Turning For Home

She stood at the gate to Del Mar, aquamarine shirt mirroring the nearby ocean. I'd be able to pick out her kind anywhere, a San Diego girl. Having spent two-and-a-half stoned festive years in America's Finest City, the look is burned in my brain: long-limbed, athletic, fresh-faced, perfectly tanned. I pointed her out to Bobby, told him there were plenty more where that came fron. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

She was hawking the local fishwrap's tout sheet. Fifty cents for the whole paper, a bargain, but an unecessary expense seeing as we had a 10,000-word e-mail from the Schnecksville Savant, or, as he's known in these parts, el hijo genio, giving us all the handicapping information we'd require. Oh that we'd actually followed his advice.

Obligatory tilt BG photo:



We grabbed a bite (of food) and marvelled at the beauty of our surroundings. The track was nice, too. We played a game where we tallied the percentage of women who met our rigorous standards (minimum of two working limbs, no visible missing teeth, a pulse) and it never fell below 50%. If the attractive women of Southern California were one giant jug of Orange Juice, Del Mar racetrack, on Saturday August 26th in the Year of Our Lord 2006, was the frozen concentrate from which it sprang.

And that's offficially the worst metaphor ever.

We were the only ones there before first post, despite our wheat beer hangovers. One benefit to living in my desert oasis is an easier trek south, away from the maddening crowds of LA proper. So while it took Bob and I a leisurely 90 minutes to cover the distance, our Westside co-horts were looking at multiple accidents and tri-county gridlock. After subjecting my guest to a Friday night's worth of speed metal, our soundtrack through the rocky hills of northern San Diego County was some "old school hip hop" courtesy of Bobby iPod, complete with gems by MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice and the Sugarhill Gang, the last reminding us, once again from twenty-some-odd years ago, "DON'T DO IT!"

FREAK!
ROCK!

And thus ends the audience participation portion of our program.

Wagering? Oh, there was wagering. Not much of it good. BG picked the first two races correctly, and while I had both his selections in exotics, I cashed neither. I had some minor wins, but couldn't break through for the big score, missing out on an exacta AND a solid place payout by a nose in the 6th.

Our other guests began trickling in, Blinders winning The Least Lame Award by getting there before the 4th, which was just as well since, by that time, we'd found our actual seats, though not without overcoming a strong desire to leap over three seats and one row to deliver a patented Filipino Windmill Beatdown to a mouthy UCSD assistant teacher in wrinkled denim. Professor Dickweed was one more word from picking his eyeballs out of his colon. My cousin, his lovely wife and a friend arrived soon after, leaving Rini (who's trading in his "Billy Legend" nickname for the slightly incongruous "Rock of Gibralter") and Veneno still unaccounted for. They both finally showed, with the latter holding a winning ticket before she even got to her seat. And then hitting the trifecta in the next race. For $500. You think that tilted two veteran handicappers who'd been getting their asses handed to them all day long? You know that scene in Swingers when Trent and Mikey are squeezed in at the $5 blackjack table and the old lady (Favreau's real-life mother, incidentally) hits on 17 and makes 21? The look on their faces? Yeah, similar.

I did finally nail the winner in the 10th, the last race of the afternoon, though my excellent odds got hammered down by post time to merely okay. But I strode away a winner less loser and knew--JUST KNEW--my fortunes would change at Pechanga, where blackjack awaited. But first we had to make the gut-wrenching decision to pass on the free Jimmy Eat World concert that followed the end of the card.

Doubling Down > JEW