Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (9 page)

Also, Safety Instructions for Your Jeopardy Weapon

A
bout a thirtieth of a second after the buzzer-frenzy began—exactly one frame on the videotape—my finger moved of its own accord.

I glanced down at my podium, afraid even to hope.

And my light came on.

Lucky shot? Maybe. I would know for sure in about twelve more seconds. The second clue, under
FICTIONAL GHOSTS
for $200:

HE WROTE THE GHOST TALE “THE TURN OF THE SCREW” WHILE HIS BROTHER WILLIAM STUDIED SPIRITUALISM

I’d never read this book, either. Luckily, however, as a teenager I’d once briefly worked in a bookstore, where I restocked a paperback edition of
The Turn of the Screw
combined with
Daisy Miller
in one volume. The unfortunate placement of the large word
Screw
on the cover, looming over the innocent-sounding “Daisy Miller,” made me wonder if the publisher even
liked
Henry James. The author’s name had stuck in my head ever since.

My finger moved of its own free will.

My light came on again.

What’s the eye?

What is, um, water?

What’s the patella?

What are cells?

Who is Henry VIII?

Who is Houdini?

The light on my podium
kept coming on.
I just tried to stay calm and let myself believe it was happening.

Three minutes later, one quarter of the game was gone. I had almost twice as much money as the other two players combined.

The returning champion, Matt, had beaten me on the buzzer exactly
once.

These weren’t particularly difficult clues yet, mind you. Consider this, the third clue I ever responded to on
Jeopardy!
:

CAVITIES IN THE SKULL CALLED ORBITS HOUSE THESE ORGANS

This doesn’t take a neurologist to figure out. Let’s assume you have a head, and that your skull has the standard number of holes in it. We’re looking for “organs,” plural, so you need at least two of them. And the word “orbits” implies a round shape. So: they were asking for a pair of round organs in holes in your skull. If you can find your own eyeballs, you’re as strong a player as I was.

Many seemingly difficult clues are actually that simple, once you learn to decode them. Sometimes the only real task is figuring out what they’re asking.

The last clue before the commercial was this:

A VIOLENT GHOST CALLED THE BELL WITCH ALLEGEDLY MURDERED JOHN BELL IN THIS “VOLUNTEER STATE” IN 1820

Almost 90 percent of the clue is irrelevant. What they were asking was simple, found simply by scanning for whatever comes after the word “this”:

BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH THIS “VOLUNTEER STATE” BLAH

To this day, I know nothing about John Bell, the Bell Witch, how crime scene investigations were pursued in 1820, or what happened to the neato ghost-finding technology they must have had. But most of us probably know Tennessee’s nickname.

All three of us playing the actual game certainly did.

But my light just kept coming on.

The first commercial break arrived.

During any stoppage in play, contestant wranglers and makeup people swarm out and slather the contestants with water, encouragement, and (in my case) a fresh layer of chrome de-polisher. But the first break always has an extra degree of breath-catching and realizing where the heck you actually are. The adrenaline can run so high that if
Jeopardy!
were one day to replace the buzzers with switchblades, I doubt many players would notice until this first break.

So I inhaled and exhaled and mumbled shy pleasantries, but mostly I tried to stay focused and think ahead, free-associating from the categories and this day’s Halloween theme, getting my mental flash cards prepared for the next burst of play:

Halloween. Monsters. Ghosts. Specters. Hauntings. Séances. Goblins. Jack-o’-lanterns. Pumpkins. Candy corn. Costumes. Frankenstein. Mary—Wait, who wrote that? Right—Mary Shelley. Bram Stoker. Boris Karloff. Lon Chaney Jr. Vincent Price…

And so on.

This paid off almost immediately. One of the clues after the break required exactly the response I had just spent an extra second bringing to mind. It was a video clue in which a guy dressed as Frankenstein came out and grunted while these words appeared on the screen:

IN A 1935 FILM, ELSA LANCHESTER PLAYED MY BRIDE, AND IN THE PROLOGUE, THIS AUTHOR

Who is Mary Shelley?

I made a mental note never to waste a spare second during a
Jeopardy!
game again. Instead, I would think ahead like this during the first commercial, any technical stoppages, and even during other players’ Daily Doubles.

As a result, I probably owe the contestant-herders an apology.

The main Jep-shepherds that day were two bright, easygoing guys named Glenn Kagan and Grant Loud, who could easily have allowed their feather-smoothing-of-strangers gig to devolve into pat box-store-greeter jawboning. Instead, they cultivated playful, even thoughtful conversations with every contestant.

This was odd. A gentle workplace is rare anywhere, much less in show business, where the enormity of wealth can magnify every human flaw. (On a functional level, some offices that entertain America less resemble a dream factory than a Hollywood Kremlin.) But the folks at
Jeopardy!
seemed to honestly like their jobs, each other, and the contestants.

This could mean only one of two things.

Either (a) the bosses at
Jeopardy!
are actually cool, creating an environment where nice people function authentically; or (b) they have blackmail Polaroids of every employee in compromising positions with citrus fruit, a Ukrainian stewardess, and what looks like aluminum ductwork, with orders to never stop smiling.

I believe it is the former.

So, an apology, Glenn, Grant, Susanne, Maggie, and every other commercial-break chaperon over the years. I’ve usually been giving you my full attention, too. Except with a giant wall of TV screens promising tens of thousands of dollars looming over my entire field of view.

This can be distracting.

So while you were engaging me in sincere conversation, I was often just trying to grunt and mumble enough to camouflage the fact that I was still playing the game. I didn’t want the other players to pick up on it and do the same.

I hope you’ll forgive me, since this habit has led to thousands of extra dollars, the margins of several Final Jeopardy leads, and eventually a gigantic mistake that arguably even led to the circumstances of a good friend’s marriage.

Alex himself even signed the wedding certificate.

We’ll loop through that part of the timeline soon enough.

My good fortune continued through the whole first
Jeopardy!
round.

The category
BOBBING
was entirely about people named Bob.
My own first name.
Another clue was practically written for a guy from Ohio who had spent much of his adult life doing comedy:

IN HIS BOOK
WITHOUT FEATHERS,
A GHOST REPORTS THAT THE NEXT WORLD RESEMBLES CLEVELAND

In my hometown, this is one of Woody Allen’s better-known remarks.

Pure coincidence, of course, and my luck couldn’t last. After all, boardfuls of clues are created long in advance and chosen at random with no knowledge of players. There was no way good fortune like this could hold out. But all you need to know about the Double Jeopardy round is that it included this entire category:

SMALL MIDWESTERN COLLEGES

Suddenly all those years of cheap motels and gas-station food were paying off. This hardly seemed fair. My finger kept moving—I was barely even paying attention to it anymore—and my light just
kept coming on.

At the end of Double Jeopardy, I had more than twice as much money than either of the other players. Thus, I had a “lock game,” in which Final Jeopardy is rendered entirely moot. I had won in a runaway.

This lacked suspense, of course, and was less-than-perfect TV. It’s a situation I’m sure the producers do everything they can to avoid. However, after a long day of intense concentration, undulating blood pressure, and things going in and out of my nose, it was also an enormous relief.

I found myself wondering how good this Matt fellow, this Clark Kent look-alike of a returning champion, had been in the previous game. For all I knew at the time, maybe luck with categories was a large part of the game. Maybe Matt’s first game had included categories like

It was possible. So I’d have to work harder before the next taping. It was the only way I could imagine controlling the outcome.

Years later—tonight, actually, shortly before writing this very sentence—I tracked down Matt by phone. I’ve always wondered about the guy who spooked me so much.

We chatted for over an hour. Great guy. Manages a winery up near Santa Barbara. The movie
Sideways
was filmed in his neighborhood. Happy, good marriage, enjoying life. Proud of his Pinot Noirs. Next time I’m up his way, I hope to crack a bottle with him.

Matt’s proudest moment on
Jeopardy!
? In the game before ours, he did extremely well in a category called
SHEEPISH COUNTRIES:

“So, of course, this was all about countries that have lots of sheep,” he explained. “You immediately think of New Zealand, maybe Scotland. But I’ve always been a geography buff. I didn’t quite run the category, but for $1,000, the clue asked for a country in the Commonwealth of Independent States which has twice the number of sheep as people…”

Matt paused on the phone line, as if he half-expected me to blurt out the answer. This might have been a very long pause indeed.

“…and I said, ‘What is Kazakhstan?’”