Mister Lucky

I promise you’ve done this before: booked the cheapest flight you could find, prayed for a window seat, and scrutinized everyone in the departure terminal hoping you would not be paired with the apologetic fat guy, the talkative grandmother, or the miscreant child. What usually happens: your flight gets bumped, you end up by the aisle, and the junior parolee sitting behind you kicks your seat for four hours straight. On rare occasion: the plane is practically empty and you get an entire row to yourself. For most of us, flying coach is a metaphor for life, a string of tolerably unpleasant encounters with difficult people, supplemented by the occasional and well overdue reprieve.

Then there are those who only fly first class.

Enter Landen Holmes, quite probably the luckiest man in the world. Growing up he never had a cavity, broke a bone, caught a cold, or fret over a pimple. At seventeen he took the SATs without studying, barely read the questions, and got a perfect score. Not that he needed college; as a member of the Holmes family, his silver spoon came standard. As wealthy as his family was, though, on his eighteenth birthday Landen played his very first lottery and won a little over two million dollars. He paid Uncle Sam, gave half to the Red Cross, and blew the balance on a three week strip club binge. Down to his last dollar he walked into the nearest 7-11 store, purchased a Powerball ticket, and hit again, this time for close to eight million.

Yes, only good things happened to Landen. If he needed a parking spot, one opened up. If he showed the slightest interest in a woman, she caved in like a landslide. If he bought a stock, it doubled in value. If he rooted for the underdog, they couldn’t be beat. Remember Super Bowl XLII when the wildcard New York Giants edged out the undefeated New England Patriots 17-14? Yep, you guessed it. Minutes before kickoff, while sitting in a swank Manhattan bar and watching the excitement on a sixty inch flat screen, he asked the bartender who she thought would win. When she responded “are you kidding me? New York, baby!” he decided to ditch the dream team and be a Giants fan for a day. The rest is history.

No doubt you’re wondering how one man could be so unbelievably lucky. He never carried a charm, wore an amulet, or acted out of superstition. He did not chant or meditate or in any way conjure positivity. In fact Landen was a self-declared agnostic theist who did not practice or have a preference for any specific religion or spiritual movement. When pressed to address what others perceived as a clear case of serial luckiness, he stopped short of dismissing the concept of luck entirely but denied it playing a clear and significant role in his personal success, instead attributing his many “achievements” to innate intelligence, timing, and thoughtful decision making.

In the west, living to be one hundred years of age is within the realm of possibilities - improbable, but possible. An amateur golfer needs about 5,000 tries to sink a hole in one. The chances of a couple conceiving identical triplets is something like 1 in 200 million. So what are the odds that any two people on the planet meet at some point in their lives? It’s sort of a trick question because there is no answer; without distinct parameters the odds are impossible to calculate. Still, for every Landen Holmes there are a billion other people whose luck can’t compare, and since everyone knows at least one poor bastard who just can’t catch a break it stands to reason that eventually the luckiest man on Earth would find himself in direct contact with his antithesis.

“Hey. Pssst! Hey! Look, hate to bother you but I’m all out of toilet tissue. Mind if I borrow a roll?”

Not even Landen Holmes could avoid the occasional trip to the public restroom. Fingertips appeared beneath the steel partition separating him and his neighbor, wriggling for assistance. He passed the man in the adjacent stall a sizable wad of paper.

“Oh, you’re a lifesaver,” said the grateful stranger. Then he blew his nose obnoxiously loud. This was followed by an unusual amount of commotion, the unmistakable sound of a zipper, and finally a gurgling flush.