Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (39 page)

I was reluctant to go at first. I like meeting new people who enjoy the same things that I do, but being a part of any convention always makes me feel like a total geek. (This includes political gatherings most of all, and I’ve attended Democratic, Republican, and Green national conventions. These are much like
Battlestar Galactica
gatherings, only with sillier costumes and much less believable dialogue.)

But the GSC had two things in its favor: it’s always somewhere not very far from Los Angeles, and there’s always an exhibition game between former champs, hosted by a Canadian (of course) named Paul Paquet.

So I went, and we played, just for fun.

I first met Jerome Vered this way. Jerome held the one-day
Jeopardy!
winnings record for a decade. He lives up in the Valley, knows every good place to eat in the northern hemisphere, and will share every ounce of his knowledge so eagerly that he may still be talking to me, right this minute. Jerome was the first person to win Ben Stein’s money, so impressively that he became Ben’s sparring partner in warm-ups for years. On
Jeopardy!,
Jerome’s a fabulous Jedi who never looks at the lights. He will wear the same shoes and trousers throughout an entire tournament. You already know why.

I also met Leszek Pawlowicz, once called the “Michael Jordan of game shows” by the
New York Times,
a Tournament of Champions winner who can spell his name without looking it up, which is more than I can do after knowing him for years. (He’s also the sort of guy who will smile gamely at that joke, even though it must have been made a thousand times.) Leszek won Ben Stein’s money by a score of 7 to 4, and is four-for-four as a
Millionaire
lifeline. Perhaps we should start up a service.

In front of maybe a hundred fervent Trebekkies, the three of us and several other good players wrestled in a simple buzz-when-you-know-it contest. I didn’t win. Neither did Jerome. Neither did Leszek.

Ed Toutant, a tall Texan who works for IBM, possibly as a supercomputer, beat all three of us. I played Ed again the next year, and I even led for a while, but he made a spectacular comeback before buying the beer.

Ed was one of
Millionaire
’s biggest winners. But when Ed was on
Jeopardy!,
he won just one single game. The correct millisecond escaped him.

Still, I often walked home to an empty apartment.

There was a serious girlfriend at the time I won
Greed,
my last One-True-Eternal-Soulmate™, but she wasn’t there for the taping. I think she was doing something terribly important, which I cannot remember at all. This particular woman was deep into showbiz. Tall and glamorous, stunningly beautiful, and well connected in Hollywood: everything I thought I wanted when I first moved to L.A. She’s a fine person, I truly believe. I still like her enormously, and I wish her much good. But we went to lots of big parties and I shook many big hands and I wondered why I still felt so lonely.

And then I wondered why I still didn’t know how to be happy.

A few months later, I met someone who did.

CHAPTER
19

JANE

Also, Jane

I
t was a blind date, actually.

My blood-spattered friend David and I often hang out with a fellow named Danny, another actor whose work you might have seen. For several years, Danny had a recurring part on a well-known TV series, a sensitive and realistic portrayal of a teenage girl fighting vampires. Really. So this meant I now had a second friend who got splattered with blood on TV. Perhaps Andy Warhol was nearly correct: in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, and splattered with blood at the time.

Danny was once in an episode that was centered entirely on his minor character. It was his chance to shine, so he threw a big party with all of his friends. I knew he was talented but I had seen little of the show, so I went to his house prepared to enjoy the evening in portions.

I shouldn’t have worried. It was one of the funniest hours I’d ever seen, even though I knew few of the characters. Danny rose to the occasion with a cocksure performance. I was also impressed with how clever and honest and surprising the writing was. I envied Danny the chance to spend time with such talent.

Months later, on our way to a ballgame, I was grumbling to David and Danny about how things had ended with the tall glamorous woman. They both had an idea for a fix-up: the woman who’d written the all-Danny episode. Jane.

I was feeling down and reluctant, but I agreed to meet her as friends, just because I admired her writing. Danny called her on his cell phone, and David introduced me—for I believe the final time—as a five-time
Jeopardy!
champion.

I could hear Jane was reluctant as well. I respected that. I couldn’t speak to her myself because I was driving on the 101 freeway, and earlier in the day John Stamos had eaten a bad piece of fish, so traffic was monstrous. Through David and Danny, Jane and I picked out a restaurant in an undistinguished shopping mall, thinking only of convenience and getting it over with.

So one cloudy afternoon of no symbolic significance, I didn’t dress up and arrived a few minutes late to meet Jane by a decaying brick wall in a dusty construction site at the edge of an unromantic mall. The restaurant, I discovered, had been closed and torn down, leaving only the nondescript bricks.

Jane hadn’t dressed up either, and was only seconds less late than I was.

So far, so good,
we both thought.

It wasn’t love at first sight for either one of us. I had described myself to her as “balding and nailbitten.” She called herself a “tiny nerd with delicate hands.” These were both pretty accurate, but we had fun right away.

We traded our flashiest conversational thumbnails—my game shows, her rhymes-with-Squeema—and laughed without force. We were friends by the time we found a place to eat, completing each other’s sentences by the time dessert came, and officially dating by the time I called David and she called Danny.

In fact, I’m not sure I ever actually fell in love with Jane. It was more that I liked her so much that it crossed into passion. I mean, Jane’s explanation of linguistic morphology involved the “Manamana” song from
The Muppets.

This was someone to spend serious time with.

There was one thing about Jane that bugged me, however. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it for a few weeks. Just something that made me edgy around her.

And then I realized: she was in a good mood almost all of the time.

Jane didn’t speak harshly when she was upset. She’d just be upset, and speak plainly, and try to solve the problem. And then she’d go back to being in a good mood.

I mean, come on. How creepy is that?

This was a woman who could throw sharp verbal knives. In a script, her characters could wield words as edged weapons, slashing and dicing and wounding precisely. But in life Jane would throw only cotton balls filled with chocolate. Even anger came wrapped in cushioning Styrofoam.

How long could you stand to be around that?

Plus, she would sometimes start to sing and dance for no reason. We’d be walking down the street, perhaps discussing ancient writing systems ( Jane was learning to read many Egyptian hieroglyphs), and then she’d suddenly break into a semi-related song, dance an impossibly silly new dance, and—worse—implore me to join right in.

How disconcerting. Obviously, this would have to stop.

Either that, or I’d have to learn how to calm down and dance.

People who really are happy, it turns out, usually don’t go around wearing billboards announcing it, handing out fliers, or evangelizing other people to be exactly the same. At least Jane didn’t.

She was just happy. Glad for every day.

We talked about it a little at first. And then we talked about it a lot.

I took the position that being happy required some definite knowledge that there was something to be happy
about
—that choosing to be happy for no particular reason was not only slightly unhinged, but possibly counterproductive. There are grave problems that must be addressed in the world, you know.

Jane would usually get up and start dancing.

And as she danced, I’d hold still in my seat, while we’d talk about the overuse of antibiotics or coastal populations threatened by rising sea levels, in all seriousness, while she was shaking her hips to the rhythm of something by Cher.

Jane almost always knew something I didn’t about the subject. Jane almost always had more fun in the process.

Eventually, she got me to stand up in these talks.

Sometimes I’d even let my hips move a little.

One day we’re curled up in a bed, and Jane finds a lump in one breast.

Of course, we’ll just go get it checked out, and it’ll soon be forgotten, we think.

Jane’s too young for this to be anything much, and there’s no environmental or dietary or other risk we can think of. So we’ll go, and they’ll say it’s nothing, and we’ll get on with our lives.

I think of my sister and missed diagnoses.

I think of my father at the end in the hospital. The doctors were
sure
he was cured.

I am secretly terrified, right there in that bed.

If Jane is, she doesn’t let on.

We go in. They do tests. And it’s something.

It’s something that has to come out.

So they cut.

They got it all, they say.

They didn’t get it all.

We go back. They cut some more.

This time they say that they’re sure.

They didn’t get everything. And there’s a chance it might have spread.

The doctor speaks in lots of technical terms. Jane asks him to fax all the test results to me. I volunteer to sort through it and translate. We both want to know every detail. It’s in our nature to know.

Jane sleeps in the bed in my book-cramped apartment while I sit up at my desk and read, looking up unfamiliar words. Cramming like
Jeopardy!
for a quiz we don’t want. If we win, the only prize for Jane is survival.

I learn about
ploidy,
which is the number of copies of DNA. In a tumor, you get extra sets. Hypertetraploidy is bad.

Jane’s lump has hypertetraploidy.

I learn about hormone receptors, indicating a tumor has integrated with the body. Having lots of receptors is bad.

Jane’s lump has lots of receptors.

I go through category after category, and Jane runs the table. Maximum bad. Maximum bad. Maximum bad.

I stop panicking halfway and notice fascination growing alongside my sadness. Grief, fully felt, can give way to sheer wonder as you realize how much you can lose.

I fall asleep at my desk, too tired to cry, just wishing I didn’t know.

How would I tell her?

How would you?

So one morning we’re driving and singing the tune of “Sing Hallelujah, Come On Get Happy”:

It’s a Giant Drug Store

But they don’t sell Giant Drugs.

They don’t sell drugs to giants,

So what the hell kind of drug store is it anyway?

The melody always sort of peters out at the end, incidentally. That’s the part where we’d trail off into laughter.

We’re going for another round of cutting, and this time they’ll look at her sentinel cells, which are camped out at lymph nodes not far from the breast. If the sentinel cells are still normal, the disease hasn’t spread.

If not, then things can get very bad.

The doctors have promised that Jane will be fine.

Doctors said exactly the same things, in exactly the same tones, about Dad.