Wiretap - Games of Chance

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

What are the odds that your grandmother met your grandfather, that your mother met your father, and that now you exist? We explore the role chance plays in our lives, from being born to winning the lottery.

It's not just you. News in Canada and around the world is moving at an incredible pace, which is where we come in. I'm Jamie Poisson and I host Frontburner, Canada's most popular daily news podcast. And what we try to do is hit the breaks on a story that you actually want to know more about. So try us out. Follow Front Burner wherever you get your podcast, Front Burner, stories you want to follow five days a week. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and you're listening to Wiretap on CBC Radio 1. Today's episode, Games of Chance, in which Dan Bingham defies fate, Philip Roth embraces coincidence, and Cookie gets lucky. Strap yourself down to the gurney, because I'm about to inject you with a lethal dose of good news.

Can it wait? I'm actually just about to try. try a little experiment for the radio. What's your big experiment? I'm doing a show this week about the role that Chance plays in our lives, and I thought it might be fun to call up random people out of the phone book with the idea that everybody out there has a story to tell. Look, Johnny, you're out of ideas. That's fine. No, that's not what...

Chance is a cruel mistress. If you go picking up the phone and calling people at a phone book and say, tell me your story, you know what you're going to get? You're going to get a handful of sand. You know, sometimes you have to give Chance a Chance. Don't you find that there's something kind of inherently, you know, enticing about the idea? Imagine yourself at a concert. Who's on stage?

It's Yo-Yo Ma. He's playing for a million people. Now, you're in the audience. Do you, A, turn around, shut up, and listen to Yo-Yo Ma, the greatest, whatever, he plays, a cello or violin player in the last hundred years. Or do you B, turn around, walk through the crowd, and grab some random guy and say, hey, I got a cello here. You want to play it for me? Maybe you'll be as good as Yo-Yo Ma. You don't do that.

You know why? Because some people are the great unwashed herd And some people are the gifted entertainers Yeah, but I mean Doesn't everybody have a story to tell? Yeah, that's why publishers ring doorbells And then just hand out checks to people to write books Well, no, I mean, I'm just saying that there's kind of

I don't know, there's almost a mystical element to it You know? Oh, there's a mystical element, yeah Everyone's like Oscar Wilde. That's why blogs are so good Look, I mean, it's something that I would like to try Okay, and you could be a little bit more supportive Okay

That's you being supportive? That's the best I can do. What about the first man who ever discovered oil? I mean, you know, you just have to start drilling, right? Yeah, I think that's how he did it. I think he just walked out of his house one day with a stick and poked it in the ground until he was a millionaire from oil. Oh, wait, you know what?

Maybe he got land surveyors and geologists and physical anthropologists and Lord knows what and found where the oil was and drilled a hole there. That's what's known as fishing where the fish are. You don't just sit in your stupid fire escape with a fishing rod and wait for a fish to bite it. All right. I'm going to start making some of these calls. And I think that the, you know, the results, whatever they may be, will be serendipitous and something in the place of nothing. Okay.

Prove me wrong, Johnny. Good luck. All right. Let's see what we got here. Hey, hello. Good afternoon, sir. My name is Jonathan Goldstein, and I host a radio show called Wiretap. Wiretap?

We're working on a show about chance. Stop to me call for these conneries like that. No, no, um... Hello? Hi, my name is Jonathan Goldstein, and I have a radio show on CBC, and this week we're doing a show all about chance. Do you have any good stories about chance? I don't know what chance is.

You know, chance, like luck or, you know, fate. We are a massive factory. Hello? Hello, my name is Jonathan, and I host a CBC radio show called Wiretap. So you work for the CBC, eh? That's my tax dollars at work. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you one thing, is that I'm really pissed off about the demise of Radio 2 classical.

Uh-huh. I mean, it used to be, you could tune in, hear some nice classical. Hello? My name is Jonathan and I was wondering if you might have a story to tell. You'll have to phone another time because I'm already late for supper. And I just have to say I'm sick. Bring back Juergen Gaw. Bring back classical music.

Bring it back to my living. I said, I'm calling from CBCM. Hi, I'm calling from CBC. I can't do anything about it. Sorry about that. You want a story? How's this for a story?

Go f*** yourself. Sometimes you take a chance and you go bust. But other times, when you least expect it, chance can throw you a bone. In an essay he wrote to accompany the 1994 reissue of his novel, Portnoy's complaint, Philip Roth tells a story that he claims never to have told anyone ever. He was going to college in Chicago as a young man, and once a week he'd treat himself to a meal at a cafeteria not too far from his school. He had his regular table there, and one day, sitting down to his usual plate of roast beef, he discovered, right there on the table, a piece of paper that the previous diner had left behind, and typewritten on this sheet of paper, were 19 unconnected sentences. As far as Roth could tell, there was no logic to them whatsoever.

He figured it was written by some avant-garde poet doing some kind of automatic writing exercise. He pocketed the paper, and over the next year, it would turn up under his bed or beside the phone, among other bits of paper, and every so often he'd return to it, studying it for meaning. Eventually, he accepted the fact that there was no unifying principle to the sentences, no hidden meaning, and if there was ever going to be one, any rhyme or reason to them, It was up to him to impose it. Roth writes. What I eventually understood was that these were the first lines

of the books that it had fallen on me to write. And that's what Roth did. He wrote over the next few decades, 19 books, and each one began with a sentence as it appeared and in the same order that it appeared on that sheet of paper. So Roth wonders, what if the paper had not been left there? What if the busboy had thrown it out before he got there? What if there had been a paper with other sentences on it?

Or what if he decided to eat at home that night? What would he have written then? Might he have written any books at all? Roth concludes by attributing his entire career to the workings of pure idiotic chance. Now, do I believe this story? I'm not sure. But here's what I do believe. If anything, Roth's story is a metaphor

for the chancy random workings of the universe and the way in which it is our job to bring meaning to these chance occurrences. The act of random selection is actually an ancient and powerful ritual in human history. And there's a profound ongoing need to find meaning out of chaos.

This is Chris Gudgeon. He's a co-author of Luck of the Draw, a popular history of the lottery. And in the course of writing the book, he spoke with dozens of people who'd won the lottery. And Chris began to see a reoccurring pattern. Everybody I talked to, regardless of if they won a huge amount of money or a modest amount of money,

there's a profound spiritual experience that people go through. People seem to search to try and figure out what the bigger meaning to the fact that they've beat the odds. And what are the odds, just to give us a sense? Roughly the same as being hit by lightning. Like five, six, seven million to one are your odds. And this is why I think it affects people, because in a world that's so secular, to win the lottery is almost literally a miracle. The odds are so outrageously stacked against you. So when you do win, it's like you've been chosen.

by fate, by something that's completely outside of ourselves and something that's not rational. And winning the lottery is like a validation that you are special. And so how do people generally respond to being chosen in that way? You know, there's actually psychologists have identified something they called affluenza. and it applies to anybody who has a sudden windfall, you know, whether it's winning the lottery or inheriting money or however you've come across a sudden pile of money.

So there's this guilt that people go through, and I think there is that sense of why me. I mean, everybody I talk to, no matter how much money they won, had a friend or family member turn against them. It's just like they're kind of rising above their station and it annoys people. I remember talking to a lady in Sydney, Nova Scotia, and she was a hospital worker, and she won 10 grand. That's all she won.

And she was getting angry notes from people, like, you should quit your job. You don't need this money. And there was a great story about this family in Smithers who won, I think, $5 million, and they'd go into a restaurant, and everyone would expect them to pay. And so they wound up moving out of Smithers, B.C. So there is definitely resentment, and this is a society that rewards hard work. Well, that's not true, but that's the myth, and lotteries fly in the face of that, and it bugs people because we want hard work to be the reason for everything. But, I mean, the fact is, most wealthy people, not all wealthy people,

but most wealthy people come from wealthy families. So the reality of our economic system is that hard work is rewarded to a certain degree, but luck is actually the key factor. You're lucky who your parents are, who your grandparents are, or even further back. So, I mean, Lottery is actually just a recognition of the fact that luck is the most important factor in everything. If you're absolutely loving your summer read and don't want the book to be over, your experience doesn't actually have to end when you finish reading. I'm Matea Roach, and on my podcast bookends, I sit down with authors to get the inside scoop behind the books you love. Like, why Emma Donoghue is so fascinated by trains, or how Taylor Jenkins Read feels about being a celebrity author.

You can check out bookends with Matea Roach wherever you get your podcasts. Neil Pasrisha has a blog where he lists the top 1,000 awesome things in the world. The last day of school makes the list, along with going through a car wash with little kids, as does that moment of finding ice cream left at the bottom of your cone, or that other momentous moment when you finally figure out how your hotel shower faucet works. But coming in at the top of the awesome countdown is the mere fact that we exist. Because when you think about it, writes Neil, of the millions of stars and galaxies, Earth might be the only place that can support life. Earth could easily have been a clump of sulfur gas

lying in darkness forever. But it isn't. And making it all even flukier, on this planet, we started off as sperm. And for the right sperm to have met the right egg means your mom had to have met your dad. But it's not just them. Think about how many people had to meet, fall in love, and make love for you to be here. Neil breaks it down as such. Your 19th century grandma met your 19th century grandpa down at the candle making shop. She liked his mutton chops, and he thought she looked cute, churning butter. Your Middle Ages grandpa met your middle ages grandma while they both poured hot oil from the castle turrets on pillaging Vikings.

She liked his grunts, and he thought the flowers in her head. hair made her heaving bosoms jump out. Your ice age grandpa crossing the bearing bridge in a woolly mammoth fur met your ice age grandma dragging a club in the opposite direction. He liked her saber-tooth necklace and she dug his unibrow. Before they had you, Neil Wright, none of your ancestors were unlucky enough to have drowned in a pond, to have gotten strangled by a python, or to have skied into a tree. None of your ancestors choked on a peach pit were trampled by buffalo or got their tie stuck in an assembly line. You are the product of years and years of survivors who all had to defy the odds and meet each other in order to eventually make you. And if all that

isn't enough to make you feel pretty lucky, once you're born, that's when the real spin of the wheel begins. Because as chancey as all that procreation stuff is, it still doesn't necessarily determine who will love you and who will raise you. As a baby, I was adopted by Marie and Owen

who actually got divorced about 18 months after they adopted me. This is Dan Bingham, and after his adoptive parents divorced, he was raised by Marie and her new boyfriend, John. John was a, you know, an

overweight hoarder. Our apartment was always a disgusting mess. As a kid, I used to, around Christmas time, I used to be embarrassed that Santa would come into our apartment and judge us. And it was a painfully strict upbringing. John, he was the law. He was the law of the house. Breaking any one of his rules usually resulted in some form of slap or punch or something. Like punching, like where? In the face, in the arm, or backhand of the head. Saturday mornings when I'd go to watch cartoons, I mean, he'd be lying across the floor, and one of his feet would be up on a chair. So I'd have to crawl over these legs, and I could tell it's going to be a good day

if his foot was on the lower part of the chair, because then I would crawl over without waking him up. But if I had to crawl over his leg that was up on the armrest, I'd always wake him up, and then just trouble would start. When things were bad in my life, there was often, how did I end up with these people? You know, of all the couples, you know, in Canada, there's like an eight-year waiting list. You know, so how did I end up with these people? Why them?

You know, inside, I knew that I came from other people, and I knew there was other, there was different blood. coursing in my veins. And I mean, I'd grown up my entire life with this fantasy of who my biological mother might have been. All I was told was that she was 17 Scottish and loved to ski. So whenever images of her would pop up, you know, I would kind of picture this young Scottish girl with ski poles and goggles. And I've heard it said from other people who aren't adopted who might have had a crummy childhood, they wonder if they were adopted. And they might even try to latch onto that kind of fantasy. So I guess in that sense, I was lucky to have that as a kind of hope that maybe one day

we'd meet and that it would be better. When I turned 18, that's when you're allowed to start searching for your biological parents. So I did fill out the forms to go looking for them, but in the end I didn't. How come? I got scared that either my biological mother wouldn't want to meet me or, you know, she was a drug addict, or she was dead, or something terrible. So I decided I'd rather live the rest of my life with this fantasy in my head than discover something awful. Little did I know that at that same time, she started the search for me. And about five years later, when I was 23, I got a phone call one day from this search agency saying that my,

My biological mother was looking for me, and if I wanted to meet her. And, I mean, of course, I said yes. And pretty soon I'm on a train to Ottawa to meet my biological mother. I get to the train station, and we had basically decided not to describe ourselves, to see if we could kind of find each other naturally. So I remember coming up the escalator and there was this huge group of people and our eyes pretty much found each other right away, right away. And, you know, we kind of awkwardly hug each other hello. We went to grab lunch and we just started chatting just, you know, about everything and everything, basically the history of our lives over lunch.

My biological mother comes from a huge Scottish family. So this giant backyard barbecue was organized where I would get to meet everybody all at once. So I get to this barbecue and everyone's checking me out. Like they're trying to see who, you know, where my eyes came from. And I was doing the same thing back to them, except I was only looking for one thing, which was hair. Yeah, yeah, nice to meet you. This is all very magical. is anybody bald.

And good heads of hair all around? Full heads of hair. I mean, a lot of grays, but just full heads of hair across the board. I mean, we all got along right away. We had so much in common. It really was, like, meeting my people. And it turns out that my whole family,

they all sing and dance and play music. And then at one point, my uncle Vincent, starts to play Danny Boy. Danny, that's your namesake. Yeah. And all of a sudden, you know, the whole backyard is singing Danny Boy. And when you've spent your entire life feeling like an outsider, sitting there with all these people who look like you and they're singing Danny Boy.

I was a weeping boy, let's just put it that way. It was just an overwhelming feeling of finally belonging. Do you think of yourself as someone who has good luck? Are you kidding me? I'm, like, one of the luckiest people I've ever met. You really think of yourself that way? Yeah, you know, I can't remember a time I wasn't lucky. You know, there's always been some kind of a halo around me like I've been chosen.

You know, a couple, I don't know if you know where I sleep, but I used to sleep at this hotel. It was a motel, actually. And whatever, the manager and I used to be kind of tight, and then we didn't get along the more after he, like, I spurned his, I'm going to say it's because I spurned his advances. Okay. For whatever reason, he asked me to leave the hotel, and I was like, fine, I'll leave, but I'm not going to go far, and I, you know, I sleep in my car behind the hotel. You know, a week ago, there's a fire, an electrical fire, something with the vending machine, and the whole hotel burns down.

I would have been in the hotel if I hadn't been kicked out. That, my friend, is lucky. Okay, well, the first question is I didn't mishear you You said that you would sleep in your car In the trunk Is it like a station wagon or No, it's like a sedan

And you sleep in the trunk I made it into a bed But that's why I got to go for people who are short Because otherwise they don't fit in the trunk I mean this isn't a permanent I mean you don't receive your mail to the trunk of your car. I don't really get mail.

I had it falling out with the post office. Okay, and my second question is, how to put this? You didn't set fire to the motel, did you? As far as anyone knows, it was the vending machine. I hope they had vending machine insurance. Is luck contagious? Are you able to bring good luck to those around you?

Oh, my God. I'm always breathing on people's lotto cards. I've heard of blowing on dice. Oh, no, I blow on lot of cards. I blow on horses. Horses? You've got to blow on them from behind to make them move faster. Are you a gambler?

Do you play the ponies? I do pretty good for myself, to the point that I can just go there and you can basically rent me out for good luck. Rent you out. How does that work? I will go with you down to the stalls, Look at them and tell you if I think they're lucky or not.

How do you base this time? Do you know anything about horses? Yeah. If it's a brown horse, does it have black hair or brown hair? They have good hair. What hair? You're talking about its mane? I'm talking about the horse's hair do.

How the horse's hair is done. And what does that have to do with how it's going to run? It's confidence. Have you ever gone out of the household like bad hair? You can't run fast if your hair looks awful. Even if you're a horse. Especially if you're a horse. Who else runs for a living?

I've never been stabbed. I've never been cut, nothing. That makes you feel lucky. Yeah. Because, you know, like, I've cut a lot of people. And I've never been cut back, except twice. What were the circumstances? One was, like, there's a guy, this guy Vinny, he had a crush on me.

And then the other time was with my mom, we just play knifing. You were sorry, did you say play knifing? Yeah, you know, like when you, with your mom, and she's like, oh, I'm going to cut you. And you go, I'm going to cut you, old lady, and you chase each other around the kitchen. She does a lunge, and then you go to turn, but you didn't realize there was Kool-Aid on the floor. And so you slip in the Kool-Aid, and then your mom gets you, like that kind of thing. Like, not a, not like a... Was it an ambulance involved?

My entire family lives by the Kredon. Never get in the back of a vehicle that has a light that spins around on the top of it. Squad car, ambulance car. Fireman car. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm. Do you have friends who, uh, who, uh, you just pity because they have such poor luck? Yeah, I mean, like, uh, my friend Sheila, poor Sheila.

Like, for example, Sheila liked you wear big underwear, you know? Terrible luck with that, because if we went shopping together and I put stuff down her underwear, she had so much room for it, she always got caught. So when you say, when you say shopping, you mean shoplifting? You know, when you go to the store and you go to the store and you go. take stuff without paying for it well I don't have the money you pay for everything all the time do you ever think that maybe your your luck is more a matter of the way that you see the world that is what luck is how is what you know whether you think it's lucky and that you know I mean

there would be people who would think it's not lucky that I sleep in my trunk I could see that Yeah. But, you know, they've never been in my trunk. It's very comfortable. It smells like, my favorite smell is like gasoline and the wintertime. I keep the car running, listen to music. You know, there's really nothing to complain about. Mm-hmm.

Look, you got your friends, you got the bar. You know, if you get a bartender, you can make really good shots. It's pretty nice. It's kind of all, all you can ask out of life, you know? You got some good music to pump to. You got a cute guy to grind on. That's all I ask. On Wiretap today, you heard Gregor Erlich and Chris Guggen, whose novel, Song of Kosovo,

will be published by Goose Lane Editions in the fall. You also heard comedian Dan Bingham. If you're in Montreal, you can catch Dan hosting Sugar Sammy's You're Going to Rear at the Olympia. For details, visit Dan Bingham Comic. com. You also heard Laura Cookiecraft and the wonderful writing of Neil Peserisha, whose latest book, The Book of Even More Awesome, just came out in paperback and is already a bestseller, which is pretty awesome. Wiretap is produced by Mirabirdwin Tonic, Crystal Duhame, and me, Jonathan Goldstein.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.com.com. It's.