The No-Luck Club
The No-Luck Club Some people make fun of my old Honda. Not much longer, baby. My wife was in a car dealership the other day when she was invited to enter a contest to win a four-wheel-drive...
...It was a no-brainer...
...It was clear that I'd been had...
...Work it, baby...
...One weekday, my mother took her to some gargantuan ladies' luncheon...
...Then I ex-plained—at least I'd get a hat out of it—that whenever a player scores three goals, fans throw their hats on the ice...
...So there we sat at the kitchen table in Lynn, Massachusetts, my 62-year-old grandmother and me, while Jimmy Smith, as Incredible as they said he would be, went through a series of suggestive grunts: Oh...
...Nana didn't like it much, either...
...That the very same game became legal when renamed "Beano" was an early lesson in legalistic sophistry for the Boston Irish, not that they were ever a people desperately in need of such lessons...
...I said, more pipingly than I would have liked, "I'm a boy...
...As I see it, the thing is practically in the driveway...
...And one night in January, my father drove me up to a gymnasium in Beverly to sit at the hero's knee...
...Mohhhhhhhh-jo...
...Then he said something I'll never forget...
...After all, this stuff is small beer for someone who'll be tooling around in a four-wheel-drive Mercedes in another week or so...
...Christopher Caldwell...
...At that age, I liked all music, from "All Along the Watchtower" to "Julie, Julie, Julie, Do Ya Love Me?," but here I drew the line...
...I probably wasn't even going to get to shake Don Awrey's hand...
...One winter afternoon a flyer arrived announcing that any paperboy who got ten new subscriptions could enter a drawing to meet Don Awrey of the Boston Bruins...
...I had been similarly deceived by the Salem Evening News, for which I had a paper route...
...Awrey said only one word: "Wrong...
...What a humiliation...
...Awrey was my favorite hockey player...
...But that only made me the more desperate to seize this rare chance to pay him homage...
...Awrey left the Bruins soon after...
...But I'm more magnanimous now...
...Beano" because Protestant legislators had banned Bingo nights once it became clear they were the source of half the revenue of the Catholic church...
...Awrey lifted his head, looked down his nose, and pointed directly at me...
...God knows why—he was a scrub defenseman on the great Bruins teams of Orr, Esposito, and Bucyk...
...He said: "Uh...
...If you were willing to leave your parish, you could play Beano every night of the week, which is what Nana did...
...the little girl in the back...
...But, after weeks of bicycling through sleet, with my fingers frozen to the handlebars, I got them...
...There hadn't been any subscription contest...
...My name got drawn...
...Two hundred Salem News paperboys were wildly waving, screaming, "I know...
...Nana's weakness was Bingo, known to her and other Massachusetts Irish as Beano...
...But her luck was bad...
...Mo-jo...
...Then I'll be saying, "Hey, Don Awrey, who's the little girl now...
...Anyone who'd wanted to come could have come...
...He was ignominiously benched for the 1976 Stanley Cup finals, a coaching decision that still tops my list of Great Moments in Sports History...
...We shut it off before Jimmy had even got his mojo halfway worked...
...I know...
...Potential subscribers for the Salem News were thin on the ground, and to get them meant transforming my paper route from a tight little 12-minute circuit into an afternoon-consuming odyssey through neighborhoods I'd never seen before...
...I plead long hair (it was 1973) and the smoke in the gym...
...I'll give this hat," he said, "to anyone who can tell me why, when someone scores three goals, it's called a hat trick...
...Ohhhhhhhhhh...
...there were at least 200 kids there, sitting on folding chairs with their chainsmoking dads in tow...
...And the realization that for this I had saddled myself with a paper route that would have prostrated Lewis and Clark...
...Work it...
...Sorry, she did win one thing...
...She never won anything in her entire life...
...My wife was in a car dealership the other day when she was invited to enter a contest to win a four-wheel-drive Mercedes...
...The gym was stifling...
...He turned to the (now-chuckling) crowd and explained that the right answer was that in 1890-something, a Montreal hat merchant promised that anyone on the Canadiens who— I told my father we had better go...
...When Nana got home, brandishing the cassette with considerable pride, I offered to play it on my tape recorder...
...I've always been drawn to contests and games, a trait that surely comes from my grandmother...
...No handshake, no prize, no food, my eyes watering (from all the smoke, of course...
...My neighborhood was Lynn Item territory...
...Awrey started off with a contest of his own, waving an official Boston Bruins winter hat in front of the throng...
...The prize was "Got My Mojo Workin'," a tape by a jazz/fusion crooner called "The Incredible Jimmy Smith...
...There was a raffle, and in a packed room, Nana's number came up...
Vol. 3 • December 1997 • No. 12
