heavy, with the odor of sour milk and the consistency and color of hot asphalt. Except bad luck isn’t warm. It’s cold, like death. Poachers call it hard because of what it does to you.
Imagine paper cuts the size of the Grand Canyon or ingrown toenails with fangs. Phrases like industrial accident and burned beyond recognition come to mind.
Not exactly my idea of a good time.
Good luck, conversely, is soft. The higher the grade, the softer the luck.
Silk gloves against velvet pajamas. Goose-down pillows on a bed at the Ritz.
But even those analogies don’t come close to its texture. Top-grade soft is indescribable. I don’t even think the gods of Olympus had anything to rival it. Except maybe Aphrodite. I bet she felt like top-grade soft.
As I sit down on a bench in Huntington Park at the top of Nob Hill, a woman walks past wearing a white tank top, her long blond hair cascading over her bare shoulders. While she’s no Aphrodite, and while no one would ever confuse Nob Hill with Mount Olympus, it’s high enoughabove the fog that the August sun has actually made a cameo.
Several women in bikinis are camped out on the grass with laptops and iPods, while two shirtless gay men, one tall and black and the other short and white, compare six-packs. On the other bench to my right sits a middle-aged woman reading a paperback, one of those Dragon Tattoo novels, while a young mother chases her toddler around the water fountain.
I watch the young mother and think about Mandy—about what I can do to keep her out of this, about whether I should warn her, about how she’s going to be pissed off that she got dragged into my business.
We didn’t used to be like this.
After Mom died, Mandy and I got pretty close. She was eleven at the time, but even though she was two years older than me, I was already a more experienced luck poacher. Mandy tended to take after Mom. She didn’t think it was right taking something that belonged to others unless they deserved it. Which usually meant some bully at school or some stuck-up little princess who needed an attitude adjustment.
But with Mom gone and Dad emotionally unavailable, Mandy and I started hanging out together, watching out for each other, keeping each other safe. I didn’t have a lot of friends. None, actually. When you can steal luck, it makes it tough to develop any kind of camaraderie. Plus when you have that level of power at nine years old, youtend to acquire an overdeveloped sense of omnipotence. My mouth didn’t help matters.
Over the next few years, I helped Mandy develop her poaching skills. We didn’t use the luck we stole, but just discarded it or used it to water the garden or gave it to Grandpa.
Once Grandpa died, Mandy was all I had.
In high school, during my freshman year and when Mandy was a junior, we started full-on collaborating, stealing luck from the jocks and the rah-rahs and the social elite and giving it to the kids who didn’t fit in and who got stuffed into gym lockers. Nobody knew what we were doing. Not even the nerds and social misfits we gave it to. We’d just process the luck and spike their sodas or milk shakes with it. Or bake it into cookies and give them out at band practice.
We were like social equalizers, smoothing out the disparity of the high school dynamic. Robin Hood and Maid Marian, robbing luck from the asshole popular kids and giving it to the geeks.
It was one of the happiest times of my life.
But once I started to poach for money as a sophomore, Mandy and I started to drift apart. She didn’t believe in stealing luck for personal profit, and I was starting to embrace the inevitability of my calling. The summer after she graduated high school, we hung out a couple of times and pilfered some luck from a bunch of yuppies for old times’ sake, but it wasn’t the same. When she met Ted ayear later in college, she gave up the lifestyle entirely. We didn’t see each other much after that.
Once Mandy left, that’s when
Imagine paper cuts the size of the Grand Canyon or ingrown toenails with fangs. Phrases like industrial accident and burned beyond recognition come to mind.
Not exactly my idea of a good time.
Good luck, conversely, is soft. The higher the grade, the softer the luck.
Silk gloves against velvet pajamas. Goose-down pillows on a bed at the Ritz.
But even those analogies don’t come close to its texture. Top-grade soft is indescribable. I don’t even think the gods of Olympus had anything to rival it. Except maybe Aphrodite. I bet she felt like top-grade soft.
As I sit down on a bench in Huntington Park at the top of Nob Hill, a woman walks past wearing a white tank top, her long blond hair cascading over her bare shoulders. While she’s no Aphrodite, and while no one would ever confuse Nob Hill with Mount Olympus, it’s high enoughabove the fog that the August sun has actually made a cameo.
Several women in bikinis are camped out on the grass with laptops and iPods, while two shirtless gay men, one tall and black and the other short and white, compare six-packs. On the other bench to my right sits a middle-aged woman reading a paperback, one of those Dragon Tattoo novels, while a young mother chases her toddler around the water fountain.
I watch the young mother and think about Mandy—about what I can do to keep her out of this, about whether I should warn her, about how she’s going to be pissed off that she got dragged into my business.
We didn’t used to be like this.
After Mom died, Mandy and I got pretty close. She was eleven at the time, but even though she was two years older than me, I was already a more experienced luck poacher. Mandy tended to take after Mom. She didn’t think it was right taking something that belonged to others unless they deserved it. Which usually meant some bully at school or some stuck-up little princess who needed an attitude adjustment.
But with Mom gone and Dad emotionally unavailable, Mandy and I started hanging out together, watching out for each other, keeping each other safe. I didn’t have a lot of friends. None, actually. When you can steal luck, it makes it tough to develop any kind of camaraderie. Plus when you have that level of power at nine years old, youtend to acquire an overdeveloped sense of omnipotence. My mouth didn’t help matters.
Over the next few years, I helped Mandy develop her poaching skills. We didn’t use the luck we stole, but just discarded it or used it to water the garden or gave it to Grandpa.
Once Grandpa died, Mandy was all I had.
In high school, during my freshman year and when Mandy was a junior, we started full-on collaborating, stealing luck from the jocks and the rah-rahs and the social elite and giving it to the kids who didn’t fit in and who got stuffed into gym lockers. Nobody knew what we were doing. Not even the nerds and social misfits we gave it to. We’d just process the luck and spike their sodas or milk shakes with it. Or bake it into cookies and give them out at band practice.
We were like social equalizers, smoothing out the disparity of the high school dynamic. Robin Hood and Maid Marian, robbing luck from the asshole popular kids and giving it to the geeks.
It was one of the happiest times of my life.
But once I started to poach for money as a sophomore, Mandy and I started to drift apart. She didn’t believe in stealing luck for personal profit, and I was starting to embrace the inevitability of my calling. The summer after she graduated high school, we hung out a couple of times and pilfered some luck from a bunch of yuppies for old times’ sake, but it wasn’t the same. When she met Ted ayear later in college, she gave up the lifestyle entirely. We didn’t see each other much after that.
Once Mandy left, that’s when
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