By Raquel Velez
When I think of the lottery, I don’t usually configure images of endless, sudden wealth and inexplicable miraculous chance. Instead I see you.
I see you hunched over your notepad scribbling numbers and combinations across and down blue lines in your sharp rhomboidal writing
02 22 09 04 07 23
You said our birthdays will bring us fortune for there are only so many days in a month and months in a year and what a chance that we have such a pair of digits attached to our good name.
We’d spend an entire day driving to the Nevada-California border so you could crunch your numbers and place your bets. See, Nevada, aware of its gambling fueled southern tip, outlawed the lottery. It’d be bad for business.
You’d waltz inside the tiny store in Primm. And the longer the line, the larger the prize. You’d give us scratch-offs to entertain us while we waited. I always hated the colored shavings that stained my thumbs and got everywhere, but the scratching was satisfying.
You kissed my forehead and smiled. I could not explain the depth, the glistening I saw in your eyes at the time. I, no older than just 5, imagined that what I saw must have been what hope looks like.
One day, I rode my bicycle around the garage all afternoon making myself dizzy. Repeating the phrase
“Please let him win” over and over in a sort of prayer or plea until the words morphed and squeezed into an endless string…
pleaselethimwinpleaselethimwingodI’llbegoodpleaselethimwinpleaseletdadwinpleasewindad…
We didn’t win.
Flash forward some time and you still scribble numbers down on notepads, but you have a collection now. You watch videos. Old men with starched shirts preaching their philosophies on how to outsmart chance. “This is how you’ll win…” they tell you. And you listen.
You allow their words to infiltrate and coalesce around your mind and burrow deep like snakes.
Sometimes you’d come home when we were all supposed to be asleep (I never was good at sleeping) and I could see the low glow of the Vegas lights that never cease seep through our curtains, and from under the crack of my closed door I could hear your voice.
You were out trying your luck, again, weren’t you? I know this because mami is crying and you’re yelling.
“We can’t afford this.” she spat. Her words, though genuine, seemed to pass through you like smoke and just made your fire grow.
This happened a lot, to say the least.
I remember sitting outside the peeling, navy blue Wild Wild West corpse-of-a-casino while you ran your “errands” inside. Sometimes we’d wait in the van but other times the Mojave sun beat down so goddamn hard that within minutes we’d melted our way out and onto the curb. It truly was enough to make you mad.
You always said you wouldn’t be long.
My sisters and I begged to differ.
Eventually you’d come out and the whole building seemed to exhale heavily. Although you were never a smoker, the entire accumulation of tobacco and nicotine that was encrusted in and blackened the walls of Las Vegas would follow you out those double doors and cling onto your hair and limbs like a desperate child.
It sat next to us in the van on our way home, writhing, and it reeked.
One day I looked into your eyes and the depth and glistening of them finally made sense. It wasn’t hope, at least not in its positive sense where it can uplift someone and bring out their best.
It was more, a sense of madness. It was a deep cavernous and clamorous yearning that was eating you from the inside out and eating us as well. An insane desire to win…to challenge the immensely miniscule and insignificant odds of making it big.
And the even crazier belief that you would.
It was a destructive hope.
We eventually fled that city. We drove miles and miles eastward in sweet June, leaving the bright and breathing desert that we called home for so long, behind us. Its image distorted by heat waves and kicked up dust.
We tried to save you… tried to cut you off from the source.
But the numbers swirled in your head. The cheery chimes of slot machine cherries and sevens haunted your dreams and dice rolled and clattered endlessly in your ears. The weekly drawings for the possibility of dreams-come-true-forever in the form of a one-time-grand-sum payment (or annual, your choice) drew you in like a seaman to a siren.
Now we live in beautiful SoFlo, but we forgot about the Miccosukee and the legality of the Florida Powerball.
The irony is enough to make one mad, I tell you.
And god, this heat is just as bad.
Your eyes are still glistening and deep and your pockets are still shallow. We fight a lot. I tell you, “you have a problem”. You accuse me of “not being a supportive daughter”.
When I turned 18, you bought me a lotto quick pick.
I wanted to swallow it and spit the chewed-up numbers in your face.
18 35 56 07 20 08
You stopped using our birthdays.
And speaking of, yesterday was your birthday, old man! March baby with worn down horns that spiral inwards towards your flaring nostrils. Mami said you dropped one hundred and sixty dollars on power ball tickets last week.
For a prize over 60 million, you said it was a “minor investment!”
So yesterday, a blue, brisk, Syracuse spring afternoon, you rang.
“Can you do me a favor? For my birthday?”
I could almost hear the numbers clanging around in your head and chiming against your teeth. I could almost smell the smoke from that disgusting casino and almost feel the bumping of tires on gravel from our drives to California.
Oh, how those crazy snakes have you in their grip. You’re mad for money and money isn’t mad for you.
I walked down into the dank little convenient store, past the neon window signs and past the frat boys’ alcohol breath.
And for once I humored you. I slid my Florida-orange I.D across the grimy countertop and bought you a goddamn
Chance.
A lifeless dream on a receipt.
And on it, the block print text humored me,
“STRUGGLING WITH A GAMBLING ADDICTION? CALL NY’S HOPELINE”
How many times have you read those words? Or maybe you were blind to them. Hopeline…
I laughed a little to myself as I walked out the door back into the March-in-Syracuse-blue.
A boy looked up to the sound of my laugh.
Perhaps I have a hint of your madness.
Is it the act of dreaming or the dreams themselves that turn one mad? Are dreams that bear no fruit and cause pain for years and years still dreams or are they nightmares? Are there instances where hopes and despairs one and the same?
I stared at the numbers in my hand.
19 24 37 50 56 12…
This poem is a response to the March 2019 "Perceiver's Prompt:" March Madness.
"MADNESS!
Hey Perceivers! Happy March Madness! In all the craziness that this month brings, whether it be, sports-related, or more academic and personal-related, we challenge you to submit a short story, flash fiction, poem, art, photograph, or video around the theme of “March Madness.” The content of the story can be whatever you please: a briefly bizarre encounter, or a full-on crazy spring read for everyone to enjoy. Perhaps, give your audience an absolutely mad account of how the semester is going thus far, or life for that matter! We will be accepting works for the first three weeks of the month (3/1-3/25), and publishing the pieces all month long on the website. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!"