Lucky Duck Feeling Like Sitting Duck

Salvador J. Gonzalez tossed and turned, tangled in bedsheets as his wife lay asleep. Only his brother-in-law knew how his humble life in this three-bedroom Anaheim house would soon, and very suddenly, be rearranged into something far more complicated, like a Rubik’s cube in the hands of a child. “I have a problem,” he said into the night.

“What is wrong?” his wife, Socorro, asked. He paused to measure his words: “I won the lottery.”

The California Lottery had announced the winning numbers of an $87-million jackpot Wednesday night. More than 24 hours later, Gonzalez still had not told his wife: He was the only one with the winning ticket and had elected to take the lump sum of $40.6 million. They were rich.

But it would take until Monday for Gonzalez to come forward and explain to officials why he had waited through the eternity of the weekend to claim the third largest lottery jackpot ever in California.

He was frightened by all the attention. And so Tuesday, lottery officials told Gonzalez’s story:

It was Thursday when Gonzalez first bothered to look at the three slips of SuperLotto tickets with the random numbers he selected at Kelly’s Mini Mart, a convenience store in Anaheim, near the pool hall where he drank beer and played billiards.

The weekend went by. Even on Monday, the 40-year-old Gonzalez still went to work at his job as a supervisor at a heavy machinery company that makes batteries. But just minutes before the Santa Ana office of the California Lottery closed Monday night, he showed up with his brother-in-law and approached the office manager.

Gonzalez finally made his wavering voice say it all aloud: “I am the winner.”

On Tuesday, Gonzalez was unavailable for comment and he wanted it that way. Lottery officials said they tried desperately to persuade him to say a few words to the world--”To enjoy his happiness,” said Herman Dustman, lottery sales manager for SuperLotto in the Los Angeles and Orange County area--but Gonzalez said he had none.

Dustman said Gonzalez is going through great pains to remain anonymous: When he arrived at the Santa Ana office, he had not called a lawyer, or publicist, or even an accountant, and he had scarcely even thought of what he would do with his new money.

There were no ribbons or flowers or some new fancy car in the driveway to replace his old American-made van. When asked by lottery officials what he would do next, he said what lottery folks are accustomed to hearing: buy a new house, buy a motor home, send the kids to college.

More than anything, they said, Gonzalez was quiet, afraid, and seemed sweetly naive about it all. Lottery officials gave him a polo-style shirt with the SuperLotto logo on it, and suggested that he wear it perhaps in his travels across the country and to faraway lands.

“Do I have to tell them I won the lottery?” he said, his face wrinkling with worry that it might be some unfortunate requirement.

He said he felt harried, beset by a whole new set of problems he never imagined: Who would be his friends, how would he know who his friends were, and perhaps most of all, who would try and take his money. Lottery officialsoffered him a pamphlet, a how-to-guide of sorts on how to be rich.

Gonzalez apparently did not buy lottery tickets on a regular basis and certainly not at Kelly’s Mini Mart, he told lottery officials. He told them that on Wednesday he bought the tickets while he was on his way to a nearby Wal-Mart with one of his sons, but that he couldn’t remember what for.

Neighbors describe Gonzalez as a quiet and private man, whose wife takes their boys, ages 9 and 5, to school each day and picks them up afterward. “We don’t have a lot of communication with that family,” one neighbor said.

Carlos Landeros, a barber at ABC Hair and Nail Shop in the Anaheim strip mall where Gonzalez purchased his ticket, was outside the El Ojo de Agua Bar--Gonzalez’s favorite pool hall--Thursday afternoon, the day after the SuperLotto drawing. The phone rang inside and the barmaid answered, then called out to Landeros.

Landeros went inside and picked up the phone. “The guy on the phone told me that he had won the Lotto but he didn’t want anybody to know who he was,” Landeros said. “He asked me, ‘Are there a lot of reporters there?’ And I told him, ‘There’s nobody out here. Who are you? What’s your name?’ The guy said, ‘I can’t tell you yet. I don’t want the reporters to know who I am. I gotta go.’ ”