Just like any suburban-american kid growing up in the 80s, we had bake sales, cake walks, and 739 other elementary school fundraisers named after sweets our mothers didn’t want us to have.
Often, these events would have drawings for prizes.
It was very simple.
You buy a ticket. Then you put your ticket into the bucket in front of the item you wanted to win.
Organizers hold a drawing, choose a ticket, then announce that ticket number.
If you have the matching ticket number, bingo, you win.
It taught the same lesson as Candyland: It’s all up to chance.
Or so I thought…
…
I really wanted this foam paddle ball set.
Seriously. It was the coolest prize out of all 20-something prizes. Certainly out of the 10 or so that were for awesome guys like me.
I wasn’t about to try and win a My Little Pony.
I wanted the man’s toy.
The foam paddle ball set.
…
I had a younger brother at the time. Maybe two.
The brother I definitely had, his name is Chris. He’s 15 months younger than I am.
We competed at things.
If he wanted to play hockey, I wanted to play hockey. If I wanted to play in the creek, he wanted to play in the creek. If he wanted to make art….well, I didn’t want to make art. And he didn’t want look for fossils either….
I digress.
Anyway, we only competed over the things that mattered.
Like, what color My Buddy we were going to get. Or who would get the Speed Racer shirt, and who would get the He-Man shirt.
…
When it came to the fundraiser named after an ADD-inducing sweetfood and how we were going to strategerize our efforts to get what we wanted, we naturally devised separate plans.
I, being the older, obviously had the better plan. Being older, naturally, gives me superior intelligence.
I would take all 10 tickets my parents got for me, and put them all into the bucket in front of the foam paddle ball set.
I didn’t want anything else. If I happened to win something else, I wouldn’t be happy with it. It just wasn’t as cool as the foam paddle ball set.
It was simple. It was rational. It made sense.
If I had 10 tickets in there, then I must *definitely* have the best chance of winning.
At least better than Chris’s strategy.
Chris’s strategy was dumb. It didn’t make any sense. It was haphazard. Too loose. Too immature.
He chose several things that he could be happy with winning. I would imagine there were about five things. (Since just about anyone would find winning a box of rubberbands to be lame…except for some people I know who would still disagree with me.)
Chris took his 10 tickets and put two into each of the five prizes he would be happy to win.
I know, right?
Haphazard.
Dumb.
…
When the time for the drawing came, I was nervous and excited and anxious all at once. But maybe it was the sweets. Or maybe I had to go to the bathroom…really bad.
I couldn’t wait for them to draw for my awesomely blue and red and yellow foam paddle ball set.
They should’ve just skipped the first 14 drawings and gone straight to it. Everyone knew it was the coolest prize anyway.
After what seemed like years of hearing random little girls screaming upon finding their number called, they finally got to the toys for real, eight-year-old men.
We didn’t let out a shrill shriek, no. We let out a raspy “Yes!” as we fist-pumped in a pre-Tiger Woods era, marching up to get our prizes with a huge grin like we’d just been elected president.
Finally, it was time for the foam paddle ball set.
I was stoked.
I was sure I was going to win.
How could I not? I had 10 tickets in there? That HAD to be more than anyone else?
…
And my number didn’t get called.
I was as pissed as you could imagine Richard Simmons being pissed.
The fist-pump still happened. But with out the pump.
At least Chris wasn’t going to win anything.
…
But he did.
In what I was sure was some sort of divinely-intervened spite (For what, I’m not sure…it could have been any number of ill-intentioned things I had done to my younger brother over the years), I’m fairly certain he won the very next drawing.
Yes! Fist-pump. Grin. March.
I hated my life.
And what did he win? Something stupid I was sure.
I think it was some sort of foam pool noodle.
You couldn’t even do anything with it except for beat people with it.
Which is exactly what happened that summer.