Fuck on Jeopardy

They threw me off Jeopardy for saying fuck too many times.  I never swear normally, certainly not at home, around the baby, but also not at work or alone or even with "the guys."  I guess it all just got to me, the whole experience, with the hot lights and the cameras and Alex Trebeck himself and all the feverish competition.

The first time I said fuck on the show, it was an innocent mistake.  I thought it was the answer to a question, or a question to the answer, or however it goes (I'd never seen Jeopardy before going it and so the whole thing with the question-answer, answer-question thing threw me, I mean I'd heard people talk about it but I guess I thought it was an urban legend or something, I even looked it up on that Snopes site, in the green room, waiting to come out, arguing with one of the people I was facing on the show).  The category was "four letter words," so right away, your mind goes to a certain place.  You know, they dance you right up to the line, and then, when you cross it, they throw you under the bus.  So the clue was "It's the edge of a hat, or the topmost edge of a cup or bowl," and I buzzed in and said "what is fuck," and with 20/20 hindsight it's easy to say, sure, Fuck is not the name of part of a bowl, it's hard to retrace the mental pathway that leads one to guess Fuck in that situation, but you likely have never experienced a high-pressure situation akin to competing on Jeopardy and so have no standing with which to judge me.

The first "fuck" was handled well by everyone involved.  The audience tittered a bit, but Alex ignored them and just told me that I was incorrect and we moved on with the game.  It could have been a deeply humiliating moment, but Alex dealt with the situation with professionalism, and I am grateful to him for that.

The second time I said fuck it technically wasn't on the show, I screamed it during a commercial break.  We were headed to the first break, I was in third place, the first fuck thing had happened, I had just missed the Daily Double, I was frustrated, and as soon as we were off, I screamed "FUCK."  The audience kind of gasped and the returning champion standing next to me flinched a bit.  Alex took it in stride -- he hardly reacted.  Someone with a headset came running in from behind one of the cameras and said to me "hey, man, you have to stop saying 'fuck,' this is a television show."  I nodded and apologized, even though I felt like, in a commercial break, I should be able to swear as much and as loudly as I want, since it's not being broadcast, but I didn't argue the point.

The third time I said fuck, I have to be honest, I don't even know what happened.  I was picking the clue and I said "State Capitals for 800" but the 800 was already off the board, so when this was pointed out to me I said "fuck" pretty loudly, and Alex just said, without a moment's thought or hesitation, "all right, you have to go," and they stopped the taping and a couple people in headsets led me off the stage.  As they were taking me away, I called out, please help me, Alex, I feel death closing in, but he wouldn't look at me.  They took me to the back and I had to watch the rest of the show from the green room.  They told me it was the first time in history that someone had been removed from the show before Final Jeopardy even though they had a positive amount of money, but they said it not in the way you'd talk about a positive achievement.

I do think, if circumstances had been different, Alex could have saved me.  I felt like...I still feel like, ultimately, he was on my side.  Even though he had been the one to decide to send me away.  If he knew how much love I had for him in that moment, he would have defended me instead of casting me off.  Because I did love him, powerfully, I idolized him -- how could I not! -- and the idea that I had disappointed the man I had come to love in the past twenty minutes, more than anyone else, was, at the moment, unsurvivable.

They draped a black garbage bag over my podium for the rest of the game.  When they aired my episode they put a black box over my face and altered my voice using computer technology, and replaced the sound of my buzzer with a sound effect of a toilet flushing.  And every time on the show Alex had given me an encouraging word, or an affectionate glance, or signaled in any way that he felt and understood and returned my love, even if he wasn't comfortable saying it out loud, they edited all of that out, so it was as if that love had never existed at all.

They invited me on the Ellen show after that, to talk about my Jeopardy experience, but Ellen didn't love me.  She treated me the same way she treats all her guests: with toxic contempt.