I didn’t dare tell that story to another human being, though. Let alone a reporter. Back then I never shared my plans or preferences, my ambitions or desires. I never gave away the things I loved.

I knew better. Other people can ruin a dream just by knowing it.

My brain had been feeling ragged for weeks by the time I bought the lottery tickets, it’s true, sick of everything around me, and I longed for something more, something extraordinary. But on the afternoon I walked to the gas station, I received the mission of my life, the plan, and it was channeled through the television show Three’s Company.

It had been a Saturday, my day off from work, and I had just finished watching “The Root of All Evil,” wherein Jack Tripper goes to the racetrack, bets on the horses chosen by his roommates Chrissy Snow and Janet Wood, wins, and returns to Apartment 201 with fistfuls of money. I’d already seen the episode dozens of times, and it wasn’t even one of my favorites, but on that afternoon in late August, as the credits rolled, I sweated and dreamed inside my trailer that never seemed to get cool, yearning for a different time and place, a different identity—and I was wishing, as usual, that I could crawl into Three’s Company and live there, curled up on the trio’s living room carpet, willing to eat scraps and suck vinegar from a sponge if that’s what it took to have the honor—when a voice emerged from the dulling cloud that had been hanging over my life for the past five of my thirty-six years and whispered, Now. Your turn.

And I knew then and there that it was my turn, and my power, my own life, that I was the grand master puppeteer, running this show, up onstage and in charge. My winning horse would be myself.

The idea was like an electric shock that reset my brain. The details still vague, I marched out of my house and started toward the gas station, keeping to one side of the narrow, shoulderless road. Cars whooshed by me in the heat, sometimes coming so close that I had to hop into the thin strip of tick-infested grass separating the road from the forest beyond, the uneven terrain threatening to break my ankles.

Some cars honked angrily; there were several blind curves on this stretch and all the locals drove like maniacs. The road was a test of speed and mortality—could you round the bend at 55 mph and not die? 60? It was a game we all played. Indeed, at the halfway point of my trek a car rounded the curve directly ahead of me and hit the brakes so hard it fishtailed and went over the center line, nearly flipping off the road and into the trees before steadying itself. Had another car come the other way at that moment, everyone involved, including me, would have died spectacularly.