Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (25 page)

I was imprisoning myself in Trebekistan.

Halloween came. On the calendar this time. The air date of my very first game.

My phone started to ring at 4:30 p.m., just as the show was ending back east.

Mom thought I looked nice. Connie thought I looked healthy. Old friends who knew me called just to catch up. I didn’t realize there were so many, or that it would feel like such a prize when they called.

Surprisingly, most people commented on how very confident I looked, how calm and in control, how completely relaxed. How bizarre. I was “the funny one,” that odd
Jeopardy!
player who seemed comfortable onstage. Clearly, my Midwestern years of doing comedy in VFW halls, dance clubs, and other near-combat conditions were finally starting to pay.

Other callers and e-mailers had other agendas. A cousin I didn’t know needed money for business. An old boss called me up for a loan. A girl I had dated perhaps twice in college thought I looked better than I had in school. She mentioned the exact total of money I had won in that day’s game. Twice.

Another round of calls came around 5:00 p.m. Chicago friends now.
Jeopardy!
was moving across the map like a storm front.

A series of Frequently Asked Questions was already developing. What is Alex like? (I dunno. I’ll ask him next time.) Do they give you anything to study? (No.) Really? (Really.) They don’t give you anything to study? (No.) Then how do you know all the answers? (I don’t. And I study.) Well, how do you know what to study? (Excuse me while I stab you in the lungs with my phone antenna.) Because it seems to me—(URKuhhhhhgh.)

At 6:30 p.m., I heard from a waitress I’d known briefly in Michigan, now living in Arizona. She only mentioned the money once.

At 7:00 p.m., our local broadcast began. I was almost as nervous watching as playing. Perhaps this time I would lose.

Annika and I plopped on the couch for the show. She was nervous, too, almost giddy. She blurted out answers and rooted and wagered and played along eagerly. She mentioned how confident I looked on the show, and smiled proudly at last when I won.

The buzzer-flash glint in her eyes had returned.

The week of Thanksgiving was more of the same. Friends calling friends, and those friends calling me. The phone rang a bit more every night. Men tended to point out a response they knew that I didn’t, asserting themselves competitively. Women more often pointed out responses that no one knew, creating safety. Rarely are stereotypes so grossly confirmed.

A few friends came over to reinforce these stereotypes over pizza and soda while my games aired four nights in a row.

Me, I ate protein bars.

My next-door neighbor David had a lot of pizza and soda that week. We’d met a few months after I moved to L.A., when he knocked on the door, hoping to borrow a hammer from a stranger. I invited him in for a beer, offered him any speed-reading book in the toolbox, and pretty soon I had a best buddy in town.

You’ve seen David on TV, even if you don’t watch much TV. He’s not famous, but he’s constantly working. I’ve seen him in a lot of roles, but mostly he’s on a certain show about crime scene investigators in Las Vegas. He tends to get splattered with blood a lot.

On the show, I mean. If he does this in private, I don’t know about it.

David has the honor of being the first person to introduce me to someone as a
Jeopardy!
champion. He did this about once every three seconds, possibly in his sleep. “Hey, this is my friend Bob. He won on
Jeopardy!,
” David would say. And then, sometimes, just to prove the point: “Hey, Bob—what’s the capital of Namibia?”

I would smile, pleased for his affection and proud to be called smart, but a little embarrassed at the trained-monkey moment. It was like being my parents’ child again. But not answering was never an option. Pavlov’s subject was well-trained.

David would know this. David would love this. “Come on, Bob. What’s the capital of Namibia?”

Windhoek,
I’d say, and then would come laughter. I’m not sure how often the show-off-ee was amused, but for us the game was a fun one.

I don’t remember who he introduced me to this way first.

The last person he introduced me to this way was Jane.

After millions of people had seen my five games, for a time I was recognized with surprising frequency. For a few days, it was almost every time I left the house. Each time, I reviewed the
Jeopardy!
FAQs once again from the top, with occasional slight variations.

While eating a burrito, I was once asked to repeat the $500 word for meat so rotten that it glows.
Bioluminescence,
I replied. I never finished the burrito.

Unfortunately, public discussions of dazzling meat, even brief ones, meant more time spent away from my studies. Leaving the house would have to become the exception. My own personal Ludovico Technique wouldn’t allow it: I had notebooks to study and straitjackets to wear and pried-open eyes to have droplets plunked into and
It’s a sin! It’s a sin!
to cry out.

I told most of my friends to pretend I had left the country for a few months.

David called a few weeks before the Tournament and asked me if I wanted to attend the movie
Amistad,
with Anthony Hopkins. I said no; I was too busy studying American Presidents that day.

You may notice that this is the second time
Amistad
has been mentioned, and for no obvious reason. Perhaps you even sense the presence of connections unseen.

Well. With that kind of buildup, if
Amistad
doesn’t pay off somehow, I suggest you get your money back.

Annika’s appreciation for the project again cooled.

One day, almost out of the blue, she actually said this while I was poring over a list of Famous Inventors:

“You
do
realize that the other players probably have real educations, right?”

As a matter of fact, I did. I also realized that I just couldn’t imagine Annika as the “her” for the his & hers Camaros.

(Actually, I couldn’t imagine sharing the his & hers Camaros with anyone, including me. I was, after all, well into my thirties. Camaros are for high-school quarterbacks with easy hair. At my age, driving a Camaro projects an entirely different image. To look the part fully, I would need to start wearing aviator sunglasses, shiny shirts unbuttoned to the navel, and someone else’s head entirely.)

When the breakup with Annika finally comes—very soon now—it will only be a couple of sentences long. You’ve been way ahead of that, anyway, since the first mention of Jane. The end of love can be as gradual as its beginning is sudden. But after a certain point, the rest of what follows is just moving furniture.

Whatever mistakes or flaws in our relationship may have been Annika’s doing, my own were much larger. She wasn’t the one trying to study the world by scrupulously never leaving the house. She wasn’t the one transforming our apartment into a well-lit Skinner box. And I certainly wasn’t the most attractive guy at the moment.

As the last weeks before the Tournament passed, I began playing my practice games wearing my clothes for the show. This makes perfect state-dependent sense. Theater groups do exactly the same thing. But theater groups are probably a bit more careful about doing laundry in between. The spare hour required seemed a luxury. There was so much to learn.

My diet became even more focused on green room cuisine: danishes, muffins, cola, and protein bars mostly, plus the Sony-lunch tuna croissants. My body was well trained for a
Jeopardy!
day. It was also well trained for washing up on a beach, huffing for air, and being carted back to sea on a pallet by concerned marine biologists.

I hadn’t exercised much. An extra hour of review always seemed more important than, say, maintaining my cardiovascular system or supplying oxygen to my brain. A spare hour of sleep seemed luxurious, too. When you’re trying to learn everything that ever happened anywhere to anyone, it’s hard to know when to stop.

By the night before the first Tournament taping date, I had put on almost fifteen pounds. I was sleep-deprived. I was constantly exhausted. I was depressed because I was losing my girlfriend.

And all I had to do
now
was overcome fourteen players who knew more than I did. Then, finally, all of my problems would be solved.

Clearly, I had everything under control.

CHAPTER
12

JEOPARDY FEVER

Also, I Am Ambushed by the Bishop of Hippo

J
eopardy!
’s standard tournament format was devised by Alex Trebek himself, when the show ended its first season with fifteen five-time champs. The format works, so it remains:

  The fifteen top players of the year are invited.

  Taping takes two five-show days, creating two weeks’ worth of games.

  The first day is a preliminary round. Nine players survive: the five winners, plus the top four remaining scorers, who advance as “wild cards.”