Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (6 page)

Two months from now, you probably won’t remember exactly what you’re wearing right this minute. But if, in the next five seconds, eight naked space aliens on an interstellar roller coaster suddenly careen out of the sky and crash ten feet to your left,
boom,
you will.

In fact, every time you put on those same clothes again, they’ll be the Naked-Aliens-on-a-Roller-Coaster-Almost-Hit-Me clothes. You’ll be flooded with memories, just by glimpsing a shirt, and for the most gratuitous reasons imaginable.

This is only human. And it’s an incredibly powerful memory tool.

Thus, another step on the Eightfold Path:

1. Obvious things may be worth noticing.

2. Remember the basics: the basics are what you remember.

The trick, then, will be simple: just make any new information brain-sticky by creating connections with visceral images and sensations. I prefer big, silly ideas, but even then my mental images are usually rooted in sex, death, food, or (if a big tournament is coming up) all of the above.

Later on, we’ll use a famous singer’s sex habits to study Native American history, examine the novels of E. M. Forster through the lens of a thirty-foot set of buttocks, and visualize a hail of burning arrows to help finally sort out those three 19th Century Presidents.

If only our textbooks would treat learning this seriously.

If you did come up with all three presidents, good for you. Not everyone does.

I bet “Millard goddam Fillmore” popped into your head first, even though the others were mentioned more than twice as often. This is partly because MillFill (as his friends called him), mentioned last, is more likely to be in your short-term memory, but mostly because he was used as a teeny punchline with a mild curse inserted, creating—yes—the slightest emotional response.

See how this works? Your brain tends to assign space to information
not
according to usefulness or importance or even, sad to say, truth (this loophole is responsible for much of modern advertising and politics), but in response to big emotions and sexy drunken bullfight sensations.

Granted, this isn’t a pleasant thought for some folks. Good thing they’ll forget it soon enough.

And so, to this day, my strongest first memory of the
Jeopardy!
green room consists mostly of wanting to hose out my skull.

It would not be the last time I felt this way.

And so there I was, Dead Man Walking, about to march onto the
Jeopardy!
stage, hopelessly unable to differentiate between Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Millard goddam Fillmore. At the time, contestants walked one by one to the podiums. I can still replay every step of that endless fifteen-foot march in my head.

As I write this, sitting here in a coffee shop, I’m also still standing in darkness, ten feet from the stage. I still hear the surprising loud whirr of electronical doojobbies. I feel the cool dry blast of recirculated air fighting klieg-light heat on my face.

I can hear the studio audience, a dark and faceless but thrumming fourth wall, still hubbubbing about the previous game.

The floor director, John Lauderdale, has the imposing calm of a Marine colonel. His job requires him to control hundreds of total strangers, five times a day, creating the lush empty stillness necessary for the players and Alex to concentrate.

John silences the room without even raising his voice.

“Quiet please,” he says, in a soft, commanding tone that would settle a house fire.

“Quiet…please.”

The crowd becomes still. The electric doojobbies all lower their voices.

There is a lurch in the timeline here.
A brain under stress goes into hyper-record.

I turn to face the stage, seeing only the back of the champion in front of me. We are preparing to march on command.

As his name is called, Matt strides toward his podium, entering the fantasy world of brilliant color and flooded light into which I have never stepped.

He turns to face the camera. I notice a small bright spot just above his collar. Something is reflecting and dispersing the overhead glare.

That exact moment is flash-fried into my brain pan. Every time I’m reminded of
Jeopardy!,
part of me is still and forever standing on that spot and in that moment. Always beginning, always terrified, frozen on the edge of light, a Hiroshima shadow of fabulous cash and prizes.

My eyes focus. On the champion’s neck, a tiny bead of sweat has formed.

For the very first time, I imagine I might have a chance.

CHAPTER
5

HALLOWEEN COMES SUDDENLY

Also, Scandalous Thoughts About Ned Flanders’s Wife

“…
H
ARRIS!”

Johnny Gilbert, the voice of God in a satin jacket, suddenly booms my name. Like the subject of a stage hypnotist, I wobble involuntarily into the light and take my place at the center podium.

Thousands of miles away, and several weeks later but felt in this moment, in a small white house not far from a wintry marsh on the shore of Lake Erie, my mother and late father are watching.

Alex Trebek strides to his mark on the floor in the center of the river-blue stage.

Just like on TV,
I notice. Duh.

Alex is taller than I’d imagined. That is interesting.

Also, he is wearing what looks like a toga. This is unexpected.

It takes a second to realize he is dressed as the Statue of Liberty. It’s a slapped-together costume, an impromptu bit of backstage whimsy to surprise us all live on camera, its cheery half-assedness much of its charm. Alex has draped his finely honed suit with a dusty green quilted pad, the kind used by stagehands when moving heavy equipment, and there is a spiky foam souvenir crown on his head. In his right hand is a miniature flashlight, the size you might find attached to a gas station men’s room key.

Alex holds this aloft like the torch of freedom.

And so I salute.

We players have been instructed to applaud, of course. It’s traditional, it’s courteous, it’s good TV. Newborn babies instinctively applaud the host of a game show.

But that’s not why I’m saluting and applauding. Alex was once a highly respected newsman in Canada, with a degree in philosophy. He is now wildly well-paid and a national icon. It would be very easy for Alex to take himself too seriously. And yet here he is, goofing around like a kindly uncle chosen to baby-sit, eager to be silly if it might amuse the kids at the end of another long five-show day.

I like him immediately. And so I play along, giving Alex and his quilted-pad costume and his men’s-room-key-flashlight a full and proper salute.

Alex seems glad to have someone join the charade. We even joke a bit back and forth before the game begins. I don’t remember now what we said. It’s on a videotape somewhere, but this is the important part:
I don’t remember.

The laughter has inadvertently gotten my body to start calming down. I am coming out of auto-record brainlock, simply because I have embraced a strange moment.

This will be a good habit from now on.

We were taping in mid-September. The game was scheduled for broadcast, however, on October 31. Halloween.
That’s
why Alex was Liberty. Aha. And sure enough, the categories for our first round were all linked to Halloween as well:

I made a mental note: Always learn the broadcast date as soon as possible, the better to anticipate seasonal clues. For a game played on the Fourth of July, for example, you might want to brush up on
FORT MCHENRY, BETSY ROSS,
and
THINGS THAT LOOK COOL BLOWING UP.

Then I noticed: This game hadn’t even started, and already I was looking forward to others.

How odd. This was a bizarre shift in attitude, certainly not the behavior of someone expecting to lose.
Reel it in,
I thought to myself.
This isn’t quite Cleveland of you.
But for reasons we’ll soon explore, I was becoming comfortable before the game even started.

This is the very first clue I ever saw on
Jeopardy!,
for $100 in the category
FICTIONAL GHOSTS:

HE PIONEERED THE NOVEL WITH “ROBINSON CRUSOE” AND THE GHOST STORY WITH “THE APPARITION OF ONE MRS. VEAL”

The word “novel” jumped off the screen.
Literature,
I thought.
Oh, crap.

But as soon as I got to the word “Crusoe,” I started to feel better. Not because I’d ever read the novel—remember, in college I was a Pong Studies major—but because when I was in third grade, the grocery store where Mom shopped started giving away hardcover versions of classic books.

Our untouched-by-human-hands-since collection of these sat on a shelf near the TV, and thus near my eyeline throughout childhood for at least twenty-eight hours a day. One of these books had these words on its spine:

Robinson Crusoe—Daniel Defoe

So I would know at least one response.
Yes!
Just in case I might forget in the next three seconds, I repeated the response in my head, over and over, waiting for the moment to ring in:

Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe…

To this day, I’ve still never read
Robinson Crusoe.
Or anything by Defoe.

I
should,
I know. Eventually. Someday I will also read
Moby Dick, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment,
and possibly the rest of
Speed Reading Made Easy,
although at this point I should probably just wait for the movie version.

Meanwhile, here’s absolutely everything else I knew about
Robinson Crusoe:

 A shipwreck was involved

 Some guy named Friday