Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (27 page)

Wes and Grace still must play each other, of course. They are still under considerable pressure. So they are ringing in with bad guesses. I’m the only player with any money at all. One
Who is Danny Bonaduce?
later, I am practically pulling away at the first commercial break.

Keep your finger off the button,
I am thinking.
Just don’t shoot yourself, and maybe Grace and Wes will nail each other in the crossfire.

Since I know even less here than usual, maybe the way to win is by
playing
even less than usual. This may not seem logical. But you’d have to ask Gödel, and he’d just think you were trying to poison him.

In the interview segment with Alex, I seem surprisingly lucid and animated on tape, talking even faster than normal. I do not remember a glimmer of this. When I look at the video, what I see are my unsteady hands, visibly shaking when I gesture.

The game resumes. In the first minute I give two wrong responses. So much for not shooting myself. I am so discombobulated that I can’t even reply to this $100 clue in the category
PETS:

THE SMALLEST OF THE HOUNDS, THIS POPULAR PET IS ACTIVE & INQUISITIVE—YOU MIGHT EVEN SAY SNOOPY

In my first game, against Matt, I deduced the Great Pumpkin by detecting multiple hints and making a snap analysis of the relative database sizes. Today (and your internal voice should slow for comedic effect here), I cannot remember that Charlie Brown’s dog is a beagle.

Still, a category on celebrities plays to the only slight advantage I might have over a librarian and a med student. At the end of the
Jeopardy!
round, I find my timing and quickly reel off:

Who is Bob Vila?

Who is Erik Estrada?

Who is Anthony Edwards?

Take
that,
smart healthy people with real educations!

My superior knowledge of
WATCHING TV WHILE KILLING TIME IN MOTELS
carries me back into the lead, with more points than Wes and Grace combined.

Six minutes to go and I can lie down and sleep. Possibly right at the podium.

The Double Jeopardy round feels much more like six hours. I respond to the first clue—
What is a bake-off?
—and am thereafter beaten on the buzzer to every single response for over two full minutes.

Grace seizes the lead, and by the twelfth clue, I am a mute, distant third. My thought process is so slow that I’m not even completing some of the clues in my head. For example:

AFTER THE BURMANS SACKED AYUTTHAYA, SIAM’S GOVERNMENT WAS MOVED TO

Two podiums to my right, Wes buzzes in, while my eyes are just reaching

THIS CITY

at the end of the clue. My brain scrambles to catch up:
Siam is the old name for Thailand,
I think,
and the capital of Thailand is Bangkok.
But I hear Wes responding “What is Bangkok?” correctly.

Wes and Grace both open fire without mercy:

“Who is Ken Follett?”

“Who was Frederick the Great?”

“What’s a portcullis?”

Yes,
I say to myself.
What IS a portcullis?
To this day, I have not the slightest idea.

As a piercing headache sets in, I realize that I am nowhere near winning or even reaching a wild card. So I feel compelled to guess. Several times.

This is a transgression against all that is Enlightened Jeopardy, an unwise straying from the Eightfold Path. Punishment comes swiftly. I spiral downward, giving four wrong responses in the last eight clues, driving my score almost all the way back to zero. It is surely among the least-competent seventy-two-second periods in the history of the show.

Alex gives the scores at the end of Double Jeopardy as follows:

“We have Grace at $8300, Wes with $5700, and Bob—faltering slightly there, winding up with $1600.”

Faltering slightly.

The first question in the
Jeopardy!
FAQ is “What’s Alex really like?”

I don’t know what “really” is. It’s not like we hang out up at the lush
Jeopardy!
Mansion, kicking back Potent Potables in a Jacuzzi with leftover groupies whom Johnny Gilbert turned down. I’ve never met Alex outside a
Jeopardy!
-related context, and for show security reasons, I assume I never will.

But I have stood a few feet away from him for a total of several hours now, conducting a strangely disjointed conversation while trying to keep two other people from butting in. And I do know this much: the guy is always rooting for every contestant to do well. Always. I rarely glimpse his face during a game, with my eyes locked on the game board, but I hear the joy in his voice whenever any tough clue is conquered or a big Daily Double pays off.

After over twenty years, he still gets excited when the games are close, and he appreciates it when people play well. He often seems to wish everyone could win.

He’s good at the rest of the job, of course. He’s too modest to admit it, for example, but I am convinced he really does know most of the responses. But there’s a much more important aspect of Alex’s job that I’ve never heard anyone fully appreciate.

Every day that Alex Trebek goes to work, he has to deal with five batches of three bright but nervous people competing for piles of cash that could change any of their lives. He can offer just the slightest encouragement to anyone, lest it appear he is taking sides, and he can provide only an occasional bit of gentle humor without risking throwing a player off stride.

Since the best players work from the rhythm of his voice, his smoothness is completely essential. He often goes entire shows without blowing a syllable, sometimes with phrases from five different languages. His gig is a bit like a referee’s job in football: you only notice he’s human when something doesn’t go right. If he mispronounces even a single rata-tat word, be it in Latin or Chinese or Russian, it can disrupt the game, breaking a player’s timing. But perfection will not even be noticed.

And at the end of all that, almost every single day, there will be a moment where Tilly from Phoenix or Walter from Yakima or Bob from Cleveland will suddenly
not
respond correctly. This will cost them dearly. And it is Alex’s job, then, to explain gently that, no, sorry, they will
not
be buying a decent car, they will
not
be paying the mortgage off early, they will
not
be sending their kids to college. I have never seen this appreciated, and it should be: Alex’s job, as much as anything else, is to be a graceful bearer of bad news to most of the people he meets. Day in, day out. And Alex has to communicate this bad news in a matter of seconds, projecting both authority and compassion, with a wink and a smile, and see you next time on
Jeopardy!,
so long.

It’s not coal mining like my grandfather did. It’s not lifting stuff like my dad. But in its own way, that’s a hard job for anyone with even a decent heart, no matter how much you get paid.

This is the role of the
Oooh.

You have seen the Oooh. And the Oooh is good.

“Faltering slightly” was Alex’s way of saying, “It was a good run. Sorry it didn’t work out. Good luck to you.” This was a somewhat elaborate Oooh. And I appreciated it.

Still, it wasn’t so bad. With Grace already nearing the coveted $10000 mark and Wes at $5700, there was a good chance they’d both advance to the next round. And they’re both cool people. So, OK. I’d worry for their safety, knowing the Ivy League Serial Killer might be lurking nearby. But I was glad for them.

At $1600, I knew I had no shot whatsoever. So when it was time to wager before Final Jeopardy, I bet it all. There was no real risk, anyway. Besides, the Final Jeopardy category was
U.S. CITIES,
and my many years on the road wouldn’t hurt.

However.

p-TING!

THIS HISTORIC CITY WAS NAMED FOR THE BISHOP OF HIPPO ON WHOSE FEAST DAY THE AREA WAS FIRST SIGHTED

I had not the slightest idea. While the Think Music played, my mind wandered again. What follows is what I thought about for the first ten seconds or so, written in prose perhaps more lucid than the inarticulate panic I was feeling, given that my brain was about to ignite.

Annika would think I was a fool. And perhaps she was right.

Trebekistan is a fine place to visit, but not at the expense of your actual home. I had driven myself to exhaustion in what was really nothing but a massive feeding of my own ego. No wonder I was thirty-five and still so chronically single.

My sister, back in Ohio, would see once again what I’d done with the one college education between us. I still would have done little to make her life truly better.

My mom would have to see her son go down in flames on national TV.

And then I realized: since I was feeling so bad, that meant the reflected pride she and Dad always basked in when I was a kid was still important to me, so much so I would turn myself inside out to get it.

Two decades later, I was after all, despite everything I thought about myself, still eight years old and trying not to pee.

Was I actually still showing up the guys I hated in school? Yes,
yes
I was, in fact. Was I still dating women for how they salved my insecurities, and not because of actual love? Yes. Was I still, in the end, wasting my abilities, just to massage my own ego?

Well.

I had learned so much without ever learning a single goddamned thing.

So this was the end of my
Jeopardy!
career.

Unless things were about to get even stranger.

CHAPTER
13

FACING THE THINK MUSIC

Also, Strangers Seize Me by the Udder and Yank

T
he Final Jeopardy Think Music consists of two repeated choruses of a happy little tick-tocking melody, not unlike “I’m a Little Teapot” conducted by an atomic clock. After thirty seconds, the music ends with the two dramatic tympani thumps—bum-
BUM!
—signaling (a) the response period has ended, and (b) Merv is getting another royalty check.

Maybe they should replace the bum-
BUM!
with a cha-
CHING!
now and again.

For the first chorus of the Think Music, you already know what I was thinking. But I didn’t want to just leave my little electronic screen empty. A dead man could do as much, and I wasn’t one yet. So as the second chorus began, I tried to invent a reasonable enough wild guess that I could escape and go home without looking like a complete idiot.

So, giving up on answering entirely,

Let go of outcome.

I read the entire clue again a second time,

Slow down and see the obvious.

looking for any hint I could free-associate from.

Everything connects to everything else.

“This historic city”…OK, and the category is U.S. Cities…well, the oldest city in the U.S. is St. Augustine; that’s in my notebooks somewhere…“Was named for the Bishop of Hippo.” Hippo, singular. A place, not the animals. Good, I didn’t think hippos had bishops. Where the hell is Hippo? Still, any city named for a Catholic might start with “St.” or “Santa.” Good enough. St. Augustine, fine…

Electronic pen on glass.
Clackity-click-whap-clackity.
But I am second-guessing my response before it is even finished.

“On whose feast day the area was first sighted.” So it’s either on a coast or near a mountain pass. Shit. Santa Fe is really old, too. And it’s in the mountains. Crap. I wonder if somebody named Fe was from Hippo. Shit…

Bum-
BUM!

The lights come up. It’s over.

Because I’m in last place, my response will be revealed first. It’s a formality anyway, since I only have $1600 more than Annika does at home. I’m curious, hoping to double this fictional total while it exists, but mostly just relieved to have been wrong in a face-saving way.