I almost made it to the "Cylinder of Shush" that day--but not quite. Finally, with game three my luck changed during the speed round. Fitzsimmons: "If X equals three, solve the following equations: two-X--"
I rang in. "Six."
"Correct. X plus five--"
I rang in again. "Eight."
"Correct. Four X minus--"
As he finished saying "one," I rang in, "Eleven."
"Correct. You're a freak!"
If being able to do seventh grade math quickly means I finally get to win the game, I thought, then yes--I'm a freak.
Game four went pretty much the same way, and I soon found myself in the "Cylinder" for the second time in a row. At the end of game five, the top two contestants (myself and a guy named Josh) took turns in the "Cylinder" answering our "Savant Categories" (his was chemistry, mine was "Star Trek"). I answered enough to keep my lead and so I won the whole game, which gave me a trip for two to Egypt and Israel and other assorted goodies.
Maybe I was in shock, maybe I was disoriented by all the music and lights and shouts of the crowd, maybe I believed implicitly that because I was from Harvard, I simply had to win. Whatever the reason, I wasn't all that surprised.
Once the episodes aired that December, I couldn't go anywhere on campus without being recognized by someone I didn't know. And even though "Idiot Savants" was canceled in the spring of 1997, I still owe the folks at MTV a debt of thanks for finally giving me the chance to make useful the useless things I knew. On the air, there were no mysteries, no shades of gray. Every question had an answer, every answer had a point value and at the end of the game, I knew just how much everything I knew was worth: a TV, a surround-sound stereo system, a free vacation, leggy pastel-clad women clinging to my arms in celebration as the closing credits rolled, a front page photo in The Harvard Crimson, recognition by drunken partygoers, the list goes on and on.
I spent a grand total of 150 minutes on air--five 30-minute episodes. My apologies to the nine other people whose fifteen minutes I stole.
Murad, a psychology concentrator, lives in Eliot House. He enjoys HRTV, spelunking and playing jazz--preferably for money.