Tales From The Horse Track: Red Moon Racing

Long time ago Levon Helm sang....

Good luck had just stung me/To the race track I did go/She bet on one horse to win/And I bet on another to show/odds were in my favor/I had him five to one/When that nag to win came around the track/Sure enough he had won

She said gambling cheaper then therapy so to the track went. And we spent.

The race track is a lot like an audition for limbo. Lost souls wrathing, wrapped in whispering cigarette smoke and wasted racing forms.

Not the star studded Triple Crown races. Not those, not the ones with the plastic surgeon structured folks from La La land.

Not the debauched super rich sheik's, not the prosperous, pampered ladies from the manors with the peacocks posed on their 1000 buck hairdo heads, and not the ones with the well manicured television talking heads.

No the real tracks where the losers and lost souls linger. Sometimes linger too long.

When you been haunting a track for a long time each time back is like stepping into a favorite, forlorn fun house.

Of course, maybe your part of the fun house ride and you don't even know it. Buy the fun house ticket take the ride the dead doctor hissed.

The track is one of the last fading bastions of the degenerate. Smoking, drinking, and gambling are all things frowned upon in our increasing Boomer puritanical society.

Not at the track. Do all that sinful sloth stuff and still have a burnt burger, a greasy slice, and a foot long hot dog on the side.

Beside me in a betting booth is a big, broken old man with an extra head like a hideous hydra dangling from his bulbous neck. Its some type of tumorous growth and it dances as he nods up and down, up and down, up and down. Murmuring to himself and studying while scibbling the prancing ponies at Belmont.

The obnoxious, drunken young expert babbles on and on behind me. Loud, pallid, and insulting he narrates every race while constantly slurring how bad every pony is at this track and how smart he is at racing, law, love, and life.

After each race he has the winner and whines loudly at his lost wager and spills another five dollar draft.

A group of old men speaking Italian ignore the loud mouth nuisance and softly chat about their families and the next race at Belmont. A Saturday night old guys out.

An intense white haired, crew cutted man with a flowing Fu Manchu and a faded forearm tattoo taps, taps, taps, his pen onto the form. Trying to morse code his mind a winner he grimaces at each horse hard.

A short man in shades and much gold glares at the simulcast seeking some cash. Seeking to make something then dash. Someone asks him about Atlantic City and he says he'll pass but what did ya think of Maries Song in the last?

A  muscle shirted kid not old enough to drink struts up to the window and bets a big exacta. His friends laugh. The white haired teller looks bored and a bit sad and taps in the bet.

The kid says its a lock.

Good luck buddy the old man says but his tired eyes say when will this long night end?

Beside him another non talkative teller, with Vince Lombardi glasses, locks, and looks, mutely clicks in wager after wager.

Lago Lindo says the cute couple giggling. Five to win and were in.

Mutely Lombardi locks it in and looks away. To what he does not say.

Slowly scanning the scibbled on pages a lady loudly looks for ponies with monikers like her sweet puppies. Something soon must catch her eye or the night will pass her by.

The tired bar girl has bags and tells the crumpled cook her feet are sore, and  says the pretty girls serving in the booths make a score while she goes home tip poor and still foot sore.

A  zombie man, with glistening, yellow soon to be corpse eyes stares blanking, then mutters that slots are a slaughterhouse for the simple minded but sends his slotting wife away while he wastes some more money on another losing horse play. 

I got Mountaineer figured, the baseball capped man with the Jeb Stuart beard tells his sleepy eyed friend who chugs his beer. Sure ya do, is all his cigarette chain smoking buddy says and they both laugh loud and long.

A bad tooth, bug eyed looking man man in big, black glasses fires stats to his Wilfred Brimley gone to seed looking buddy. Lunar Module, he mumbles, take the moon pony its a witches moon tonight, the kind my ex wife liked flying to.

A big booted biker, tattoed Visigoth, stands sipping beer and battling Belmont. Staring, silently at the screens.

If the racing Gods smile perhaps the loud, pale, problem prognosticator will holler about the horses with the Visigoth.

Sadly like my superfecta no luck with those ponies.

In their wheel chair chariots two old men grimly gaze down the crowded hall. Searching for wives gone to long, fearing another casino fall.

One wears a 101st airborne cap from a war long ago. The other fumbles with a phone and hearing aid saying he can't hear a damn thing in this racket.

Where the hell are they? I don't wanna be here all damn day while the women play and play.

Casinos, like land wars in Asia, his gray grimace says are easier to get into then out of or so the tote sheets say.

Slinking sloth like along the wall, not leaving any ooze, the sad eyed, skeleton man thinks its all a ruse. A riderless horse he picked to win and then the jock went for a spin.

Carrying a stack of papers a big belled man, sweats and sits hard, stung by the effort to reach the races before his hot pick fires. Or his heart doesn't.

Two happy couples giggle an exacta score one man shouts this means beers all night for all four.

Its then we head for the door.

Still losers at the core.

But we will all be back for more.

Everyone, like Bob Weir once sang, wants one more Saturday night to score.

Before shown that last, big, black eternal door.