I mean, even if you’re not a regular player, every once in a while, when the payout gets up in the mega-millions—you know, like 75, 85 million dollars—you say to yourself, What the hell, and when you’re paying for breakfast up at Mort’s Deli in the Palisades, you take back your change in lottery tickets. They say your odds of winning the lottery are something on the order of 40 million to one. You have a better chance of getting hit by lightning or waking up one morning to discover that you’ve morphed into a fucking cockroach overnight. But you buy the tickets anyway, right? And in spite of yourself, you entertain the fantasy of what you’ll do with the money when you win it. Let’s see . . . 85 million, you’re going to want to take the lump-sum payout, which turns out to be 54 million or so at present-day value, then divide by two for taxes, and you’re looking at 27 million bucks—net, net. Now you start spending it. This is L.A., so you figure you could easily go 6 or 7 million for a proper home befitting your new status as a multimillionaire, plus you’ve got to go another million for furnishings.
