After my experience at the ’97 Belmont Stakes, I kept a passing interest in horse racing. I would make a point to watch the Triple Crown races on TV, but not much more. Sure, there was the occasional Preakness party hosted by a Baltimore friend, coupled with brief trips to an OTB, but no real investment in the sport until I met Jim.
Jim is a fellow writer who started graduate school in Pittsburgh a year after I did, so we did not meet until the fall of 2004. Over many beers these past 5+ years, Jim would regale me with tales of his father, which 85% of the time involved a horse. More specifically, the shenanigans Jim, Sr. and his buddies would get into on the way to, at and on the way home from various horse races. These stories are not mine to tell, and if I wrote them they would lack the style, charm and romance of the storyteller. Also, you would not believe a word of it. The “Horseshit Tales of Jim and Jim, Sr.” are so outrageous, so hilarious and so tragic, they put the Bible to shame. And not unlike the Bible, the parishioner is not asked to test the limits of physical possibility, but rather to believe in something Greater. It does not matter if our eyes have never seen a 100 year-old woman give birth, a sea split in two, or a man walk on water. These things simply happened and there were witnesses to tell the tale afterwards. It does no good to debate the truth, for doubt only ruins the story. Instead, choose to believe and thy will be enlightened. And so it is with the “Horseshit Tales.” I love them and I believe them because they fulfill a missing part of my soul. And because I am already damned to Hell for having listened to them.
After graduate school, I moved to New York. After a year in the city, I met Andrea, the woman who would be my wife. It would be three weeks between that meeting and our first date. First, there would be Saratoga. The day after meeting Andrea, I left to go on a family vacation to visit my sister in Portland and celebrate my father’s 60th birthday (and make a side road trip with my brother to Vancouver and Seattle). A few days after my return, I was scheduled to pick up an award at a film festival on Cape Cod. Sensing the geographical possibilities, I accepted an invitation from Jim to attend a couple of days of racing at Saratoga with his friend Perry before heading to Massachusetts.
Jim was driving from Pittsburgh to Perry’s house upstate and the two of them were to meet me at the train station in Albany, and then head over to our hotel to prepare to attend my First Communion at the Saratoga Cathedral. Perry is a professional Native American storyteller and between the two of them, my ears were burning with the heat rising from the horseshit. Or was it the actual 95-degree heat wave that flooded the Saratoga racetrack like a plague, thereby cancelling the day’s races for the first time in 130 years? Stunned, Perry and Jim decided that the only plausible way to salvage the day was to spend it in the most depressing place on earth: the Albany OTB.
Having never previously been to Saratoga, I could not fully appreciate the stark contrast this dank pit of a bettor’s palace held. Saratoga Race Course, for those who have not been, is the Garden of Eden. Surrounded by lush green grass and tall oak trees shading communal picnic tables, the track itself is in marvelous shape, with an inviting apron from which to watch the action thundering mere yards away. It was worthy of a stop on a road trip to Montreal with Andrea the following year. The Albany OTB is where the next overzealous religious cult should hold its mass suicide. Now, it could be that everyone in there that day was depressed that the Saratoga races had been cancelled, and were therefore forced to bet on harness racing at such luminous tracks as those in West Virginia, Delaware and New Jersey, but I’d be surprised if the mood changed much from day to day. It’s actually quite a large venue, almost like a converted strip club, with dozens of 13-inch screens trained on various races, some of them not even live. After a few miserable hours, we decided we’d be better off stripping naked and scraping our privates across the hot gravel of the parking lot, and then going back to our hotel room to drink, play cards and pray for cooler horses to prevail the next day.
And it was evening and it was morning, a second day. The weather cooled a bit and Saratoga rejoiced. We arrived at the track just before the first races, lugging in a cooler filled with sausages, cheeses and, of course, beer. Perry and Jim patiently refreshed my memory on how to read a Racing Form, while somewhat cheerfully bickering back and forth about which horses were going to win, a delightful ritual that continued throughout the day. Meanwhile, I took in the gorgeousness of the track and the picnic area and the festivities that surrounded me, drinking beer, making several uneducated guesses as to which horse might win and which horse might win me a lot of money, nervously placing bets at the betting window and then wandering onto the apron to watch the race unfold exactly the opposite of how I predicted, and then repeated the entire procedure eight or nine more times until the last horse limped across the finish line and the crowds headed to the parking lot to continue their partying in the town of Saratoga Springs. I have since returned twice to Saratoga, once with Jim and Perry and once with Andrea. There are few summer days so glorious as one spent on the shaded grass of Saratoga. From the tales I have been told, Louisville is a whole other animal. I look forward to forging my own tales, with Perry, Jim and (if I am lucky) Jim, Sr. himself as witnesses.
Jackie Robinson's Fenway Tryout
13 years ago
