Moonwalking With Einstein (28 page)

The first event of the morning was names and faces, which I’d always done pretty well with in practice. The point of the game is to take a packet of ninety-nine head shots and memorize the first and last name associated with each of them. One does that by dreaming up an unforgettable image that links the face to the name. Take, for example, Edward Bedford, one of the ninety-nine names that we had to remember. He was a black man with a goatee, a receding hairline, tinted sunglasses, and an earring in his left ear. To connect that face to that name, I tried to visualize Edward Bedford lying on the bed of a Ford truck, then, deciding that wasn’t distinctive enough, I saw him fording a river on a floating bed. To remember that his first name was Edward, I put Edward Scissorhands on the bed with him, shredding the mattress as he paddled it across the river.

I used a different trick to remember Sean Kirk, a white guy with a mullet, sideburns, and the cockeyed smile of a stroke victim. I paired him up with the Fox News anchor Sean Hannity and Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, and painted an image in my mind of the three of them forming a human pyramid.

After fifteen minutes of the contestants staring at those names and faces, a judge came by and picked up our packets, and handed us a new bunch of stapled pages, with the same set of faces arranged in a different order, and this time, with no names attached. We had fifteen minutes to recall as many of them as possible.

When I put down my pen and handed in my recall sheet, I assumed my score was going to be somewhere near the middle of the pack. The names of Sean Kirk and Edward Bedford had come right back to me, but I’d blanked on the cute blonde and the toddler with the French-sounding name, and a handful of others, so it was hard to imagine I’d done all that well. To my surprise, the 107 first and last names I was able to recall were good enough for a third place finish, just behind Ram Kolli, who memorized 115, and just ahead of Maurice Stoll, who did 104. The winner of the event was a seventeen-year-old competitive swimmer from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, named Erin Hope Luley, who’d managed an impressive 124 names, a new U.S. record and a score that would have gotten a nod of respect even from the top Europeans. When her number was announced, she stood up and waved sheepishly. I looked over at Ram, and caught him looking back at me. He lifted his eyebrows as if to say, “Where’d she come from?”

The second event of the morning was speed numbers, always my worst. This was the one event where Ed’s coaching had given me little advantage—because I had largely ignored Ed’s coaching. He had been prodding me for months to develop a more complicated system for numbers—not quite the “64-gun Man of War” Millennium PAO system he had spent months working on, but something at least a step ahead of the simple Major System that most of the other Americans would be using. I’d indulged him and developed a PAO system for all fifty-two playing cards, but I never got around to doing the same for every two-digit combination from 00 to 99.

Employing the same Major System as the rest of the mental athletes, I used my five minutes of memorization time to go for what I figured was a very safe ninety-four digits—mediocre even by American standards. And still I managed to get the eighty-eighth digit mixed up (instead of Bill Cosby, I should have seen a family playing an oversize version of Milton Bradley’s Game of Life). I blamed my poor showing on Maurice, whom I had heard even through my earmuffs gruffly yelling, “Enough with the pictures already!” at a press photographer who was circulating in the room. Still, my eighty-seven digits left me in fifth place. Maurice had banked 148, a new U.S. record, and Ram had finished in second with 124. Erin was way down in eleventh place, having remembered just fifty-two digits. I got up, stretched, and had a third cup of coffee. “They’re known as MAs, or mental athletes,” I heard Kenny Rice earnestly tell the camera, “but at this point in the competition, MA could stand for something else: mental anguish.”

Though I’d been operating with inferior mnemonotechnics in the numbers event, when it came to speed cards, the next challenge, I was the only competitor armed with what Ed referred to as “the latest European weaponry.” Most of the Americans were still placing a single card in each locus, and even the guys who’d been competing for years, like Ram and “Ice Man” Chester, were at best turning two cards into a single image. In fact, only a couple of years ago it was entirely unheard of for anyone to be able to memorize a whole pack of cards at the U.S. championship. Thanks to Ed, the PAO system I was using packed three cards into a single image, which meant that it was at least 50 percent more efficient than what was being used by any of the other Americans. It was a huge advantage. Even if Maurice, Chester, and Ram were going to wipe me in the other disciplines, I hoped I might be able to run up my score in speed cards.

Each competitor was assigned an individual judge with a stopwatch, who took a seat across the table. Mine was a middle-aged woman, who smiled as she sat down and said something that I couldn’t make out through my earplugs and earmuffs. I had brought along my black spray-painted memory goggles for speed cards, and up until the moment a freshly shuffled deck was placed on the desk in front of me, I was still weighing whether to put them on. I hadn’t practiced without my goggles in weeks, and the Con Edison auditorium was certainly full of distractions. But there were also three television cameras circulating in the room. As one of them zoomed in for a close-up of my face, I thought of all the people I knew who might end up watching the broadcast: high school classmates I hadn’t seen in years, friends who had no idea about my memory obsession, my girlfriend’s parents. What would they think if they turned on their TVs and saw me wearing huge black safety goggles and earmuffs, thumbing through a deck of playing cards? In the end, my fear of public embarrassment trumped my competitive instincts, and I left the goggles on the floor by my feet.

From the front of the room, the chief arbiter, a former marine drill sergeant, shouted, “Go!” My judge clicked her stopwatch, and I began peeling through the pack as fast as I could, flicking three cards at a time off the top of the deck and into my right hand. I was storing the images in the memory palace I knew better than any other, the house in Washington, D.C., that I’d lived in since I was four years old—the same house I’d used to remember Ed’s to-do list on the rock in Central Park. At the front door, I saw my friend Liz vivisecting a pig (two of hearts, two of diamonds, three of hearts). Just inside, the Incredible Hulk rode a stationary bike while a pair of oversize, loopy earrings weighed down his earlobes (three of clubs, seven of diamonds, jack of spades). Next to the mirror at the bottom of the stairs, Terry Bradshaw balanced on a wheelchair (seven of hearts, nine of diamonds, eight of hearts), and just behind him, a midget jockey in a sombrero parachuted from an airplane with an umbrella (seven of spades, eight of diamonds, four of clubs). Halfway through the deck, Maurice’s Teutonic wail once again penetrated my earmuffs: “No walking!” I heard him yell, presumably at another photographer. This time, I didn’t let it break my focus. In my brother’s bedroom, I saw my friend Ben urinating on Benedict XVI’s papal skullcap (ten of diamonds, two of clubs, six of diamonds), Jerry Seinfeld sprawled out bleeding on the hood of a Lamborghini in the hallway (five of hearts, ace of diamonds, jack of hearts), and at the foot of my parents’ bedroom door, myself moonwalking with Einstein (four of spades, king of hearts, three of diamonds).

The art of speed cards is in finding the perfect balance between moving quickly and forming detailed images. You want to catch just enough of a glimpse of your images so as to be able to reconstruct them later, without wasting precious time conjuring up any more color than necessary. When I put my palms back down on the table to stop the clock, I knew that I’d hit a sweet spot in that balance. But I didn’t yet know how sweet.

The judge, who was sitting opposite me, flashed me the time on her stopwatch: one minute and forty seconds. Not only was that better than anything I’d ever done in practice, but I also immediately recognized that it would shatter the old United States record of one minute and fifty-five seconds. I closed my eyes, put my head down on the table, whispered an expletive to myself, and took a second to dwell on the fact that I had possibly just done something—however geeky, however trivial—better than it had ever been done by anyone in the entire United States of America.

I looked up and quickly glanced over at Maurice Stoll, who was stroking his goatee and seemed agitated, and I felt an unseemly satisfaction in the trouble he seemed to be having. Then I looked over at Chester and got nervous. He was smirking confidently. He shouldn’t have been. He had clocked in at a lethargic two minutes and fifteen seconds.

By the standards of the international memory circuit, where thirty seconds is the best time, my minute and forty seconds would have been considered middling—the equivalent of a five-minute mile for any of the serious Europeans. But we weren’t in Europe.

As word of my time traveled across the room, cameras and spectators began to assemble around my desk. The judge pulled out a second unshuffled deck of playing cards and pushed them across the table to me. My task now was to rearrange the unshuffled pack to match the one I’d just memorized.

I fanned the unshuffled deck out across the table, took a deep breath, and walked through my palace one more time. I could see all the images perched exactly where I’d left them, except for two. They should have been in the shower, dripping wet, but all I could spy were blank beige tiles.

I can’t see it
, I whispered to myself frantically.
I can’t see it
. I ran through every single one of my images as fast as I could. Had I forgotten a giant pair of toes? A fop wearing an ascot? Pamela Anderson’s rack? The Lucky Charms leprechaun? An army of turbaned Sikhs? No, no, no, no.

I began sliding the cards I did remember around with my index finger. In the top left corner of the desk, I put my friend Liz and her dead pig. Next to her, the Hulk on his bike, and Terry Bradshaw with his wheelchair. As the clock ran out on my five minutes of recall time, I was left with three cards still on the table. They were the three cards that had disappeared from the shower: the king of diamonds, four of hearts, and seven of clubs. Bill Clinton copulating with a basketball. How could I have possibly missed it?

I quickly neatened up the stack of cards into a square pile, shoved them back across the table to the judge, and removed my earmuffs and ear plugs. I had it nailed. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind.

After waiting a moment for one of the television cameras to circle around for a better angle, the judge began flipping the cards over one by one, while, for dramatic effect, I did the same with the deck I’d memorized.

Two of hearts.

Two of hearts.

Two of diamonds.

Two of diamonds.

Three of hearts.

Three of hearts ...

Card by card, each one matched. When we got to the end of the decks, I threw the last card down on the table, and looked up with a wide, stupid grin that I tried and failed to squelch. I was the new U.S. record holder in speed cards. The throng that had gathered around my desk applauded loudly. One person hooted. Ben Pridmore pumped his fist. A twelve-year-old boy stepped forward, handed me a pen, and asked for my autograph.

For reasons that were
never made clear, it had been decided that the three top finishers in the first three events of the morning would be given a bye, and wouldn’t have to compete in the final preliminary event of the morning, the poem. Despite my low score in numbers, my record performance with the cards was enough to leave me in second place overall, behind Maurice and ahead of “Ice Man” Chester. We were all going straight to the quarterfinals. The three of us left the competition hall with Ben Pridmore and walked over to the Con Edison cafeteria, where we sat at the same table eating a cordial, and mostly silent, lunch. When we returned, the three of us were joined on the stage by Ram, the forty-seven-year-old fifty-state marathoner Paul Mellor, and seventeen-year-old Erin Luley, who had set a new United States record—her second of the day—in the poetry event, while we were out of the room.

Now that there were only six of us left, the competition shifted to its second phase, designed to amp up the drama for the benefit of the television cameras. Nifty 3-D graphics were now projected onto a screen in the front of the room, and theatrical lighting poured down on the stage, where there were six tall director’s chairs for us to sit on, each with a lapel microphone resting on it.

The first event of the afternoon was random words. In a typical random words event at a typical national championship, the competitors would have fifteen minutes to memorize as many words as possible from a list of four hundred, then a short break, and then thirty minutes to write as many as they could remember in order on a sheet of paper. It’s not exactly a spectator sport. For the U.S. championship, it was decided that everything would happen on stage, with the hope that this might lend the event some of the hand-wringing, agonizing screams, and other kabuki antics that make the spelling bee such compelling theater. The six of us were to go in a circle, one by one, each calling out the next word on the list we’d memorized. The first two mental athletes to miss a word would be knocked out.

The list was a collection of concrete nouns and verbs like “reptile” and “drown,” which are the easiest to visualize, mixed in with a few harder-to-imagine abstract words like “pity” and “grace.” Whereas your objective in a normal random words event would be to memorize as much as possible, and perhaps be a little reckless about it for the sake of packing your memory palace to capacity, Ed and I had reckoned that the rules of the U.S. championships meant that a wiser strategy was to memorize fewer words—I went for a mere 120—but make sure they were 100 percent right. We figured most of the people on the stage could probably remember more words than me, but also that somebody was going to freak out and try for more than he or she could handle. I would not be that guy.