Recently, after an early round of golf, I stopped in at my favorite watering hole, Clasen’s Tavern in Union. It was a bit before their 11 a.m. opening time, but the doors are usually open by then.
The only person in the place was my favorite bartender Tammy, so we quickly caught up on the “what have you been up to” news you share you see somebody only once every couple of weeks or so.
Within minutes, a guy walked in and took a seat a couple of stools down the bar from me. He was a bricklayer born in 1970, with three dogs, six kids (four of whom still live at home, one a high school junior and the other three students at McHenry Community College) and “only two wives.”
I never learned his name (barroom conversations go like that), so I felt it would be an imposition to ask how the two-wife experience was going for him. Or even how a thing like that works. Or in what kind of universe that would sound like a good idea.
None of that mattered when he mentioned that the Power Ball was now up to 1.8 billion dollars.
That’s 1.8 billion with a B. With that kind of scratch you could order 900 million beers at a place like Clasen’s.
“Wow,” Tammy said, “how nice would that be?!?” She meant winning the lotto, not delivering all those beers.
“Yeah,” said Mr. Three Dogs, Six Kids, and Two Wives. “I could find something to do with that kind of change.”
They seemed to be waiting to hear my input into the conversation, so I said the first thing that came to mind: “I’ve never bought a lottery ticket. Ever.”
They seemed dumbfounded. “Not even for one-point-eight billion dollars?”
“No thanks,” I said. “Maybe especially not for one-point-eight billion. I don’t want it. It would ruin my life.”
“Not mine,” Three said. (By now I figured we were on a first-number basis.) “I’d never lay another brick.”
I nodded, because it must be hard to lay enough brick to put food on the table for a gaggle of dogs, kids, and wives. I’ve kept each of my housemates mostly singular, so I’ve never needed all those commas in my bankbook to keep things humming along well enough.
They chattered on about all the wonderful things they would do with all that dough. But the more they talked, the more convinced I was that it would be a pain in the butt to try to fit all that cash into my life.
After all, here I was enjoying the conversation, enjoying my beer, enjoying the smell of the Philly cheese steak sandwich coming my way in the next few minutes, and I thought: “Could a 1.8 Billionaire enjoy a morning in a small-town bar like this?”
After all, how long would it be before somebody learned that the old guy at the end of the bar was crazy rich, whipped his head around too fast to gander at him, and decided to sue for whiplash?
Or for someone to insist that the rich guy’s “How you doin’ today?” was a bit too suggestive and lawsuit-level creepy?
Or for someone to decide that the tiny scratch in his mud-spattered Ford F-150 bumper must have been made by the rich guy’s 2012 Subaru, and that only a new Lamborghini Egoista would make it right?
Because let’s face it, people are greedy idiots these days when it comes to lawsuits. And billionaires are easy targets, willing to settle for a whopping pittance just to get you off their back.
So, no thank you very much to winning 1.8 billion bucks on a Power Ball ticket. No ticket for me. I’ll gladly use that two bucks to have Tammy pull me another draft, one that I know will arrive on the coaster in front of me without trusting for luck to put it there.
Then again….
Hm-m-m.
It might be fun to collect that huge Power Ball payout in crisp one-dollar bills. Oh, the fun I might have with a billion singles—and an extra eight-hundred million of them on top of the pile.
A dollar bill is a bit more than a tenth of a square foot in size, so it would only take about 18,000 bills to carpet my 2,000 square foot house with Washingtons.
Trust me, I did the math.
Of course I did.
And then, once I was done with the fund-flooring in my house, I could offer the same to my closest friends who live in similar-sized homes. With that winning Power Ball ticket, 100,000 of my best friends could also be living in cash-carpeted comfort.
Last time I checked, I didn’t have 100,000 close friends, but I’ll count them up again right after I cash in that Power Ball ticket. I may be surprised at how likeable I am sitting on a mountain of moolah.
Or better yet, I could demand to be paid in pennies! A penny is legal tender, right? How could they refuse?
Of course, that would be 180 billion pennies — which is more than the 130 billion American pennies currently in circulation.
That means I would corner the market on every existing penny in circulation (how priceless would each cent be then!?!) and they would still owe me another fifty billion uncirculated pennies tied up in rare-coin collections.
All those cool Lincoln wheat pennies that haven’t been made since 1959. Or the Indian head cents that were discontinued in 1908. Or the Flying Eagle Cents from before the Civil War. Or even still older ones.
So yeah, I’ll take my winnings in pennies, please.
Only pennies, and nothing else.
I insist.
And if they refused, imagine the lawsuit I’d be able to file!
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com
