Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (42 page)

Bhutan lies high between China and India, not far from Himalayan Tibet. Kathmandu is not far, nor is Kolkata, nor Dhaka. The kingdom is explicitly Buddhist, the only such state in this world. It was closed off to us, mostly, until very recently. It’s the place fiction calls Shangri-La.

The main thing to know is how little we know. One of their mountains is the highest one left that has never been climbed. No one even quite knows where the name
Bhutan
comes from.

But the king once announced, with the pomp of such things, that “Gross National Happiness” was more vital than Gross National Product. This is the kind of a king I could vote for.

They eat yak meat and drink butter tea and sometimes wear large red hats. Their big sports are archery and shot put. There is no word in their language for “traffic jam,” although elephants frequently migrate. Cigarettes are an illegal drug.

They just got their first traffic light. Then they took it back out. It was too much, too soon. People just stopped and stared.

I’m not saying Bhutan is paradise or ever was. Nowhere is paradise. But Bhutan seems as close to nowhere as the world may have left.

Someday I’d like to visit, and sip butter tea in a large red hat under a Bhutanese sun, eating yak meat and watching young shot putters. But I’m oddly afraid I might spoil it all. Perhaps the remnants of cola still deep in my bloodstream would contaminate something and all of the elephants would die.

Then again, something like this is happening already. Seven years ago, Bhutan got TV. There now are five satellite dishes, in a field filled with pink flowers. And so Bhutanese schoolchildren in flowing ceremonial robes can be seen acting out
Wrestlemania
moves.

Timelines and cultures converge in an uncontrolled Bhutanese swirl. Centuries mix.

So perhaps I will go. Perhaps I
must
go, and soon. It’s mutating anyway. That’s what human cultures do. But for me and for now, Bhutan remains just a place in my head, another small part of Trebekistan.

There’s so much more to the world than I ever dreamed in the Snow Belt.

The notebooks filled quickly, although not quite as fast as Jane’s hopes for my performance. She was smiling and healing. The days ticked away. We were running out of time faster than things left to study.

I just wanted to win once. Just once.

For myself, I wanted to prove I belonged on that stage. But for Jane, and more than anything else, I wanted to see the smile one win would bring, what the excitement would look like as it played on her face. This was
our
project, after all, and with time feeling so precious, every day a prayer answered, I wanted every minute she invested to pay off. I didn’t know what a we-won-at-Radio-City dance could look like, but I could imagine nothing more wonderful to see.

This was my old lifelong racket, of course, performing for others’ happiness and approval. But I understood why, in this case. Jane’s laugh was good reason. The best reason of all.

One game. Just one game would be enough.

CHAPTER
21

MY LIFE AS A ROCKETTE

Also, Why I Have an Ancient Civilization in My Pants

N
ewark was dark and freezing when I landed.

In the car, my nose kept fogging the window. It was the first time I’d seen New York without two of its towers. Six months after the unspeakable happened. Now there were empty shafts of light, a glowing memorial, rising in the twin towers’ place.

I stared from the car all the way through New Jersey. Trying to comprehend. Fogging and wiping. And trying to comprehend once again.

Grief, fully felt, can give way to sheer wonder as you realize the size of a loss.

I arose at 7:00 a.m., which was four in the morning on my body clock. The producers wanted us all downstairs and ready at 7:30.

As you may have guessed, I had been rising at 4:00 a.m. in preparation back home. At 4:00 a.m., every day, in Los Angeles. For a month, I arose at 4:00 a.m. so my body would be ready.

Jane woke up with me. Every morning.

She loves me, you know. I am grateful. Although I question her sanity.

My own you’ve already assessed.

I hurried downstairs, hoping to spot the
Jeopardy!
group in the Waldorf-Astoria lobby. I was wondering whom I would recognize in the tumult.

In the distance stood a man who looked just like Frank Spangenberg, only larger than any human being I may have ever laid eyes on.

I’d seen Frank on the show, so many years earlier, oozing the quiet assurance of a spaceship computer, all whispering menace and walrus mustache. But nobody had warned me that Frank might not be human. But here he was, almost seven feet tall.

He was so big I was slightly frightened even to say hello. He could crush me or stomp me or just gently crinkle my neck in one giant paw, all possibly by accident, not even noticing until the
thwump
of my limp body hitting the ground. I felt like a pudu approaching a moose.

(The pudu mentioned here is the world’s smallest deer, native to the mountains of Chile. They come up to your shins when they’re full-grown adults. As babies they fit in your hand like a prize. Their full Latin species name is just
Pudu pudu
—scientifically extra silly—and they look like furry Vienna sausages with large worried eyes. Their only defense is to run up a log, but only if there’s a log nearby. Sometimes they bark when they’re scared. Overall they’re endangered and look like they know it.)

Frank couldn’t have been nicer, as he shook my arm in his hand. He was as excited and nervous as I was. This was no HAL computer, just a big friendly guy with a big eager brain.

And then I noticed, around him, all the human-sized players. So many I liked. So many so good. Tournament of Champions winner Bob Verini was there. Eric “Powerhouse” Newhouse, winner of both a Teen and a Teen Reunion tournament. Kate Waits, Claudia Perry, Leslie Frates, Leslie Shannon, India Cooper, Babu Srinivasan, accomplished champions all. Jeremy Bate, the alternate, in case one of us dropped dead from nerves. Every name I recognized, every player was good.

To my left stood Chuck Forrest, winner of a Tournament of Champions, laughing with Robin Carroll, winner of a Tournament of Champions and an International Tournament. Behind them were Tournament of Champions winners Rachael Schwartz and Brad Rutter. In one glance, I could see more tournament wins than people.

The last player I glimpsed was perhaps the most skillful: Eddie Timanus, the show’s only blind five-time champion. The greatest Jedi of all. Anyone who doubts you can win without looking at the Go Lights needs only to have seen Eddie’s first five games.

The show gave him a braille card with the names of the categories. After that, he was flying solo. And Eddie soared, timing the Go Lights exquisitely. Which is all the more amazing, because he had no way to read ahead in the clue, so he couldn’t anticipate which word was the end. Alex would stop, and he’d just hear it and feel it and still beat his opponents and then out came the answers. His thumb seemed to work on its own.

He’s the Yoda of timing, the Obi-Wan of the buzzer. Watching him play is pure joy.

Also, I’m told, he will crush you in poker.

I don’t belong here,
I thought to myself. But Jane had given me one last extra present.

She couldn’t make the trip, but I wanted something small to hang on to, something to remind me of what really matters.

Jane had an old $1 token from the Luxor casino from some Vegas trip of many years earlier. (The Luxor delighted her because her knowledge of hieroglyphs meant she could fact-check the walls. She was pleased with the glyphs they got right—the headboard proclaimed “Cleopatra,” in fact—but more amused by complete random nonsense. The Luxor, seen clearly, is a transcendent work of art, a compendium of ultimate Dada poetry, unknowingly composed across entire continents and ages.) The coin was a worthless old token, in a box on a shelf in the back of a closet, but it seemed exactly right for the need.

It was just a token, not wealth. Just like excess money itself.

All its symbols were of civilizations long gone. So our time here is borrowed. It’s each moment that counts.

And as she gave it, she kissed me, with a promise to kiss me again on its return. So what mattered was already in my life, no matter what.

Just play each moment. Let go of outcome.

Jane and her token told me this three different ways.

I don’t belong here,
I thought several times. And then I’d turn the coin in my hand, quietly, and relax, and stop worrying, and remember what mattered.

We were alive. This was a very good day.

Susanne, the head wrangler, and old compadre Glenn were grinning at our group, all twitchy and eager and already buzzing like kids on their first day at camp. So were two fellows named Tony and Bob, whom I hadn’t yet met, and a sweet, smiling woman named Maggie. (Wrangler Grant was still with the show, but in some other capacity. I think he’s the guy who says
p-TING!
now.)

We were all joined together, all twenty of us, in something so novel we knew we’d remember it as long as we lived. The only question now was what those memories would be.

So we packed into a shuttle bus and rode across town. The bus itself trembled with nervous delight. There was no competition, no battle of egos, no staking of territory. Just smiles and introductions and sporting mutual encouragement. And then we all filed through the stage entrance to Radio City Music Hall. The birthplace of
Jeopardy!
340itself.

In all the years I was a comedian, I never got near this.
How do you get to Broadway?
I mused to myself.
Practice Jeopardy!

We wound through the hallways and climbed up back stairwells. The walls were all covered in photos of singers and dancers and Rockettes, decades of glorious kick-lines. Each step cast an echo of footfalls in spangles, the excitement of youth and the knowledge of age, seeking fulfillment on a stage before thousands.

Every atom here bounced with excitement.

The green room was strangely familiar, even routine. We’d all done tournaments like this before. Next would come waiting and listening for our names to be called, small talk and nerves and a tick-tocking clock, a day passing too quickly and too slowly at once.

Alex came by and said encouraging words to the group. He looked eager and nervous himself, and why not? A big Broadway debut, his face on the cover of
Playbill.
(The rest of us were all listed inside, like a cast.) I was proud for him. This was a long way from Sudbury.

Harry Friedman, the boss, and others popped in. They’d invested millions in this. Not just in prizes, but special lighting and cameras, transport and housing, the design and creation of an entire grand stage. Every player could see in the producers’ wide eyes that the games to be played meant as much to the show as to us.

I thought many times about Dan and Kim and Grace and the others. I wanted to make them look good by extension.

And then came the thought:
I could let the show itself down. I could make them look foolish for choosing me.

I knew this was almost pathologically extra, a burden no one else would have put on me. It wouldn’t help me. It wouldn’t help Jane. But there it was. I felt what I felt. I didn’t know why I was there, but I wanted dearly to live up to the honor.

I sank into a cushion and wondered whom I would play, or whom I would even want to. A wild card slot was the only real target.

The format was exactly like the earlier tournament. Five games in the first round, with five winners and four wild cards advancing. The rest I would worry about later.

After squeaking through against Grace and Wes, I’d researched other tournaments, curious what my odds with $3200 had been. Virtually zero, I learned. So my presence in New York was miraculous.

I had hoped for a miracle on the day I was sick backstage. Fair enough.

The show had doubled the value of each clue, so any score below $10000 would have almost no shot. A $20000 score virtually assured one of seeing the semis, unless something truly odd happened again. So I aimed for $20000 and hoped for the best.

The math of the situation was hardly encouraging. A miracle wasn’t necessary now. Near-perfection was.

As you already know, there are sixty clues in a game. With three Daily Doubles on which nobody buzzes, there are fifty-seven buzzer decisions to make. With difficult clues, I’d be lucky to know two-thirds of the responses. That would be thirty-eight clues. But everyone here had the skills of a Jedi, so I could only expect to win on the buzzer one time in three.