Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!

by Bob Harris

  The clutter and lights removed, the living room became large and empty and silent and dark.

  There was room once again for Annika. Not that it mattered anymore.

  Perhaps I did not watch the second game while trying to get reacquainted with my acquaintances, treating my friends once again like friends.

  Most forgave me the distance, happy for my opportunity and looking forward to seeing the shows. Soon, however, the conversations inevitably came around again to the Jeopardy! FAQ, always asked with nothing but kindness. This had been fun after the initial five victories (and is obviously fun again, since this book exists), but for a time it was a constant reminder of failure.

  More, since I couldn’t discuss the results until the shows aired, I couldn’t even say I didn’t want to talk about it. That by itself would give the outcome away. And you do not talk about Fight Club.

  So I said as little as possible and kept a big hard smile on my face, and soon enough the conversation would transition into trained-monkey displays. “Hey, Bob—what’s the capital of South Africa?” I’d stifle and smile and just eat the banana. I was now compelled to be a good sport the next day, and the next, and the next, losing again privately every single time.

  My friend David, the one so often blood-splattered on TV, the first to start introducing me this way, was also the first to stop introducing me this way, the moment he sensed I didn’t want to talk about it. But such questions still came from most people I knew, and “Cape Town” I’d faithfully answer. This would be leaving aside South Africa’s judicial and administrative capitals at Bloemfontein and Pretoria. Winston Churchill was once imprisoned in Pretoria. He and FDR came up with the term “United Nations” while Churchill was in a bathtub. President Taft got stuck in bathtubs a lot. Taft was from Ohio. I don’t want to go back. I had one chance, and turned it into a full half hour with no chance at all.

  Sometimes I would just wander off into Trebekistan. It was quieter there.

  Bloemfontein, after all, is where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission held hearings in the wake of apartheid. These were mostly in English and Afrikaans, but the country has eleven official languages and its people speak about thirty. Afrikaans is derived from the Dutch spoken by colonists who first settled the cape. They kidnapped people from Asia as slaves, so to this day there is a large Cape Malay population of Muslims who shun depictive art, expressing themselves with details and color. Their homes are brilliant, reds and yellows and blues next to each other, like a giant roll of Life Savers candy. Life Savers were originally marketed to help “stormy breath.” Wait—that was one of my Final Jeopardy clues. One I got. Unlike that last game. I might have embarrassed my whole family.

  None of these threads ever seemed likely to fascinate the person I was speaking with. So I’d try to steer the conversation into something of mutual interest: I hear Cape Town is gorgeous. Have you ever thought of visiting Africa?

  But usually the encounter would hold course. “Do the Czech Republic now. And Egypt. What’s the capital of Estonia?”

  Sometimes I just didn’t go out.

  I missed the quiet of study, the simple routine, and the structure of a single objective.

  So I just kept reading. Occasionally I would try again to find some detail that would help heal Connie of Marvin. But mostly I let the subject wander. The joy of learning can be as addictive as any drug, it turns out. It was almost impossible to stop. South Africa’s symbolic flower is the Protea, you know, which covers much of the Cape of Good Hope like a blanket. These are often trampled by wild baboons. If you disturb a sleeping baboon, it may shower you with excrement. This still sounds better than facing the Snow Belt right now.

  I didn’t imagine that someday I would visit the Cape of Good Hope, or that several of these very baboons would chase me, every one of us screaming, after one of the larger males had climbed into my rental car and decided to get all territorial about it.

  I had never been chased by wild baboons before. I can’t really recommend it. I did not react with dignity. I believe my cries of (and this is exactly what I said) “oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit!” are still wafting in the Antarctic breeze.

  I did things like that a lot, later. While I was coming to terms with how things turned out with Jane.

  Perhaps I did not watch the second game on the night it was broadcast because I was in the company of some young lady who I hoped might take Annika’s place.

  The 200-unit apartment building I called home was around the corner from the three-block-long actual Melrose Place, which gives you lay of the land, and vice versa. Since Annika and I had moved in, we had passed many dozens of heart-stoppingly gorgeous young Hollywood hopefuls in the mailroom and elevators and stairwells, unavoidably bumping and brushing against them in passing. Half of these were female. Male baboons can frequently mate with any female, who signifies interest by presenting her swollen buttocks.

  Few women looked my way, however. I was in my thirties, after all, which in Hollywood is legally dead. I was balding and nail-bitten, with chrome-colored skin. So headfuls of thick and fragrant hair were tossed to the other side. Skirts of remarkable contour walked off.

  For a while I didn’t mind. Annika was beautiful, smart, and kind. I rarely noticed other women for more than a fleeting few seconds. But now I was single. And I had just won a pair of sports cars. His & hers sports cars, in fact. Older males often lure younger females through displays of ability to obtain food.

  So one day I arrived home in a cherry-red convertible, one of my two new Camaros. And I watched closely for any reaction. I was scientifically curious, you understand, about what effect this might have. After years of TV ads equating new cars with sex, I was interested to see if there was, in fact, any response from the opposite gender. Of course, it would be truly appalling if things changed, I thought. Bonobo chimpanzees use sexual intercourse as a form of greeting.

  And ultimately, yes, there was this one defibrillating young lady who had never spoken to me before. She was a Hollywood attraction of unlikely curvature, fluffed and cantilevered and balanced on stilts, a display of primary colors (red lips, white teeth, blue eyes, black hair) kept in constant and eye-catching motion, less dressed than presented, all shimmering sweet-smelling gloss. I will leave her unnamed and little-described because I am sure by now she is married to either a studio chief, a powerful drug lord, or an entire platoon of marines.

  “Nice car,” she said—she actually said, like the most fictional ad—her flowing dark mane barely covering her pendulous stereotypes. Her voice was like wind chimes and talc.

  My disbelief and delight were tempered with a certain disgust at us both. Still, this did not end the conversation, which continued all the way upstairs and lasted in brief spasms for weeks. I do not believe WORLD CAPITALS ever came up.

  I never even tried to touch her, actually, although it was fun to let you think I did for a paragraph. I was just curious to spend time with someone who so clearly should have been dating the car.

  I sold the Camaros not long after that.

  Cars weren’t the only prizes that arrived.

  You remember Johnny Gilbert, at the end of each taped episode, zipping through a long list of sponsors and names. “Some contestants receive,” Johnny would say in the broadcasts, and then he’d elaborate liniments, ointments, unguents, and balms, plus chocolates and cookware and home games and creams, noun after noun, as if chosen at random.

  It took a few months to begin. But then: boxes and envelopes flooded into my living room, month after month, a dam overflowing, lifetime supplies of products I wasn’t sure what to do with.

  The sensual hands that made love to a Butterball never arrived in the mail, but Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup arrived by the case, joined soon by Mrs. Butterworth’s Lite. I arranged her kind faces in amusing long grids, a syrupy gauntlet running the length of my dining room table.

  Next came multiple toasters, for multiple toasting. I held toast races for a wh
ile, with Mrs. Butterworth’s judges.

  Bon Ami cleanser came, case after case, enough to scrub California. There was Tiger Balm liniment for giving Asia a back rub, enough Ex-Lax to poop a new island. Robitussin arrived in emergency quantities, relief for some mass coughing disaster. There was Advil to soothe any armed insurrection, and ChapStick for nuclear holocaust.

  This Berlin Random Noun Airlift was bewildering. I had almost enough medicine to open a pharmacy. I stopped playing with the new arrivals as toys and began to wonder how to respond.

  It was Kim Worth who suggested I donate the whole pile to shelters.

  It wasn’t the last thing I donated.

  Even after taxes, my pile of cash plus the sale of the sports cars meant that for the first time I wasn’t broke, nearly broke, recently unbroke, or hoping just to get back even with broke. I had at least six months of not-broke in my future, possibly more. It wasn’t enough to retire on or support anyone else long-term, but I was in a position to give something away. And this, too, came with unexpected puzzles.

  All my life, I had thought myself generous. I hadn’t realized how much easier this is when you don’t have much in the first place. You share or you don’t, and your reasons are clear and justifiable.

  Now, for the first time, I would walk down La Cienega or La Brea or any prosperous boulevard nonetheless trafficked by people in need—elderly, ill, communing with private deities, or worse—and I would feel weirdly stripped of my usual certainty. How much to give, and to whom, and how often? I suddenly had choices. I could help very few people a lot, or lots of people a little, or lots and lots of people not very much at all, becoming anything from miserly to bankrupt in the process. This was confusing. Whom do you even ask for advice?

  My Baptist minister grandfather was long gone, but I remembered the collection plate he passed after terrifying us. I liked the idea, if not the execution. After all, the word kindness appears exactly thirteen times in the New Testament, but greedy only five. (Then again, ointment shows up fourteen times. So live your life accordingly.)

  And so eventually I sought wisdom in some of the older volumes I had bought for my studies. I can’t reliably spell some of their names, but one is called the Tao Te Ching, another is the Bible, and still another is called the Dhammapada. There’s a whole box of such books in Jane’s spare bedroom, amid the giant dusty pile of my still-packed-up stuff.

  I don’t pretend to understand more than a fraction of it all, but on the point of charity there seems to be broad agreement: just break off a chunk between 2.5 percent and 20 percent (depending on whose version of the infinite you ask) and pass it around.

  Fair enough, then. This was a real relief. I picked a number I could live with and got on with life.

  By the way, and granting that I’m a foolish novice, these books really do all seem to agree on some stuff. You have to get past tongue-busting names, ripping creation tales, pre-refrigeration dietary laws, and miscellaneous amulets, but most of the remaining ruckus seems to agree on two basic ideas:

  1. play nice, and

  2. don’t stab.

  I admit this may be a slight oversimplification.

  Then again, true words are not always fancy. The Golden Rule we learn as kids—“do unto others as you’d have them do unto you”—seems to be taught to pretty much all children, everywhere, and probably always has been. This “ethic of reciprocity,” a handy survival tool for any troop of humans, appears somewhere in any major tradition you can think of, from the Confucian Analects to the Christian Gospels to the Taoist T’ai Shang Kan-Ying P’ien (whose spelling I had to check, but many of whose injunctions are so familiar you’d think Gandhi and Jesus were chatting on Oprah).

  Maybe our disagreements, then, are just over definitions. Does “nice” require, for example, one set of dress codes and dietary laws? Is wearing the proper holy headgear so important that it’s OK to stab someone if they don’t? It kinda depends who you ask, and what they’re eating, and what clothes they’re wearing that day.

  Meanwhile, all of our kids are on the back porch having cake together, wondering why the adults are all yelling about their hats.

  Kids can be pretty holy that way, if you ask me.

  I’m not saying that we shouldn’t attempt to comprehend the infinite. We probably couldn’t stop if we tried. It seems to be hardwired, possibly as a way to survive. A toddler shocked by a two-prong outlet might decide that all outlets have a zzzap. This assumes structure and rules and invisible connections, even though the toddler can barely imagine the other side of the wall.

  This innate, constant sense that there is a fabric to things is so instinctive we don’t even question it. We can scarcely imagine a universe without rules we can rely on. And since our brains are connection machines, we can’t help but try out some cool explanations about why. And the longer we believe our favorites, the more hardwired they get.

  And we’re also wired to defend our beliefs, always, whatever they are. (Family reunions are so delightful this way.) Our brains actually give themselves neurochemical rewards for defending existing pathways from contradiction. (This makes perfect sense for survival: You’re alive? Keep doing the same thing, your body says. Here’s a yummy.) This explains why so much “thinking” is only the pursuit of reinforcement, and why disagreement involves trying to “win.”

  So even if all gods were wiped from human memory—and most of them, over the ages, probably have been—we’d probably start finding new ones tomorrow, and fighting over them not long after. Which would feel like exactly the right thing to do.

  Meanwhile, science—a simple framework, bringing discipline to our fallible search for connections—has explained so much, so fast, that we can now, all of us, either feed all of humankind and/or kill every living thing, and possibly both in the same week.

  Well, if that’s not exciting, I don’t know what is.

  Maybe my God is the right one. Or maybe yours. Or maybe both. And if this isn’t the time to start getting to know each other’s gods, and saying hi, and making peace, I don’t know when it will be.

  I’ll say this for the Concordance: nobody ever started a war over it.

  Sorry to rant. Let’s play some more. If it sounds like I’m down on the whole god thing, quite the opposite. In fact, near the end, I’ll be reading from the Book of Common Prayer, presiding over Dan Melia’s marriage.

  So you never know.

  Speaking of Dan, he spent most of the second game of our two-day final beating me about the face and neck with his buzzer. I was not particularly fond of him, at that moment.

  Until I saw the tape, later on in the Snow Belt, I didn’t remember much about that game. Or rather I did, but I didn’t want to.

  I remembered walking onstage. My head felt like it was being cracked open from the inside, as if all of the crap I had shoved in, realizing it was no longer needed, was now clawing its way out.

  There was a big throbbing zero on my scoreboard. That’s not something you forget.

  But still, I resolved, I would fight with my best. I would smile and make light where I could. I would never give up until the absolute end, no matter how embarrassing the loss became. This was, after all, the Snow Belt way.

  I got in on the first clue—What is a rolling pin?—and didn’t win on the buzzer again until after the first commercial. My Weapon shot blanks. The first round was already halfway gone.

  Kim made a good run, blocking my own for a while. This was an extra frustration.

  In the Double Jeopardy round, I again got the first clue, but was shut out of the buzzer for the next two entire categories. Even so, at one point, I had about $3000 and both Daily Doubles in play. With a hot streak I could still conceivably win.

  After that, I was beaten on about a dozen straight clues. If my buzzer arm had suddenly detached from my body and crawled away to a corner in shame, the results would not have been any different.

  When Kim hit the first of the last two Daily Doubles, this sig
naled the end of my chances.

  Still, I had one last opportunity to take second place. The last Daily Double. But I had to bet everything again.

  You can probably guess how that worked out. A few more minutes of flailing, and it was over.

  I smiled where necessary, clinked complimentary champagne with Dan and Kim, and walked the long march through the hard Sony lot. I was leaving for what had to be the last time.

  Max drove me home to an empty apartment.

  I wanted more. But my chances were gone.

  And this really was, at last, the end of my Jeopardy! career.

  What I had now was some money, a lot of friends I’d neglected, and an empty apartment. I also had a family in Ohio whom I felt I’d let down. They’d be disappointed, and they would try not to show it. I was certain. And it would be so obvious it would hurt.

  All kinds of kind people would try to make me feel better, and of course that would only feel worse.

  Even Mrs. Butterworth was running out of reassuring things to say.

  I was tempted to hide, stay home, and take long luxurious baths in her syrup. But there was not, unfortunately, enough Bon Ami cleanser to wash off the strong scent of failure.

  There was only one way to do that, much as I dreaded it.

  I bought a plane ticket to Ohio. It was time to face down the Snow Belt.

  CHAPTER

  17

  A PEP TALK FROM PRESIDENT GARFIELD

  Also, What I Bought from the J. H. Gilbert Co. of Willoughby, Ohio

  On the drive from Hopkins airport in Cleveland, I passed through downtown for the first time since my retreat into Trebekistan.

  My body felt surprisingly calm. This place was familiar. My stress was fighting against reassurance. This generated a great deal of noise.