With a Little Luck: A Novel (7 page)

I walk into my dad’s apartment and am as immediately saddened by the décor as I always am whenever I visit. It’s not so much the décor as the lack of it. It’s the same “temporary” apartment he moved into when I was young and my mom and he split. Or at least he thought it was temporary, and so did I. Now, twenty-three years later … not so temporary. He has two TVs that are on almost all the time. They’re both old and look like he picked them up at a pawn shop. Which he probably did. He has a couch facing the TVs, a long coffee table in front of it, and a sad and dying plant in the corner. That’s it.

His bedroom consists of a tiny end table with chipped paint, a lamp that looks too small even for the tiny table, and a mattress on the ground. He takes “no frills” to new heights.

“There’s my Care Bear!” he says, as he pulls me into a hug, forcing me to snap out of my standard once-over and wince.

“Hi, Daddy,” I say, and hand him the white paper bag.

“What’s this?”

“Fruit,” I say. “It’s good for you.”

“Who’s the parent here?” he asks.

Excellent question
, I think, but I bite my tongue. “My bill had a split seven on it, so I needed to order something else,” I explain. “That became your fruit.”

“Say no more,” my dad says, nodding solemnly. He’s the one who taught me about the dangers of the split seven to begin with.

I yawn and look at his coffee table. He’s stacked bunches of torn
pieces of paper in curious piles, but I don’t want to invade his privacy, so I just avert my eyes and smile.

“So what’s going on, Pop? Why the need for a good-luck rub of the Buddha’s belly?”

“Berry’s belly,” he corrects with a smile. “Well, honey … there was a Hold ’Em tourney at the Bicycle Club in Bell Gardens.”

“Okay …”

“So I wanted in, but I was a little strapped. There were a bunch of donkeys at the table, you know, tourists, trust-fund types, easy pickings. I knew if I played tight, played smart, it was an easy score. Easy way to cash five hundred dollars. The buy-in was fifty dollars, but I didn’t have it, and nobody will stake me anymore—”

“Slow down,” I interrupt. “Maybe there’s a reason nobody will stake you anymore.”

You see, staking is when poker players lend one another buy-in money for a percentage of the player’s potential winnings. Sometimes your “generosity” turns into a very tidy profit. Sometimes you end up with nothing. So you’re not likely to continue staking a guy who’s been on a fairly steady losing streak.

“So nobody would stake me, so I borrowed the buy-in straight up. I knew I’d win it and pay it back. Then I’d clear four hundred fifty dollars.”

I remain silent. I’ve heard it too many times before. How Dad played every hand perfectly, but some donkey made a stupid call but caught the winning card. How if it wasn’t for these housewives and retirees and college kids coming in and making a mockery of the game, he would be rolling in cash.

“So, Dad, you’re out the fifty dollars. And you can’t get by without it.”

“Baby, I just needed to see your pretty face. My good-luck charm
so that when I get in a game tomorrow, I can win it back and pay this guy off.”

“Right. But you’ll have to borrow more money to play tomorrow.”

“Yes, but when I win it back, it won’t matter.”

And now you understand what I go through at least once a week. This is not a new dialogue. This conversation has played out so many times I could say it backward in three languages even though I don’t know three languages or have the ability to speak backward. Point is—it isn’t anything new.

It doesn’t even have anything to do with the money. It doesn’t matter if he wins or loses. For gamblers, it’s all about what they call “action.” It’s the excitement as the cards are coming out. It’s the rush before the dealer flips that card over. It’s addicting. Another way to think about it is this: Gamblers love winning more than they hate losing. And then when they do win, they get so excited they want to win more. So they keep playing. And lose what they won.

I, on the other hand, hate losing more than I love winning.

“Dad, I’ll give you the fifty dollars. You take the day off tomorrow.”

My dad bristles, as always. “No, honey … I can’t take your money.”

But he’ll also end up taking it, just as he does every single time. And I’m tired after having worked all night and then found out that the last guy I kissed is now dead. So I’d like some time to process this. And I tell my dad as much without the gory details.

“Dad, I’m tired. I need to go. I’m leaving you fifty dollars. Take the day off tomorrow and do something outside. Go for a walk. Take a book to the park and read. Or a magazine. Don’t go to the casinos, don’t stay here and play online poker.… Go out.”

And so he doesn’t have the opportunity to argue or keep me there any longer, I kiss him on the cheek and walk out without looking back.

I always feel a sense of relief when I’m home. I’m sure that’s how it is for most people, but my place is also a veritable potpourri of lucky charms. Although there are no leprechauns anywhere here. I loathe them. They’re fake and childish, and seem like they exist (or don’t) to mock everything I believe in.

I also hate even numbers. Anything even-numbered is never a good thing. If I have multiple anything I have three or seven. I don’t love five even though it’s odd, because it seems so “evenly” between one and ten. I have three rabbit’s feet, which are actually quite morbid when you think about it—we know they weren’t lucky for the particular rabbits they came from—but my dad gave each of them to me on different momentous occasions when I was little, and in addition to being superstitious I am also sentimental. And probably many other words that start with
s
and have four syllables. (Don’t go there: Psychotic is three syllables and starts with a
p.
)

Yes, I’m quirky. As much as I hate that word, it’s true. But, I hope, quirky in a good way. Not like, say, Jeffrey Dahmer quirky. I’m not like every other person, but I choose to believe it makes me unique … perhaps even charming. Regardless, I’m me. And I know I’m not like anyone else, for better or worse. So I have the three rabbit’s feet hanging by their little ball keychain–type thingies all in a row on my wall. I have an elephant with his trunk pointed toward my front door. The elephant is believed to be a good-luck animal in many countries, though there is a lot of debate about whether the lucky figures should have their trunks pointed up or down: Pointed down “dispenses” good luck, and pointed up
“stores” it. I haven’t had such great luck of late, so mine is pointed down. No need to store the luck I’ve had.

I also have a large brass horseshoe up on my front wall, a larger version of the rose-gold and pavé-diamond one that my dad gave me for my sixteenth birthday. I did stop wearing it briefly after Carrie wore hers on
Sex and the City;
the horseshoe necklace was my thing—kind of like my trademark, not to mention the sentimental value multiplied by what it stood for and the safety I felt in wearing it for added luck protection. Then one day there they were on the necks of impressionable young girls everywhere. So I took mine off. And promptly put it back on when I slipped and fell a day later just as I passed a cute guy at the post office. There was a slippery next-day mailer on the ground. Apparently. All I know is I went zooming past him right after we’d made eye contact and I’d smiled what I thought was a confident and welcoming smile. I took two more steps, and the tile floor came up and hit me in the chin. Back on went the necklace.

I also have a four-leaf clover in my wallet that’s supposed to bring money, but anyone who works in radio and isn’t Don Imus will tell you that if you’re in this business, you do it for the love of the job, or the music, or even the thrill—but definitely not for the money. So I’m hoping the money will arrive some other way, like via Lotto, aka the tax on people who are bad at math, although as I’ve already noted, I don’t play—so perhaps via some rich uncle I never knew I had who’s been watching me from afar and admires my scrappiness. An uncle who never had kids of his own and got into a fight with my mom or dad before I was even born, and they stopped speaking so I never even knew I had an uncle. I even asked my parents once if I had any aunts or uncles that I didn’t know about, living in Monaco, perhaps, and they looked at me like I was nuts. More nuts than usual. Anyway, why give up hope? I say.

Moose greets me at the door with his big brown eyes, and it’s the perfect antidote to the one-two punch of the dreadful go-kart news coupled with witnessing my father’s slightly less tragic but still death-by-a-thousand-cuts everyday existence. I take a look around my apartment and know that nothing “good-newsy” is going to happen between now and when I go to sleep. It’s just one of those days. So to take myself out of the funk, I throw on one of my favorite cover songs, Annie Lennox singing Neil Young’s “Don’t Let It Bring You Down.” Even though I’ve never quite understood it. Where are the castles, why are they burning, and why should a raging inferno be considered trivial? Still, I’m a sucker for a good cover song. Especially if I love the original and the artist does it justice. This one does just that, and it has a message that I need to hear.

My definition of urgent must be different from that of Bill, my station manager. I nearly break a sweat getting to the office twenty minutes early because I got two emails marked with those little red exclamation points and an “urgent” voicemail from him, yet for the life of me I can’t see the emergency.

“Are you ready?” Bill asks, when finally I walk into his office. He had been on a phone call, so our “urgent” meeting had been delayed ten minutes.

“I’m ready.…” I say, thinking,
This better be good. Raise, maybe?

“Good,” he says.

And that’s … that?

I sit there, blinking at him, waiting for his achingly urgent news that I apparently needed to be ready for, but he just goes back to shuffling some paper around his desk and then looks at his computer. I take him in as he basically ignores me even though he’s the one who called me in for this urgent meeting. He’s about five-eight, I guess. Not tall by any means, but not short. In between. My being five-seven makes me taller than him in most shoes. He has a mostly shaved head combined with a ridiculous comb-over, but you can tell from the would-be hairline that it wasn’t a first choice. His nose is a bit “puggish,” which is cute on a dog but less so on a station manager who is ignoring you.

Finally he looks up. “You can go.”

I sit there incredulous.
Is this a joke? Am I on
Candid Camera
? Did he not just ask me if I was ready for some urgent news and is he now excusing me before even delivering it?

I let out an involuntary guffaw, which causes him to look back up at me.

“Did you have a question?” he asks.

“Well … yes,” I say. “You wanted me here, I thought, for an urgent meeting? And then you asked me if I was ready … and then you didn’t tell me anything.”

“Because you said you were ready,” he says.

“Perhaps there was some miscommunication, then. What were you asking me if I was ready for?”

“The contest,” he says. “To announce the winner, hello?”

“Oh,” I say, and try my best not to look at him like he’s a complete idiot, while simultaneously wondering if I’m the idiot, all the while willing my head not to explode.

We’ve been running a contest with a few of our sister stations in different cities. One winner from each station will be flown to New York for the opening night of the Rolling Stones’ latest “comeback”
tour. Side note: How many times should we allow bands to do “farewell” tours and then “comeback” tours before we call bullshit on them? It’s really gotten out of hand.

Anyway, the contest is called “Ten from Ten to Ten,” and it’s really not that complicated to win—you just have to have no life, not sleep, and never leave your radio. It’s that simple. We’ve played eight Rolling Stones songs during the past twenty-one hours. I started us off last night at about ten p.m., and the station kept it going all day today. I’ll play two more songs between when my shift starts at seven and ten p.m. tonight, bringing us to a total of ten Stones songs. You can imagine how I feel having three even numbers thrust into my life in a significant way like this, but it’s offset by the fact that there are three “tens,” so I’m choosing to believe the odd number balances it out.

Our winner will get front-row tickets and backstage passes, and will participate in an after-show “meet and greet” with the band, winners from other radio stations, and a handful of DJs. I get to fly out to New York and warm up the crowd before the show. While public speaking is something I do daily on the radio, it’s something I never do in public. I wonder if I chose radio because I wanted to be heard more than seen. There will be cameras everywhere and an audience upward of twenty thousand people. To say I’m nervous about the appearance would be like saying that dropping a baby on its head isn’t recommended. I’m terrified. But I will rise to the occasion, and just to be on the safe side, I’ll ask Natalie for one of those Xanax pills she’s always taking when she’s stressed, or if she’s anxious, or if the sun rose that day.