By Anna Collins

“Does there have to be a flat screen television everywhere you go these days?”

I’m asking my friend Barb, as we sit crossed legged on my new living room carpet in my new oceanfront home. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon on my birthday. I take another sip of Chardonnay from my Waterford crystal Lismore Nouveau white wine glass (it’s one of those trendy new glasses with no stem; a cleverly disguised euphemism for a tumbler) and continue to bitch.  “Even my bank has a flat screen right smack in the middle of the lobby. And it’s always blaring out the food channel. It’s so annoying! I really don’t want to hear how to caramelize onions while I’m making out my deposit slip.”

I’d been spending a lot of time at the bank these days, ever since I won the Florida State Lottery. Fifty-nine million dollars – one winner – me. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

“It’s sick. Are we so mentally bankrupt as a society that we have to be entertained and bombarded by noise every waking moment?” Barb adds as she reaches over to the bottle on the tray between us and pours herself some more Chardonnay. I watch as she fills her glass right to the brim. “This wine is really good. My gynecologist has a flat screen in all the examining rooms. What’s up with that? You don’t suppose he gets bored looking at the same thing all day, do you?”  

I consider her point as I grab a hand full of Cheez-its from the bowl next to the wine and thoughtfully pop one in my mouth. I suck on it for a moment before annihilating it with my back molars.

“I guess when you’re sitting in there waiting in a paper gown, it beats reading that reproductive system chart on the back of the door or looking at the plastic model of the uterus for a half hour. Why would any one willingly want to become a gynecologist anyway?”

“They’re probably the guys that couldn’t get dates in high school and college,” Barb says, “but it’s better than being a proctologist - that’s really bizarre.”

“And gross,” I add. “Who strives to be an ass doctor?”

This cracks us up. We’re so juvenile. Even though we’re in our forties, both of us have the sense of humor of a 14-year-old male. We loved (and bought) the movie Jackass much to the horror and chagrin of our other ‘mature’ girlfriends who prefer to watch Under the Tuscan Sun eight million times in a row, or cry hysterically over The Notebook.  Not us. We think there’s nothing funnier than seeing an Asian doctor holding up an x-ray that shows the matchbox car that’s lodged in his patient’s rectum. We chuckled over that scene for weeks.

My glass needs refilling. Barb notices and does the honors. The wine we are drinking is very expensive. It’s called Chalk Hill and it’s $67 a bottle – the most I’ve ever paid for a bottle of wine. I bought it on a recommendation when I was perusing expensive wines at the liquor store.

Flashback to yesterday:

The rather portly and fresh-out-of-detox looking clerk at ABC Liquors, wearing one of those back brace things around his waist – unbuckled (so what good is it doing him?) sees me reading the label on a certain bottle of Chardonnay and says, “That Chalk Hill is the most Meursault-like of all the Chardonnays.”

Right. Whatever that means. But not to be upstaged by a man in an unbuckled back brace, I nod my head wisely.

Wait a minute - wasn’t ‘Meursault’ the name of the main character in the Albert Camus novel The Stranger? What does that have to do with wine? Has it now become cool to name wine after characters in classic literary works?  Did I miss the memo? I furrow my brow.

The clerk narrows his gaze and looks at me as if reading my mind. “Not the guy in the Camus novel – Meursault the vineyards. A lot of people make that mistake.” 

I un-furrow my brow and raise my eyebrows. They do?

He continues, ”White wines from Meursault take a long time to mature and generally reach their peak after eight to fifteen years. This time is necessary for the wines to develop their intense aromas and mellowness. The Chalk Hill, in my opinion, still needs time to soften and round out, but it’s a rival. It’s brimming with a bright, steely minerality and at $67 a bottle, it is truly a treasure.“

Geez. I didn’t know these ABC guys were so knowledgeable. You’d never know it by looking at them, that’s for sure. The only thing I ever remember having a ‘steely minerality’ was my ex-mother-in-law’s personality, and she was no treasure.

 “I’ll take four bottles.” I say. “Make that five.”

“Five bottles! Great! What did you win the lottery?” the clerk asks laughing, his unbuckled back belt swinging at his sides like an unhooked, low-slung bra.

“Yeah, I did,” I reply, laughing back.

End  flashback.

I couldn’t wait to try my new wine. I knew it would taste better than the crap I usually buy with the hopping kangaroo on the label.  Truthfully, I didn’t care if the Chalk Hill actually tasted like chalk; the point was, for once, I wasn’t buying whatever was on sale at Publix or Walgreen’s liquors. Incidentally, who made the rule that the lighting in every Walgreen’s Liquors has to match the brilliance of the sun? Hold on to your retinas – don your welding masks -we’re going into Walgreen’s liquors! Two words people – ‘dimmer switch’! But I digress and anyway I never have to go in there again.

I look over at Barb; she’s been talking the whole time I’ve been going through the aforementioned scenario in my head and I haven’t a clue what she’s said. This is her one contention with me – she says I don’t pay attention. She’s right. Now I have to fake it. I snap back to the conversation just in time to hear her say, “So what would you have said? I think I was right to tell him about the overdose don’t you?”

I shoot back with one of my stock answers: “You know it’s always better to listen to your heart – follow your intuition and you can’t go wrong.”

Barb knows me. “You weren’t paying attention were you?”

“No.”

All my girlfriends are married or living with someone. Barb is my only remaining single girlfriend. We’ve been buds for over 20 years and she’s one of the few people in this world that knows everything about me and hasn’t run off screaming. If she were a man, I’d marry her. 

We are on the second (or third?) bottle of Chalk and almost done with the bowl of Cheez-its. We’re getting pretty toasted. God, I love Cheez-its. It’s funny – I’ve been poor and rich, men have come and gone, but the one constant in my life has always been Cheez-its. Ever since I was a kid, they’ve never changed, never let me down; always the same comforting, iridescent orange, crispy goodness. I often thought if one were remiss for a night light, a handful of the bright orange lovelies, strategically placed, may give off enough radio active glow to aid one’s way to the bathroom. Indeed, if not opened, I daresay Cheez-its have the shelf life of plutonium – after all usually when there’s a ‘z’ instead of an ‘s’ in cheese – we’re talking chemical longevity folks. But again, I’m digressing.

Remember when I told you I won the lottery and I’d get to it in a minute? Welcome to the minute. Two months and four days ago I won the lottery. Winning the lottery feels exactly like you think it would: incredible, fabulous, freeing and you keep saying, “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!” Then finally, you believe it and it changes your life forever. I opted to take the money in a lump sum and I put it in a money market account until I decided whatever else I wanted to do with it. The only extravagant purchases I made were the wine, the $50 a piece wine glasses, some new clothes – oh and my new 4.2 million dollar home on the beach. It sounds like a lot, but really it isn’t – I still have plenty of money left.

This new house is my DFZ or decision-free zone, a safe haven where I can contemplate my future or not. I had to move from where I was living. I couldn’t very well stay in my first floor $200,000 condo where I was kept awake night after night by the fornicators with the squeaky bed on the floor above me, and expect to make rational financial decisions about my vast fortune, now could I? A person needs a good amount of shut-eye to think clearly. I don’t want to end up like some of those other lottery winners I read about on the Internet who lost everything:

Willie Hurt of Lansing, Michigan, won $3.1 million in 1989. Two years later he was broke and charged with murder. His lawyer says Hurt spent his fortune on a divorce and crack cocaine.

Ernest "Knucklehead" Johnson won $8.2 million in the Pennsylvania lottery in 2004 but after investing his winnings in an auto dealership specializing in canola oil powered cars, he now lives quietly on $450 a month and food stamps.

Texan Francine “Jugs” Fitzpatrick won 16 million in 2005. Fitzpatrick was munificent to a variety of causes, giving most generously to the Save the Ferrets foundation. Her downfall came when she invested in a clown catering service that was successfully sued for 16.2 million when one of the clowns twisted a long black balloon into a suggestive shape in front of a wealthy client’s wife, leaving the wife with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Fitzpatrick’s family has turned against her as well. “She’s a dumb ass,” says son Wordell, “We used to be able to walk into any Wal-mart in the area and buy what ever we wanted. Now, after the lawsuit, we’re just regular folk again and Daddy's back to work as a machinist. We all want to kill her."

Poor slobs. Let me tell you about some more of my ‘peers’. After winning the mother lode, I got invited to the Millionaire’s Ball – a party for all the lottery winners. Talk about a motley crew; half of them looked like they’d been sitting in Darwin’s waiting room for most of their lives and the other half I’m sure had no idea what the word ‘motley’ meant. I suppose that’s because people who are already rich don’t play the lottery; it’s mostly a game for the lower-socio economic strata of society; a fool’s game – at least that’s what my attorney told me right before he asked to borrow $40,000.

I’ve always heard people say that if they won the lottery they’d help out those less fortunate; donate to charity, send money to those starving, big-eyed kids on the TV commercials, etc.. But I can tell you first hand, that’s a healthy load of hoo-hah. Most of the winners I met told me they promptly went out and bought things like a Harley, a boat, a diamond necklace, or a monster truck. Not one person I talked to said they immediately wrote out a big fat check to the Save the Whales or the America Diabetes Association  Not one.

I don’t pretend to be noble. I’m sure I’ll eventually donate to some good cause – but right now, I don’t give a rat’s ass. I want to have fun.

Before I won the lottery I worked as an electrologist removing unwanted chin and moustache hair from hirsute women. And believe you me, the minute I learned I’d won, I promptly pulled the plug on my epilator. Those people who say they keep on working at their regular jobs after they win millions of dollars should be bitch-slapped and forced to give the money back. It should be illegal to be that stupid and have that much money.

People always ask me how I picked the winning numbers. I think the trick is to have the numbers mean something to you – it’s gives them a special energy. Not like the ‘quick pick’ that the felonious looking cashier at the gas station punches in for you while he’s checking out your boobs.  For instance, I picked 2, 3, 11, 12, 14, 41. Here’s why:

2 – the number of years a psychic told me it would take before I marry the man of my dreams (husband #2) in Hawaii.

3 – the number of friends I have that I can really trust
11 – the month my first divorce was final

12 – the day my first divorce was final

14 – the age mentality of my sense of humor

41 – my age

Lately, some of the people I’ve told my formula to tell me they’ve tried this method using their kids’ birthdays, anniversaries, stuff like that and then they report, rather peevishly, that they still haven’t won yet – like it’s my fault. So now when people ask I just tell them it was luck.

When I first moved in to my new house, the neighbors introduced themselves and welcomed me to the neighborhood. I even got invited to a house party. The hosts acted all hoity-toity and talked about investments and trips to Europe and what private schools their kids went to. Then later, some of the men, when they found out how much money I’d won – tried to hit on me while I was out by the pool having a smoke. Of course they’re all married, just like when I wasn’t rich. I pretty much keep to myself now.

I suddenly notice Barb is staring at me and she’s probably been talking to me all this time too. “Where do you go Amelia?” she asks.

I smile at her.  “Hey, you wanna go to Tahiti? There’s this really cool cruise ship called the Paul Gaugin that goes there.”

“Sure.” Barb’s eyes are glassy now.  “When?