by Jameson Draper
Roman immediately regretted his outfit choices as soon as he stepped out of the Uber and onto Pimlico grounds. The whole thing was a glorified patch of dirt transformed into gray mud by the formless rain, and he was wearing the white loafers he bought from the thrift specifically for the occasion. The thrift was in the Hispanic part of town. It’s also where he got his white Stetson, which, along with the loafers, he figured came from the body of some older Mexican man, who once deemed these garments his Sunday best. Roman paired the hat and loafers with a loose off-white Oxford shirt tucked into cream linen pants, all sure to be destroyed by the mud. He erroneously thought an all-white fit would be proper and haute, his own personal nod to the commencement of summer and the ceremony of tradition. It was supposed to be the first warm weekend of the year—and it was, nearly touching eighty degrees—but the rain had not been in the forecast. He originally wanted to wear an all-black outfit, since this was a pseudo-funeral for Pimlico, its last year hosting the Preakness Stakes before they moved the Triple Crown race out of Baltimore to the state track down in Laurel to allow for repairs that, Roman was convinced, would never actually happen. He didn’t see the need for repairs to a century-old track; he’d been alive long enough to see the aesthetic charm of old venues turned into something grotesque and efficient for the sake of capital. He lamented the loss of old baseball parks, which, like Pimlico, he’d never been to. This was why he made the hour-long trek down to Baltimore for what he was sure would be the old venue’s swan song.
What Roman found, though, in his porcelain splendor, was not a Kentucky Derby-esque display of snobbish American decadence he yearned to cosplay for one fateful late spring day, but a Petri dish of no-frills debauchery and hedonism, the smell of flowers and cigars replaced by shit and cigarettes. He thought he’d find himself surrounded by southern belle debutantes donning garish hats in their closest sojourn to a Union state; instead he found half-naked women with smeared makeup in crop tops and ripped jean shorts, racing each other along the tops of port-a-potties and double-fisting Black-Eyed Susans, the official beverage of the Preakness Stakes, a peach schnapps and bourbon concoction with a touch of orange juice whose sweetness makes a mint julep taste like bitters. Roman apparently failed to realize this was Baltimore, Charm City, a place with rustic industrial allure built upon the backs of blue-collar workers and dreamers, whose idea of luxury was a cold beer and a fistful of crab guts. He realized, albeit too late, that he thought this would be like Louisville. He accidentally imagined Churchill Downs without realizing it, full of pageantry and performative etiquette, where expensive drugs were done by the American elite behind the closed doors of suites and limousines, where you could see the best wide receiver in the NFL and the richest man in the South standing shoulder-to-shoulder, placing bets on horses you’ve never heard of in amounts you could never fathom. Instead, he found himself in this mud they called the “infield,” a place that somehow escaped the watchful eyes of God, where men in faux leather boots and Make America Great Again t-shirts did key bumps of coke out in the open and fondled unsuspecting girls behind Zyn pop-up tents. If Churchill Downs was a society ball, then Pimlico was a state school frat party. The rain kept coming harder and from the infield the horses could only be seen for a fleeting moment, rounding the second-to-last turn of the races, kicking up mud and disappearing as fast as they came. Roman was disgusted and, moreover, heartbroken.
He stood under a sprawling tent in the beer line, jaded and ready to leave, smoking a cigarette he bummed from an overweight man with a soul patch and a straw cowboy hat adorned with the Coors Light logo, who complimented Roman’s Stetson, by now soaked through. The beer line in the tent was packed to the brim because Ray Lewis would be there signing autographs. Roman looked at the line of unmoving drunkards thoughtlessly waiting like the line was the event itself. When he got to the front—which seemed like it took hours—he convinced the bartender to sell him six beers and three shots, planning not to go through that ordeal again. He poured the shots into a plastic flask he brought and harnessed the beers between his forearm and chest. He walked back outside. The rain had subsided into a sort of steady mist, subdued enough for Roman to stand alone in the mud, drink, and plot his next move. He had none. His loafers were covered in mud, with no more white visible, and the cuffs of his linen pants were spattered. He looked around and saw he was the only person standing alone, everyone else in a group of friends, laughing or crying or puking or sleeping on the lawn. It was clear to him this venue was only used once a year, left to rot for the other fifty-one weekends in this otherwise quiet residential neighborhood. Everything looked sad to him. Even the grandstand, the dilapidated concrete sloping and cracking at its seams, extemporaneously covered by a glass press box that made it look not so much nice again, but like the racetrack was trying to hide its true state of desolation and disrepair. The image of a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound came to Roman. He wandered toward the bathroom. The cement concourse was streaked with unidentified liquid stains and smelled like stale beer, musty laundry and hot dogs. Once he was inside, the scene seemed, at first glance, more congruent with Roman’s expectations. It was full of ambling attendees who paid for seats. They were dressed a bit nicer than the clientele outside, but upon a second glance even they exuded some sort of brokenness in fashion; the men’s black and gray suits poorly tailored, some of them wearing sneakers instead of dress shoes; the women wearing ill-fitting dresses with unbecoming silhouettes, cosplaying themselves a subculture they evidently knew nothing about. In the bathroom, Roman’s loafers were further defiled by the standing water on the floor, most of which, he assumed, was actually stale piss.
Roman lost track of time back at his lonely spot in the infield, drinking away the hours, thinking that maybe they should tear this shit hole down. He downed his beverages quicker than he planned and laid back into the wet earth in an act of surrender, accepting that once he woke up, he may never be able to wash off the mud. But he did wake up, an unknown number of hours later, to a foreign touch and the unmistakable and inscrutable scent of a woman. A woman? He opened his eyes and saw a beauty with golden locks, hazel eyes, small mouth, fair skin, and an inexplicably pristine white dress, leaning over him with a look of concern, rubbing his right arm. She looked like an angel to him, juxtaposed with the roaming miscreants all around her. The deep focus of the scene before him struck Roman like something from a movie. He thought she smelled floral and earthy, but it could’ve just been the still-wet mud beneath him, though he noticed it had stopped raining and, while still cloudy, the sun was attempting to peek through the dense rain clouds. It was like the heavens had opened up to him. He was still very drunk. He thought maybe he was dreaming. He felt himself and felt her arm. All he could muster was a short, confused, “Huh?”
She put her finger on his lips to indicate silence and Roman acquiesced, still mostly unsure of…everything. Then she laid beside him. He wondered why, and worried that her beautiful long hair was going to get dirty from the mud. He looked around and saw no one nearby. It seemed this woman was alone. He turned and looked at her with one squinting eye, his vision going in and out of focus. Closer to him, she smelled like pure ethanol, cheap vodka. He looked at her and she looked at him for almost an entire minute. Neither spoke. Then she took her hand and ran it across his sideburns and through his hair and smiled. At that moment, Roman realized his Stetson had fallen off in his sleep. It sat in a puddle of mud above his head. She moved her hand down to his collar and pulled him close. She closed her eyes and started to make out with him. She unbuttoned the top button of his Oxford shirt and ran her hands through his chest hair. He felt himself growing at her touch. She smiled as she kissed him and exhaled. Roman could smell cigarettes on her breath in addition to the alcohol. All signs, aside from her seraphic beauty, pointed to the fact that she was another pleasure-seeking youth at the overindulgent booze-soaked white kid saturnalia, but for the first time, Roman didn’t care. For a few moments he opened his heart and his body, taking in everything from her scent, her touch, her gaze.
He pulled back from her kiss and said, “What’s your name?”
The woman smiled and pulled away from his grasp; he had wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her in without realizing it. For the first time he wondered if others were looking, but then thought again, and decided he did not care one way or the other. The woman did not respond. She sat up from the ground and grabbed his muddy Stetson. She put it on. Her head was small and the hat was huge, but her smile, glowing out from under its brim, further illuminated her beauty, its very spirit drowning out the mere size of the ruined hat. She pinched his exposed chest, stood up and turned around to walk away. As she strode toward the crowd in the distance, Roman noticed with a mixture of pleasure and astonishment that, somehow, her little white dress was completely clean. There was no mud anywhere. Roman could not fathom how that was possible. He noticed from the taut feeling in his cheeks that he, too, was smiling wide.
He shook off the final remnants of his sleepiness and noticed that in the distance a stage had been set up some time during his rest and Bruno Mars was performing. Bruno Mars was listed on Roman’s Preakness ticket as the “afterparty” performer, meaning he had missed the main race. Normally this would have angered Roman, but he noted with some surprise that he was totally unbothered. He looked around and didn’t see where the woman had gone. He stood up and stumbled half-drunk around the smattering of people that remained for the show—most had gone home, it seemed, after the races, probably because of the rain—and could not find her anywhere. He knew that if she was in his sightline, she couldn’t be missed. She was too bright, a moving orb of light among the drab grayness of the track, to blend in with the crowd. He decided he needed another beer, so he went back to the tent, where the beer line was thankfully much shorter.
Roman got his beer quickly. He walked back outside and stood alone again and scanned the scene before him as he sipped his tepid brew. His clothes were almost completely coated in mud and he was cold to the bone, but he felt a pulsating warmth inside. He looked around and for the first time noticed the hitherto hidden beauty of this American tableau. Patches of grass, glowing verdant and full of life from the downpour, were sprouting up out of the suffocating infield mud. The porta-potties sat in incredibly straight rows on either side of the field in perfect symmetry. The torn-up mud on the only turn on the track he could see was glistening in the afterglow of the rain. The sky in its yellowgray timidity took on a friendly softness. Even the tumbledown grandstand in the distance shone in a new light; its charm was in its disarray and decay, not despite it. Each crack and slope and spore of mold were another story, another layer, in this grand house’s long history. Roman realized—or maybe just remembered—that every scar is a story. A wave of melancholy overtook him; he wished people could just get in touch with the sensuality of downtrodden imperfection. For the same reason he liked the musty old halls of baseball stadiums he’d never been to, he began to develop an acute and dear love for the ramshackle Pimlico. And now it was going to be torn down, mere months away from the cold and unforgiving face of the wrecking ball. And so it would cease to exist, whatever bound to replace it sure to be more soulless, sterile, and empty than what now stood on these mythic grounds.
Something inside Roman changed for good. He was just happy to have been able to see Pimlico as it was always meant to be before it was too late.
He walked off the grounds at dusk and didn’t bother to try and wipe off his shoes.
He had already forgotten that the unnamed woman stole his hat, though he remembered her.
He sat on a curb as the stragglers left the Bruno Mars show.
He watched a group of angry PETA representatives on the opposite corner protesting the inhumane practices of racehorse owners and smiled.
He found a vendor down the block selling leftover Miller Lites for one dollar a pop.
He bought three.
Jameson Draper is a writer from Detroit. He currently lives in Baltimore. His work has appeared in Burial Magazine, Hobart and Michigan City Review of Books, among others. He loves his gray cat, a crisp negroni and a baseball game on a summer night. He is endlessly frightened and is wondering if he could maybe have a bite of your shawarma. Follow him on Twitter @jamdraper.