113: Windfall

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.

Ira Glass

Not that long ago, Todd Powell won $27 million from the Florida State Lottery. Up until that point, he made his living working long hours in the ice and snow on the Alaska pipeline. He sat on the bed the morning he won watching them draw the numbers on television, his bags packed to head north to Alaska.

Ira Glass

Money changes things. And a lot of money changes a lot of things. People Todd had known his whole life were nervous talking with him. Strangers wrote asking for money, sometimes for a lot of money. There were family troubles.

Ira Glass

He couldn't sleep at night, couldn't eat, lost 26 pounds. He only weighed 154 when he won the lottery. There were fights over money with his wife. They got divorced. He lent friends money who not only never paid it back, they avoided him. They got indignant when he asked for the money, saying he couldn't possibly miss a few thousand bucks. It changes you, all that.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our program, windfalls and the power of money for good and bad over our own lives. Act One, Reservations. A story of an entire community that is turning its back on a fortune, and why that might not last. Act Two, But Baby It's Cold Outside. Writer Dan Savage, and how a windfall check he got in the mail is hurting his family life. Act Three, Money is Good. How one woman learned to stop worrying and start spending, spending, spending. Act Four, Pot of Gold. Scott Carrier tells the story of someone's life that improved with a huge insurance settlement even though the money never arrived. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Reservations. Nine years ago, a Native American tribe in Minnesota, the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, built a casino. The reservation had been poor for a century. Soon they were the second biggest tourist attraction in the state, second only to the Mall of America. Soon they had hundreds of millions of dollars. And it's unclear what to do with all that cash. Alix Spiegel visited.

Alix Spiegel

It's 8 o'clock on a Monday morning, and there are 1,000 people on the floor of the Grand Casino. 1,000 people have showered, brushed their hair and teeth, put on clothing, and traveled-- some of them significant distances-- to the Grand, where they're now pouring money into slot machines with an enthusiasm I don't usually associate with 8:00 AM Monday morning. I've been told a number of times by the people running the Grand that I'm not supposed to interview casino patrons with my tape machine. So I change a five and walk around with a bucket full of nickels, trying to look friendly.

I sit down next to a gray-haired man at a quarter slot and get as far as hello before he tells me to go away, I'm gambling, which I do. I walk a couple aisles over and take a seat next to a woman with two small pictures of her grandchildren propped up on the deck of her slot machine. Her name is Donna. She's 67 and travels every Monday from her home an hour way to gamble at the Grand. She plays from 8:00 in the morning until 2:00 in the afternoon and then returns home to work at her job as a bartender for the legion club.

A couple times a month, she'll come to the casino with her husband, the farmer. And even though she's 67 and he's 74, they'll stay up all night gambling. On special occasions, like their birthday, they'll rent a room at the hotel next door. She tells me that the casino relaxes her. She says she saw on TV that they pump special oxygen through the air ducts in the ceiling, and she thinks this might have something to do with it.

I'm here to do a story about the Grand Casino, about how the nickels pushed into slot machines by people like Donna have changed life on the Ojibwe reservation. So I try to interest Donna in a conversation about the people she's been feeding her paycheck to for the last two years. Donna isn't interested. She doesn't even remember the name of the tribe which owns the casino. She, like the other thousand people sitting on the casino floor, is just here looking for easy money.

Of course, the odds are stacked in the house's favor. So their pursuit of this windfall simply produces a windfall for someone else, the Ojibwe tribe. I try to talk about this with Donna as she works the buttons of her Wheel of Fortune slot. But she just nods, keeps her eyes glued to the spinning video screen in front of her, and lets me talk.

Alix Spiegel

Kenny Weyaus takes me on a tour of the Ojibwe reservation to show me what's new. A lot is new. We drive past new duplex homes on a new road with new curbing and new street lighting. We turn at the new water tower and circle the new spiritual center.

Kenny is a member of the Ojibwe tribe and a tour guide at the Native American museum. Our interview was set up by a PR guy who told me that Kenny knows as much about the Ojibwe as anyone in the tribe. He's 57 and has lived away from the reservation only twice, once after high school, when he moved south to train in the army, and again after his marriage, when the reservation economy was so poor he had to move to Minneapolis to find work.

All of this new dazzles Kenny. It means, among other things, that he won't have to move away from the reservation again. And as we pass each new building, he recites the date of its opening. The new museum, May 18, 1996. The new health clinic, December 12, 1992. We idle in the parking lot of the new lower school and admire the new playground, then drive down the street to yet another new cedar wood building.

Alix Spiegel

As we circle to exit the school parking lot, I notice a freestanding, double-wide trailer tucked just behind the school's southern wing. It has colored paper pasted to its windows and some chipper looking signs.

Alix Spiegel

Then we drive deeper into the reservation. We pass a dilapidated trailer and another, some HUD housing.

Alix Spiegel

Kenny doesn't say much about the broken-down trailers and public housing. But just across from the comfortable looking, middle-class homes the casino built, there are beat up trailers, trash-strewn yards, little kids walking barefoot around broken glass in a driveway, and the general feeling that things aren't going so well. The Niagara of money pouring into slot machines across the street clearly isn't reaching everyone. And this, in a funny way, is the choice of the tribal government, which takes a moment to explain.

Of the 545 Native American tribes in the US, about 226 have gambling casinos. But most of these operations are too far away from a concentrated population to make any real money. Only a few, around 5%, generate significant profits. The Ojibwe are one of these tribes. So are the Mashantucket Pequot in Connecticut and the Ojibwe's neighbors, the Shakopee tribe, who have a casino just south of Minneapolis at Prior Lake.

But the Pequot and the Shakopee are doing something very different with their windfalls. They're distributing the profits to their members on a per capita basis, which means that each month, every tribal member gets a check in the mail for their fair share of annual casino profits. The tribes don't publicize how large these checks are. Published accounts, which the Shakopee won't confirm, say that each Shakopee member gets $40,000 to $50,000 a month, which is a lot of money. And I should say here, that the Ojibwe tribe could never offer their members a payment of that size. Although it'd still be a lot by anyone's standards, conservative estimates are about $10,000 per year for every man, woman, and child in the tribe.

I ask Kenny if he'd prefer a system of per capita payments instead of a program of investing in buildings and social programs, as the Ojibwe have. And he doesn't pause at all. He doesn't want the money.

Alix Spiegel

Over the next couple days, I go out with a number of people from the tribe, nice, newly middle-class people set up for me by the PR man who's acting as my liaison. And whenever I ask them whether they'd want more money, say, in the form of per capita payments, their faces tighten, answers get general, and they all say no. They don't want per capita. They want everything to stay the way it is.

Like Kenny, they allude to the old ways. And I come to understand that the old ways is a euphemism for joblessness, alcoholism, and drug abuse. It's a difficult and embarrassing thing to talk about because it plays into ugly stereotypes about Native Americans and alcoholism. Because they're basically saying they think they could handle the money, but they worry that their family and neighbors can't. When I press one woman to articulate what she thinks will happen if they distribute the money, she tells me to turn off the tape recorder, then leans forward until I can see the pores in her nose. Easy money, she tells me, is dangerous. And this is where our interview ends.

Early in the evening, I go driving on the reservation. In front of a row of HUD homes, I find two teenagers, Marcus and Wesley. As I drive up, they're running circles around an older man who's clearly inebriated. They're laughing, waving their hands in his face, taunting him as he tries to make his way down the street. I roll down my window and ask what they're up to, and the smaller one, Marcus, tells me they're terrorizing drunks.

So I get out of my rental, and we stand together on the street, watching the cars pass, talking about the casino, basically marking time until another victim stumbles by. Marcus and Wesley aren't impressed with what the casino money has accomplished for their community. They hold forth on the thesis that everyone on the reservation is still poor and still tired of not having anything and that everyone except the government wants per capita payments.

As we talk, another old man staggers down the street towards us. He has two young girls with him. The older one holds his upper arm tightly and tries to steer him away from the curb. The younger ones skips behind and in front of him, almost under his feet.

Alix Spiegel

We wait some more. Every time a car goes by, Marcus waves at the person inside. I ask who it is, and he tells me it's his cousin.

Alix Spiegel

Two cousins pass. Three cousins pass. Four cousins pass.

Alix Spiegel

Pretty soon another figure staggers down the road in our direction. It's Wesley's cousin, Billy.

Alix Spiegel

Billy used to work at the casino but got laid off. Now he lives with a family he says can't support him and gets by on welfare checks. Everyone agrees that about half the tribe wants per capitas. And it's people like Billy, the people who are worst off, who tend to want them the most.

Alix Spiegel

Marge Anderson is the chief of the Ojibwe tribe. She's a small woman who sits in a large office with all the props of the executive around her, a small golf green, a big mahogany desk, a mug with the appropriate observation about where the buck stops, and pictures. Marge with Bill Clinton, Marge with Bruce Springsteen, Marge smiling with Johnny Cash.

Marge has been tribal chief since '91, when the casino opened. She's the person who has presided over the tribe's economic boom. The person who built the roads and built the schools, and through sheer force of will, made the reservation a much better place than it was 10 years ago. She's also the main opponent of distributing profits through per capita payments, though it's such a sensitive issue right now that when I ask her about it, she tells me to turn off my tape recorder.

Finally, I get her to say this on tape--

Alix Spiegel

Marge knows that many people in the tribe want per caps. She even knows this may cost her her job. In the last election, the tribe voted in a new secretary treasurer who ran on a per capita platform, promising to give more casino money directly to tribal members. And Marge is worried that he might disrupt the work she's accomplished. And she's getting tired. She sighs and tells me that her job takes too much time. She's frequently away on weekends. She says she's afraid that her grandchildren won't know her.

In addition to the problem of trying to convince a group of people who are poor that they should not vote themselves more money, she's now fending off her white neighbors who are threatening to take away the casino and the casino profits entirely.

Alix Spiegel

In part, it's this possibility, that the casino will be taken away, that gives such urgency to Marge's opposition to per capita payments. She feels the tribe must use every scrap of money that they have to diversify their economy, create an economy that is not dependent on the casino. So she's buying pizza franchises and investing in bottled water, and generally pouring the tribe's money into industries which aren't subject to the whims of state legislators. She feels there is a window here, just a brief sliver of time, before the jealousy of their white neighbors or the innate attraction of easy money overwhelms them.

Alix Spiegel

When I met Mishkoob, he had just come back from collecting signatures. He had a clipboard with Mille Lacans for Progress written on top and five new names penciled on the petition. The PR man at the casino warned me that Mishkoob was a zealot and a radical. And when I sit down at his kitchen table, there are charts and graphs everywhere, heaped in piles on the floors, scattered over the desk by the window. And then, suspended from a hook on the wall by the desk, an unsteady looking bar chart which tracks the growth of the Ojibwe government's budget. Mishkoob pounds the kitchen table and makes his argument.

Alix Spiegel

Mishkoob's heard the arguments against per capita. He's heard the rumors that other tribes who have tried the per capita system have had problems with boozing or lack of motivation, but dismisses the possibility that these problems will afflict the Ojibwe.

Alix Spiegel

That night, I run into Marcus, Wesley, and their friend Courtney at the casino, and we all pile into the rental and go cruising. It was supposed to be the first day of school for Marcus and Courtney, but Marcus hasn't enrolled yet, and Courtney got suspended for setting fires in the time out room. So no one in the car had anything to do in the morning but me.

We visit a friend of theirs, Rae Ann, but the boys are restless. They want to go riding. They want to turn donuts in the dirt road behind the casino. They want to go tail whipping down at Moon Lake. They want to do these things in the rental. Mostly though, they want me to buy them alcohol.

Alix Spiegel

I offer McDonald's instead, my treat. There's general approval and we leave Rae Ann and drive north for cheeseburgers.

In the car, we talk mostly girls, automobiles, and the supernatural. Wesley tells me that ghosts walk the shoulders of the roads at night. He says they're all around the woods. In the western part of the reservation, an area called The Point is filled with them at night. Finally, we finish our McDonald's run and drive down to a park by the lake to eat. The park is empty, just a picnic table, some scattered trash, and us.

We sit together in the car, eating sweet and salty food. And when we finish, I tell them about my conversation with Marge, about how she wants to save the casino money. So that if the white people take the casino away, there will still be industry on the res. Her fear that people will take the money and blow it on drink and drugs. Marcus and Wesley are quiet, but Courtney pipes up.

Alix Spiegel

There's a wall of winners at the Grand Casino. It's covered ceiling to ground with framed photographs of jackpot winners. Most of them look frenzied with happiness. They hold fans of money over open mouths, balance oversized checks on their hips. And in the middle of the wall of photos, there's a picture frame, the same size and shape as the others, with a mirrored surface, where the winner's picture would be, and the words, this could be you, written in block lettering. It's a hard message to resist.

[MUSIC - "AMERICA" BY LITTLE JACK MELODY AND HIS YOUNG TURKS]

Ira Glass

Act Two, But Baby It's Cold Outside. Now this story of how a sudden influx of money affected one otherwise happy home, that of writer Dan Savage in Seattle. A warning to some listeners, Dan mentions the fact that he's a homosexual in the upcoming story.

Dan Savage

The check came in the mail. I didn't even get to see it, never got to hold it in my hand and marvel at the string of zeroes that came before the decimal point. My boyfriend Terry deposited the check as if it were any old check that came in the mail to our house. Our money goes straight into our joint checking account, so I never got to see our check. But this wasn't like any of our other checks. This was the single largest check ever made out in my name that didn't arrive in a yellow envelope with Ed McMahon's picture on it.

I write a sex advice column. And a book publisher got this crazy idea that they might make money for themselves by publishing a collection of my old columns. On the expectation that they would make money, the publisher gave me some money. I rewrote my old columns, and shortly before the book came out, they sent me a check.

I don't have it in me to tell you how much this check was for. I couldn't stand to hear from people that I got paid too much or too little. And it's hard for me to talk about money anyway. Money was scarce when I was a kid. My parents had four kids in Catholic schools and braces, and paying for it all on a Chicago cop's salary was not easy. Conversations about money were unpleasant. My family avoided talking about money just like we avoided talking about how drunk Grandma always seemed to be.

So I can't bring myself to tell you how much this windfall came to. But I will say this, it was in the low to high-mid five figures, OK? It was 10 times as much money as I made the year I turned 30. Enough money to make me feel so monumentally guilty, that after Terry told me the check came, I had to lie down in a dark room for the rest of the afternoon.

Before the money had a chance to settle into our checking account and get acquainted with what little bit of money was already there, my boyfriend Terry was making plans to spend it and spend all of it. Terry likes spending money, especially our money, which I like to think of as my money, since I earn it. But I have to push these thoughts out of my head and let Terry regard my money as his. That's the deal we made when we decided to adopt.

Terry quit working to stay at home with the baby for a couple of years. We're having a family the old-fashioned way. Our relationship, with the exception of the two penises thing, is very traditional. Terry stays at home and takes care of the baby. I go out in the world and make the money. In other words, a stay-at-home fag, a go-to-work fag, and one little baby's sexual orientation to be determined at a later date. As Terry sees it, it's my job to make money, and his job to spend it.

I, however, cannot spend money. When I was growing up, spending money was just as painful as talking about money. More. My mom would drive all four of us out to the Sears at Irving and Western in Chicago at the beginning of the school year. While my brothers and sister ran around oblivious to what was actually going on, sensitive little faggy me would see the tortured look on my mother's face as she realized she couldn't afford back-to-school clothes for all of us. Then I'd watch her pull out her Sears credit card, pray it wasn't maxed out, and hand it to the sales clerk.

On two occasions when it was just mom and me, her Sears card was maxed out. Seeing my mom turn red and say no when the clerk asked if she could pay cash was heartbreaking. To this day, I hate to shop. I don't do malls or department stores or boutiques or even catalogs. High-tech options are no better. I get the same sick feeling surfing into the virtual Gap that I get walking into an actual Gap.

But Terry loves to shop. Traditional enough to begin with, our relationship is never quite so comically traditional as it is when we fight about money. Or I should say, when we fight about how Terry spends money, my money. After the baby came and Terry stopped working, I thought I'd managed to pound some sense into his head. We couldn't live paycheck to paycheck now that we had a baby. We needed money in the bank in case the baby got leukemia or something, or if I did. Terry saw the logic, and we agreed we would both buy less and save more.

That's not how it worked out. Buying less was easy enough for me, as I never bought much to begin with. But spending money, including money he did not have, was always Terry's hobby. And pretty soon Terry was taking the baby for walks through Old Navy and Nordstrom's and Barnes and Noble. When the baby was asleep at home, Terry was getting online and buying CDs.

Now, this is where it gets comic, sitcom-ic. Think Lucy and Ricky. Since he knows it makes me angry when he spends money on stuff we really don't need, clothes, shoes, music, money we might need if the baby or I get leukemia or something, my boyfriend always hides the things he buys. But since we live in a very small house, there aren't many places to hide things. So I go into a closet looking for my shoes or a coat, and I find a shopping bag hidden behind our old clothes full of brand new clothes, or a box of new CDs.

A la Ricky Ricardo, I storm into the living room and ask-- and I apologize in advance for my lousy, mock Cuban accent-- honey, what is this, holding up the bag. A la Lucy Ricardo, Terry denies ever having seen the bag before. Well, how did this get into our closet, then, I ask. I don't know, pouts Terry. Oh, Lucy, I exclaim. Whaa, cries Terry.

These were the dynamics at play when the big check arrived, the one with all those zeroes. Our windfall took a bad situation and made it much, much worse. In my mind, what had been a little gun in Terry's hand, our checking account, became a nuclear weapon. If it had been up to me, we wouldn't have deposited that check. After all, if we didn't cash it, it couldn't hurt us or change anything.

So a few days after Terry deposited our check, I did something patriarchal, very Father Knows Best. Something unlike anything I'd ever done before. Out of our joint checking account, I wrote myself a check for the full amount of my advance and deposited that check in an account only I have access to, my old savings account. I was afraid that if I left our money in our joint checking account, our windfall would disappear one afternoon while I was at work. Oh yeah, I knew Terry could spend the entire amount, the whole low to high-mid five figures, at one go.

I moved the money out of our checking account after Terry made the mistake of telling me what he wanted to buy with it, a new car. I think that's a bad idea for several reasons. First, it appears the planet is about to fall into a worldwide economic recession-cum-depression. And people tend to need less sex advice in a recession. And I'm concerned that the sex advice business, like liposuction and website design, might dry up if everyone is standing in bread lines or jumping out windows. I'd rather have the money in the bank.

Secondly, I don't want a car. I'm 34. I've never owned a car. I don't know how to drive. I suggested to Terry that we buy a beat-up old car, something priced in the low four figures or high three. But he insisted we needed a new car, not for us, but for the baby. We need a safe car, a Volvo or something. He promises no more shopping once we've got it. And if me or the baby does come down with leukemia, Terry pointed out, he'll need a new car to get us back and forth to our chemotherapy appointments. And he swears that if we buy a car, we'll eat nothing but macaroni and cheese and wear only rags for the rest of our lives. At war with my inner voices, I agree to spend our money to buy us a car that I can't drive.

Terry has started shopping with a vengeance. He's reading books on smart car buying, visiting all the internet sites, getting advice from people with experience buying cars. While Terry shops, I worry. Early in our relationship, when we first moved in with each other, one of my first official acts as Terry's boyfriend was to pay off his low to mid-low four figure credit card debt. He was supposed to pay me back a certain amount every month, but after three months, I told him to stop. We'd already merged our checking accounts, so the check he was writing me every month came out of our checking account. And I would put the money back into our checking account, and Terry would spend it. It was all a little silly, so I told him to stop, and I joked about having bought myself a boyfriend.

As time went on and I started making enough money that we could contemplate Terry not working, I stopped joking about buying a boyfriend, because sometimes I worry that's exactly what I've done. Is Terry just another windfall? I love Terry, but does Terry love me? Or does he love not having to worry, for the time being at least, about supporting himself? Or if that's why he loves me, is that OK? There are lots of reasons people love their partners. And the notion that the only valid one is sexual passion is pretty limiting. Maybe part of the reason Terry loves me is because checks come in the mail. And maybe that is OK.

More than any other force in a relationship, more even than sex-- and I say this to you as a sex columnist-- money always seems to push people to the extremes of their characters. Money turns ordinary people into caricatures of themselves. Money was a large part of what destroyed my parent's marriage. And now I find myself worrying that money concerns, who makes it, how it's spent, the pressure I'm under to make more, the pressure Terry's under to spend less, will do long-term harm to my relationship with Terry. Because the problem with money is that money problems are never just about money. They're about who you are. And right now in our house, there are only two options. You're either Lucy or you're Ricky.

Ira Glass

If Dan Savage has offended you in some way over the years, if you hate his sex advice column, if you want for some reason to destroy his personal life, you can do it by buying his new book, Savage Love: Straight Answers from America's Most Popular Sex Columnist. Coming up, money is good not bad, even money you don't have. Two case studies. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Windfall. What happens to you when you make the big score, for better and for worse. And up until the point in this program, I'd have the moral of every story has been very-- how to say this-- it's been very public radio. That is, the lesson of every story has been money is scary. Money is bad. Money can lead to dangerous feelings and things and make people unhappy. And so as an antidote to that, in this half of our program, we bring you stories of money actually doing people some good.

Ira Glass

We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, Money is Good. Picture, please, this couple. When Elizabeth was seven, her father sat her and her 10-year-old sister down at the kitchen table with a bunch of charts, a bar graph, showing what college tuition would cost by the time each of them hit 18, and how much of that Elizabeth and her sister would be expected to pay themselves, and how they should start earning and saving right away.

Ira Glass

Meanwhile, four states away, same year, 1978, when Mike was 11, his mom woke up him, his brothers, and his sister in the middle of the night, dragged them down to their dining table where their dad was sitting with some paper lunch bags.

Ira Glass

His dad had been to the races, won the trifecta. But he did not put it away for the kid's college or invest it or pay off the mortgage or save anything.

Ira Glass

Two decades later, this man meets this woman. Situation, he'd just lost his job. It was rough. Needed to drink. Her situation, she had a job tending bar. And the money thing came up pretty fast.

Ira Glass

Liz Gilbert is a writer at large for GQ Magazine. Michael Cooper is the director of a human rights foundation.

[MUSIC - "DIAMONDS AND PEARLS" BY PRINCE]

Ira Glass

Act Four, Pot of Gold. If a windfall can change your life, can your life also be changed by a windfall that you simply believe will occur? We have this story from Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City.

Ira Glass

Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself, with Nancy Updike and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Alex Blumberg did our interview today with the lottery winner, Todd Powell, at the top of the show. If you'd like to buy a cassette of our program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Our email address, [email protected]. Or you know you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia who said this, when he discovered that i'd bought all that new equipment for the studio without telling him--

Dan Savage

Honey, what is this?

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass.

Dan Savage

Well, how did this get in your closet, then?

Ira Glass

Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

PRI, Public Radio International.