They were giving away money. That was the reason I took the long subway ride from Brooklyn to Harlem one Sunday morning in August. Once I arrived, though, it was all too clear that I wasn’t the only one who had heard about the opportunity. The open audition for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” was supposed to run from noon to five, but already, a little after eleven, a line of would-be millionaires snaked out of the lobby of the Apollo Theatre and down the sidewalk. We were a diverse bunch of dreamers. I waited in line behind an effete Jewish guy and an older African-American man who was discussing the pros and cons of Obamacare, and just in front of a petite young Korean woman, who did her best to respond politely to a lady who seemed unable to keep herself from sharing the strange, likely fictitious, details of her own life, most notably the masters degree in reverse psychology that she claimed to have earned from Nassau Community College. Before we were admitted, en masse, to the theatre, the reverse psychologist wandered off, drawn away by another, even more powerful dream.
To have a shot at winning any money, I needed to intuit the qualities that the producers were looking for from the thousand or so people who would audition in the course of the day. The producers wanted to make entertaining television, and I had to assume this meant they wanted us to be voluble and emotional and wacky. While we waited to take the multiple-choice test that started the process of winnowing our numbers down, we were blasted with overloud pop music, and occasionally instructed to stand up and dance so that they could film us for a promo about the audition process. I thought, Couldn’t this somehow be a secret part of our evaluation? Couldn’t they simply be watching a direct feed from this camera and picking out the lively ones? I leapt up and gamely waved my arms back and forth. All the single ladies. All the single ladies. All the single ladies. Uh-uh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.
I passed the trivia test, which earned me the right to stay behind as hundreds of less savvy applicants were shown the door. Next came two more hours of waiting, then an in-person interview in which we discussed our answers to their questionnaire—“What is an embarrassing story about you?” “Do you have any hidden talents?” “What would you do if you won a million dollars?” The game had already begun. To secure an appearance on the show, you had to spin an interesting narrative about yourself or put on display your charismatic quirks. You had to prove that you were willing to sacrifice the last shreds of your dignity. It was at this stage of the process that I overheard one of the friendly twentysomething (white) producers coaching a heavy-set African-American woman before her on-camera interview to “just go in there and be a crazy mama. Just be a crazy mama.”
Did I mention on my questionnaire that I could perform a serviceable impression of Chewbacca? Did I offer that up to them as proof of my willingness to give them whatever they wanted in exchange for a chance at their money? Yes. Yes, I did. The rest of my interview in the cramped bowels of the Apollo Theatre was merely a formality. I would be good on the show because of X, Y, and Z. When I was twelve, I was an actor in a sex-ed video starring Bill Nye the Science Guy. I would spend a million dollars on the world’s greatest first-anniversary present for my wife. Can I do the Chewbacca now? Of course I can. It is a great and unholy sound, and for several seconds all talk in that room came to an end. A guy who recognized the noise for what it was clapped from somewhere back in the line. I boarded the train back to Brooklyn, uncertain that I had succeeded, though I needn’t have doubted the Wookiee’s allure. Two weeks later, I received a postcard informing me that I was part of the “contestant pool,” and a week after that a producer called to tell me that my episode would shoot in seven days’ time.
There are plenty of ways to explain my psychological problems with money, but let’s begin with autobiography. My father was a physicist who, upon relocating to the Pacific Northwest, taught himself to be a mechanical engineer and who, until the final decade of his career, insisted on running his own small firm. Practically, this meant that he paid several engineers regular salaries while he took home whatever was left, a sum that was sometimes considerably less than what he could have made if he had been willing to let someone else be his boss. It wasn’t that my father was irresponsible about money, only that it didn’t rank especially high on his list of priorities, and, anyway, he was sure he could get enough of it if he ever really needed to.
As a young man, I made similar assumptions about my own life. I graduated from college, spent a year in Africa on a fellowship, then came back to New York City to make my life in writing, which is to say that I did other, entirely unrelated things to make ends meet while I waited for my literary stardom to take hold. First, I was a bartender, and then later I was a tutor to wealthy high-school students. In my early twenties, I took up poker, and while there were some months where I scratched out my rent in home games and underground clubs, I wouldn’t want to calculate what tiny sum I might have been making as an hourly wage from playing cards. Somewhere down the line, my thinking went, there would be a huge book advance or a MacArthur “genius” grant to make up for all those years of paltry income. “Irrational optimism,” I believe, is economists’ term for this approach to financial matters.
My trouble with money goes deeper than simply being unrealistic about how I will get it. I suffer from an extreme version of the ubiquitous middle-class problem of not being able to believe completely in its reality. Each time I earn it or spend it, I am struck with the vertiginous sense that somehow I’ve been badly tricked. Weirder still to me is the choice not to spend the money I make and instead to save it, so that my wealth transforms into a mere number on a page. I understand that I should want the number to be large so that one day maybe I can own my own apartment, I can travel to Berlin if I want to, or I can retire and stop working altogether; I should want the number to be large because then I’ll know I’m winning; I should want the number to be large because, all things being equal, my life will be easier than if it is small. But, still, the absurd abstraction of money constantly tempts me to do things like empty my savings and throw it all down on black at the roulette table, because I don’t entirely believe that, win or lose, it will really change anything.
Game shows are like a fever dream that plays on this madness. They give away money like it has no value at all. They give money to people just for being smart. On a game show you can skip over all the steps where you have to work to earn the money directly to the step where you simply have it, your optimism irrational no more. Who wants to be a millionaire? Well, I do, for one. I think.
In the latest version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,” the first ten trivia questions appear in an order that is random in terms of both the questions’ level of difficulty and their monetary value. Moreover, you don’t learn how much each question is worth until after you answer it—it can be anywhere from a hundred dollars to twenty-five thousand dollars. In the next stage, the stakes are higher, with values progressing from a hundred thousand dollars to two hundred and fifty thousand to five hundred thousand and, finally, to a million, though it’s a rare contestant who even reaches this second level, and the questions become decidedly more difficult. The rules governing “lifelines” have also changed a little since the show’s heyday, with Regis Philbin. (Philbin was replaced by Meredith Vieira, in 2002, who in turn gave way, this fall, to Cedric the Entertainer.) No longer can you phone a friend (who quietly searches for the answer on Google while pretending to be thinking hard about it) or ask to have the choices reduced from four to two. Instead, contestants who are stumped may once poll the audience for its help (the one holdover from the original version) and twice jump over a question entirely. If you choose this latter option, you forfeit the money assigned to the question, but that still beats answering incorrectly, in which case you are sent packing with a hug from the host and a thousand-dollar consolation prize. You can walk away with half of your bank at any point during those first ten questions, or with all of it if you reach the second round.
To prepare for my appearance, I found a Web site where superfans record every question and every answer on every episode ever broadcast. The answers to the questions are hidden on the screen so you can play through a game as though you are the contestant. In the week before my episode, I obsessively studied the transcripts of the old shows, trying to categorize the kinds of questions that I tended not to know. On a yellow legal pad I scrawled a long list of my weaknesses: planet-discovery facts, women’s-clothing names, U.S. currency trivia, names of bones and muscles, inventors and their inventions, space shuttles and astronauts, constitutional amendments, U.S. Presidents, celebrity chefs.
I went to the Brooklyn Public Library, and when I made my mission clear to the reference librarians there I was thronged by four late-middle-aged, mostly bearded men who excitedly brought me volume after volume after volume—I was living out what must be one of the great fantasies of their profession. I returned home with a stack of thirty or forty books. I learned the Presidents in order and mnemonics for birthstones and astrological signs. I studied my coins and dollar bills. I was motivated by the money on the show but also by anxiety about the possibility of making an ass of myself on national television, by the fear of missing or even having to jump a question that my mother or father or brother or wife or friends would know the answer to and never let me live down.
I knew I should have just kept on with the studying, stuffing my brain full of useless but financially valuable trivia, but instead I locked in on the transcripts of the old games. I would tell myself that I would play through five more and then stop, but two hours would pass and my eyes would be dry and aching from staring, unblinking, into the screen of my computer. “Known mainly for inventing condensed milk, Gail Borden, Jr., was also the first to publish a report about what event in 1836?” “Though it might sound serious, heterochromia iridis is a harmless condition in which a person has what?” “Which of these colors does not appear in the letters of Google’s standard logo?” “In his first State of the Union address, who lamented that three of the prior seven elected U.S. Presidents had been assassinated?”
All told, I played through the episodes of almost two hundred different contestants. I meticulously recorded how much I won each time, as though by tracking my results I could know ahead of time how I would actually perform when it counted. I made a mistake and was left with only the thousand-dollar consolation prize thirteen per cent of the time, I quit and walked away with money thirty per cent of the time, and fifty-seven per cent of the time I was still going, moving on to the next question even though on the show the real contestant had already ended her episode by walking away with money or by answering a question incorrectly. It was the thirteen per cent that terrified me. Despite my best effort to balance risk, I lost one in eight times—great odds over the long run, but I didn’t have the long run, and my heart would break if I left the real show with a mere thousand dollars. I knew this because, even when I sat alone in front of my computer, to lose was to feel an elevator dropping straight through to the bottom of me.
On the morning of my show, I had to arrive at the ABC studios in Manhattan by seven. Upstairs, I hung up the three different outfits I had been told to bring and surrendered my cell phone and personal effects. There were a series of talks by the show’s lawyer and producer and a tour of the studio, but most of what the dozen or so other contestants and I did was wait. We were even warned that, if they ran out of time today, some of us would have to come back tomorrow to repeat the process. The army of production assistants or assistant producers or assistants to the producer who rode herd over us—a friendly and chatty bunch of young women, mostly—worked hard to keep us cheerful, but they would, from time to time, abruptly break off conversation and stare into the middle distance to listen to some more important voice instructing them to carry out one task or another. Without the contestants there would be no show, but the real power clearly resided in the converse of this idea.
Finally, after several hours of green-room purgatory, my own name was called. My adrenal glands released into my body such a potent cocktail of stress hormones that I found it necessary to skip from foot to foot like a boxer as we took the steel elevator down a floor to the studio. I followed my producer, Jen, behind the stage flats that ringed the small arena in which “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” is filmed—there was a contestant out there under the lights, and I could hear Meredith Vieira introducing her to the studio audience. Coming toward us the other way around the loop was a garrulous young Indian guy I had met upstairs. I offered him a fist bump in contestant solidarity, noticing too late that something wasn’t right, that he was wearing the shocked rictus of a gambler who has just lost more money than he had ever imagined he would put on the table. Later, my wife, who was waiting in the studio audience for my appearance, confirmed that not only did he miss a question but also that it was the very first one he was asked.
Now, as I write this, I am able to feel bad for him, but at the time I felt nothing. I was on the cusp of a great opportunity and had become almost completely self-absorbed. All that mattered was how well I did, how much money I made—there was nothing else. I followed Jen down a hall to a bare high-ceilinged space that sat between the “Millionaire” set and the set of “The View,” and where the tattooed firefighter from Boston waited his turn to go on the show. Upstairs in the green room he had been a picture of easygoing confidence, our group’s alpha male, but now he wore a look of white-gilled fear, as I suppose I must have as well. Jen reviewed with me, for the third time that day, what canned anecdotes I would talk about on the show (we were either going with the newlywed narrative or the sex-ed video), and we planned out when the best time would be for me to do my Chewbacca impression.
I began to pace the concrete floor, trying to rehearse in my mind what I needed to do to succeed. I needed to take my time on each question. I needed to play defensively and skip the questions whose answers I didn’t know. I had to be willing to take the twenty thousand dollars that would likely be on offer instead of making good television like they wanted me to and getting something wrong and walking away with a thousand dollars. I had to keep my head clear. I had to be rational. Already the pace of my existence had ratcheted up to three or four or five times its normal speed.
A very skinny woman with bleached hair and a showbiz face walked by from the set of “The View”—I believe it was Elisabeth Hasselbeck. The firefighter’s name was called. Later, Whoopi Goldberg came through, and we had the following heart-to-heart.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
For reasons I cannot fully explain, I found it deeply reassuring to see her.
The lunch break was coming up soon, so really, I told myself, there was no reason to get too nervous yet, but the firefighter missed a question, and suddenly it was beginning.
I will slow it down for you, but know that I experienced all of what came next as taking something on the order of forty-five seconds. Time for me became like time when you are on a roller coaster, something irrelevant and strange, a parameter that has lost its usual ability to define the shape of your life. Whatever plans I had made about how I would play the game evaporated from my mind. I am shaking Meredith Vieira’s hand. I am offering up the first rehearsed story about the time when I was twelve and had a bit part in a sex-ed video with Bill Nye the Science Guy. I am staring up at the giant video screen where the questions will appear momentarily.
“Are you ready?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then let’s play ‘Millionaire.’ ”
Already you are in it. Already it’s happening.
This is my first question:
Maybe it will all be this easy. When I say that MOMocrats must be a political blog, the producers reward me by putting five thousand dollars in my bank.
This is my second question:
It is wonderful to feel certainty when you are so prepared to feel doubt. I know that the right answer is (b), and for that I am given another fifteen thousand dollars, bringing my bank to twenty thousand.
Here is my third question:
Really. This is a question I was asked on a nationally televised game show. For knowing that Kobe Bryant is a basketball player, I receive an additional thousand dollars.
Here is my fourth question:
I don’t know the answer, or I’m not sure enough, anyway, to risk my entire game, but I have trained myself to use my Ask the Audience lifeline on this sort of question. If you ask the audience about some obscure event from eighteenth-century U.S. history, thirty-four per cent of them will say (a) and thirty-seven per cent will say (b) and eighteen per cent will say (c) and eleven per cent will say (d), and then where are you, really? But America knows popular culture—it is the food they eat and the air they breathe. Seventy-five per cent of my beautiful audience says that it is Jennifer Lopez, and God bless them for knowing this, because this question is worth two thousand dollars. I make a series of kiss-blowing gestures to the three banks of seats—a move I learned from professional tennis players thanking the crowd after winning a major. What have I done? What have I accomplished? I have answered four trivia questions and earned twenty-three thousand dollars.
There is no time, though, to make sense of this new reality. The show rolls on relentlessly.
This is the fifth question I am asked:
I confess to Meredith that the reason I know the answer is (c) is because of my own casual involvement in this as a teen-ager. If I could go back in time, I would not allow this nerdy admission to come out of my mouth on national television, but I am five questions in and haven’t used either of my Jump the Question lifelines, and I’ve begun to feel dangerously expansive. Knowing what LARPing is turns out to be worth only five hundred dollars, but still, it’s free money.
We cut to a commercial, which, since the show is pre-recorded, simply means that Meredith tells the camera that we’re going to a break and then welcomes us back to the show. Meredith feeds me the setup so I can explain how, if I win a million dollars, my wife and I will reprise our honeymoon trip to the Bahamas, but if I walk away with only a thousand we’ll probably just grab pizza on the corner. It was a joke I felt O.K. about when I made it off the cuff several days ago, in a phone pre-interview with a producer, but after practicing and retelling it several times at the same producer’s behest it has grown a little stale, like an old vaudeville act. You have to do it, though. You have to give them this simplified narrative of yourself, or they won’t let you try to get their money. The danger is the distraction. The danger is letting yourself care whether Meredith or the studio audience or the millions of people watching out there in America like you. The danger is that it pulls your mind away from the absolute need to be perfect at the game, to make not even a single mistake.
This is my sixth question:
There is a brief moment between when you hear the question and when the answer choices are revealed on the giant screen in front of you, and, in a strategy borrowed from the test prep I do with high-school students, I try to predict what I think the answer will be before I see all the options. My hunch is mosquitoes, but once the choices appear I am tempted by bedbugs, too. Couldn’t that be plausible? Isn’t it possible that this is the moment where I blithely choose an answer that turns out to be wrong and am left with only the thousand-dollar consolation prize? I could easily jump this question and take my chances later on, but I convince myself to answer what I know to be true: (d) Mosquitoes. For that act of bravery I am awarded another three thousand dollars, so that now my bank contains twenty-six thousand five hundred dollars.
This is my seventh question:
What is so truly remarkable about this show is the scale of money they are giving away relative to what they require of you. I have lived in New York City for over a decade, and like everyone else here I go to art museums every once in a while. I have seen the paintings they are asking about. For knowing who Chuck Close is, the producers of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” add twenty-five thousand dollars to my bank. From a financial perspective, answering this question correctly is the greatest thing I have ever done in my life. I throw my hands in the air, walk over to kiss my wife, then stand at the podium trying to gather myself like a man who has just taken a great snort of some particularly good cocaine.
Here is my eighth question:
I talk it through slowly, as if it must be some kind of trick. Wine. Olive oil. The Mediterranean. This one? This was worth another seven thousand dollars. On paper, at least, I have increased my personal wealth by fifty-eight thousand five hundred dollars. As Meredith explains all this to me, a sound-effect horn blares through the studio’s speakers, indicating that this particular episode has run out of time. Meredith pats my hand and invites the viewers at home to come back tomorrow to see how it all ends.
To those viewers, the show presents the illusion that I returned to my apartment in Brooklyn and came back the next day, but, in fact, five episodes are recorded each day, and all that usually happens when a contestant is held over from one day to the next is that she and Meredith Vieira go backstage and change their outfits to signify that twenty-four hours have passed. In my case, though, the break corresponds to the stage crew’s union-mandated lunch break, so I am taken back upstairs, where I’m sequestered for an hour in an empty, fluorescent-lit dressing room. There are three chairs, a low table, and a long mirror with a sink, but for all intents and purposes it’s a prison cell. I rearrange the furniture to make room for me to pace back and forth across the cramped space, but it isn’t enough to burn off the jet fuel that has poisoned my blood.
I am able to think just enough to comprehend that if I use my two lifelines I can leave today with fifty-eight thousand five hundred dollars without having to answer another question. Of course, I’ll also have a chance at bigger money than that. A hundred thousand seems like an unfathomably large sum. The truth is that I have no idea what kind of behavior will come out of me once I am out there again under the hot studio lights.
My first question after the lunch break is this:
This is an easy question if you believe it is an easy question. But, if you are obsessively parsing the wording because you know that you have fifty-eight thousand five hundred dollars on the line, you might start to be troubled by the phrase “included this tip, ‘You can’t hurt babies and old people.’ ” You might think it’s obvious that a Nerf Ball can’t hurt people, but perhaps the tip is to tell people what not to do, as in: “Be sure not to hurt babies and old people with this whiffle-ball bat.” And couldn’t it be a Koosh Ball? Isn’t that at least possible? In all those games you practiced on at home, weren’t you sometimes confident that you knew the answer, and then weren’t you shattered when you learned that you were wrong? I jump the question. The answer is Nerf Ball. Of course it is.
My tenth and final question in the first round is a kind of blessing:
I have studied the Presidents, and I have never read anything like this. My choice is simple because I have no idea what the answer might be. If I use my last Jump the Question, I can guarantee myself a free look at the big money. There is no world in which I would try to answer this one.
So. Now comes my chance at a hundred thousand dollars. What have I done to deserve to arrive at this moment? I spent a day auditioning for a game show and another one in which I have so far correctly answered eight of ten questions (with a little help from the studio audience). I have bantered with Meredith Vieira, and, before my eighth question, I have performed my Chewbacca impersonation. For this, I have somehow earned the right to try to answer a trivia question for more money than I will likely ever earn in an entire year. I have imagined this moment countless times. Meredith will ask me the question and I will know the answer, or maybe I won’t be certain but will still guess correctly and I will run around the studio with my arms wide, like an airplane coming in to land. A hundred thousand, two hundred and fifty thousand, five hundred thousand, a million. Life-changing money.
Meredith tells me, “It is time to play classic ‘Millionaire.’ ”
A quick hit of the theme song blares over the sound system and the tiny spotlights that ring the stage rake across where I stand at the podium. Around me the audience cheers and claps as though I’ve just rescued a small child from a burning building. The music drops to a subtle drone, and Meredith explains to me what lies ahead: “You are now just four questions away from a million dollars. You have fifty-eight thousand five hundred dollars in your bank. That is your money if you choose not to answer this question. Let’s see your question for a hundred thousand dollars.”
As she reads it from her prompter, it appears simultaneously on the giant video screen before me:
My whole body deflates a little when I see it. When I played through all the old episodes in preparation for coming on the show, I was struck by how much harder the questions in the second round got, the ones that escalate from a hundred thousand dollars to two hundred and fifty thousand to five hundred thousand to a million. Of the twenty hundred-thousand-dollar questions I saw, I only knew the correct answer seven times. I am now up against the harsh reality that faces every “Millionaire” contestant: there are only three ways for your episode to end. You can win a million dollars (which hasn’t happened in years), you can get a question wrong and leave with the paltry consolation prize, or you can quit with the money you’ve earned so far. You can win or you can lose or you can quit.
I try to reason my way through it. Seth Meyers, the skinny, nerdy little “Saturday Night Live” head writer and “Weekend Update” host, seems an improbable athlete. Mario Lopez, I think, is the guy who was on “Saved By the Bell” in his teen years, which wouldn’t have left him much time for high-level golf. It seems plausible that Carson Daly is from California and an ex-jock. Was Nick Lachey the one who married Jessica Simpson and had a reality-TV show about it? I’ve spent a lifetime not caring at all about this kind of hollow celebrity, and only now is it clear to me how terrible a mistake this has been.
You win or you lose or you quit.
If you say “I will walk away,” they will give you fifty-eight thousand five hundred dollars.
It will only be right to give up if I don’t actually know the answer. So if I think it’s Carson Daly, it will haunt me in quiet hours if the answer really is Carson Daly, and it will be a triumph if the answer turns out to be Nick Lachey or Mario Lopez or Seth Meyers. But if the answer really is Carson Daly, I will carry with me a curse of melancholy regret for all my days on this earth. I will never want to hear that man’s name or see his smug, fat face interviewing B-list pop stars, because not knowing more about his absurd, meaningless existence was what cost me my life’s one great opportunity at implausible wealth.
I can’t think. I can see the giant video screen with the question on it. I can feel the studio audience wishing good things for me. I have a body. I have consciousness, but mostly it’s just a stream of static. If I say I will walk away, they will give me fifty-eight thousand five hundred dollars.
“I have a feeling,” I say out loud, “but it’s not strong enough to overcome the lure of fifty-eight thousand five hundred dollars in a box on the street. So I …”
“What are you feeling?” Meredith probes. “Just out of curiosity.”
“What would my guess be?”
“Yeah. What do you think?”
“My guess would be Carson Daly. But I’m going to walk. Final answer.”
“O.K., you’re walking with fifty-eight thousand five hundred dollars. The correct answer … Carson Daly.”
Carson Daly.
Carson Daly. Carson Daly. Carson Daly. Carson Daly. Carson Daly. Carson Daly. Carson Daly. Carson Daly.
Illustration: Maximilian Bode.