The Radio Contest, part 1

Originally published October 31, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1250

Do not seek great depths of comics wisdom in the following words. It’s just, well, something that happened to me that’s kind of bizarre, and I went along with it because I thought, “Well, might be able to get a column out of it.”

I was driving home the other morning, and had my radio tuned to a Long Island radio station, 103.1. It’s an oldies station, and I love it, because I never know what sort of memories are suddenly going to be stirred up when I listen to it. It’s the auditory equivalent of jamming a stick into the silted bottom of a pond and then blinking in surprise at whatever happens to be dredged up by the impact.

They were asking trivia questions. The challenge was to answer three questions relation to horror/suspense films, within thirty seconds. I listened as a woman called in to take a shot at it. The first question was, “In a 1960 film, Anthony Perkins played a homicidal maniac fixated on his mother.”

I was already saying Psycho when the DJ continued, “What was the name of the hotel which he owned?”

“The Bates Motel,” she replied, and I realized that I would have blown it. The phrasing was designed to make you blurt out a premature and wrong answer.

I listened, playing along for the second: “What 1968 movie starring Mia Farrow was about witchcraft?”

“Rosemary’s Baby,” I said, and the woman echoed it a moment later. Easy enough, although I always thought of the antagonists more as Satanists than witches, but that’s splitting hairs.

“What was the name of the teenaged actress,” came the third and last question, “who was possessed in The Exorcist?”

“Linda Blair,” I said immediately.

Dead silence on the radio.

“Linda Blair,” I repeated, trying to urge the caller to intuit the answer through my overwhelming psychic prowess.

Nothing.

“Aw, c’mon! Linda Blair!” I said with rather unseemly irritation. This was bugging the hëll out of me. How could someone not know this? A film which shocked the movie-going public at the time (although by today’s standards, it could probably run on “Nick at Nite” and not provoke a raised eyebrow) and catapulted Blair, with her spinning head, into the public eye (and such G-rated subsequent epics as Born Innocent, Chained Heat, and—most horrifying of all—Roller Boogie). Who could forget Linda Blair?

“Uhm… Linda…” she started, struggling to try and come up with the last name.

And her time was up. “We’ll see if someone else can answer all three questions. Call in,” they said.

I felt a bubbling sense of moral outrage (which, I admit, has a fairly low boiling point. I become morally outraged if I have to wait at a train crossing). These were easy questions! Who couldn’t nail all three within thirty seconds? It was just silly—to say nothing of being an insult to one of the premiere pea-soup-vomiting actresses of her generation.

I had to do something about this. I could not stand still for the insult. I could not let this affront go unavenged.

Aw, screw it—I just wanted to win.

This has always been my greatest asset, and also my greatest liability. I have an overwhelming drive to win, which has helped to propel me along my career path. This, in and of itself, is a plus. On the other hand, I’m a lousy loser. If you want someone on your team who’s going to play as if his life depended on it, you want me. If you want someone who’s going to be a good sport if you lose, get someone else. If I know I’m going to be faced with a challenge, I’ll prepare for it with life-and-death intensity, no matter how stupid that challenge may be, just because I have a drive to win. When I agreed to the stupid debate with Todd McFarlane, I prepared myself to such a degree that consequently—when I trounced him—I made it look so easy and effortless that it seemed like I was beating up on a helpless punching bag. I’d over-prepared and looked like a bully, which was probably what Todd wanted.

When playing a game, I play to win (unless it’s, y’know, against my six year old or something). If I don’t win, I get annoyed with myself. Remember Kirk in Star Trek II saying, “I don’t like to lose”? I should get a bumper sticker that says that. I mean, no one likes to lose, but it’s not that big a deal to some people. To me—it is. That’s why, when I win an award, it means a lot to me. I like to win. Whenever possible. Sue me. To a degree, I try and avoid board games and card games in the same manner that an alcoholic avoids booze: I don’t do well with the downside of it. The last time I played Monopoly was fourteen years ago. I lost so badly that I knocked the entire board off the table, sending the pieces flying everywhere.

This did not serve me well in high school, particularly, because I would join athletic teams in order to find social acceptance, since that was the only way in the jock town where I lived that one could find social acceptance. Unfortunately, I was totally inept at any major sport. Lousy soccer player, lousy basketball player, lousy baseball player. The heart was willing, the flesh was hopeless. Contests of the mind I could win; contests of the body, forget it. So I was drawn to comics, identifying with heroes for whom no physical challenge was too daunting, and they would always triumph over those who would try to put them down.

Still, physical competition and my relative lack of skill at them has always screamed “high school” to my psyche and brings up very unpleasant memories.

But the radio challenge was a cakewalk. This was something I could win, with no effort and no risk of humiliation.

Moments later I got home, picked up the phone and started dialing. Hit a busy signal for the first minute, and figured I didn’t have a prayer. Legions of Linda Blair fans, no doubt sharing my indignation at the slighting—via lapse of the public consciousness—of this quality actress. Everyone had to be calling in with the right answer.

I got through in a little over a minute and wound up getting the on-air announcer. “Hi, I wanted to take a shot at the trivia questions,” I said.

“Oh good!” he said. “Because we still haven’t gotten a right answer to the last question. It’s a trick question.”

Immediately alarm bells went off in my head. A trick? It—it seemed so straightforward. They’d said “teenager.” Was there a teen in the film I’d forgotten about, other than Blair? Maybe she hadn’t been a teenager in the film and the answer was, “Nobody!”

“There’s a trick to it?” I said nervously.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” he said confidently. I was pleased at his certainty on both our behalves. Me, I jotted down “Linda Blair” on a napkin just to make sure I didn’t blank on her name.

They rolled tape (since I wouldn’t be on “live,” but rather about five minutes later. Avoids problems if a contestant shouts, “Oh [insert obscene expletive here]!” in case they screw up) and he started firing the questions at me. I answered the first two with confidence. At least I didn’t feel guilty about “building” on the previous contestant’s work. I’d known the answers.

He then asked me the Exorcist question. With just a millisecond of hesitation, I said, “Linda Blair?”

“That’s right!” he exhorted. “We have a winner!”

I was very pleased, of course. And deep within me, the high school student who had carried all sorts of useless bits of information in his head and was reviled by all the jocks and always felt unhappy because he couldn’t measure up to the demands of the athletic community. That student rejoiced in the triumph.

“And we’ll be getting those Knicks tickets off to you,” the announcer was saying.

My mental congratulations slammed to a halt.

Knicks tickets? Knicks? My mind wandered for a moment. Say “Knicks” to me, I’ll think you’re talking about what you get from a bad shave. Knicks?

“—for this Thursday’s game against the 76ers at Nassau Coliseum!”

“Knicks… that’s a basketball team, right?” my mind said, and fortunately enough my mouth—on autopilot—simply said, “That’s great! Thanks!”

“Plus you’ll be eligible to join in our half-time contest for further prizes!” he added.

I felt my blood run cold.

Half-time contest. I did not like the sound of that.

And when the DJ was done chatting with me, and passed me over to the assistant so that she could get my full name, address and the like, I asked her what was up with the half-time competition.

“Well, what do I have to do?” I asked cautiously.

“We’re going to make you dance,” she said.

Okay. Okay, I could handle that. Baryshnikov I’m not, but I’ve got a basic sense of rhythm. Plus I’ve taken some dance lessons. I can do a basic swing step, some mambo, hustle. It didn’t seem to make sense, but I could handle that…

“No, I’m kidding,” she said, amused by her own joke. “No, we’re going to bring you down to the court, and you’ll have the opportunity to make a free throw from the foul line to win more prizes!”

My harmless game of knowledge, my trivia contest—that I was certain I could win with no evoking of ghosts of my horrendous teen athletic career—had just been taken to a new, potentially astronomic opportunity for personal humiliation.

And somewhere from within me, that inept high school student said, “You are so screwed.” And I had the sick feeling that he was right.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. Next week: Peter on the floor of Nassau Coliseum, being booed by 13,000 fans. Bring popcorn.)