Literature / Lucky You

Lucky You is a 1997 novel by Florida humorist Carl Hiaasen.

JoLayne Lucks is an African-American veterinary assistant living in the small rural town of Grange, Florida, who happens to hold one of two winning tickets to the Florida State Lottery. Unbeknownst to and unfortunately for her, the other winning ticket is held by Bodean "Bode" Gazzer and his best friend "Chub", two dull-witted white supremacists who become solidly convinced that they are entitled to have both winning tickets, if they want to fund their new militia movement in time to stop NATO from invading the United States from their secret bases in the Bahamas. A vicious beatdown ensues, but JoLayne, far from being cowed, becomes set on getting her ticket back, and enlists Tom Krome, the newspaper reporter sent to interview her about her good fortune. Hijinks ensue, including house fires, the kidnapping of a Hooters waitress, the faces of the Twelve Apostles appearing on the backs of turtles, and a deranged confrontation on a remote island in Florida Bay.

A theatrical adaptation was produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2008.

Has nothing to do with the 2007 film Lucky You starring Eric Bana and Drew Barrymore.

Lucky You contains examples of:

• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Dominic Amador, an incompetent building contractor, lost his contracting license after a catechism school he had worked on collapsed.
  So one night he got hammered on Black Jack and Xanax and, using a ⅜ inch wood bit, drilled a perfect hole in each of his palms.
• And I'm the Queen of Sheba: When Moffitt, an ATF agent, confronts Bernard Squires, a mob lawyer, Squires insists his client, Richard "Icepick" Tarbone (whom he denies being his client), is a legitimate Chicago businessman, to which Moffitt responds, "Sure he is, and I'm Little Richard's love child."
• Arc Words: "It's your lucky day."
• As the Good Book Says...: As Bode is reading a white supremacist pamphlet that labels minorities as "descended from Satan":
  Amber: Where does it say that in the scriptures?
  Bode: Oh, it's in there. "Those who lay down with Satan shall bring forth from his demon seed only children of darkness and deceit."
  Bode was winging it; he hadn't cracked a Bible since junior high.
• Back-Alley Doctor: JoLayne Lucks was trained as a registered nurse and her first job was working in an ER, but she prefers working in a vet's office. She starts to treat Chub (one of the men who attacked and robbed her):
  Chub: You ain't no doctor.
  JoLayne: No, but I work in a doctor's office. An animal doctor... and you're about the dumbest, smelliest critter I ever saw.
• Being Evil Sucks: The villains of Hiaasen's novels, in their ruthless, single-minded pursuit of money, sex and power, often end up getting it, and it's miserable. Bode Gazzer and "Chub", after beating and robbing JoLayne Lucks, are in possession of two winning lottery tickets worth a total of $28 million. But to cover their crime, Bode insists they have to hide for a few days on a remote island in the Florida Keys, which leads to Chub running their stolen boat aground and trying to push it free:
  The mud sucked at Chub's legs, and his bare skin stung from the sea lice. Fastening to his arms and belly were tiny purple leeches, no larger than rice kernels, which he swatted away savagely. Additional concern was generated by an exotic tingle in his crotch, and it occurred to Chub that some exotic parasite might have entered his body by swimming into the hole of his pecker. No other millionaire in the entire world, he thought rancorously, had these kinds of problems.
• Believing Your Own Lies: Bode Gazzer, the self-proclaimed founder of a white supremacist militia (which consists entirely of himself and two other people) insists on being addressed as "Colonel."
• Bigotry Exception: JoLayne Lucks, a former nurse now working as a veterinarian's assistant, is so good at her job that several of the county's most bigoted white people who bring their pets to her confess that she is the only black person they have ever liked or trusted.
• Black Comedy:
  • One of the townspeople in Grange drilled holes through his own hands in the middle of a drinking binge. Upon recovering, he claimed them to be magically appearing stigmata referencing Jesus' crucifixion and spends a while going around trying to get someone to drill holes through his feet as well to further sell it. He is absurdly proud when he finally gets it done, and shows off the bleeding holes in his feet to everyone:
    Amber looked away. This surely could be explained, she thought. A toxic contamination in the town's water supply, a radiation leakage in the maternity ward...
  • In the epilogue, Chub dies of thirst after being marooned and failing to use a pair of Hooters shorts to flag down a plane.
• Deep South: Several of Hiaasen's characters move to Florida expecting it to fulfill most of the Deep South archetypes, only to be severely disillusioned by some communities' ethnic diversity and tolerance of minorities and liberal politics, especially in South Florida. Bode Gazzer, the self-proclaimed white supremacist and militia leader, reflects:
  He had become thoroughly fed up with Miami. Everywhere you turned there were goddamn foreigners, and when you came across a real, English-speaking white person, there was a better-than-even chance he'd turn out to be a Jew, or some ultra-liberal screamer.
  • He starts to fantasize about Idaho as a promised land for white supremacists, where "he felt sure the minorities out west were more docile and easily intimidated."
• Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: Bode Gazzer and "Chub", find themselves the legitimate owners of a winning lottery ticket worth $14 million - and immediately decide that they need to beat up and rob the owner of the other winning ticket, to thwart the U.S. government's plan to screw them out of the other $14 million.
• Dying Alone: After Bode Gazzer dies of blood loss, Chub is alone on Pearl Key, having elected to be stranded there instead of accompanying Krome and JoLayne back to the mainland to be arrested. By the time his water and food are gone, he is frantically trying to signal planes passing overhead, not caring whether he goes to prison for the rest of his life if it means not dying of thirst on the island. But since his parents disowned him, he disavowed his family, and the closest thing he had to a friend in the world is buzzard bait next to him, there's no one left on earth who knows he's missing, is looking for him, or gives a rat's ass if he dies.
• Entitled to Have You: Bode Gazzer's attitude towards JoLayne Lucks' winning lottery ticket. In his Insane Troll Logic world, winning one-half of a $28 million jackpot is proof that the government is trying to screw him out of the other half.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Chub is secretly relieved to find out that the holder of the other winning lottery ticket is black, reflecting that if she'd been a white woman, especially an elderly white woman "like his granny" he wouldn't have been able to go through with robbing her (let alone savagely beating her).
• The Fettered: Even after quitting his newspaper job to help JoLayne Lucks, Tom Krome still cares enough about the tenets of journalism to carefully note the particulars of what is happening, as if he is reporting the story;
• Gun Stripping: How Bode attempts to intimidate the "watchers" he is sure are lurking in the woods. It fails miserably when he's unable to put the assault rifle back together.
  He thought, how hard can this be? Chub can do it when he's drunk!
• Hanlon's Razor: Averted. Once Bode Gazzer learns that someone is following his fledgling white supremacist militia, his paranoia quickly fastens on the "only two possible explanations": a government agency is tracking them by spy satellite, or one of his cohorts has "leaked" to the enemy. To be fair, the latter is closer to the truth, which is that Bode idiotically decided to use JoLayne Lucks' stolen credit card to finance their road trip after the theft, thus ensuring that no matter where he runs to, the one person on earth who can track him down is the woman he and Chub robbed and savagely beat up.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: JoLayne Lucks, who is recovering from a vicious beating from two white supremacist thugs, returns to her work at a veterinary clinic; when her boss compliments her for keeping her cool after a dog bites her thumb, she responds, "you'd do the same thing if you had a dog's brain. I've seen humans with less of an excuse do worse."
• Inherent in the System: ATF Agent Moffitt, reviewing Bode Gazzer's extensive criminal history, is not the least bit surprised that "despite his many crimes, Bodean James Gazzer had cumulatively spent less than twenty-three months of his whole worthless life behind bars."
• Idiot Ball:
  • Onus Dean Gillespie, a.k.a. "Chub", when he isn't "stoned to the gills", displays flashes of common sense that are lost on his partner, Bode Gazzer. These include: 1) winning $14 million in the state lottery is a good thing, not the latest evidence of the government conspiring against the ordinary white man; 2) even though the lottery prize will be paid in installments, and subject to taxes, it is still more money than either of them has ever seen or could ever hope to earn or steal in their lifetimes; 3) robbing and assaulting the owner of the other winning ticket might complicate the collection of their legitimate winnings; and 4) using said owner's stolen credit card to fund their shopping sprees and drunken nights at a Hooters is "risky to the point of stupid." Unfortunately, because Chub is too lazy to argue against his partner's Insane Troll Logic, he lets himself get dragged along on these idiotic ventures.
  • Judge Arthur Battenkill, Jr., realizing that he's about to be arrested and indicted for felony murder, hurriedly packs a suitcase and makes plans to leave the country... then spends a leisurely time in his home showering, shaving, and getting dressed for his new life in the Bahamas, allowing the police to pull up outside his front door a good ten minutes before he walks out.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Guns in every flavor are so abundant in Florida that few people take the time to become halfway decent shots.
• Insane Troll Logic: Conspiracy Theorist white supremacist Bode Gazzer inherited his teacher parents' rhetorical skills and added his own "boundless" creativity. His myriad theories would be funny if they didn't serve as justification for his chronic laziness and racist violence:
  • Handicapped parking spaces are actually earmarked for the "blue-helmeted" NATO troops posed to invade the United States from hidden bases in the Bahamas;
  • Seat belts were designed to keep patriotic Americans trapped in their cars when the invasion happens;
  • Holiday airplane crashes are deliberately engineered by the FAA to ensure themselves Christmas bonuses;
  • The NOAA has deliberately mislabeled nautical charts to prevent survivalists from finding refuge in the Florida Keys;
  • The U.S. government is deliberately preventing "Christian white men" from winning the Florida lottery, which explains why Bode and Chub only won half of the $28 million jackpot, instead of the whole prize;
  • Using JoLayne Lucks's stolen credit card at a gun show will send the show's "disguised ATF agents" on a wild goose chase after JoLayne (instead of making it ridiculously easy for JoLayne to track the men who assaulted and robbed her).
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: After subduing the two men who beat up and robbed her, JoLayne Lucks tries to understand why they did it in the first place:
  • Treating Chub's gunshot wound, she examines his unconscious face, and concludes, "if there was a telltale mark, a congenital feature identifying the man as a cruel sociopath, JoLayne couldn't find it. His face was no different than that of a thousand other white guys she knew, living out hard, fumbling lives - not all of them were impossible racists."
  • When Bode Gazzer is lying on a beach, bleeding to death from a stab wound inflicted by a stingray, JoLayne pleads with him to stay awake and explain why he and his partner targeted her to beat up and rob. Bode retreats into half-baked racial assertions, "We believe in the supremacy of the white race, if that's what you mean. We believe the Bible preaches genetic p-p-purity." When JoLayne demands to know what she or any other black person ever did to him, he mumbles, "prison one time, there was a Negro that stole the magazines out from under my bunk... another time, they got my car stereo. Either them or Cubans for sure."
• Karmic Death: Bodean Gazzer, a self-proclaimed survivalist and militia leader, takes refuge on an uninhabited island in the Florida Keys to hide from the vast forces he believes are pursuing him; but being too lazy to do any actual research about Florida's wildlife, he mistakes a stingray for a large grouper and kicks it - with fatal results.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Bode Gazzer's primary "hat". Between television, "a series of unhealthy friendships", and a stack of pamphlets published by other Right Wing Militia Fanatics, Bode fancies himself an expert on the federal government, the Tri-Lateral Commission, handling assault weapons, and wilderness survival. Most of what he "knows" is just his wild imagination compensating for him being too lazy to learn or practice any of what he claims to understand.
• Lazy Alias: Onus Dean Gillespie, after being disowned by his family, adopted his childhood nickname of "Chub", and "decided to wait until something good popped into his head" for a surname. The mail in his dingy house trailer is addressed to "C. Smith," "C. Jones" or "Mr. Chub."
• Moral Myopia:
  • Tom Krome's girlfriend, Katie Battenkill, is married to a Circuit Court Judge. Her husband, Arthur, has been cheating on her for years, but becomes a jealous maniac when Katie confesses her affair to him.
  • After JoLayne and Tom subdue Bode and Chub, JoLayne calmly extracts a lottery ticket from his wallet, replacing the one they stole from her; Bode blurts "that ain't yours!" in protest.
• Named After Somebody Famous: Thomas Paine Krome
• The Napoleon: Bode Gazzer is "five foot six and had never forgiven his parents for it." Literally everything that goes wrong with his life, he blames on his shortness, which he blames on his (equally short) parents, despite or because of the fact that his brothers have the same genes but are of average height.
• Never My Fault: Bode Gazzer "has spent thirty-one years perfecting the art of assigning blame." His efforts at Implausible Deniability are the only funny things about his otherwise violent and racist actions:
  By the time they'd reached Pearl Key, Bodean Gazzer and Chub were barely speaking. At issue was the newly-purchased marine chart of Florida Bay, which neither of them were able to decipher. Chub blamed Bode, and Bode blamed the mapmakers from the National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration, who (he insisted) had purposely mislabeled the back-country channels to thwart the flight of survivalists... this time, Chub wasn't buying it.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Bode and Chub's incoherent white-supremacist views (and their blinding stupidity on other topics) are pathetic enough to almost be funny, at least for the first few chapters. Then they give JoLayne a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown for the offense of being a black woman in possession of a winning lottery ticket. And threaten her turtles for good measure.
• Not Used to Freedom: A subtle example. Bodean James "Bode" Gazzer has "spent thirty-one years perfecting the art of assigning blame" for his sorry excuse for a life. When being the (legitimate) owner of a $14 million lottery ticket offers him an easy road to making all his dreams come true, he does everything in his imagination, consciously or unconsciously, to avoid collecting the prize, because he needs to bitch about how unfair life is to him the way other men need oxygen to breathe.
• Nudity Equals Honesty: JoLayne Lucks quickly gets the better of Tom Krome by forcing him, at gunpoint, to strip down and climb into her bathtub just as she's vacated it, while she questions him about his assignment to interview her for a newspaper story. He reflects that he's dealt with all manner of reluctant interviewees, but he's never felt so uniquely disarmed.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: ATF Agent Moffitt is usually the Consummate Professional, but he is so enraged by the white supremacist and anti-government "decorations" of Bode Gazzer's apartment that it brings out his mischievous streak and leads him to spend a few extra minutes on a Paranoia Gambit.
  Moffitt could not just simply slip away and allow such shitheads to go on with their warped lives, exactly as before. After all, how often does one get the opportunity to make a lasting impression upon paranoid sociopaths? Not often enough. Moffitt felt morally obligated to fuck with Bodean James Gazzer's head.
• Paranoia Gambit: Moffitt, "inspired by the shadowy trappings of hate" in Bode Gazzer's apartment, leaves an ominous message on the wall of the apartment ("WE KNOW EVERYTHING") in the hope that it will panic Bode and Chub into reckless, self-destructive flight. It works like a charm.
• Reckless Gun Usage: In an effort to intimidate the shadowy forces he is sure are watching him, Bode Gazzer brazenly decides to clean and strip an assault rifle on the tailgate of his truck in full view of cars passing him on the highway. The display falls apart when Bode (who's been shown the process but never practiced it) can't put the thing back together.
• Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: Bode fashions an identity for himself as one, and Chub follows along:
  It was inevitable that the poacher and the counterfeiter would bond, sharing as they did a blanket contempt for government, taxes, gun laws, liberals, environmentalists, assertive women, and honest work.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Written and published two years after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which inspired a brief media focus on Right Wing Militia Fanatics.
• Royal "We": Subverted slightly; when a character wants to intimidate another, or dodge responsibility (or both), he or she will often use the Royal "We", claiming to be speaking on behalf of others. Tom Krome's "useless, dickless incompetent" editor, Sinclair, tries to use the royal "We" when rejecting Krome's pitch for an investigative story into the theft of the main character's lottery ticket; Krome recalls this as one of several "insipid tricks" taught at Sinclair's mid-level management school, on the "theory that a plural pronoun brought corporate muscle to an argument."
• Shoot the Dog: Bode Gazzer and Chub persuade JoLayne Lucks to confess where she hid her winning lottery ticket by shooting one of her pet turtles; later, their newest "recruit", Shiner, fires wildly at a sound in the night, wounding the paw of an innocent raccoon.
• Shown Their Work: Hiaasen, a former investigative reporter, does his homework, and nearly every one of his novels features an academically-toned passage educating the reader on a subject which happens to be very pertinent to the plot, including, in this novel, the demise of the Everglades.
• Soap Punishment: Bode is a white supremacist whose nice liberal parents once washed his mouth out for saying the N-word. Now he can be as racist as he pleases, but he can't bring himself to utter the N-word, much to the amusement of the other white supremacists.
• Society Is to Blame: Subverted to the Nth degree. In nearly all of Hiaasen's novels, there is at least one villainous or criminal character whose backstory makes clear that they started out with affectionate parents, good teachers, and no obvious trauma or temptation towards criminality, and yet they become criminals anyway, largely because they are too lazy to pay attention in school or hold legitimate jobs.
  • Bode Gazzer's parents were both teachers, both earnestly tried to "interact" with him, and only inflicted corporal punishment on him once (for saying the n-word at age 12), yet he still turned out as a white supremacist thug, blaming everything wrong with his life on his parents, authority figures in general and the government in particular.
  • Likewise, Onus Dean Gillespie was born to reasonably affluent parents and all six of his older siblings attended Georgia State University, but Onus chose a "life of sloth, inebriation and illiteracy." After his parents disowned him, he took up his childhood nickname of "Chub", but was too lazy to think of a surname.
• Stalker with a Crush: Chub is a notable one, towards a waitress who reminds him of Kim Basinger.
• Sub-Par Supremacist:
  • Bodean James "Bode" Gazzer is five-foot six inches tall and compensates for it by wearing three-inch cowboy boots, and walking "with a swagger that suggested not brawn so much as hemmorhoidal tribulation." To his secret shame, his parents' Soap Punishment at age 12 left him incapable of saying the n-word.
  • Onus Dean Gillespie, a.k.a. Chub, is six-foot two inches tall, but beer-bellied, glue-sniffing, and emits a "damp, fungal reek."
  • Shiner invents the word "swatch-ticker", but can't visualize the symbol, and asks Bode to draw one; Bode gets it wrong, but insists that "that's exactly how the Nasties done it." Amber privately reflects that the "militiamen" who have kidnapped her are "a pretty lame operation."
  • As Bode is dying, Chub demands that he "act like an upright, God-fearing member of the white master race" and say the word "nigger" just once. Chub even offers to spell it for him - "N-I-G-E-R."
• Taxman Takes the Winnings: Subverted. Bode is incensed to learn that the $14 million lottery jackpot is being paid in annual installments over 20 years, not all at once, and worse, subject to taxes. Chub points out that they are both dead broke and even after taxes one of those annual payments is "still a very large piece of change", but Bode - a paranoid Conspiracy Theorist - refuses to budge from his theory that winning the lottery is just the latest proof that the U.S. government, and God Himself, are dead-set on screwing him over, and hardens his resolve to increase the pool of their winnings by stealing JoLayne's winning ticket (which Bode reasons is rightfully his anyway).
• This Is a Work of Fiction: Hiaasen likes to have fun with this trope.
  Pearl Key is an imaginary place, although the indiscriminate dining habits of the blue crab and the common black vulture are accurately portrayed. However, there is no approved dental use for WD-40, a trademarked product.
• This Is Reality: In-Universe. Near the climax, the hapless wannabe-skinhead Shiner is confronted at gunpoint by JoLayne Lucks, who demands to know why he helped Bode Gazzer and Chub, who savagely beat her up and stole her lottery ticket. He mumbles that they offered him a place in their "brotherhood" (but not a share of the money), and he said "sure" because he thought it sounded cool. JoLayne offers to show him the bruises on her face, breasts and belly that his "brothers" inflicted on her, and he throws up.
  • Likewise, when JoLayne and Tom Krome let him go to take Amber back to the mainland, he tries to make a show of bravado, and she reminds him (in case he forgot) that the second they see a telephone, she has every right to call the police and report that Shiner kidnapped her and delivered her to (almost) be raped by Bode and Chub. He throws up again.
• Too Stupid To Live:
  • While wrestling with Tom Krome in the shallows of Pearl Key, Bode sees what he thinks is a large flounder and aims a random kick at it. It turns out to be a stingray, whose barb goes straight through his femoral artery.
  • Chub, once he has run out of glue to sniff, tries using pepper spray as an intoxicative inhalant - the resulting pain is so volcanic that he screams non-stop for 25 minutes, and vomits non-stop for 50.
• Undying Loyalty: Judge Arthur Battenkill's law clerk, Champ Powell, idolizes his boss, and is so eager to please that, after Judge Battenkill confides in him about his wife's affair with Krome, shoots out the windows of Krome's house with a hunting rifle, then volunteers to burn the house down, accidentally killing himself in the process. As Katie himself remarks, Champ didn't do it for money, he did it solely to score "brownie points" with his boss.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Judge Arthur Battenkill.
• Windmill Crusader: Bodean "Bode" Gazzer might honestly believe that the United States is about to be invaded by an army of NATO troops from secret bases in the Bahamas, and that he and other white supremacist militiamen (but mostly himself) will be the only thing able to preserve "the heart and soul of America." It's one of the reasons why he insists that half of a $28 million lottery jackpot isn't enough, and he and Chub "deserve" to have the other winning ticket as well (especially when it comes out that the holder of that second ticket is a black woman).
• You Watch Too Much X: The Napoleon Bode Gazzer gleaned from television that "humans as a species were growing taller with evolution", which is why he blames his height (5'6'') on his mother gobbling MSG during pregnancy and his father failing to stop her; the fact that both his parents are genetically short is irrelevant to him.

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