I head down to the OTB a little late, and stammer, as usual, over my bet. The thing is, I have to do a Triple-Crown-prospect Barbaro trifecta, but I have this snaking feeling about Bernardini. Its just a hunch but I believe in intuition (think Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink). And so in the end I drop $21 on a trifecta and $10 on Bernardini. I just feel good about him, though I still want that trifecta to win.

The International Food Festival is taking place outside my apartment, so on the way home I stop for supper.  There’s two places I can get fried oysters, which one? The one with the longer lines! Their oysters must clearly be better. I went there last year and I remember them being terrific. The line is long, very long, and I start to worry that I’ll miss the race. But I stay with it, and yum, fried oysters, a trifecta in my pocket that possibly might (finally) be a winner ... life is so good.  Damn, these are good oysters. Good oysters. Wait, what the fuck? What the hell? I spit food up on the street. There’s something wrong with that last oyster, and i just did something very unladylike.

Now my mouth has just this horrid rancid-oyster flavor. It’s awful. I can’t even think about the horse race or the winning trifecta ticket in my pocket because all I can think about is this oyster, and the taste in my mouth, and the public spitting of food into my little cardboard oyster trough, and my death, which is now imminent. But I have to get the taste out. At the International Food Festival, there’s no shortage of corn on the cob. What I need, I decide, is an elote. The first three corn places have nothing but butter and salt, but then I see one with lime juice and cayenne. It’s right next to a pig picking. “Put lots of pepper on it,” I tell her. She sprinkles some on. “More,” I say. She sprinkles a little more on. The pig turns on its spit beside us. It’s about the size of Babe, and its eyelashes are singed. This is very upsetting to me, this pig. I am not sure I can swallow the corn. “More please.” She looks at me, then coats the bastard (the corn, not the pig). Relief, at last. I have burned my taste buds off. I have not eaten Babe. Recently.

But crap, there’s a race! So I rush home, upstairs, turn the television on. The horses are loading into the gate. Barbaro, they are saying, has warmed up more than any other horse. He’s almost skipping. He looks great. He can’t wait to go. He can’t wait to go. No shit, he can’t wait to go! He gets out of the gate before the gun, somehow manages to pull through with enough strength to force the doors open. Is he okay? This is not good. The doors are held together by bigtime magnets, it takes a stunning amount of force to break through them. He seems fine, it’s okay. It’s okay. The horse seems just dancy as the handlers load him back in, as the other horses look on confused. Let’s start the race again. My heart’s about to pop out of its own gate just watching this.

Bang! They’re off. They head out, Like Now leads the pack. But within second the announcer is screaming, “Barbaro has been pulled up!  Barbaro has been pulled up!” The other horses are left to gallop without any calling, because although the camera continues to follow them, the announcer is beside himself.

And then Bernardini wins. Gorgeously.

But Bernardini doesn’t keep the spotlight long; they switch to the footage of Barbaro. He’s on three legs, you can see the fury of him at his sudden predicament. A race horse is bred to do one thing, and how. The cruelest aspect of the sport is that they love what they do. The best of them understand a win; such horses are often “raced” the day after a loss against a purposefully slower horse to relieve their spirits. They are bred to run, but they are also bred with leg bones like spun glass.  I’m not sure what a horse emotionally is, really; I grew up with horses on the family farm, and I could pet them, but though the land where they grazed was ours, the horses themselves belonged to the Amish neighbors. I’m no horse expert. But of this I’m certain: that horse saw its fate.

I’m not sure I can justify gambling on the ponies after tragedies like this, except that I know I will, over and again. I may not eat Babe, but I will bet on those damn ponies. When I was a kid, my father took me to the track frequently enough in the summer months (he lost, I won), usually on Wednesdays and always on the Fourth of July. Gambling at the track ain’t like a day in Vegas: a 20-deep horse race like the derby is a chess game next to card counting or slots. But outside of the gambling there’re also the horses. My father’s a sweetheart on a sunny day, but he’s a moody, whiny, temperamental old codger when his luck runs south. He would lose the first couple races and still offer a jovial, “Well, we’ve got 7 to go.” A few more lost races, then he’d give me a couple dollars and I’d pick whichever jockey wore a red jersey and rode a black horse. It did not help that my horse won. When we got to the part of the day where he started complaining about how expensive the drinks were, I’d turn and watch how fast those horses ran. They wanted something so bad they’d wreck themselves to get it, that’s how they ran.

Tomorrow I’ll go pick up my winnings. I just checked the payoff and my winning ticket is worth $130 or so.  That is the biggest payoff I’ve seen in a few years. I know its cliche to say that it feels like an empty win, but damn, the pretty horses make me cry, they make me cry like my heart just broke right open.