Short Story Identification

Cafe Society
1

Hey all, I’m trying to track down a short story I read as a teenager.

I know I read it in a magazine and believe it was a Playboy but that could easily be wrong and I would have read it within a couple years of 1990 (though who knows if it was a current magazine).

The story is about luck. My memory of it is that somehow some guy is given the opportunity to buy magic luck pills. For his purchase he gets something like 10 good luck pills and 10 bad luck pills and no way to tell which is which.

So he tentatively takes one pill and buys a lottery ticket (or some other luck based thing). Then he begins to go there a sequence of horrible events that ultimately leave him near death and unconscious in a hospital.

On waking in the hospital he realizes that the bad luck pill is pretty awful but that he currently has an imbalance of pills. 9 bad, 10 good. So chugs down all 19 remaining pills at one go figuring that they’ll have to balance out to good luck.

Then some acquaintance comes into the hospital room and in the course of talking he learns that he won the huge lottery/he received a massive inheritance/something else that indicates the first pill had actually been a good luck pill and now he’s really in for a world of hurt.

The end.
Again, lots of bad memory between now and reading that story but does it sound familiar to anybody?

2

I don’t know this story (although it sounds great), but I have a recommendation. If you like this kind of story, check out utterly brilliant '50s writer Henry Kuttner. This sounds like something he could have written back then. Start with a story called “What You Need”.

Also, Theodore Sturgeon’s “Shottle Bop” might be of interest.

I’ll be watching the thread to see if anyone recognizes the story you described–I’d love to read it.

3

This sounds like a lot of stories that were published up to the 1950’s. After that, that type of story became rare. It’s similar to entire small genre of things called “deal with the devil” stories: