Page 2 - Just Deserts

Prologue

None of us were to keep any record of our activities—for
obvious reasons, as you shall see. But the only talent I brought to
graduate school was a photographic memory, and the only skills I
learned there were note-taking and report-writing. Now, with the
passage of decades since the occurrence of the events I shall relate in
these pages, and with the demise of most of the participants
involved, my pledge of silence is broken. The cerebral archive already
shows signs of time’s ravage; if I take any longer wondering whether
or not to divulge these secrets, the seal upon them will be set forever.
I am writing pseudonymously, of course, and have altered the
names of my co-conspirators. If anyone cares to uncover our
identities, it will not be impossible from what I am about to
reveal. The newspapers always carried small stories about
winners of particularly large lottery jackpots in those days. So, for a
period of time I leave to your discovery, the field may be narrowed to
a small group of UCLA graduate students who, having pooled their
few crumbs of disposable income into a biweekly purchase of
California lottery tickets, finally won a huge prize.
The five of us really had less in common than, say, a pool of
office-workers who see each other forty hours a week. We
happened to live in the same co-op apartment building in
Westwood; other than that our lives did not frequently intersect. As I
recollect, Carlos was a year or two into the master’s program in urban
anthropology; Doreen had been working her way through law school;
Lester toiled in the vineyard of public health; Gerald, the oldest,
spent days and nights in the library locating obscure citations for his
doctoral thesis on Occam’s Razor; and I, your faithful narrator, had
been pecking away at American literature under the unsympathetic
gaze of the English department.
But after our lucky numbers came tumbling down the chute, we
immediately had something to be shared equally: eighty-seven
point two million dollars, distributed over twenty years. Each of us
therefore received one one-hundredth of that amount per year: after
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