Lottery hopefuls fit Thoreau’s portrait of ‘quiet desperation’
By: Minx McCloud
For a transplanted New Yorker like me, one of the down sides of living here is that sometimes when there’s a really big lottery amount at stake, my friends back home try to wheedle me into buying them tickets.
I have no idea how lotteries work, or why tickets aren’t sold in certain states, and I actually don’t care. All I know is that on Tuesday, the phone calls began.
"Minx, if I send you $800, will you buy tickets for me and the gang in my office?"
Um … in a word, no.
Call me suspicious, but I’ve heard of a few cases where someone bought the tickets with their own money and then tried vainly to collect the money owed them AFTER the drawing had been held. You know how hard it is to get people to pay for a ticket they already know is a loser?
Besides, I don’t even have any idea of how to buy a lottery ticket. They ask confusing questions and speak in some sort of code known only to lottery people. They also ask how you want to be paid if you win, and I just know I’d make the wrong choice, no matter how much I’d been coached.
Naturally, this means I don’t buy tickets for Jim and myself either. I’m positive I’d screw up and pick the wrong option and then my husband would yell.
See, it doesn’t matter if we were $300 million richer Jim would point out that had I chosen the proper payment option, we would have had an additional million dollars and I’d never hear the end of it.
Also, I have faced the reality of my life, and truth be known, if it was a lottery where the winner got struck by lightning, I’d be a shoo-in, but $375 million? In that case, I’m just another luckless schmuck.
I’d rather shred money and stuff a bed for my cat with it than spend it on a lottery ticket.
I don’t need the guilt either. If I won the lottery, I’d feel bad for all those people who lost and needed the money more than I did, and I’d be a sucker for all those phone calls lottery winners complain about getting. "I heard you won $375 million and my baby needs new shoes." "Say no more, madam, I’m sending you a check so you can buy your own Stride-Rite franchise."
Now you may be a perfectly normal person who simply buys a lottery ticket on a lark, but when I worked in a convenience store, most of the people I saw waiting on lottery lines seemed very pathetic to me.
They don’t appear to be having fun with the whole lottery thing. Henry David Thoreau said "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," but I would go one step farther and say that many of them can be found on queue for lottery tickets.
There are the old folks, dollar bills crumpled in their palsied hands, spending money that they don’t look as if they can spare. Some of them don’t even drive. They hike to the local deli with tiny halting steps and buy their tickets with an air of trepidation.
Housewives with dark circles under their eyes whisper their numbers, convinced that their ticket is the winner and fearful that others will hear those numbers.
And then there are the slack-jawed idiots, reeking of beer and sweat, who jostle each other, curse and brag about what they’ll do with all that money
To tell you the truth, I didn’t even want to go into my local convenience store for coffee on Tuesday. I’ve not seen it here in New Jersey (yet), but out on rural Long Island, my old home, I saw guys on line who reduce the entire lottery purchase system to a beer-soaked, good-ol’-boy brawl. ("You stole my numbers. I wuz gonna play 28 and 64!" "Did not!" "Did too!" "Put ’em up, fool!")
About 20 years ago, I had a friend who insisted to me that she had to get to the store every day to play her husband’s numbers in one of those pick 3 things. She wasn’t working and her husband was a bartender. They didn’t even have money for a car, and yet every day, she walked to the store and plunked down three dollars on lottery tickets.
They never won even though they always played the same numbers. That’s how truly rotten their luck was. But they still spent three dollars every single day.
One day, she was too ill to get to the store, I wasn’t around, and her lazy husband didn’t want to get up off his butt to go for the ticket. One of their tickets finally hit that day. It was only for a couple of hundred dollars, but that must have looked like a fortune to them. Her husband went out, got drunk, and gave her a black eye when he came home. Lovely marriage, eh?
Again, "quiet desperation."
I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy lottery tickets if you really enjoy it and have some fun with it. I have been known to buy one of those "Bingo" tickets they sell in Connecticut. My mom loves them and you really get your money’s worth. It consists of three bingo games and you have to scratch each little box off a list to try and get bingo. It can actually take 20 minutes to do it.
I’ll pay a dollar for 20 minutes of fun any day. My mom has great luck and it tickles her fancy, so it’s well worth it. We usually at least get back the cost of the ticket.
However, you won’t see me on a lottery line hoping that my ship is about to come in. I can handle the rowdy beer drinkers, the sad-eyed losers, and the desperate housewives, who may actually be hoping that they will at least win enough money to escape their unhappy lot in life.
What I can’t handle is their devastating disappointment, and the fact that they keep coming back, hoping to win, day after day.
Minx McCloud is a freelance writer who writes about life in New Jersey. She can be reached at [email protected]