It’s like my Mama, God rest her precious soul, always used to say, she always said “Charlene, the road to Hades is littered with good intentions”
She was right, but Mama was right
about a lot of things.
My name is Charlene
Lynn Harrison. I’m a proud Alabamian. Born and raised, and with the good
Lord willing, they’ll bury me there too. But not for a while. Right now at this
present time, I’m living in Florida, right now.
Anyway, I’m 44 years old. Ten years ago I won ten
million dollars in the lottery from a ticket I got as a tip at the House of Waffles and Grits where I was waitressing. I
was working there first thing out of high school. That was then. Nowadays I’m a card wrapper at
the Grand bay Indian casino in Florida. Not the ones from near China but
regular ones.
I shouldn’t said Indian. The
Indians who own the place don’t like to be called the Indians casino and I can
see that. I mean if it was owned by a bunch of Japanese people you wouldn’t
call it the Jap casino, so I get that.
So that’s what I do, I wrap
cards. A card wrapper is the person who cleans the playing cards, puts them in
order and loads them into the plastic wrapping machine so’s they look brand spank’n
new. Then I pack them on to a cart and they get taken out to the dealers on the
floor.
Well anyway, my story starts when
I was just divorced from my second husband. His name was Birdie. Well, his name
was Orville Hopkins White but somewhere along the line he picked up the name
Birdie and that was that.
So I was waitressing at the House
of Waffles and Gritts back in Alabama, in Forkland, the town where I’m from.
That’s over in Greene County, about 20 miles near Evington, if you know where
that is..
Well I had a regular customer,
Seward Lee. He was at least ….I don’t know….old, real old, like…old old….and
that was back then, some twenty years. I imagine today, he’s even older. Well,
one day, it was a Saturday morning, I’ll never forget that, ole Seward’s paying
up his check from breakfast and he’s paying with a few tattered dollars, coins
and pennies, so I looked away as not to embarrass his kind soul and he say’s
“Charlene, seems I’m a tad shy of enough to leave you a decent tip”
So I says, “Mister Lee, you go
on, I could build me a mansion on the tips you left me over all this time” and
he goes “Nope, child, I won’t have it” and digs into that ragged wallet of his and
takes out a lottery ticket and leaves it on the table and he says “It’s a
chance isn’t it? More than what’s most got”
“And I goes “You don’t have to d0
that, bless your heart”
So that night they draw the
lottery, and I’m watch’n and everything, putting a little tint in my hair. I do
that on Friday nights, and they call my number. I won ten million dollars. The
first thing I thought was “Life is gonna be a breeze from here on”
Lord, lord, lord how wrong was I.
I got a lawyer because everybody
said I should. His name is Jepson Leonard. I went to
him because I was in school with one of his little brothers. Donald Leonard but
every one called him flathead, no, I do not know why. He looked to have normal
head to me.
Jepson Leonard had an office in
shopping plaza in town where the Food Lion is, so it was easy to park there and
all. He told me to take the money out over 30 years instead of just one lump
sum. That would give me an income of almost $400,000 a year and that was just
fine with me.
Well before I could collect a
single red cent of that money, the other girls from the House of Waffles and
Grits who waited tables with me, one day
they took me in back by the dishwasher machine. They said that they deserved an
equal share of the money because we had all agreed that tips would be shared
between us. I said “Well, I dunno” and they all started squack’n and squealin
the way they do cept for Sue Anne Lynne she’s like
the leader of everyone and all, she just looks at the girls and smiles this
like fake smile and walks away and the girls follow her, and they all go back
to work.
Now, I won’t say I ever liked Sue
Anne Lynne. I knew her in high school and all I’ll say is she had a reputation,
and leave it there except to say her whole family is stuck on stupid and she was known back then as a slut, and
leave it there.
So that
night, the shift ends, and its dark and I walk out to my truck, and I look
behind me and there’s Sue Anne Lynne and I smile, and I say “Sue Anne, I’m so
sorry this is happing between us” and that was when she punched me square in
the face. Then she hit me again. And again after that. My nose was bleeding to
beat the bad and I felt dizzy, and I seen the other girls come rushing out of
the kitchen and that’s when I fell down.
I laid there for a while and
opened my eyes and the other girls picked me up and I said “Thank you, oh thank
you” but the only reason they picked me up was to hold my arms so Sue Anne
Lynne could punch me again and down I went again and when I’m down there Sue
Anne Lynne says, “Charlene Lynn right now you stuck up higher than a light pole
but girl, you gonna split that ticket with us fair and square or you gonna
catch this beat’n every day. You hear me straight?”
About that time the busboy
Edwardo and Leroy the cook come running out and pick me and Leroy says, “What
in the Sam hill is go’n on here?” and all the girls didn’t say nothing all at
the same time.
Edwardo and Leroy pulled up from
the gravel and I says “They want me to even split the money from the lottery
with them cause they say we split all the tip money together”
Leroy and Edwardo dropped my
arms, and down I went again, and he turned and faced the girls. Leroy boomed
out “Ya all’s gonna take your cut and leave us out?”
Then he turned to Edwardo and
said, “Son of a bitch” and Edwardo just nodded and all. Then he turned back to
the girls and says “Y’all’s split’n that money with us” and then they all
walked back inside the Waffle and Grits leave’n me on the ground.
I never went back to the
restaurant after that day. I still didn’t have any money from the lottery, that
just don’t arrive over night like you’d thing it would. It’s a slow process to
collect what’s rightfully yours from the government. So I moved in with kin, my
cousin Luyanda and her husband Tall Carl.
After that incident in the
parking lot I said to myself and the Good Lord almighty, right then and there,
that no other human being was ever again going to put a hand on me. My Daddy
beat me for no reason, and my brothers hit me and my ex-husband, Birdie
Johnson, he hit me something awful. Well no more. As Jesus is my Lord and
savior, no more.
That next day I went down to
Lloyds hock shop where they don’t ask a lot of questions and I bought me a .22
caliber pistol with six bullets. Lloyd Driscoll showed me…what do you call
that? Like the on and off switch thingy so it would only shoot when I wanted it
too and I put that in my purse.
Well the girls lawyer sent me a
note that said the girls would allow me to keep $3,000,000 if they could have
the rest. So I went back to see Jepson Leonard the
lawyer and he said the girls from the House of Waffles and Gritts were wrong in
think’n and not to share a plug nickel with them that they were just a bunch of
rats coming out of the woodwork.
“We’ll fight em in court “ he says.
So we fought them in court, and
we lost. The girls and Edwardo and Leroy was there and all smile’n like a bunch
of possum eat’n fire ants.
So Jepson Leonard says “We’ll
appeal it to the Alabama Supreme Court” right after I paid him an arm and a leg.
The Supreme court reversed the
Circuit Court because any agreement with the Waffles House waitresses and me
was unenforceable under Alabama law because it was founded on gambling
considerations which is illegal in Alabama. By that time Jepson Leonard was
almost as rich as I was after what I paid him.
Now the thing is, I still didn’t
have a single penny from that lottery. My lawyer wrote a letter to the lottery commission
asking them to hold off any payment since the entire matter was in court.
Well, the day after I won in
court it was in all the newspapers and the TV news and what not and I’m walk’n
downtown and guess who I come across? Seward Lee, that’s who. Seward Lee, that
kindly old man who left me the winning ticket for a tip.
Well Seward Lee walk’s right up
to me, all smiles and what not and grasps my hand and his face got all twisted
like a rattlesnake ready to strike and he hisses “I’m sue’n you, Charlene Lynn.
Half that money is rightfully mine and you know it”
So back to Jepson Leonard I go,
cept now he’s got a real office in a real office building and he says “We’ll fight’
em in court.”
And we did and after the longest
six months of my life the judge says “Mr. Lee, if you wanted what that ticket
could bring, you shouldn’t have given it away”
So now after legal fees and what
not, I got a lot less money than I started with so they lawyer goes “We’ll set
up a corporation and you can funnel almost all of the income to your relatives
through the corporation”
So we did and life went on until
my ex-boyfriend, Billy Rippon, he’s as worthless as gum on a boot heel, never
worked a day I knew him, fumbled his way back into my life.
That snake in the grass dropped
me and went back to his wife after she won a settlement for getting hit by a
mail truck. Well he sued me because he said that I said that if I ever won the
lottery that I would buy him a new truck.
Well, I went back to see Jepson Leonard,
that lawyer, whose in even a bigger office now, and he says, “We’ll fight him
in court” and we did, and I have to say I was as nervous as a cat in a room full of rockers until the judge
called Billy Rippon and his lawyer up to the bench and whispers loud enough for
all to hear “You two rope dicks ever bring a piece of crap suit like this
before my court again, I’ll have you hog tied and whipped”
I like that judge.
Well, I figured I was all free
and clear, gassed up and ready to go, because just about everyone I knew had
already sued me when I’ll be damned if that low down snake I had divorced,
Birdie Johnson, came crawling around looking for money. To this day, I don’t
know why I didn’t see that coming.
Well, one morning I climbed into
my truck and go on down to the Convenience mart to buy a pack of Marlboro
lights. That’s my brand, Marlboro lights. So I get my smokes when Birdie,
that’s my ex, he jumps in the truck on the passenger’s side and he goes, like,
yell’n at me “Drive down to the boat lift”
So I go, “Birdie, you drink’n
again, ain’t you?”
And he pulls out this gun and he
goes “Does this look like drink’n to you?”
I shook my head “No” and he goes
“Then shut your mouth and drive”
So I goes “What do you want? ”
and he goes “You sign’n that lottery money over to me or you gonna die today.
Now drive”
Well, that just dilled my pickle
Now the boat lift is down highway
90 all the dang way over to Bayou Heron and there isn’t never nobody there.
Never.
So I’m barrel’n ass down to the
launch when my phone rings but Birdie goes “Don’t you answer that” and I go
“I’m answering my own damn phone” and he goes “You do, and it’ll be the biggest
mistake you ever did make”
Now let me tell you something
about Birdie, and don’t take this the wrong way about him, but he is a
psychopath dog-with-fleas-crazy-drunk redneck. I don’t mean anything by that,
I’m just say’n.
Now he can be sweet and kind but
that temper of his, well, you can imagine. When that would go, he would land a
smack on me something awful till I left him. And right at that moment in the
truck he was all but frothing at the mouth and he had more than a little liquor
in him cause I could smell it.
Anyway, I let the phone ring and
we pulled up to the boat ramp and park, and turn the truck off and look at
Birdie, real sweet like, and whisper nice things to him like I used to do. Well
it was working a little but when that idiot phone rang again and ruined the
whole spirit of things and I said “Birdie, if I don’t answer that, they’re
gonna to start looking for me”
So he let me answer it and that
was the biggest danged mistake he ever made because I had that loaded .22 in my
purse. and I knew how to use it and I used it on him. Shot him right square in
the right side of the chest.
He’s rolling around in the seat
going “You shot me, you shot me” and I thought about all those times he belted
me one for no good reason and I closed my fist and I belted him one and said, “Birdie
you ain’t got the sense God gave a goose”
I never hit nobody with a punch before and
when I landed the first and last one of my life on Birdies face I broke my
knuckles. I drove to the hospital and
pulled up outside the emergency room door and I hold my hand up so the nurse
could see it, all swollen and what not, she looks at Birdie in the front seat,
white as a sheet and blood just all over and she goes “What happened?” and I go “I broke my hand”
So the cops come, I go to jail
for the night we all go to court, and I call the lawyer Jepson Leonard……again….and
in court Birdie lies about how the whole thing was a lovers quarrel and the
judge lets me go with a warning.
Just when I figured more shit
could not possibly be added to the crapola storm that was my life, I come home
one day and there’s a United States Federal Marshal with a piece of paper that
says I owe the government $1,000,000 in taxes in something called a gift tax
and a million more for something else.
So take a guess where I went?
Yep, back to Gad-danged Jepson Leonard
the lawyer and we go to court and the judge goes “Yep you owe em the money” and
that wiped me out, so I went to my relatives that we funneled all that money
too, and I asked for some of the money back.
Well, they had gotten used to
live’n high on the hog and told me they did not at that time have a penny to
spare nor did they see have’n a penny to spare in the future. So I went back to
the lawyer and he said “I figured that could happen” and he closed the
corporation that paid them except the tax was different in that case and what I
was left with was $10,000 a year.
So I took the money I got, packed
up and left Alabama for Florida and I work in this Indian casino, wraping
money. That’s what I do, eight hours a day, five days a week. Its fine.
A lady from a magazine come by
one time and says she tracked me all over tarnation and back because she wanted
to write a story about me and about how the money ruined my life.
But the money didn’t ruin my
life. People’s greed is what ruined my life. And I don’t know how much was
ruined neither. I mean all those things that happened to me, well it just took
all the bad and unstable things that crowded my life and put them in
perspective, help me to see them for what they were.
I’m happy now. I work with real,
real nice people. I got a steady fellow,
a good man. A trucker. We’re having a baby girl this June. I got a decent place
to live, nothing fancy, but it suits us just fine. I’m happy now.