Plus. Payback is a bitch. I was only locked up for a hot minute. I didn’t do no hard time or no bending over in the joint neither. I stuck mostly to myself. Spent most of my time reading. Educating myself. Boogar and Squirrel was doing five to ten when I got there. Armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. I stole some damn lawnmowers. Garden tools. I get out. Six years go by. They get out. I move back to California to be closer to my family, to get away from the thugs and drugs that’s on every other corner on the South Side of Chicago, and to dodge all forms of criminal activity, including loose bullets. One more year goes by. It’s 1981: Boogar get shot in the head on Lake Shore Drive for something, and almost a year to the day later Squirrel OD’s on heroin. Nobody understands why I don’t go to either one of their funerals. Especially Mama. “Your own cousins, Lewis? Y’all used to play together when you was little.”

“We didn’t play all that good together,” was all I said.

I ain’t hung up on the past. I’m trying to live in the here and now. And right now I’m all twisted up between the bottom sheet, the mattress, and this woman. A very plump woman. I need a cigarette bad but I know I ain’t got none. That much I do remember. I’m almost scared to roll over and see who she is, but I blink a few times, straining to put yesterday and right now together. Luisa. That’s her name. What a fucking relief. I push her to the side and roll out the bed. The telephone comes out of the cradle and crashes to the floor, but it don’t matter, ’cause it don’t work. Shit. My head is killing me. This tiny-ass room is dark and it smells like cigarette ashes, warm beer, and stale reefa. But I’m used to it. Still, opening a window wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Kids are playing outside.

Before I make it out to the bathroom, I hear a knock on the front door. Who in the hell could that be this time of morning? I wrap a towel around me, walk over, and look through the peephole, but I don’t recognize the middle-aged black dude’s face. I crack the door open a little bit.

“Yeah?”

“Are you Lewis Price?”

“Who wants to know?”

“The Clearing House Sweepstakes, sir, but if you’re not Lewis Price . . .”

“Wait a minute,” I say. My heart is pounding like a galloping horse, because by the time he hands me that white envelope through the crack of the door I know that, number one, there is a God; number two, one day my luck was bound to change; and, three, it do pay to gamble sometimes. I let out a long sigh after I take the envelope.