Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (13 page)

Up before dawn, mind-numbing days doing backbreaking work, home and in bed. And again. He did this, no exaggeration, for thirty-seven years. For my sister and me.

I believe, although I cannot prove, that he had high hopes.

Mom had a name tag, too. Hers was pinned to a smock handed to her by Newberry’s, a five-and-dime in a shopping mall surrounded by a half-mile rectangle of concrete.

In the days before box stores replaced entire small towns, Newberry’s was the sort of place you’d run to three times a week, anytime you discovered you needed pliers, a Wiffle bat, a box of plastic party sporks, or perhaps a single staple.

If you went in the doors closest to the 25¢ mechanical horsie, you’d find Mom at a cash register, talking with someone named Bea (or sometimes Ethel).

Someone’s dog would be sleeping against one wall. No one would mind.

You’d ask Mom about whatever item you were looking for—tea cozies, toy flutes, brake fluid, baby food, nine-volt batteries, fake vampire teeth, a protractor, baseball cards, or a Halloween mask of Harry Truman. And Mom would ask Bea (or sometimes Ethel) about it, and they would be certain your item was there somewhere.

Wait—Lillian might know where it is. So they’d ask Betty—who was walking by holding a live snake from the pet department—if Lillian was back from lunch. Pretty soon, someone else named Eleanor was asking Doris to page Marian.

About here, Olive would walk up, holding the same live snake from the pet department that Betty had, plus a large box of rubber balls. There would be no explanation.

Doris would ask what’s going on, and then either Mom or Bea (or sometimes Ethel) would re-explain the saga in remarkable detail.

An hour later—after you’d bought the item somewhere else, returned home, and ultimately installed it, worn it, or eaten it—you’d find yourself going back to Newberry’s, just out of curiosity.

You would find twenty-seven middle-aged women in smocks trying to get a boxful of rubber balls out of a live snake.

Mom would be awfully glad to see you again, though.

This might also explain why I went to the J. H. Gilbert Company. Newberry’s was
always
running out of rubber balls.

If you came to our small white house not far from reclaimed marshland in the middle of the Snow Belt, Mom would offer you food.

This is how she tells you she likes you. It is also how she tells you she loves you.

It may also be how she tells you it’s about to rain, or that the water heater is acting up again, or that there is a bunny outside in the backyard, quick, come look. There have been offers of food involved with each.

In the kitchen you will find, at all times: bagels in the fridge, pretzels on the table, pizzas and pierogis in the freezer, cookies in the cupboard, pasta on the stove, and lasagna in the oven. You will be expected to eat at least three.

You can make conversation by commenting on the large variety of knickknacks shaped like frogs and ducks. Several of the frogs are holding umbrellas. Discuss.

If Dad is awake and still alive, he will offer you a beer afterward. Then you will sit outside on the porch and not move for several hours. Soon you will fall asleep before you expect to and later awaken under a warm blanket you’ve never seen before.

If you get up and look around, Mom will be asleep in bed, but Dad will probably still be on the porch, sitting silently by himself. He was one of the men in the neighborhood with their shirts off, drinking beer on summer nights. Some nights there was more beer than Dad available.

I understand now that this was part of how he got himself ready to lift things for the rest of his life, but I was pissed about all the quiet for years afterward. And he was pissed at me for being pissed. But we started talking it all through, bit by bit, in the years after he was diagnosed, and we made our peace just a few hours before he died.

Dad had cancer. The doctors said that they got it all. But they didn’t. Then they said the new medicine would make him better. Instead, it made him much, much worse.

When there were only a few days left, Mom and Connie and I took shifts at his side, making sure he would never be alone. I had the night watch.

I remember sitting with him in the silence of the hospital, wishing I hadn’t hated all the quiet that had come before.

Of what he and I said to each other on the very last night—and we both knew this was the very last night—I remember every single word. Many were complete nonsense, in fact—silly quotes from Lewis Carroll, Ogden Nash, and Edward Lear—but that’s getting ahead of the story again. In any case, it was the last time I ever saw Dad laugh. I’ll remember that happy moment as long as I live.

You know how memory kicks in under stress.

The next day, when Dad was gone, rubber galoshes weren’t nearly enough. Not for me, not for Connie, not for Mom.

I might have had to buy a rubber raft.

That weekend, I had to buy a pair of black dress shoes. I still have them. I’ve tried throwing them out, but they simply won’t go. So they’re in the big stack of boxes and bags in the spare bedroom.

I only wear them occasionally, when I have to dress up.

After Dad, I avoided alcohol completely for many years. It would be a long time before I was comfortable around Potent Potables.

A dear friend named Dan Melia would help me with that. But I hadn’t quite met him in the
Jeopardy!
green room just yet.

Mom and Dad were both raised in an obscure Appalachian hamlet called Rose Hill, an hour by carriage from Cumberland Gap, the low spot where Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky converge. Daniel Boone once blazed a trail through the opening. A few generations later, my parents were born just up the road.

My father’s dad taught him how to hunt dinner with a slingshot made from a tree branch and a long slice from a discarded inner tube. This grandfather could kill a squirrel with a rock, a stick, and a car tire from twenty paces. To be honest, he scared the crap out of me.

My mother’s dad was a coal miner before becoming a Baptist minister. All things considered, he was very good around brimstone. He was so holy on Sundays that he could damn things for all eternity without even getting out of his chair. This grandfather scared the crap out of me, too.

Rose Hill was the sort of place where any child could stand on a hill and accurately predict the weather in three states for the next week, even if they’d never held a book in their hand.

My dad was one of those kids.

Up the road, you might find a family running its own little dairy farm, requiring a half-dozen children in bonnets to get up twelve hours before dawn to till the soil, gather wood, and rearrange the cows, all before walking three days to school each way with thirty-pound Bibles strapped to their backs, just to build up their strength in the Lord.

My mom was one of those kids.

In Rose Hill, large and hardworking families were a way of life, mandated both by infant mortality and a total lack of birth control. Simply producing enough food to keep all the mouths quiet was a sizable and sufficient test.

As a result, parenting skills—at least in my parents’ own experience—were rightly judged by the percentage of children who reached adulthood with twenty fingers and toes, arrangement optional. Providing for survival was all the love there was time for.

So Dad lifted things that were too big for a man of his size. Mom still feeds people too much for their height. It took a long time to be grateful for what this actually meant. It is humbling to realize it now.

Still, our house wasn’t exactly the Library of Alexandria. The few books we owned when I was very small featured Jesus as either the star or co-star. The one I remember most was a large, neatly bound
Concordance of the Bible,
which gave unto me a full and ceremonious list of all of the words used in the original, but rearranged by frequency of use into (if I understand this right) descending order of holiness.

If you’re curious, the word “unto” turns out to be pretty damn holy—about ten percent holier than “Lord,” even. I did the math. In fact, “unto” is almost twice as holy as “thou.” But then, “all” is holier than “thou,” too, so yes, everything’s holier than thou, really.

I was reading the
Concordance,
for some reason, at an unexpectedly pink and squishy age. (My relatives disagree on the exact date; all I remember is the first word my eyes ever understood, under a cartoon of a red “h-a-t.”
Hat.
A red
hat.
And a new world opened up.) The
Concordance
was a major interest when I was a small child. It’s a bit of a slog, what with the complete lack of plot or character development, but it does have a certain postmodern flair.

Clearly, I would need to be in a place with more books.

A kindly first-grade teacher intervened on my behalf. Phone calls, interviews, and tests followed—fortunately, no needles—until I was finally whisked off on a scholarship to a lush and prideful all-male college-prep mill for the wealthy, twenty miles and three tax brackets from home. Modeled on the English tradition, this was Hogwarts without magic: a private academy with rows of students in little suit jackets, a motto in Latin, ritual morning assemblies, and processionals by Elgar reverberating in every wall.

I was eight years old. I was scared to death. I said OK and just tried not to pee.

There will be times in this book when I exaggerate a little, trying to keep you entertained. You may have noticed this. The next eleven sentences will not be one of those times.

To this day, the school symbol is an interlocking “U” and “S,” strongly resembling the dollar sign itself. (In fact, the school was founded in 1890, and this exact symbol was how the U.S. Mint often marked bags of currency in the nineteenth century.) The football team is actually called the Preppers. The most famous alumnus is Jim Backus, the actor who played the tycoon Thurston Howell III on
Gilligan’s Island.
You can guess where he found inspiration.

The other kids’ parents seemed to own everything in town. The father of one of the kids across the hall owned the Cleveland Browns. Dad couldn’t even afford tickets. We never went, although we watched almost every single televised game, year after year.

Mom and Dad were so proud of me for getting this chance. They told their friends, and then told me about telling their friends.

Which was a wow. Dad was so busy lifting things and Mom was so busy helping Marian find the glue gun that getting such intense and vocal approval, so regularly, was a startling and glorious thing. No way was I ever giving that up.

However, some of the wealthier kids at Hogwarts didn’t always take kindly to a younger, poorer, smaller kid screwing up the curve in Newberry’s-employee-discount clothing. Imagine
Lord of the Flies
with a better supply of underpants, and you’ve got the idea.

All considered, it was both (a) a frequent source of physical terror, and (b) more than a working-class kid could have hoped for. This is a very confusing combination.

It’s too bad that the J. H. Gilbert Company did not sell rubber rooms. I probably could have used one.

To this day I still get quarterly Alumni Notes from the school. Many of my former classmates, after honing their sharpest skills at the best Ivy League schools, are now bankers, civic leaders, and corporate titans. They are well-groomed, square-jawed, fondly remembered, respected by all, and passing their privileges down to their own beloved children.

Who are probably strangling cats.

Revenge, when it came, came always in displays of intellect. Eventually I graduated at the top of my class. This was not because I cared about knowing much of anything, by the end, but more as a way to prove I could not be broken.

I once went to the hospital with a knot on my skull made by the cement locker-room floor. The next week I struck back at my attackers in math and history class, piling facts on their chests until they couldn’t breathe. I wanted them to see the emergency room, too, suffering from limited functions and Peloponnesia.