Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!

by Bob Harris

  Cleveland was bluer and brighter in spring than I’d remembered. The next long, gray winter was still at least weeks away. The roads were far less crowded than in California. This was physically relaxing, at least. I exhaled and stretched out for the ride through Cleveland’s heart. The town was actually named for Moses Cleaveland, a surveyor sent by Connecticut. Cleveland was the home of Alan Freed’s first rock-and-roll concert, which was called the Moondog Coronation Ball. No one ever specifies exactly when the previous Moondog died in office. Connecticut is the Nutmeg State. Man, that was fun.

  The Cuyahoga River rolled up, cleaner and clearer than I’d remembered. But it didn’t quite match what I expected to see, so it just looked confusing. I was having trouble enough staying focused. My mind was racing even as my body unwound from the flight. Cuyahoga comes from the Mohawk word for “crooked river.” Curiously, what we call the Mohawk language does not contain an m. I’m not sure what noise the Mohawks made when something smelled good. I wonder what Mom’s cooking right now.

  To my left lay Lake Erie, glittering in the sun. There were shore birds at play on the horizon. Oliver Hazard Perry fought here in the War of 1812. An important expedition to Japan was led by his brother, Matthew Perry. One working title for the sitcom Friends was Six of One. This is also the name of a fan club for the TV series The Prisoner, about a man who didn’t know where he was or why, and didn’t know how to get out. I know the feeling sometimes.

  Jacobs Field leapt into frame, a new stadium where the Indians could break people’s hearts. I flipped on the radio and searched out the score, trying to distract my head.

  They were winning, even leading their division, in fact.

  I wondered if I was in the right city.

  A half hour to the east, I crossed into the Snow Belt. I think I was expecting a snowy white curtain. But the sky stayed blue with defiance.

  Soon I passed Lawnfield, President James Garfield’s home, with its maple trees overlooking a park. Red-haired children played with a shiny blue ball. Twenty years in this neighborhood, and I had never once been to this park. I suppose it had always been there. I turned off the boulevard and pulled to a stop, watching the ball and a big fluffy dog and two families not worried about time.

  I looked over at Garfield’s house. Thirty years in Ohio, and I’d never once visited. I’d passed by here hundreds of times. He was dead; it was old. That was all I had ever seen.

  But James Garfield was cool, I had learned in my studies. A Civil War general who fought against slavery. Classically educated, ambidextrous, and verbally fluent. He could write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other, both at the same time. He once found a new proof for the Pythagorean theorem. He did this for the sheer joy of learning. Our most intelligent president.

  He didn’t even try to be president. He was nominated against his will, and campaigned without leaving his porch. Such talent and modesty. He was unashamed of his abilities and succeeded through kindness and work.

  Now here was a man to believe in. I nominate Garfield for president of Trebekistan.

  Except he was shot just four months into office and died two months later. His doctors soon killed him from gross inability, infecting him, ripping him, bursting open his liver, and calling it medical care.

  I believe Connie would vote for him, too.

  The president died despite Alexander Graham Bell’s best attempts. The good inventor showed up with a newfangled metal detector, hoping to track down the bullet. But the bed’s metallic frame, a rarity then, kept the metal detector from working. No one in the room understood both how the bedframe and the detector were constructed.

  Our smartest president died, ironically, from a lack of general knowledge.

  I watched the children’s red hair as they bolted toward their parents and bounded away with the bouncing blue ball. I listened hard at the gleeeeek! of their laughter. It was louder, I think, than my own ever was.

  The Snow Belt itself held a world full of wonders. Somehow I’d just never noticed.

  I was an hour late home to my mom.

  Mom hugged me and laughed just to see me again.

  It was nice to see all of her frogs.

  There was starch on the table and starch in the freezer and starch in the fridge and the cupboard. I found pasta with beans, ravioli with crackers, and a three-layer cold gnocchi sandwich, plus pretzels and bagels and breaded fried nuggets of whatever was breaded.

  I was home. It was good.

  Mom never once mentioned Jeopardy! Never once. Not protectively. She just didn’t care. She was proud of me for reasons only mothers must know. We walked through the yard and watched bunnies at play. She asked about my health, and my work, and my love life.

  And when I finally dredged up the subject of Jeopardy!, she was proud of how I’d won, and prouder still of how I’d lost, that I’d hugged Grace and shaken hands with Dan.

  Am I yet just a child, I thought to myself, that I need my mother to tell me these things?

  Yes I was. Yes I am.

  I ate pizza with dumplings, drank a gallon of eggnog, and fell asleep, back on Mom and Dad’s couch.

  When I awoke, Mom was sleeping in exactly the spot where she’d dozed after meals long before. Her cooking is strong anesthetic.

  Dad would rest on the loveseat when spring nights were cool, on those nights when we’d all watched TV. He was gone now, but when I was asleep he was still there. I stared for a long time at the spot as if I could make him come back.

  The TV was the same. So little had changed. Perhaps if I looked closely at the screen, Chuck Forrest would still be on Jeopardy!, winning and bouncing with ease. Maybe baby-faced Chuck would still trounce his opponents or towering Frank with his long walrus mustache would still gently murmur through clues.

  I could almost imagine that no time had passed.

  I was sitting in the very spot where I’d once been so sure I would never build any real life. Where I’d never find work I could do with real pride. Where I’d never move out, much less travel the world. Where for fun I’d watch people much smarter than I was.

  And I realized that all those times Mom and Dad had watched Jeopardy!, they were watching it only for me.

  In the morning the maple trees whissshed in the breeze. The backyard was alive like a zoo. Robins and cardinals and blue jays flew by. Squirrels were cavorting with glee back and forth, their tails flicking and curling as if just for show. The word squirrel comes from the Greek for “shadowtail,” skia oura, which descends to our very own word.

  Wait, I thought. Hold on. I’d seen Mom’s backyard before, once or twice. Was the connection to classical Greece always here? That seemed new.

  There were wind chimes from a box store, a distant echo of ancient China. And the cheap plastic birdbath had a vaguely Roman design.

  There were ancient empires all over the backyard. Quick, come look.

  I skipped lunch, not wishing to be rendered unconscious again, and headed out to see where else Trebekistan might lead.

  The print of the new sign that read Welcome To Mentor was in “furniture font,” Caslon Antique. It’s made to resemble weathered type from old presses, now consciously chosen to evoke rural pasts, frequently after commercial rezoning that knocks down heirloom trees. Aha! I could see. And I smiled. This was fun.

  The lawn of the church where I’d gone as a boy was enormous, the better to evoke a most powerful god. It’s an architectural cliché all over the world, as common as the Golden Rule itself. Somehow I’d never noticed it here.

  This was a town I had never seen before. It was almost the same. It was where I grew up. But the scale and the meaning had changed. The marsh was miles away, much farther than I’d always sensed as a child. The mosquitoes, for their part, were only the size of insects. How strange.

  History now shook the ground. Economics and politics flew in on each breeze. Art and religion were painted on street signs.

  Had this always been here on display?


  In Willoughby, just across the Chagrin River, still the small town of my birth, I stood speechless beside the town square. Monuments spoke of the dead who had fought in great Wars of the Civil and both World varieties. These battles and places were places and battles now, actual cities and beaches where the flesh of men bred from this very ground bled.

  The park has a captured enemy cannon I would climb as a boy, unable to imagine its meaning. It’s there to mark men who were neighbors and friends before they were names on a plaque. The places and times of their last days on earth had been distant and meaningless. Not anymore, although there are no markers for the price paid by the living, left behind to carry on. Soldiers died. Loved ones faded away.

  Children like me sometimes play the same way here, straddling the cannon and yelling “boom,” with no sense of the horror and loss. I stood for a moment in silence and wonder. Would it be solace to the grieving to know they, too, would be forgotten? Or would it have made everything worse?

  I didn’t think I’d ever know the answer.

  On the corner of Erie and Vine in the town of my birth once stood the first three-color traffic light in America. The original is in a museum somewhere, but I turned and watched the new one in its place, click-clack-clack-ing back and forth. Green yellow red. Green yellow red. Clockwork since before I was born. I’d passed through here hundreds of times, thousands, never knowing the history of even the tiniest thing. So I stood in the sunlight and gazed into Trebekistan, watching cars pass for a century, green yellow red, green yellow red, green yellow red. Studebakers, Corvairs, and Edsels rolled by.

  A woman pushing a stroller saw me watching the stoplight, and stopped to watch me watching it. We stood for a moment that may still be continuing. When I noticed and smiled, she averted her eyes, pushing her baby away from the strange man.

  Finally, I believe I must have passed the J. H. Gilbert Company of Willoughby, Ohio, the receipt from which we’ve considered in detail.

  I promise you I didn’t know what the receipt was for when I wrote chapter seven. But state-dependent retrieval has unusual power, and coincidence is much of reality. Remembering home, as I’ve written these words, has brought back memories I didn’t expect.

  I stopped on that day at a cemetery at Mentor’s far end.

  The cemetery is where Dad taught me to drive.

  “There’s no traffic,” Dad said, “and everyone’s dead, so at least you can’t kill anyone here.”

  I was creeping a blue Malibu along a narrow road between headstones, doing 5 mph, nervous, embarrassed, and trying too hard. Dad was outstanding. His teeth had gone bad, so he was shy about smiling, but he could be wicked and kind all at once. He was both on this day. This was great. We had fun.

  “Just go slow, be respectful, and get good with the brakes. If you don’t, you could wind up right back here.”

  I could see in his eyes he was kidding. And not.

  So in my teens I was taught about danger in a place built on death, and I’ve been careful as hell ever since. Dad had a way of his own with these things.

  Dad beat me back to the spot, returning too soon. He’s under the shade of a tree near my first shift of gears. There’s a marker that came from the army.

  I go there sometimes without telling my family. I don’t want to remind them of loss. So I go there and walk, or I sit, or just leave. It’s a place Dad and I can still talk.

  On one particular visit, perhaps this one, it was raining real hard.

  I think it was rubber galoshes.

  I drove Mom down to Connie’s house, completing my trip. Carefully. Good with the brakes.

  We sat in the dining room, Mom, Connie, the kids, and her faithful-as-tides husband, Rich. Quilted place mats for plates, quilted squares to keep food warm, quilted cushions on wood for our butts. Connie served protein, with proteins for sides. We were cutting and shoveling, knives and forks, clickety-clackity, stray bits flying onto the carpeted floor, devoured by two quilted dogs.

  “Well, what, exactly, did you plan on spending the $100,000 on?” Connie asked. With a dozen things hurting her body at any given time, my sister can cut right through crap.

  My mouth was too full to reply.

  “Then you don’t even know what you lost,” Connie concluded. “And you’ve won several good friends.”

  This was true. Kim and Dan and I got together a few times after our two-day final. We had dinner and went to movies and sat around exploring Trebekistan with each other. Dan, since he’d won the $100,000, would usually pick up the check. In a way, I was becoming glad he had won. It turned out his financial situation was even more dire than mine, and with a son to raise in the balance.

  And the conversations were a great prize on their own. Kim might relate something I was eating to a bit of French history. Dan would pick up the thread and hold forth on the Celtic influence across the west coast of Europe. Kim would respond by noting a similarity in linguistic patterns in Arabic. Dan would then relate a recent archaeological anomaly which might explain the relationship.

  I would nod a whole lot.

  I did the same to Connie, nodding and chewing.

  “I know you, Bob. The money wouldn’t have made you happy. You just would have wanted more money.” This was also true. I chewed faster. Too much truth makes you want to respond, if only to stem the flow. “The biggest win in the world wouldn’t have made you happy. You just would have wanted to win more.”

  Large amounts of truth can cause gastric discomfort. I was almost angry, for no valid reason, which is how my anger is usually served.

  “Nothing that could have possibly happened on that stage would have done you a damn bit of more good. You won lots of games. You’ve made everyone proud. The only one who expected more, or who is remotely upset, is you.”

  I swallowed.

  Connie, I should add, is reasonably happy, despite never once being able to afford a single fine luxury, and despite never getting the education she deserved. Despite physical pain for most of her life. Despite so many surgeries that her anesthesiologist gives frequent-flyer miles. Despite being abandoned by too many doctors and even friends whose compassion ran out.

  Connie is able to be happy.

  Here I had spent all this time feeling guilty. She’d just gotten on with her life, forgiving and surviving and raising her kids, and even making time to teach other kids how to blow flutes.

  Now she was giving me the education I didn’t get.

  Later on, alone after everyone else was in bed, I let myself watch myself lose. Connie and Rich had taped all the shows. I watched with the same sneaky shame that most people reserve for their porn, but with much less excitement.

  It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought.

  Alex was kind as he opened the show: “Bob Harris may have outsmarted himself yesterday…but I would like to point out that many, many times in our tournaments in the past, the player who was a distant third after our first day wound up winning.”

  “I don’t need your pity,” I replied with a grin. The audience and Alex laughed. We were on our way to surviving the half hour. Much of what followed was similar.

  All those years on the road—biker bars, strip clubs, prom nights, bachelor parties, the Giggle Ditch in Knoxville and the Comedy Yurt in Dubuque—seemed to kick in when I needed them most. A comedian is always of low social status, begging for your amusement, re-earning his place, and so losing was not really new. Pain channels to laughter, frustration is jubilance, anger just sets up the joke.

  If you ever see the show, you will probably believe I’m enjoying it. And I was, in a way. I was enjoying Dan and Kim. I was enjoying the inevitable Clevelandness of my loss. I was mostly enjoying the whoosh of the air in my ears during the long fall.

  But my timing, on the tape, was almost like in a nightclub. I got maybe six answers but made jokes all game long.

  Kim joked the same way in the end.

  Unlike me, he still had a decent chance. Near the finish, in fact, on
a Daily Double, he briefly had a realistic shot at winning. However, Kim had to bet everything.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “If I’m gonna get back in this game…” Kim paused, considering the math. “Y’know, I’ve always wanted to say this, Alex: let’s make it a true Daily Double.”

  The audience cheered. So did I. And then he was faced with the following:

  IN 1 KINGS 10, GOD TELLS HIM “ANOINT HAZAEL,” BUT HE DOESN’T TELL HIM TO VISIT HOMES DURING THE SEDER

  Kim’s face was an expression of puzzlement, concentration, and chagrin. I knew that look well. I had worn it myself. Seconds later, Kim exhaled audibly, not a sigh, but the sound of releasing a heavy burden. He knew he would soon hear the Oooh.

  Next to me, I could feel Dan’s shoulders unclench. Relaxing. He could already sense he had won. And we both knew that the correct response—“Who is Elijah?”—would become to Kim what John Quincy Adams was to me.

  Kim had lost. But he was still the same man I had met in Wisconsin, the comedian trapped in the cold of an unwilling tavern, the one telling his own jokes anyway, still cheerful, still smiling despite it all.

  “What the heck, I’ll come back,” Kim said. And when he won $200 on the next clue, he deadpanned, “See?” The audience laughed with appreciation. He deserved it and smiled back, enjoying the moment as best he could.

  I had a similar rueful smile of my own. My two-day total: $1.

  One. Single. Dollar.

  I jokingly reached for my wallet as Alex announced my total. “I figure you’ve got it on you,” I said.

  “I’ve got a buck, yes,” Alex replied, grinning back.

  To my knowledge, my $1 remains the worst two-day final score in any Jeopardy! tournament in history.