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Queenie

Queenie just loved The Price Is Right. So much so that she kept right on watching after Bob Barker retired in June of 2007, and that comparative dullard Drew Carey took over as host—although, in all fairness, not even avuncular Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” could have effectively replaced the man Queenie regarded as the all-time God of Game Shows and principal deity of daytime TV.

But as much as she loved the program, Queenie had a few issues with The Price Is Right. She did not like—which is to say, wanted to murder—those asshole contestants who were always asking “What was the last bid, Bob (Drew)?” so they could go exactly one dollar higher and thereby screw their fellow contestant out of a fighting chance at winning the frigging prize and getting to dash onstage for a shot at a Chrysler Town & Country. I mean, play fair! Queenie thought. That shit just bugged the shit out of her.

And as for all the cars the show awarded, and had been awarding since something like 1972, well, it only stood to reason that a percentage of those people had wound up getting killed in the cars they won on The Price Is Right, which took irony too far the way Queenie saw it. I mean, those poor souls figured winning a car was the luckiest damn thing that ever happened to them, or ever would happen, and look what a nasty joke that turned out to be, Queenie thought. Just nasty.

Then there was Plinko, the game where a contestant let five fancy pucks slide down a peg-studded inclined board into slots at the bottom with cash values ranging from zero dollars to ten thousand dollars. The announcer always made a great big deal about the CHANCE TO WIN UP TO FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS, but no one had ever done that, or ever would do it, the way Queenie saw it. It was just so much bullshit. The closest anyone had come was thirty thousand one hundred dollars, during Drew Carey’s first season, and before that it was something like twenty-two thousand. Queenie knew this because she had looked it up online. It always seemed to Queenie that the chips had eyes for those two slots worth zip.

But anyway. It was Plinko Queenie thought of at the top of the stairs one morning, with three rolls of toilet paper in her arms for reloading the TP holder in the powder room, just beyond the stairway. She dropped one roll onto the first step and watched as it bounced its way to the bottom and straight through the powder-room door. Score! Queenie thought. The second roll scored too—and so did the third.

Son of a bitch! Queenie thought. Unaware that that was going to be not only the luckiest thing that would happen in her life that day, but for the rest of the year.

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