Au Revoir, Suckers

There are all sorts of homecomings.

Back gallops Gary “Riding Under the Radar… WAAAAY Under the Radar” Stevens from five months in France. He was supposed to stay through November… November, 2005.

“I’m very homesick,” he said.

“I’m going to host a talk show,” he said.

“There’s a language barrier,” he said.

“Some of the owners have not been happy with me,” he said.

“Also,” he added, “France sucks.”

Okay, I made that last part up. (Not the part about France sucking, of course; the part about him actually coming out and saying so.) Gary made the announcement yesterday as he slid out of the saddle of a mount that had chugged home fourth. By the way? I’m leaving. Next week. Screw you, France, and your whole business of making right-hand turns around the track. His jock agent has been lining up mounts at Del Mar for September the third.

This is worthy of a party. At the risk of causing another hurricane, I need to have a party over this. For Gary was once lost, and now he is found. My most recent party was a racing party, a Derby to-do complete with Meal Wheel, so you know it was quality, and I still have the leftover cups and napkins and plastic jockey helmets (don’t ask) that I need to use up because if somebody wants to borrow this stuff for something other than a racing-related event I really don’t want to know what’s going there.

I’ve already got the alcohol taken care of. I am now, after much trial and error, Princess of the Mint Julep. A lot of work went into this, huge amounts of research and practice that pretty much consisted of a trip to ABC Liquors about twelve hours before the guests were due.

Back in April my local ABC had just undergone rennovation, and the fact that I 1) was aware of this 2) was excited about it should give you a window into how thrilling my life is at any given moment. “Rennovation” at the ABC pretty much consisted of moving the rack of Boone’s Farm from Aisle 9 to Aisle 5 and also replacing the linoleum floor with a tile one, with the unintended effect that shopping cart usage suddenly became much more noticable.

Granted, if you need a shopping cart in a liquor store, you have bigger problems than noise pollution concerns, but when you have pina colada mix and a stack of plastic champagne flutes and two bags of ice, the little green basket ain’t gonna cut it. You need a cart. But a cart on tile creates its own unique soundtrack (quote: “rattlerattlerattleRATTLERATTLErattlerattle”) and for once in my life I did not wish to draw attention to myself. I was unshowered, wearing a baseball cap, and pushing a shopping cart around a liquor store on a Friday night.

Therefore: I fit right in. The cart and I spent many happy minutes in the Australian wine aisle.

Having never made—or, frankly, tasted—a mint julep before, I had a dress rehearsal with Flipper as Assistant Bartender. I knew what to watch for, though—mint juleps are famous for their very own, very special flavor, namely gasoline garnished with crushed peppermint TicTacs--but I wanted to make sure the drink tasted like ass because it was a mint julep, not because I had effed it up.

We read the directions on the mix, imported from a bluegrass shop at the Greater Cincinnati International Airport (“It’s Not Just For Getting Stranded Anymore!”) and encountered an immediate problem.

“What’s a ‘jigger?’” I said.

It was not listed, oddly enough, in my Better Crocker Book of Kitchen Measurements. Flipper wound up calling her father. “It’s a shot,” she informed me upon hanging up. (Huh. You really can talk to your parents about anything. Perhaps it’s time for the “Where did my baby nephew come from?” conversation.)

We then faced the issue of what constituted a shot and, more importantly, which shotglass to use. I have many shotglasses, all of them kinda sorta cherished and very definitely unused. The last time I called one into action, I had gotten into this huge, massive argument over American involvement in Kosovo with my then-boyfriend and I needed a drink once I realized that I had in fact sunk two years into dating an utter toolbox. For this occasion I turned to the “Class of ‘99” shotglass I’d brought home from the gift shop at the Air Force Academy, as this would have been my graduating class at the Academy had I been highly disciplined or scientifically talented or in any way competent. The shot glasses, then, were somewhat useful as an undergraduate; they now line the top of my refrigerator, a tactless yet incredibly pathetic landscape of thick, decaled glass.

Flipper and I wanted to use something appropriate to the occasion, however, and I suggested the one with the Cincinnati skyline on the side to add some local flavor to what was an essentially Kentucky-based celebration, but she pointed out that the tiny plastic flying pig embedded on the bottom might displace the proper measurement of an actual jigger. There was then much discussion over calling into action a glass shaped like a tiny beer mug, but I vetoed it on the grounds that I had already gotten into the borboun and the idea of pouring liquor into a tiny beer mug was starting to freak me out. (“It’s jockey-sized,” I pointed out. “That’s— that is just too scary, man.”)

So we finally settled on a high standard of properly balanced emotionalism and good form, selected the glass with the least amount of dust in it, added a jigger’s worth of Early Times into a Ron Jon’s Surf Shop glass, sipped at it, agreed that it tasted like ass for all the right reasons, and dumped the rest down the sink. Thus do legendary hostesses hone their craft.

That party was perhaps my greatest feat of home entertainment, largely because it was pouring down rain, but it also pouring over Churchill Downs at the same time, and as you well know a good hostess is all about an authentic atmosphere. Everybody drank the mint juleps, even my friendboy Andy, although in between sips his face tended to spontaneously contort into an expression I’d not seen since I watched him take multiple doses of the finest Wal-Mart brand cough syrup on the market, a very high-quality product called “Tussin.”

I attempted to arrange a pari-mutual betting pool, a plan that was immediately abandoned once I realized that this would involve math, so everybody threw two dollars in one of the plastic jockey hats and drew names of horses to root for. (Andy got Minister Eric. “Great,” he said. “I got the fundamentalist Christain horse.”) G-Force was happy with her selection, Song of the Sword, until Song of the Sword came in something like forty-seventh in a nineteen-horse field. “I am over Song of the Sword,” she announced as he cheerfully trotted across the finish line just as the last car was pulling out of the Churchill Downs parking lot.

Some of my guests had never seen a Kentucky Derby before; some of them, not so much as a single horse race. I poured out to them everything I knew about the factor of a sloppy track, the various styles of the jockeys, and the horses’ performances as two-year-olds. It was a very intellectual twenty seconds.

Your average Derby lasts just a blink over two minutes, and once the bell sounded I tore my gaze away from the race to cast sidelong glances at my guests. These forklift drivers, these graphic designers and college professors, were perched on the outer edges of the futon, clapping and yelling. I took stock of how far I’d come since last year’s Derby, having returned to this sport that rooted me in my over-the-border-from-Kentucky background, marveling at my transformation from emotionally attached Cincinnatian to poised, educated racing fan who very firmly felt that the little chestnut with pretty tail should win so that he would not feel sad after the race.

Yeah, that’s worth a party, and Gary Stevens missed it. He will not miss it next time. Gary didn’t like France, or France didn’t like Gary; either way, he’s coming home, now, returning to counterclockwise starts and dirt tracks—away from the wine glasses and back to the shotglasses. Here’s to you, Mr. Stevens: One jigger decanted from a first-edition “I MADE IT TO THE TOP! PIKE’S PEAK, ELEVATION 14,110 FEET”. You're home now.

shaving her legs at: blondechampagne@hotmail.com