Chapter One: Breakfast at “Lucky
Leoung’s”
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Trust me, I’ve heard all of the reasons why you should never buy a lottery ticket. It’s a tax on people bad at math. You have essentially the same odds of winning a big jackpot whether you buy a ticket or you don’t. And to tell you the truth, up until that day at Mr. Leoung’s market on Beale Street in downtown San Francisco, I had almost never bought one.
Mr. Leoung and I
share quality time just about every work day.
Rain or shine, I ring the bell dangling from the top of his front door
as I slide into the store at about 7:45 a.m., fill myself a jumbo cup of his
secret blend of coffee, select a doughnut from his not particularly generous
selection, and make my way to the counter where we have our usual argument over
whether the Giants are a better team than the A’s. This usually consists of him describing how
many more games the Giants have won so far this year than my Athletics while I
respond with a comparison of West Coast World Series titles won, 4-0 A’s. At that point, Mr. Leoung’s narrow shoulders
shrug under his red windbreaker, he takes my money, sounds the chime on the
cash register and moments later the bell rings again as we exchange smiles and I
head out the door.
On that brilliant October day, you
could barely hear the bell as I entered the market over the hubbub of voices inside. I pushed my way past a group of Asian women
in their mid-50’s to get to the coffee machine.
It took a little more polite elbowing to get through another gaggle of
strangers to reach the doughnut box, that day offering even less of a selection
than usual. Fritters are my favorites followed by caked doughnuts with
icing. Bear claws I can tolerate and
doughnut holes are a scam on the buying public.
Fortunately, there was one bear claw, slightly mangled, pushed against
the back of the doughnut box. Maybe
today still held out a glimmer of hope.
That’s when I noticed the line to the counter. It stretched past the potato chip display, around the condiment shelves, under the beer banners, and ended all the way in the back of the store in front of the case containing the largest selection you’ve ever seen of “It’s It” brand ice cream sandwiches.
“What the heck is going on here today?” I asked Mr. Leoung’s neice Le who was heading to the back of the store at the same time I reached the end of the line.
“And you call
yourself a newsman,” she laughed as she straightened some cans on the top of
the shelf against the western wall of the store. It occurred to me that I hadn’t
eaten pork and beans since senior year at Sonoma State. “It’s lotto day. Today’s jackpot is up to $500 million and
everyone in the neighborhood knows my uncle has the luckiest lotto machine in
the Bay Area.”
I know, there’s no such thing as a
“lucky” lottery machine. The ping-pong balls
the lottery commission in Sacramento uses to choose the winning numbers are
incapable of independent thought, let alone figuring out which store is most
likely to sell the winning combination.
Still, I wasn’t likely to win that argument with Le. She was speeding to the middle of the line
anyway where a group of older men had just knocked over a cardboard cutout of a
Giants Hall-of-Famer, bending back the picture of the beer bottle he was
holding. How can you make it to
Cooperstown without a World Series ring?
I shook my head at the very thought.
I took a sip of my coffee, reached into a side pocket on my pack, slipped my headset around my ears and hit speed-dial for the desk.
“News.” Isabella’s voice filled my ears as a large man wearing a San Jose State Spartans jacket squeezed between the shelves and me disturbing the nice row of pork and beans Le had just straightened.
“Will you still love me when I win the lottery?” I took a nibble on my bear’s claw then washed it down with another sip of my black coffee.
“The way this
place is going, someone’s going to need to do something,” Isabella said. “But first things first, can you get me
something on lotto fever this morning?”
“Sure, I’m at Leoung’s Market over
here on Beale and the place is nuts.”
“I’m not surprised,” I could hear Isabella shuffling through some press releases on the desk. “Everyone knows Mr. Leoung’s the luckiest place in the City to buy a lottery ticket. Did you know four of the last 30 major jackpots came from that machine?”
“I do now,” I said. I knew discussing the logic of ping-pong ball memory would get me no further with Isabella than it would with the excited crowds here. “I’ll knock you out a couple of rosers and send in some bites with the people in line with me.”
“Sounds good and can you do a live hit with me in seven minutes?”
“No problem.”
“Sweet,” Isabella’s voice then shrank to a whisper forcing me to cover my free ear with my hand to hear her over the mayhem of Mr. Leoung’s. “What do you make of this mandatory meeting at the end of evening drive?”
“What mandatory meeting?”
“Check your e-mail, will you McKay?” Isabella’s voice was back to normal volume which is to say somewhere between an angry football coach and a jet airplane.
“It’s probably just more of Gregg’s corporate bullshit anyway,” I said. “Now I gotta get to work if I’m going to have something for that live hit.”
“Five minutes away now,” she said as she disconnected.
I put my coffee
down on a shelf next to a stack of canned sandwich meats and dug into my fanny
pack. I pulled out a microphone and a
small digital voice recorder, plugged item A into item B, and went to
work. I talked with the people ahead of me
in line about their hopes and dreams of fame and fortune after winning the half
a billion dollar jackpot. Later I would
wish I had been a little less smug with some of them.
With two minutes to go before my live
shot, the line had moved so that I was standing next to the bent Giants
cut-out. Le was just finishing using
tape to point the beer bottle upright and I tapped her on the shoulder.
“Please don’t go anywhere for a second,” I said. “I’m going live and I want to do a short interview with you.
Le looked up and down the line for a second. I hoped she couldn’t see the uneven line of pork and beans cans my Spartan friend had disturbed. Finally she shrugged and agreed.
“I hit speed dial-number two and plugged my microphone into the jack on the phone. That way I could use the headset for my voice and the microphone for Le’s.
“There you are McKay. Cutting it a little close huh,” producer Eddie Solis answered the line. “Are we all going to get fired tonight? Don’t answer that, I’m putting you on hold. You’re 25 seconds from air.”
I listened to the last few seconds of an ad for household cleaning supplies. The muted jingle grew louder in my ear as the director punched my line up on the board.
“Bay Area News Radio Time 7:55,” anchor Ramika Kenai’s voice had just a hint of the exotic but fell far short of what you would call an accent as she greeted local commuters. “We’ll have traffic and weather on the eights in three minutes but first who doesn’t dream of becoming fabulously wealthy? With the Mega-Millions jackpot now standing at an even half of a billion dollars, people from all over the region are flocking to Leoung’s Market on Beale Street in downtown San Francisco. Bay Area News Radio reporter Sean McKay joins us live from ‘Lucky Leoung’s’ with the story. Sean, how did the store get that name?”
I’ve been Mr. Leoung’s patron for as long as I could remember and I had never heard anyone call it “Lucky” anything. It sure wasn’t as a result of the doughnut selection. Fortunately, thanks to Isabella, I knew the answer Ramika wanted.
“Ramika,” I said, “it may defy the laws of logic but somehow there are four millionaires out there right now who can thank their fortunes to the decision to buy a lottery ticket from Leoung’s. I’m standing here with Le Leoung right now. Ms. Leoung, how do you explain your store’s amazing string of good luck?”
As Le began to answer, I felt a bump in the back from Spartan jacket dude. His bushy eyebrows danced a rumba as he nodded his square shaped head to the front of the store where I could see a gap had opened between us and the rest of the line. I took Le by the elbow and together we walked forward closer to the counter. Le wrapped up her answer about the alignment of the stars on the day her uncle was born and the resulting good fortune that shines on all who knew him. I could only hope a ray of that luck would fall on me at about the time of tonight’s mandatory station meeting.
“So there you have it, Ramika,” I said. “Can it work for a fifth time? Who knows but there’s a store full of people here willing to put down a dollar for that dream. Live in San Francisco, Sean McKay, Bay Area Radio News.”
I thanked Le and noted that I was close to the front of the line. I plugged my microphone back into the digital recorder and pointed it at the ceiling. I hit “record” and got about a minute of room ambiance, something I knew would come in useful when I put together my “taped” pieces. Yes, even though all of our audio now consists of nothing but one’s and zero’s, we still use jargon from the days of magnetic tape. Don’t ask me why.
“You’re not drinking coffee today, Sean?” Mr. Leoung’s voice started me. I switched off the recording and craned my neck around Spartan jacket to my coffee which had no doubt gone cold in the company of the sandwich meat cans.
“Charge me for a jumbo,” I said, “and a full bear claw.” I put the last piece of the claw into my mouth and chewed.
“Tell you what, since you have no taste in baseball teams, let me do this,” Mr. Leoung stroked his goatee. “The coffee’s on the house, I’ll charge you for the bear claw, and a chance to be part of the Lucky Leoung family. That will be your usual four bucks.”
Screw ping-pong ball logic, I wasn’t going to insult my friend by turning down a deal like that. Mr. Leoung printed out the lottery ticket and exchanged it for a wrinkled five dollar bill that had survived an extra spin cycle in my washing machine. I waved away the change as I slipped the ticket into my pack, next to the microphone and digital voice recorder and stepped out of the way of Spartan jacket dude. I hope I never run into that guy again for the rest of my life since by now he’s figured out that by rights the ticket I walked out of Mr. Leoung’s with should have been his.
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