Unfinished Business

I've decided to simply ignore my 90 day or so absence and pick up right where I left off. And what better way to resume than with some reminiscing...



A day to end all days. The 2nd leg of the Triple Crown as you may know takes place at Pimlico race track a short cab ride away from The Johns Hopkins University. The race is a whole day event filled with good times. Here is my day log - as I remember it.

*Anything with an asterisk is advice for later...

6:00 am - wake up time. First race is at 10 (I think) and gates open at 8am. My friend John Monagan (pronounced, mow-nahgin) is the only two-timer at Preakness among 5 guys and 1 girl.

6:40 am - we decide to leave behind Jason's cooler because it's actually the biggest cooler any of us have ever seen. Rumor has it that there are limits to cooler size and since Jason's looks something like this, better not to risk it. That leaves us with 1 clothe cooler and a big styrofoam joint for 96 beers. Space and ice are now our first worries.

6:41 am - the cab driver asks for 30 bones. Borderline extortion considering the meter runs it at about five fifty. We don't tip. At least my cab didn't.

6:50 am - the driver lies to us and lets us off at the wrong entrance for the infield. The correct entrance is about a mile away. The beer is very heavy and John and I question each other's strength as we juggle a full cooler, a case, and wooden stakes. More about the stakes later.
And in case you were wondering - neither of us were as strong as we thought.

7:10 am - we're finally set up at the entrance. We decided not to employ the locals who had stolen shopping carts and offered their carrying services. There was a substantial market for this service - very interesting. We have a good spot in line and things are looking up. The atmosphere is thick with excitement. That's until Jason shows up with an empty styrofoam cooler. The handle had ripped off and all the ice spilled out. We begin to worry about ice again.
*Styrofoam coolers were actually quite a liability. Several times people would be walking with styrofoam and the cooler would rip in there hands and pour the contents everywhere. People would cheer and heckle like crazy whenever this happened - it was great.


7:30 am - we brought a cermonial 6-pack of Presidente and had to finish this outside. Glass wasn't allowed inside. The head of security was this well spoken woman with an accent and gave a hilarious speech. It went something like this -
"We're gettin ready to open the gates. Glass bottles aren't allowed inside (points at John and I) so don't try it. Whatever my coworkers here say ain't allowed, ain't allowed inside. Don't give them any lip about this because they'll just raise their hand and you're gonna have to deal with me. You don't want this."

*Presidente, if you've never had it, is a Dominican beer and especially delicious in the morning



7:55 am - the line has condensed and people are ready with possesions in hand. John is our runner and we're heading left out of gate. The idea is that you find a spot close to the track, big screens, and betting windows. Once you get your spot you rope off an area with your stakes and caution tape and that's your land.


8:05 am - you walk through an unlit underground tunnel (underneath the track) to get to the infield and it's intense. People are cheering like crazy and the light at the end of the tunnel calls to you. Emerging from the tunnel reminded me of that baseball commercial where you're greeted by "the bluest sky and the greenest grass you've ever seen." Surreal. I paused at the end of the tunnel and people flooded by me. This made me realize that I am that dude in Gladiator when the doors open to the coliseum that gets his head bashed in because he just freezes from all the sunlight. (I think its the beginning of this scene).


8:10 am - we find Jon and begin staking our land. We tape off an unnecessarily large piece of land with a good view of the track. The problem is that the big screens had not been hoisted yet by the cranes, so it turns out we weren't near a screen. We didn't think it'd be that bad. We would eventually be wrong. The colonizing and claiming of land was incredibly revealing. I'm pretty sure I have an exact picture of how it took place with the original 13. Seriously.


9:20 am - ice is sold by the truckload just inside the gates - our fears abate. We set up our chairs, our coolers and begin our Poisson distribution of empty beer cans. Jason and I throw around the pigskin - we have that much space - until a group of security, all wearing yellow jackets, comes by and tells us to put it away. I ask a different security volunteer why we we aren't allowed to throw around the football and he says,

"I don't know. I don't give a fuck. Have a good time."

It quickly becomes the quote of the day... maybe my life.


9:40 am - trouble arrives in the form of a group of sixty Pike brothers from the University of Maryland. They don't respect our taped land. We try and hold them off to hilariously little avail. Intense semi-drunk group discussions follow about whether or not to re-tape a smaller area, move all together, or refuse to make any concessions. Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, manifest destiny, Canada, the war on terror, South Africa, apartheid and WWIII are all alluded to. We decide to abandon the tape and form a smaller circle of chairs and coolers. We've lost 75% of our space. The UMD kids have brought, I'm not exaggerating, 40 cases, and a blow-up pool that they filled with ice. This was surprising at first.


*Never be surprised by anything at Preakness.


10:oo am - the first race goes off. This would be the closest I came to banging a trifecta. Horse racing terminology is certainly worth learning if you have no idea what I just wrote. Our spottie along the fence finally gets its first action. We're just before turn one and the horses quite literally roar by. Everyone around us starts cheering wildly as the ponies approach but I'm once again caught silent in admiration. My head turns, and then its over - I snap out of it because I realize my first ever horse wager is actually en route.


The finish was 6,8,1a,2 and I had 6,8,2. Dang.


*It would have paid hundreds of dollars... $#%^!


10:05 am - when's the next race, I asked. 30 minutes. What do we do now? You heard the man, have a good time.

12:00 am - the time has been flying by. A day at the track can actually be quite efficient. Check the program, mention things you like about certain horses, wade through the throngs of people to get to the betting window and then come back holding your square piece of receipt paper that could be worth thousands. With just enough time after all that for a bathroom break and a beer it can actually work out quite nicely.

By this time everyone that is actually here to enjoy the day has arrived at the infield.
I must confess now that the time format I have set up loses all accountability after noon. I'm pretty messed up about now, and that means the rest of the infield is pretty messed up. Sobriety is no where in sight.

Witnessing my first port-o-potty race - Seeing this in person is absolutely amazing. The first people to get up and race cause an absolute riot. In fact, I didn't even know it was happening until a beer can sprayed over my head. What would posses a man to get up there I can never understand. I missed my throw by a ways...


*The shirtless man at the 1:19 mark died. Seriously, he's actually dead.

This video title makes me smile.

The debauchery only gets worse - Everywhere you walk you see things like this and this. The amount of violence surprised me. So many people get cut and want to bleed on you - its gross.

Do not walk with girls - let the girls walk by themselves. Every five seconds some drunk asshole screams in a girls face, "SHOW YOUR TITS!!!" This method is much less successful than the alternative, which is to simply pick up the female on your shoulders, hold her in the air and let the mob begin to chant. This is very dangerous for the holder here because if she doesn't you get pelted with beer cans. That's pretty much the response to everything you don't like at preakness, throw a half full beer at it. Either way, you don't walk with girls because if you do, you're likely to get pelted with a Busch Light.


The craziest thing I personally witnessed - the urinals are easily the most likely place to catch a disease. The ground in between the rows and 5 yards outside of the outside row is muddy. It's muddy with urine. And sometimes feces. As the day progresses fewer and fewer urinals are actually accessible without stepping in waste. My story has to do with why.
A girl stumbles up nearly unconscious to the bathroom line right next to mine. She looks over with that glaze in her eyes that we've all seen and recognize to be the empty drunk void. I start to laugh (I did alot of that at preakness) because she has the drunk parkinson's. About 5 seconds go by and she's still staring at me. I look back over and notice that she's peeing on herself. She honestly just stares at me, in front of a now empty urinal, as urine runs down her leg for 30 seconds - slightly losing her balance and readjusting every now and again. It was something out of a horror movie.


The End - preakness for most people ends like this or even better, like this. But our ending was a little different. We smashed all our chairs, waited for the last race - there is one more after the actual Preakness race - and left with a smile on our face. I also left with a new perspective on human dignity, self-control, and my life in general.