The Winner: Part Eight

I get to move into my loft on Christmas Eve. The nostalgia has passed and now staying at my mother's house gives me nightmares. The only things I take with me from home is the plasma TV, the PS3, and my mother's ceramic figurines. Soon the delivery drivers form the Ikea store show up. I had to make up some bullshit story about how I was planning on giving my family a fully furnished house as their present to even get these guys to come out on Christmas Eve (oh, and pay them an extra two-hundred dollars, but fuck it. I want to be comfortable.

The mail is already being forwarded to my new address. There's a postcard from my mom already in the mailbox. It's a picture of a buff naked male and a naked woman with a perfectly shaved bush standing around on a beach with The Body Eternal Medical Spa and Resort. On the back it read...

Dear Poopy...

Im havun a good fun time here. The beach is excullant and I had met some real nice pepol here.Thay teach me to "hate the wait" and to self achualise. Fat is death and the only cure is somethen we learn about call EGO which will keep us thin and ALTRUISM which makes all slobby and obesce under the fallcy of KINDNESS. So far, I've had 3 lipsuckton treatments and have lost a third of my body fat! O and I been doon Pilates a lot too. Hope XMAS isnot too lonely.

Love,

Momma.

What the fuck were these people saying to my mom? Did I really send her to a fat camp run by assholes who read too much Ayn Rand? Oh well, she seems happy, and I guess she's losing weight (or at least getting it sucked off of her), so what am I gonna do? What I should be doing is looking into some cosmetic surgery myself. I wouldn't mind having that COCKSOCKET tattoo lasered off my skin graft.

I toss the postcard on the new black-laquered coffee table. Besides that message from my mom, I've gotten a literal stack of shit I gotta sort through. I never got that much mail before (my credit has always been shit, so I never had to deal with those mail-in card offers) but since winning the lottery, my mail has increased exponentially. Every two-bit investment broker in the world seems to have sent me personal letters offering their services, twice. Every charity from the Feed The Niggers Foundation to Loving Hope for Gay Christian Homeless Kids were sending elaborate mailings almost daily, as well as offering information on the tax benefits of doing so if simple altruism isn't enough for you. Every third world time share company in the world is inviting me to stay at their resorts. The Church of Scientology offered me a free OT Level II auditing at their compound in California for a small donation. Even a fucking Muslim charity has sent me information. Let's see...donate to them, watch them donate to some terrorist group, see terrorist group blow up something and piss America off, see my ass land in Guantanamo Bay living with the fuckers...sounds great.

Professional solicitations like those make up about half of my mail volume. The rest are personal letters from people, all of them begging for money. They all must have seen my name on the news or something and decided that I would be the perfect guy to hit up for money. I've gotten so many letters from out-of-work families with terminally ill children that I don't even bother reading them anymore since these assholes are obviously not trying. I got one written by some obviously brain-dead stoners asking for fifty-bucks so they could buy a bag of weed. Nice try, but I don't give change to the bums with "I'm Honest! I Want A Beer!" signs either. Most of the letters started right off the bat saying "normally we wouldn't do this but we're desperate." Most of them invoked the Christmas Holiday as some reason for me to be extra charitable. Most of them tried to appeal to my non-existent sense of Christian charity, peppering their almost illegible sentences with "God Bless" or fucking Bible verses. Sorry, but that sappy Jesus shit just doesn't work on me.

At first, I read all of these pathetic letters just for some cruel laughs. But the parade of human misery wore on even me so I had to stop reading, figuring give it a week or two and people will forget all about this. But the mail didn't stop. If anything, it increased. I thought that changing addresses would give me some relief, but the volume barely hiccuped. I know the reason I'm getting hammered with so many letters is that lottery winners traditionally aren't that bright. I started to see each letter as an insult to my intelligence.

Today's batch is almost surreal. I get a letter with pictures of deformed children, asking me to please give them money so their baby's flipper arms can be broken and stretched to something approximating normal length. Another is from some girl in Cambodia asking if I would marry her so she could immigrate to this country. She said her family is marked for death in her country and that she would be a very obedient wife if I chose her. Sounds like something I could be interested in, but I looked at the Polaroid of herself she enclosed and was like no. I got something asking me to donate to the 9/11 Truth Movement. Fuck that.

The last letter was from a village in Africa, and for some reason I read it all the way through. It was written by some dude named Ugundo from some country I can't pronounce, saying that the gods of his village told him to write to me....blah...blah...blah...give us money so we can buy a well for our village and your name will be forever be passed along by the storytellers of the village and written into song for your generosity.

My first instinct was likely the same as anybody's; no fucking way am I gonna trust someone in Africa with my money. But what held my attention was the pictures. They were all of, presumably, Ugundo. One had him dressed in a loincloth and standing over a freshly killed Zebra smiling. Another of him in a white button up shirt with some woman (he wrote on the back "This is my sister Funmi") or of him standing right next to a lion. Perhaps it's just the animals, but I start finding these pictures incredibly cool. I go over to my computer and quickly type out a response.

Dear Ugundo,

I am moved by your plight and would like to correspond more with you about purchasing a well for your village. I look forward to corresponding with you.

Sincerely,

Poopy Peanutz.

Really, I'm not all that sincere about giving them the money, but figure at worst I'm out the cost of a stamp and I might get some yucks from fucking with these primitive spearchuckers. I stick the letter in an envelope and put it in my outgoing mail. We'll see what this Ugundo fella is really about.

The only thing that I had left to do today was make a call. I get out my new RAZR cellphone and hit the autodial for Sergei. It rings four time before he picks up.

"Who is this?" he sounds pissed.

"Sergei, it's Poopy."

His tone immediately changes when he hears it's me, "Poopy, my friend! How are you doing? How is the new car working out for you?"

"I had to take it to the shop because some asshole broke in and stole the stereo. It's gonna cost me two and a half grand to get the interior repaired, the stereo replaced, and an alarm installed."

"I remember when I was a little boy in Leningrad. Such people were shot in the back of the head in the public square. Pity they can't do that here."

"Sergei...I need to talk to you."

"Go ahead, I'm not busy."

"Not over the phone, in person."

"Ah, I understand," Sergei says.

"You free the day after Christmas around two?"

"I have to drive my uncle to the airport at two. Can we meet later, say four over at my motel?"

"I'll be over there at four o'clock then," I say. I hang up before Sergei gets a chance to say goodbye, and stuff the phone back in my pocket. I look out the window of my new home and see it's beginning to snow, and I suddenly get the urge to make hot chocolate. Ahh, looks like it will be a white Christmas after all.