Turn Left at the Trojan Horse by Brad Herzog Page A

Lincoln Park neighborhood. Following the thrill of our wedding day, we found ourselves falling into a routine and a future laid out before us like a straight track to the horizon. True adulthood had arrived, and responsibilities along with it. But we yearned for options. We wanted to sample life’s possibilities before settling down. So this time I responded by traveling outward. We collected our meager savings, bought a thirty-four-foot RV, and hit the highway.
    Through forty-eight states and nearly eleven months, we allowed our thoughts to expand and fill the open spaces, crystallizing our criteria of what we wanted out of a place to live. In the end, we opted for small-town serenity on California’s central coast, a place where John Steinbeck, Doc Ricketts, and Joseph Campbell used to clink beers, stare into tide pools, and ponder the human condition. I was self-satisfied at my ability to control my destiny and certain that the sky was the limit as long as I didn’t settle for anything less than the ideal. But that was when I was a young phenom, newly married, already published at age twenty-six, still clinging to the idea that I could somehow change the world, one word at a time. That was before I had kids and a minivan and an unfathomable mortgage and the notion that my achievements were not meeting my expectations.
    Â 
    Before I found myself humbled by the vagaries of my profession, I would joke to friends that my sole objective was to someday gain entry into the encyclopedia. I figured the folks who make it into those glossy pages had been rewarded for being universally impressive or constructive or, at the very least, memorable. They discovered chemical elements or trekked into lands unknown or churned out literary classics. They earned their immortality. So I aspired to join them. Was that too much to ask?
    Be careful what you wish for.
    Several years ago, at the peak of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire phenomenon, I tried out for the show. By that I mean I phoned the 1-800 number they flashed on the screen and attempted to answer three trivia questions. I did it once a day for a couple of weeks. Why not? I am self-employed. There are worse ways to take a work break. It was a diversion, a lark—until I passed the initial round and received a fortunate random phone call telling me I had moved on to the next tryout hurdle.
    So in rapid succession I answered five more questions, tougher ones, on subjects ranging from Mary Lou Retton to the Teapot Dome scandal. Finally, there was this synapse-snapper: “Put the following ancient civilizations in the order in which they were established—Assyrian, Mayan, Sumerian, Classical Greek.” Wise Athena must have been smiling down on me. More likely, it was Tyche, goddess of luck. Soon enough, I found myself in Manhattan, along with nine other contestants, hoping for an opportunity to sit across from diminutive Regis Philbin and his shiny teeth, each of us craving a chance to conquer trivia questions for gobs of money in front of an audience of millions.
    Then I won the “fastest-finger” round—by thirteen-hundredths of a second. This meant I was headed for something called the “hot seat,” which at the time was the epicenter of pop culture in America, a piece of furniture as iconic as Archie Bunker’s chair. Surreal doesn’t even begin to describe it, and because I tend to be rather cynical and inhibited, it was as out of character as if I had joined the cast of A Chorus Line .
    For the next forty minutes, I did my best not to humiliate myself in front of twenty-five million people. I am sure I didn’t impress the ten million or so folks who were screaming at the boob on the tube who wasn’t quite sure about the name of Dilbert’s pet dog or the logo of Hallmark cards. But, using my lifelines early and often, I clawed my way through the murk of ignorance until suddenly this little television host was showing