Saturday, March 27, 2004

Quite Possibly The First Time I Have Used a Blog For Its Intended Purpose

as in, linking to other webpages the world might find interesting, rather than sitting down to fret over Merv Griffin, accidentally dressing like a stripper, and piece-of-shit racetracks.

You simply must go here. It is the webpage of a teacher who assigned letter grades to the flags of the world, and it's just about the most hilarious thing I have seen on the internet. (Favorite comment: On Libya's flag, which is simply a rectangle of green, the author says, "Did you even TRY?") Also, don't miss the monstrosity that is the flag of the Falkland Islands, which features a picture of a sheep riding on top of an island riding on top of a ship.

Friday, March 26, 2004

Day at the Races

No day at the track like starting a day at the track in the all-together. I was newly showered and wearing one sandal when I learned that within three hours, Pat Day was going to be riding at Tampa Bay Downs.

Watching Pat Day ride at Tampa Bay Downs is the approximate equivalent of seeing Babe Ruth roll into an over-thirty softball game down at the middle school fields. TPD is my very favorite piece-of-shit track, God bless it, but the fact remains that it is, pretty much, a piece of shit. You don't go there to see the pretty hats and watch that nice Ryan Foglesonger mount up. Five-grand claimers, a starting gate somewhere east of BFE, and a clientele fresh from a Jerry Springer taping: This is Tampa Bay Downs, long may its crappy flag wave.

So seeing Pat Day there is a rare occurrence, somewhat on par with John Kerry going an entire two seconds without reminding everyone that he is, in case you haven't heard, a Vietnam war vet, but when that blue moon does rise you had damn well better be there to pass the story on to yet-unborn generations.

And yet there was a lot to recommend not doing so. His post time was at 4:19; I found out about his holy presence at the Downs at 1:17. The Blonde Bachelorette Pad sits a good two hours from the track. Also I was wet. And un-makeuped. And broke.

But I had a full tank of gas and I had a hair dryer and no fear of taking on I-4 in a fully responsible manner ("GET OUT OF MY WAY I'M TRYING TO MAKE A POST TIME YOU STUPID AMBULANCE MY GOD YOU PEOPLE HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE OF PRIORITIES!!!!!")

BTW, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank I-4 for providing an unparalleled Luke Skywalker Flying Through the Trench of the Death Star driving experience. The Florida Department of Transportation, in its unending efforts to piss me off, has decided to tear up the world for "transportation flow improvements." Apparently improving the flow of transportation chiefly involves narrowing traffic to a single lane and placing monolithic barriers along each side. The entire line is going a hundred and seven miles an hour, you've got a margin of error of about four millimeters on either side, and Darth Vader is at the wheel of the massive black SUV behind you, lasers armed. Thanks, FDOT. May the Force bite you in the ass.

I made it to Tampa in an hour and a half, once again proving that God does indeed keep me around pretty much for reasons of His own amusement.

I totally needed a camera crew with me as I crossed the parking lot to the track. I had to park in northern Albuquerque, so I had this 4520-mile dash to the turnstyle. I've got my notebook in one hand and a handful of post positions in the other and I am sprinting. I'm running to see the runners. All this required John Williams fanfare and perhaps a few seconds of slow-mo. I'd nominate the entire moment as an NTRA commercial, but it was far too awesome and marketable. "No!" the NTRA would say. "More footage of Bob Baffert wearing sunglasses! The kids love it!"

My favorite part of any race comes long before the gates and the dirt and the wire are dealt with at all. It is that moment in the paddock when the jockeys stream out to meet their mounts, brilliant in their silks and heartstopping in their certainty. They cross their arms, whips in hand; their goggles rest atop their helmets or dangle from their necks, and you can see the race in their eyes. "It is humanly impossible to look cool in a helmet," someone once told me--well, jockeys do. The blood and mud from the last race has been washed away, and it's Morning In America, right there on the grass. It is baseball's opening day, it is the first dawn of spring, nine times a day in a paddock.

Astronauts, in orbit, see sixteen sunrises within a twenty-four hour period; the only thing in the human experience rivaling this is a full card at a racetrack.

The first thing I noticed about Pat Day as I watched him preparing for the Florida Oaks was that he needed a haircut. The second was that he looked exactly like the other jocks in the walking ring--just a little older, a little shorter, and generally somewhat less likely to go about hurling telephones at people. Given my affection for Pat, it was kind of like standing four feet away from God, or Lou Holtz.

We'd cleaned up for Pat. This being the Tampa Bay Derby day, a somewhat-respectable Kentucky Derby prep, the outriders' bridles were draped in roses and the drunks with their faces mashed up against the OTB screens were actually .00000001 less disgusting than usual.

It is a metaphysical experience to watch a race where I like to--downwind, upright, both hands gripping the outside rail--and see the story unfold on the dirt just beyond my toes.

It starts in silence.

The gate seems miles and miles away--at Tampa Bay, you can't even see it on ground level--and the break, the bell ringing, the chutes clanging clear, the hooves tight and low... I can hear none of it. And the jockeys, as they round the backstretch behind the tote board, the jockeys float. The board obstructs the horses, and for a second or two the silks are suspended in air, groundless, gliding.

The field is all clumped together as it rounds the second turn, and I am on my toes, leaning in. There are the bright red silks of the favorite. Here comes Day. Here he comes.

The handicappers are smacking programs against the fence, against one another. The woman next to me, she is missing this. "Who am I rooting for again?" she asks her boyfriend. He has to check the ticket, as he knows numbers, not names. "Um. Five, then two, then eight," he says.

"They have to win in that order?" she asks.

In the space of this, the horses have rushed up at me; the jockeys have gone to the whip.

Sportswriters like to wax on and wax off about the "thundering hooves" and "trembling ground" of the homestretch, but I have yet to experience it. In my own corner of this universe, a race in the stretch is like watching a comet--flashing--hushed and holy and punctuated by the slapslapslapslap of whips on hides and the shooting screams of the crowd.

Here's Day, balancing, absolutely still, the horse churning beneath him, cutting through and bursting past the leaders in full flight. He is Indiana Jones. I am yelling, not words, just yelling, pushing him forward and the finish line back.

There are, in this world, minutes, seconds, hours, days. Pat Day is bound by none of these. Pat Day warrants his own unit of time. He is beyond the stopwatch or the hourglass; he is at once strobe lights and a midnight snowfall. He and the horse drift forward, so fast that they are past me just as I've registered them, and yet slow, slow, slow, a rhythmic arc stretching on and on.

After he won (of course he won) Day touched his whip to the sky, then thumped his mount fraternally on the neck and slid to the ground as though he'd done nothing particularly wonderful. He bounded past me back to the jock's room, gesturing as he talked to a reporter about the race. Someone snapped a picture of the groom carrying his tack. Hoofprints stamped the sandy dirt of the track beyond, scattered and blurry, bare proof of the kinetic miracle that had just sprinted past.

So endeth the prep race.

The Derby itself goes for a mile and a sixteenth, so the start went off right in front of the grandstand. This meant that the pony faithful were presented with the opportunity to smash right up against the starting gate, an absolutely unsurpassable experience. And so of course the crowd headed for the bar.

I didn't realize it until about a week later, but I was, as I leaned up against the fence, watching the field file into the gate, currently on national television. ESPN2 was broadcasting the whole thing live to as many as seventeen viewers and an Appleby's in Topeka, and they were all--as long as they were ignoring the actual action in the shot, staring at the extreme left of the screen, squinting really really hard, and looking specifically for the blonde in the overwashed capri jeans--watching the back of my head briefly glance down to make sure that no one had vomited on my shoes lately. Aw, man, it was awesome. And I have it on tape. ESPN2, baby. I'm clued up. I am money. If I cash in some favors and really fling myself into it, I'll be on C-SPAN3 by the end of the year. Or even--I should be so lucky--Lifetime. ("Lifetime. For women with no life and waaaaaaaaaaay too much time.")

The best moment of any start is those two or three seconds after the last horse is loaded and everyone--jockey, owner, better, horse, history--is just waiting. We are all on the same plane at that moment; all on one level, pitched forward and staring and silent, waiting. Then there's faint shouts of "Go! Go!" from the loaders, the bell rings, and bam clank the gates fly open, the horses drop, and organized chaos pours past.

Though I know I will miss them, I love to watch them go. Silks are flying, horses are jostling, the jocks in the rear are hunched and fierce, legs and brainpaths and instincts reorganizing the entire race now that the start's been shot all to hell. Round the bend, behind the board: We are in silence again.

I stayed.

I stayed past the trophy presentation (Day some more, again), past the next post parade and into the shit races, the last on the card. I stayed for the lovely dappled gray that stared at me as he went past, the seven-year-old kid moving her lips as she read the names in the program, the starter who stroked the head of the horse in his gate as the field loaded on either side.

The sun went down, the air chilled. ESPN2 moved on to dirtbike racing. I made the four thousand mile hike back to the Millennium Bellemobile, program swinging from my fingertips, dancing a little. I had seen greatness. I had seen Day.

I had also gotten horrifically sunburned. I have two skintones, transparent and scarlet, and in my catapult to the side of Pat Day I'd left behind the SPF-90. O aloe. O master's degree, wisely applied.

I felt better, however, when my mother called to tell me 8.95-months pregnant sister had suffered a night of heartburn after consuming a pregnancy-sized portion of lasagna. "I am sitting here," she said after I copped to discovering that the sun in Florida CAN BURN YOU, "trying to decide which of you did the stupider thing."

Ah. That would be me. I am the Pat Day of Acts of Blondeness.

blondechampagne@hotmail.com

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