“Can I offer you a chance to buy lottery tickets for the Red Cross?”
Unlike with the newspapers, I managed to sell them! People really bought tickets from me. I tried as far as possible to be pitiful and wretched and get people to feel sorry for me. I was a little, odd, ginger kid with glasses who was somewhat weird. People opened their doors with a questioning, surprised expression.
“Can I offer you a chance to buy lottery tickets for the Red Cross?” I muttered, miserably.
Then people would get an expression of pity, especially women. People thought maybe I was with the Red Cross somehow or supported by the Red Cross, even a bit special, and so they obviously had difficulty saying no, unlike with the Scene.
I did well and earned a percentage of every ticket sold and felt that I had found a good line of work. For the first time in my life, I had money in my hands and felt I’d begun to make a little bit of a living. After my first sales, I went up to the shop on the corner of Osland and Bústaðavegur which was called Ingaskýli. I bought a Coke and some licorice and gumballs and punk cards and even a packet of fizzy drink powder. Dad would definitely have started weeping profusely if he had seen me spend this much money on such stuff. But I didn’t give a damn. It was my money that I’d worked for, and I was in charge of how I got rid of it.
My advancement as a Red Cross salesman was unexpected: I swiftly became one of the most successful sales representatives. It didn’t take long before I became a kind of wholesaler and started taking a box of one thousand tickets, which I shovelled out without delay. I found the Red Cross tickets a fascinating idea and became quite excited about it, so now and then I bought a ticket myself. The tickets were arranged vertically in a cardboard box with the edges facing up. When I ran my hand over them, I’d feel like I must have found the winning ticket, as if it was somehow different than the losing ones. But I never got any prizes, and it didn’t matter how strong the feeling was or how much the tickets shouted at me “buy me, buy me.” When I ripped them open, I always found inside “Sorry, Not a Winner.” I scrutinized the tickets carefully to see if there was any possible difference between winning tickets and the rest. They were, of course, rather primitive scratch tickets which were actually — it’s true — open at one end, but you couldn’t see anything even when you peeked in the opening. Then it occurred to me to wonder if it would be possible to see through them. I went into the storage closet where the light bulbs were kept and found a seventy-five-watt candle bulb that I put in a lamp and took with me into my room. I held the bulb up to the opening and turned it on. The font was faint, but I could discern the winning tickets by where the graphics of the lettering was different from the non-winning tickets. There was a clear difference between “Sorry, Not a Winner” and “Congratulations! You have won a Box of Chocolates from Nóa Síríus.” After this, I dutifully illuminated all the tickets I had to sell and found a few that were winners. They weren’t remarkable prizes, mostly gift baskets and boxes of candy, though mostly just candy. But over time I got several strange prizes, such as a tow hitch, which was some kind of rope system for pulling cars. It was an orange plastic tube, and out of each end you could pull iron hooks on ropes, and if you let go of them they ran back inside the tube. It was a really handy and neat tool to have in the trunk of a car. I went and got the prizes regularly from the Red Cross headquarters. They didn’t know I was a sales guy and just thought I was some amazingly lucky Red Cross supporter. I became the number one salesman — selling lottery tickets had played into my hands, an unprecedented opportunity. I got to have a sales table in Glæsibæ at Christmas. My own sales table! I sat snugly next to a large sign with the logo of the Red Cross and doled out winless tickets that I’d already shone through.
“Can I offer you a chance to buy lottery tickets for the Red Cross?”
“Yes, yes,” people said and thought it was exciting.
Most folk opened their ticket in front of me. There were no winners, not a single ticket; no one ever won anything. I didn’t have any morals, so this was fine. I felt like I wasn’t doing anything bad because the tickets were not that expensive, and no one was angry when they didn’t win. People seemed to just find it fun and exciting.
“Aha, Red Cross lottery tickets, listen, I’m going to get three tickets — and I’m going to get a prize!”
We both laughed. Of course, there was no prize.
“Listen, that was just really bad luck, I’m going to get another three tickets. Now I’ll definitely win.”
I smiled encouragingly.
That Christmas my parents, along with everyone in the family, got awesome Christmas presents from me for the first time. I said I’d purchased gifts with the money I had earned from being a salesman, but of course these were all prizes I had picked up from the Red Cross. Mom got a box of Norwegian chocolates, and Dad got the tow hitch. Aunt Gunna and Aunt Salla each got a box of chocolates. Everyone was happy and surprised because no one had ever received a Christmas gift from me before.
When a man hits on a masterstroke that enables him to cheat, it’s vital to keep quiet about it; at the same time, it’s tempting to boast about having found loopholes in the system. It is not just tempting for selfish reasons: you also want to give others a share in the discovery, and I wanted to reveal how crafty I had been in illuminating the tickets. I showed a couple of other sales guys this trick and taught them how to identify winning tickets from the rest. Two knew, then everyone knew. Next time I went to the supervisor in Fossvogur to get more tickets, I noticed she wasn’t as cheerful and high-spirited as usual. Instead of handing me a box, she asked me to sit down with her in the kitchen. I was immediately suspicious that she had found out about my trick. I was sure that somebody must have talked to her. She crossed her arms and looked hard at me.
“Is it true you’ve been looking through the tickets?”
I put on my surprised face and appeared as though I didn’t know what she meant.
“Hmmm?”
I seemed to be gaping with surprise at the very thought that someone could have such a thought in their head.
“Nahhh, who said that?”
“I was told you’d looked through the tickets and could somehow see the prizes.”
I continued looking totally amazed. How could such a crazy thought occur to someone! And who could be so obnoxious as to blame me? The most hardworking salesperson! This was nothing more than a petty swindle. I shook my head.
“Nah, I don’t think that’s even possible.”
“No, I thought not.”
She clearly thought it wasn’t credible. Maybe she didn’t believe whoever had told her? I thought it would be best to persuade her to believe that the person who told her was jealous of me because I was so hardworking and, on top of everything else, had the most sales of all.
“Who said it was possible?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes. No, I’ve never done it,” I said innocently, smiled and then added:
“I don’t think it’s even possible.”
She looked at me thoughtfully.
“No, well, it doesn’t matter.”
“No, so I just want to get some more tickets,” I said, in a livelier tone.
She was hesitant.
“The thing is, I just have so many people now who are selling and I simply don’t have any tickets for you. But thank you, and do come talk to me next winter.”