Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!

by Bob Harris

  Lyn stays at the bottom of the board, playing THE LAW for $400:

  FAILURE TO PAY A BUILDING CONTRACTOR MAY RESULT IN HIS LEANING ON YOU WITH THIS TYPE OF LIEN

  Crap again. I don’t know the response to the second clue. I just stand there, trying to relax and put myself back in all the games I’ve played at home.

  Peter beats Lyn on the buzzer. He responds incorrectly, and the clue passes unwon. (“What is a mechanic’s lien?” is the response we don’t know.) For an instant, I mentally focus directly on Alex, something I have very rarely done in any game, imagining that I’m seeing him on TV. As the third clue begins, I am trying once again to merge where I’m standing with my living room.

  I am not standing at a podium. I am standing at a low bookcase. And this is not a buzzer in my hand. This is a ballpoint pen rolled in masking tape…

  THE EISENHOWER CENTER IN THIS KANSAS TOWN HOUSES NUMEROUS MEMENTOS OF THE PRESIDENT’S LIFE AND CAREER

  I don’t even need notebooks filled with haunting mental images. There are American Legion halls and bowling alleys and lonely people drinking in Kansas, too. Those are haunting enough. So:

  What is Abilene?

  With almost no thought to the buzzer. And my light comes on.

  Then, rapid-fire:

  What is Easter Island?

  Who was Stu Sutcliffe?

  What are cigar bands?

  What is Independence Hall?

  What is Mother, Jugs & Speed?

  My light comes on. And on. And on and on.

  I reel off ten correct responses before the first commercial. It’s like Alex and I are just chatting in a hallway, with a few interruptions as others pass. I’m back.

  At the first break, my score is three times higher than Lyn’s; Peter has a negative number. I’m ringing in on over 80 percent of my attempts. To my right, I can glimpse Peter clenching his jaw, growing frustrated. Lyn’s voice, two podiums away, is already slightly urgent.

  Of course, Lyn is a working mother, and Peter runs his own business. Unlike me, they have lives.

  So again, they have that particular disadvantage.

  After the commercial, Alex asks about my fever, slyly letting the audience know why last week’s (that is, yesterday’s) cartoonish incompetent can suddenly wield his buzzer like the hammer of Thor. I blither as always, not sure if it’s appropriate to thank Wes and Grace for their kindness on camera, so much that I almost keep Alex from sharing a stunning note of encouragement.

  Once upon a time, Alex tells me, another bottom-rung wild card stood exactly where I was standing. And he managed to come from behind and win the entire tournament.

  Well. Pretty thrilling thought, I must say. I am secretly starting to think it’s just possible. But certainly that could never happen twice.

  I mean, you’ve read this far. Can harbingers ever be this obvious, either in real life or the retelling?

  Thank goodness you’re letting me step out of the narrative so often to screw with your expectations a bit. I appreciate that. Otherwise, you’d already know how everything turns out. And that’s a very bad thing to presume.

  You’ll see this sort of thing again, later, when Jane, the best friend I have ever had, whom you will meet and love right along with me very soon now, is diagnosed with a particularly scary form of cancer.

  Yes. That was a bomb just now. Cancer always is, you know.

  If you’re angry in some weird way, you should be. It’s not fair, you say. I was having a good time a minute ago.

  Trust me. I do know how that feels.

  Just six months after meeting her, just a bit ahead in our story and while she and I (and vicariously, you) are all curled up happily in bed together, Jane will find a lump.

  The lump will be bad.

  Of course you do not expect moments like this. They come while you are in the middle of things, in exactly this way. During exciting things, maybe, or sad things, or contented things, or whatever things you are doing. You never get up one morning and say, “Today I will fall in love.” But one day you do. You never get up one morning and say, “Today I will learn how I will die.” But one day you’ll do that, too. We all do.

  I’m pretty sure Jane never got up one morning and said, “Today I will discover I have cancer.” But one day, she did.

  None of us expects a day, later on, when we will get up so early that it’s still the coldest, blackest hour of the night, and then drive to a hospital to find out whether we will live or die.

  But one day, that day came for the best woman I have ever known.

  A doctor was about to cut her open—again—and grab another chunk of her from another specific spot and peer at it closely amid furrowed brows and a dozen growling gadgets. By that afternoon we would know if her particularly scary form of cancer had spread.

  That particular morning came for Jane. It began at precisely 4:00 a.m. one day.

  I would not be able to imagine what one does to pass the time on a morning like that, except that Jane and I actually did it once.

  We sang.

  Imagine that in your own car, with someone you love, on a similar drive to your nearest hospital.

  We sang.

  Jane started it. She gets most of the credit. In the empty early morning, we passed a drugstore with its lights on. It said GIANT DRUG STORE.

  Jane made up a little ditty on the spot:

  It’s a Giant Drug Store, but they don’t sell giant drugs.

  I made up a second line:

  They don’t sell drugs to giants, so what the hell kind of drugstore is it, anyway?

  And then we laughed. And we sang it again and again and again and again. Trying to hold on to the song and each other and what it feels like to be alive in just one good moment, even once, with someone you love. Maybe if we just kept singing, the hospital would never come.

  We sang.

  The tune Jane chose for the song, if you’d like to sing it yourself for a moment, is the same one Judy Garland sang in her last MGM film appearance: “Sing Hallelujah, come on, get happy, we’re gonna chase all your cares away.”

  You should have seen Jane’s face. Laughing in the passenger seat of my car, streetlights reflected in the tears on her cheek.

  You know how memory kicks in.

  If you need to put the book down now, reassess, and feel sad or angry or confused for a bit, go ahead. We’ll get back to the game in a minute, I promise.

  That’s another thing you do around something like cancer. It reminds you that all the things you treat as so damned important usually aren’t. You completely reassess. But that takes time. Meanwhile, you get on with things anyway. You just take a breath and go on ahead with what you were doing, probably even some things that seem like they barely matter, at least for a while.

  There is comfort in routine. The firing of any familiar neural pathways can feel like a letter from home. So we’ll get back to the game in a few more paragraphs, and pretty soon it’ll probably even be fun again, almost like nothing ever happened.

  Still, I’m about to take a break myself, right now, as I’m writing this very sentence. Other people in this coffee shop are looking at me kinda funny.

  One thing I’ve heard from people who’ve seen me on Jeopardy! is that while I hide nervousness well, they can always see everything else I’m feeling.

  What’s a foot fault?

  What’s a referendum?

  What’s Serial Mom?

  For the rest of the first Jeopardy round, I remain in command. The one audio clue is a TV science-fiction star singing a ludicrously overacted version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—a track I played a dozen times at my college radio station.

  Who is William Shatner?

  I’m winning on the buzzer, and of the thirty clues in the round, I’ve known the responses to twenty-eight. The game is turning into a runaway: I’m at $6000, Lyn is at $2700, and Peter is still in negative numbers. All I have to do is stay the course, play and wager conservatively, and I
’ll have a great shot at a runaway win.

  The remaining Daily Doubles are my only concern. If Peter or I find them both, I’ll be fine. But if Lyn lands one and nails a big wager, I could still be in trouble.

  Double Jeopardy begins. Alex announces the categories. I think ahead along with him.

  HARRY GUYS(Okay: Truman, Belafonte, Houdini, Reasoner, Carey…)

  WE’RE MALAYSIA-BOUND(Kuala Lumpur, um, some islands, um…)

  FETAL ATTRACTION(Crap. Lyn’s a mom. This is hers.)

  TOP 40 BONUS(Mine.)

  FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY(Uh-oh. How many harbingers can I have in one game?)

  POETS’ RHYME TIME(Chuck? Notebooks? Don’t fail me now.)

  Peter starts off the round at the bottom of the board, hunting for Daily Doubles on the $1000 row of TOP 40 BONUS and WE’RE MALAYSIA-BOUND. Each time Peter or I call for a clue, I hope to hear the Bweedwooo, Bweedwooo, Bweedwooo-dwoo-dwoo-dwah sound of a Daily Double being revealed.

  Lyn hunts for a Daily Double in the $1000 row of POETS’ RHYME TIME. I dread the Bweedwooo, Bweedwooo, Bweedwooo-dwoo-dwoo-dwah when she’s in control. But it doesn’t come here, either. Instead:

  SIR PHILIP’S RENAL ORGANS

  And my light comes on. What are Sidney’s kidneys? I blurt, with barely a second thought.

  This is something I would never have known a few months ago. I am starting to feel like a very different player from the terrified guy bouncing around with Lancôme up his snotter. I still don’t know much about who Philip Sidney was, of course. But now I can recognize him as a poet in less than two seconds.

  I’m way ahead again, with $9200 to $2100 and $1700 for Lyn and Peter.

  But then Lyn, the second librarian I’ve played in twenty-four hours (and third librarian in seven games), impressively rips through the rest of POETS’ RHYME TIME, whipping off

  “What are Blake’s snakes?”

  “What are Pope’s hopes?”

  “What are Pound’s hounds?” all in a row.

  I realize I’m just lucky our game board has been far stronger on pop culture than the classics. Lyn’s command of literature is as good as her silly rhymes.

  Where are those damn Daily Doubles? I wonder. Peter gets a correct response and selects from the board. No Daily Double. Peter gets another and selects. No Daily Double. Lyn gets a correct response and selects…

  Bweedwooo, Bweedwooo, Bweedwooo-dwoo-dwoo-dwah.

  Lyn’s Daily Double is in the category FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY. This is more harbinger, um, -ish -ness than I would prefer.

  Lyn looks up at our scores. She has $4700. I have $9200.

  HEAVY ARMOR & HEAVY RAINS DEFEATED THE LARGE FRENCH ARMY AS MUCH AS HENRY V’S MEN AT THIS 1415 BATTLE

  One “What is Agincourt?” later, Lyn is at $8700. All I can do is smile, applaud, and hope for some heavy armor and rain of my own.

  Lyn chooses again, and finds the last Daily Double on the very next clue. Damn! She now has the option to try to put the game away. Instead, she makes a conservative wager, essentially rendering the clue meaningless, choosing to fight on the buzzers for the rest of the game.

  Still, my easy runaway is now a battle. And while the TOP 40 category—my strongest—is gone, all of FETAL ATTRACTION remains.

  Fortunately, we split what I thought would be Lyn’s strongest category three ways. Peter has kids, and thus personal fetal experience. I am lucky again. I then knock off three of the HARRY GUYS—including Harry Belafonte, one of the names I’ve thought ahead to—and manage to name an island that is much less obscure than it once would have been:

  THE STATES OF SARAWAK & SABAH ON THIS ISLAND MAKE UP ABOUT 60% OF MALAYSIA’S LAND AREA

  Because three different nations occupy portions of this same island, What is Borneo? is in my notebooks at least half a dozen times.

  I now have a $2800 lead over Lyn. There are seven clues left, worth just $3200 combined. Lyn will need every clue to take the lead entering Final Jeopardy.

  It is time to loosen my grip on the Weapon. The worst possible move is an incorrect response.

  Doing nothing is better than doing something really stupid.

  I choose a $400 clue in MALAYSIA, since Lyn hasn’t seemed strong on geography. If I get it, I’ve clinched the lead going into Final Jeopardy. If Peter gets it, I’ve clinched at least a share of the lead.

  ENDAU-ROMPIN PARK IS ONE OF THE LAST HOMES OF THE SUMATRAN SPECIES OF THIS HORNED MAMMAL

  Could be a rhino, I think to myself. But who knows what the hell lives in Sumatra? I keep my hand off the buzzer. The only way Lyn is going to pass me is if I start guessing incorrectly.

  Peter rings in. His “What’s a rhino?” is correct. I’ve now clinched a tie entering Final Jeopardy by doing absolutely nothing.

  Peter selects a clue in FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY:

  BY ALLOWING REBEL FORCES TO ESCAPE AFTER GETTYSBURG, THIS UNION GENERAL MAY HAVE PROLONGED THE WAR 2 MORE YEARS

  George G. Meade was the Union general at Gettysburg, I think. But wasn’t that a good thing? Maybe somebody else was the screwup. Again, I leave my Weapon uncocked.

  Peter rings in. His “Who is Meade?” is correct. I’ve now clinched the lead entering Final Jeopardy by doing absolutely nothing, well-aimed.

  There are still five clues—an entire category’s worth—on the board, but the rest of the round is superfluous. Lyn’s high second-place score will compel me to make a large wager and answer correctly to guarantee a win.

  If I answer Final Jeopardy correctly, I win. If not, I probably don’t. Nothing else really matters right now.

  As the last few clues roll by, one strikes me as absurdly obscure, the sort of thing that no amount of study or normal experience could fill in:

  OF PROTON, ELECTRON, OR NEUTRON, WITH “SAGA” IT’S MALAYSIA’S NATIONAL CAR

  Lyn, Peter, and I just stand there, staring. Zombie Jeopardy. Who knows what they drive in Malaysia?

  It’s not like someday I’m gonna be hitchhiking in Malaysia in a steaming rain. It’s not like I’m gonna accept a ride to Kuala Lumpur from a man I don’t know driving Malaysia’s national car, revealing the correct response in a way I’ll remember as long as I live. It’s not like I’m gonna go off wandering around strange countries for months trying to learn the right lessons after how things turned out with Jane.

  Even Trebekistan isn’t that strange a place.

  Right?

  p-TING!

  The Final Jeopardy category:

  BRITISH LITERATURE

  This may be Lyn’s strongest subject. It may also be my weakest. Alex briefly glances at Lyn. I can’t see Lyn’s face, but her expression reflects noticeably on his.

  Two podiums away, I can tell that Lyn is grinning.

  Back in the Snow Belt, Dad and I spent many autumns watching the Cleveland Browns in the years they were known as the “Cardiac Kids,” captivating our frogs-with-umbrellas neighborhood.

  The quarterback was a tiny man named Brian Sipe. He stood only three-foot-two and weighed just nine pounds, the only NFL Most Valuable Player I’ve ever seen who was smaller than the opposing team’s cheerleaders. I believe he now lives in a tree, making cookies.

  But damn, that teeny man had heart. When the fourth quarter came, Brian Sipe would stand his ground while 300-pound carnivores lunged and ripped at his flesh. Cleats hammering the frozen earth would thunder out threats of his imminent doom, and Brian Sipe would hold his place manfully. And at the last possible second, just before having his bum blown to pieces, Brian Sipe would sling the ball heavenward, seemingly at random. More often than not, this laced-leather token of prayer would fall into the arms of a guy wearing the same-colored helmet, not far from some unlikely goalposts.

  Then my dad and I and everyone in the Snow Belt would all scream as if our testicles were coming unspooled. Including the women.

  This was even more fun than it sounds.

  If you were driving through Cleveland on a Sunday afternoon in the 1980s and thou
ght you heard the sound of 250,000 people being force-fed into a paper shredder, that was the extra point being kicked.

  And so, from September to December every year, our neighborhood would festoon itself in brown and orange, the Cleveland Browns’ colors, amid the endless coatings of snowy white.

  Someday, just once, I wanted to be like Brian Sipe.

  Even if we always, always lost the last game.

  After the commercial, Alex even comments on Lyn’s visible delight at the Final Jeopardy subject:

  “When we revealed the category—ENGLISH LITERATURE—a few moments ago, Lyn Paine smiled broadly. I think she likes this category.”

  Ulp. My Jeopardy! career could be over for good in exactly thirty seconds.

  p-TING! comes the clue:

  THE 5TH EDITION OF THIS WORK, PUBLISHED IN 1676, INCLUDED A SECTION ON FLY FISHING BY CHARLES COTTON

  “Good luck,” Alex says. The Think Music begins.

  I have absolutely no idea. None. So, back to the basics:

  Slow down and see the obvious.

  What follows is my actual thought process, as verbatim as possible amid a pre-verbal spasm of neural chaos. Hum the Final Jeopardy Think Music to yourself if you like:

  OK. “Fifth edition.” Is that the hint? New Edition was a band once…Ummm…“1676.” Is that the hint? 1776 was a movie I saw in junior high. Guys in powdered wigs singing about Abigail Adams’s combustibility…Errm…Is “fly fishing” the hint? The writers went a long way to get there. Hmm…Could be this Cotton guy, but I’m running out of time. OK…