Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (36 page)

And we’re also wired to defend our beliefs, always, whatever they are. (Family reunions are so delightful this way.) Our brains actually give themselves neurochemical rewards for defending existing pathways from contradiction. (This makes perfect sense for survival:
You’re alive? Keep doing the same thing,
your body says.
Here’s a yummy.
) This explains why so much “thinking” is only the pursuit of reinforcement, and why disagreement involves trying to “win.”

So even if all gods were wiped from human memory—and most of them, over the ages, probably have been—we’d probably start finding new ones tomorrow, and fighting over them not long after. Which would feel like exactly the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, science—a simple framework, bringing discipline to our fallible search for connections—has explained so much, so fast, that we can now, all of us, either feed all of humankind and/or kill every living thing, and possibly both in the same week.

Well, if
that’s
not exciting, I don’t know what is.

Maybe my God is the right one. Or maybe yours. Or maybe both. And if this isn’t the time to start getting to know each other’s gods, and saying hi, and making peace, I don’t know when it will be.

I’ll say this for the
Concordance:
nobody ever started a war over it.

Sorry to rant. Let’s play some more. If it sounds like I’m down on the whole god thing, quite the opposite. In fact, near the end, I’ll be reading from the Book of Common Prayer, presiding over Dan Melia’s marriage.

So you never know.

Speaking of Dan, he spent most of the second game of our two-day final beating me about the face and neck with his buzzer. I was not particularly fond of him, at that moment.

Until I saw the tape, later on in the Snow Belt, I didn’t remember much about that game. Or rather I
did,
but I didn’t want to.

I remembered walking onstage. My head felt like it was being cracked open from the inside, as if all of the crap I had shoved in, realizing it was no longer needed, was now clawing its way out.

There was a big throbbing zero on my scoreboard. That’s not something you forget.

But still, I resolved, I would fight with my best. I would smile and make light where I could. I would never give up until the absolute end, no matter how embarrassing the loss became. This was, after all, the Snow Belt way.

I got in on the first clue—
What is a rolling pin?
—and didn’t win on the buzzer again until after the first commercial. My Weapon shot blanks. The first round was already halfway gone.

Kim made a good run, blocking my own for a while. This was an extra frustration.

In the Double Jeopardy round, I again got the first clue, but was shut out of the buzzer for the next two entire categories. Even so, at one point, I had about $3000 and both Daily Doubles in play. With a hot streak I could still conceivably win.

After that, I was beaten on about a dozen straight clues. If my buzzer arm had suddenly detached from my body and crawled away to a corner in shame, the results would not have been any different.

When Kim hit the first of the last two Daily Doubles, this signaled the end of my chances.

Still, I had one last opportunity to take second place. The last Daily Double. But I had to bet everything again.

You can probably guess how that worked out. A few more minutes of flailing, and it was over.

I smiled where necessary, clinked complimentary champagne with Dan and Kim, and walked the long march through the hard Sony lot. I was leaving for what had to be the last time.

Max drove me home to an empty apartment.

I wanted more. But my chances were gone.

And this really was, at last, the end of my
Jeopardy!
career.

What I had now was some money, a lot of friends I’d neglected, and an empty apartment. I also had a family in Ohio whom I felt I’d let down. They’d be disappointed, and they would try not to show it. I was certain. And it would be so obvious it would hurt.

All kinds of kind people would try to make me feel better, and of course that would only feel worse.

Even Mrs. Butterworth was running out of reassuring things to say.

I was tempted to hide, stay home, and take long luxurious baths in her syrup. But there was not, unfortunately, enough Bon Ami cleanser to wash off the strong scent of failure.

There was only one way to do that, much as I dreaded it.

I bought a plane ticket to Ohio. It was time to face down the Snow Belt.

CHAPTER
17

A PEP TALK FROM PRESIDENT GARFIELD

Also, What I Bought from the J. H. Gilbert Co. of Willoughby, Ohio

O
n the drive from Hopkins airport in Cleveland, I passed through downtown for the first time since my retreat into Trebekistan.

My body felt surprisingly calm. This place was familiar. My stress was fighting against reassurance. This generated a great deal of noise.

Cleveland was bluer and brighter in spring than I’d remembered. The next long, gray winter was still at least weeks away. The roads were far less crowded than in California. This was physically relaxing, at least. I exhaled and stretched out for the ride through Cleveland’s heart. The town was actually named for Moses Cleaveland, a surveyor sent by Connecticut. Cleveland was the home of Alan Freed’s first rock-and-roll concert, which was called the Moondog Coronation Ball. No one ever specifies exactly when the previous Moondog died in office. Connecticut is the Nutmeg State. Man, that was fun.

The Cuyahoga River rolled up, cleaner and clearer than I’d remembered. But it didn’t quite match what I expected to see, so it just looked confusing. I was having trouble enough staying focused. My mind was racing even as my body unwound from the flight. Cuyahoga comes from the Mohawk word for “crooked river.” Curiously, what we call the Mohawk language does not contain an m. I’m not sure what noise the Mohawks made when something smelled good. I wonder what Mom’s cooking right now.

To my left lay Lake Erie, glittering in the sun. There were shore birds at play on the horizon. Oliver Hazard Perry fought here in the War of 1812. An important expedition to Japan was led by his brother, Matthew Perry. One working title for the sitcom
Friends
was
Six of One.
This is also the name of a fan club for the TV series
The Prisoner,
about a man who didn’t know where he was or why, and didn’t know how to get out. I know the feeling sometimes.

Jacobs Field leapt into frame, a new stadium where the Indians could break people’s hearts. I flipped on the radio and searched out the score, trying to distract my head.

They were winning, even leading their division, in fact.

I wondered if I was in the right city.

A half hour to the east, I crossed into the Snow Belt. I think I was expecting a snowy white curtain. But the sky stayed blue with defiance.

Soon I passed Lawnfield, President James Garfield’s home, with its maple trees overlooking a park. Red-haired children played with a shiny blue ball. Twenty years in this neighborhood, and I had never once been to this park. I suppose it had always been there. I turned off the boulevard and pulled to a stop, watching the ball and a big fluffy dog and two families not worried about time.

I looked over at Garfield’s house. Thirty years in Ohio, and I’d never once visited. I’d passed by here hundreds of times. He was dead; it was old. That was all I had ever seen.

But James Garfield was cool, I had learned in my studies. A Civil War general who fought against slavery. Classically educated, ambidextrous, and verbally fluent. He could write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other, both at the same time. He once found a new proof for the Pythagorean theorem. He did this for the sheer joy of learning. Our most intelligent president.

He didn’t even try to be president. He was nominated against his will, and campaigned without leaving his porch. Such talent and modesty. He was unashamed of his abilities and succeeded through kindness and work.

Now here was a man to believe in. I nominate Garfield for president of Trebekistan.

Except he was shot just four months into office and died two months later. His doctors soon killed him from gross inability, infecting him, ripping him, bursting open his liver, and calling it medical care.

I believe Connie would vote for him, too.

The president died despite Alexander Graham Bell’s best attempts. The good inventor showed up with a newfangled metal detector, hoping to track down the bullet. But the bed’s metallic frame, a rarity then, kept the metal detector from working. No one in the room understood
both
how the bedframe and the detector were constructed.

Our smartest president died, ironically, from a lack of general knowledge.

I watched the children’s red hair as they bolted toward their parents and bounded away with the bouncing blue ball. I listened hard at the
gleeeeek!
of their laughter. It was louder, I think, than my own ever was.

The Snow Belt itself held a world full of wonders. Somehow I’d just never noticed.

I was an hour late home to my mom.

Mom hugged me and laughed just to see me again.

It was nice to see all of her frogs.

There was starch on the table and starch in the freezer and starch in the fridge and the cupboard. I found pasta with beans, ravioli with crackers, and a three-layer cold gnocchi sandwich, plus pretzels and bagels and breaded fried nuggets of whatever was breaded.

I was home. It was good.

Mom never once mentioned
Jeopardy!
Never once. Not protectively. She just didn’t care. She was proud of me for reasons only mothers must know. We walked through the yard and watched bunnies at play. She asked about my health, and my work, and my love life.

And when I finally dredged up the subject of
Jeopardy!,
she was proud of how I’d won, and prouder still of how I’d lost, that I’d hugged Grace and shaken hands with Dan.

Am I yet just a child,
I thought to myself,
that I need my mother to tell me these things?

Yes I was. Yes I am.

I ate pizza with dumplings, drank a gallon of eggnog, and fell asleep, back on Mom and Dad’s couch.

When I awoke, Mom was sleeping in exactly the spot where she’d dozed after meals long before. Her cooking is strong anesthetic.

Dad would rest on the loveseat when spring nights were cool, on those nights when we’d all watched TV. He was gone now, but when I was asleep he was still there. I stared for a long time at the spot as if I could make him come back.

The TV was the same. So little had changed. Perhaps if I looked closely at the screen, Chuck Forrest would still be on
Jeopardy!,
winning and bouncing with ease. Maybe baby-faced Chuck would still trounce his opponents or towering Frank with his long walrus mustache would still gently murmur through clues.

I could almost imagine that no time had passed.

I was sitting in the very spot where I’d once been so sure I would never build any real life. Where I’d never find work I could do with real pride. Where I’d never move out, much less travel the world. Where for fun I’d watch people much smarter than I was.

And I realized that all those times Mom and Dad had watched
Jeopardy!,
they were watching it only for me.

In the morning the maple trees
whissshed
in the breeze. The backyard was alive like a zoo. Robins and cardinals and blue jays flew by. Squirrels were cavorting with glee back and forth, their tails flicking and curling as if just for show. The word
squirrel
comes from the Greek for “shadowtail,”
skia oura,
which descends to our very own word.

Wait,
I thought.
Hold on.
I’d seen Mom’s backyard before, once or twice.
Was the connection to classical Greece always here?
That seemed new.

There were wind chimes from a box store, a distant echo of ancient China. And the cheap plastic birdbath had a vaguely Roman design.

There were ancient empires all over the backyard.
Quick, come look.

I skipped lunch, not wishing to be rendered unconscious again, and headed out to see where else Trebekistan might lead.