You say the price your mom tells you. The United States Marine says one dollar more. The rocket science guy says a dollar higher than him. Only, this round-you win.
All those potatoes open their little eyes.
Except now, you need to guess the price of a whole cow full of milk in a box, the way milk comes in the kitchen fridge. You have to guess the cost of a whole thing of breakfast cereal like you’d find in the kitchen cabinet. After that, a giant deal of pure salt the way it comes from the ocean only in a round box, but more salt than anybody could eat in an entire lifetime. Enough salt, you could rim approximately a million-billion margaritas.
All the Zeta Delts start texting you like crazy. Your in-box is piling up.
Next come these eggs like you’d find at Easter, only plain white and lined up inside some special kind of cardboard case. A whole, complete set of twelve. These really minimalist eggs, pure white…so white you could just look at them forever, only right away you need to guess at a big bottle like a yellow shampoo, except it’s something gross called cooking oil, you don’t know what for, and the next thing is you need to choose the right price of something frozen.
You cup one hand over your eyes to see past the footlights, except all the Zeta Delts are lost in the glare. All you can hear is their screaming different prices of money. Fifty thousand dollars. A million. Ten thousand. Just loony people yelling just numbers.
Like the TV studio is just some dark jungle, and people are just some monkeys just screeching their monkey sounds.
The molars inside your mouth, they’re grinding together so hard you can taste the hot metal of your fillings, that silver melting in your back teeth. Meantime, the sweat stains creep down from your armpit to your elbow, all black-red down both sides of your Zeta Delt T-shirt. The flavor of melted silver and pink bubblegum. It’s sleep apnea only in the day, and you need to remind yourself to take the next breath…take another breath…while the supermodels walking on sparkly high heels try pimping the audience a microwave oven, pimping a treadmill while you keep staring to decide if they’re really good-looking. They make you spin this doohickey so it rolls around. You have to match a bunch of different pictures so they go together perfect. Like you’re some white rat in Principles of Behavioral Psychology 201, they make you guess what can of baked beans costs more than another. All that fuss to win something you sit on to mow your lawn.
Thanks to your mom telling you prices, you win a thing like you’d put in a room covered in easy-care, wipe- clean, stain-resistant vinyl. You win one of those deals people might ride on vacation for a lifetime of wholesome fun and family excitement. You win something hand painted with the Old World charm inspired by the recent release of a blockbuster epic motion picture.
It’s the same as when you felt sick with a high fever and your little-kid heart would pound and you couldn’t catch your breath, just from the idea that somebody might take home an electric organ. No matter how sick you felt, you’d watch this show until your fever broke. All the flashing lights and patio furniture, it seemed to make you feel better. To heal you or to cure you in some way.
It’s like forever later, but you win all the way to the Showcase Round.
There, it’s just you and the old granny wearing the sweatshirt from before, just somebody’s regular grandma, but she’s lived through world wars and nuclear bombs, probably she saw all the Kennedys get shot and Abraham Lincoln, and now she’s bobbing up and down on her tennis-shoe toes, clapping her granny hands and crowded by supermodels and flashing lights while the big voice makes her the promise of a sports utility vehicle, a wide-screen television, a floor-length fur coat.
And probably it’s the acid, but it’s like nothing seems to add up.
It’s like, if you live a boring-enough life, knowing the price of Rice-A-Roni and hot dog wieners, your big reward is you get to live for a week in some hotel in London? You get to ride on some airplane to Rome. Rome, like, in Italy. You fill your head full of enough ordinary junk, and your pay-off is giant supermodels giving you a snowmobile?
If this game show wants to see how smart you really are, they need to ask you how many calories in a regular onion-cheddar cheese bagel. Go ahead, ask you the price of your cell phone minutes any hour of the day. Ask you about the cost of a ticket for going thirty miles over the speed limit. Ask the round-trip fare to Cabo for spring break. Down to the penny, you can tell them the price of decent seats for the Panic at the Disco reunion tour.
They should ask you the price of a Long Island iced tea. The price of Marcia Sanders’s abortion. Ask about your expensive herpes medication you have to take but don’t want your folks to know you need. Ask the price of your History of European Art textbook, which cost three hundred bucks-fuck you very much.
Ask what that stamp of Hello Kitty set you back.
The sweatshirt granny bids some regular amount of money for her showcase. Just like always, the numbers of her bid appear in tiny lights, glowing on the front of her contestant desk where she stands.
Here, all the Zeta Delts are yelling. Your phone keeps ringing and ringing.
For your showcase, a supermodel rolls out five hundred pounds of raw beefsteak. The steaks fit inside a barbecue. The barbecue fits onboard a speed boat that fits inside a trailer for towing it that fits a massive fifth- wheel pickup truck that fits inside the garage of a brand-new house in Austin. Austin, like, in Texas.
Meantime, all the Zeta Delts stand up. They get to their feet and step up on their audience seats cheering and waving, not chanting your name, but chanting, “Zeta Delt!” Chanting, “Zeta Delt!” Chanting, “Zeta Delt!” loud enough so it records for the broadcast.
It’s probably the acid, but-you’re battling some old nobody you’ve never met, fighting over shit you don’t even want.
Probably it’s the acid, but-right here and now-fuck declaring a business major. Fuck General Principles of Accounting 301.
Stuck partway down your throat, something makes you gag.
And on purpose, by accident, you bid a million, trillion, gah-zillion dollars-and ninety-nine cents.
And everything shuts down to quiet. Maybe just the little clicking sounds of all those Las Vegas lights blinking on and off, on and off. On and off.
It’s like forever later when the game show host gets up too close, standing at your elbow, and he hisses, “You can’t do that.” The host hisses, “You have to play this game to win…”
Up close, his host face looks cracked into a million-billion jagged fragments only glued back together with pink makeup. Like Humpty Dumpty or a jigsaw puzzle. His wrinkles, like the battle scars of playing his same TV game since forever started. All his gray hairs, always combed in the same direction.
The big voice asks-that big, deep voice booming out of nowhere, the voice of some gigantic giant man you can’t see-he demands, can you please repeat your bid?
And maybe you don’t know what you want out of your life, but you know it’s
A million, trillion…you say. A number too big to fit on the front of your contestant desk. More zeroes than all the bright lights in the game show world. And probably it’s the Hello Kitty, but tears slop out both your eyes, and you’re crying because for the first time since you were a little kid you don’t know what comes next, tears wrecking the front of your red T-shirt, turning the red parts black so the Greek Omega deals don’t make any sense.
The voice of one Zeta Delt, alone in all that big, quiet audience, he yells, “You suck!”
On the little screen of your phone, a text message says, “Asshole!”
The text? It’s from your mom.
The sweatshirt grandma, she’s crying because she won. You’re sobbing because-you don’t know why.
It turns out the granny wins the snowmobiles and the fur coat. She wins the speedboat and the beefsteaks. The table and chairs and sofa. All the prizes of both the showcases, because your bid was way, way too high. She’s jumping around, her bright-white false teeth throwing smiles in every direction. The game show host gets everybody started clapping their hands, except the Zeta Delts don’t. The family of the old granny climbs up onstage-all the kids and grandkids and great-grandkids of hers-and they wander over to touch the shiny sports utility vehicle, touch the supermodels. The granny plants red lipstick kisses all over the fractured pink face of the game show host. She’s saying, “Thank you.” Saying, “Thank you.” Saying, “Thank you,” right up to when her granny eyes roll up backward inside her head, and her hand grabs at the sweatshirt where it covers her heart.
