by Guy Branum
Further, arguments made at the time of my column that Chelsea should be left alone because she had not chosen to be in the public eye have been belied by the past twenty years of American political history. Chelsea is a relatively boring, talentless child of privilege who is still regularly suggested as a Democratic candidate for public office. In 2008, when she was acting as a campaign surrogate for her mother, she told a child reporter that she was off-limits for press coverage. She, a twenty-seven-year-old woman, told a fourth-grader that she was off-limits. That’s my fucking problem. A few years later, Chelsea got a six-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year job as a correspondent for NBC News. Being powerful and well connected has its perks, but it also has its downsides, and one of them is that people get to criticize you. I’ve been the criticizer, and God knows I now have to live with being the criticized.
WHAT IS EASY-BAKE OVEN?
IN BROADCAST NEWS, THERE’S a moment when Holly Hunter’s character, Jane, pulls her boss aside and tells him what he’s doing wrong. He says, “It must be nice to always believe you know better. To always think you’re the smartest person in the room.”
“No,” says Jane, “it’s awful.”
She’s not supposed to say that. She’s supposed to take his statement as a reproach, to accept that she cannot possibly always be the smartest person in the room. Instead of consenting to polite social modesty, she just talks about her truth.
What I’m saying is I don’t know how I’m supposed to write this book. After all, you’re not supposed to go around saying you’re smart. You’re allowed to say you weigh 140 pounds, you’re allowed to say you have 4 percent body fat. I’m not precisely allowed to say that I could probably name five-plus Eastern Roman Emperors, and that has affected my life in ways that are good and bad.1
One of the reasons it’s terrible to talk about knowing too much is, say, the presumption that remembering that Basil II was known as “The Bulgar Slayer” has any bearing on anything of real importance.2 Or, say, that the problem with Jane is the belief that she knows better, not that she actually thinks that she knows better.
The arrogance of thinking you’re just better at problem-solving than anyone else! In the wake of thirty years of intervening feminism, we can recognize that a male executive telling a female subordinate she shouldn’t make suggestions because she’s not doing so passively enough probably isn’t her problem. I’m not a woman, though, so I wasn’t taught by the world to doubt myself and fear acting with authority.3
Then allow me, at the top of this chapter, to stipulate that I am an arrogant prick. There has hardly been an argument with a loved one in my adult life that did not involve the words “You think you know everything!” being launched at me. It is true. I do, often, think I know everything.
The problem with having a brain and, let’s be honest, a soul that loves trivia is that very frequently, I do know the answer. In the most trivial of senses, it means that if you said, “What was the name of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s uncle who ruled one of the Crusader states?” I’d say, “Raymond.” It would come from my gut, before I even knew it was true, but I’d be certain it was true, because my gut trivia reactions are usually true.
But usually is not always.
If 95 percent of the time I know a random thing I shouldn’t know, just instinctively, it means that at least 5 percent of the time, I’m exceedingly wrong about something and just as certain about it as when I thought I knew.
Allow me to tell you an illustrative story.
One time I was at the bookstore in the Grove, Los Angeles’s most glorious mall. Really, probably the most illustrious mall in the English-Speaking World. How illustrious is it? They used to shoot Extra there. That’s right: The place where I go to the movies and buy hot dogs is so fancy that they shoot entertainment television there. Sometimes on a random morning, I’d rush to get a power cord for my iPhone and I’d have to push past the muscley kid from Saved by the Bell letting us know it was Splitsville for Blake Lively and Penn Badgley. This is the rarefied air within which the forthcoming tale takes place.
I was at the café at the top of the Barnes & Noble, in some way intending to do productive work and not doing productive work. That’s like 80 percent of my life when I don’t have a job. It’s why my book editor, the handsome Rakesh Satyal,4 had to wait far too long for this book. Anyway, I went to buy a coffee from the Starbucks in the bookstore. It’s one of those weird things that keeps saying it’s a Starbucks but isn’t quite a Starbucks and won’t take Starbucks gift cards. I mention this for two reasons:
1. To create a sense of displacement for the story to come. If the filming of Extra at the Grove reminds you that this is a sexy, rich place, the knowledge that this is a space billed as a Starbucks but which does not conform to the standard rules of a Starbucks should let you know that I was not exactly on stable ground.
2. To protest the very idea of such places. The sole redeeming factor of Starbucks is the standardization of rules. If you walk into a Starbucks, you know everything. You know your iced coffee will not be hot coffee poured over ice, you know that you can order a kid’s temp, you know precisely what that turkey panini will taste like. It is an embassy of middle-class values ready to embrace you regardless of your circumstances. Things at variance with these rules are apostasies.5
So I was in the Barnes & Noble quasi-Starbucks, and I realized I was standing behind two friends of friends. They were my friend Cressida’s sketch group partners, and one of them was her best gay. He was the kind of gay who tried to insulate himself against unfavorable social interactions by packing on as much pec meat as possible. There are some men, many of them gay, who say, “Nothing bad can ever happen to me if I have very large arms and chest.” He was one of those, and I loved him for it. There are few qualities I find as fascinating in a gay man as being super-muscley, and one of those few qualities is the cocktail of self-hatred and dedication that causes them to put such energy into their striated social insurance. Can you imagine how hot I’d be if, instead of admitting all the secret shames I’ve reported in this book, I just tried to hide from my truth in a gym. The lats I’d have!
This meaty-peced homosexual never talked to me. We were frequently in social situations together, but he usually behaved as though I were an intangible apparition. Also, Cressida’s boyfriend, my dear friend Thom, hated him.
In this particular situation, he was for some reason talking about how rare it was for someone to get to direct the film adaptation of a play he or she had directed on Broadway. I interrupted and loudly declared that Mike Nichols had directed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway and had gone on to direct the film.
This dude—let’s call him Brian because all gay guys are named Ryan, and I’d love to call him that, but that’s his actual name, and there’s not a generic gay male first name as good as Ryan (I currently have over sixteen hundred Ryans in my contact list)—said he did not think Mike Nichols had directed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway. And he hadn’t. I was wrong—very wrong. Mike Nichols, rather, directed Barefoot in the Park on Broadway, and that success had gotten him the directing gig on the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? movie. I did not know at the time who had directed it on Broadway.6 The point is that no one cares and you can just look it up on your phone and I was trying to show off for a cute boy who did not like me and I failed miserably and emphatically. Also, I was well past thirty at the time.
Because isn’t that why people know too much? To show off? To feel useful? Isn’t my vague list of the names of twenty of India’s thirty or so states just an attempt to ward off uncertainty that is as pathetic and much less sexy than the massive pecs of “Brian”?
I do not know when this became part of my personality. I don’t think it was, at its origin, concretely related to my desire to be something bigger and better than what my godforsaken farm town had made me. If the two are related, it’s not that one is the parent of the other. Instead, they are sisters, shared symp
toms of the disease of my childhood: a general awareness that I did not fit in.
Growing up, I had basically been Mom’s little helper. I could help do the math and remember the errands. It was really just my mom being a good parent and trying to teach me to do math and do errands, but in my head, it meant I was valuable. In almost no other part of my life did I feel valuable. As we have detailed elsewhere in this book, most of the choices I made in my three- or four-year-old life were considered suspect by the people of Sutter County. But knowing things—that was something I could do right.
And that’s the thing: When you’re right about a fact, you’re right. My sister was always able to know what my father or mother wanted. She could deftly give it to them while getting what she wanted. She understood the moving target of my father’s whims in ways I never could. I could do what I thought he wanted, but I could also be told that I was wrong. State capitals can’t do that to you. You can go to a book and look up what a state capital is. It won’t go anywhere. Montpelier. Doesn’t it feel good just to say it?
As the youngest, least powerful member of a family, as a person managing hostility from several family members, and whose nascent non-gender-conforming behaviors were being heavily policed, I was maybe just trying to feel some degree of power and control. If I couldn’t understand how my dad or gender norms worked, at least I had the certainty of knowing how the Calvin cycle makes photosynthesis work.
Or maybe I’m just curious. Maybe that curiosity of mine is magically real for no reason, like my homosexuality. Maybe a fairy kissed my sleeping eyelids with nerd-dew, or the argumentative demand to know how World War I started is coded into my genes. Yet three quarters of the people I was related to had no curiosity about any of this stuff at all. Only my mom and her mom seemed to think it was charming or cool.7
These are all plausible theories, but I’d like to offer you another. It is entirely possible that I became obsessed with knowing as much as I could—about as many things as I could—because of game shows.
I love game shows. Everyone should. People show up looking nice and well put together. They are then asked questions or given tasks to perform, and if they answer or perform correctly, there is a ding and they win a prize. I think all of us, when we are six, want to win a prize. We all want to hear a ding. We want to feel like we are worthy of celebration. I certainly did.
Game shows run during the daytime. This is TV watched only by people without jobs. When I was small, before the Early Reagan Recession destroyed the tranquility of my childhood, my mother was one of those said people without a job. She was a housewife with two kids and with a husband who wasn’t particularly nice to her, nor particularly respectful of her skills. Turning the TV on at ten a.m. and knowing exactly how much that washer/dryer cost was a thing that made this woman I worshipped feel better about herself. And I wanted that glow for myself.
And let’s talk about the daytime game shows of the 1980s! They were great, full of levels of carpeting unimaginable in our current television environment. You had a boring host, not particularly hard games and questions, and on some of them the possibility of getting to mingle with midlevel TV celebrities. A regular human being could go and rub elbows with Mr. Belvedere mom Ilene Graff if they only knew how to properly describe an Irish Setter without using the word “Irish” or “setter.”8
I didn’t just want to be smart. I wanted my smartness measured, and I definitely associated that measurement with being able to transition to the world of people who knew stuff and visited the larger world. It would take me through the television and into that world, which was sitcoms and entertainment, but also Congress and people who had gone to college and Europe and knowing things about the stock market. I was just waiting until I was old enough to start sending in those postcards to get to be on the Jeopardy! teen tournament. Then everything would change.
I did not make it on the Jeopardy! teen tournament. But I did experience a debased version of it my freshman year at Berkeley. A sign up on the campus bridge where clubs advertised told me that there was a quiz bowl meeting coming up. Quiz bowl. I knew that term from television. Quiz bowl meant questions, and buzzers, and rightness.
There are a lot of ways this story can go from here. More dramatic, moralistic directions. I could show up and be terrible and discover that all of my small-town pomposity had been nothing more. I could show up and be the best and realize that knowing the fact that Gdansk is Poland’s largest seaport is meaningless if you’ve never actually been there. Or I could win six hundred thousand dollars on Jeopardy! All of these would be more interesting to you than what happened.
What happened is that I showed up to quiz bowl and I was fine. I was good enough for a highly competitive team like the one at Berkeley, but not good enough to be on the main touring competitive team. I didn’t care. I loved it.
Quiz Bowl, a Primer
Let me explain how a quiz bowl match works. Four people sit across from four other people; everyone’s at a desk with a buzzer in front of them. A ninth person reads questions, a tenth keeps score. There are chairs for people to watch. No one is ever there to watch.
Every game consists of twenty toss-up questions that start out vague, then get progressively clearer. Each is worth ten points. No consultation is allowed; you and your team are all working independently to figure it out. You can ring in whenever you like, but if you get it wrong, your team gets minus-five points and cannot answer the question. This will piss off a dude on your team. Here’s a nice example from a tournament I played at:
An old joke about this American president was that if someone made a doll of him, you could wind it up and watch it do nothing for eight years. For ten points, name this man, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, who became the thirty-fourth president when he was first elected in 1952.
Dwight Eisenhower
See, it starts out with a weird fact almost no one knows, goes through a couple that make the question more gettable, then lands on the obvious “Who became president in 1952?”
If you answer a toss-up question correctly, your team gets a bonus question. They can come in different shapes and sizes, but they all are multipart and allow for collaboration. Here is a bonus question from that same mid-nineties tournament:
Did you see Hamlet?9 I didn’t, but I read it, so answer the following about that play where everyone is dead at the end:
(five points) This king usurps the throne that should have been Hamlet’s.
Claudius
(five points) This queen keeps her position by marrying Claudius, even though Hamlet later insinuates this is incestuous.
Gertrude
(ten points) This eavesdropping noble takes a sword in the gut when he listens in on a conversation between Gertrude and Hamlet.
Polonius
(ten points) This son of Polonius gets Hamlet back by wounding him with a poisoned sword, but perishes in the attempt, though not before he says, “The king is to blame.”
Laertes
That’s the structure, but a game is more than a structure, it’s also a feeling. The feeling of quiz bowl is readiness. It’s a quiet, still listening, then an instinct, then a buzz, then an answer, then points. It’s risking and winning based on your ability to identify technetium faster than seven other people who still possessed, or at least maintained until their mid-twenties, their virginity.
For seven years of my life, I recreationally sat in a room with borderline asexual, borderline Asperger’s students and answered questions about school stuff. I wasn’t a star, but I didn’t feel mediocre. I felt capable. I wasn’t mad that I wasn’t the first person at the table to identify Nadine Gordimer from a set of clues about her early short stories, I was just excited that I was around a group of people who knew more about Nadine Gordimer than I did. And not that deep, complex, single-subject knowledge my professors and grad student instructors had—no, the good kind of knowledge. Fatuous, facty, and encyclopedic. They made jokes
about Zeno of Elea and referenced the War of Jenkins’ Ear when talking about contemporary news stories. I was in the place I’d been trying to get to all of my life.
For my years at Berkeley, I went to quiz bowl meetings at least once weekly. And there I became friends with true, complete dorks. They brushed the bad habits10 off of me, they let me know I didn’t know everything about everything, and they told me to memorize lists of things. They were harsh, antisocial clichés, almost entirely male, but this wasn’t like the male harshness of my dad or football teammates. In the end, I was capable of succeeding at their game. I would get a taste of that sweet buzz. I would get to be right. I’d get to prove that if I wasn’t good for anything else, at least I knew that George Eliot wrote Middlemarch. It was the first time I really understood why guys play basketball for fun. I didn’t need to win or be the best, I just wanted to see what I could do. Get the workout. Hang out with people I thought were fun and funny and see if I could get my brain to sparkle when it needed to.11
It turns out I wasn’t really addicted to knowing what the capital of Bangladesh is. I was addicted to having my brain feel on. To feeling like I was using the fullness of my powers in a way that had rarely been possible in Yuba City. I liked quiz bowl, but I liked quiz bowlers better.
When I went to law school, they started making me tour with the quiz bowl team. At Berkeley, I’d been good enough only for tournaments being held at our school. Minnesota had a much-better-funded and much-worse-at-playing team. The mediocre skills that had been drilled into me at Berkeley were now suddenly valuable, so instead of spending my weekends checking the footnotes of law review articles, I spent them in vans driving to other college towns of the Midwest to answer questions about hockey and astrophysics.12
In the van on the way to a quiz bowl tournament in Michigan, I fell in love. On most trips, I boarded the van with a book and we all politely listened to late-1990s indie pop as we crossed America’s fruited plains, but as time wore on, our collective need for socialization crept high enough that van-wide talk began. There was a jaded conspiracy theorist who probably ended up buying a lot of Bitcoin early on; there was a bearded chemical engineer I assumed was in his mid-thirties but was actually eighteen. A Mennonite historian, a Muslim Kansan girl whose dad owned three Dairy Queens, a dazzlingly intelligent, medium-handsome architecture student, a thirty-seven-year-old who enrolled in classes at the university only so he could play quiz bowl, and a zaftig freshman girl from North Dakota who dressed and behaved exactly as though she were an eighth-grade boy.
