Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (14 page)

College, after that, was oddly uninteresting. Everything I had ever learned, I had learned as a counterpunch. Every “A” was a right hook unthrown. Suddenly those people were gone.

So was my reason to learn.

Unsure what to do next, I chose what seemed practical, even stable: I majored in electrical engineering. But my college still had rotary phones in the dorms. This was hardly encouraging.

It didn’t help that I was two years younger than the others in my class—I was sixteen when I first arrived at college—and convinced that my obituary would include the word “virgin,” possibly in the headline. Uninterested in my own major, I spent most of college hanging around the campus radio station, doing an all-night jazz show and trying to pick up girls.

By the time I graduated, I knew a little about music, how to do large amounts of work, and how to chat lightly while nervous without passing out. Do not underestimate the importance of these three things.

Despite my near-ignorance of both Applied Pong and Pong Theory, I managed nonetheless to land a job in the field, working for a defense contractor, learning to show military guys from a friendly dictatorship how to flip switches on things that went
zip, zzzzzap,
and (ultimately)
boom.
It took a while before I understood exactly for whom I was ultimately working. Once I did, I didn’t want to. So: lift things, drink in silence, and everyone would be proud.

One morning, however, the car surprised me by bluntly refusing to drive to work. Instead, it just drove on its own, for four solid hours, back to the small white house not far from reclaimed marshland in the Snow Belt.

Mom offered me food. Dad drank a beer.

I can’t imagine how many times my dad got through his day by thinking proudly that his son was at least going to attend college, get a useful degree, and make something of himself in the world. Now that was gone.

I was twenty years old and already a complete failure.

I turned to my favorite holy book for words of guidance. But
the, and,
and
of
were no use.

If the J. H. Gilbert Company of Willoughby, Ohio, had sold rubber erasers large enough, I probably wouldn’t be here right now.

Meanwhile, on almost the very day my car suddenly decided it needed to go home and start over, Merv Griffin had just reanimated a certain defunct quiz show. And for some reason, Mom and Dad would put
Jeopardy!
on and watch it five times a week. Channel 5, 7:30 p.m., right after the Ohio Lottery drawing that Dad lost five dollars on every night.

Usually I’d come downstairs and watch it with them. So this became our routine: Mom, Dad, Alex, and I would play this game. (There were other people playing the game, too, but we only noticed a few.) I was puzzled at the time by my parents’ instant loyalty to the show. Every single night. Even though they didn’t know many of the answers. Some nights they barely even seemed interested. Strange. Mom would knit something warm for someone to sleep under, and Dad would chew on his three-starch dinner and sip his beer.

Alex, for his part, was always impeccable. He was, after all, Alex Trebek: he of the
Magnum, P.I.
mustache and laser-sharp suits. I remembered him from the daytime game
High Rollers,
which I’d watched as a curious boy just to glimpse Ruta Lee’s leg curl when she kissed him on the cheek.

Alex would zip through the clues every night, rolling through phrases in Latin and Urdu with impossible ease. I’d try to fire back, with Mom and Dad occasionally chiming in bits of their own expertise: “What is Chrysler?” or “Who’s Robert Kennedy?” The three of us combined probably knew half of the responses.

Occasionally, Connie and Rich would swing by from their hope-filled newlywed home, but during the game, they’d always find something to do in the kitchen instead. It wasn’t hard to see why. Connie had taught me to read
hat,
after all. Soon I got the scholarship to the private school. She didn’t. And she didn’t attend college, either. There wasn’t enough money for more than one of us. I was the prep-school kid.

Slowly I saw that all of the privilege-parading I’d resented in my classmates—the sheer damn self-entitled unappreciation for luck—I had been inflicting on Connie for years. And now the college education she didn’t get, I had just wasted.

Some things are so large that even an apology sounds wrong.

Connie and Rich always found a way to spend those thirty minutes in the kitchen, rearranging the dumplings, making sure all the frogs and the ducks shared their umbrellas. I understood, while wishing I didn’t.

I never imagined I might someday compete on the
Jeopardy!
stage, or that Connie might watch with delight, or that the results might one day help her recover from having bones rearranged.

Besides, the players were simply too good.

I felt impossibly dumb next to one talented fellow, Chuck Forrest, a law student from a snowy small Midwestern town a short drive from my parents’ own house. Chuck was as young as I was, but he won five games in runaways, inflicting severe thumbily harm while lightly maintaining a college-kid grin. Chuck set a new record for winnings while bouncing through clues with a fearless abandon that confused other players, including me in the Snow Belt on Mom and Dad’s couch.

Before long, Chuck had also won the $100,000 Tournament of Champions. He was self-assured and well versed and on his way with his life. I could not imagine what that would be like.

A few years later, as my early adulthood was taking the form of long days on the road, I remember also shrinking from Frank Spangenberg, a huge and gruff-looking New York transit cop with a walrus mustache and dark, hooded eyes. Frank was fascinating: he had the body of a linebacker, the amiable demeanor of Captain Kangaroo, and the knowledge of your average talking science-fiction computer. He quickly established a new five-game record for winnings that stood for over a decade.

Like Chuck, the buoyant Boy Wonder before him, Frank could be quizzed in seemingly any category—
FRENCH LITERATURE, QUANTUM MECHANICS, PLACES TO DUMP A BODY, THINGS ALEX LEFT IN HIS CAR
—and Frank would buzz in, smile through his eight-pound mustache, and answer with the calm, vaguely disturbing assurance of HAL himself. And when the show held a special 10th Anniversary Tournament of previous champions, Frank won that, too. (Chuck, however, was working overseas and couldn’t participate. It seemed clear that a cage match would be needed someday.)

Damn. I felt small.

Sometimes I think it would be nice to go back and tell the twenty-year-old me that one day I would actually meet Chuck and Frank. I would join them, in fact, in a tournament at Radio City Music Hall, competing for a million dollars. Then again, I think the twenty-year-old me would have passed out on the spot.

The forty-year-old came pretty darn close.

So I’d sit there with Mom and Dad for that half hour. Every single night.

Then I’d go back upstairs and stare at my future, trying to squint and tilt my head until I could make out some of its details. I couldn’t see anything but a giant blur.

The blur would turn out to be an accurate depiction. In the years since, I’ve had at least six different careers you’d call full-time, fourteen addresses I can remember in four states and the District of Columbia, and more than a few nights sleeping in airports or the backseat of Max. I’ve lived in shared rooms, fancy condos, tiny apartments, luxury houses, and even the YMCA. (About which: I will confirm that you can get yourself clean, and you can have a good meal. You
cannot,
however, do whatevah you feel. Especially if whatevah you feel is the need to move the hell into a real apartment.)

I have few regrets. But the possible items I may have bought from the J. H. Gilbert Company of Willoughby, Ohio, now seems like a staggering list.

The first time I ever thought about trying out for
Jeopardy!
was also the first time I ever visited California. I was toiling on the edges of the music industry, which is to say I was surrounded by people whose fashion, moral, and business instincts were largely inspired by Colombian crime lords. (From what I understand, the entire music business at that time was much like the illegal drug trade, only with more drugs.)

A business trip had sent me to Los Angeles for a week in November. In preparation, my boss provided careful instructions on how to wear my
Miami Vice
–inspired sport jacket with the sleeves pushed up to show, as he actually phrased it, “just the right amount of forearm.” This mattered greatly.

I played along, since it was a chance to glimpse the guidebook version of L.A.: Melrose, Beverly Hills, Venice, the Strip, and always, always the ocean. This was exciting. But that’s not the main thing I remember feeling.

I remember feeling warm.

“Comfortable outside” wasn’t something we had in the Snow Belt, especially in November. November was eight months into winter, the month we’d usually start getting sympathy letters from the Russian infantry.

So one night, in Santa Monica, I stood on a hundred-foot bluff overlooking the Pacific and vowed that someday I would live here in the sun forever, never be cold again, and devote myself to forgetting things as hard as I could. I’d find a job, or maybe, I dunno, win money on that quiz show, in the process of all that forgetting.

I also resolved that someday I would meet a girl and propose to her on that very spot. I even made a mental note of the location, so I could be sure of finding it again.

As it happened, I was standing between a park bench and a dirt path, about half a block from a fifteen-foot religious statue that looked like a giant penis. It’s still there, a singular object even the J. H. Gilbert Company of Willoughby, Ohio, might have found challenging to sheathe.

I didn’t know much about memory yet. But I was pretty sure I could remember
that.

This is another one of those spots where I’m not exaggerating for the next eleven sentences:

A few years later I actually did stand on that exact spot with a girl I was madly in love with. Her name was Tonya, and I asked her to marry me. Not only did she say yes, we even went ahead and said the vows, right there, the sea as our only witness, promising forevers, tears filling our eyes.

About a year after that she started sleeping with her boss, although she didn’t tell me about it for a while. Not until Christmas Eve, in fact, which she apparently thought was a good time to tell me. We stayed up all night, breaking up, and she left on Christmas morning, shortly before it was time to watch my niece and nephew open their presents.

A few months later she moved to Ecuador. I have no idea why she chose Ecuador. I never saw her again.

The spot we were standing on later collapsed in a mudslide, plummeting over the cliff for good.

I’ve been a little twitchy about commitment ever since.

I’ll skip most of the other One-True-Eternal-Soulmates™. You’re already through Leviticus and Deuteronomy. By the time you reach Thessalonians, you see the plot coming anyway.

Clearly, I’ve been doing something wrong.

Maybe I should stop dating women in eleven-sentence increments.

Eventually, on that first day I was sitting in the makeup chair, my current One-True-Eternal-Soulmate™ was the quiet, pretty, intelligent schoolteacher named Annika, the one motionless enough to wear bees. She had two master’s degrees, spoke several languages, did occasional volunteer work for the poor, and was completely trustworthy. We both had rewarding careers, we were in perfect health, and all of our friends approved.

Clearly, this could never work.

Money, or at least my part of our money, was getting tight. I was actually working several part-time creative jobs, all of which paid more in ego than actual cash. The best one was a radio gig I’d had for about a year, doing commentaries and humor for the top-rated news station in California. I was on every day, in afternoon drive time, and I had even won several awards. Finally. I was doing something Mom and Dad’s memory could be proud of.