Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!

by Bob Harris

  A business trip had sent me to Los Angeles for a week in November. In preparation, my boss provided careful instructions on how to wear my Miami Vice–inspired sport jacket with the sleeves pushed up to show, as he actually phrased it, “just the right amount of forearm.” This mattered greatly.

  I played along, since it was a chance to glimpse the guidebook version of L.A.: Melrose, Beverly Hills, Venice, the Strip, and always, always the ocean. This was exciting. But that’s not the main thing I remember feeling.

  I remember feeling warm.

  “Comfortable outside” wasn’t something we had in the Snow Belt, especially in November. November was eight months into winter, the month we’d usually start getting sympathy letters from the Russian infantry.

  So one night, in Santa Monica, I stood on a hundred-foot bluff overlooking the Pacific and vowed that someday I would live here in the sun forever, never be cold again, and devote myself to forgetting things as hard as I could. I’d find a job, or maybe, I dunno, win money on that quiz show, in the process of all that forgetting.

  I also resolved that someday I would meet a girl and propose to her on that very spot. I even made a mental note of the location, so I could be sure of finding it again.

  As it happened, I was standing between a park bench and a dirt path, about half a block from a fifteen-foot religious statue that looked like a giant penis. It’s still there, a singular object even the J. H. Gilbert Company of Willoughby, Ohio, might have found challenging to sheathe.

  I didn’t know much about memory yet. But I was pretty sure I could remember that.

  This is another one of those spots where I’m not exaggerating for the next eleven sentences:

  A few years later I actually did stand on that exact spot with a girl I was madly in love with. Her name was Tonya, and I asked her to marry me. Not only did she say yes, we even went ahead and said the vows, right there, the sea as our only witness, promising forevers, tears filling our eyes.

  About a year after that she started sleeping with her boss, although she didn’t tell me about it for a while. Not until Christmas Eve, in fact, which she apparently thought was a good time to tell me. We stayed up all night, breaking up, and she left on Christmas morning, shortly before it was time to watch my niece and nephew open their presents.

  A few months later she moved to Ecuador. I have no idea why she chose Ecuador. I never saw her again.

  The spot we were standing on later collapsed in a mudslide, plummeting over the cliff for good.

  I’ve been a little twitchy about commitment ever since.

  I’ll skip most of the other One-True-Eternal-Soulmates™. You’re already through Leviticus and Deuteronomy. By the time you reach Thessalonians, you see the plot coming anyway.

  Clearly, I’ve been doing something wrong.

  Maybe I should stop dating women in eleven-sentence increments.

  Eventually, on that first day I was sitting in the makeup chair, my current One-True-Eternal-Soulmate™ was the quiet, pretty, intelligent schoolteacher named Annika, the one motionless enough to wear bees. She had two master’s degrees, spoke several languages, did occasional volunteer work for the poor, and was completely trustworthy. We both had rewarding careers, we were in perfect health, and all of our friends approved.

  Clearly, this could never work.

  Money, or at least my part of our money, was getting tight. I was actually working several part-time creative jobs, all of which paid more in ego than actual cash. The best one was a radio gig I’d had for about a year, doing commentaries and humor for the top-rated news station in California. I was on every day, in afternoon drive time, and I had even won several awards. Finally. I was doing something Mom and Dad’s memory could be proud of.

  I didn’t usually mention that this paid exactly thirty-five dollars a day. Before taxes and union dues.

  I was afraid. I could go back on the road and make money that way, but that would mean more time away. This wouldn’t make life any more stable.

  I hadn’t yet told Annika about my money problems. But if something didn’t work out soon, I might not be able to pay the rent. And since I’d let things go this far, that could easily seem like a breach of trust, even meaning the end of our relationship. It might even mean going back to Ohio. Another whole round of failure.

  There was no way I could face the family again. Not at this age. It was one thing to return home after college; now my entire adulthood was starting to look like mistake after mortifying mistake.

  And then a makeup lady got some goo on the inside of my left nostril.

  Less than an hour later, I wanted more. Lots more.

  CHAPTER

  8

  EVENING FALLS

  Also, A Fifty-Foot Wall in My Head

  My first game had been the fifth and final show of that day. Since Jeopardy! is recorded on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I would normally have had either one or six nights to prepare for the next game. However, because of a scheduling quirk—I had played on a Wednesday evening, just before a two-week Teen Tournament, to be followed by a series of celebrity games played by Washington political figures—my next taping date was still weeks away. (Personally, I wanted to see the teens play the politicos. We all know exactly who would have won.)

  I had made it through the first trial thanks to my Jedi buzzer technique and large amounts of pure luck. Now came another amazing bit of good fortune: I had extra time to study.

  To win four more games, all I needed to do was somehow simulate a complete liberal-arts education.

  I had just under three weeks.

  First things first: Remember the lesson of Halloween. Consider the broadcast dates for the next four games: November 24 through 27. My potential fifth game was scheduled for Thanksgiving Day. I was about to become rather expert on the Mayflower.

  Second things second: maintaining my Jedi state-dependent retrieval buzzer skills would be paramount. I would need to set up the VCR to tape every game, so I could practice several times a day. But for the most accurate rehearsals possible, merely tapping my finger on my thigh or a table would not be enough.

  I would need a practice buzzer.

  A simple plan: I would just find a ballpoint pen, remove part of the clicky bit so it would simply spring, then wind this in masking tape to the desired weight, shape, and size. That should work.

  OK. Now I would give myself bright lights, a podium, and the sound of Alex speaking from my right side. At a minimum, this would involve rearranging the furniture.

  I should add, incidentally: I had not yet left the Sony parking garage.

  I made the practice buzzer the next day. I still have it. I’ve used it before every tournament. It’s my second-favorite memento of the show.

  Still, it’s a strange thing to have on a shelf. It feels like a real Jeopardy! buzzer in your hand, but it doesn’t visually resemble one at all. It looks a lot more like something you’d be caught with in an unseemly scandal involving grainy photos, hush money, and a mysterious blonde fleeing to Mexico. I had to explain it to every woman I ever dated, even if they already knew about my Jeopardy! games. This was usually a source of amusement, albeit with some furrowed brows or even mild expressions of concern.

  Jane was the only person who ever guessed what it was at first glance. In fact, she picked it up, pushed the button a few times, and turned it over in her hand, as if comparing it with the one she would have made herself. Then she looked around at my overflowing shelves and the hip-high piles of reference books, the ones now jammed into cardboard boxes in her apartment, and grinned as if she wanted to sift through them all, too.

  Looking back down at the practice buzzer, she asked an interesting question.

  “What do they call these things, exactly? They can’t really be called ‘buzzers’…”

  You’ve already peeked in on the rest of that day, involving champagne and the renaming of the Signaling Device.

  We had no idea what was coming just a few months lat
er.

  For obvious reasons, Jeopardy! doesn’t allow you to share the outcome, no matter how much you want to leap ahead in your story, with anyone but immediate family and close friends. And they’re not allowed to tell a soul. The safest thing, in fact, is not to let anyone you know leave the house until the whole thing blows over.

  The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club.

  This is elaborated in a pre-taping legal agreement, much of it in fifth-century Latin, drafted in lamb’s blood on goatskin seized during the Crusades. (Sony’s attorneys are very well connected.) You seal the folded contract by pricking your buzzer finger with a needle and pressing it down quickly into a blob of hot wax—leaving a clear print, a DNA sample, and a blood oath all at once—and this entire deal goes straight into a positronic vault, where it can be accessed by Sony lawyers at any point in history.

  I’m exaggerating mildly, but this stuff really should be taken seriously: the show’s very existence, not to mention the jobs of everyone involved and any chance whatsoever of playing in future tournaments, depends largely on the audience not knowing the outcome.

  The second rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club.

  There were exactly three people I was sure I was definitely allowed to tell: my sister Connie, my mom, and Annika.

  Since I didn’t yet own a mobile phone—this was the Bronze Age, remember—I would have to fight traffic for an hour before I could get home and make some calls.

  I passed the time by telling my memory of Dad all about it.

  When I finally got home, I called Connie first. She couldn’t have been more pleased. She wasn’t doing very well physically, though. Marvin was acting up again.

  “Marvin,” I should explain, is the name we have given to the endless catalog of maladies that meander in and out of Connie’s flesh. What the name “Marvin” lacks in clinical specificity, it makes up for in convenience. And since autoimmune diagnoses are largely guesswork anyway, it’s just about as accurate.

  Marvin’s health and Connie’s are inversely proportional: if Connie’s feeling vigorous, Marvin is very sick or possibly on his deathbed. And vice versa.

  When I called after the first game of Jeopardy!, Marvin had just learned flamenco, and he was thumping his heels on Connie’s last nerve. And still, Connie was truly happy for me. Her voice became noticeably less weary when I told her how things went.

  We talked and laughed for a while. I remember wishing very hard I could trade all of my good fortune for a way to make Connie feel better.

  I called Mom next. She picked up on the first ring.

  She was, in her own word, tickled. And then I told her the broadcast date and a bit of my already-forming plan of attack for the next four shows: weeks of hammering thousands of possible short answers into my skull, rearranging the furniture, buying a bunch of bright lights…

  “And what does Annika think about all this?”

  There are times when my mom can talk for hours about nothing besides an animal that hopped through the backyard two days ago, some new and exciting carbohydrate, or what fell over down at Newberry’s.

  But sometimes Mom cuts right to the point.

  Annika got home a little late that night. This wasn’t unusual. She was working as a public school teacher at the time, so it sometimes took an extra hour just to peel off the Kevlar.

  I was always amazed that a creature this small and quiet could somehow command an overcrowded room full of strange and hyperactive children. I admire her to this day.

  And this comes from a former stand-up comic, mind you. I’ve worked 3:00 a.m. prom nights in Manhattan, strip clubs in the Ozarks, and biker bars on the Mexican border. And there’s no way I’d set foot in the job Annika did. There must have been a much tougher side to her that I never saw.

  Or maybe I just didn’t pay enough attention to see past my own assumptions, or I was too lost in my own thoughts to care. Maybe the Jeopardy! coordinators aren’t the only people I just grunted at while thinking ahead.

  I told Annika the news about Jeopardy! before she’d even gotten in the door. In my hurry, I’m not sure I even said hello. This was ego, of course. I was ready to feel like a hero, and wanted only to see this reflected in her face.

  Finally, a long stare, followed by a slight eye-roll, and then:

  “You’re really going to rearrange the furniture?” said with equal dollops of bafflement and horror.

  I guess even Mom knew that was coming.

  Still, the slightest bit of joy might have been nice.

  Some moments march upon you with voices shouting and clocks ticking down their arrival. Births, graduations, marriages, prizes on fabulous game shows—all will be enormous, with flashing lights and band music and sometimes even love, and they will carry no surprise. Things will have changed. You will know when and how.

  Some moments creep up silently, unannounced. They will be small, and slip upon you before your guard is ready. You will feel a shift and not know why.

  Some moments just come.

  Sudden, unexpected clarity: Annika and I were becoming strangers.

  Looking back, I had known deep down that the relationship was in trouble long before this moment. On some unacknowledged level, it wasn’t that big a surprise. But even afterward, I wouldn’t admit it to myself, much less try to do anything about it, for months.

  This is a fairly clunky approach to happiness. It’s also nothing unusual.

  I later learned that the human brain is profoundly averse on a mechanical level to integrating new connections that cross wires with established neural pathways. When a pathway is large and complex enough to be named, we call it a “belief” or an “attitude” or “that goddamned habit of yours, Harold.” But it’s ultimately a tangle of well-connected neurons. And these are extremely hard to cross, sometimes as physically insurmountable as a fifty-foot wall. More so, in fact, since they’re invisible, and buried inside your own head.

  Even trivial thoughts can color our ability to see reality. How many times have you looked in vain for a particular item—car keys, eyeglasses, maybe facial tissue in a green room—convinced that it had suddenly disappeared, only to notice that it was, in fact, squarely in plain view all the time, often in a spot you had looked at directly? This is called cognitive dissonance, and it’s a common form of this inability of the brain to cross-wire itself. If you don’t think the keys exist anymore, poof!—they don’t, at least between your ears.

  The effect is even more powerful with long-held beliefs, whose neural pathways have had more time to grow and strengthen with rehearsal, developing numerous connections to strong reinforcing emotions. Such beliefs often become filters through which the world is viewed; the only facts and ideas we can even see are those that fit into the existing pattern.

  Therefore, most of the time, our mental model of the world—including mine as I write this and yours as you read—are less a measure of reality than an echo chamber for existing sensations and emotions. Everything from “I’m doomed to be fat” to “I’m not a good listener” to “I fail under pressure” to “Norwegians are always mean to me” can become cardinal tenets, personal boundaries that we simply cannot cross.

  You can actually see this acted out on Jeopardy! several times each week. You’ll often see a contestant in second or third place get a Daily Double so late in the game that a large wager is their only real chance to win. And almost always—not some of the time, mind you, not most of the time, but almost all of the time—that player will not bet enough to take the lead. Instead, they’ll bet small, apologizing to no one in particular with a little shrug.

  In that moment, they have chosen to lose.

  Whether or not they respond correctly, they have guaranteed that they will trail entering Final Jeopardy. And since good players respond correctly to most Final Jeopardys, that’s usually that.

  On the other hand, most players also respond correctly to most Daily Doubles. So a large bet makes
a win the most likely outcome of a “risky” large wager, even though the game might have seemed out of reach.

  Why do people do this? The same reason my father worked for thirty-seven years in a factory he hated. The same reason I stayed in (and, in truth, cultivated) bad relationships. The same reason you probably do something in your life, right this minute, that you wish you didn’t.

  All change is hard, even good change, like winning something. It’s hard for any of us to imagine real alternatives to our expectations, so they’re what we often wind up with. Which reinforces the existing pathways in what can become an inescapable loop.

  I sometimes wonder if natural selection didn’t reward our ability to bullshit ourselves in precisely this fashion. If two hominids were both fleeing a large, fast predator, and one of them was sincerely thinking “I am safe, I am exceptional, the gods are watching over me, and I cannot die” and the other was thinking “AIEEE! I’m an entrée! AAIEEE! ” it’s not hard to guess which one got dragged back by his entrails.

  With Annika (and Tonya and Leviticus and Zachariah), I couldn’t imagine how things could be otherwise, what I could do differently, or what I could value differently. On the other hand, my high-school revenge-training had put such a value on intellectual competition that, even while filled with self-doubt, once a Jeopardy! game started, on some level I couldn’t imagine not winning.

  This leads us to our next step down the Eightfold Path:

  1. Obvious things may be worth noticing.

  2. Remember the basics: the basics are what you remember.

  3. Put your head where you can use it later.