“It was so sad,” my friend A. was saying last night. “Every time they played that Jose Mari Chan song, I couldn’t help but cry. I’m really going to miss Tita Cory…”
Then he brightened up. “Guess what, though: I won! But not much; there were too many Cory combinations.”
I almost choked on a damned peanut. Gamblers — they are so “with” the times, sometimes outrageously so. I gather that during the past two days, bookies had refused to take bets on 3-1-8 — for 3:18, the time (local) of the former president’s death. They were not taking a chance on an obvious choice for millions of bettors.
“So what’s with 8-7-6?” I said. That was A.’s winning combination. “‘Corazon Cojuangco Aquino’ makes 7-9-6.” Gambling might not hold much interest for me, but I am familiar with the logic these people used in coming up with their numbers. It ranged from the sublime to the tortuous, and I was wondering which side of the fence 8-7-6 fell on.
“Simple,” A. offered. “August is the eighth month of the year, and she was 76 when she died. Ta-da!”
Gamblers are such optimists. They seem to think, if subconsciously, that the world revolves around them, that it is at their service, and that if only they looked more closely, listened more intently, it will somehow make manifest to them that winning combination. It is supposed to do this on a daily basis, too. Thrice, even. And at the end of each draw there will have been just a single set of numbers that will make the cut, and it will always make sense. On my last birthday, A. bet on 6-3-9. That was for my birth month and age. The winning numbers that day were 4-3-9. That made sense. “Of course! ‘June’ has four letters!”
“Hmp. And if it had been 5-3-9, you’d say it was for ‘Hunyo.’”
“Why not?” he said. “Anything’s possible.”
Indeed it is. Life’s interesting that way, don’t you agree? Not too long ago we rushed a friend to the hospital after he complained about shortness of breath. It was a good thing, too, because when they took his blood pressure it had gone down to zero. As we idled in the emergency bay, the thought came to me from out of the blue. “Wouldn’t it be a riot,” I said, “if 5-8-0 won today?”
“Huh?”
“‘Blood pressure zero,’ dummy. 5-8-0! Check with your bookie.”
And wouldn’t you know it: 5-8-0 it was indeed. A. stormed into the ward. “You!” he said to the bewildered patient. “Schedule your next attack earlier in the day, why don’t you? You’re not helping my game any.”
I wish I were as certain about how the world and the lottery work. I wish I were as sanguine about the possibilities that lurk in tragedy or misfortune — as well as in license plates, phone numbers, whatever. “You should have seen Kris,” he’d said. “The poor girl was crying her heart out; ruined her make-up. Did you know she has freckles?” I did not, but I could imagine: Kris. Aquino’s. Freckles. Hmm. That would be 4-7-8. Or 4-8-8, if you counted the apostrophe. With these things, who knows?
Photo: The Yankee Analysts
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