Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (5 page)

A few feet to my left stood the returning champion. His name was Matt, although with his glasses, perfect hair, and square jaw, he looked a great deal like Clark Kent. Matt appeared smart and confident, as people from high-gravity planets often do. At that moment he was memorizing a set of tiny laser discs that had been placed in his crib when he was jettisoned from a dying world.

It was late afternoon. I had already spent almost an entire day in the green room. As mentioned,
Jeopardy!
shoots five games at each taping, and you don’t know when you’ll play until your name is read aloud. I had already felt my adrenaline spike four times, as the players for the first four games were called out. Four times I had leaned forward in my chair, full-body clenching with nerves. Four times I had slumped down with both disappointment and relief, sinking back to watch another hour tick by.

By the time Susanne Thurber began to call the last names for the day, I was already exhausted. And I still didn’t know if I’d play. An alternate player is kept on hand, usually a local like myself, just in case someone passes out, takes ill, or (this is not hard to imagine now) simply runs away. So my blood pressure surged once again.

“…Bob Harris!” she said.

Now there was no turning back. In seconds I was thrust into the makeup chair for a last-minute touch-up to freshen my flesh tone. I paid no attention. I was too busy trying hard not to do anything stupid.

So, while a trained professional braved the sheen of my Irish skin (my entire family bears a strong resemblance to polished chrome), I silently recited a half-memorized list of 19th Century U.S. Presidents. I was trying to sort out, again, whether Pierce came before Buchanan.

I have this habit of overthinking during stress, and I had convinced myself that I couldn’t possibly survive the upcoming game without getting this key point resolved:
They always ask about presidents. I know the first and last bunches, but there’s this big hole in the middle with just Lincoln’s head sticking up. Buchanan had to be early, but not very early, and Pierce was, too. But who went when? And what about Millard goddam Fillmore…

To my left, meanwhile, Matt had quietly moved on to reciting the entire
K
section of the
Oxford English Dictionary
(second edition) while crushing a lump of coal into a diamond with one fist. I tried not to notice.
Jeopardy!
requires every neuron you can spare, and I only had one shot at this. The nineteenth century needed my urgent attention.

Gradually, however, I became aware that my skin stylist had gotten a teeny blob of flesh-colored goo on the inside of my nose. This was itchy, and I didn’t need the distraction. Especially since the issue was not yet sorted out: Was it Buchanan, then Pierce? Or Pierce, then Buchanan?

That’s when the makeup lady accidentally gooped my nozzle a second time. This dab clung to the edge of my nostril, dangling precariously, attracting a large crowd of curious nerve endings. Three U.S. presidents were being upstaged. This had to stop.

Being a Midwestern boy of squarish head, the only makeup I’d ever had on my face had rubbed off someone else’s. I wasn’t sure quite what to do. I didn’t notice any Kleenex for a quick wipe, so I did the next logical thing.

I sniffed.

This,
it turned out, was the idiotic mistake I’d been expecting.

I had now snorted the entire glob up into my nose, deep into my sinuses, and possibly six inches along my spinal column. Since I assume you’ve never passed around a bottle of Jergen’s and a straw at an all-night cosmetology rave, imagine brain-freeze from a too-fast cold milk-shake, spritzed across the linings of your nasal passages.

Ow.

A rubbing-alcohol tingle rolled through my skull, obliterating 19th Century Presidents and everyone they held dear. Civil War Generals started to fade, and Europe began losing its capitals. Asia and Africa would soon fall away. My entire earthly awareness was focusing on the spreading twinge of Maybelline Shiny Man #7.

Ow ow ow ow owwww.

Past and future collapsed. Continents drifted. Nine civilizations flourished at Troy. In five minutes, I was about to be quizzed on national TV, and the only fact I could recall:
My brain is filling with painful goo.

This was bad. While
Jeopardy!
has several recurring categories, Alex rarely trots out Things Rammed Up Your Nose.

So this was the end of my
Jeopardy!
career.

Fortunately, after some interval of between three seconds and six weeks, I realized there was a massive box of facial tissue—identifiable by the words “facial tissue,” in fact, near the brand name—directly in front of my face. Always had been. Possibly since the founding of Los Angeles.

I spent the next few minutes making funhouse faces and honking.
Gwoooonngggk!
Six passing geese were greeted in dialect.
Glorngk, glorrrrngk!
A tow truck thought it heard “Hello, sailor.”

Finally,
ahhhhh.
And just in time.

But now I would never figure out whether Buchanan or Pierce came first. And don’t even talk to me about Millard goddam Fillmore.

Clearly, I was going to lose.

Few great philosophical insights have come from things crammed into someone’s nose. It’s not clear that many philosophers even looked thoroughly.

But let’s take a moment and notice that this whole tingly episode wouldn’t have happened if I’d simply managed to notice the giant Kleenex box
directly in front of my face
when I first sat down. Thus, before the first game even begins, we embark on what I humbly call the Eightfold Path to Enlightened Jeopardy:

1. Obvious things may be worth noticing.

Most things aren’t nearly as difficult as we make them. This is true of
Jeopardy!,
which gives you hints in almost every clue, as much as anything I’ve ever been around.

Before long, we’ll hit a bunch of other simple ideas that seem handy, in pretty much the order I learned them myself. Many are exceedingly obvious; all are much easier said than done.

Buddhists, of course, follow an Eightfold Path in their own tradition. Enlightened Jeopardy is similar, except instead of a release from suffering and ego, you get lots and lots of money. Sometimes even cars and stuff.

Granted, these objectives may be mutually exclusive.

I never said I had every detail worked out.

Our second step on the Eightfold Path is even more important than the first. In fact, it’s essential to everything that follows, including amassing your own series of
Jeopardy!
wins.

To begin, close the book for a while. Seriously. Don’t make trouble. I have my eye on you, remember. In just a few pages, we’ll march into the studio, meet Alex, and start stumbling through an actual
Jeopardy!
game. But for right now, go away for five full minutes.

And while the book is closed, see how thoroughly you remember your own private mental image of me bouncing around the
Jeopardy!
green room with a half-gallon of Cover Girl horked up my blowhole.

Go ahead. Close the book, enjoy the mental movie, and come back in a few. You’ll have fun at my expense, and eventually it’ll help lead to a better memory.

Come back when you’ve got a big dopey grin on your face. I’ll wait.

Welcome back from the river of Avon.

Fun? Easy? I bet you have a terrific imagination. You can probably remember complex mental pictures in remarkable detail, almost effortlessly. Yes? Good.

Now, forget all that. And without looking, see if you can reel off all three of the presidents I mentioned, the ones I was trying to put in correct order.

Take a minute. They’re in your skull somewhere. For extra credit, recite all three in the order they were first mentioned.

For most people, it’s suddenly not quite so simple. But shouldn’t the presidents be the easy part? These are, after all, just simple names, not physical sensations and events you’ve never even experienced. If your brain were a disk drive, three little names would occupy a teeny fraction as much space as your mental video of me caroming around the Sony lot with Estée Lauder’s legs dangling from my nose.

Even now, there’s a decent chance you still may not remember all three names, even though right this second you now have yet another cartoon image of me in your head.

This is not a flaw of memory. You almost certainly
do
have a remarkable memory, not to mention a playful imagination, as we’ve just demonstrated. However, your brain’s structure has a different set of priorities than you do.

To the chagrin of anyone trying to memorize anything, our heads are much less interested in what we particularly
want,
which tends to be momentary, than in keeping us from becoming dead, which is rather more permanent. And given that many of our natural predators are big foul-smelling things that roar and leap, the rapid creation of memory—one of the keys to our species’ survival, in fact—is necessarily a profoundly physical, emotional, and sensory task.

In contrast, the forty-three U.S. presidents (counting Grover Cleveland twice), the forty-six vice presidents (counting twice-serving George Clinton and John C. Calhoun only once each), and the forty British monarchs (excluding the Saxons and Danes, the Cromwells, and Lady Jane Grey) seldom attack you in the night with claws flashing, teeth digging for your throat, and their venomous drool overwhelming your senses. Hardly ever, in fact.

Books themselves are less memorable still. Square little things. Slow on their feet. Trade paperbacks barely so much as spit. Even hardbacks, which at least have an exoskeleton, rarely attack. (Although I’d be leery around chapter 15 of this book if I were you. Nasty little page. John Quincy Adams is involved, so be alert. He’ll creep up on you.) So, like it or not, you’ll always have a hard time simply transferring book data to brain with a minimum of blood loss. Instead, it’s the physical, emotional, or intensely sensory stuff that stays.

In short, human beings are wired to sweat the
big
stuff: sex, food, combat, sex, birth, death, and sex. Like it or not, your own hippocampus (the brain chunk that decides how much priority to assign to a given memory) has roughly the same tastes and interests as Homer Simpson, drunk, at a bullfight.

Viewed through this lens, my backstage attempt to snort up a majority control of Revlon is loaded with a gazillion little memory grabbers: it’s set in a high-pressure situation, there’s physical pain causing goofy commotion, and the resolution of the problem is made more urgent by the presence of a ticking clock. Throw in tasty music and Uma Thurman, and Quentin Tarantino could probably make it look kinda cool.

Compare the last time you were in a traffic accident (or similar moment of sudden terror), even if it was months or years ago, to a recent, routine drive to the store (or other mundane experience similar to the sudden terror).

Which do you remember better? If you’re human, it’s probably the distant car wreck.

Here’s how that’s possible: Right this second, your brain is quietly, continuously associating the experience of running your eyes across this very page with where you are, the time of day, what you’re wearing, what you’ve eaten, the mood you’re in, the sounds and smells around you, how much sleep you’ve gotten, the brightness of the light, and how your butt feels right this second in that chair. (Did you just suddenly notice your butt just now? Good. You’re paying close attention.)

Most of this usually vanishes quickly, replaced by an endless stream of other mundane detail. However, during life-threatening, sexy, or otherwise visceral experiences, the constant flood of information is suddenly considered significant by the little Homer-Simpson-yelling-olé part of your brain. Sex? Violence? Survival issue!?!?
Record everything! NOW!
And since your brain is all about self-preservation and has no time to sort the data, a large chunk of
everything
going on will be retained.