The Lotto
Times were lean, my baby’s daddy left me for the girl who processed our application for food stamps, so I got a job with the Human Lotto. I produced the necessary photo identification, the proof of employment eligibility; provided my Social Security Number; filled out the W-4 form; and they tattooed the twelve numbers on my skin, shellacked me toes-to-neck with opaque metallic foil, and dropped me off in front of the E-Z Mart to hustle for customers with the other scratch-off girls.
At the E-Z Mart there were fifteen of us: shiny, grey, and metallic. Some were young, some were old; some thin, some heavy; some black, white, brown, yellow—but beneath our necks all of us were grey.
One of the girls had been doing this for years. She had been scratched off hundreds of times. She said usually it was done in motel rooms, the scratching, by lonely men: bald, paunchy, sweating, pale. But other times it was cocktail lounges, executive suites, employees-only restrooms, the Admiral’s Club of an airport terminal. You really never knew. I asked her did it hurt, and she said, “Some more than others.” She said last night it was a suburban living room—leather furniture, decorative fireplace, portraits of children on the walls—a divorced father of four watching television’s John Stamos announce the winning numbers as he (the father of four) frantically clawed her naked.
The girl took those of us new to the profession under her wing. She taught us how to solicit, how to hustle, what salves and creams to use when the metallic foil and men’s fingernails irritated our skin. Sometimes we got worse than scratches, hideous men in motels leaving us with deep punctures, incisions, lacerations; and the girl sutured us herself, with a cigarette lighter-sterilized sewing needle and fishing line, in the out-of-order ladies’ restroom of the E-Z Mart. When we went to get re-shellacked, our employers, if they noticed the sutures at all, said nothing. We were paid by the hour, plus commission. All state and federal withholding was automatically deducted from our paychecks.
We learned about statistical probability, economies of scale, expected payoff. We learned every subtlety and nuance of the speech cadence of John Stamos, reading someone’s lucky twelve-digit number off of plastic white balls on television. We learned what men would do, if they had ten million dollars, telling us how they’d buy Corvettes and bed foxy, gold-digging broads and tell their bosses to go screw themselves with tungsten/titanium sand wedges; while denuding us, grimly, with their foil-flecked fingernails.
“Luck be a lady,” they said, pallid, paunchy, sweating, bald; and we learned to stare at our naked selves, reflected palely, in the dark sectors of the television, as John Stamos read the day’s twelve lucky numbers; to see if we had made anyone a winner.
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