Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (47 page)

Brad’s buzzer timing was so machine-like precise that a term finally existed for someone snuffing the Go Lights: “getting Ruttered.” The phrase has been used ever since.

That night, Brad (aka the Master from Lancaster, the Ruttweiler, the Eviscerutter) took the entire group out for dinner. Most of us had changed into new shirts or blouses, relaxing offstage like any gang after work. Rotating ourselves as in a pre-game rehearsal, we matched up with new friends all night long. Pictures and a sense of fraternity grew. Beer happened. We promised we’d stay in good touch. Most of us do to this day. In this very hour as I write this, I swear, I’ve received e-mail from Robin and Leslie Frates. Dan Melia hasn’t met them all yet, but he will someday, I am sure.

As parting gifts, some contestants will receive friendship in Mrs. Butterworth quantity.

And this, finally, definitely, at last, for certain this time, was the end of my
Jeopardy!
career. Had to be.

You’d know I was lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed. Of course. A million bucks would be nice.

But it didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. I had more than great memories; I had new friends on three continents, a head full of curiosity from months buried in notebooks, a girlfriend returning to health glad for every new day, and a token of love to take along on my travels.

This was hardly an end. It was a beginning.

It was time to explore Trebekistan with my own eyes.

I didn’t realize baboons would be waiting, or that lost in Malaysia would be a fine place to be, or that slinging bricks in a cave could be a source of such joy.

CHAPTER
23

LOVE, KINDNESS, AND AN OLD CHICKEN SANDWICH

Also, Why Penguins Throw Up Down Under

A
fter the Masters, and some sleep, I came back to Jane.

The
we won!
dance was everything you’d hope. A lot of arm movement involved in this one, with a Rockette-kicking thing going on. Very aerobic. The kind of thing you do when you’ve fully returned to health.

I’m afraid, however, that I must confess something that I didn’t like any more than you will.

Jane and I didn’t quite manage to get married.

Or move in.

Or even keep dating for long.

I warned you of many surprises to come.

In fact, we even broke up, then stayed best friends anyway.

We dated other good people, whom we drove up the wall by talking about our best friend. This was a cruelty to all concerned: to the people we dated, and to each other, and most of all to the smooth resolution of this book.

Why did this happen? I do not know. But I think it is this:

Survival’s not scary. But deciding what you do with it can be. Forever, in all its forms, can be frightening. Jane and I simply saw it and barked and ran away up a log.

This was confusing as hell. It took a while to sort out that was what had happened. I wound up dating an actress, took a job on a certain TV show about crime scene investigators in Las Vegas, and went about getting on with a normal Hollywood life.

I pushed Trebekistan aside, ignoring the lessons and the fun sharp turns life had already taken. I showed just the right amount of forearm for a while, or at least that’s what I tried.

You can guess just how well that worked out.

Once Jane and I were good and miserable, just enough, we agreed to start dating again. But this time, only on one condition, for us both: we were alive, after all. So we’d best start behaving that way.

For Jane and for me, part of recovery meant thinking about what to do with our time still on the planet, challenging each other to follow interests that grew in the months that we crammed for the Masters. Call us eclectic, or dilettantes, or just eager students. All I know is it’s brain-fizzy fun.

Jane paints now, in fact, splashy abstracts and dazzling surrealist still lifes. These are bold and colorful and gorgeous, although my retinas often need to lie down. One day she will have a grand museum debut. I will print warning labels and alert paramedics. Eyeballs could burst from seeing colors that sharp.

Her study of languages continues to grow. Mayan hieroglyphs are Jane’s most recent challenge. She points and explains and I nod like a dog. There are theories and questions and great urgent ideas, and nobody really knows much at all. But sometimes I bark to show interest.

Jane has taken to cooking the same way that she paints. Which is to say: everything, all at once, vivid colors and styles. Taking the fine-dining “fusion” trend to a new level entirely, Jane has pioneered
con
fusion cuisine. It’s fragrant and vibrant and intensely tasty. You might have smelled some of Jane’s food, if you’ve ever flown over California.

I think that the paintings and cooking are Jane’s secret plan to reanimate Mayans to explain what she’s reading.

My
Jeopardy!
cramming left me with unsolved clues about the world. They are many and ridiculously far-flung. As a writer, I can work anywhere there is paper, so it’s easy to go looking for answers and hints. This is what I’ve done often since, traveling to places I never would have imagined except for my notebooks, getting as lost as I can, and not always intentionally.

Jane drove me to the airport and kissed me good-bye for a while, although we’d talk when we could on the phone. I was headed east and then south and then north and I would return from the west, carrying only what would go over one shoulder, on a half-aimed safari in the wilds of Trebekistan.

Soon, baboons seized my rental car at the Cape of Good Hope. You may remember my one-word response, repeated many times, still wafting in the cold, salty air.

I now know how it feels to believe you are about to be savagely killed by wild animals. It is not a good feeling. But I swear this is true: the adrenaline rush really
did
feel much like the
Jeopardy!
green room, amped by a factor of lots. This was a difference of degree, not of kind.

Leaving my car to walk toward the lighthouse on the Cape’s southernmost point, I left a small bag of tzatziki-flavored chips on the floor of the passenger side. I didn’t realize I’d left the window open a few inches. That was all it took. On return, I soon learned just how clever a hungry baboon can be.

The baboon, for his part, discovered he didn’t much like tzatziki. Neither of us was pleased with these particular lessons. Another baboon chased me off. I ran. One repeated word has floated in the air ever after.

It was evening, darkening, with an Antarctic breeze. Few people were left, and other baboons were emerging to scavenge food. I was in little real danger, but I didn’t know that quite yet. I was afraid that they might scavenge me.

Another tourist passed by. She was amused and concerned, and gave me an old chicken sandwich as a lure. Five minutes of planning and screwing up courage. Then
sprint, toss, evade, dash, slam! Roll the window!
and suddenly I was safe in the car.

So now I know something else, if it ever comes up:

WHEN TRAPPED BY HUNGRY BABOONS WHO HAVE SEIZED YOUR RENTAL CAR JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL IN AFRICA, THIS IS WHAT GETS YOU TO SAFETY

What is charity?

An old chicken sandwich can be spectacular wealth.

In Malaysia I got trapped in a sudden dark cloudburst.

I was looking at chevrotains, tiny snaggletoothed creatures, even smaller than pudus. (They’re also called “mouse deer,” despite being neither deer nor mouse. If that sounds confusing, consider the woodpecker.) I was in a park with a garden by a lake, and I had lost track of the time and the sky.

The downpour was almost blinding. As the rain soaked my clothes, a few minutes of walking brought me within sight of a highway. I wasn’t sure which way I was headed, but at least now I had a road. So I anticipated a long trudge, a hike that was becoming a swim.

Within moments, a guy pulled his car off the road to help out. This wasn’t a cab. I wasn’t trying for a ride yet. Before I had a chance, someone stopped. Just a guy with a heart, making room in his car.

A Proton Saga car, in fact. Malaysia’s national vehicle.

In the side window was a prayer cloth lined with Islamic verses. There was also a stuffed Pink Panther doll, hanging by four suction cups, in the rear.

For the next forty-five minutes, I sat with Faraad, a construction worker from Melaka, as he drove through a sky-opening torrent. His English was only slightly better than my Bahasa Malaysia, which is little more than “thanks” and “hello.” But still we talked about the rain and movies and music, using names and hand gestures. The conversation gradually warmed as we helped each other find words.

Faraad was about a hundred miles from home, it turned out. He had a job on a building site nearby, and was making enough money to send home to his kids, whom he loved the way he loved breathing, even though he couldn’t see them often now. His jaw clenched at this thought. I didn’t know what to say in my own language, much less his. But I understood, just like you do. So he saw that on my face, as he would have on yours.

He didn’t mind for a moment that I was dripping all over his new national car. He smiled and waved once he got me back into the city, then he drove back the way we had come. Faraad must have gone out of his way. How far I will never know.

Faraad was just glad for the company, happy to help, eager to help out a stranger.

WHEN YOU ARE STUCK IN A TORRENTIAL RAIN IN THE MIDDLE OF MALAYSIA, THIS IS WHAT GETS YOU SAFELY WARM AND DRY

What is kindness?

Not far from that spot, there’s a Hindu temple hundreds of feet in the air in a cave. You climb stairs lined with small monkeys who try to steal from your bags. Some people bring flowers that are scattered around. The cave ceiling is open, so light and vegetation descend in an ecstatic display.

It looks like a place where a god might hang out. Or Harrison Ford might get chased by a boulder. Or both.

In the distance, once you climb, are condos and industrial tracts, small explosions of squareness that block long horizons. So centuries merge, as they tend to in Trebekistan. But once you step inside the cave, all of that goes away. Light pours in from above. When I arrived, the raised temple was sun-flood-lit and glowing.

Tourists come, just as I did, so there’s work to be done, keeping the walls and the statues intact. The work on this day involved the lifting of bricks up a steep twenty-foot stairwell inside the cave, reaching up to the shrine. There was a small hill’s worth of bricks at the bottom to move. This was all done by hand in a bucket brigade: five men on the stairs, in a tireless line, hurling bricks up a slope all day long. Catch a brick, turn, and throw. Catch a brick, turn, and throw.

The bricks, I should add, were much bigger than bricks. Closer to truth: catch a cinder block, catch your balance, and heave.

These five men worked as hard as my own father did.

And they were
singing with joy.
All five. The whole time.

Not well, I would add, judging from how they laughed at their own sudden strange harmonies. But they were singing.

I stopped for a chat, which involved lots of hand-waving and pictures scribbled down on a small pad of paper. (It’s a fine way of talking; when I don’t know the words, I just draw, and then offer the pen. Most people will smile and engage in the game.) They were, after all, slinging heavy bricks in the air in a backbreaking fashion in the dark in the dank in the heat, already fatigued, with apparently days of the same to look forward to. I couldn’t quite see how singing fit in.

Perhaps, near the temple, they were singing a hymn?

No, it turns out. It was just a truly happy song.

These men were from Bali. Their families were poor. They were a very long way from home. In Los Angeles they’d be the Mexican day-laborers lined up outside building-supply stores. They were singing because they were making what to them were great riches—enough that they could send home the extra, and make things better for their families.

THIS IS THE EMOTION STRONG ENOUGH TO MAKE MEN SING WITH JOY WHILE THEY SLING BRICKS IN THE AIR IN THE DARK IN THE HEAT HUNDREDS OF MILES FROM HOME, FACING ONLY MUCH MORE OF THE SAME

What is love?

Fathers working too hard to spend time with their kids specifically
because
they love them.

Halfway around the world, in other cultures entirely. And still I had not left the Snow Belt.