Champagne Parties and Caviar Dreams

One day I was hanging out in my living room and my roommate walked in and said, “My God, did you know the price of gold is six hundred dollars an ounce?!”

Now, I lived in South Africa from 1999 to 2002 and gold is a major industry over there. In fact, South African newscasters report the price of gold the way American newscasters report the Dow Jones Industrial Average. They announce it like the weather (“It’s twenty-eight degrees in Pretoria and the price of gold is $287 an ounce. Here’s Jan with sports.”) And the entire time I lived there the price of gold hovered between $250 and $310 an ounce. I couldn’t believe that gold had more than doubled in price without me hearing about it.

“No way.” I said. “No way the price of gold is that high. It’s probably around $350.”

My roommate looked at me like I had just said Tetris was a kind of pasta.

Then he asked me, “You want to bet?”

Obviously he had just looked up the price of gold online twenty seconds ago. Nobody walks into a room and announces the price of gold completely out of nowhere unless they have just that minute learned the stat themselves. For him to be wrong at that moment he would have to have the most bizarrely specific case of Tourette’s of all time, one that compelled its victims to randomly announce incorrect facts, as if they were the world’s worst Snapple cap.

However, at that moment, he was also implying that I was wrong about a trivial factoid and he was challenging me to defend my knowledge with money.

Few things annoy me more than when somebody says something I believe to be flatly incorrect. One of those more annoying things is when someone says something I believe to be flatly incorrect, then follows it with a smug, condescending comment like, “You want to bet?” Another thing is the word, “anyhoo”.

So, at that moment, I felt that I had been challenged, that a gauntlet had been thrown, and even though my brain was fully aware that he was right and I was wrong, my mouth said, “Fine. Let’s bet.”

(Also, my girlfriend was in the room at the time. I think I felt duty-bound to accept any challenge presented, no matter how retarded. Thanks, evolution! That instinct’s definitely helpful.)

“How much?” my roommate asked.

“A hundred bucks,” said my mouth. My brain silently screamed that I was an idiotic douchebag.

“Fine.” he said.

We promptly went into his room and walked to his computer, which was obviously open to a website displaying the current price of gold. It was six hundred dollars an ounce. Shocking.

“How about that?” I said, trying unsuccessfully to maintain some dignity. I pulled a hundred bucks out of my wallet and handed it over.

The whole event took ninety seconds. As I walked back to the living room I thought to myself, “that has got to be the dumbest thing I have ever done in my life.”

And it was – at the time.

Little did I know that I could go even dumber. But that story, my friends, is a story for another time.

Later on, when I was thinking about my price of gold bet, I was reminded of a line from Guys and Dolls. “Son,” one of the characters says, “if a man shows you a deck of cards on which the seal has not yet been broken and says that he will bet you that the Jack of Spades will leap out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear, do not bet that man. For if you take that bet, then as sure as you are standing there, you will wind up with an ear full of cider.”

A wise lesson. To that I would add, “if someone randomly announces the price of gold, completely out of nowhere, just fucking believe them.”