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luck, which has the consistency of 2 percent milk, while the Lemonade bottles hold the low-grade stuff, which, conveniently, looks like lemonade. There’s not as much demand for low-grade good luck, though you can usually sell it to a junkie, who’ll overpay for a fix.
    The empty Protein Monster bottles in my cabinet would hold top-grade good luck if I could ever get my hands on some.
    Not every poacher uses Odwalla bottles to store and sell his or her product, but it’s less expensive than buying sport water bottles and the word association helps me tokeep the grades straight. Plus it makes for easy drop-offs. You leave the bottle on the table after you get your payment and the buyer walks out with a bottle of Odwalla. No one notices a thing.
    While good luck can be injected into the bloodstream, which has a much more immediate effect, it can also be combined with mixers to make lucky cocktails, or substituted for milk to make lucky brownies. The preferred choice of ingestion, however, is drinking it in its pure form. Though if most people knew where their luck actually came from, they might choose another form of consumption.
    He pissed it all away isn’t just an anecdotal expression. If you haven’t processed poached luck out of your system before you have to take a leak, then all of that potential income is going to end up in a toilet bowl or on a bush or running down your leg. Though technically, you can’t piss it all away. The human body is nearly 70 percent water, so some residual luck stays behind. And those who are born with luck never lose it through urination or perspiration or any other kind of ay-tion. It stays in the system until a poacher like me comes along.
    Those of us who aren’t born with it have to settle for the shadows of other people’s good fortunes.
    While poaching luck is almost as easy as catching a cold, processing it into a consumable form is a little more involved. For my customers to use the luck I’ve poached, it has to be extracted and processed from my bladder usinga catheter connected to a series of tubes that run through a portable centrifuge, where the luck is separated from the urine and deposited through one of the tubes into a plastic container.
    It’s kind of like donating blood platelets, only without the movie or the free cookies or the American Red Cross T-shirt.
    Not the most pleasant or sanitary way to extract luck, but it cuts down on the volume loss that can occur when using other, less-efficient processes. Up until the 1960s, poachers collected urine in a glass flask with a rubber stopper and condensation tube, then placed the flask over a Bunsen burner and let the urine and water boil off, leaving the luck residue behind. Trouble was, some of the luck always got lost in the evaporation. Then there were the adverse effects from the heat or flame. Burned luck doesn’t hold its market value. And it tastes horrible.
    Might as well just drink the urine straight.
    I grab a bottle of Odwalla Super Protein, a little more than half full of a white liquid that can pass for the real thing, and I put the bottle in my leather backpack. I’m almost out the door when I stop and go back to the refrigerator and grab a bottle of lemonade, which I give to the homeless guy on my way out.
    While admittedly not an altruistic gesture, that doesn’t make it any less sincere.
    “What’s this?” he says with a complete lack of gratitude.
    “It’s good luck.”
    “Good luck?” He holds it up and turns it back and forth. “It’s not even full.”
    Some people just don’t know how to show their appreciation.
    “Here.” I throw him a five-dollar bill. “Put a shot of tequila in it. It’ll taste like a margarita.”
    Then I make my way up Lombard to the Starbucks on Union and Laguna for my ten o’clock delivery.

S tarbucks is an ideal place for making drop-offs. It’s out in the open where no one expects it. No one’s looking around to see what anyone else is doing. People