Waking up that morning last October, my dream was to win a fortune on Jeopardy!. Then I watched the returning champion, Harrison Whitaker, shred through the games right before mine. My new dream was to not throw up all over the stage. by David Lewis Waking up that morning last October, my dream was to win a fortune on Jeopardy!. Then I watched the returning champion, Harrison Whitaker, shred through the games right before mine. My new dream was to not throw up all over the stage. I achieved this dream only by going into the bathroom right before filming and giving myself a full-body rubdown with CBD lotion.  Standing in the center podium, moisturized and filled with diminished expectations, I looked to my left and shared a glance with the other new contestant. In that look of deep commiseration, we both knew that neither of us were opponents. We were meat for that vegan bastard on my right to swallow like a hippo. Then Ken Jennings came out, and the game began. It turned out I didn’t need that CBD rubdown. As soon as the announcer introduced me as “a subterranean tour guide from Seattle” all the stress burned away.  This was nowhere near as stressful as the time I bombed out on Ellen DeGeneres’s dating show, or the time I faked being a Hollywood special effects wizard to get invited to a white nationalist meeting with a tape recorder in my backpack.  But don’t mistake calm for confidence. I was calm because I knew I had absolutely no chance of winning. The only way I was going to beat the returning champion was with a reverse-Slumdog Millionaire: if a series of random, traumatic events in his life prevented him from knowing the exact bits of trivia on the board that day. I hoped he got in a fender-bender at the exact second NPR mentioned which states the Wabash flows through. If he knew absolutely anything that I knew, I was screwed.  Because more than anything, Jeopardy! is about how fast you can press a button. It’s not even really a trivia game, it’s Space Invaders with some trivia thrown in. And Harrison had the buzzer speed. Nobody is allowed to buzz until Ken is done reading the question. If you press the buzzer a fraction of a second before that, you get temporarily locked out. Except for the nanosecond after the Big Bang, no tiny amount of time has led to as much Reddit speculation as how to get that perfect press. Weeks before going on, I studied all the material and practiced all the tricks with a professional game show buzzer. I perfected a foolproof “bounce” strategy where I listened to how Ken asks questions and “bounced” my buzz off the last syllable. But in the morning mock game, where all the contestants rehearse before the taping, my “bounce” strategy bounced straight into Harrison. He said he also practiced by listening to Ken’s voice… at double speed. It was a brilliant strategy! I just wished I learned about it a day earlier.  Fun bit of Jeopardy! trivia: While an episode of Jeopardy! takes 22 minutes to watch, it only takes 22 seconds to play. Or at least it feels that way.  In that 22-second blur, I felt like that paralyzed French memoirist who wrote a book by blinking out the alphabet. Endless bits of useless information I knew flashed in front of me. The buzzer in my hand might as well have been  attached to Wheel of Fortune in the next studio. And then it was over. I walked off stage listening to the click of my dress shoes. One heel was clicking loose because, before the CBD rubdown, I had been viciously grinding it into the greenroom floor. By the time I got back to the hotel, the sole had completely fallen off. I really wished I’d brought another pair of shoes. The next day, dazed and half-soled, I processed the reality that I would never be a Jeopardy! champion by riding the Jurassic World flume ride at Universal Studios on an endless loop. Only animatronic dinosaurs squirting water in my face could provide a second of relief from constantly thinking about what I could have done differently.  The T. rex roared, the boat splashed down the 84-foot drop, the souvenir camera flashed a picture. If anybody bought all those $21 photos and made them into a flip book, they would have seen a sad man whose face never changed, because his thoughts never changed, as he made the endless loop through Jurassic Park. *** Returning to my day job as a Beneath the Streets tour guide, I discovered how much more fun it is to be soaking wet when you’re surrounded by dinosaurs. During the winter rain, the tunnels beneath Seattle flood so much that it looks like the Phantom of the Opera down there.  And I was glad to be the Phantom, hosting as many tours down there as possible. The surface world reminded me too much of losing on Jeopardy! Just being on the bus on my way to work brought back memories.  It was on the D-Line where I first read the e-mail that I’d finally been invited to audition in person after years of taking the online test. It was on the D-Line where I learned the audition would be indefinitely postponed because the entire world was going into COVID-19 lockdown.  I get off at the same bus stop where I literally ran up the hill to get to the Seattle Central Library before the COVID closures. Cramming a backpack, and two tote bags, borrowing multiple library cards from friends to make the most of the COVID postponement. I spent the quarantine strengthening my weak subjects for the audition, cramming on physics, chemistry, sports, country music, and anything else that could possibly have “What is” before it.  The first time I auditioned, I was way too corporate about it, wearing a lot of tan. Then it dawned on me that Jeopardy! is a TV show and not an Ivy League professorship. The next time I auditioned—four years later—I dressed up like a metrosexual magician who's really into football, and got cast on my second try. Flamboyant clothes in Seahawks colors, the secret to an outfit that pleases all of America.  With the audition, you can learn from your mistakes because you can audition as many times as you like. Some people audition for decades, their whole lives, and never get on. Once you do get on, you can’t learn from your mistakes, because you can only be on Jeopardy! once in your life. Now back in the tunnels, all that trivia I crammed seemed so trivial. I started to make peace with the fact that it wouldn’t be so bad spending the rest of my life showing people around the cowboy ghost town, ruins underneath Seattle. When it rains, the 19th-century sidewalks leak like a shipwreck, but some are still inlaid with purple glass skylights from the days before lightbulbs, when that was the only way to light the tunnels.  “They look like amethysts,” a guest said. “For the same reason! Amethysts are filled with manganese, and iron impurities, just like the glass from back then.”  That was a sentence I never would have been able to say if not for years of trying to get on Jeopardy! In that second it hit me how much of the trivia I crammed in order to get on TV for 22 minutes I actually use every day. My background in history and literature has always been pretty good, but it is only because of Jeopardy! that I can succinctly explain to ten-year-olds why our volcanoes are different from the volcanoes in Hawaii, and why the huge beams supporting all the buildings in Pioneer Square are made out of Douglas fir instead of cedar. Jeopardy! is the only reason why I know most of the bands who the people taking my tour are coming to town to see. And it’s definitely the only reason I can even pretend to fake my way through a conversation about sports with all the people so rich they can fly all over the country just to watch football games. They tip well. When I was on Jeopardy! Ken Jennings mentioned that the flashcards he made to learn cocktail combinations are why, if things don’t work out, he can always make a living as the world’s only Mormon bartender.  At times, trivia life can seem trivial. But knowing a little bit about manganese and iron impurities literally transforms the broken glass in the sidewalks into jewels.  ...read more read less