The Chance of my life
Created | Updated Aug 2, 2007
“Chance would be a fine thing” laughed Bill O’Sullivan when Ruby told him he was having a son, “sure all you can produce is daughters. You and your mother before you.”
And he was right. Between them Ruby and her mother had produced six girls. And no boys at all. Bill knew there was no chance.
“I’m telling you,” his wife replied with conviction. “Me bump’s a different shape and Molly can tell the sex from the shape of the bump. She’s always on the money. Never been wrong yet.”
“Go on with you,” Bill repeated, “Like I say…Chance would be a fine thing”. And he kept saying it every time Molly appeared at the house making her predictions, until six months later his son was born. Seven pounds 12 ounces. Full head of coal black hair. Eyes just like his father’s. Chance O’Sullivan. There was nothing else they could have called him.
I’m George Armstrong, by the way. My part in all this is a small one but I like to feel it’s significant. You see I’ve known him from back when we were at Primary School, and I’ve been with him for the whole cresta run – well except for the five year experiment of course, he was on his own for that one. But, hey, I’m already getting ahead of myself and I need to start from the beginning. As I say, I’m George Armstrong. I’m fifty two years old. Wealthy by most people’s standards. Happy by anyone’s. And I owe all of my wealth and a lot of my happiness to him. You could say he gave me the chance of my life.
I’d always wondered how he got his name. I mean, Chance, strange name for a guy. And he’d always been pretty closed mouthed about it. Then one night, around the start of the Your Big Chance reality TV show we were out in a Chinese restaurant in Leeds. We’d been auditioning the hopeful. Anyone who’s ever eaten in Leeds knows the place, just round from the Yorkshire Post. Anyway, we had the Banquet for two, crispy duck, the lot. And after a couple of bottles of wine he just opened up and told me.
“Tell it after it’s all over George, will you. Tell the whole crazy thing.”
The O’Sullivans lived in Westland Bungalows - a weatherbeaten estate of tin mizzen huts towards the foot of the Cavehill Road, on the north side of Belfast. Chance was the third in a line of four children, the only boy. His parents spoiled him stupid as was the way back in the fifties when a son and heir was born.
Bill, his father, was a self employed bricklayer, grabbing whatever sub contract work he could from the old money building families that ran the city construction scene. It would be another half generation before the hungry young property developers would come with their cranes and change the Belfast skyline. Bill and Ruby had saved for years to try and scrape up enough money to leave Westland Bungalows and purchase one of the new semi detached houses going up in Kylemore Avenue, or some such place further up the Cavehill Road. Sadly it seemed that every time they almost made it, the work would dry up or some family emergency would arise and their little pot of savings would be depleted. They had almost given up.
Chance made up his mind early on that he wasn’t going into his Da’s line of work. He’d looked at his father’s calloused hands and made his decision. Seen too many weeks with no pay cheque. Known too often the disappointment of cancelled holidays. Felt too keenly the social gap between himself and many of the other children at Cavehill Primary School. Heard the names they called him behind his back. Chancey old Smellyman and the like. No, Chance had another plan entirely. He was going to make an impact. And if he had to cut a few corners on the way, well that would be fine by him.
By age ten he was running a pitch and toss racket on the school playground. That’s when he and I got together. I was from Sunningdale Park at the top of the Cavehill Road. I joined the school late, having just moved from Armagh due to my father being appointed vice-principal. Chance and I had been kept behind for “disrupting the class” on my second day, and a lifetime’s friendship was born. We ran the scam together for two years – made a fortune. Man, those primary five kids were so gullible. We took them for all that they had. The rules were simple. As many of you as liked stood in a big circle and tossed your coins. Thruppence got you into the game. If on any one throw there was an odd man out, that guy won the pile.
Now you’d be thinking there was no way at all to rig this. But Chance and I had a system. It had come to Chance one day when Mrs McWilliams was trying to explain about long division.
“If I just touched my head”, he thought, “George could flip his coin to heads. And my shoulder if he needs to get tails.”
He had no qualms at all about the deception. “Business is business” he told himself, briskly.
He explained it well and I caught on fast. A bit of refining to make sure that sometimes, if there was no danger of losing the round, we both landed the same side of the coin. But on around seven flips out of ten Chance would give the nod. I’d worked out a way of checking my coin and flipping it over as I took my hand away. Totally subtle and unobserved. The thruppences would change hands. Another bunch of suckers suckered.
And, as Chance would say, “Bob’s your uncle.”
Or in this case Martin. An uncle of mine worked in a local branch of Barney Eastwood’s betting empire. Never made it quite to manager, but knew all there was to know about odds, horses, and taking the punters. And even though his young devotee felt that he lacked ambition, Uncle Martin became, for awhile at least, a role model to Chance O’Sullivan.
Martin would allow Chance, quite illegally mind, to stand beside him on a Saturday and watch him take the bets. Learn the ropes. Chance was amazed at the way they kept coming. There really was one born every minute. He decided that his previous careful cheating was, in fact, unnecessary because the odds were so stacked against the punters – though he didn’t suggest giving the thruppences back! And he wanted to learn everything.
Uncle Martin was amazed at the way Chance wanted to find out every single detail.
“It’s as if the lad’s found his vocation” he would often say.
And sure enough, by the time he was sixteen he was expelled from the local High School for running an illegal betting operation out of the tuck shop. Earned himself a headline slot on the UTV news at six. Chance didn’t care. He was on the rise. Educated in all that mattered. (Though he did take three years out to hang around the Student Union in Rupert Stanley College, Belfast making contacts and experimenting with some illegal chemical substances)
You see, something had taken root in Chance O’Sullivan. It wasn’t that he was a crook. And he certainly wasn’t a conman (well except for the primary school playground incident, of course). No it was more that he had a vision. Chance had a vision for alleviating the ordinariness of life. His own life and the lives of those around him. He had weighed up the world of his father and found it to be lacking. He wanted so much more out of life than his parents had experienced. And something inside him knew that he had been born at the right time.
The late nineteen sixties and early seventies were an exciting time for Chance, and for so many of his peers. It was a world where the unexpected happened. Where miracles took place. Where the only rule was that life is unpredictable. Where there was magic in the music, in the new boutiques springing up all over Belfast despite the developing “troubles”, on the radio. Everywhere. It was working all around him. He wanted it to work for him.
He worked for awhile in record shops and as a roadie for Strupp, one of the so called intellectual bands that came out of Northern Ireland in the mid seventies. He researched the music scene in Liverpool and London. He spent six months in Paris. I went with him on some of his trips and was amazed by his work rate. And his play rate. It was never dull hanging with Chance.
And all the while he was preparing for what he would do next. He knew there was a market for something in Belfast. Just what that might be took him awhile to work out, but by eighty two he had seen the vision for combining all his interests into one magnificent venture.
To create it he had to plough in most of his savings. Or at least, about £12,000 of it anyway, he told me. There hadn’t yet been even a sniff of a ceasefire in Belfast, and the nightlife hadn’t developed to anything near what it is today. So there were a lot of punters for his Take a Chance on love musical roadshow extravaganza. For years it was all the rage at schools, scout halls, and youth clubs. He even got a couple of one off gigs at the Student Unions as part of Rag week. Those were great nights. The punters loved his sideline book on “Will they get it on tonight?” And he showed quite a talent for working out the odds correctly. Though he did know that there was a bit of cheating going on out there on the dance floor.
“You have to give the punters something, sometimes” he would often say to me in his more reflective moments. “Everybody’s looking to feel superior, and it brings them back for more. And anyway, it all helps to create the illusion. To give them the magic.”
Chance’s big break came when he read The Diceman – Luke Rinehart’s 1970s book about a man who hands the course of his whole life over to the throws of a dice. Makes every decision according to the numbers that come up.
Now just about everyone born after nineteen fifty has read Diceman at some stage of his or her life and a reasonable percentage of readers has even tried it on for an hour or two. Though not many dare to embrace the frightening chasm that opens up when the predictability of life is gone. I guess we’re all control freaks under our own hats. But Chance was different. He felt, by the very nature of his name, and, I suppose, because of the growing vision in his soul, that he was called to it. You could say he felt it in his bones. It was, as Uncle Martin might have said, his vocation.
Starting towards the end of eighty nine, Chance O’Sullivan gave more than five years of his life to being a Diceman. Lived everything by the rule of the dice. Every decision. Every relationship. The outcome of every journey he took was dictated by the fall of the numbers. Maybe he was having an early mid life crisis – well he was thirty seven after all, or maybe the boredom of his life was just getting too much for him. I don’t know. He told me, however, that he saw it as one long journey of self discovery. One long experiment to find out if he was lucky. And Chance was one lucky guy!
I didn’t see him at all for those five years. It seems my number never came up. I didn’t hear from him either – so the only information I know about those times is what Chance later told me himself. However I don’t think he ever lied, misled or exaggerated about that time. He knew he had done something special. There was no need to spin.
At the end of his first five years he took stock. His stock looked good and by now he was quite the prosperous man about town. His current account stood at the princely sum of £67,000. He had shares and bonds to the value of £453,000 and was part owner of a highly successful racehorse. He had made a substantial down payment on a home in middle class Holywood, County Down with the proceeds of Take a Chance on love (sold, I believe, at the dictate of a number four), and was easily making the small residual mortgage payments. He had travelled to every continent, had lived for six months in Florence, and had studied with monks on a Tibetan mountain top. He owned a villa in Tunisia.
He had learned to appreciate the opera, discovered spas and fine cognac and become a committed vegetarian. He sported a pony tail and dressed in black Armani. His life had certainly changed. For the better, he felt. And, to the best of his knowledge, he had fathered no children. Though he had been both married and divorced. (On numbers three and six, as he recalled.) Indeed, the experiment had produced magic beyond his wildest dreams. His life was unpredictably magnificent. Chance O’Sullivan was riding high. And if, deep in his heart he had questions about what this dice life was producing in his soul, he hid them well. He just knew that something very special was directing his life.
It was early nineteen ninety five that he quit the dice. Feeling pretty confident that number one could not possibly come up for the sixth time on the bounce, he gave it the option “Quit the dice”. He’d been spicing his life up with the “Quit the dice” option on and off for a couple of months, but the option had never landed. His percentage game, he thought, was still in good shape. Freud or one of those guys would have had a lot to say about his inclusion of the option in the first place. It’s a strange place the old subconscious and whilst the walls he had build up around his inner self seemed pretty secure both to himself and to those who felt that they knew him, there must have been some part of him somewhere that hungered for predictability. For what the rest of us call normality.
For awhile after he quit he just didn’t know what to do with himself.
“I was just empty, George. Washed out.” he said to me when he called me, later, to offer me a job.
It’s like that for all of us I think, if we walk away from all that we’ve come to know. And for Chance life with the dice had grown, in a paradoxical way, to feel so secure. He was self aware enough to understand this, and to know that it was an illusion, but then again, he hadn’t had to take responsibility for any of his own decisions since October 17th nineteen eighty nine. His whole sense of personal accountability had been eroded. He had been subject to a higher power. Only obeying orders. For a few weeks his mind was paralysed. He became indecisive. Later he called it his deprogramming.
Chance, being Chance however, it didn’t take too long for his brain to kick back into gear.
“It just came to me” was how he put it.
One day he was sitting in a little coffee shop in Botanic Avenue watching the students go by and he remembered the old days of doing the roadshow in the Student Union. It was just around ceasefire time too, and there was this whole sense of expectancy in the air. Just the atmosphere in which an entrepreneur of his experience might thrive. He just had to do it this time without the dice. Well, without using them himself anyway. The possibilities set him wondering.
A year later he opened the first of his Chance Behaviour clubs in Shaftesbury Square, Belfast. The city had seen nothing like it. Nowhere had seen anything like it. By the end of ninety seven there were five of them. One in Belfast, one in Temple Bar, Dublin, and more in Manchester, Newcastle and Soho. He had plans for a European franchise.
It was a simple idea really. For a moderate entrance fee (£50) patrons were given a pair of dice. You can guess the rest I’m sure. The whole ambiance was straight out of Diceman. The only house rules were that you had to do exactly what the dice commanded. Anyone caught disobeying was thrown out. For those without the mental creativity to load their own numbers with stimulating options there were suggestion cards provided. All kinds of exotic characters roamed the premises. And they would do all kinds of exotic things. It was the ultimate corporate night out thrill. Magic, miracles and wonder. For a little extra (around £500) you could have the whole experience recorded on take home VHS. The profits were rolling in. Chance O’Sullivan was on the rise again.
* * * * * * * * * *
On Millennium night Chance threw out the challenge on National TV. It had been a wonderful year for him. In January he had launched his Chance Encounter range of perfume. With the public face he chose, there was no way it would fail. He was living in London now where he had headquartered a national string of upmarket casinos. The Main Chance. They were turning millions. Now he was ready for the advent of his new reality TV show Your Big Chance. It kicked off on Millennium night.
Hundreds of punters had tried to get on the show. Chance, myself and two assistants had screened them all. And now it was down to a TV vote. As with all of Chance’s ventures the rules were simple. But effective.
“So Belinda” he intoned before the watching nation, “do you promise to do everything the Dice tells you to for one year? To work where it wants you to work, love who it tells you to love, and to go, be and do only what it tells you?”
“I do.” she replied, eyes all lit up like lights on a Christmas tree.
“People she needs your votes. Remember, only six people can play. Will Belinda be one of them?” Belinda wasn’t.
By the end of the voting he had his six.
Sponsored by The Main Chance they would live out one year in a strictly monitored world where every decision was taken by the dice. No expense spared. Though they all had to sign disclaimers indemnifying the Sporting Chance Holding Company and all of its subsidiaries from any and all liability for any eventuality that lady luck might bring their way.
Chance had syndicated the show world-wide. It was 24 hour live on line and on his Chance for Excitement pay per view Cable TV station, and for a small fee (£20) viewers could make suggestions that would load some numbers for their favourite character. Become vicarious Dicemen. The gain without the pain. The tabloids loved it.
At the end of the year Chance Himself would name the winner based on which of them, in the view of the great man had been the most lucky - or maybe he’d just throw a dice, there were all sorts of rumours that this might be the twist. The winner was going to then going to designate random numbers to six mystery prizes, three of which were worth one million pounds sterling and three worth more or less nothing. Then let the dice make the call.
As the clock over the Thames struck twelve, Chance handed out the dice. “Throw” he commanded. The game was on.
It was the TV blockbuster of the year. Like with everything else in the O’Sullivan empire nothing had been left to chance and the whole operation had been meticulously planned right down to the random throws that dictated the evolving pattern of rules controlling the game. These took place on the second Tuesday night of every month. Chance had a whole team of people acting as a think tank. Coming up with six options, each of which offered an opportunity to take the game to a whole new level.
Punters were glued to their seats worldwide. The night that the former lead singer of B list Indie band Cheyenne Army threw a four and as a result had to come clean to his dying mother that he was booked in for a sex change (brought about by previously throwing a one, as I recall) was the night that easily topped the UK national viewing figures record (22.1 million) set by the BBC for the final ever episode of “Only Fools and Horses” in December 1996. When she reached out and hugged him there wasn’t a dry eye anywhere. The price of advertising reached an all time high.
You see, he was doing it. Fulfilling his vision. Finding his destiny. Chance O’Sullivan, almost single handedly, was reaching into the jaded, shopped out, post idealistic world that was UK2000 and offering magic. The dice were the symbols, but the miracles came from the soul of Chance himself.
The result of the game was almost anticlimactic. The luck that had been with Chance during his own time as a Diceman rubbed off. Or maybe as Peter Carrol once wrote in an essay on the Magus If he can convince his acolytes that they are magicians capable of anything, such beliefs will tend to become self fulfilling. Chance read that kind of stuff. Quoted from it on “team bonding days”. We all had to learn it.
Whatever it was, it worked and the game produced six happy endings. The Sporting Chance Holding Company made sure of that. The eventual winner, Gregor McLaughlin from Lanarkshire (a former Scottish International goalkeeper, standing six feet three inches tall, with curly black hair, dazzling teeth and a deep perma tan – though at least one of these attributes was the direct result of throwing a five in the middle of April - won, on a two as I recall, the full ownership of the Glasgow Chance Behaviour franchise. Two years later he sold out for several million pounds. Though not on the throw of a dice.
* * * * * * * * * * *
It was in late two thousand and three that Chance’s luck finally turned. When the magic left him.
I’d cashed in my chips by then. Fifty one years old with a mild heart murmur I’d taken a buy out option on my Sporting Chance Holding Company shares and gone back home. Home to the top of the Cavehill Road, which had only changed a little since I was a lad. McCoubery’s the chemist had gone, and the sweet shop where I used to buy the penny chews long, long ago – but Jack Irwin’s Da’s butcher’s was still standing and the houses in Sunningdale Park were still solid and dependable. I bought three houses in the area. Well, there’s nothing like investing in the old home streets is there? I moved my widowed sister and her youngest boy into one of them and my elderly Mam into the other. Chance told me I was mad.
“You’re worth millions George!” he bellowed “Will you not go and buy yourself a proper house!”
I disagreed. It was only three million. And anyway I wanted to be there. You know who you can trust when you’re fifty one. And where you belong.
Anyway, back to Chance.
When they brought him down it came fast. The Financial Services Authority officials rolled up to the head offices of Sporting Chance one morning at 7 am. At the same time officials from Scotland Yard and Customs and Excise turned up at every Chance Behaviour outlet and Main Chance casino. The Money Laundering activity of one Chance O’Sullivan (or to be more precise Yuri Jacobovitch his main Russian shareholder) was one of the big stories of 2003. Bigger than the Gulf War almost.
Chance was devastated. He’d brought Yuri in as he put it, to help him go worldwide. Yuri was a Russian oil billionaire. Owned a premier league football team and all. Chance had trusted him. It would be great to say that I’d had a nose for Yuri and that’s why I got out or that I’d warned Chance but my warnings had gone unheeded. Any of those options would have made me look good. But the truth is I liked him too. And I too had been seduced by his billions and his Siberian accent.
It was all down to dealing then. And they screwed him to the wall. Chance had no desire to go to prison so of course he told them whatever he could about Yuri. Which wasn’t as much as you’d think. Due diligence, paradoxically, was never a big word in Chance’s vocabulary when it came to friendship. Anyway, his bargaining power was limited, and he had to deal away almost every penny he had to preserve his freedom.
“I was born in a mizzen hut and in my life I’ve had it all” he told me last Christmas, “but I’ve always been the same me inside. Losing all this stuff won’t change me”
One thing about Chance has always been that he was his own man, and he didn’t need the shiny things to feel secure. And when he arrived to spend Christmas with me the bounce was almost back in his step. So he’d brought the wrong man on board. So he’d lost all of his empire. Well the dice might have made him do those things years ago. He was just thankful he’d had the whole cresta run to enjoy.
“George,” he said “I’m fifty two and I have my health and no money. You’re fifty two and you have three million and a dickey heart. Who’s the luckier man?”
And he was right. Deep inside I know he was right. He’d been too polite to add that he’d made me my three million. And he point blank refused to accept the half of it that I offered to give back to him.
I don’t know if he was regretting too that he’d treated love and romance in such a cavalier way during his life. I do know though that he spent a fair bit of time round at my sister Janice’s place. Janice had always had an eye for him back when we were growing up, and she may well have carried the candle all these years. Though not a word was spoken to me about it. Nor has there been a word spoken yet.
New Years Eve we had a party. There was Janice, Chance, myself and my wife Sandra, my Mam (both Chance’s parents are dead and his sister lives in New Zealand), and a few of the neighbours. It was a good party as parties go and I was feeling pretty mellow and delighted to be back home and knew I was much better heart murmur wise. I could see though that there was a restlessness in Chance’s whole demeanour. You can always tell with Chance when he’s thinking. And of course he and Janice were spending a lot of time chatting quietly and looking into each others’ eyes.
Sandra and I slept in next morning. It must have been about noon when we stumbled down to the kitchen.
There on the table was a note. George - thanks for everything. Why not conjure your own magic? See you sometime. Chance.
Beside the note sat a set of keys. Janice’s house keys. And perched on top was a pair of dice.
And he was right. Between them Ruby and her mother had produced six girls. And no boys at all. Bill knew there was no chance.
“I’m telling you,” his wife replied with conviction. “Me bump’s a different shape and Molly can tell the sex from the shape of the bump. She’s always on the money. Never been wrong yet.”
“Go on with you,” Bill repeated, “Like I say…Chance would be a fine thing”. And he kept saying it every time Molly appeared at the house making her predictions, until six months later his son was born. Seven pounds 12 ounces. Full head of coal black hair. Eyes just like his father’s. Chance O’Sullivan. There was nothing else they could have called him.
I’m George Armstrong, by the way. My part in all this is a small one but I like to feel it’s significant. You see I’ve known him from back when we were at Primary School, and I’ve been with him for the whole cresta run – well except for the five year experiment of course, he was on his own for that one. But, hey, I’m already getting ahead of myself and I need to start from the beginning. As I say, I’m George Armstrong. I’m fifty two years old. Wealthy by most people’s standards. Happy by anyone’s. And I owe all of my wealth and a lot of my happiness to him. You could say he gave me the chance of my life.
I’d always wondered how he got his name. I mean, Chance, strange name for a guy. And he’d always been pretty closed mouthed about it. Then one night, around the start of the Your Big Chance reality TV show we were out in a Chinese restaurant in Leeds. We’d been auditioning the hopeful. Anyone who’s ever eaten in Leeds knows the place, just round from the Yorkshire Post. Anyway, we had the Banquet for two, crispy duck, the lot. And after a couple of bottles of wine he just opened up and told me.
“Tell it after it’s all over George, will you. Tell the whole crazy thing.”
The O’Sullivans lived in Westland Bungalows - a weatherbeaten estate of tin mizzen huts towards the foot of the Cavehill Road, on the north side of Belfast. Chance was the third in a line of four children, the only boy. His parents spoiled him stupid as was the way back in the fifties when a son and heir was born.
Bill, his father, was a self employed bricklayer, grabbing whatever sub contract work he could from the old money building families that ran the city construction scene. It would be another half generation before the hungry young property developers would come with their cranes and change the Belfast skyline. Bill and Ruby had saved for years to try and scrape up enough money to leave Westland Bungalows and purchase one of the new semi detached houses going up in Kylemore Avenue, or some such place further up the Cavehill Road. Sadly it seemed that every time they almost made it, the work would dry up or some family emergency would arise and their little pot of savings would be depleted. They had almost given up.
Chance made up his mind early on that he wasn’t going into his Da’s line of work. He’d looked at his father’s calloused hands and made his decision. Seen too many weeks with no pay cheque. Known too often the disappointment of cancelled holidays. Felt too keenly the social gap between himself and many of the other children at Cavehill Primary School. Heard the names they called him behind his back. Chancey old Smellyman and the like. No, Chance had another plan entirely. He was going to make an impact. And if he had to cut a few corners on the way, well that would be fine by him.
By age ten he was running a pitch and toss racket on the school playground. That’s when he and I got together. I was from Sunningdale Park at the top of the Cavehill Road. I joined the school late, having just moved from Armagh due to my father being appointed vice-principal. Chance and I had been kept behind for “disrupting the class” on my second day, and a lifetime’s friendship was born. We ran the scam together for two years – made a fortune. Man, those primary five kids were so gullible. We took them for all that they had. The rules were simple. As many of you as liked stood in a big circle and tossed your coins. Thruppence got you into the game. If on any one throw there was an odd man out, that guy won the pile.
Now you’d be thinking there was no way at all to rig this. But Chance and I had a system. It had come to Chance one day when Mrs McWilliams was trying to explain about long division.
“If I just touched my head”, he thought, “George could flip his coin to heads. And my shoulder if he needs to get tails.”
He had no qualms at all about the deception. “Business is business” he told himself, briskly.
He explained it well and I caught on fast. A bit of refining to make sure that sometimes, if there was no danger of losing the round, we both landed the same side of the coin. But on around seven flips out of ten Chance would give the nod. I’d worked out a way of checking my coin and flipping it over as I took my hand away. Totally subtle and unobserved. The thruppences would change hands. Another bunch of suckers suckered.
And, as Chance would say, “Bob’s your uncle.”
Or in this case Martin. An uncle of mine worked in a local branch of Barney Eastwood’s betting empire. Never made it quite to manager, but knew all there was to know about odds, horses, and taking the punters. And even though his young devotee felt that he lacked ambition, Uncle Martin became, for awhile at least, a role model to Chance O’Sullivan.
Martin would allow Chance, quite illegally mind, to stand beside him on a Saturday and watch him take the bets. Learn the ropes. Chance was amazed at the way they kept coming. There really was one born every minute. He decided that his previous careful cheating was, in fact, unnecessary because the odds were so stacked against the punters – though he didn’t suggest giving the thruppences back! And he wanted to learn everything.
Uncle Martin was amazed at the way Chance wanted to find out every single detail.
“It’s as if the lad’s found his vocation” he would often say.
And sure enough, by the time he was sixteen he was expelled from the local High School for running an illegal betting operation out of the tuck shop. Earned himself a headline slot on the UTV news at six. Chance didn’t care. He was on the rise. Educated in all that mattered. (Though he did take three years out to hang around the Student Union in Rupert Stanley College, Belfast making contacts and experimenting with some illegal chemical substances)
You see, something had taken root in Chance O’Sullivan. It wasn’t that he was a crook. And he certainly wasn’t a conman (well except for the primary school playground incident, of course). No it was more that he had a vision. Chance had a vision for alleviating the ordinariness of life. His own life and the lives of those around him. He had weighed up the world of his father and found it to be lacking. He wanted so much more out of life than his parents had experienced. And something inside him knew that he had been born at the right time.
The late nineteen sixties and early seventies were an exciting time for Chance, and for so many of his peers. It was a world where the unexpected happened. Where miracles took place. Where the only rule was that life is unpredictable. Where there was magic in the music, in the new boutiques springing up all over Belfast despite the developing “troubles”, on the radio. Everywhere. It was working all around him. He wanted it to work for him.
He worked for awhile in record shops and as a roadie for Strupp, one of the so called intellectual bands that came out of Northern Ireland in the mid seventies. He researched the music scene in Liverpool and London. He spent six months in Paris. I went with him on some of his trips and was amazed by his work rate. And his play rate. It was never dull hanging with Chance.
And all the while he was preparing for what he would do next. He knew there was a market for something in Belfast. Just what that might be took him awhile to work out, but by eighty two he had seen the vision for combining all his interests into one magnificent venture.
To create it he had to plough in most of his savings. Or at least, about £12,000 of it anyway, he told me. There hadn’t yet been even a sniff of a ceasefire in Belfast, and the nightlife hadn’t developed to anything near what it is today. So there were a lot of punters for his Take a Chance on love musical roadshow extravaganza. For years it was all the rage at schools, scout halls, and youth clubs. He even got a couple of one off gigs at the Student Unions as part of Rag week. Those were great nights. The punters loved his sideline book on “Will they get it on tonight?” And he showed quite a talent for working out the odds correctly. Though he did know that there was a bit of cheating going on out there on the dance floor.
“You have to give the punters something, sometimes” he would often say to me in his more reflective moments. “Everybody’s looking to feel superior, and it brings them back for more. And anyway, it all helps to create the illusion. To give them the magic.”
Chance’s big break came when he read The Diceman – Luke Rinehart’s 1970s book about a man who hands the course of his whole life over to the throws of a dice. Makes every decision according to the numbers that come up.
Now just about everyone born after nineteen fifty has read Diceman at some stage of his or her life and a reasonable percentage of readers has even tried it on for an hour or two. Though not many dare to embrace the frightening chasm that opens up when the predictability of life is gone. I guess we’re all control freaks under our own hats. But Chance was different. He felt, by the very nature of his name, and, I suppose, because of the growing vision in his soul, that he was called to it. You could say he felt it in his bones. It was, as Uncle Martin might have said, his vocation.
Starting towards the end of eighty nine, Chance O’Sullivan gave more than five years of his life to being a Diceman. Lived everything by the rule of the dice. Every decision. Every relationship. The outcome of every journey he took was dictated by the fall of the numbers. Maybe he was having an early mid life crisis – well he was thirty seven after all, or maybe the boredom of his life was just getting too much for him. I don’t know. He told me, however, that he saw it as one long journey of self discovery. One long experiment to find out if he was lucky. And Chance was one lucky guy!
I didn’t see him at all for those five years. It seems my number never came up. I didn’t hear from him either – so the only information I know about those times is what Chance later told me himself. However I don’t think he ever lied, misled or exaggerated about that time. He knew he had done something special. There was no need to spin.
At the end of his first five years he took stock. His stock looked good and by now he was quite the prosperous man about town. His current account stood at the princely sum of £67,000. He had shares and bonds to the value of £453,000 and was part owner of a highly successful racehorse. He had made a substantial down payment on a home in middle class Holywood, County Down with the proceeds of Take a Chance on love (sold, I believe, at the dictate of a number four), and was easily making the small residual mortgage payments. He had travelled to every continent, had lived for six months in Florence, and had studied with monks on a Tibetan mountain top. He owned a villa in Tunisia.
He had learned to appreciate the opera, discovered spas and fine cognac and become a committed vegetarian. He sported a pony tail and dressed in black Armani. His life had certainly changed. For the better, he felt. And, to the best of his knowledge, he had fathered no children. Though he had been both married and divorced. (On numbers three and six, as he recalled.) Indeed, the experiment had produced magic beyond his wildest dreams. His life was unpredictably magnificent. Chance O’Sullivan was riding high. And if, deep in his heart he had questions about what this dice life was producing in his soul, he hid them well. He just knew that something very special was directing his life.
It was early nineteen ninety five that he quit the dice. Feeling pretty confident that number one could not possibly come up for the sixth time on the bounce, he gave it the option “Quit the dice”. He’d been spicing his life up with the “Quit the dice” option on and off for a couple of months, but the option had never landed. His percentage game, he thought, was still in good shape. Freud or one of those guys would have had a lot to say about his inclusion of the option in the first place. It’s a strange place the old subconscious and whilst the walls he had build up around his inner self seemed pretty secure both to himself and to those who felt that they knew him, there must have been some part of him somewhere that hungered for predictability. For what the rest of us call normality.
For awhile after he quit he just didn’t know what to do with himself.
“I was just empty, George. Washed out.” he said to me when he called me, later, to offer me a job.
It’s like that for all of us I think, if we walk away from all that we’ve come to know. And for Chance life with the dice had grown, in a paradoxical way, to feel so secure. He was self aware enough to understand this, and to know that it was an illusion, but then again, he hadn’t had to take responsibility for any of his own decisions since October 17th nineteen eighty nine. His whole sense of personal accountability had been eroded. He had been subject to a higher power. Only obeying orders. For a few weeks his mind was paralysed. He became indecisive. Later he called it his deprogramming.
Chance, being Chance however, it didn’t take too long for his brain to kick back into gear.
“It just came to me” was how he put it.
One day he was sitting in a little coffee shop in Botanic Avenue watching the students go by and he remembered the old days of doing the roadshow in the Student Union. It was just around ceasefire time too, and there was this whole sense of expectancy in the air. Just the atmosphere in which an entrepreneur of his experience might thrive. He just had to do it this time without the dice. Well, without using them himself anyway. The possibilities set him wondering.
A year later he opened the first of his Chance Behaviour clubs in Shaftesbury Square, Belfast. The city had seen nothing like it. Nowhere had seen anything like it. By the end of ninety seven there were five of them. One in Belfast, one in Temple Bar, Dublin, and more in Manchester, Newcastle and Soho. He had plans for a European franchise.
It was a simple idea really. For a moderate entrance fee (£50) patrons were given a pair of dice. You can guess the rest I’m sure. The whole ambiance was straight out of Diceman. The only house rules were that you had to do exactly what the dice commanded. Anyone caught disobeying was thrown out. For those without the mental creativity to load their own numbers with stimulating options there were suggestion cards provided. All kinds of exotic characters roamed the premises. And they would do all kinds of exotic things. It was the ultimate corporate night out thrill. Magic, miracles and wonder. For a little extra (around £500) you could have the whole experience recorded on take home VHS. The profits were rolling in. Chance O’Sullivan was on the rise again.
* * * * * * * * * *
On Millennium night Chance threw out the challenge on National TV. It had been a wonderful year for him. In January he had launched his Chance Encounter range of perfume. With the public face he chose, there was no way it would fail. He was living in London now where he had headquartered a national string of upmarket casinos. The Main Chance. They were turning millions. Now he was ready for the advent of his new reality TV show Your Big Chance. It kicked off on Millennium night.
Hundreds of punters had tried to get on the show. Chance, myself and two assistants had screened them all. And now it was down to a TV vote. As with all of Chance’s ventures the rules were simple. But effective.
“So Belinda” he intoned before the watching nation, “do you promise to do everything the Dice tells you to for one year? To work where it wants you to work, love who it tells you to love, and to go, be and do only what it tells you?”
“I do.” she replied, eyes all lit up like lights on a Christmas tree.
“People she needs your votes. Remember, only six people can play. Will Belinda be one of them?” Belinda wasn’t.
By the end of the voting he had his six.
Sponsored by The Main Chance they would live out one year in a strictly monitored world where every decision was taken by the dice. No expense spared. Though they all had to sign disclaimers indemnifying the Sporting Chance Holding Company and all of its subsidiaries from any and all liability for any eventuality that lady luck might bring their way.
Chance had syndicated the show world-wide. It was 24 hour live on line and on his Chance for Excitement pay per view Cable TV station, and for a small fee (£20) viewers could make suggestions that would load some numbers for their favourite character. Become vicarious Dicemen. The gain without the pain. The tabloids loved it.
At the end of the year Chance Himself would name the winner based on which of them, in the view of the great man had been the most lucky - or maybe he’d just throw a dice, there were all sorts of rumours that this might be the twist. The winner was going to then going to designate random numbers to six mystery prizes, three of which were worth one million pounds sterling and three worth more or less nothing. Then let the dice make the call.
As the clock over the Thames struck twelve, Chance handed out the dice. “Throw” he commanded. The game was on.
It was the TV blockbuster of the year. Like with everything else in the O’Sullivan empire nothing had been left to chance and the whole operation had been meticulously planned right down to the random throws that dictated the evolving pattern of rules controlling the game. These took place on the second Tuesday night of every month. Chance had a whole team of people acting as a think tank. Coming up with six options, each of which offered an opportunity to take the game to a whole new level.
Punters were glued to their seats worldwide. The night that the former lead singer of B list Indie band Cheyenne Army threw a four and as a result had to come clean to his dying mother that he was booked in for a sex change (brought about by previously throwing a one, as I recall) was the night that easily topped the UK national viewing figures record (22.1 million) set by the BBC for the final ever episode of “Only Fools and Horses” in December 1996. When she reached out and hugged him there wasn’t a dry eye anywhere. The price of advertising reached an all time high.
You see, he was doing it. Fulfilling his vision. Finding his destiny. Chance O’Sullivan, almost single handedly, was reaching into the jaded, shopped out, post idealistic world that was UK2000 and offering magic. The dice were the symbols, but the miracles came from the soul of Chance himself.
The result of the game was almost anticlimactic. The luck that had been with Chance during his own time as a Diceman rubbed off. Or maybe as Peter Carrol once wrote in an essay on the Magus If he can convince his acolytes that they are magicians capable of anything, such beliefs will tend to become self fulfilling. Chance read that kind of stuff. Quoted from it on “team bonding days”. We all had to learn it.
Whatever it was, it worked and the game produced six happy endings. The Sporting Chance Holding Company made sure of that. The eventual winner, Gregor McLaughlin from Lanarkshire (a former Scottish International goalkeeper, standing six feet three inches tall, with curly black hair, dazzling teeth and a deep perma tan – though at least one of these attributes was the direct result of throwing a five in the middle of April - won, on a two as I recall, the full ownership of the Glasgow Chance Behaviour franchise. Two years later he sold out for several million pounds. Though not on the throw of a dice.
* * * * * * * * * * *
It was in late two thousand and three that Chance’s luck finally turned. When the magic left him.
I’d cashed in my chips by then. Fifty one years old with a mild heart murmur I’d taken a buy out option on my Sporting Chance Holding Company shares and gone back home. Home to the top of the Cavehill Road, which had only changed a little since I was a lad. McCoubery’s the chemist had gone, and the sweet shop where I used to buy the penny chews long, long ago – but Jack Irwin’s Da’s butcher’s was still standing and the houses in Sunningdale Park were still solid and dependable. I bought three houses in the area. Well, there’s nothing like investing in the old home streets is there? I moved my widowed sister and her youngest boy into one of them and my elderly Mam into the other. Chance told me I was mad.
“You’re worth millions George!” he bellowed “Will you not go and buy yourself a proper house!”
I disagreed. It was only three million. And anyway I wanted to be there. You know who you can trust when you’re fifty one. And where you belong.
Anyway, back to Chance.
When they brought him down it came fast. The Financial Services Authority officials rolled up to the head offices of Sporting Chance one morning at 7 am. At the same time officials from Scotland Yard and Customs and Excise turned up at every Chance Behaviour outlet and Main Chance casino. The Money Laundering activity of one Chance O’Sullivan (or to be more precise Yuri Jacobovitch his main Russian shareholder) was one of the big stories of 2003. Bigger than the Gulf War almost.
Chance was devastated. He’d brought Yuri in as he put it, to help him go worldwide. Yuri was a Russian oil billionaire. Owned a premier league football team and all. Chance had trusted him. It would be great to say that I’d had a nose for Yuri and that’s why I got out or that I’d warned Chance but my warnings had gone unheeded. Any of those options would have made me look good. But the truth is I liked him too. And I too had been seduced by his billions and his Siberian accent.
It was all down to dealing then. And they screwed him to the wall. Chance had no desire to go to prison so of course he told them whatever he could about Yuri. Which wasn’t as much as you’d think. Due diligence, paradoxically, was never a big word in Chance’s vocabulary when it came to friendship. Anyway, his bargaining power was limited, and he had to deal away almost every penny he had to preserve his freedom.
“I was born in a mizzen hut and in my life I’ve had it all” he told me last Christmas, “but I’ve always been the same me inside. Losing all this stuff won’t change me”
One thing about Chance has always been that he was his own man, and he didn’t need the shiny things to feel secure. And when he arrived to spend Christmas with me the bounce was almost back in his step. So he’d brought the wrong man on board. So he’d lost all of his empire. Well the dice might have made him do those things years ago. He was just thankful he’d had the whole cresta run to enjoy.
“George,” he said “I’m fifty two and I have my health and no money. You’re fifty two and you have three million and a dickey heart. Who’s the luckier man?”
And he was right. Deep inside I know he was right. He’d been too polite to add that he’d made me my three million. And he point blank refused to accept the half of it that I offered to give back to him.
I don’t know if he was regretting too that he’d treated love and romance in such a cavalier way during his life. I do know though that he spent a fair bit of time round at my sister Janice’s place. Janice had always had an eye for him back when we were growing up, and she may well have carried the candle all these years. Though not a word was spoken to me about it. Nor has there been a word spoken yet.
New Years Eve we had a party. There was Janice, Chance, myself and my wife Sandra, my Mam (both Chance’s parents are dead and his sister lives in New Zealand), and a few of the neighbours. It was a good party as parties go and I was feeling pretty mellow and delighted to be back home and knew I was much better heart murmur wise. I could see though that there was a restlessness in Chance’s whole demeanour. You can always tell with Chance when he’s thinking. And of course he and Janice were spending a lot of time chatting quietly and looking into each others’ eyes.
Sandra and I slept in next morning. It must have been about noon when we stumbled down to the kitchen.
There on the table was a note. George - thanks for everything. Why not conjure your own magic? See you sometime. Chance.
Beside the note sat a set of keys. Janice’s house keys. And perched on top was a pair of dice.
