We spent Sunday at the horses. Syrupy, golden sunshine penetrated everything. There was a wind, and within it was the ghost of a chill.

"It's almost never like this in LA," Jesse said. "Sunny and windy like this."

Jesse pointed out the art deco magnificence of the grandstand and I tried to imagine how many men had wasted their lives in there, evading wives and children, looking for that one big win. Southern Californian men of the 20th century: migrant farm workers, lowlife barflies, stuntmen and junkie cabaret musicians. But good things happen too.

I drank gin and tonics and bet like a fool.

Suddenly you hear the horses when they turn into the stretch. You're momentarily ashamed that you've been gaping at the mute and sterile screen. You hear the pounding of their hooves and you can almost feel it. The vain and pleading hollers of the crowd.

We were in the infield, where there was a playground. We bet and watched and read the form and bet and watched. Odds shifting on the board. Always a scratch or two. The starting gate reappearing somewhere on the track. The kids held races of their own.

It was over and we walked back out the tunnel. Below the grandstand, men sat in disordered groups and watched the last remaining off-track races. Exhausting all their chances, putting off their journey home.

Puerto Rico where we were, in Condado, had a vague look of distress. Everything was clean and safe for the tourists but there seemed to be a weariness from the decades of catering to them. On Saturday night at the El San Juan half the crowd was up in a throng watching a boxing match on TVs suspended from the ceiling. The room was ornate and old and retained some of the grandeur of another age when you had to wear formal clothes to gamble. The dealers were aloof, even rude. I sat down at a blackjack table and in between hands the woman to my left lit a cigarette, and the dealer waved off the air before her with a sour look. I rose in protest. Elsewhere dealers were grim and humorless; the cashier girl said neither thank you nor good night.

Why'd I have to go and pick the Chiefs and the over. The over?! Players crossed the line like yuppie mountaineers popping Mt. Everest in a hailstorm. And by that I mean few. And far between.

The over!


The cabbie fucked up and didn't cut across the avenue to turn left on 105th so he left me off on the far side of Mad and I grumbled and he apologized. On my short walk home I came upon a driver, drunker than me, staggering out of his town car toward his door. His uneasy gait, expensive shoes padding on the pavement out of time, betrayed his inebriation.

Once inside my building I charged down the hall like a toy soldier, I don't know why. Chin up, barrel chest, arms swinging. I checked the mailbox for no particular reason at all, with complete conviction that it would be empty. And it was. I closed it swiftly yet methodically, making a game of formalized gestures. I stomped up the stairs full of conviction but by my landing I was panting and frail, all too human.

The Big Dance

In the basketball tournament, the Big Dance, every nine-to-five slave has a tenner in a pool and consequently we find ourselves identifying with these players and places and we match our momentary emotions to the haphazard, pan-state scattering of places our teams are from, Kentucky and Kansas and Texas and Eastern Tennessee, and at the very same time there are soldiers sitting in a barren room in Iraq telling their Iraqi interrogators where they come from: Texas, New Jersey, West Texas, Kansas.