Lucky Bastard Read Online Free PDF Page B

has her name and a local phone number on it. No address. I can find out where she lives by doing an Internet search, but that won’t tell me where she’s going. Or what she plans to do when she gets there.
    I watch the cab take off through the Stockton Tunnel toward Chinatown, then I see Baldy cross the street upahead of me and disappear around the corner of the Hyatt. I pocket Tuesday’s card and follow him down Sutter to Powell, where he turns the corner and walks into the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. I continue past the entrance and a couple of doormen in Beefeater costumes who are jawing with each other and opening doors, then I double back on the other side of the street.
    Baldy doesn’t reappear. I think about waiting him out or going inside, but it’s pushing half past time-to-go and I can’t risk missing my ten o’clock appointment and losing a sale. So I grab a cab and ask the driver to take me to my crappy little apartment in the Marina.
    “I didn’t know they had crappy apartments in the Marina,” he says.
    “I’m lucky,” I say. “I got the last one.”
    “What’s the address?”
    I live in a studio on the third floor of a four-story building on Lombard Street, next to a dry cleaner’s, across from a transient motel, and just this side of dilapidated. Not my first choice for living accommodations, but sometimes you take what you can get. Or go where your mistakes take you.
    I remind myself that it’s only temporary. That someday I’ll get back into a top-floor apartment or a flat in a well-maintained building with quiet neighbors and double-paned windows and an entryway that doesn’t smell like urine. Until then, I’ll just have to deal with the consequences of my hubris.
    The cab drops me off in front of my apartment building, where a homeless guy sits camped out in front with a mostly empty donation cup and a black cat.
    Black cats were historically associated with witches and thus imbued with the evil of the underworld, which is why today you have people who think it’s bad luck to have a black cat cross your path. Nothing creates luck, good or bad. It just exists. Yet most people go around believing they can somehow manipulate it to their advantage.
    Even poachers can’t manipulate luck. We’re more like conduits or brokers, transferring luck from owners to buyers. However, we don’t just capitalize on situations to suit our needs, but often create the circumstances that compel others to seek us out.
    The stock market crashes of 1929 and 1987 didn’t happen all on their own. Neither did the dot-com crash, the Enron scandal, or the mortgage-lending crisis. Not that we orchestrated these events, but we helped to precipitate them. When you poach luck from enough people and sell it to others, sometimes things like this are bound to happen.
    Grandpa even told me stories about how luck poachers were responsible for some of the most famous downfalls and deaths in history.
    Marie Antoinette. Adolf Hitler. Richard II.
    Abraham Lincoln. Al Capone. George Armstrong Custer.
    Just to name a few.
    And who’s to say there weren’t luck poachers two thousand years ago in Jerusalem? Maybe Jesus ended up dying for our sins because he shook the wrong hand.
    I run upstairs, past the peeling hallway walls and the stained carpeting and the tenant who plays his music so loud it thumps through my floor, and I open my refrigerator, which contains eggs, bacon, juice, bread, condiments, and more than half a dozen Odwalla bottles—five of them of the lemonade variety, three Super Protein, and all of them on the plus side of half-full. All of my Vanilla Protein Monster bottles are clean and empty, sitting on a shelf in my cabinet, waiting for product.
    They’ve been empty for three years.
    While good luck doesn’t go bad if not ingested right away and doesn’t have a shelf life, it tends to keep better when refrigerated or stored in a cool, dry place.
    I use the Super Protein bottles to store medium-grade good