Susan and I were back in Louisville for a visit recently, and though we didn’t make it to the track, we did run into our old drinking buddy Brian, and he related this somewhat Bukowskian equestrian yarn:
You know John Gordon? I was at Churchill downs for his dad’s birthday party. John and the rest of his siblings had paid to have a race named after Mr. Gordon for the occasion. You can do that you know, pay $500 or something and they’ll name a race for you, put it in the program and announce it and everything. When Mr. Gordon’s race came up I placed a bet on a horse to show and I won. I was getting ready to go cash in my ticket when one of Mr. Gordon’s children said, why don’t you give that ticket to my dad for a souvenir? He’s already got the winning tickets to win and place, and he just needs that one to make a set. I didn’t want to part with it since it was $12, but John and the other kids kept bugging me and said, look, we paid for you to get into the track and we’ve been buying you liquor and food that’s worth way more than $12—we see you’ve had about 6 mint juleps already!--so I finally gave in and said, alright, OK, and gave Mr. Gordon the ticket.
Well, a couple months later it’s my birthday, and I get a card in the mail from Mr. Gordon. Mr. Gordon’s never sent me anything before but now here’s a birthday card from him--and when I open it up there’s the $12 ticket! So I thought, well, that’s nice; I didn’t know why he did it, actually, since I had forgotten all about the ticket, but I figured he just felt guilty that he had taken it away from me—especially if maybe he heard that I didn’t want to give it up. So a week or so goes by and I’m walking around with this ticket in my wallet. Finally a friend of mine, Mike, says he has to go to the track to cash in a ticket, and I say, you know what, I’ve got this ticket right here that I need to cash in too, so I might as well go with you. So when we get to Churchill Downs, Mike gets in line for the ticket window and I give him my ticket to cash in too since there’s no sense in both of us standing in line. When he gets up to the window, he gives them his ticket first, no problem, they give him the money. But then when Mike hands the guy my ticket and he runs it through the machine, all these red lights start flashing and a siren goes off, and cops and FBI agents come running from every which way and they all converge on Mike. “That ticket is a forgery!” they say. And Mike points at me and says, “I don’t know anything about it! I got it from him!” And so they all converge on me too. It turns out the ticket is a Xerox copy of the one I gave Mr. Gordon! The real one had already been cashed in, that’s how they knew. So I tell them the whole story of the ticket, and they say, “Sir, your story does not make any sense.” “Why would I do it for only $12?” I said. “If I was gonna do it I would do it for the trifecta or something where I win fifty-thousand dollars!” “We don’t know,” the cops said, “but you did it.”
So we had to go into the office and sit there and be grilled for a couple of hours. They ran a background check on both of us to see if we had any outstanding warrants, and luckily neither of us did. Thank God they didn’t arrest us, but the upshot of it was, we were banned from Churchill Downs! Now, I go there all the time, I love the place. And Mike is, like, almost a professional gambler, so he goes every day! When they told us, we couldn’t believe it, and the first thing we both asked was, “For how long?!” And they said, “What do you mean for how long? For life!!!” Now I don’t know why Mr. Gordon did that, and I don’t really know him that well, so I’m kinda uncertain about how to approach him on it, but you better believe I am gonna say something to him about this the next time I see him.
Yeah, I would like to hear what Mr. Gordon has to say for himself. Next time we’re back in Louisville, I’ll be sure to ask Brian for an update. (Ed Hamilton)
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