Jane is a good friend of mine. She never misses an opportunity to tell me about the upcoming Powerball jackpot, sending me email with teasing subject lines like “Hey! Tonight’s Powerball @ $325M!” or “WOW! Tonight’s Powerball @ $500M!”. I think Jane might be a robot.
After many weeks of the jackpot growing without a winner, not Jane but a local newspaper tells me that in the January 5th drawing two people, one in California and one in Wisconsin, had all six numbers. They will split the grand prize, $632 million, meaning $316 million each if they take the annuity payout, $225 million each if they take it in cash.
So, no giant jackpot for me this week, but a new contest has already begun, with a guaranteed $20 million prize, increasing by at least $2 million twice a week until there’s a winner — quite possibly me.
Always cooking in the back of my mind is what I’ll do with the money, but also cooking is the thought that first I’ll have to protect it, so I’ll need a good lawyer. I wrote about needing a lawyer last week, here.
About five years ago I paid a certified financial planner something like $350 to look over my handful of investments and tell me how to do better. She did tell me, and it was good advice, not good enough to make me rich of course, but when my ship comes in she’ll be the first person I call. I won’t tell the secretary anything about my “sudden wealth”, the term financial types use for coming into a lot of money. I’ll just ask for an appointment, and say “Let’s make it for a full hour this time.”
When my ship comes in I’ll buy a nice house, but it will have to be all on one level because I’m getting older and stairs are becoming the enemy. But some houses now have elevators, real elevators, the kind you step inside and the doors close. I’d always have my phone with me in case the thing gets stuck or the power goes out, it’s probably best to keep your phone in one of those little holsters that hangs on your belt so you can never be caught without it.
I’ll hire a cook when my ship comes in, maybe a Mexican lady. I’ll tell her how much I love Mexican food, but not the hot kind, more like what they call Tex-Mex.
She should have at least a little English, but since I’ll also need to hire a housekeeper to keep the place organized and tidy, maybe I can find one who’s able to speak Spanish, that way the cook won’t feel lonely, and the housekeeper can translate for her whatever it is I’m talking about.
Sometimes on a television show the cook or the housekeeper or the gardener, that’s another person to hire, will have kids of their own and it just makes sense when my ship comes in they can live in my big house too, the more the merrier, but maybe they need to be in another wing or maybe a separate building next door in case the kids are noisy or they like loud music, they’re only kids, after all.
Here’s another idea I had, not to have a house at all, instead just live in a fancy hotel in New York City. I started thinking about living like that a few years ago when I was following the news about the scammer girl who was the fake German heiress.
It sounded like she was living a pretty good life, tipping the help with fifty dollar bills and the concierges with hundreds, while scamming Manhattan banks and making up excuses for not paying her rent. She was pretty and sexy and charming, although some people I know didn’t think she was pretty at all. The charming part meant lots of socialites wanted to be her friend and lend her money until her own ship, a fictitious delayed inheritance, came in, and pick up the check when the group went out for dinner, I guess whenever they got tired of hotel food.
Those stories made it sound like the concierges in a fancy hotel could find you anything you wanted. I like going to museums, but not alone, and I thought I would ask the concierge to ask around for a fine-arts major to keep me company and go with me to my favorite museums like the Cloisters at the north end of Manhattan, and maybe tell me a little extra about some of the paintings without making it a whole big lecture. Maybe in her 30s, early 40s would be fine too. She should be smart and pretty, but not so pretty that she looks like a model and people are going to look at us and think, ha, that’s not his daughter or his granddaughter or his niece I’m sure.
I like Italian girls; they’re fun and natural and nice to look at. It would be okay if my companion was born over there, in fact that might make her a better-natured person than the average American girl. She should be mature, I don’t mean physically, I mean mentally mature, but it would be okay for her to be a little silly too sometimes. She’d be there to go places with me and be a good companion. I wouldn’t expect any funny stuff, certainly not at first, but we’re only human, after all.
And oh yeah, saying the girl could be Italian made me remember one more thing for when my ship comes in, I’ll put it here, it’s to learn to speak Italian. I wrote in another article here that in freshman high school they put me in Italian class instead of Latin like I signed up for because my real name looks Italian, even though it isn’t, and how much I enjoyed being in Miss Mercurio’s class for a few days. By contrast, I think French would be hard to learn, their words are not spelled anything like the throaty, wet way they sound, but Italian is spelled pretty much the way it sounds. Then if my museum companion was Italian, we could talk in Italian while we’re looking at paintings. I would pay extra for her to help teach me Italian of course; I won’t care about how much things cost when my ship comes in.
I want to go to other museums besides the ones in New York City of course; there’s a nice small museum out in one of the Hamptons, on the far end of Long Island, either 80 or 180 miles from the city, I forget which. That means I’ll need a car, but not a limousine where everyone’s going to say “Who’s that” when we go by, but something more low key. I saw somewhere that a Bentley is pretty much the same as a Rolls-Royce but without the wings on the radiator and all. There would need to be a chauffeur of course, that’s one more on the payroll. He probably should be a retired cop so he could be a bodyguard too. I guess when we stop to have a meal, he should be near us but probably not at the same table. That doesn’t sound quite right somehow, but things get complicated when your ship comes in. I’ll have to think about that part some more.
I’ve been cutting my own hair for over a year, not to save money but to avoid other people and the coronavirus. I’m assuming that when my ship comes in, Susan, who used to cut my hair here in town, will be available, triple vaxxed and maybe masked-up too if that’s the rule then. She’ll have to get some sort of a pass at the front desk to come up to the room, although I guess ‘suite’ or ‘floor’ would be a better word for it. I’ll leave her name at the desk and send a car, a nice car, not some random-brand Uber, down to the shore to bring her up to the city. I guess I should arrange with the concierge for a nice in-room lunch in case they hit a lot of traffic coming in. So it’s not awkward for her at lunch, she can bring along Tina, the receptionist at the hair parlour, to keep her company.
Something else I’ll do when my ship comes in is have a dinner for everybody I worked with at Insco, except for the few people I didn’t get along with, they know who they are. Or maybe a picnic outside would be better, then we could all just wander around and catch up. If it’s outside maybe no alcohol because of what happened with the cars at the softball game that time.
Getting back to all the people I’ll have working for me if I live in my own house instead of the hotel, I looked for books on how to be rich, meaning how to manage your life, where to buy things like good clothes and such, but the books all seemed to be about how to get rich, which of course won’t be an issue.
With all those people in the house, I guess I’ll have to hire some sort of manager to tell them how to do their jobs and write their paychecks. Maybe my financial planner will know someone. Or maybe I’d get a butler, a butler could manage them, like in one of those high-class English TV series like Upstairs, Downstairs or movies like The Remains of the Day. If the butler was a guy like Anthony Hopkins that would be great, we could have a drink together once in a while.
One thing I almost forgot, I’ll get my shoes made to order and not have to try on every pair of shoes in the store anymore. I have a narrow foot.
If I want to go somewhere that’s not close after my ship comes in, I’ll fly there first class. Going places first class sounds nice, but I don’t really want to fly at all anymore, I haven’t been in a plane for 25 years. I can tell from the newspapers it’s different now – there’s all kinds of not-very-nice people flying now, even in first class. Maybe a better idea would be to just charter a small Learjet like the one that picked up Pete and his wife to bring them to Wichita in the final episode of Mad Men. If I’m not going very far, maybe just take the car, the chauffer and I can take turns driving.