The Wrong Answer

Newsletter 2024-11-04

There’s nothing trivial about trivia. It’s worth literally tens of dollars in gift cards. My history with such challenges is checkered at best. In high school, I was the captain of the scholastic bowl team. I’d like to say it’s because I was the smartest, but really it was because I was the best at deciding who looked the most confident and using their answers for the group. I can tell when people don’t know what they’re talking about because they make the same face I see in the mirror every day. As an adult, my record has been less stellar. I’ve logged many consecutive failures at my elementary school’s alumni trivia night, save for the one year when we brought two high school teachers with us as ringers. Together, they knew everything about the niche categories of rock music, hockey, auto racing, and Seinfeld, which just so happened to be the exact topics that year. Looking back, it’s possible they cheated and wrote all the questions themselves. If you’re going to commit fraud, do it when there’s a twenty-five dollar gift card for a fried chicken place up for grabs. There are worse reasons to go to prison.

Wednesday, I tried my hand at bar trivia for the second time. It’s held at a brewery within walking distance. That seems like an ideal proximity, but it actually disincentivizes me. The brewery’s main competition is my own house. No bar stool can compare to my couch. That’s why, out of hundreds of opportunities to go to the weekly competition, I’ve only shown up one other time. It doesn’t help that Wednesdays are when I host board game nights with our friends Peter and Delilah. I could play make-believe with tiny bits of cardboard every week for the rest of my life. I’m the only one. This week, everyone else was ready for a change of pace. I’m grateful that change involved hanging out together at a neutral location instead of our friends just staying home. Adulthood is the struggle against the inertia that keeps us in our living rooms. Usually, it’s a battle I’m happy to lose.

We were barely out the front door before we were met by the first disaster of the night. Being a good dad, I had air-fried a quick batch of mini corn dogs to feed my children. When I lovingly shouted for them to come eat, only three kids showed up. The fourth was outside playing with friends. Waffle is part of a roving band of children her own age who are constantly out on adventures throughout the neighborhood. The situation is so good and wholesome that I question if it’s real. It could be part of a foreign government’s spying operation disguised as a stereotype of American life from the 1950s. If any of Waffle’s friends ever slip into a Russian accent, I’m calling the police. I walked out the front door and shouted for Waffle to come home. In this age of modern technology, that’s still the best way to reach her. My obnoxious voice can be perfectly understood by everyone in a two block radius. I’m sure it’s a coincidence that all my neighbors are moving away.

Waffle didn’t respond. After some searching, we spotted her in the distance on the ground next to her toppled bike. Trivia night was off to a great start. Reluctantly, I moved to check on her. Rushing in to help isn’t always the right answer. Sometimes even the most traumatic injury heals faster if I give my kids a chance to walk it off. It’s not beyond their power to regrow a leg if they put their minds to it. Two blocks later, we arrived at my fallen child. She hadn’t actually fallen. She had voluntarily gone to the ground in an attempt to fix her bike. The chain had slipped off yet again. I’ve tried various solutions to keep it in place, none of which have worked. The only upside of this recurring problem is it’s the one kind of maintenance I know how to perform. Thanks, YouTube. I flipped the bike upside down and pedaled the wheels backwards to get the chain back where it belonged. Then I sent her inside to eat the frozen corn dogs I had so painstakingly prepared. I was killing it as a dad. It was time to go to a bar while my children stayed home.

If I were a better parent, I might feel guilty about leaving my kids behind while Lola and I went out to eat a few blocks away. Thank goodness I’m the worst. Ditching them for outings like this works better for everyone. If they were to go out to eat, they would just order chicken tenders, grilled cheese, or corn dogs. We have all those things at home. Never mind that we also have beer at home. We don’t have bar trivia there, so that justified the trip. In hindsight, we might have been better off eating with the kids. Lola and Delilah both ordered chicken tenders, and I ordered a chicken sandwich, which was just a chicken tender on a bun. Only Peter bucked the trend by ordering wings, which were unbreaded tenders. At least I wasn’t quite paying full price. I had one of those saver cards schools sell for fundraisers. The meal was a waste of money, but it was slightly less of a waste than it could have been. As far as I’m concerned, that means I turned a profit.

There was more at stake than money. We had a reputation to uphold. The one other time we went to trivia night at this brewery, we won, besting five or maybe even six other tables that were barely paying attention. It was a victory for the ages. Our prize was a fifty dollar gift certificate, which didn’t even cover the cost of our food and drinks for the night. I’ve never felt so rich in my life. If only I had contributed in any way. While I know basic facts about history and politics, I’m clueless on sports and pop culture. When we won at bar trivia all those months ago, we pulled ahead by wagering everything on the final question, which I also didn’t know. At least I’m consistent. If we were going to win this time, I would once again need the rest of my table to do all the heavy lifting. I was counting on them to bring home another gift card to cover part of my meal. I put the “free” in freeloader.

We did well in the first round, nailing all of the questions. I would tell you what they were, but successes are quickly forgotten. I only remember the times I fail, all of which will haunt me until my dying day. In the second round, we had to identify screenshots from movies. We missed a few there. Clearly I don’t waste enough of my life watching my twenty-five different streaming services. I need to veg out harder. In round three, we reached our first controversial question. We needed to identify the third best-selling musical artist of all time who was “no longer alive.” They repeated that awkward phrase half a dozen times within the question. I’m guessing these queries started out on social media. They were worded that way to defeat the algorithm. “Dead” is a forbidden word. It’s the modern equivalent of “Bloody Mary.” The question said the top two not-alive artists were Michael Jackson and Elvis. For the third, I suggested Prince. Peter thought it might be Whitney Houston or David Bowie. We went in circles, changing our answer back and forth. At the last second, we settled on Prince, mainly because I hadn’t contributed anything so far. Surely I had to be good for a point or two. It turns out I was not. Worst of all, I dishonored the memory of Whitney Houston, who was the right answer. I know which ghost will be haunting me next Halloween. I can’t wait to hear her hit those high notes.

The next round was my chance to redeem myself. One of the questions asked for the three undefeated college teams located the closest to the brewery. I thought I had this one thanks to my Saturdays of watching college football while playing Xbox. Lola thought I was wasting my life, but I knew I was preparing for trivia glory. As usual, Lola was right. I correctly named Indiana University but missed the other two. Worst of all, I forgot Iowa State, which was still undefeated before Saturday. That last one hurt since I was born and spent my early childhood in Iowa. I dishonored my own people right after disrespecting not-alive Whitney Houston. My list of enemies was growing scarier by the minute.

Despite my trivia missteps, we weren’t far out of the lead. The country’s next Jeopardy champion was unlikely to be hanging out in a central Indiana brewery on a Wednesday night. I tried to redeem myself on a music question. The MC asked what two cities, located in the same state, are the most commonly mentioned in songs. I immediately said Memphis and Nashville. I could only name one song with Memphis in it. I reasoned, however, that country songs are the most literal and therefore the most likely to feature a narrative story with place names. If you listen to music in a pickup truck, those two cities are the center of your cultural universe. The rest of the table wasn’t convinced. They went with Los Angeles and Hollywood. For the first and only time, I was right and they were wrong. Surely that wouldn’t be something I’d bring up for the rest of our lives.

Photo by Drew Hays on Unsplash

That music city question was worth ten points. We had dug ourselves quite a hole. Thankfully, the night ended as all good nights do: with gambling. We could wager up to thirty points on each of the three questions. We maxed out all the way down. The first question was about a female athlete who was the first to earn more than a hundred thousand dollars in 1971, which is like ten billion dollars in today’s money. Full disclosure: I don’t understand how inflation works. Lola got that one right. It was Billie Jean King. At the time, there wasn’t enough money in circulation to pay her. The US had to give her the deed to the moon. I don’t remember the other two questions because they didn’t involve awarding celestial bodies to sports heroes. We got them right, no thanks to me. We left the round with a perfect score. Now it was in the hands of the judges, and by judges, I mean the MC doing basic arithmetic.

The announcer read out the final standings from lowest to highest. She rattled off six teams that weren’t us. We were in the final two. “The Worst.” Our team name echoed through the speakers. We were second, and, consequently, not quite the worst. I wanted to set expectations low when I picked our team name. I like to under-promise and also under-deliver. The first team beat us by exactly ten points. The difference was Nashville and Memphis. I prepared to riot.

Never mind the dozens of other points we didn’t get from questions I didn’t know, or the nearly two hundred points we got from questions the rest of the table knew that I didn’t. I prefer to brood on the only ten points that were within my reach. If we had gotten them, there would have been a tie breaker, which I also wouldn’t have known. That’s not the point. The lesson here is that I’m the world’s leading expert on geographic references in country music song lyrics as long as “the world” is limited to our table of four. We walked away with a twenty-five dollar gift card, half the value of the one for first. Last time, Peter took the card. I came out further ahead when we didn’t win. I’m still going to complain, though. It’s sort of my thing.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James