Lucky Garj

               Garj was in love with her. Maybe. He’d only known her for two minutes. And did he really know her, or did he just know her face, admire her body, and adore her voice, which tickled him all over when she asked him if he wanted a refill? She was beautiful from head to toe. While he drank he observed her from across the restaurant. She smiled when she talked to other people. She didn’t smile when she talked to him, which he took to be a sign she was into him. Probably too nervous to smile, just like him.

               By the end of the night his lovelust was overpowering his senses. It’s impossible, he thought. She’s too much. Besides, what’s so special about her? She’s just like everyone else on the inside. She goes home and poops just like me, just like my mom, just like my dad. Maybe when she gets off tonight she’ll go home and have diarrhea, real messy and wet and painful and hot, all over the toilet. Maybe she won’t make it to the toilet and she’ll soil those tight pants and her sexy underwear and it’ll drip down her legs, into her shoes. She was wearing black leather shoes. He stared at them from afar while she took another table’s order. She was smiling.

               He paid his check and left.

               The sidewalk to the bus stop was a checkerboard of cement tiles, and he made sure to space his steps so that his toes landed right on the lines. With each step his long legs swung into his view, and he admired his slacks. But pants don’t matter. His shirt was right today. The right shirt on the right day. It was Thursday, the day of solid colors and long sleeves. This is why the server was into him. The right shirt on the right day makes things right. The bus would arrive in eight minutes, so he stopped in a convenience store to buy a scratch-off lottery ticket. Twenty one scratch-off lottery tickets. After all, it was Thursday and he was wearing the right shirt.

               Stepping out into the mild air he scratched the tickets in a flurry of fury with his lucky penny, a shower of silver dust falling from his hands. One ticket down, not a winner. Two tickets down, not a winner. Five minutes until the bus arrived. Three tickets down, oh fine, a secret code to enter online. Four tickets down, won another ticket! Great. Five tickets down, not a winner. With one minute until the bus would arrive he ran into the store to claim his free ticket. He scratched it immediately. Not a winner. Mother of shit.

               The bus arrived and he climbed on, found a seat next to a small person with a hat and sunglasses, and sat down despite it not being a particularly lucky seat. He knew all the right seats, and this wasn’t one. He scratched his remaining sixteen tickets on the ride home, and the small person beside him asked him if he was a winner for every ticket he scratched. They talked about money and jobs and romance. And speaking of romance, he told the small person he had just met a girl, the girl at the restaurant who never smiled at him, and said that he felt something awfully powerful for her. Only time would tell, though. The small person laughed and nodded a knowing nod, and told Garj about his or her own deceased spouse. Garj didn’t know if the small person was a man or a woman or something other, but their brief connection didn’t depend on that. The deceased spouse, said the small person, was a real looker, a real charm basket, and a real good cooker.  His or her wisdom exceeded his or her years, and the small person told Garj about the time his or her husband or wife was a server in a restaurant. Oh, but Garj’s stop had come and it was time to go. “Goodbye,” Garj said to the small person. He stepped off the bus with his pockets full of losing tickets, and continued to scratch them as he walked home.

               When you get an unlucky seat on the bus unusual things happen and you get distracted from the important things. This was his only thought as Garj walked home under apricot colored streetlight. Another losing ticket. Another free ticket. Another loser. Another. Another secret code. Six dollars off a tank of gas. Tank of gas? Garj didn’t drive. This is the city. No one drives. What a useless ticket. He threw it in the street. Fifteen dollars. Oh, good one. He pocketed that one. There were no tickets left. Maybe twenty one wasn’t as lucky a number as he had thought. No, that wasn’t it. His trial and error studies and careful observations proved twenty one was a lucky number for Thursday. The problem was the seat on the bus. He should have known. If you’re going to take a bad seat, don’t scratch your tickets until you get home. But it was too late now.

               The stairs were endless up to  his apartment on the ninth floor. The elevator worked, but the stairs had proven to be a lucky path for Garj years ago when he first moved in.  He met a girl in the elevator his first week in the apartment, and she turned out to have a boyfriend. What a terrible thing. Then he met another girl some months later and she was rotten inside, unleashing a whole series of unlucky events in Garj’s life when they started dating. A year later, Garj stubbed his toe on the elevator door when he was wearing only socks. That was his last day to use the elevator. What relationship any of the things in Garj’s life had to do with the feeble, minor choices he made every minute is unclear. To Garj, though, it is perfectly clear. Everything matters, everything is related. Every step, every breath, every action, every piece of clothing worn, every path taken, every word uttered, every item bought, every drink drank, every edible eaten, it all had some entanglement with the unseen fields permeating reality and affecting outcomes in his life. Garj spent a good amount of time studying the indirect relationships between every choice and every outcome, amassing a huge system of inputs and outputs and patterns like a neural network of cause and effect. The number of variables were endless, but Garj made a careful study of which variables affected which aspects of his life, which tiny things could affect other tiny things, and to what extent it all weighed on the end result. Superstition washed over him like a whale’s tongue.

               Breathlessly he came to the ninth floor and went home to sleep.

               Garj never went to lunch with his coworkers on Friday because that was the right time for online gambling. Tedwick and Rodard and Handry stopped asking him to lunch on Fridays, didn’t even bother to stop by his cubicle anymore. They knew he’d be glued to his computer, clicking everything at just the right moment, his lucky sparklefish bracelet dangling from his left wrist, his Friday-appropriate plaid worker’s vest framing his torso, his mom’s family heirloom hanging around his neck, both feet planted flat under the desk. If you interrupted Garj at the wrong time he’d throw thunder and hell at your ears for fucking up his perfect game, his sure-thing victory.

               “Oops. You can just do what you were about to do,” Tedwick had once said, “just do it now, like I never said anything. Sorry to interrupt.”

               “That’s not how it WORKS, TEDWICK,” Garj had said, having missed his click by mere seconds. “Step away. STEP AWAY. I need this space. Get out of the cubicle, you’re changing the air. I need things right. Get away. The air’s all wrong, fucking housecunt.”

               Handry had encountered a similar dose of vitriol when interrupting Garj’s Friday lunch gambling to ask if he would like anything from the ol’ Cornerhouse Pub and Bistro.

               “STOP, STOP, STOP,” was Garj’s answer. “Stop cunting up my shit. I’d love it if you’d…” but he trailed off as he lost himself again in the flashing world of online gambling. The wrong click, the wrong word, the wrong moment, the wrong blink of the eyes would set Garj’s pachinko game against him. The only skill in gambling, Garj often said, is merely to get things to line up in your court so you can set the winds of victory in motion. So frequently did his winds of victory not avail, and so frequently did his idea of perfect luck work not as planned that he knew outside forces were ruining his aura of fortune. Those outside forces were Tedwick, Rodard, and Handry.

               This Friday Garj did his usual thing. It was 12:10. Time to start gambling. But as he stared at the glow of his monitor a voice that tickled his whole body came from across the office. That voice, that tickling, dancing, sing-song voice of a maiden out of his dreams… he knew it well. Breaking the aura of fortune, he peeked out of his cubicle and saw the server from the restaurant down the hall, smiling and speaking to Sabia, the blind girl down the way who had interesting body smells.

               He gambled for a minute and lost. Everything was off. He looked down the hall and she was still there, talking and smiling at Sabia.

               This whole ordeal was throwing everything off. Good fortune does not come to those who welcome disorder into their lives. But the allure of that ravishing beauty made his muscles tight. If he left the cubicle he’d throw off the entire order of right things required to give him the luck needed to win. But if he passed a chance to engage the illustrious girl with his charms, the girl he was sure was into him on account of her not smiling at him, he would regret it through the whole weekend. What a dilemma. He kicked his chair aside and marched down the hall.

               “Hello, Sabia, have there been any calls from my clients?”

               “Hi Garj!” said the girl, staring at nothing. “I’m afraid not. That one client, the man who sounds like an engine starting up, he’s the last one who’s called.”

               “Unbelievable,” said Garj. The girl from the restaurant looked at him.

               “Are you…” she started.

               “Yes,” said Garj, bowing. “That was me.”

               She looked perplexed and cocked an eyebrow. It was good Sabia couldn’t see anything because there was a visible cloud of failure floating over Garj’s head.

               “Oh,” said the girl. “Yeah, in Hudd Buckets. Yesterday. I remember. I was going to ask if you’re the manager of this office.”

               “I am not.”

               “She’s here to file a complaint,” said Sabia, sort of looking in Garj’s direction, but also looking in no particular direction.

               “Music to my ears,” he said. “A complaint about what?”

               As the girl’s lips and the rest of her mouth sang a song of disgruntled words, Garj tuned out and heard only, “La-de-da, Oh-la-la-la, Do-ba-doo, Boom-ba-la, ooh-ooh-oooh, dooo do-do-do.” And he examined his shirt and his vest. Lucky Friday’s vest. This entire interaction would turn out well.

               “Let me show you  to the manager,” said Garj, extending a hand, and placing another one on the girl’s shoulder. Already he was about to pass out.

               “The pie was very good,” he said, as they walked to the manager’s office. “Yesterday’s pie.”

               “I hear that a lot,” she said. “I’ve never had it.”

               “You’re kidding. Let’s go straight over there after you talk to my boss. For lunch. I’ll buy you a pie.”

               Oh Garj, you stupid fool. He only said stupid things, and the longer he talked, the stupider his words became. This carried on until they made it to the manager’s office. The girl entered and Garj waited by the door, rejected and uncertain. But the shirt, the vest, his morning routine, everything was right. He’d done everything right. Things should work out well. Good luck was on his side. He put his ear to the door for a minute to listen, then backed away and touched a plant, caressed the wall, glanced at the fluorescent light in the ceiling. The aura of fortune was off. Online gambling would be waiting for him when he got back to his cubicle, but its machinations wouldn’t be in synch with his pulsing waves of luck. It was better to just leave it for now and focus on the girl tossing everything into disarray.

               When she came out of the manager’s office the first thing Garj noticed was her black leather shoes, which didn’t look stained by diarrhea. Then he noticed the rest of her and he felt good. But before he could ask her to lunch the manager walked out and took the girl by the arm and walked with her, far away from Garj. He went back to his cubicle and gambled for the rest of the lunch hour.

               After work he stopped by a convenience store, not the one from Thursday night, but a convenience store found to have perfect synergy with Friday. He waited for his watch to strike 5:11 before entering. Perfect timing. Walking only on the green tiles and going out of his way to pass through the 2 liter soda aisle, he approached the attendant.

               “Hi Garj,” said Bulba, the large woman in charge of the place. She looked at the clock on the far wall. “I already pulled your tickets.” She slid eleven tickets across the countertop toward Garj.

               He shook his head. “Mmm. No, I can’t take these. I have to see them pulled myself. It doesn’t work like that.”

               Bulba frowned. “Just pulled ‘em like five minutes ago. I can’t sell them to anyone else, they ain’t gonna want these.”

               “I don’t want these, either.”

               “Fine. Eleven tickets, then?”

               “Yes.”

               Bulba pulled eleven more tickets and handed them to Garj, who handed her sixty six dollars and took the tickets outside, being sure to only step on the green tiles on the way out.

               He scratched them with his lucky penny, which he kissed before each card.

               The ancients played these games, Garj reflected as he scratched. He had once gone to the History of Gambling Museum in the city of Yorn, and saw all kinds of marvelous displays of two thousand year old lottery tickets from China, four hundred year old tickets from England, and he saw walls of numbers etched by careful players, and even golden pots and bars that were awarded in bygone eras to bygone winners. How arbitrary it all seemed at the time. They were all dead, but their treasures lived on, their lottery tickets nothing but eternal antiques for museum displays. When Garj imagined himself as a distant relic of ancient gambling, and he pictured his laptop sitting in some future museum, perpetually one click away from the roll of the dice or the pull of the lever, he felt a little sad. But the adrenaline rush of the game kept him focused.

               All tickets scratched. A free ticket on one of them. He went back inside and exchanged it for another. A secret code to enter online. And he recalled the two secret codes he’d won the previous day. Maybe there was luck still to come.

               At home he sat down with his three secret codes and typed them into the lottery’s website to find his prizes. The first code returned a prize of fifty dollars. Exquisite. The second code returned a prize of forty dollars. Alright. The third code returned a prize of nine hundred thousand dollars. He called everyone he knew and got blackout drunk on expensive scotch that night, fading hard into the weekend.

               Monday morning he went in to work without his lucky Monday socks and followed only half of his daily rules and routines for maintaining an aura of fortune.

               “I’m rich, Sabia,” he said, walking past the reception desk.

               “Great to hear!” said Sabia.

               It would be a week before Garj received the check from the lottery commission, and after taxes he would only have five or six hundred thousand dollars, but that was still a lot of dollars. Fifteen years of his salary straight to his pocket. Beaming with a new confidence and a stronger affirmation of his superstitious lifestyle Garj went down the block to Hudd Buckets for lunch, where that lovely girl worked.  He would whisk her away with a tantalizing bag of gold.

               But she wasn’t working. He wasted his time and money on a carrot casserole with a bad server who was slow and who had a bad attitude.

               Through the week he didn’t bother with the lottery or with online gambling, but he did spend Wednesday night at the slots throwing his quarters away into the jingling jackpot that never came. The thrill of the lever and the anticipation of the reels, the mesmerizing spinning reels that teased his eyes, stole his time and his soul long into the night, captured him and held him in his safe space. The fake wood panels of the small Casino Lapurjio were Garj’s Wednesday night home. The whole place reminded him of his grandparents’ house, even the smell  of age old smoke in the carpet and the walls and the chairs was there to take him back to old days. His butt was always numb by the end of the night. Tonight was the same. The one-armed bandit left him with eight dollars, and he had entered with more than fifty. No worries. He had hundreds of thousands coming to him. To think of how many nights could be spent gambling with that money was a happy dream to Garj. He went home to his bed. This bed, and this apartment, and this kitchen, this refrigerator, this couch, all of this, he suspected, would change. It would all be better with new money. And there would still be gambling.

               Thursday. This would be his day. He wore the right shirt, solid color and long sleeves. He went to work, he worked, he did his job, and he went home and took a bath. Then he went to Hudd Buckets and had the beautiful server from last week.

               They struck up a conversation.

               “What was your complaint at the office the other day?”

               “Oh, that? Just a thing about my account.”

               “You have an account with us?”

               “Had an account.”

               “I’m sorry.”

               “Can I get you anything else?”

               “How about I buy you a pie? That pie we talked about.”

               She laughed, because she didn’t remember talking about any pie. The importance Garj had imparted on that conversation last week was quite a bit larger than the importance she had placed on it, which was next to nothing. She refilled his water.

               “I mean it. I’ll buy you a pie. But maybe you get things free, here.”

               “I do. But thank you.” She walked away.

               It hit Garj that she was probably seeing his boss. He could almost hear her voice whispering into his ear, he could almost see her bending over beside him, could almost feel her lips wet against his ear, her hot breath saying, “Give up. I’m fucking your boss, buddy.”

               He paid his check and left. He stopped by the convenience store and bought twenty-one lottery tickets. He scratched them with his lucky penny while he waited for the bus. In all twenty one tickets there was not a single winner. Not a single secret code or a single tiny victory of free gas or a free soda. This is what he got for not sticking to his perfect routine through the day. The bus arrived and he climbed on.

               The same small person with a hat and sunglasses from last week was sitting in the same seat, and the same empty seat next to him or her was the only one available. Garj sat down without saying anything. The small person coughed, turned his or her head to Garj, and said, “As I was saying. My tender-love was a server in a restaurant, too. Oh my goodness, what a strong sense of empathy and devotion! I guess it came from working with people all day, you see, being in the closeness of other good souls all the time.”

               His or her voice was like an acorn rattling around in a lunchbox. Garj didn’t care for it, but he sat and listened without saying anything. He could tell the conversation would be a monologue despite his best efforts.

               “Hammu, that’s my late love’s name, by the by. And Hammu used to come home to me, hold my face, kiss my cheeks, rub my nose, hands all over my back, and tell me about the people, the customers. So many of them, you see, were just people. By that I don't mean the best people, the most thoughtful or sensitive, never aware they were dealing with a human being, not a robot to serve them. But they were people, still, all the same, you see. And Hammu loved them anyway. And every day was different, was a day of transformation from simple to complex, but the complexity piqued Hammu’s senses.”

               Garj looked at his lottery tickets while the small person talked. Not a single winner. He used his fingernail to scratch away any extra sliver concealer in case he might have missed something. Still nothing.

               The small person’s hands were clasped tightly in front of his or her face, and tears streamed down from under the sunglasses. Garj pretended he didn’t notice.

               “Oh, Hammu! Such a heart.” And the small person bowed his or her head and was quiet for the rest of the ride. Garj checked his tickets again to make sure they weren’t winners. They still weren’t.

               The next week Garj received his payment of five hundred eighty five thousand dollars. He took the week after that off work and went to Las Vegas where he could gamble like someone who meant it. The nights were dark and bright at the same time, filled with loud games and heavy drinks  and smoke and satisfaction in every direction. He stumbled across sidewalks and roads and alleys until the early hours of morning, sometimes ending up back in his hotel room, sometimes sleeping in a stripper’s car, sometimes sleeping with trash in a vacant lot not far from the main strip.

               He lived still with scrupulous attention to superstitious detail even in Las Vegas. A  new environment could not throw him off his game. He invented new rituals that needed to be followed, discovered workable paths to take from casino to casino, and observed lucky charms within the hotels and restaurants that would grant him balance and peace in the infinitely permeating invisible fields of fortune. He was a fish back in water. A trout back in the river where he belonged.

               He was back at work the following Monday. His hangover never seemed to go away.

               “Slam any sweet meat?” came a voice from behind Garj. He spun around to see a grinning Tedwick bouncing his eyebrows up and down. “Getcherself a luck fuck?”

               “Might have, but I don’t remember,” said Garj. “Won some money, though.”

               “Great! What kind of jackpot?”

               “Oh, no jackpots. Just some blackjack, a few slots.”

               “Speakin’ of slots! How’re the broads in Vegas? Haven’t been since I was eleven, but my memory says they got the best broads in the country.”

               “They’re fine. A lot of pretty ones with smooth bodies, but…”

               “You know I don’t go in for that kinda thing, Garj. I like my women short and stumpy. Dykey broads with short hair and baggy pants.”

               “I know Ted. That’s why I don’t think you’ll like Vegas. These girls are thin and they have good posture with sizable assets and long hair. Not your cup of teabags.”

               Tedwick was nodding. “Yeah, yeah. But the money was good? You won?”

               “It was.”

               “Good, good. Glad to hear it. Come get me if your hangover goes away and you remember any of the sex you had.”

               Garj said he would do that, and Tedwick went back to his cubicle with pictures of large, manly women stuck to the walls.

               When lunch rolled around Rodard and Handry came by Garj’s desk to ask if he wanted to go to The Smeared Cream for a bite to eat. They wanted to hear all about Las Vegas. He obliged and they went to Garj’s least favorite restaurant where they talked about gambling and magic shows. Through the course of their lunch the noise over by the bar was getting rather loud, and Rodard and Handry looked to see what the commotion was about, wanting to be part of the excitement themselves. Wishing to get his mind back on the orderly structure of his life, Garj offered to go see what all the fuss was about, to get away from the conversation.

               He walked to the bar area and saw his boss laughing, red in the face, like his tie was choking him. His arm was around a girl--the server from Hudd Buckets. They kissed sloppy French kisses on the lips, food coming out of their mouths, and their drinks overflowing with foam. How about that, Garj? You were right. She is fucking your boss. It struck Garj right in the chest. But before he let himself feel any worse, he remembered his lottery winnings. And he remembered that he had just won an additional half million in Vegas the week before. Things didn’t matter anymore. He had money, and he had structure, method, and luck. He returned to his table and told Rodard and Handry their boss was at the bar. They stopped having fun and quietly finished their lunches. Garj looked at his watch because he couldn’t wait to go back to the office to tell Tedwick about all the sex he'd had in Las Vegas.

The End