Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (8 page)

 Wait for the Go Lights,

 Then thumb-thump like crazy.

But I knew going in that my knowledge would be no better than anyone else’s, and probably worse than most, since I just barely squeaked through the test. My reflexes are good, but not great. And given that the returning champ would already be more experienced, I would begin at a clear disadvantage.

I would have to try something else entirely to have any chance of winning.

HE PIONEERED THE NOVEL WITH “ROBINSON CRUSOE” AND THE GHOST STORY WITH “THE APPARITION OF ONE MRS. VEAL”

My eyes focus on the final “L.”

Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe…

“…Veal,” Alex says.

A half-beat of total silence. Instants pass. I fight myself slightly, keeping my eyes off the Go Lights.

I am hoping my finger will simply move on its own.

Back in Ohio, watching
Jeopardy!
in a small white house with Mom and Dad during a period when my adult life didn’t quite, um,
take,
I had gotten into the habit of tapping my index finger in synch with the contestants hitting their buzzers.

It was just something to do, part of playing along. Even if I was completely lost in a category—which was often—I could still flatter myself by hoping I might have gotten the timing right.

I left before long, stumbling out into the world in search of my own actual life, and I didn’t see the show much for a long time. Usually I was working nights as a B-minus-list comedian, making a decent living by roving constantly between cheesy nightclubs and small Midwestern colleges. My day for most of the early 1990s consisted of a six-hour drive to a motel in some small Midwestern college town, followed by a performance, food from a gas station, and a little sleep before repeating the process the next day.

Occasionally I’d get to drive back to New York or D.C. or Chicago or wherever my latest One-True-Eternal-Soulmate™ happened to share an apartment with my stuff. This would also be where a landlord and credit-card companies happily collected my money. After a few days of visiting my life, I’d climb back into Max and rumble out to another string of small Midwestern colleges.

Still, every time I’d happen across
Jeopardy!,
the little finger-tapping habit never stopped.

When
Jeopardy!
suddenly called, I had exactly two weeks to prepare. So instead of trying to cram a whole bunch of information into my head, I decided first to go online and read as much as possible about how memory worked.

Since the Internet was still in its Bronze Age—I had a dial-up connection, browsed with Netscape, and wore a helmet made from the tusk of a wild boar—this took time. But when I first stumbled into a description of a phenomenon called “state-dependent retrieval”—basically, the power of things like sights and smells and even our body chemistry to trigger memories—it made instant sense. (Many experts split some of what follows into “context-dependent retrieval,” a separate category. Conceptually, it’s all pretty darn similar, though.)

Have you ever returned to a city you haven’t visited in years, a place you couldn’t possibly still be able to navigate, only to find that once there, you instantly knew your way around again? Bingo.

The scatteredness of my own life and the constant travel had taught me the power of individual places to bring back unique memories and powerful emotions. I had wondered how and why this always happened.

The mind-altering effect of specific places is so powerful that we instinctively take it for granted. We even create special places where certain emotions, and
only
those, are to be felt. Cemeteries, for example, are places of death and sadness, despite the fact that they’re filled with living creatures and expressions of love. Almost nobody actually dies
in
a cemetery, although it would be pretty convenient.

Carnival rides, on the other hand, reliably send thousands of giggling people across America straight to hospital emergency rooms, year after year. But these remain places of joy and excitement, filled with happy families, all zooming and giddy.

So where do we cry, and where do we go
Wheee
?

Again: human memory is built not on logic, but on intense experience. We
have
grieved in cemeteries, so they literally give us grief. We
have
squealed in carnival rides, so they give us new joy, no matter how many sudden experiments in human flight may occur.

Since our neurons are so interconnected, just one stimulus can trigger a memory—a
response,
in
Jeopardy!
terms—which leads to another, and another, as synapses fire automatically, a long line of falling mental dominoes.

In short: the context stimulates the neurons that create the memories and feelings that create the behavior.

This is a fact of life in sports. Have you ever wondered why there’s a home-field advantage in every type of game, even the ones without crowds or referees? State-dependent retrieval. Players whose muscle memories are preconsciously invoked by the nearby sights, smells, and sounds are at an enormous advantage.

State-dependent retrieval is strong stuff. Fortunately, it’s also simple to use.

Feeling too blah to exercise? Put on the workout clothes anyway. Pretty soon you’ll probably feel like working out, as if the clothes created the feeling. Which they did.

Want to ace that next test? Don’t study in your kitchen or dorm room; study in a room as much as possible like the place where the test will be given, at the same time of day. Wear the same clothes you’ll wear. Sit in the same seat. (Have you ever picked a random seat in a classroom, and before long discovered that it was inexplicably the place you were most comfortable?
Ta-daa.
) All else being equal, you’ll probably feel more comfortable, remember more, and perform better on the day.

And this is our next step on the Eightfold Path to Enlightened Jeopardy:

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.

So how should you train a split-second muscle response for a nationally televised game show?

While being flooded with the imagery of the game itself.

Fortunately, that’s exactly what I’d already done with my index finger, thousands and thousands of times.

As I did this research, my current One-True-Eternal-Soulmate™ was named Annika. She and my stuff lived peacefully in a small apartment they shared in West Hollywood. I usually got to visit for a couple of weeks each month.

Annika was (and is, wherever she might be now) spectacularly well educated, good-hearted, and soft-spoken. We had been together for almost two years, during which nothing much happened.

This was, I remember thinking,
fantastic.

My previous relationships had had a habit of exploding in interesting ways, including flights to Ecuador, undisclosed pre-existing boyfriends, sudden elopements with wealthy horse breeders, and other spontaneous romantic combustions.

This was entirely my own fault, of course. Anyone can singe themselves by accident once or twice. Eight or ten good scorchings, you begin to realize they actually enjoy quality time around open flames. It’s one thing to ignore red flags; it’s quite another to write sappy love songs to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and then wonder why things never quite work out. But that’s all for another book. (Working title, top of my head:
Kissing the Hindenburg.
)

I once visited a gorgeous blonde’s apartment and received a guided tour of her many framed self-portraits as Anne Boleyn. There were perhaps a dozen on the walls, and more in her closets. And I thought to myself: OK. This is
manageable.

Maybe I was just insecure enough that I needed to feel needed, and was willing to pay any price.

Of course, I wasn’t such a great catch myself, with my own moments as magnesium flash powder. And my habit of overthinking during stress, seeking solutions not by listening but by retreating into my head, didn’t exactly help. This had worked exceptionally well on math tests when I was younger, but proved ineffective during intimate arguments. Too many discussions went like this:

“Bob, I really need you to listen more closely.”

Listen closely? I
am
listening closely. I bet you’re just upset because I hid all your guns, won’t give you my PIN number, and can’t see the resemblance to Anne Boleyn. Besides which, Anne Boleyn had six fingers on one hand, but it keeps going back and forth between left and right in the paintings. I’d think you’d know where to stick the extra pinky. Say…with six digits, where do you put a wedding ring? And is it still possible to extend the middle finger? Or would you use the middle two?

But with Annika, at last, there was a placidity I adored. Her intelligence and education were attractive, yes, but it was more her sedate reserve that I found attractive. It was soothing to be her boyfriend. We didn’t fight. We didn’t debate. Looking back, I’m not certain we even spoke. Plus, she had a calming physical presence, the sort of stillness one usually finds in someone trying to break the world record for being covered in the most bees.

This was, at last, a kind of serenity. I certainly wasn’t worried about Annika cheating on me. That would involve moving at least a half-dozen major muscle groups. We spent most weekends when I was home sitting in the living room, catching up on our reading, and quite noticeably not burning in a hydrogen fireball down to our bare metal superstructure in just over thirty-seven seconds.

It was on just such a day, shortly after
Jeopardy!
called, that I stumbled across the notion of intentionally not using the Go Lights, instead simply trusting my instincts like a wannabe Jedi, letting my finger react on its own.

Delighted with the sheer lunacy of the idea, I immediately told Annika. But the more I tried to explain the plan, the less rational it must have sounded. I think this was the very first time she thought I was gradually losing my mind.

It would not be the last.

Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe…

There are two small white lights on the contestant’s side of the podium that illuminate when you’ve won on the buzzer. The one closest to my right hand is in my peripheral vision. Sometimes the entire game is only about making this one hidden light come on.

My finger moves slowly amid hard plastic chaos. I only hope that it knows what it’s doing.

Cliklikikkitylikkityclikit.

CHAPTER
6

THINKING AHEAD WHILE NOT THINKING AT ALL