Lotto Loser’s Lament : Wrong Day for Right Numbers

So he forgot. Big deal .

So he could have come into some money, paid off his house, both houses. Who cares?

So he could have spent the rest of his life in luxury, with a fishing rod dangling between his fingers. Maybe a gold fishing rod, maybe from the stern of his yacht.

So what if it was $8 million?

But Jim DeSantis lost. So did the rest of us, but not like Jim DeSantis. His numbers, all six of his special one-of-a-kind numbers, came up Wednesday as the winners of the $8-million California state lottery jackpot.

But there was a problem. DeSantis, 40, a foreman in The Times’ Orange County composing room, has been playing those same numbers ever since Lotto started. He plays every Wednesday and Saturday. But he just missed last Wednesday.

He was called into work early, thrown off schedule. By the time he made it in, he remembered. It was still Wednesday and his numbers--44 12 39 36 2 47--popped into his mind.

“But I’ve only won $5 in a year, so I just figured I wouldn’t play that day,” DeSantis said, recounting his folly Friday at his Huntington Beach home.

And after all, those numbers had no real significance, like a birthday or a draft card number or somesuch. They had just seemed lucky when DeSantis first chose them. But, then again, maybe he had been wrong.

So DeSantis stayed on the job, where he has been for almost 19 years. He didn’t even give a thought to rushing out, just for a minute, to play his numbers. He did ask a colleague whether she was going out to buy a ticket.

Nah, she wasn’t. So he wouldn’t either. He would live dangerously.

But habit being what it is, DeSantis later called up the winning numbers on a computer terminal at The Times. That’s what he does when his 8-year-old son, Jimmy, forgets to call him at work after he watches the winning numbers chosen on TV.

“Well, I got a really strange look on my face,” DeSantis said of that fateful moment at the computer screen. Those numbers seemed awfully familiar. He went to his desk to check his old lotto cards, the ones with those same numbers played week after week.

“I was with another guy, and he told me how my face just started looking really strange,” DeSantis said. “I looked at the card, and I couldn’t believe it. He looked at the card, and he couldn’t believe it, either.”

DeSantis seems a low-key kind of guy. He said he doesn’t remember saying anything at that moment.

Maybe he was stunned. Maybe he was trying to interpret the cosmic meaning of it all, why Nov. 18, 1987, was fated to be the day the big one got away.

“I just sat there for about an hour and didn’t move,” DeSantis said.

It was a while later, about 9:30 that night, that DeSantis returned a call from his son, who was then asleep.

His wife, Beverly, answered the phone. “I just told him that Jimmy wanted to tell him that he forgot to write the lottery numbers down,” she said. “Then he told me about the numbers and about how he didn’t buy a ticket.

“I told him I thought that was grounds for divorce,” she said with a laugh. Or sort of a laugh.

“He’s very sick about it,” she said. “He didn’t do anything yesterday (Thursday). He just sat around. He only had soup before he went into work. He didn’t have any breakfast today.”

DeSantis said that’s understandable. How would you feel? “I ain’t felt like doing a hell of a lot,” he said.

Oh sure, he will indulge in a bit of “what iffing.” What if he had bought that ticket?

“I probably would have quit my job,” he mused. “And I would have paid off this place and another place we have at the river (near Bullhead City, Ariz.). And I would have done a lot of fishing. Maybe even bought a boat.”

But DeSantis isn’t messing around anymore. He will change his numbers and buy a lottery ticket for Saturday’s drawing, worth $12 million because nobody drew all six winning numbers Wednesday. And he will keep buying, playing every Wednesday and Saturday, until he does hit that jackpot that he knows was meant for him.