The Last Days of Easy Eddie : The four tickets did not win, but it was clear he would try again.

Easy Eddie has disappeared from his apartment in Fernwood, but I’m sure it isn’t a police case. I believe that he has become a victim of his own loathsome greed. Perhaps he even came face to face with the obsession that had changed him over the past months from a pleasant, spacey free-lance comedy writer into a drooling, red-eyed maniac, and it was more than he could take.

You can blame the California Lottery for that.

At one time, Eddie was a loose and amiable kind of guy, which is why everyone called him Easy Eddie, although some said he was not too tightly wrapped and was amiable only because he did not often understand what was going on around him.

Be that as it may, I liked him and respected him for the amount of effort he put into whatever writing assignment he had, whether it was for television or the print media.

We would have long conversations up at the Shemrun bar in Topanga about writing and eventually reach the stage where neither of us was making a lot of sense, except to conclude, with tears in our eyes, that it was not a good age for poets.

Eddie’s watery condition was fairly remarkable since he did not drink at all, not even wine or beer, but would become awash simply being around someone he liked who had been drinking.

He called it psychological inebriation and had it refined to the point where you would swear there was liquor on his breath, but I know for a fact that he never touched the stuff. He just wanted the person he was drinking with to feel comfortable. Tell me he wasn’t a sweetheart.

I began to notice the change in Eddie after he started buying lottery tickets. Like most writing free-lancers, he lived from job to job, but fortunately resided with a girlfriend named Laura who worked as a part-time secretary and helped run the household. They lived just above the poverty line.

I was with Eddie when he bought his first lottery ticket. He was at Vons getting some mineral water, croutons, peanut butter, tuna and alfalfa sprouts to prepare dinner that night, something he called a Perrier Delight. I never asked him what it was because the very idea of mixing those things together and eating them was more than I wanted to discuss.

Eddie ended up with exactly $1 in change from the transaction and said, “What do you do with a dollar these days?”

“Well,” I said, “you can buy a lottery ticket.”

Easy Eddie said why not and bought a ticket. He won $2. It was the first time in his life he had won anything and he was obviously elated. So he purchased two more tickets with the $2 he had won and hit $2 on each ticket. Now he had $4.

“I don’t believe this!” he said, putting down his bag of groceries.

The people in line behind him were becoming annoyed at the delay and the clerk, a nice young lady, finally said, “Sir, you’ll have to move on.”

“Sure,” Eddie said, “just give me four more lottery tickets.”

The four tickets did not win, which disappointed Eddie a lot. But it was clear he would try again. All the way back to his apartment he talked about the possibility of winning big, and I’m sure he discussed it with Laura as they were enjoying their Perrier Delight for dinner.

A few weeks later, I saw Easy Eddie again. We had invited them to dinner and he wanted to watch the news to see if anyone had won $1 million that day in the lottery spin. Laura said that was all he talked about anymore.

I forget exactly who won that day, except that he was either a Puerto Rican or a Mexican, which seemed to really get to Eddie. He began making derogatory ethnic remarks about those people winning the money he ought to have.

Laura tried to calm him down but he told her to shut up, which he had never done before, and went stomping out the front door. When I heard his car roar out the driveway, I followed him to a 7-Eleven on Ventura Boulevard.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” I demanded.

Eddie pushed past me into the store, elbowed an old lady out of the way and bought $50 worth of lottery tickets.

“You’re crazy,” I said. “That’s your rent money.”

“To hell with the rent,” Easy Eddie said, leaning on the counter to scrape the lottery symbols clear. He didn’t win a dime.

“Lend me 20,” he said.

“No way, Eddie.”

“I’ll pay it back as soon as I finish the Punky Brewster episode.”

“No!”

“Give it to me!”

He grabbed me by the lapels of my smart new London Fog jacket, which really p.o.’d me. Here was the guy I had enjoyed many a psychological drunk with threatening to punch out my lights because I would not indulge his obsession.

“Eddie,” I said, pushing him away, “you’re sick.”

He stared at me in anger for a moment, but then the rage drained to awareness. I think Easy Eddie was realizing I was right. He turned and ran out the door and I never saw him again. The moon was full. It was a beautiful night.

Laura heard from him only once. She got an envelope in the mail that contained a winning $100 lottery ticket. I guess it was Eddie’s way of saying he was sorry.