What” I noticed my hand was shaking. I managed to get the four letters out of the light pen. But there are drunks who can write their names in the snow—without bending over—who write more legible characters.

Snappity-snappity-snappity-snappity.

Moments later, wrangler Glenn came over with one of the strangest questions I have ever been asked.

The awarding of new cars to retiring undefeated champions had only begun a few weeks earlier, at the beginning of this broadcast season. Champions were to have their choice of a Chevy Suburban, a Tahoe, or a Corvette convertible. One thing they didn’t expect: none of the champs liked SUVs. Everyone wanted the sporty Corvette.

So now they were out of Corvettes.

This is what Glenn asked: Would I mind, then, if they just gave me two Camaros instead? One would be a convertible, at least. I could think of them as “his & hers” Camaros if I liked. Would that be all right?

Umm…OK.

Snappity-snappity-snappity-snappity.

A moment before the game resumed, one of the makeup commandos told me I looked paler than usual, roughly one shade darker than transparent. Naturally: all of the blood in my body was rushing to my heart, lungs, liver, and fast-twitch skeletal muscles.

After all, I was now wrestling entire herds of ravenous badgers.

Snappity-snappity-snappity-snappity boogety-boogety woop-woop-woop yah GAAAH!

Finally:
p-TING!

THE NKVD, WHICH LIQUIDATED ITS OWN FIRST 2 CHIEFS IN THE 1930S, DEVELOPED INTO THIS GROUP IN 1954

I started thinking of my mom, who would soon be sitting on the couch in the Snow Belt, watching this strange moment. I thought of all the years we had watched this show together. And I still didn’t know why she and Dad had sat there so many nights.

Three letters,
I thought.
Take your time. Three letters.

I thought about my sister Connie, and hoped her family would enjoy seeing this. I wished she could have had the chance at my formal education, which wound up being less useful to me in practice than a lifetime of screwups, a couple of books, and a boatload of weird off-color jokes. I wished there was more I could do to make her feel better.

Take your time. You can do this.

I really missed my dad. I wished he could see this.

Don’t screw it up. It’s only three letters.

As to the clue, I had first heard the correct response while attending Lord of the Flies Academy. Not from books or classes. A couple of the rich kids whose gym lockers were near mine sometimes compared the school to this organization whenever they couldn’t get their way.

Make sure it’s spelled right. Is it spelled right? Look at it. Make sure.

In college, the radio station where I had hid from so many classes had a Ukrainian nationalist program director. We once had a long conversation about the correct response.

OK. It’s spelled right. There.

And just in case, I even had a mnemonic for the acronym in the clue, in case it was asked the other way around.

N.ikita K.hruschev’s V.D. came from…

What was the KGB?

Center stage, stand with Alex. Sweet’N Low candies! Tiger Balm liniment!

I wobble off the stage. They remove the cordless mike I’ve been wearing most of the day. I sign some papers and hug the crap out of Susanne and Glenn and Grant and possibly twenty or thirty total strangers.

And then I’m alone again. Bright sunshine.

Back in the outside world, less real now than the stage. Walking on the cement of the Sony lot, the same old and hard concrete trail back to the parking garage.

This was exactly the trail I had walked five (or four, or possibly six) times before, back when I couldn’t even pass the test. Every echo of my feet in my funeral dress shoes, clop-clop-clopping on the unchanging pavement, reminded me of failure so intensely I wondered if those five games had really occurred.

Finally, Max was waiting there for the ride home, just as he had been every time before. I wondered if he would be jealous of the two new Camaros.

This might have been a wise moment to pause and appreciate what had just happened.

But I had not even reached the garage before I started thinking about the Tournament of Champions. I still wanted more.

I was halfway home before I even realized that someone else would be there.

CHAPTER
11

THE WAR COMES HOME

Also, Detaching My Althing from My Knesset

B
link, blink.

Annika was staring at me as we met in the doorway, waiting for me to say something. I had already told her the news of my undefeated run. It had only been a half-second or so since her immediate reply, but her eyes were already starting to narrow, measuring every instant as it passed.

“Can I quit my job?” she had asked. These were, in fact, her first five words.

I was already late ringing in with an answer.

This wasn’t what I’d been expecting. Not that I had expected anything specific. But I had just won $58,000 and two cars, something I had
not
done, it should be said, on most prior days. In Annika’s previous experience, in fact, I had not been a winner of $58,000 and two cars with disconcerting frequency.

Her day, meanwhile, had revolved around force-feeding third-grade knowledge into eighth-grade children given second-rate books but first-rate weaponry. So I don’t wish to judge her response harshly.

But there she was, waiting expectantly. Not a word of excitement, curiosity, or even genuine interest. Just: “Can I quit my job?”

Blink, blink.

I had met Annika in a coffee shop in Cleveland a couple of years earlier. Her eyes were the same color as my drink that day, and are now the color of whatever type of coffee you like best. (No matter what I write, you’ll conjure your own private Annika anyway. All I ask is that you make her anatomically correct, petite, and extraordinarily lovely. Whatever shade of coffee you would find prettiest, that is the correct color for your Annika’s eyes. Her hair, however, is the same color as the hair of someone you loved once and no longer know.) My own personal Annika had eyes which were one cream with a touch of cocoa. Which is to say: eyes you’d consider spending your whole life looking at.

On our first dates, her eyelids would sometimes curl at the outer edges, revealing just the tiniest extra bit of perfect white eyeballs. This was always just a buzzer-flash instant before she would toss her head back and laugh. This was a delightful millisecond. I would always see that glint of white and immediately feel the pleasure of pleasing a beautiful woman.

When Annika moved in, I studied those eyes for hours on our first night in my bed. Even in the half-dark of reflected Hollywood street light, there was still a flash of eye-light just before the sound of her laugh.

I had not seen that glint of light in a long time.

I was reminded of all this, as she stood there, looking up at me with those eyes that you have imagined. They were flashing again, but in a different way.

Her voice was calm. But in her eyes—my Annika’s eyes—your Annika’s eyes—was, of all things:
anger.

On some level, I understood. Between the two of us, after all, she was the educated one. I was the traveling comedic screwup. She was the more calm and composed and capable under pressure. I was the one with the scars. Annika was, after all, the teacher, whose job it was to know how much a person can and cannot learn in a limited period of time. What I’d just done must have seemed not possible, like somehow I was cheating in life.

So, in the eyes you’ve imagined, framed by the hair of someone you once loved:
Do you love me, and if so, to what immediate financial extent?

Blink, blink. A distinct lack of flash-before-laugh.

And here I’d been expecting something akin to “congratulations.”

I didn’t have the slightest idea how to answer.

I did, however, know that after taxes, the seemingly giant pile of
Jeopardy!
cash was enough to get myself out of debt, pay the rent for a while, and disappointingly little else. I had no idea what to do about the cars yet. Annika could quit her job, but I couldn’t support her for long.

And it wasn’t like she’d been on my side in all this in the first place. If she’d been eagerly making flash cards or something, hell, I’d have happily given her a kidney, not to mention either one of the his & hers Camaros.

Clearly, Annika and I would have to talk through all these unspoken feelings. We’d have to confess our anger, accept our own mistakes and shortcomings, and develop new habits so we wouldn’t repeat the same cycles. This would be a great deal of work, and at the end we might still fail.

Then again,
another
hundred thousand dollars would be just the ticket. Winning the Tournament of Champions seemed like it could solve everything.

Compared to the alternative, this seemed like the easiest option by far.

And so, back to the books. More books. Books about languages, history, theater, and music. Reference and sports books. Fashion and art books. Books about cooks, crooks, and coastal Chinooks.

The Tournament would be played in just four months.

There wasn’t a moment to waste.

My first five-subject notebook had already been filled: 300 pages of half-legible scrawls. I started a second. Eventually, a third and a fourth would be filled, all of which I still own. There are also a half-dozen thinner notebooks on especially useful subjects. One page in ten has a lurid, half-competent sketch combining references to the highest creative arts and the rudest of bodily functions.

When I began to study
ANATOMY,
there was a gleeful irony: I now started memorizing obscure body parts by linking
them
back to classical subjects. The ankle bone, for example, is called a
talus,
easily remembered by thinking of Achilles getting shot in his famous tendon while wearing flip-flops decorated with all sorts of talismans. What kind of talismans? Whatever you find stickiest. I used little keisters, dangling on strings, slapping against the ankle bone, talismans hitting the talus and making me snicker with every fresh tap.