I am here to spin. It’s 3:30 p.m. on a Friday in late January, in Los Angeles—specifically, Culver City. I am in a freezing-cold studio on the Sony lot. I like saying “on the Sony lot.” I’m on the Sony lot, in a studio, and it’s freezing cold. But I am thankful for this temperature. My skin rests atop a roiling sea of sweat. I am often a boat adrift on this sea. A friend once saw my wedding photos and asked if I had been flung into a pool—you know, one of those weddings. Nope, just plain old sweat. My friend went silent. I am no longer married. I have three children: boy and girl and girl, eighteen and seventeen and twelve. My parents were married for more than fifty years. My father died five years ago. Toward the end, he became panicked by every chill and practically lived with a pulse oximeter on his index finger. My marriage fell apart a few months after his death. It was sad and painful, Pat, and thank goodness things are much better now. But I’m talking to myself, because Pat Sajak has yet to stroll into this freezing-cold studio on the Sony lot in Culver City. I stand before the wheel while Pat is in his dressing room, putting on his Thursday suit.
I am Thursday. Or one of three people who constitute Thursday, March 26, 2020.
To my right is Mark, from Brentwood.
To my left is Cyndi, from Baltimore.
I am David, from New York.
We are loosening our spinning arms while two contestant handlers prep us, their eyes strobing between frantic and calm. It seems that an airplane door has slid open and the next twenty minutes are ten thousand feet below. They tell us to just have fun. They tell us to clap without clapping, because actual clapping might mess up the audio. They tell us to smile and stand straight and speak loudly and clearly and remember the used-letter board and on Free Play call a vowel and buy vowels when you can, and, oh, just have fun, that’s the important thing, Mark, David, Cyndi, have fun and be yourself. I nod and fiddle with my nametag. Then I nod again and practice clapping without clapping. The theme of the week is Gone Fishin’, so the set has been decorated as an Adirondack-style lodge by way of the Country Bear Jamboree. Rough-hewn logs and fieldstone have been fashioned from high-density urethane foam. There are canoes and a tackle box and over the mantel an image of a salmon. My fly-fisherman father would’ve liked this place. In the rafters, a studio audience hangs like the seventh circle of spectator hell: those doomed to witness game shows. The contestant handlers are almost mystically upbeat, as if earlier they had chopped up a rainbow and snorted its brightly colored lines. Wind seems to blow through their hair as they warm up our voices by having us shout random letters. T! N! R! S! They remind us to reach for the wheel a few spokes to the right and grip near the top with our thumbs raised. They’ve obviously seen accidents. Perhaps disasters. Contestants thrown onto the wheel, impaled, crucified, crushed. This multicolored grindstone weighs more than a ton. All jewelry has been removed from our spinning hands. I imagine myself slipping forward and becoming a dopey version of the Vitruvian Man, going around and around. Just remember to buy vowels. And to clap without clapping.
The makeup person comes over for the last touch-up. She’s wearing a parka and fingerless gloves. She dabs a brush into mysterious powder and gessoes me new again. I love this woman. Earlier, in the hair-and-makeup room, she punched up my always tired eyes. I seem to be getting my father’s eyes. Like those cups that hold soft-boiled eggs. And she clipped a few rogue hairs from my eyebrows. I am fifty-two years old. I flew in yesterday. Many of the other male contestants joked about sitting in the hair-and-makeup chair. They asked for mascara or blush with a theatrical swish. Or if they were bald they requested curls. I always try to avoid my own gaze in the mirror. I am no good at looking at myself. I see every fault. Every bump and blemish and rash. I keep my eyes lowered as if I were passing a potential mugger.
“All set,” the makeup person says.
“Thank you,” I say, hoping my thank-you is imbued with extra meaning.
“Good luck,” she says.
She says good luck to us all.
The contestant handlers give us water pulled from a contestant water-bottle caddy.
“O.K., guys, we’re going soon.”
We sip. We nod. We sip again.
The floor is being buffed to its final black onyx shine.
The stage manager and his production cohorts bustle along the sidelines.
Cues are called, cameras focussed and primed for the opening shot with the overhead sweep of Pat Sajak and Vanna White entering the studio like the king and queen of TV prom, Vanna heading for the puzzle board, Pat for the wheel, where his Thursday awaits.
“Remember, just be yourself,” the contestant handlers say before stepping away.
We nod. We smile. We are ready.
Merv Griffin, from San Mateo, invented the “Wheel.”
Merv Griffin, night-club singer and recorder of “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts.”
Merv Griffin, host of “Play Your Hunch.”
Merv Griffin, star of the syndicated “Merv Griffin Show,” which aired on WNEW Channel 5 New York. This was the Merv I knew. Merv and Mike Douglas and Dinah Shore and sometimes Joe Franklin and always “The Brady Bunch” and “The Partridge Family” and “I Dream of Jeannie” and “The Odd Couple” and “The Munsters” and “Sanford and Son” and “Get Smart” and “Green Acres” and “My Three Sons” and “The Honeymooners” and “All in the Family” and “The Hollywood Squares” and “The Gong Show” and “The Price Is Right” and “The $20,000 Pyramid” and “Match Game”—man oh man, “Match Game”—and whatever else was available for a kid freed from school and eating cinnamon toast in his parents’ bedroom. Sitting four feet from that nineteen-inch Zenith color television. Manipulating the Jerrold remote with its twelve hard-click buttons and toggle switch that travelled between three planes of existence: standard (2-13), extra (14-25), and extra weird (26-37). I might’ve been talentless at the piano but I was Rick Wakeman on that motherfucking Jerrold, alternating between “Hogan’s Heroes” and “The Flintstones” without missing a canned beat. Those were happy days, made happier only on Saturday mornings, when I parked myself in the living room, with its twenty-five-inch Zenith—oh, the glory of those additional six inches—and participated in a network ménage à trois of children’s programming: ABC with “The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour” and “The Krofft Supershow” and “Super Friends” and CBS with “The Sylvester and Tweety Show” and “The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour” and “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” and NBC with “The Pink Panther Show” and “Speed Buggy” and “Land of the Lost.” Click, click, click-click-click. Television was the essential part of my upbringing, and my generation might have been the last to share this cathode-ray DNA with our parents and grandparents. We could all talk Lucy.
Merv Griffin always struck me as Johnny Carson lite. His show taped from the Celebrity Theatre, in the heart of Hollywood, and Merv himself had the demeanor of a gold bracelet hanging loosely from a wrist. His guests oozed a sincere shallowness I found intriguing. Zsa Zsa. Marty Allen. Charo. Rip Taylor. Natural performers, all of them. And sometimes my beloved Steve Martin showed up. It was my first taste of this specific kind of cheese. Little did I know Merv was also an innovator.
In 1963, he and his wife came up with “Jeopardy!”
He even wrote the thirty-second ditty for Final Jeopardy. It’s called “Think!” and it earned him additional millions in music royalties.
Smart Merv.
Then, in 1975, he duplicated this success by marrying the game hangman with Vegas-style roulette and, voilà, “Wheel of Fortune” was born. Chuck Woolery, later of “Love Connection” fame, was the original host, and his co-host, the model Susan Stafford, was the letter turner. The initial show involved a fair amount of shopping, but in the eighties the format settled into its present-day incarnation, with Pat Sajak and Vanna White. All of this made Merv Griffin a very rich man. In 1986, he sold his empire to the Coca-Cola Company, and soon he started buying casinos and hotels, and even had disastrous dealings with our current President. Merv died in 2007, a billionaire. His epitaph reads, I will not be right back after this message. God bless the man, now a pile of bones and a collection of YouTube videos I’ve recently watched, along with the entire series run of “Ark II” and “Monster Squad.”
My youngest is the reason I’m on the show. Late spring, 2018. She and her older sister and I are sitting on the couch eating our takeout dinner in front of the “Jeopardy!”/“Wheel of Fortune” block. In concept, I prefer family meals at the table, but in reality the glow of the television during dinner can feel as vital, if unnecessary, as a warm piece of bread. I grew up watching the nightly news, local and national, with my pork chops and applesauce. My family was an NBC family, meaning we went from Sue Simmons to Chuck Scarborough to John Chancellor. My father would come home from work and prop himself behind the newspaper. I knew I was being too loud if I heard the Times ruffle. Or if he asked me to turn up the television while I was monologuing about my fifth-grade day.
“Can we change?” my youngest asks during Double Jeopardy.
“Let’s not,” I say, since I’ve always been decent with general knowledge, though I’m more Trivial Pursuit than Encyclopædia Britannica. And maybe I want my daughters to be impressed with their dad. I remember doing the same with my father, answering the questions—or, more accurately, questioning the answers—hoping he might notice what a clever son he had.
“Please change,” my youngest says.
“Not yet.”
My father adored television. He watched a lot of sports, and as a boy I would always forget which team we were rooting for. The white team? No, no, the blue team. In retirement, he took in a lot of financial news, CNBC nipping in the background like a Jack Russell terrier. He also enjoyed shows like “Deadliest Catch” and “Swamp People” and “Duck Dynasty,” where seemingly real men did seemingly real-man things. My father had no idea how to change a tire, but he could take down a marathon of “Ice Road Truckers.” As an adult, whenever I visited him, the most I expected was a temporary muting of the volume. I hardly took this as an offense; rather, I plopped myself down on the nearest chair. I think he chose being aloof over being shy, perhaps for the sake of corporate self-preservation. And maybe parenthood baffled him as well. He operated nearer the surface. But he had a sweet and sentimental underbelly, which could be glimpsed when he was scratched the right way.
The closest moment I ever had with him was on the day he was buried and I was tasked with identifying his body in the coffin. This happened at the Frank E. Campbell funeral home, in Manhattan, on the corner of Madison and Eighty-first Street, a grand brownstone that resembles a consulate for the dead. The funeral director led me into the empty chapel: the coffin was on a bier near a door, where, on the other side, the hearse was parked and waiting. The two of us walked to the coffin. The lid was already raised. I noticed the familiar dark-blue blazer. My father’s uniform even in death. And then came the hair. How strange it was to see it combed in a slightly different fashion. Then I saw the trace of stitching that zigzagged across his lips. That was disturbing. And almost a cliché. The same with the waxy Madame Tussauds complexion. In that coffin, my father looked cored of meaning, hollow and shrunken, but this was him, and I put my hand on his empty chest and told him I loved him. He never seemed more vulnerable. More human. As if reborn to me. Oh, Dad, I remember thinking, I’m sorry.
If I could tell you I would let you know.
Who is W. H. Auden?
But now “Jeopardy!” is finishing and “Wheel of Fortune” is beginning, and both my daughters enjoy trying to solve the puzzles, so we tuck into Pat and Vanna. “Wheel of Fortune” puzzles come in a variety of categories. There’s Food & Drink, Person, Thing, Before & After, What Are You Doing?, On The Map, Phrase, Crossword, etc. Before & After might be BALD EAGLE SCOUT. What Are You Doing? WATCHING THE SUNSET. Crosswords have multiple interconnected answers revolving around a clue, as in “Seeing Red”: LOBSTER, ROSE, BLUSHING. “Jeopardy!” this ain’t. The game starts with two tossups, worth a thousand dollars and two thousand dollars. No spinning is involved. Letters are randomly revealed until a contestant rings in with the correct answer. Tossups also appear toward the end of the game, in the form of the Triple Toss-Up, three puzzles done in rapid succession and worth two thousand dollars apiece. If you can dominate the tossups, you can bank nine thousand dollars without ever spinning. No luck is involved; it’s just a matter of wits. Occasionally, I can get on a roll, and I must’ve got on one of these rolls, with the five tossups and the four regular puzzles, because during the bonus round, where the winner of the regular round could win a car or cash, my youngest turns to me and says, “You should go on ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ You’re really good at it.”
“Trust me, I’m not.”
But she, ever enthusiastic, is convinced of my genius, and she goes and grabs my laptop and within minutes has found the online application for becoming a contestant. I humor her because I know they will never pick me.
The e-mail told me to be honest with myself—uh-oh—and consider the following questions before deciding to attend the “Wheel of Fortune” audition: Do I think I can solve puzzles in front of a national audience? Um, I doubt it. Am I able to stay focussed and control my nerves under pressure? Historical evidence suggests otherwise. Can I call letters with a clear and confident voice? Define confident. Do I have good presence and vitality and energy? Hmm, I think so, as I recheck the address in the e-mail, having already walked a block in the wrong direction after exiting the subway. But here I am, outside the Ink 48 hotel, on the far West Side of midtown Manhattan. The e-mail informs me that there will be a coffee stand in the lobby for guests staying at the hotel. Please do not drink this coffee! This is not for us. There will be a water station in our audition room. I wish I had brought coffee. But I like the line “This is not for us.” That could be the title of something.
On the fifth floor, in the Helvetica Room, I’m greeted by Jackie, a contestant handler. I instantly like her. She reminds me of Suzi Quatro playing Leather Tuscadero. I try to do the thing where I signal my acknowledgment of the absurdity of participating in this embodiment of American kitsch, but Jackie cuts through my muddled irony with her positive you-betcha energy, and I take a seat near the back.
Soon, Jackie and two of her colleagues get things rolling. “Is everyone excited?!” they shout, and we shout back in the affirmative, and we clap and smile, because we know clapping and smiling are an integral part of the audition, so we clap and smile ourselves into possible game-show existence. Look at us sparkle. Some whoop. Then others whoop. I myself refrain from whooping. Instead, I nod as I clap and smile, hoping my nodding indicates an amused detachment. Then I whoop.
We are put through our “Wheel of Fortune” paces. A puzzle is projected onto a monitor and one of the contestant handlers reads a random name from a clipboard and the random name stands up and a travel-sized wheel is spun and the wheel stops and the random name calls a letter, ideally in a clear and confident voice—T! N! R! S!—and either the letter is revealed or there’s a buzz and we’re on to the next random name. It’s all very quick and professional. These contestant handlers run a well-oiled contestant-culling machine.
“Running on empty,” the man sitting next to me whispers.
“I hear you,” I say.
“No, no, the puzzle. It’s RUNNING ON EMPTY.” (To maintain the sanctity of the audition process, this answer and the answer below have been fabricated.)
I realize he’s right. He’s solved with only the “N”s revealed. This man must be a “Wheel of Fortune” savant. And this happens over and over again, the “Wheel” savant figuring out the answer early on and whispering it to me. But, when my name is finally the random name, the puzzle is brand new and I get no whispers from my Rain Man, so I squint and call “T” and there’s a buzz and I sit back down. Soon enough my neighbor is summoned. He calls a few letters before solving: BEAUTIFUL ISLAND SUNSET. Correct. We clap and smile. They throw him a “Wheel of Fortune” T-shirt. The only thing I go home with is a small No. 2 pencil that says I tried out for “Wheel of Fortune.”
Two weeks later, there’s a letter in my mailbox, the “Wheel of Fortune” insignia emblazoned on the upper right corner. CONGRATULATIONS! I am standing in the lobby of my apartment building. I shake my head, NO and WAY playing in stereo. It’s like being accepted to cartoon Stanford. I look around for someone to tell, but nobody’s there. I grab my phone. My youngest is at pony camp. My oldest is on a camping trip. My middle is with her mom. I text her and wait for the dot-dot-dot of Are you serious?, the dot-dot-dot of OMG, but no dot-dot-dots appear, so I call and leave a message and then head upstairs to read the rest of the letter. I’m told the show tapes only four days a month, five or six episodes a day, with the actual taping schedule not formed until two weeks in advance, which will be as much notice as I will get. I am responsible for all my expenses. Most important, and printed in bold, there is an appeal to keep things in perspective. “Being a contestant on Wheel of Fortune is a wonderful opportunity!” the letter continues. “But it shouldn’t take precedence over other important areas of your life.” They want me to make sure I’m financially sound before I decide to head to Los Angeles. And if I’m not feeling physically sound, no problem, they’ll have me appear at a later date. “Your health is more important than spinning the wheel!” There’s a tender seen-it-all quality to the prose, as if the “Wheel of Fortune” people can hear your shouts of joy, and they’re shouting right along with you, because this is exciting, but they’re also reminding you that this is just a blip on the radar of life, and maybe you’ll win a lot of cash and tons of prizes, and maybe you won’t, but guaranteed you’ll have some fun. That said, please please please don’t do anything stupid to be here, like quit your day job. The “Wheel” will accommodate.
My phone rings. It is mid-January, 2020. Over New Year’s, a massage therapist told me that this year is going to be my year, and I believe her, which is unlike me, believing in this kind of optimism, but fuck it, I believe her, so I answer the Culver City area code.
“David, it’s Jackie from—”
I agree immediately. They have asked me twice before, and for various reasons I’ve had to say no, but this third offer, well, that’s the formulaic charm. I soon receive a FedEx with important information about my future “Wheel of Fortune” appearance: the release forms, the travel details, the hotel recommendations, the schedule, the request for notification about any possible felonies in my past, etc. The wardrobe section is by far the most interesting part: men get a brief paragraph—dress “business casual” and NO JEANS! NO TENNIS SHOES!—while women are bombarded with multiple paragraphs concerning the positives of two-piece outfits, and solid colors, and blazers, and well-fitted, padded bras, and the negatives of tight tops, and loose tops, and clingy tops, and striped tops, and black or bright red or white tops, and any sort of bold pattern, and silk blouses, and low-cut blouses, and necklaces, and pins, and bracelets.
I choose a pair of dark-blue pants, a medium-blue shirt, and a suit jacket.
Of course, I envision the ridiculous outfits I could wear, as well as the ridiculous things I could do, like trying to solve the puzzle right from the start —I HAVE A POOP IN MY PANTS—real sophisticated stuff, stuff my father hated at the dinner table. I claim iconoclasm, but the truth is more desperate. The closer my appointment with the “Wheel” gets the more fraught my appearance seems. How should I act? What are the proper levels of self-consciousness, micro and meta? I laugh again at the absurd prospect of being a contestant—I’ve been laughing a lot, short bemused snorts, like unexpected sneezes. And then I have a moment of dread. What if I fuck up royally? What if, instead of JAMAICAN COFFEE BEANS, I guess JAMAICAN COFFEE BEARS? Because I could so easily do that.
This is a very bad idea.
I am sitting in the contestant waiting room, at the “Wheel of Fortune” studio, on the Sony lot, in Culver City. The room is more like a locker room, with rows of lockers and a modest spread of breakfast items and weak coffee. We might as well be factory workers on break. Our cell phones have been locked inside these lockers. We can have no reading materials, either. We must simply exist, as ourselves, full of impounded energy, twenty of us, including alternates, representing five days in March and one day in April. We size one another up. I take note of those who have followed the dress code and those who have not. Two of us will be our competition. I try to slip on a journalistic mask, but I’m too self-deprecating and too eager to please. I am a monkey grinding himself.
I remember dancing once, like really spinning-around-and-flopping-all-over-the-place dancing, in the living room of my boyhood apartment. I have no idea why I was dancing; maybe the TV was playing a song I liked, maybe I just wanted my share of attention. I must have been ten, though my memories often reduce down to ten. I’m flailing around, as loose as Steve Martin, and my father lowers his newspaper and stares at me and says, “What are you, some kind of fag?” I know that my father is teasing, as he’s prone to do, though “fag” is more familiar during school recess, circa 1977, than after dinner on Seventy-third and Lex. I hardly recall my reaction, but I know that I stop dancing and retreat to my bedroom, which is wallpapered with posters of the rock band Kiss, as well as hundreds of photographs of the band meticulously clipped from Rolling Stone and Circus and Creem. Maybe I slip on headphones. Maybe I listen to “Flaming Youth.”
This is a big mistake, I think, picking over a Danish.
This isn’t funny.
Wuss. Wimp. Pussy. Candy-ass.
I am hardly a man.
There are gasps in the contestant room. “Hello, everyone.” It’s Vanna White. She’s in a robe. “This is the real me,” Vanna tells us, “before the magic of makeup and wardrobe.” And yet she glows. Vanna has repeated the same dress only once, out of more than seven thousand. She wishes us luck and leaves. It’s all very quick. No autographs, just kind words. People might joke about Vanna White having the world’s cushiest job, earning millions for “turning” letters four days a month, but “Wheel of Fortune” would not be the same without her. Because Vanna is pure goodness. She just is. She humanizes the blank coldness of the puzzle board with her confident gait and soft touch and radiating warmth. She is sexless sex appeal, her smile a slice of apple pie. Vanna responds to our call when we are right, and when we are wrong she frowns with sympathy. She might clap for us without clapping, but we hear her loud and clear. Pat is O.K., though Pat has the startled appearance of the class clown who has found himself the butt of the joke. Vanna is the show’s beating heart.
After Vanna, we have an hour-long thrill-a-thon with the legal department, and then we are brought into the freezing-cold studio for an introduction to the wheel and the mechanics of the game, and we record our “howdy” for our particular affiliates, which is beyond embarrassing (“Watch me play ‘Wheel of Fortune’ on WABC!”), and return to the contestant room and are given our contestant groupings (hello, Cyndi, from Baltimore; hello, Mark, from Brentwood) and draw numbered golf balls to determine what day we will be (we are Thursday) and then draw again to determine our placement on the wheel platform (I’m the center position), after which we head back into the subzero studio (I now understand the padded-bra suggestion) and speed through a pretend game with a pretend Pat Sajak, who resembles my high-school English teacher, but this Mr. Rushton seems more the literary-actor type, and as we spin and practice, and spin and practice, the studio audience begins to file in, plus the guests of the contestants—oh, and what about my youngest, who started this ridiculousness? Well, she has a school trip this weekend, and, though she isn’t going on the school trip, she’s sort of made plans to, like, hang with all her other friends who aren’t going on the school trip, so, yeah, Dad, do you mind if I, like, stay put? Um, O.K. And my middle has a party she wants to go to. Fine, fine. And my oldest is away at school and has no desire to come to L.A. and watch his father play “Wheel of Fortune.” Yeah, yeah, I get it.
The space inside a television is bigger than expected, the distances free of edits, the vantages seen through eyes rather than cameras. “Ladies and gentlemen, here are the stars of our show, Pat Sajak and Vanna White.” There I am, between Mark, from Brentwood, a precision runner, and Cyndi, from Baltimore, who during the introductions will show Pat her self-professed skill on the mouth trumpet, her puckered lips going toot-toot-toot. But the mouth trumpet has been cut from the broadcast. Now it’s just Cyndi, who lives with her beautiful wife, Kailie, and their dog, GG. And I am David, from New York. I imagine my children, laughing at their goofball dad. The space inside a television is familiar yet alien, like one of those dreams of being in your house but the house isn’t your house. It is uncanny. That’s the word. I’d like to solve, Pat: UNCANNY SENSATION. It is a doll-house version of “Wheel of Fortune,” and we have been shrunk. We are Mike Teavee in the chocolate factory. Look at me, I’m on TV! I notice my head, my nose, my smile. And my voice, horrible. But my skin looks decent—thank you, makeup person, wherever you are. I see my father. In the head. In the nose. In the smile. I imagine my father watching me from his chair in the living room. His small-bore son. Unserious. I have decided, in this moment, to try to be myself. I will honor the game and play earnestly. Whatever viewing party I had planned before the pandemic is now happening via text message. My children are with their mother. I will win a thousand-dollar gift card to Cabela’s by solving AMAZING CLOUD FORMATIONS. My middle texts, “Congrats dude.” My oldest texts, “What’s the Hulu password?” Today is Thursday, Episode 139 of Season 37 of Our Lord, “Wheel of Fortune.” But most Americans have discovered a new day of the week, previously unknown, which has steamrolled all the other days into an endless, featureless horizon. The clock has started. Less than twenty minutes will be spent inside this television. Vanna is wearing a sapphire-blue princess-cut shift-style dress. Pat has on a silver-gray suit and a silver-blue tartan tie. I am clapping, and then I remember and clap without clapping. With all the flashing lights and sounds and colors, I feel as though I’ve dropped within an A.D.H.D. diagnosis. When I was twelve, I saw Kiss in concert at Madison Square Garden. This was peak Kiss. My father took me. He wore a blazer, like the blazer he was buried in, Brooks Brothers, dark blue. A lot of the people around us sported makeup. The Demon. The Starchild. The Catman. The Spaceman, who was always my favorite. My father must’ve been baffled and possibly disturbed by this scene. And here was his son, enraptured. Halfway through, he asked what was happening up there onstage, and I, wide-eyed and deranged, shouted that Gene Simmons was spitting up blood. This was the apotheosis. God knows what my father made of me. But taking me to the Kiss concert became his story, a story he told with great pleasure. And I didn’t expect him to show up here. In his chair with the remote. Watching me as Pat approaches and we pick up our ringers for the first tossup of the game. Maybe because I’ve been thinking about death. Maybe because I know how petrified my father would be if he were alive in this moment of the coronavirus, eighty-six years old, his lungs already ravaged by years of smoking. Stay away. Stay away. Even more than usual. Stay away. I place my hand on his chest. The space inside a television is nothing but a space to be filled, and I try to fill my father’s emptiness with love, seeing him as a person, which is ironic, since he’s just a husk, and yet I see him. The worst has happened. Time will say nothing but I told you so. And I want my father to feel my love regardless, my love for him, my recognition of us. We were both helpless to help. And all I want is for my children to see me, even as I have a hard time seeing myself. I swear during “Rock and Roll All Nite” my father swayed his shoulders a bit. Confetti fell from the ceiling, fell all over us. It was the final encore. And here we are, at the end, which is the beginning, my father dead and my relationship with him just starting. I try pouring myself into him before the lid is closed forever. The opening tossup is revealed with a chime, the category What Are You Doing?
▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢
I watch as the letters reveal themselves like ticks on a metronome.
▢ ▢ ▢ T ▢ ▢ G M ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢
Cyndi will win twelve thousand five hundred dollars. Mark will win nine thousand dollars, which includes a trip to London.
▢ ▢ I T ▢ ▢ G M ▢ ▢ ▢ O K
And, though I’m no good with tossups, I know this one. A hundred per cent I know this one. I can’t quite believe it. Practically made for me. Maybe this game will go my way. Maybe I’m destined to win big. Maybe the gods are telling me something. This could be my year, after all.
I ring in.
Pat says, “David,” with Pat-like anticipation.
“WRITING MY BOOK,” I answer in a clear and confident voice.
“Nope,” Pat says.
I will come in third, otherwise known as last. Three thousand one hundred and fifty dollars, plus the Cabela’s.
A few more letters are revealed.
Cyndi rings in.
“BAITING MY HOOK.”
“Yeah,” Pat says. “There you go.”
I see myself nod and smile. It’s a good smile, I decide. A natural smile. ♦
