Lucky Bastard

by S. G. Browne

  Baldy doesn’t reappear. I think about waiting him out or going inside, but it’s pushing half past time-to-go and I can’t risk missing my ten o’clock appointment and losing a sale. So I grab a cab and ask the driver to take me to my crappy little apartment in the Marina.

  “I didn’t know they had crappy apartments in the Marina,” he says.

  “I’m lucky,” I say. “I got the last one.”

  “What’s the address?”

  I live in a studio on the third floor of a four-story building on Lombard Street, next to a dry cleaner’s, across from a transient motel, and just this side of dilapidated. Not my first choice for living accommodations, but sometimes you take what you can get. Or go where your mistakes take you.

  I remind myself that it’s only temporary. That someday I’ll get back into a top-floor apartment or a flat in a well-maintained building with quiet neighbors and double-paned windows and an entryway that doesn’t smell like urine. Until then, I’ll just have to deal with the consequences of my hubris.

  The cab drops me off in front of my apartment building, where a homeless guy sits camped out in front with a mostly empty donation cup and a black cat.

  Black cats were historically associated with witches and thus imbued with the evil of the underworld, which is why today you have people who think it’s bad luck to have a black cat cross your path. Nothing creates luck, good or bad. It just exists. Yet most people go around believing they can somehow manipulate it to their advantage.

  Even poachers can’t manipulate luck. We’re more like conduits or brokers, transferring luck from owners to buyers. However, we don’t just capitalize on situations to suit our needs, but often create the circumstances that compel others to seek us out.

  The stock market crashes of 1929 and 1987 didn’t happen all on their own. Neither did the dot-com crash, the Enron scandal, or the mortgage-lending crisis. Not that we orchestrated these events, but we helped to precipitate them. When you poach luck from enough people and sell it to others, sometimes things like this are bound to happen.

  Grandpa even told me stories about how luck poachers were responsible for some of the most famous downfalls and deaths in history.

  Marie Antoinette. Adolf Hitler. Richard II.

  Abraham Lincoln. Al Capone. George Armstrong Custer.

  Just to name a few.

  And who’s to say there weren’t luck poachers two thousand years ago in Jerusalem? Maybe Jesus ended up dying for our sins because he shook the wrong hand.

  I run upstairs, past the peeling hallway walls and the stained carpeting and the tenant who plays his music so loud it thumps through my floor, and I open my refrigerator, which contains eggs, bacon, juice, bread, condiments, and more than half a dozen Odwalla bottles—five of them of the lemonade variety, three Super Protein, and all of them on the plus side of half-full. All of my Vanilla Protein Monster bottles are clean and empty, sitting on a shelf in my cabinet, waiting for product.

  They’ve been empty for three years.

  While good luck doesn’t go bad if not ingested right away and doesn’t have a shelf life, it tends to keep better when refrigerated or stored in a cool, dry place.

  I use the Super Protein bottles to store medium-grade good luck, which has the consistency of 2 percent milk, while the Lemonade bottles hold the low-grade stuff, which, conveniently, looks like lemonade. There’s not as much demand for low-grade good luck, though you can usually sell it to a junkie, who’ll overpay for a fix.

  The empty Protein Monster bottles in my cabinet would hold top-grade good luck if I could ever get my hands on some.

  Not every poacher uses Odwalla bottles to store and sell his or her product, but it’s less expensive than buying sport water bottles and the word association helps me to keep the grades straight. Plus it makes for easy drop-offs. You leave the bottle on the table after you get your payment and the buyer walks out with a bottle of Odwalla. No one notices a thing.

  While good luck can be injected into the bloodstream, which has a much more immediate effect, it can also be combined with mixers to make lucky cocktails, or substituted for milk to make lucky brownies. The preferred choice of ingestion, however, is drinking it in its pure form. Though if most people knew where their luck actually came from, they might choose another form of consumption.

  He pissed it all away isn’t just an anecdotal expression. If you haven’t processed poached luck out of your system before you have to take a leak, then all of that potential income is going to end up in a toilet bowl or on a bush or running down your leg. Though technically, you can’t piss it all away. The human body is nearly 70 percent water, so some residual luck stays behind. And those who are born with luck never lose it through urination or perspiration or any other kind of ay-tion. It stays in the system until a poacher like me comes along.

  Those of us who aren’t born with it have to settle for the shadows of other people’s good fortunes.

  While poaching luck is almost as easy as catching a cold, processing it into a consumable form is a little more involved. For my customers to use the luck I’ve poached, it has to be extracted and processed from my bladder using a catheter connected to a series of tubes that run through a portable centrifuge, where the luck is separated from the urine and deposited through one of the tubes into a plastic container.

  It’s kind of like donating blood platelets, only without the movie or the free cookies or the American Red Cross T-shirt.

  Not the most pleasant or sanitary way to extract luck, but it cuts down on the volume loss that can occur when using other, less-efficient processes. Up until the 1960s, poachers collected urine in a glass flask with a rubber stopper and condensation tube, then placed the flask over a Bunsen burner and let the urine and water boil off, leaving the luck residue behind. Trouble was, some of the luck always got lost in the evaporation. Then there were the adverse effects from the heat or flame. Burned luck doesn’t hold its market value. And it tastes horrible.

  Might as well just drink the urine straight.

  I grab a bottle of Odwalla Super Protein, a little more than half full of a white liquid that can pass for the real thing, and I put the bottle in my leather backpack. I’m almost out the door when I stop and go back to the refrigerator and grab a bottle of lemonade, which I give to the homeless guy on my way out.

  While admittedly not an altruistic gesture, that doesn’t make it any less sincere.

  “What’s this?” he says with a complete lack of gratitude.

  “It’s good luck.”

  “Good luck?” He holds it up and turns it back and forth. “It’s not even full.”

  Some people just don’t know how to show their appreciation.

  “Here.” I throw him a five-dollar bill. “Put a shot of tequila in it. It’ll taste like a margarita.”

  Then I make my way up Lombard to the Starbucks on Union and Laguna for my ten o’clock delivery.

  Starbucks is an ideal place for making drop-offs. It’s out in the open where no one expects it. No one’s looking around to see what anyone else is doing. People are too busy reading the paper or surfing the Internet or playing with their iPhones to care. Sometimes I think you could be masturbating while waiting in line and no one would notice.

  The cute brunette with a Celtic-knot tattoo on the inside of her left wrist who takes my order looks like she just passed legal when she got out of bed this morning. I’m a sucker for brunettes. So despite that I know nothing good is likely to come of it, I chat her up to feed my ego.

  “I like your tattoo,” I say.

  “Thanks,” she says, without a smile.

  “No beginnings or endings. Timeless nature of the spirit. Infinite cycles of birth and rebirth. Or is it just for good luck?”

  She glances at her wrist and looks up at me with a little more interest than before. “Most guys don’t know about all that stuff.”

  I just smile and thank her for taking my order, then I claim a chair and wait for my cappuccin
o, catching the barista glancing over at me every so often.

  In addition to my morning routine, I’ve developed some repetitive consumptive behaviors that, while not destructive, are a definite by-product of my lifestyle.

  Cappuccinos. Apple fritters. Lucky Charms.

  Mochas. Mentos. Corporate-coffeehouse baristas.

  Just to name a few.

  Some might look at my behaviors and call them addictions. Fixations. Arrested development.

  I prefer to think of them as endearing eccentricities.

  I look around Starbucks, checking to see if my ten o’clock is here, looking for furtive glances or a knowing nod or an index finger brushing across the nose à la Paul Newman and Robert Redford in The Sting. But no one looks my way other than the cute barista and an attractive Asian woman in a red coat talking on her cell phone as she walks out the front door. I’m hoping my buyer actually shows. If things don’t pick up soon, I might have to start poaching door-to-door and selling my product at a discount.

  “Grande cappuccino!”

  When I walk up to the counter, the barista who took my order hands me my drink. “It’s for no beginnings or endings,” she says, displaying her wrist like an offering. “The timeless nature of the spirit, like you said. I don’t believe in good luck.”

  “That’s too bad,” I say, taking my cappuccino. “Because I was kind of looking forward to testing out mine.”

  I give her a smile, then I walk back to my table and sit down and wait for my appointment, trying not to look desperate.

  My life used to be a lot easier. Poaching luck provided an ultimate lifestyle of freedom and wealth and endless opportunities. I had everything I ever wanted and more. But that’s the problem with feeling like you’re on top of the world. Eventually, you begin to think you own it.

  Three years ago in Tucson, I was contacted by a woman for a contract job. Not for a particular mark, but for a specific type of luck. Something I’d never poached before. A job I shouldn’t have taken. But the amount of money she was offering was too good to pass up.

  For people who are born with it, bad luck isn’t toxic. It’s just something they live with, something their systems have acclimated to. But for poachers and people who aren’t born with it, bad luck is like a virus that grows exponentially the longer it stays in your system. Though Grandpa used to tell me stories about poachers who only trafficked in bad luck. Specters, he called them. I can’t imagine what it would be like to steal bad luck for a living. Once was bad enough.

  I’d poached long enough to have a constant dose of low-grade good luck running through me for most of my first thirty years, but when you steal bad luck, it stays in your system, too. And bad luck, whatever the quality, pretty much cancels out anything but pure, soft, high-grade good luck. Which isn’t easy to find when you really need it.

  I learned that lesson the hard way.

  But when someone hands you a bag full of money that amounts to more than you made poaching the previous two years combined, you figure you’re young and strong enough to handle it. Of course, it doesn’t enter your mind that all that money might get lost or stolen or fall into a black hole. I still don’t know what happened to it. The next day, the money just wasn’t there.

  Bad luck has a way of making you realize your full potential for stupidity.

  By the time I finish my grande cappuccino, my ten o’clock still hasn’t shown up. I check my voice mail and my text messages but there’s nothing. As far as I can tell, no one other than the cute brunette barista has been checking me out and I haven’t noticed anyone suspicious hanging around outside. If this was a setup then somebody didn’t get the memo. Which means I’m dealing with another customer who got cold feet. Just my luck. At least I’ve got the ten grand from Tuesday, which should help to cover my expenses for a few months.

  Before I leave, the barista with the Celtic-knot tattoo comes over to my table and gives me her phone number on a napkin.

  “I’m free for dinner,” she says, then bites her lower lip in that seductive way only women can get away with. Kind of like grooving to music at a bar. When a woman does it, it’s alluring. Appealing. Acceptable. When a guy does it, it’s like watching the end of cool as we know it.

  When the barista turns and walks away, she glances back over her shoulder and gives me a seductive smile. An unspoken promise of secret treasures to be found. But at the moment, I’m not channeling my inner pirate.

  For some reason, the bad luck I poached three years ago has left me with some sort of vibe or pheromone that attracts female baristas from corporate-coffeehouse chains. Which you wouldn’t think is a bad thing. Not only do I have all of these young, cute, sexy baristas coming on to me every time I go into a Starbucks or a Peet’s, but I have a world of free cappuccinos and mochas at my veritable fingertips. Free sex and all-you-can-drink espresso beverages. And with more than seven dozen Starbucks and Peet’s combined in San Francisco and several baristas at each location offering up their phone numbers and their sexual charms, who could ask for more?

  Except every barista I’ve slept with, from the Peet’s in West Portal to the Starbucks at Ghirardelli Square, wants something serious while I just want to have some fun.

  I prefer short-term relationships. Ideally, relationships that last one night. That way, you never have to worry about developing feelings for the woman or seeing her go to the bathroom while you brush your teeth.

  Even nearly halfway through my thirties, I still avoid emotional intimacy.

  Call it an occupational hazard.

  To be honest, the main reason I avoid relationships is because no normal woman would understand what I do. Who I am. She’d try to change me. Or else end up leaving me. So I just save them the trouble by leaving first.

  I never was good at making commitments.

  More than once, things have started to get complicated and I’ve had to make a list of Starbucks and Peet’s that I can’t patronize anymore. I even swore off baristas after the fiasco at the Peet’s on Fillmore, but some habits are harder to break than others.

  I watch the brunette with the Celtic-knot tattoo return to her post behind the counter, where she continues to glance my way, then I pocket the napkin she gave me without any intention of calling the number on it. But when it comes to baristas, my intentions are about as dependable as an incontinent bladder.

  On my way out the door, I bump into Mandy.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey,” she says back.

  We stand there, me half leaving and her half coming, the two of us half blocking the entrance to Starbucks, half staring at each other, neither of us saying anything.

  I never was good with awkward moments.

  I watch her face, waiting for her to say something, to give me a cue to play off of. But she just looks at me with that expression of disapproval, as if I’m perpetually disappointing her.

  “How are the girls?” I finally ask.

  “They have names, you know.”

  “Right.” I never was good with names. “So how are they?”

  “Fine. You missed their birthdays again.”

  I never was good with birthdays, either. Or anniversaries. Or holidays. I even forgot it was Christmas one year.

  We stand and stare some more without making eye contact. It’s not easy to do, but we’ve had lots of time to practice.

  “And your husband,” I say. “What’s his name?”

  “Ted. His name is Ted. And he’s fine. We’re all fine.”

  I just nod, trying to ignore the rising color in Mandy’s cheeks, wondering if she’s going to ask how I’m doing. If I’m still poaching. Though it’s more likely she’d rather not know.

  “You still up to your old tricks?” she asks.

  “A little here and there.”

  Mandy nods, her lips pursed. I can tell by her expression that she wants to ask me if I’m ever going to grow up, but she won’t. Not here. Not in public.

  Mandy never did like to mak
e a scene.

  Several customers come and go, squeezing past us as we continue to half block the entrance.

  “I should be going,” she says.

  “Sure. It was good to see you.”

  She doesn’t reciprocate and we don’t hug. Instead, I just step to the side and let her walk past me into Starbucks. Unlike the barista, she doesn’t look back as the door closes shut behind her.

  With a container of medium-grade good luck and ten thousand dollars in my backpack, I figure it’s a good idea for me to leave the money someplace safe before I head back downtown to my office. While my apartment isn’t necessarily the safest place, considering I live across from a motel for ex-cons and drug addicts, it’s closer than my office and more practical than the bank.

  Before heading straight to my place, I walk up Laguna to the Green Street Market to pick up a roll of Mentos. There are other markets and corner stores that I could hit up on my way home, but I’ve been going to the Green Street Market ever since I happened upon it more than two years ago. And like my Lucky Charms and my Starbucks cappuccinos, I’m a creature of habit.

  When I walk into the store, an older guy in a suit is down at the end of the counter, talking on his cell phone. Sam, the proprietor, is standing behind the counter wearing a black, short-sleeve silk shirt and an unfamiliar expression. His smile seems strained, his eyes unnaturally fixed on me, like he’s trying not to look anywhere else. Even though the weather is typical San Francisco summer foggy, Sam’s suntanned chrome dome is shiny with perspiration.

  “’Morning, Sam,” I say.

  At first Sam doesn’t say anything. Just keeps staring at me with that odd expression, like he knows me but he’s pretending not to. Then he says, with too much formality, “Good morning.”