Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (28 page)

Alex smiles gently at my response. He sees the resignation in my body language and measures how to phrase what he’ll say next.

I fear the Oooh.

But
Who is St. Augustine?
is correct.

Fred Ramen, an undefeated champion who actually went to his classes at NYU, will tell me more about St. Augustine later, on the way back to the hotel. Fred will have the slightly distant carriage of a Luxembourgian prince, but will speak like a kid showing you a hidden cache of squirt guns. I will like him immediately.

Fred, I will learn, grew up watching
Jeopardy!
with his father and was too nervous to sleep before his first time on the show. He spent much of that day loading up on caffeine and hoping not to face the returning champion, a certain Harvard-trained Berkeley professor causing much fear in the green room. Fortunately, Dan Melia won his fifth game just before Fred’s name was called. Fred soon won five games himself, but he put it down to good luck. He will still dread Dan, as we ride back to the Hilton.

Hippo, Fred will inform me, was an area ruled by the Romans, roughly where Algeria and Tunisia are today. And St. Augustine, I will learn, was a fourth-century utopian with influential sexual hang-ups, another fine mess joining Mark Twain and Gandhi in the grand human pageant. I will smile and resolve to learn more.

Fred will later confess that he studied obsessively and even created a computer program to time his Go Light reactions, comparing different techniques to the nths of a second. The forefinger is fastest, Fred will be certain. I’ll agree.

I will feel a great deal less alone.

Once I’m done reacting with hapless surprise at being correct, Alex moves over to Wes, whose $5700 current bankroll is (a) nearly twice my $3200 final score and (b) still not quite enough to feel confident of a wild card spot.

Wes’s Final Jeopardy response: “What is Santa Fe?”

His wager: large enough to clinch a wild card if his response had been correct. Large enough to eliminate him now.

Wes hears the Oooh. He looks even sicker than I feel. I’m bummed for my erstwhile caretaker, his Forrest Bounce and all.

Alex turns to Grace. She has a big smile, the correct response, and a conservative bet. She’s into the semifinals. We hug, and Alex invites her to join him at center stage.

Wes and I are happy, envious, and thoroughly defeated.

As the audience applauds, videotape versions of other advancing contestants introduce themselves to the home audience. Their mortal equivalents, meanwhile, are led to join Alex and Grace onstage. Since nine players will advance, it’s quite a brilliant little herd.

Wes and I helplessly watch them assemble. Our buzzers are limp and powerless now. We smile wanly at each other, wordlessly communicating a mutual desire to get drunk somewhere.

I turn to exit.

This, finally, was the end of my
Jeopardy!
career.

Jeopardy!
is a TV show, however. Appearances matter. So contestant wranglers Susanne and Grant and Glenn ask Wes and me to remain onstage at our podiums. We only need to be good sports for just another minute or two. There is some commotion offstage, perhaps a minor technical glitch. Hushed voices handle whatever it is.

I let the long seconds pass. I am already thinking of Merv’s big hotel, where a solid gold bed and a platinum pillow await. My fever is peaking. I need to lie down.

The camera comes on. The show is almost over. Finally.

Alex turns to the other contestants. I only have to stand here for a few more instants. But instead of congratulating the winners, he does something unusual, something I never once saw him do while watching back in the Snow Belt.

Alex starts, of all things, to
count.
He points to each contestant at his side, one by one, speaking aloud. “One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-
eight,
” Alex says. And then he looks in my direction. I cannot fathom why.

But $3200, as of that final instant, becomes one of the lowest scores ever to advance through the first round of a tournament in the history of
Jeopardy!

I want to celebrate, either by jumping up and down or by curling up on the floor and moaning softly.

Instead, my body averages the two. I lumber dizzily toward Alex and the other winners, a pasty-skinned Irish guy in a discount-rack corduroy sport coat, grinning and joking and just amused enough to remain standing and talking for another few minutes.

It feels like being given a surprise party by people I have never met.

Of course, this means some unseen producer (I have a few suspects in mind) with a wicked talent for improvisation has figured out how to frame those moments to capture my authentic response on camera. So one could say this is as manipulative and cunning as anything in “reality” television. More so, in fact, since “reality” contestants fully expect their emotions to become fodder. My feelings, arguably, are being milked.

To which I can only say:
Moo.

More to the point, I would like to add, with a few years of perspective:
Moo moo moo, moo mooooooooooo,
and, on considered reflection, further
moo.

I glance at Wes, still standing politely at his podium, watching from a great distance. Of the eleven people now crowded onto the stage, he is the only one who will never return.

He and I will stay in touch for years afterward, and I will come to know him as generous, vastly better-educated than I am, and yet modest to an extreme. We’ve lost touch of late, but from what I can find out he is improving his foreign-language skills, with aspirations of becoming one of those sainted physicians working in insufferable Third World conditions to bring health and hope to the destitute. That’s, um, after his gene therapy project is finished.

Here is everything you need to know about Wes: when I catch his eye, he just smiles back at me. “Enjoy it,” he is saying. “I’m happy for you.” This will be the only thing he ever says about it.

I believe he actually means it.

Before the cameras click off and the doojobbies stop whirring, I half-jokingly rest my head for a moment on the shoulder of a fellow contestant named Lyn.

Lyn doesn’t look too happy about it. Justifiably so. If Lyn ever reads this, I apologize. If I am her, and some strange guy carrying a contagious booger just three notches down from Ebola, something even Wes couldn’t cure, playfully puts his head on my shoulder less than twenty-four hours before I’m playing for $100,000, I reach into my ankle holster, pull out my backup buzzer, and click the poor bastard into the next life.

Lyn doesn’t do that. I owe her some thanks.

The nine survivors are all facing another day and two more rounds of play. And Dan Melia, the Ivy League Serial Killer, is still lurking in the field.

Wes goes out to dinner with Grace and her husband. I go back to the hotel to lie down.

In the lush Beverly Hilton, a plush little thermometer reads a golden 102 degrees.

I assume a shiny fetal position and groan myself to sleep in a satisfyingly self-pitying way.

A nice quiet blackness follows.

Morning.

Fever down.

My body suddenly moves with a novel ease.

The day before, while certain of losing, I have had glimmers of useful insight, thoughts of failed loves, and failing loved ones, and of losing track of the purpose of knowledge, reflections of failures greater than anything a game show can offer.

These are instantly forgotten.

I am awake and alert and excited and ready to win.

I want more. And I want it now.

CHAPTER
14

WE’RE MALAYSIA-BOUND

Also, Why People Are Looking at Me Funny in This Coffee Shop

I
n the green room, the nine of us are quiet and focused. I munch on my protein bars in careful state-dependent increments, thinking about Go Lights and timing. I am dreading the pre-taping rehearsal.

Yesterday I survived only through three gifts of fortune: a lucky Final guess, Wes’s incorrect response, and freakishly low wild card scores. Today I am again on my own. Even with my fever subsiding, I doubt that a mere Jedi buzzer trick can work against fellow champions. Perhaps at this level, everyone has fully integrated the Go Lights, Borg-like, into their central nervous systems.

I will know very soon.

The rehearsal begins. We’re switched in and out quickly. I’m not called right away, so I watch from nearby, more carefully and alertly than ever.

And to my surprise, I catch almost everyone at least peeking once or twice at the Go Lights, trying the difficult feat of honing their timing on the day of play. This is akin to timing a 90-mph fastball after only a few swings. I have no idea if they can, or how—I certainly can’t—but I find this all slightly encouraging.

I have a chance. There is hope.

Although one guy does not seem to need the practice: Dan Melia.

Dan Melia, who has written, edited, and perhaps inadvertently eaten more books than I’ve ever read. Dan Melia, whose snoring has footnotes, whose sneezes are quoted in theses, whose belches are bagged and numbered by the Library of Congress.

The Ivy League Serial Killer is loose. His buzzer is sharp, and his brain has big jaws. I have no natural defense.

We return to the green room. Soon, Susanne enters, calling names for the first of three semifinals.

“Some Guy! Dan!…”

I sit in one corner and try to hold very still. Maybe she won’t call me if she doesn’t see me.
Don’t say Bob, don’t say Bob, don’t say Bob…

“…Some Guy!”

Whew.

Bizarrely, one of the other contestants and I discover that we have actually met in passing, many years before.

In my days as an unknown comedian, playing every bowling alley and American Legion hall between the Atlantic and the Rockies, I once worked a weekday one-nighter in a bar in Wisconsin that smelled of armpits, cheese, and back hair. Standing before flashing neon beer logos and wood-paneled walls decorated in dead Green Bay Packers and deer, I struggled mightily to amuse working-class men who were only there to drink and be left alone.

These men, you notice, in no way whatsoever resembled my own father. Not even slightly. After all, they were in Wisconsin.

Usually on such nights, I remained onstage just long enough to collect a paycheck and be left alone myself, often in the company of another comedian with unrealistic dreams, or perhaps a waitress smelling of cigarettes, cleaning products, and cherry lipstick.

This particular night, one of the other comedians was a tall, thin guy with laser-beam eyes and the sort of large flowing hair the Bee Gees would have envied. His act was particularly memorable, filled with literary and historical references I was sure must have been funny, if only I knew what he was talking about. The jokes were all clever, with recognizable structures, but seemed to be drawn from a Ph.D. database I couldn’t quite access. The few jokes I
did
understand were brilliant. In another place or era or space-time dimension, this guy would have been huge.

The crowd responded, of course, with the intense kind of indifference normally reserved for Indonesian earthquakes, Iranian apartment collapses, and other such faraway tragedies. If bodies had washed up on the foot of the stage, it wouldn’t have changed the mood noticeably. And here’s the thing: the guy just smiled, kept on going, and truly enjoyed himself.

I envied that. I don’t know if it was a kind of courage, or perhaps the lunatic sort of self-reliance that must come from being smarter than everyone you’ve ever met. He seemed to know his situation, too, taking a dark glee in the experience. We didn’t speak more than a few words before the show, and I was long gone by the time he finished, probably somewhere gathering a fresh cherry stench. Besides, the next act (I swear to you) was scheduled to be a guy with a toilet plunger on his head. My will to live was sapped enough as it was.

But the image of this well-coiffed beanpole cheerfully citing Proust over the clacking of pool cues and the wafting aroma of fermenting piss never left me.

His name is Kim Worth. He remembers me first, and I am happy to recognize him. “Long way from Wisconsin, isn’t it?” we say.

The lights are sure a lot brighter here.

I wish him good luck. And I try once again to get focused.

On a side note, neither Kim nor I can remember the name of the Wisconsin town where we first crossed paths. Not to this day. Can’t even guess.