SPORTS
Lucky in Kentucky
So I was drinking margaritas on Cinco de Mayo, yet again celebrating the diversity we have here in the good ole U. S. of A., when my phone rings. My buddy Bill, who is also celebrating other people’s Mexican heritage in his abode, has the best of ideas.
“Dude”, he says. “We should totally go to the Kentucky Derby this weekend.” “Agreed” I say. And it wasn’t until we were halfway through Indiana that I realized he was serious and we would be in Louisville in a matter of hours.
Rob, another old high school buddy, just moved to Louisville, but since we had no idea where he lived we decided to check out all the Marriott Hotels where, we'd been told, he had found a job. When he saw us in his lobby, his jaw dropped. "Where are you staying?" he asked. "With you," Bill said. Rob's already busy weekend just got a lot busier.
“But I’m working,” he said.
“That’s okay, we’ll wait,” Bill said and off we went to the hotel bar for one last tribute to Cinco de Mayo.
We’d arrived in Louisville on a Thursday night. Since the derby isn’t until Saturday, we had all day Friday to explore, getting about as far as the Liquor Barn to restock Rob’s fridge and whiling away the afternoon looking through the local weekly for cool stuff to do Friday night.
Rob’s a big fan of an entertainment zone downtown where are the chain bars like Hard Rock and Coyote Ugly are located. But unless you have the $20 cover charge and are NOT wearing a Motorhead T-shirt, entrance is restricted. So we convinced Rob to stretch his wings and wound up in a little juke joint on the other side of town with cheap PBR’s and a wicked CD changer.
As soon as I get in the door, I hear the opening synth lines of the best album of all time -- Van Halen's 1984. It didn't take long for Rob to get into the mood. Every time Van Halen got to the "Jump" line, he'd shout it out and beer would go spraying in all directions. But the bartender liked us so, much to the dismay of the rest of the patrons, he took the CD changer off random and played the whole 1984 album.
It was fairly late when we got back to Rob's place. His girlfriend Megan took offense at something so while we're camped out in his living room, they're chasing each other around the house. Rob locks himself in the bedroom, but she kicks the door down, breaking the frame, and starts punching Rob in the face. But, as happens these days, his screams turned to nasty sex noises as we all hit the hay.
It wouldn’t be derby day if you didn’t wake up with a serious hangover, so on derby day we kick-started the morning with a trip to local Waffle House. On the way to the track we also stopped back at the Liquor Barn – the only landmark I knew in town – to purchase what they call “barnoculars” for the race. For those who don’t know, barnoculars are like regular binoculars, except the eyepiece screws off and you can fill the chambers with booze.
Unfortunately, the security guards are not among the uninitiated and my barnoculars were the first thing to go. I had imagined the Kentucky Derby to be a world of men in seersucker suits and women in large floppy hats, but all you could see from the parking lot were thousands of drunk twenty-somethings pounding down beers as fast as they could before the containers were confiscated at the gate.
For all the hype, you might think the Kentucky Derby is a tough ticket. About 150,000 people a year show up, but most of them are squeezed into a general admission area on the track infield that is never too full.
Once inside the gate, I saw some guy lift up his
shirt to show 2 bottles of 
booze
taped to his chest that eluded security detection. I asked him about it and
he said he has never been pinched. The trick, he said, is you have to switch
out the metal screwcaps for plastic ones so the metal detectors don’t
go off. But this too is apparently a well known stunt. Later, I saw another
guy with a listerine bottle full of booze taped to his leg.
Since our roadies were confiscated, Bill and I decided to partake of the local derby tradition, a a mint julep, bourbon with a hint of mint, and engage in a local custom called walking around.
There are 12 races on derby day, with about an hour of betting time in between each one, so as you can imagine, there’s not much to do but drink beer and people watch. Around 2 o’clock, the booze started to kick in and, under the hot sun, things got very sloppy very quickly.
Up to then, it had been a pretty relaxing day. Then all of the sudden, girls started lifting their shirts up for beads, guys started fighting each other, puking on the grass, falling down and passing out and -- keep in mind -- the big race was still another 4 hours away.
I’ve been to mardi gras and seen some pretty crazy shit in my day, but I have to admit to being stunned over the next several hours at the anarchy on this infield. This wasn't a horse race, it was a biker rally. Nascar in Sturges where cut-offs, tank tops, tattoos and facial hair are the official uniform of the day.
For relief, Bill and I found a tunnel that led us to the paddock area. This is where the horses line up before they go onto the track. So 5 hours into our first visit to Churchill Downs we saw our first actual horse.
I wandered off to gaze at the swells in the grandstand and returned to find
Bill had taken advantage of my absence to talk two of those silly hat babes
into thinking he was someone important. They said they were in town from Tampa
and their family owned one of the horses in the Derby. Bill told me later
they had invited us up to watch the race fromtheir Millionaires Row skybox.
But when I suggested the come back to the infield with us, it put the kibosh
on everything and they dropped Bill like a hot rock.
Finally, its race time and we realize we still haven’t placed our bets. Bill’s got a girl in Chicago who told him she really likes the name Giacomo so he drops a ten-spot on this 50-1 nag, then we race back to find a good spot at the rail. Like, sure, no problem. 150,000 people and nobody else has thought of watching the race from the rail. All we hear is the sound of the bell and all we see is a puff of dirt as the horses pass.
When
the final results are posted on the Jumbotron, there is a collective groan
all over the track -- except next to me where Bill is falling down crazy.
Giacomo, his 50-1 shot, has come in. He takes his winnings in hundreds and
flushes them up in the air like they are a hand of aces. The first round is
on him.
As the sun sets over the horizon, we wander out of the track with ouBill's winnings burning a hole in my pocket. Churchill Downs is in a pretty seedy part of town -- so we decided there was no reason to go anywhere else. On the way out, I heard Salsa music inside a house so, looking to spread the joy, I ran in and began dancing with the senioritas. The men were not amused.
Then we wandered into a family’s backyard barbeque, where were welcomed with beer and food. Finally, we moved on to this dive bar where we re-capped the day (again) while outside all of Louisville was shutting down.
Miles from downtown, with not a cab in sight, Bill and I were genuinely screwed. We went back and woke up the family that gave us the barbeque, offering the guy $20 to drive us back home, which he miraculously accepted.
We got back to Rob's house just as he was getting off work. Hearing the story of our winnings, he suggests we hit one more late night club, so off we go again. Bill’s eyes are tiny slits and his head nods off in the back seat. At the club, a valet takes the car (and Bill) while Rob and I catch up.
I haven't seen Rob in a while, so catching up takes some time. So we close the joint and, when the valet returns with the car, Bill is still zonked out in the backseat. When we get back to Rob’s place, Bill is still asleep so we decide to leave him be in the backseat.
The next morning – late the next morning – Bill comes stumbling into the kitchen with a red streak across half his face. He looks like Chief Illini without the feathers. He’d fallen asleep with half his face against the window and, in the short time since dawn, picked up an intense sunburn -- but on only half his face.
It would have been nice to find a tanning bin somewhere where we could park him under a sun light with a towel on that half to even it all out. But it was Sunday and we already had a little explaining to do for our five day Cinco de Mayo celebration.
So we crawled back to Chicago, silent, hungover, embarassed -- and thinking to ourselves, man, was that great!
