The crowd and crush of people at Keeneland’s Opening Day moved but went nowhere. People pushed back and forth from the betting counters to the bartenders, where a can of beer cost over six dollars. While standing in line, he talked me through betting, but I couldn’t remember his instructions a few minutes later. After betting on a seven-year-old claimer called Infallible, the crowd blurred away while I read the two white tickets that the machine spit out. He smiled at me and I smiled back, but when we turned to move, the smell of sweat, perfume, smoke, and people made me want to puke. I tried to refocus my senses.
A frat boy in khakis and a hunter green jacket puffed pompously on a sour cigar without really inhaling but managed to blow it directly at her as he passed. The smell of musk and sweat steamed from the man to her left whose pit stains illustrated the need for stronger. To my right, a vanilla-scented woman with an orange tan clung to a friend in a black, backless dress, wobbling in stilettos.. A dark haired man with his hand clamped to girl’s butt sloshed the bourdon down the naked back of the girl in the black sheath. The smell of bourdon and stupidity fill me.
I looked for the exit and couldn’t see it.
The air did not move nor did the crowd.
Where was an exit? I needed an exit. I touched my churning stomach and felt my plain brown hair clinging of the back of my neck. Wiping the sweat on my forehead, I reached to tightened the pony tail. Suddnely, I was hot and then shivering. These were warning signs.
“Can we go outside?” I watched my date’s eyes change from happy to disgust. Although he looked at me, I knew he could not see me today. He could not see my hyper-alertness or the discomfort. He only saw me ruining his day. He could not see my own self-disgust for not being able to hang out like the old friends we were.
“I’m getting a bourbon. I’ll get you a coke and some water. Go outside along the wall. I’ll meet you there.”
I tried to think about Dave and his tattoo calf muscle. He ran every day and did a teaching internship in New Zealand. We’d had the same landlord for years and met in a history class. He’d once grown his hair longer than mine and let me run my hands through it. We’d last seen each other in D.C. the year I’d left for Iraq; I’d been living on the border of Texas and Mexico but went to DC for a conference. Had that really been five years ago? I’d traveled a lot since then, seen a lot working for the Army and the Navy as a contractor.
Looking in all directions, hundreds of happy people blocked my view of the exits. They hummed and propelled each other to the alcohol, to the betting, or to the horses. I stepped forward, joining the push, in the direction of the door, and spotted the exit. My eyes scanned and found a vacant space once outside. B-R-E-A-T-H-E, I spelled the word in her mind, forcing air slowly in and out.
There was no one within six feet. I put my back against the cool wall. My body shivered. The muggy air of a Kentucky spring held me in place as the mass moved toward the stands with the start of another race. I wished I had declined this day at Keeneland, but in all the years I’d lived in Kentucky and went to school in Lexington, I’d never had never been to opening day. Of course, I’d been to the in-field of Derby, but not Keeneland. My body would not have reacted this way back in college. I knew I could count people in a room, analyze exits, target small threats now.
I wanted to hide as I watched for Dave to exit, trying to focus. Focusing on the wall I could feel behind me, I breathed slowly in and out. The people paraded by in pairs and groups, looking like the covers of magazines. Some nodded or looked at me and I flashed a smile. The bright dresses welcomed spring as women wobbled in open-toed wedges. Most of the men wore suits, khakis with jackets and ties. They looked “comfortably numb” (Waters and Gilmour). I wished for that right now, but my mind would not allow it.
Most of the people I saw probably had no idea if their dates were having a nice time. Most probably had no idea where Libya was on a map or that pilots, some in their mid to late twenties, enforced no fly zones there right now. Most likely did not know Americas were stilly dying in the Middle East and even Africa. Most of this crowd certainly did not know that Iraqis or any locals who helped American soldiers in a war zone were being kidnapped and killed along with their families right now. This I could not erase or forget.
In fact, if I were a terrorist, this opening day at Keeneland would be the place to hit. High civilian casualties and too few exits.
Goose bumps raced up my arm. Suddenly I couldn’t feel the breeze on my feet or the cold wall on her back.
I saw nothing but the blackness, relief.
Reference:
Waters, Roger, and David Gilmour. “Comfortably Numb”. The Wall, performance by Pink Floyd, Columbia Records, 1979.
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