Photo by Jason Frank Rothen
Most bums play the lottery. About a quarter of them became bums from gambling in the first place so it makes sense. Plus their lives suck. But is the lottery sooo bad?
When asked about the unhappy link between the homeless and their obsession with changing their luck, National Council on Problem Gambling executive director Keith Whyte kept repeating the word “co-morbidity.” It’s a cheery little term that combines addictive habits and mental- health issues; every homeless person’s twin Saddams.*
“I used to win all the time. I used to be lucky, very lucky,” says 49-year-old Alfred Sinclair, though it is hard to get what the fuck he’s talking about, since he’s homeless, missing a leg, and wheelchair-bound, and looks to have been so for most of his life. He recalls a particular windfall a few years back. “A friend of mine, Muhammad,” he says, referring to the clerk at the store where he used to get lottery tickets on credit, “he’d let me play because they knew I was lucky. I won $500 and me and Muhammad got a cognac, you know, the one with the worm in it. I don’t really drink, but I got fucked up that day.” If he ever hits the big one, however, Sinclair has mostly altruistic plans for his winnings. “Say I got $50 million. I’d keep maybe $20 million for myself and build a house, what have you. I’d give my three kids $1 million each, and I’d give at least $30 million to charity,” he says. “It’s better to give than to receive.”
State lotteries love people with this hopeless attitude, since, compared to other games of chance, the odds and average per-dollar return on the lottery are dismal. The odds against winning the pick-six type of lottery games are about twelve million to one, and the average return on a dollar gambled on the lottery is about 40 cents. Compare this to a return in the neighborhood of 90 cents per dollar for slot machines, and you’d have to be crazy to have any hope of winning the lottery. “If you’re going to gamble,” says Whyte, “you can’t find a worse bet than the lottery. I would say this is not likely to be a good strategy for homeless people.”
But we want to be optimistic this month. So here goes. Shit, as far as strategies for homeless people go, maybe this kind of gambling is the most logical. In a grim way, homeless people are an ideal demographic for the lottery. After all, they have the least to lose. The usual arguments against habitual lottery play, things like, “If you took that ten dollars you spend every week on the lottery and saved it, in ten years you’d have a down payment on a car,” seem a little silly when the player in question doesn’t even have a mattress. In fact, for someone who only takes in a few bucks a day, the chance to triple or quadruple that is pretty alluring. If someone gives you two dollars and you turn that two dollars into a scratcher, that scratcher can turn into $50. There you’ve got yourself a bottle of Thunderbird, a Big Bite hotdog and maybe a night at an SRO.
And though it is going too far to say that losing is as good as winning, losing does have its own reward. Because you always get to play next time, get another chance. In a sense, every time someone destitute buys a lottery ticket, what they’re buying is renewable hope, a new chance with each ticket purchased. And who the hell needs hope more than the homeless? Right?
BRIAN THOMAS GALLAGHER
*Special thanks to Paul Remy from the Special Issue for that term.
