Free Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! by Bob Harris

contestants also receive! zipped across TV screens thousands of miles away and several weeks in the future.
    Sue Bee brand honey! and Scalpicin hair treatment! and the Jeopardy! electronic game! later, finally, it was over. While Alex disappeared back into the mists of celebrity, I wobbled off the stage, back into the darkness, and tried to readjust my eyes, ears, and self-esteem.
    Susanne Thurber patted me on the back and gently guided me toward a series of forms I needed to fill out. I was walking gingerly, trying to convince myself of what had just happened. Patients leaving surgery are often more sure of their footing.
    There was a slip of paper with a large number on it and a place for me to sign. The number was simply impossible to believe. It was enough money to pay rent for an entire year. It was twice what I had paid for rumbling old Max, larger even than the college debt I had worked for eight years to pay off.
    I stuffed my copy of the slip into my thrift-store sports jacket, grabbed a free Goodie Bag including a Jeopardy! home game—which I still own, almost ten years later, somewhere in a dusty pile in an apartment I don’t quite live in—and wobbled out into the Sony lot.
    I was proud. I was relieved. I was tired.
    I wanted more.

 
 
    CHAPTER
7
     
    HOW EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED
     
    Also, Twenty-One Interesting Uses for Rubber
     
    U nfortunately, I still didn’t have much in the way of actual memory skills.
    I often wonder, even now, if I have much of a memory at all. Example: I finished the chapter about taking the Jeopardy! test about a week ago. And I still don’t remember what year it was the first time I failed.
    I’ve been thinking of going through a large stack of old notebooks and tax receipts, trying to pin down the year. This is no inconvenience. Sometime between six months and six years ago, I again moved in with a delightful and talented woman—for the fifth (or fourth, or possibly sixth) time—and, as you know, all of my stuff is still in boxes and garbage bags, as it has been since you picked up this book.
    I’ve mentioned this woman several times now, of course. Jane, who named Squeema, wink-wink.
    The bags and boxes were supposed to be unpacked long ago. But they’re still all sort of shoved into the corner of the guest bedroom, which was supposed to have become an office. Instead, it’s just storage.
    It wouldn’t take more than a few days to unpack. I don’t have much. I don’t like to own stuff. There’s a whole explanation for that. The one I usually tell myself involves frugality and charity and even a self-flattering touch of asceticism. But of course that’s complete baloney, and you deserve better.
    The main reason I don’t own many things is that I hate packing up. I’ve had to do it too many times.
    I’m forty-two years old and I’ve never been married. Came close a few times, but one of us always screwed it up or exploded over Lakehurst, New Jersey, or something. My series of exes is now long enough that the names have started to repeat like the books of the Old Testament: Ruth, then First and Second Sara, First and Second Kelly, and so on. Eventually you get to Goliath—that was just a phase—and then finally the Ephesians, who seemed nice at the party but didn’t even call the next day.
    Some of it was youth. I knew everything, you should know, at least for a while anyway. Some of it was bad luck or the odd tragic calamity here and there. And some of it was living in Hollywood, where too many people upgrade relationships the way they do cell phones.
    Still, I sleep OK. I’ve never cheated on anyone, my lies have usually been the kind that kept nice little surprises hidden, and I’ve never once said the words “I love you” without meaning them. I’m still friends with about half of my former One-True-Eternal-Soulmates™, and quite close to a few, if that means anything.
    But I still can’t quite unpack all the boxes. This late in the game, sometimes