Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (29 page)

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Authors: Bob Harris

BOOK: Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!

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If anyone else once went to a comedy show in a bar smelling of cheese and armpits and saw two comedians working in mortuary silence: please, for your own sake, alert the town elders. Please hand them this book, with the next page’s corner turned down.

Town elders, attention: Your town is so nondescript that two
Jeopardy!
champions, trying with all their might, have no idea what it’s called or even what part of the state it’s in.

Maybe it’s time to consider a pumpkin festival.

An hour passes.

Susanne enters the green room, calling names for the second of three semifinals.

“Lyn! Peter! Bob!”

So Kim and Grace will play each other in the third semi. I wish them both the best.

And suddenly I’m at a podium again. Alex walks out.

And it’s time to see how far the extra study, my Jedi buzzer trick, and a normal body temperature will carry me.

Lyn is at the champion’s podium, so she calls the first clue. She dives directly to the bottom of the board, hunting amid high-dollar amounts for the first Daily Double. This is also a demonstration of confidence. This first clue, in a category called
THE LAW,
is surprisingly easy:

NOW A BODY OF LAWYERS, IT ONCE REFERRED TO A RAIL SEPARATING SPECTATORS FROM COURTROOM PROCEEDINGS

Two separate hints in the clue. Even if you’re not sure about the “bar” in “bar exam” also referring generally to lawyers, you’ve got confirmation that the word they’re looking for is a physical barrier.

I focus my eyes on the “-ngs” at the end of “proceedings,” and wait, wait, wait, wait, trying to remember just how to time the buzzer. Thinking only about the timing. Readying myself. Seeking just the right instant. Finally,
cliklikikkitylikkityclikit.

Crap.

Lyn beats me on the very first clue. I’m early on the buzzer. Adrenaline affects your reflexes. Maybe my perception of time is skewed. While Lyn responds, I take a breath and force myself to think about the categories again. Maybe focusing on the game will calm me, letting good state-dependent stuff kick in.

Lyn stays at the bottom of the board, playing
THE LAW
for $400:

FAILURE TO PAY A BUILDING CONTRACTOR MAY RESULT IN HIS LEANING ON YOU WITH THIS TYPE OF LIEN

Crap again.
I don’t know the response to the second clue. I just stand there, trying to relax and put myself back in all the games I’ve played at home.

Peter beats Lyn on the buzzer. He responds incorrectly, and the clue passes unwon. (“What is a mechanic’s lien?” is the response we don’t know.) For an instant, I mentally focus directly on Alex, something I have very rarely done in any game, imagining that I’m seeing him on TV. As the third clue begins, I am trying once again to merge where I’m standing with my living room.

I am not standing at a podium. I am standing at a low bookcase. And this is not a buzzer in my hand. This is a ballpoint pen rolled in masking tape…

THE EISENHOWER CENTER IN THIS KANSAS TOWN HOUSES NUMEROUS MEMENTOS OF THE PRESIDENT’S LIFE AND CAREER

I don’t even need notebooks filled with haunting mental images. There are American Legion halls and bowling alleys and lonely people drinking in Kansas, too. Those are haunting enough. So:

What is Abilene?

With almost no thought to the buzzer. And my light comes on.

Then, rapid-fire:

What is Easter Island?

Who was Stu Sutcliffe?

What are cigar bands?

What is Independence Hall?

What is
Mother, Jugs & Speed?

My light comes on. And on. And on and on.

I reel off ten correct responses before the first commercial. It’s like Alex and I are just chatting in a hallway, with a few interruptions as others pass. I’m
back.

At the first break, my score is three times higher than Lyn’s; Peter has a negative number. I’m ringing in on over 80 percent of my attempts. To my right, I can glimpse Peter clenching his jaw, growing frustrated. Lyn’s voice, two podiums away, is already slightly urgent.

Of course, Lyn is a working mother, and Peter runs his own business. Unlike me, they have lives.

So again, they have that particular disadvantage.

After the commercial, Alex asks about my fever, slyly letting the audience know why last week’s (that is, yesterday’s) cartoonish incompetent can suddenly wield his buzzer like the hammer of Thor. I blither as always, not sure if it’s appropriate to thank Wes and Grace for their kindness on camera, so much that I almost keep Alex from sharing a stunning note of encouragement.

Once upon a time, Alex tells me, another bottom-rung wild card stood exactly where I was standing. And
he
managed to come from behind and win the entire tournament.

Well. Pretty thrilling thought, I must say. I am secretly starting to think it’s just possible. But certainly that could never happen twice.

I mean, you’ve read this far. Can harbingers ever be this obvious, either in real life or the retelling?

Thank goodness you’re letting me step out of the narrative so often to screw with your expectations a bit. I appreciate that. Otherwise, you’d already know how everything turns out. And that’s a very bad thing to presume.

You’ll see this sort of thing again, later, when Jane, the best friend I have ever had, whom you will meet and love right along with me very soon now, is diagnosed with a particularly scary form of cancer.

Yes. That was a bomb just now. Cancer always is, you know.

If you’re angry in some weird way, you should be.
It’s not fair,
you say.
I was having a good time a minute ago.

Trust me. I do know how that feels.

Just six months after meeting her, just a bit ahead in our story and while she and I (and vicariously, you) are all curled up happily in bed together, Jane will find a lump.

The lump will be bad.

Of course you do not expect moments like this. They come while you are in the middle of things, in exactly this way. During exciting things, maybe, or sad things, or contented things, or whatever things you are doing. You never get up one morning and say, “Today I will fall in love.” But one day you do. You never get up one morning and say, “Today I will learn how I will die.” But one day you’ll do that, too. We all do.

I’m pretty sure Jane never got up one morning and said, “Today I will discover I have cancer.” But one day, she did.

None of us expects a day, later on, when we will get up so early that it’s still the coldest, blackest hour of the night, and then drive to a hospital to find out whether we will live or die.

But one day, that day came for the best woman I have ever known.

A doctor was about to cut her open—again—and grab another chunk of her from another specific spot and peer at it closely amid furrowed brows and a dozen growling gadgets. By that afternoon we would know if her particularly scary form of cancer had spread.

That particular morning came for Jane. It began at precisely 4:00 a.m. one day.

I would not be able to imagine what one does to pass the time on a morning like that, except that Jane and I actually did it once.

We sang.

Imagine that in your own car, with someone you love, on a similar drive to your nearest hospital.

We
sang.

Jane started it. She gets most of the credit. In the empty early morning, we passed a drugstore with its lights on. It said
GIANT DRUG STORE.

Jane made up a little ditty on the spot:

It’s a Giant Drug Store, but they don’t sell giant drugs.

I made up a second line:

They don’t sell drugs to giants, so what the hell kind of drugstore is it, anyway?

And then we laughed. And we sang it again and again and again and again. Trying to hold on to the song and each other and what it feels like to be alive in just one good moment, even once, with someone you love. Maybe if we just kept singing, the hospital would never come.

We sang.

The tune Jane chose for the song, if you’d like to sing it yourself for a moment, is the same one Judy Garland sang in her last MGM film appearance: “Sing Hallelujah, come on, get happy, we’re gonna chase all your cares away.”

You should have seen Jane’s face. Laughing in the passenger seat of my car, streetlights reflected in the tears on her cheek.

You know how memory kicks in.

If you need to put the book down now, reassess, and feel sad or angry or confused for a bit, go ahead. We’ll get back to the game in a minute, I promise.

That’s another thing you do around something like cancer. It reminds you that all the things you treat as so damned important usually aren’t. You completely reassess. But that takes time. Meanwhile, you get on with things anyway. You just take a breath and go on ahead with what you were doing, probably even some things that seem like they barely matter, at least for a while.

There is comfort in routine. The firing of any familiar neural pathways can feel like a letter from home. So we’ll get back to the game in a few more paragraphs, and pretty soon it’ll probably even be fun again, almost like nothing ever happened.

Still, I’m about to take a break myself, right now, as I’m writing this very sentence. Other people in this coffee shop are looking at me kinda funny.

One thing I’ve heard from people who’ve seen me on
Jeopardy!
is that while I hide nervousness well, they can always see everything else I’m feeling.

What’s a foot fault?

What’s a referendum?

What’s
Serial Mom?

For the rest of the first Jeopardy round, I remain in command. The one audio clue is a TV science-fiction star singing a ludicrously overacted version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—a track I played a dozen times at my college radio station.

Who is William Shatner?

I’m winning on the buzzer, and of the thirty clues in the round, I’ve known the responses to twenty-eight. The game is turning into a runaway: I’m at $6000, Lyn is at $2700, and Peter is still in negative numbers. All I have to do is stay the course, play and wager conservatively, and I’ll have a great shot at a runaway win.

The remaining Daily Doubles are my only concern. If Peter or I find them both, I’ll be fine. But if Lyn lands one and nails a big wager, I could still be in trouble.

Double Jeopardy begins. Alex announces the categories. I think ahead along with him.