You Can't Win If You Don't Play

I have a problem. Actually, I have a lot of problems, but let’s try to narrow the field a bit.

I have a gambling problem. It’s minuscule, really. Tiny. Hardly worth mentioning, were it not for the fact that I break out in a cold sweat every time I pass a lotto machine, or the lottery counter at the grocery store, or the gas station, or the hundreds of other places where lottery tickets are apparently sold. I haven’t seen them at the library yet, but frankly, I’m surprised.

You’ve heard of “Aha!” moments? Well, there are also “Oh, shit!” moments. One usually experiences the latter when one is being mugged, or falling off a cliff, or saying “I do” to someone, when it’s really more of a “Do I, though?”

I experienced my “Oh, shit!” moment today, at the drug store of all places. Nary a cliff or imminent spouse in sight. There was, however, a man dressed in a style somewhere between “casual” and “homeless”, frantically scratching at a ticket in the store’s entryway where the lotto machine hunches like a glimmering troll. He had this…thing. I don’t know what to call it, some kind of specialized tool for scratching the silver stuff off a lotto ticket. A scratcher for scratchers.

The problem is that I didn’t just glance at him as I walked by. The problem is that I thought, “Where can I get one of those?”

I then headed towards the back of the store, to the courtesy counter. I had decided, after much gathering of my courage, to ask whether they could cash my little stash of $2 winning tickets. I had $8 total and it was burning a hole in my psyche. As it turns out, why, yes, yes they COULD cash my tickets. While awaiting this bounty, I fell into a brief conversation with a fellow gambler (it seems insane to use that word, but there it is), and let’s just say he had that same sheen of unwashed desperation as the guy out front.

“I am not like them,” I tried to tell myself, my pulse accelerating. “I am not desperate. I’m having FUN playing the lottery. THIS IS FUN.” I folded up my meager prize and headed out of the store, reminding myself to cash my next winning tickets someplace else, so that the people behind the counter wouldn’t add me to their mental list of “regulars.” I felt the gravitational pull of the machine as I left. I felt it physically. I felt what can only be called a craving to stop and sacrifice those $8 winnings to this weird, ugly silver god.

No, I don’t have a problem.

It started (like most problems do) without fanfare. I had won the lottery before, but only because my boss had bought me scratch-offs for my birthday one year. I won almost $200! OMG! I had been to Vegas, again on someone else’s dime, found myself $1,000 in the black and promptly lost it all on a slot machine, a “one-armed bandit” (which, frankly, doesn’t seem like much of a bandit. I could totally take a one-armed bandit).

And then one day, not long ago (we’ll get to that in a moment), I decided that, goddamn it, I’m an adult, and if I want to throw my hard-earned money away on scratch-off lottery tickets, then that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I can eat all the donuts I want, I can buy myself a birthday cake when it’s not even my birthday, and I can give my money to the State of Ohio Lottery Commission and get, more than likely, absolutely nothing in return.

BUT (and it’s a big “but”) I might also win enough to pay off my house, to give myself some small security, to quash the fear and anxiety that haunt my every waking minute. Or I might just win $100. I could really use $100. That seems doable — people probably win $100 all the time, right?

And then I made the mistake of researching “How To Win The Lottery” because that’s what I do. If chaos theory has taught us anything (and I don’t know that it has, but people talk about it a lot) it’s that everything has a system. There is always a way to tweak the odds. And in the case of scratch-off lottery tickets, that tweak is to buy in bulk. Buying just one scratch-off ticket is a fool’s game. But buying, say, 20? Well, mama didn’t raise no fool.

So, I went from buying one ticket, for $1 each, to buying 10 tickets for $2 each. I also tried four of the $5 tickets, but that’s for the rich folks, and also I just didn’t take a shine to those particular tickets. I have my favorites, the ones that “feel” lucky, the ones that “give you more chances of winning” (say, 1:10,256 versus 1:174,352). I like the ones with the smiling sun on them because they’re red and yellow and cheerful, and since I’ve always collected anthropomorphic sun items (T-shirts, pillows, wall hangings, etc.), that seems like A SIGN, all caps, that I should buy those particular tickets.

I went from spending $1 a week, to $5, to $10, to $20, to $40.

All in the space of a month.

It’s not really the money that is worrying. I’m not spending my non-existent kids’ college funds. I’m not spending the rent money. I blow more than $20 a week on Starbucks.

But I feel dirty. I feel wrong. I don’t like the scheming and plotting that seem necessary to maintain my sense of normalcy, to distance myself from this new set of behaviors. Go to a certain gas station, but not this time, you were just there. Go to the grocery store, but only sometimes, because you have to face the lady behind the counter in the checkout when you shop. Don’t ask the 7-Eleven clerk the questions that the other losers ask — has anyone hit big on this ticket yet? What do you know? TELL ME YOUR SECRETS!

I am a horrible person.

I don’t want to be “one of those people”, snatching the ticket from the clerk’s hand and scratching at it like a crazed lemur right there in the store. It’s like jacking off in public.

I have a Master’s Degree, I use big words to annoy people, I work in the legal field. I am better, I am smarter. I am throwing my money away ironically.

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far away, my first husband worked at a gas station. When I visited him, I stood before his counter in a tiny dune of silver. “What’s that?” I asked, gesturing towards the floor, baffled.

He pointed at the rolls of lottery tickets behind him. “People buy them, stand here and scratch them off, and then buy more.” Tens of people every day, hundreds in a month, who knew how many in a year? All scared. All desperate. All human, just like me.

I keep a running tally of my gains and losses on a piece of paper in my kitchen. In this way, I pretend that I have control. When I hit some magic negative number, I will stop.

What is that magic number, you ask?

Hopefully, I’ll know it when I see it.