“Well when you’re sitting back
In your rose-pink Cadillac
Makin’ bets on Kentucky Derby Day…”
The Rolling Stones, "Dead Flowers"
So tomorrow’s Kentucky Derby Day, a day I used to refer to as a High Holy Day in my own personal church of vice, a sort of pagan bacchanal in honor of our collective survival of yet another brutal upstate New York winter, a festival to commemorate another safe passage into the glories of springtime. A time to gather the tribe together for an afternoon of celebration involving heavy drinking, serious eating, frenzied gambling, and general mirth and merriment.
I can’t help but think back to some of those parties now, and most especially the last one, on Derby Day 2005. I whipped up twenty five pounds of pulled pork and fifteen pounds of potato salad amongst other culinary delights, and strategically placed several coolers full of ice and high-quality ales and lagers around the property. Because, as you all know by now, that’s how I roll.
The Derby Day dawned bright and cool, with a stiff breeze that would ultimately lead to some unexpected party chaos. The crowd filtered in and the drinking and gambling commenced. We usually tried to get those two things well underway before we started rolling out the banquet; it just seemed like the right way to do things.
The day proceeded swimmingly and according to plan, but at some point, the aforementioned stiff breeze ripped an electrical line off a pole standing in the backyard of our next-door neighbors, and all of a sudden, about ninety minutes before The Big Race, our power went out.
Well fuck me twice with a spoon, I remember thinking.
The wire flapped up and down in my neighbors’ yard, slapping the ground and shooting sparks off wildly, in every direction. The kids ran around screaming apeshit blue murder, and the adults present murmured and talked amongst themselves about this unexpected development and then they all seemed to sort of look at me, and I realized I needed to do, uh, something.
Already one, maybe two, ok, why try to finesse it, three sheets to the wind, oh, who we kidding. I didn’t have the slightest idea of what to do. I had bigger concerns, like, who was gonna win the Grade 1 Woodford Reserve Turf Classic, I kinda liked this horse named America Alive, but I had a feeling our new quandary might mean he’d wind up winning without us.
Using my truly awesome, finely honed powers of deductive reasoning, which somehow still functioned despite the horrifying brain cell massacre the beer overindulgence had set in motion, I called the Fire Department: seemed to me that flying electrical sparks might pose some sort of fire hazard. Yeah. I thought something might catch on fire, and generally that is a problem best handled by your local Fire People.
They swooped in just moments later, sirens blaring. Ah yes, I thought. They’ll make it all better, and we’ll bet the Woodford, crush that shit, and then nail the Derby, and I’ll send my guests home fat, drunk, and happy at the fresh bulges in the wallets.
They got out, and the kids all tried to climb into the fire engine, a hook and ladder if I remember it correctly, and you’ll forgive me if I don’t remember it exactly right, given the circumstances. They looked around, watched the wire flap and slap in the breeze.
“Who called this in?” one of them asked.
“Me.” I said with an optimistic smile.
“Yeah, nothing we can do about this. You gotta call the power company.”
Well fuck me four times with a spoon, I thought. The power company? Are you kidding me? Can’t you see I got a Derby party going here? The Derby’s in an hour and a half! The power company, sheet, those fuckers won’t be here until Wednesday. ‘Cause that’s how they roll.
I thanked the fire folks for coming, and since they didn’t offer me a good solution, I didn’t offer them any pulled pork sammiches.
I got on the phone and called the power company, feeling defeated. I had an overflow crowd of people over to watch the Derby and eat pulled pork and now we wouldn’t be able to watch the race, hell, I wouldn’t even have the capacity to heat up my finely crafted homemade barbecue sauces.
I explained the situation the person on the phone, heavily over-emphasizing the gravity of the situation, in the certainly vain hope that they’d send a truck right over. The woman on the phone insisted they’d get right on it, but hell, we’re talking about the power company. Right on it, I figured, meant sometime early the following week. We’d have to settle for newsprint accounts of the proceedings.
In the meantime, the next-door neighbors strolled over and explained they had an emergency generator. A friend, the kind of guy who knows how to get an emergency generator set up and working – and for the record, I am clearly not one of those kind of guys – offered to help me go next door and dig the thing out of the bottom of a pile in their garage. I am good at digging around and lifting heavy shit by myself, so I was not completely useless, but I didn’t feel so optimistic about things at that point.
We found the generator, sitting underneath a staggering and impressive collection of boxed clothes, tricycles, unused household utensils, and other assorted detritus. I pulled it out and carried it next door, refusing the help of my more mechanically-inclined friend: might as well make myself handy for something, I thought.
He fiddled with wires and plugs and such while I stood by idly.
And then, like a Derby Day miracle, the power company pulled up.
I wanted to cry.
I drunkenly explained the urgency of the situation. The kids clapped and cheered and I got them chanting, “NiMo! NiMo! NiMo!”
They did their thing in the backyard next door. About three minutes before the Woodford Reserve Turf Classic went to post, The Big Cat yelled out the window to me:
“The power’s back on! Get your ass back in here, we gotta bet this thing!”
I offered the power guys some pulled pork sandwiches, and one of them took me up on it. And then I ran inside to help The Big Cat put together our bets, but I didn’t get there in time. Thankfully, he put something together, not anywhere near as much as we would have bet had I not gotten seriously distracted by the electrical wire fiasco, but something.
America Alive sat in the back of the pack and then ran by them all like they were tied to posts and romped home at 18-1, and we had won some money, about a tenth of what we would have won under optimum conditions, but a win nonetheless.
I cooked up the sauces and mixed them into all that pork and then we asked the crowd what to do, save some of the winnings or press and send it all in on the Derby, and the response was overwhelming: send it in, send it in, send it in, they yelled. So The Big Cat and I retired to my bedroom with our Racing Forms and a wirebound notebook and a pen and proceeded to put together a series of bets that involved all of our initial investment (many of the party participants had given us $25, $50, $100, or even in one case, $200 to invest on the day’s racing) plus a healthy chunk of the profits America Alive had netted us. A lot of it we sunk into a 78-1 shot going by the name of Closing Argument.
He called the bets in and then we all ate the pork and the potato salad and the slaw and a bunch of other stuff and waited for the race. I remember looking at Lauren and her taking one look at my drunken ass and just shaking her head and laughing. She was good like that. She gave better indulgences than the old Popes, I’m tellin’ ya…
So the race went off and we all stood around the living room watching and somewhere near the finish line we heard the announcer say that Closing Argument had the lead, and we went wild, screaming bloody murder, but he faded to second and we didn’t have any of the other ones in there. We lost. Some other hopeless longshot had won. Giacomo. 50-1. I never saw him coming.
After the race ended, I went into the kitchen for some more pork and another beer. I told my Dad that Giacomo was the most hopeless-looking Derby winner I’d ever seen in my life, that no rational mind could have foreseen him winning, that he was proof positive that horse-racing made absolutely no sense, that you couldn’t figure it out for shit.
“I give up!” I yelled. “I quit! Fuck this fucking game! It’s nonsense! I’m gonna start going to church again, Dad!”
He smiled. There was a little hope on his face. He tapped my mother on the shoulder.
“The prodigal son threatens to return!” he told her.
&&&&
Well, the prodigal son stayed prodigal. I didn’t start going to church, obviously, and I didn’t give up the horses, at least not for awhile.
I kept my faith in the horses for another couple of years, what else did I know, they’d been good to me. Back in ’99, the first year we had Bailey, Lauren up and quit, with absolutely no prior planning on either of our parts, her well-paying job as a graphic designer at an insurance company, and I worked part-time at a non-profit. As you might imagine, part-time work at a non-profit did not prove particularly lucrative, and by May of that year we began to flounder financially.
One Friday afternoon, not knowing what else to do, with few options, I walked into an off-track betting parlor with the princely sum of eight dollars in my left front pocket. Two hours later, after a series of cleverly-crafted wagers, I walked out with over eight hundred in that same pocket. I walked up the stairs, through that front door that led into our kitchen, with a shit-eating grin on my face. Lauren was standing in there, holding Bailey. She looked at me, saw the crazy look on my face, and said, WHAT? She knew I’d done something she just didn’t yet know if the something had proved heroic or incredibly stupid.
I pulled out the eight hundred and change from my front pocket and threw it down on the kitchen counter and then took Bailey Boy from her.
“Look what Daddy done, son! Look at that!”
Eight hundred and change was a lot of money back then, at least to us. Lauren picked it up and counted it and then started laughing hysterically. I bounced the boy up and down and whooped until he started crying.
“Sorry, kid.” I said.
I proceeded to go on a torrid, six-month run with the horses that left our otherwise broke asses living like hit men. I could do no wrong. I worked part-time at the non-profit and Lauren didn’t work at all, I’d come home at three or four in the afternoon and work on my very, very shitty first novel for an hour or three, except on the days when I felt like I had something hot going on at the races. On those days, I wouldn’t come home until six. And I usually came home with a bonus. Not always, but often enough.
Years later, after things had changed considerably, we went to a birthday party for a niece and a nephew one September Saturday afternoon. At some point, I excused myself from the proceedings and drove off to a betting emporium. I had a notion, a feeling. I had gotten hot again with the horses that summer. I took ninety-six dollars and sunk it in to a bet called the Pick Six, which requires one to pick the winners of six races in succession. A difficult enough maneuver, and the experts say it’s not worth trying unless you can afford to lose ten times the ninety-six I went in for that day, but I had a hunch.
I got back to the party and then we left and then we drove around for awhile, and when I got home, I ran in and checked the early results and saw that I had gotten the first four races, just needed to beat the one-to-five favorite in the stakes race and then get one of the top two choices home in the sixth and last race in the sequence.
Turned on the TV to the racing channel and watched in wonder as I beat that favorite into submission. Watched the last of the six races in our bedroom, and as they came down the homestretch, I saw my two picks running first and second, far ahead of the rest of the horses, and I watched in stunned silence: I had it. In the bag.
I came out of the bedroom and Lauren said, well, I didn’t hear any yelling in there, I guess you didn’t have it.
I looked at her with the same grin I’d flashed eight years earlier when I walked into that kitchen with eight hundred and change in my left front pocket.
“I got it,” I said.
I’d just won $13,787.
&&&&
Things have changed.
I’m not so into the horses anymore.
Can’t put my finger on it, but the mystique seems to have vanished into thin air.
I haven’t bet since last November.
I know. Me. No bets. Since last November.
Things have changed.
Some time around last November, around what we veterans of young widowhood refer to as the two-year mark, I got sick of things as they stood. I’d gone as far as I could stand living in misery. And misery no longer seemed the proper way to honor a time that, while glorious, is no more. At the pronounced encouragement of someone near and dear to me, I decided to start living again. Just like I seemed to have no choice on that long-gone May day when I walked into a betting parlor with eight bucks in my pocket, I seemed to have no choice. I couldn’t take it anymore.
I dropped a lot of things, and added some others. One of the things I dropped turned out to be the horses. It didn’t taste the same anymore. I left them behind, unconsciously at first, and then, after a week or two, to my utter surprise, I didn’t even miss them. Actually, before Christmas even hit, I found I enjoyed having other things to worry about on my Saturday afternoons.
I’d get Saturday’s Racing Form now and then, and I’d thumb through the pages absent-mindedly, restlessly, a pen in my hand looking for something to underline or circle, looking for something I couldn’t seem to find in there anymore.
&&&&
They call them hunches, like they’re random guesses, but I think there’s something more to it than that: it’s less random than we think.
Taking a right when we planned on taking a left; a phone call we didn’t realize we’d made until we heard a voice answering on the other side of the line; a yes when we thought we’d said no; a stray conversation that we meant to avoid when we stumbled into it in the middle of our mind’s midwinter reverie.
I’m playing a hunch in the Derby this year. My apologies to anyone who has suffered this long into this narrative and expected a well-thought-out, well-reasoned, and plausible Derby selection: I know I received some requests for such today. Sorry. This is all I got now.
In the old days, I would have watched all prep races, I would have read the past performances over and over and over again, I would have read every comment every half-assed degenerate between here and San Francisco had left on every racing blog and bulletin board up and running, I would have obsessed over every last scrap of information I could have gotten my eyeballs on.
Things have changed.
I watched nothing, and read nothing, this year, and I felt some sort of freedom in that nothingness.
Tonight, I took a quick glance at the past performances of the twenty horses contesting this year’s so-called Run For The Roses, and this is what I got for ya:
I like STATELY VICTOR to run past the tired pacesetters at about 20-1.
I think the filly, DEVIL MAY CARE, might prove herself a worthy adversary of the boys.
I think MISSION IMPAZIBLE, SUPER SAVER, and DISCRETELY MINE might run big.
But who knows?
The weather nerds say the race might see anywhere from two to five inches of rain come down.
This would have bothered me in other years, but I don’t care so much now.
Whatever happens, happens.
I can live with it.
If the gods choose to smile upon me, Stately Victor will shock the world and win, and then, a few hours later, I’ll go out and realize my long-held secret dream of bowling a 200 game.
And if none of that happens, well, I’ll live.
I’ve lived through worse.