This multicolored grindstone weighs more than a ton.

Contestants thrown onto the wheel, impaled, crucified, crushed. T! N! R! S! They remind us to reach for the wheel a few spokes to the right and grip near the top with our thumbs raised. Wind seems to blow through their hair as they warm up our voices by having us shout random letters. The contestant handlers are almost mystically upbeat, as if earlier they had chopped up a rainbow and snorted its brightly colored lines. In the rafters, a studio audience hangs like the seventh circle of spectator hell: those doomed to witness game shows. My fly-fisherman father would’ve liked this place. There are canoes and a tackle box and over the mantel an image of a salmon. Rough-hewn logs and fieldstone have been fashioned from high-density urethane foam. The theme of the week is Gone Fishin’, so the set has been decorated as an Adirondack-style lodge by way of the Country Bear Jamboree. Then I nod again and practice clapping without clapping.

They tell us to smile and stand straight and speak loudly and clearly and remember the used-letter board and on Free Play call a vowel and buy vowels when you can, and, oh, just have fun, that’s the important thing, Mark, David, Cyndi, have fun and be yourself. They tell us to clap without clapping, because actual clapping might mess up the audio. It seems that an airplane door has slid open and the next twenty minutes are ten thousand feet below. We are loosening our spinning arms while two contestant handlers prep us, their eyes strobing between frantic and calm. Or one of three people who constitute Thursday, March 26, 2020. I stand before the wheel while Pat is in his dressing room, putting on his Thursday suit. But I’m talking to myself, because Pat Sajak has yet to stroll into this freezing-cold studio on the Sony lot in Culver City. It was sad and painful, Pat, and thank goodness things are much better now. My marriage fell apart a few months after his death. Toward the end, he became panicked by every chill and practically lived with a pulse oximeter on his index finger. My parents were married for more than fifty years. I have three children: boy and girl and girl, eighteen and seventeen and twelve. A friend once saw my wedding photos and asked if I had been flung into a pool-you know, one of those weddings.

My skin rests atop a roiling sea of sweat. I like saying “on the Sony lot.” I’m on the Sony lot, in a studio, and it’s freezing cold. I am in a freezing-cold studio on the Sony lot. on a Friday in late January, in Los Angeles-specifically, Culver City.

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