Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (32 page)

Except for one thing: some players really
do
seem reliably better at blanking the Go Lights than others, game after game.

This may be luck—an anomaly of insufficient trials, the unlikely flip of a coin that lands heads ten straight times—but it’s also possible that some Jedis are simply that good.
Jeopardy!
clues end in a limited number of rhythms and sounds, a few hundred combinations at most. Maybe someone with particular talent, watching the game in the months before playing, might preconsciously sense the unseen buzzer-person’s own internal clock.

This would not be different from my own Jedi skills. Just much better.

In any case, by the end, you will meet one player whose name has become synonymous with tungsten destruction.

However, as Dan and Kim have begun the $100,000 two-day grand final by making the Go Lights vanish repeatedly, there is not even a word for what is happening.

It occurs to me that one ought to exist.

But there is not much time to think about it.

I am not standing at a podium. I am standing at a low bookcase. And this is not a buzzer in my hand. This is a ballpoint pen rolled in masking tape…

Finally, ten clues into the game, I find my way in
BODIES OF WATER:

SITTWE, BURMA, & CALCUTTA, INDIA ARE MAJOR PORTS ON THIS BAY

I’ve never heard of Sittwe, and the only Burmas I know are the country and the Shave. But there are three big hints: First, we want a huge body of water, since it serves ports in two countries. Second, the clue explicitly says we want a “bay.” So we just need a giant wet spot near India. Fortunately, I once drew a cartoon in my notebooks depicting, right to left, a Bengal tiger eating an Indian guy swearing in Arabic, representing the layout of the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. Thus:

What is the Bay of Bengal?
is correct. (And if you ever see a rerun of one of my games, and I’m jabbing the air with my left hand just before a response, I’m working my way across a cartoon just like this.)

The next clue takes similar seat-of-the-pants logic:

THE KAGERA RIVER IS THE LARGEST AND MOST IMPORTANT TRIBUTARY OF THIS AFRICAN LAKE

I’ve also never heard of the Kagera River. But there are only a few big lakes in Africa, and this was just a $400 clue with no other hints at all, so the writers can’t be going for anything tricky. The obvious answer, then, would be the biggest lake in Africa, which is fortunately as round as its royal namesake:

What is Lake Victoria?

Finally comes this Daily Double:

NAMED FOR AN EXPLORER IT’S CANADA’S LONGEST RIVER

I flash to a cartoon in my notebooks—a hurried blue scrawl of Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis of SCTV dressed as Canadian hosers and drowning in a river of beer—and without hesitation I blurt:

What’s the Mackenzie?

I’m climbing back into the game.

Alex, for his part, seems to be having a fabulous time, decorating his lines with Hindi accents and Scottish brogues where appropriate. He seems at least as stoked as we are.

As we reach the first commercial, Kim, Dan, and I have played a nearly perfect game, responding to all fifteen clues correctly with only one missed guess.

Despite letting seven of fourteen buzzing opportunities pass—still surrendering half of the game so far—I am tied with Dan for the lead.

During the break, I am playing ahead furiously. I still have no idea what
PEOPLE OF THE MONTH
is, and
MOVIE DEBUTS
is too broad of a category to consider. But my notebooks do have a large section on
ARCHITECTURE.

In my mind, the first important English architect loves dashing in and out of royal doorways (Inigo Jones). A German pole vaulter gropes a small dog (Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school). A hundred dancing corpses shout “Yay!” while poking the holes in a block of Swiss cheese (Swiss architect Le Corbusier). The greatest trophy in the field is shaped like a building wearing a pretty skirt (the Pritzker Prize).

On the tape, as Alex moves through the contestant chats, I’m staring intently at the board, still trying to sort out which Finnish guy—Saarinen or Salonen—designed the JFK airport and the arch in St. Louis.
Ah, wait—it was Saarinen, because he was soarin’ in.

I am also trying not to notice that my hands are becoming sweaty. I am wiping them on my suit, attempting to keep my buzzer dry.

We begin again. I blast through two in a row, then Dan rips off four in a row. I fight back with two more:

What is Rococo?

Who is Le Corbusier?

The latter, of course, is an
ARCHITECTURE
response I’ve called up just moments before.

This last clue—

THIS SWISS MAN WHO USED A PSEUDONYM WAS KNOWN FOR HOUSES ON STILTS LIKE THE SAVOIE HOUSE IN POISSY

shows you how little I really know at this point. I do not know that “Le Corbusier” was a pseudonym, I have never heard of the Savoie House nor Poissy, and I have no idea why you’d put houses on stilts. Instead, I see only this, in the category
ARCHITECTS
:

BLAH
SWISSBLAH BLAH
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH

Thanks to months spent with notebooks, I find the correct response, barely reading it off the image of the word in my head, stumbling through the pronunciation of “core-booze-yay” as if I’ve never seen it before in my life. This is not far from reality. And yet the game against the Berkeley professor with a Harvard education is still a virtual tie.

PEOPLE OF THE MONTH
turns out to be a category asking for people with names matching calendar months. Asked for a Swedish playwright, the only one I can think of is “Strindberg,” a name in my notebooks connected to Sweden and little else. I don’t see any link to a calendar month. Instants later, Dan replies:

“Who is August Strindberg?”

I am left only shaking my head. Still, on the very next clue, in
MOVIE DEBUTS
, I respond with

Who is Johnny Depp?

HA! Take
that,
guy who actually knows Swedish playwrights’ full names! But I’m starting to realize that Dan has actually
read
all the books whose titles I have merely memorized. This is not going to make my life easy.

In the remainder of
MOVIE DEBUTS,
Dan gets Valerie Harper. Kim gets Kiefer Sutherland. I get Jennifer Beals. So I get the best end of that deal. And finally, on the last clue of the round, I take an unusual risk:

STACY KEACH & SONDRA LOCKE DEBUTED IN THIS 1968 FILM BASED ON A CARSON MCCULLERS NOVEL

I ring in, naming the only Carson McCullers novel I can remember, knowing there are others on my list. But sure enough,

What is
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter?

—puts me back in the lead at the end of the round.

I still feel outclassed, however. I begin to believe I will have to continue gambling where I can in order to win in the end. You may notice that this is a departure from the Enlightened Path. Ahem.

As soon as the round ends, Dan and Kim and I are having so much fun in the competition that we immediately turn to chat, not realizing that we’re barely paying attention to Alex doing the outro for the folks at home. It’s both the hardest I’ve ever played and the most fun I’ve ever had in a game. The feeling seems entirely mutual.

During the break, I make a point of saying out loud to the others that my temperature is still down and I’m still feeling much better. More than once.

I am saying out loud something I am trying to believe, something I am just wishing were actually true.

I can feel my fever returning.

As an aside, I caution you to consider any malady I suffer here as(a) nothing that will ultimately affect any outcome, and (b) affirming little more than my own status as a certified, MedicAlert-bracelet-wearing Weenie. In fact, my status as a PWW (Person With Weenieness) is so advanced—and so uncontaminated by actual disease—that it will one day be described in sophisticated journals.

My sister Connie, on the other hand, has been diagnosed over the years with Acute Chronic Hyper-Everything. You’ve already met “Marvin,” her variety of baffling unwellnesses, and Marvin’s possible origin in the tank of a Bug Truck atomizing its neuroactive piss through the watershed of a marsh in the Snow Belt.

However, over the years, my sister has also been positively, definitively diagnosed (or misdiagnosed) with the following, among others: