A Million Little Questions: Memoirs of an Addict
I really don’t know a lot about addicts, just that I am one. Of that I’m sure. I don’t know when exactly it all started or who started it or if I’ve hit rock bottom or even if I’ll ever recover. All that’s certain right now is that I’m definitely addicted. The monkey is not only on my back, he’s got his claws into me good, his incisors in my neck and probably his little youknowwhat deep inside me in a place no monkey penis has any business being.
And what I’m addicted to is a force more powerful than any liquor, pill, weed or opiate known to man. It’s trivia. My name is Jerry, and I’m a trivia addict.
Trivia addiction takes many forms. In today’s world there are as many different ways to get your trivia jones as there are trivia junkies looking for a fix. Without question my brand of choice is Barstool Sports Trivia at GameOn! Wednesday nights, if you’ll pardon the blatant plug. When Monday morning rolls around, I’m already mentally counting down the minutes until 8PM Wednesday when I’ll once again be feeling the sweet, sweet burn of that first “Famous People” question going down. “Born in Medford, MA in 1978, this actress has hosted shows on MTV and E! and was in ‘Fantastic Four’...”* and I’m hooked. I’ve got the fever, and the only cure, is more trivia.
Of course the true addict can’t be satisfied with just one fix, and I’m no exception. You can scarcely have a beer in a sports pub these days without seeing a chalkboard behind the bar scrawled with some bit of arcana like “Who held the Red Sox record for hits in a season by a Second Baseman before Dustin Pedroia broke it?”* Stadiums and ballparks all have the obligatory scoreboard question. Bars have trivia video games. All I have to hear is that stupid goose squawking over Don Orsillo’s voice to know it’s time once again for tonight’s Afflac trivia question and I start salivating like Pavlov’s dog. In the face of even the most mundane, stupid question, I’m powerless to stop myself. And don’t even get me started on the summer of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” when my obsession over getting past the phone-in questions and the hours of prepping for my inevitable interview with Regis caused a crisis in my marriage.
They say that’s one of the warning signs; when you’ve hurt the ones you love. My Sweet Irish Rose is as patient and understanding as they come, but there’s no question I’ve caused pain in our marriage with this insidious affliction. Cleaning my night stand one time she found my stash of Trivial Pursuit cards. She’s come downstairs in the middle of the night to catch me in the act of watching Jeopardy!, shouting out the answer to “‘Storm on the Sea of Gallilee’, stolen in the Gardner Museum heist was the only seascape by this painter”* I’ve tried to get her to invite people over to play “Scene It” with me, but she doesn’t want to be an enabler. Then there was the time I ran out of the house in a stupor, mumbling something about heading to New York to find the Cash Cab and it was only her love and the love that stopped me.
Some experts say that all addictions are hereditary. That some of us are simply more vulnerable than others from birth, but who knows? Maybe I have a family history. Maybe my great grandfather cleaned up at the County Cork version of GameOn! over questions like “Before his wife died in childbirth, how many of Seamus McGillicudy’s children starved to death?”* Maybe my maternal grandfather Jeremiah Sullivan used to bandy questions over a pint after a day of hauling dead bodies for the Boston ME’s office. For all I know, Machinist’s Mate Bud Thornton was defeating the German navy by day and by night was winning the USS Solomons trivia championship on questions like “What is Hitler’s major malfunction?”...”*
I should point out though that I never did formal bar trivia until last year through Barstool. But it’s not an exaggeration to say it’s what I was put on this Earth do to. I actually have no useful, practical skills of any kind. I’m barely employable. I can’t sing or play an instrument. I can’t work with numbers and I’m not book smart or street smart. But when it comes to worthless bits of information that have been thrown at me over the years, for some reason my brain stores them and when the need arises, the door that info is stored behind springs open. I can’t explain how. To speak in a sports metaphor, Ted Williams could hit a baseball well because of hours upon hours of careful study and scientific research. But Mickey Mantle was a savant, drunkenly stumbling to the plate seeing triple and swinging at the ball in the middle. I am Mantle.
And fortunately, I’ve found like-minded souls. Like Nicholas Cage finding Elisabeth Shue in “Leaving Las Vegas,” I’ve have people who share the same self-destructive addiction for Demon Trivia as I have. Kati Cawley. Uncle Buck. Alicia. Soog. Occasionally Giggles or UB’s friend Scott. My Barstool trivia squad is like a team of experts with highly specialized skills, assembled for the purpose of working together to complete a single task. Like Mission Impossible. Ocean’s 11. X-Men. SuperFriends. Heroes. The Traveling Wilburys.
At the risk of sounding too full of ourselves, there’s not been a category yet we can’t handle. “The actor who played Zed in Pulp Fiction also used the word ‘Gimp’ in what 1995 movie?”* We got that. “What symbol on a computer keyboard is called an ‘octothorpe’?” * No sweat.
“In what state does Rte 90 (the Mass Pike) end?”* Puh-leeze. There are no holes in our game. Nothing we cannot answer.
There have even been a couple of times when it was just Kati and I and each time we came in the Top 3 out of two dozen or so teams. Not to single anyone out because it’s a team game, but playing short handed we were the stuff of legend. I’d answer a guy question “Which NBA player shot over 60% from the floor and over 80% from the line in the same year?”* and on the chick question “Macy’s has agreed to carry this line of cosmetics...”* she’d have the answer before they finished asking. If this were the Middle Ages, minstrels would roam the countryside singing songs about our performances. It’s a wonder our DNA didn’t combine across the table to form a race of highly advanced trivia champions who can write for smutty newspapers.
There have been times when our full team was so good it defies metaphor. Where we were as dominant as... our trivia team. No other comparison works. Perhaps you could say we were like the aliens in the first half of “Independence Day,” crushing all the puny humans in our path. Still, last year didn’t end well. Our season almost exactly mirrored the Patriots, where we just fell short at the end. We lost the championship by one question. Our version of the Giants was a team of all men, which is unheard of. And their David Tyree catch was “In inflation-adjusted dollars, what is the most expensive movie of all time. Hint: the starlet had 97 costume changes.”* It was a tough loss, but all it did was tighten the grip Lady Trivia has on me.
And like a true addict, I’ve gotten my fix in other places. When the Barstool season was over or my team wasn’t available, I’ve gotten together with other junkies. People I work with have formed a team and we’ve gone to other bars hosted by other trivia people with similar success through questions like “What is the term for a number which can be expressed as a fraction?”* and stuff about Mario Lopez. They say another sign of a true addict is when it affects their job performance, and to a person we’ve asked each other trivia stuff instead of doing our jobs. In the end, we’re all just enablers, dragging each other into the same endless cycle of question/answer, question, answer.
And now we’re into the final weeks of Barstool Trivia. But it won’t be an end for me, I know that. I’ll be meeting up with my other co-dependent trivia junkies and continuing the cycle. But I have no intention of stopping. I can’t. Because when you’re as bad off as I am, a thousand bits of useless information isn’t enough, and one is too many.
*[Answers to the questions throughout the article are, in order: Maria Menounos, Mark Loretta, Who is Rembrandt?, 16, One testicle, “Ususal Suspects,” #, Washington, Kevin McHale, Sephora, “Cleopatra” (F-ing Cleopatra!), Rational Number]