On my first trip to the Kentucky Derby I went with my friends
John and Bob. This was Bob’s idea. I had no idea what I was in for.
When I told people I was going, about seven people asked for
commerative glasses of the race. I said that I would surely get them. Note, I
had only seen the Derby on television.
It all looked so gentile. It all
looked so elegantly southern.
Arriving the night before the race and after parking the car
for some exorbitant sum on somebody’s lawn, what I saw was something akin to Fellini’s
Satyricon. There was drunkenness, dope
smoking and half naked people everywhere. They seemed to be contained in a
cordoned off section of town near the Downs.
Vaguely I remember we were looking for a guy name Tom. We found him standing on top of a US Mail box
wearing nothing but tighty whities and holding a sparkler in each hand
screaming some bizarre rant.
Well, anyway fast forward, because it is all a blur, to the
infield the next day. At that time, we
discovered that the infield gets hot. We
also discovered that the commerative glasses came with mint juleps in
them. Hey, I bought one and it was
mostly ice, a splash of bourbon, some sugar and a sprig of mint. I figured with
pacing I could down seven of these in the course of 12 hours. Oh, I was so much younger then….
Whenever I could tear myself away from the infield’s show us
your boobfest and the guy who was so drunk he was drowning in his Styrofoam beer
cooler, I would buy another mint julep.
By the end of the day the mint julep vendor ran out of ice. By the end of the day the vendor ran out of
mint. By the end of the day they ran out
of water. The last two commerative
glasses I bought were just water glass sized containers of pure bourbon. By the time the race was over I did not
really comprehend where I was.
After the last race it took a bit to rally and leave the
racetrack. Funny thing though, once you
got out of the zoo of the infield, they were selling the glasses sans alcohol
for about half the price of a mint julep.
Oh, the hangover I could have avoided.
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