by Bob Harris
You would find twenty-seven middle-aged women in smocks trying to get a boxful of rubber balls out of a live snake.
Mom would be awfully glad to see you again, though.
This might also explain why I went to the J. H. Gilbert Company. Newberry’s was always running out of rubber balls.
If you came to our small white house not far from reclaimed marshland in the middle of the Snow Belt, Mom would offer you food.
This is how she tells you she likes you. It is also how she tells you she loves you.
It may also be how she tells you it’s about to rain, or that the water heater is acting up again, or that there is a bunny outside in the backyard, quick, come look. There have been offers of food involved with each.
In the kitchen you will find, at all times: bagels in the fridge, pretzels on the table, pizzas and pierogis in the freezer, cookies in the cupboard, pasta on the stove, and lasagna in the oven. You will be expected to eat at least three.
You can make conversation by commenting on the large variety of knickknacks shaped like frogs and ducks. Several of the frogs are holding umbrellas. Discuss.
If Dad is awake and still alive, he will offer you a beer afterward. Then you will sit outside on the porch and not move for several hours. Soon you will fall asleep before you expect to and later awaken under a warm blanket you’ve never seen before.
If you get up and look around, Mom will be asleep in bed, but Dad will probably still be on the porch, sitting silently by himself. He was one of the men in the neighborhood with their shirts off, drinking beer on summer nights. Some nights there was more beer than Dad available.
I understand now that this was part of how he got himself ready to lift things for the rest of his life, but I was pissed about all the quiet for years afterward. And he was pissed at me for being pissed. But we started talking it all through, bit by bit, in the years after he was diagnosed, and we made our peace just a few hours before he died.
Dad had cancer. The doctors said that they got it all. But they didn’t. Then they said the new medicine would make him better. Instead, it made him much, much worse.
When there were only a few days left, Mom and Connie and I took shifts at his side, making sure he would never be alone. I had the night watch.
I remember sitting with him in the silence of the hospital, wishing I hadn’t hated all the quiet that had come before.
Of what he and I said to each other on the very last night—and we both knew this was the very last night—I remember every single word. Many were complete nonsense, in fact—silly quotes from Lewis Carroll, Ogden Nash, and Edward Lear—but that’s getting ahead of the story again. In any case, it was the last time I ever saw Dad laugh. I’ll remember that happy moment as long as I live.
You know how memory kicks in under stress.
The next day, when Dad was gone, rubber galoshes weren’t nearly enough. Not for me, not for Connie, not for Mom.
I might have had to buy a rubber raft.
That weekend, I had to buy a pair of black dress shoes. I still have them. I’ve tried throwing them out, but they simply won’t go. So they’re in the big stack of boxes and bags in the spare bedroom.
I only wear them occasionally, when I have to dress up.
After Dad, I avoided alcohol completely for many years. It would be a long time before I was comfortable around Potent Potables.
A dear friend named Dan Melia would help me with that. But I hadn’t quite met him in the Jeopardy! green room just yet.
Mom and Dad were both raised in an obscure Appalachian hamlet called Rose Hill, an hour by carriage from Cumberland Gap, the low spot where Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky converge. Daniel Boone once blazed a trail through the opening. A few generations later, my parents were born just up the road.
My father’s dad taught him how to hunt dinner with a slingshot made from a tree branch and a long slice from a discarded inner tube. This grandfather could kill a squirrel with a rock, a stick, and a car tire from twenty paces. To be honest, he scared the crap out of me.
My mother’s dad was a coal miner before becoming a Baptist minister. All things considered, he was very good around brimstone. He was so holy on Sundays that he could damn things for all eternity without even getting out of his chair. This grandfather scared the crap out of me, too.
Rose Hill was the sort of place where any child could stand on a hill and accurately predict the weather in three states for the next week, even if they’d never held a book in their hand.
My dad was one of those kids.
Up the road, you might find a family running its own little dairy farm, requiring a half-dozen children in bonnets to get up twelve hours before dawn to till the soil, gather wood, and rearrange the cows, all before walking three days to school each way with thirty-pound Bibles strapped to their backs, just to build up their strength in the Lord.
My mom was one of those kids.
In Rose Hill, large and hardworking families were a way of life, mandated both by infant mortality and a total lack of birth control. Simply producing enough food to keep all the mouths quiet was a sizable and sufficient test.
As a result, parenting skills—at least in my parents’ own experience—were rightly judged by the percentage of children who reached adulthood with twenty fingers and toes, arrangement optional. Providing for survival was all the love there was time for.
So Dad lifted things that were too big for a man of his size. Mom still feeds people too much for their height. It took a long time to be grateful for what this actually meant. It is humbling to realize it now.
Still, our house wasn’t exactly the Library of Alexandria. The few books we owned when I was very small featured Jesus as either the star or co-star. The one I remember most was a large, neatly bound Concordance of the Bible, which gave unto me a full and ceremonious list of all of the words used in the original, but rearranged by frequency of use into (if I understand this right) descending order of holiness.
If you’re curious, the word “unto” turns out to be pretty damn holy—about ten percent holier than “Lord,” even. I did the math. In fact, “unto” is almost twice as holy as “thou.” But then, “all” is holier than “thou,” too, so yes, everything’s holier than thou, really.
I was reading the Concordance, for some reason, at an unexpectedly pink and squishy age. (My relatives disagree on the exact date; all I remember is the first word my eyes ever understood, under a cartoon of a red “h-a-t.” Hat. A red hat. And a new world opened up.) The Concordance was a major interest when I was a small child. It’s a bit of a slog, what with the complete lack of plot or character development, but it does have a certain postmodern flair.
Clearly, I would need to be in a place with more books.
A kindly first-grade teacher intervened on my behalf. Phone calls, interviews, and tests followed—fortunately, no needles—until I was finally whisked off on a scholarship to a lush and prideful all-male college-prep mill for the wealthy, twenty miles and three tax brackets from home. Modeled on the English tradition, this was Hogwarts without magic: a private academy with rows of students in little suit jackets, a motto in Latin, ritual morning assemblies, and processionals by Elgar reverberating in every wall.
I was eight years old. I was scared to death. I said OK and just tried not to pee.
There will be times in this book when I exaggerate a little, trying to keep you entertained. You may have noticed this. The next eleven sentences will not be one of those times.
To this day, the school symbol is an interlocking “U” and “S,” strongly resembling the dollar sign itself. (In fact, the school was founded in 1890, and this exact symbol was how the U.S. Mint often marked bags of currency in the nineteenth century.) The football team is actually called the Preppers. The most famous alumnus is Jim Backus, the actor who played the tycoon Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island. You can guess where he found inspiration.
The other kids’ parents seemed to own
everything in town. The father of one of the kids across the hall owned the Cleveland Browns. Dad couldn’t even afford tickets. We never went, although we watched almost every single televised game, year after year.
Mom and Dad were so proud of me for getting this chance. They told their friends, and then told me about telling their friends.
Which was a wow. Dad was so busy lifting things and Mom was so busy helping Marian find the glue gun that getting such intense and vocal approval, so regularly, was a startling and glorious thing. No way was I ever giving that up.
However, some of the wealthier kids at Hogwarts didn’t always take kindly to a younger, poorer, smaller kid screwing up the curve in Newberry’s-employee-discount clothing. Imagine Lord of the Flies with a better supply of underpants, and you’ve got the idea.
All considered, it was both (a) a frequent source of physical terror, and (b) more than a working-class kid could have hoped for. This is a very confusing combination.
It’s too bad that the J. H. Gilbert Company did not sell rubber rooms. I probably could have used one.
To this day I still get quarterly Alumni Notes from the school. Many of my former classmates, after honing their sharpest skills at the best Ivy League schools, are now bankers, civic leaders, and corporate titans. They are well-groomed, square-jawed, fondly remembered, respected by all, and passing their privileges down to their own beloved children.
Who are probably strangling cats.
Revenge, when it came, came always in displays of intellect. Eventually I graduated at the top of my class. This was not because I cared about knowing much of anything, by the end, but more as a way to prove I could not be broken.
I once went to the hospital with a knot on my skull made by the cement locker-room floor. The next week I struck back at my attackers in math and history class, piling facts on their chests until they couldn’t breathe. I wanted them to see the emergency room, too, suffering from limited functions and Peloponnesia.
College, after that, was oddly uninteresting. Everything I had ever learned, I had learned as a counterpunch. Every “A” was a right hook unthrown. Suddenly those people were gone.
So was my reason to learn.
Unsure what to do next, I chose what seemed practical, even stable: I majored in electrical engineering. But my college still had rotary phones in the dorms. This was hardly encouraging.
It didn’t help that I was two years younger than the others in my class—I was sixteen when I first arrived at college—and convinced that my obituary would include the word “virgin,” possibly in the headline. Uninterested in my own major, I spent most of college hanging around the campus radio station, doing an all-night jazz show and trying to pick up girls.
By the time I graduated, I knew a little about music, how to do large amounts of work, and how to chat lightly while nervous without passing out. Do not underestimate the importance of these three things.
Despite my near-ignorance of both Applied Pong and Pong Theory, I managed nonetheless to land a job in the field, working for a defense contractor, learning to show military guys from a friendly dictatorship how to flip switches on things that went zip, zzzzzap, and (ultimately) boom. It took a while before I understood exactly for whom I was ultimately working. Once I did, I didn’t want to. So: lift things, drink in silence, and everyone would be proud.
One morning, however, the car surprised me by bluntly refusing to drive to work. Instead, it just drove on its own, for four solid hours, back to the small white house not far from reclaimed marshland in the Snow Belt.
Mom offered me food. Dad drank a beer.
I can’t imagine how many times my dad got through his day by thinking proudly that his son was at least going to attend college, get a useful degree, and make something of himself in the world. Now that was gone.
I was twenty years old and already a complete failure.
I turned to my favorite holy book for words of guidance. But the, and, and of were no use.
If the J. H. Gilbert Company of Willoughby, Ohio, had sold rubber erasers large enough, I probably wouldn’t be here right now.
Meanwhile, on almost the very day my car suddenly decided it needed to go home and start over, Merv Griffin had just reanimated a certain defunct quiz show. And for some reason, Mom and Dad would put Jeopardy! on and watch it five times a week. Channel 5, 7:30 p.m., right after the Ohio Lottery drawing that Dad lost five dollars on every night.
Usually I’d come downstairs and watch it with them. So this became our routine: Mom, Dad, Alex, and I would play this game. (There were other people playing the game, too, but we only noticed a few.) I was puzzled at the time by my parents’ instant loyalty to the show. Every single night. Even though they didn’t know many of the answers. Some nights they barely even seemed interested. Strange. Mom would knit something warm for someone to sleep under, and Dad would chew on his three-starch dinner and sip his beer.
Alex, for his part, was always impeccable. He was, after all, Alex Trebek: he of the Magnum, P.I. mustache and laser-sharp suits. I remembered him from the daytime game High Rollers, which I’d watched as a curious boy just to glimpse Ruta Lee’s leg curl when she kissed him on the cheek.
Alex would zip through the clues every night, rolling through phrases in Latin and Urdu with impossible ease. I’d try to fire back, with Mom and Dad occasionally chiming in bits of their own expertise: “What is Chrysler?” or “Who’s Robert Kennedy?” The three of us combined probably knew half of the responses.
Occasionally, Connie and Rich would swing by from their hope-filled newlywed home, but during the game, they’d always find something to do in the kitchen instead. It wasn’t hard to see why. Connie had taught me to read hat, after all. Soon I got the scholarship to the private school. She didn’t. And she didn’t attend college, either. There wasn’t enough money for more than one of us. I was the prep-school kid.
Slowly I saw that all of the privilege-parading I’d resented in my classmates—the sheer damn self-entitled unappreciation for luck—I had been inflicting on Connie for years. And now the college education she didn’t get, I had just wasted.
Some things are so large that even an apology sounds wrong.
Connie and Rich always found a way to spend those thirty minutes in the kitchen, rearranging the dumplings, making sure all the frogs and the ducks shared their umbrellas. I understood, while wishing I didn’t.
I never imagined I might someday compete on the Jeopardy! stage, or that Connie might watch with delight, or that the results might one day help her recover from having bones rearranged.
Besides, the players were simply too good.
I felt impossibly dumb next to one talented fellow, Chuck Forrest, a law student from a snowy small Midwestern town a short drive from my parents’ own house. Chuck was as young as I was, but he won five games in runaways, inflicting severe thumbily harm while lightly maintaining a college-kid grin. Chuck set a new record for winnings while bouncing through clues with a fearless abandon that confused other players, including me in the Snow Belt on Mom and Dad’s couch.
Before long, Chuck had also won the $100,000 Tournament of Champions. He was self-assured and well versed and on his way with his life. I could not imagine what that would be like.
A few years later, as my early adulthood was taking the form of long days on the road, I remember also shrinking from Frank Spangenberg, a huge and gruff-looking New York transit cop with a walrus mustache and dark, hooded eyes. Frank was fascinating: he had the body of a linebacker, the amiable demeanor of Captain Kangaroo, and the knowledge of your average talking science-fiction computer. He quickly established a new five-game record for winnings that stood for over a decade.
Like Chuck, the buoyant Boy Wonder before him, Frank could be quizzed in seemingly any category—FRENCH LITERATURE, QUANTUM MECHANICS, PLACES TO DUMP A BODY, THINGS ALEX LEFT IN HIS CAR—and Frank would buzz in, smile through his eight-pound mustache, and answer with the calm, vaguely disturbing
assurance of HAL himself. And when the show held a special 10th Anniversary Tournament of previous champions, Frank won that, too. (Chuck, however, was working overseas and couldn’t participate. It seemed clear that a cage match would be needed someday.)
Damn. I felt small.
Sometimes I think it would be nice to go back and tell the twenty-year-old me that one day I would actually meet Chuck and Frank. I would join them, in fact, in a tournament at Radio City Music Hall, competing for a million dollars. Then again, I think the twenty-year-old me would have passed out on the spot.
The forty-year-old came pretty darn close.
So I’d sit there with Mom and Dad for that half hour. Every single night.
Then I’d go back upstairs and stare at my future, trying to squint and tilt my head until I could make out some of its details. I couldn’t see anything but a giant blur.
The blur would turn out to be an accurate depiction. In the years since, I’ve had at least six different careers you’d call full-time, fourteen addresses I can remember in four states and the District of Columbia, and more than a few nights sleeping in airports or the backseat of Max. I’ve lived in shared rooms, fancy condos, tiny apartments, luxury houses, and even the YMCA. (About which: I will confirm that you can get yourself clean, and you can have a good meal. You cannot, however, do whatevah you feel. Especially if whatevah you feel is the need to move the hell into a real apartment.)
I have few regrets. But the possible items I may have bought from the J. H. Gilbert Company of Willoughby, Ohio, now seems like a staggering list.
The first time I ever thought about trying out for Jeopardy! was also the first time I ever visited California. I was toiling on the edges of the music industry, which is to say I was surrounded by people whose fashion, moral, and business instincts were largely inspired by Colombian crime lords. (From what I understand, the entire music business at that time was much like the illegal drug trade, only with more drugs.)
