There is no single reason why this should be so, and hence virtually no way to reverse the process that is destroying horse racing in all of its forms. But if none of the other reasons existed, there’s one that could very well do: This Saturday’s Derby winner, regardless of who it is, will scarcely be around long enough for the public to identify with. Like most valuable racing horses these days, the winner will almost certainly be taken out of the game while in its prime and put out to stud — or, if it should become only the third filly in Derby history to win, out to breed. In other words, instead of keeping his or her horse face out there in front of the public to be immortalized, the world’s greatest racehorse will be devoting its best years to producing little copies of itself. Racing, like every other sport, needs stars, and to have stars you need familiarity. Stars spark interest and bring people put to the track, cash in hand. But nowadays all but a small percentage of regulars know the names of the top horses.

Horse breeding is as precise a science as cross-pollination. For instance, the 2000 Derby winner, Fusaichi Pegasus, was the son of Mr. Prospector, the nation’s leading stallion during the 1990s, and his mom, Angel Fever, came from a line that included Northern Dancer and Hail To Reason. The only way you’re going to match that pedigree is to clone it. This kind of system works well for the horses themselves by reducing the possibility of injury — in what other sports are athletes smart enough to retire in their prime to a life of luxury, sex and grassy meadows? But it doesn’t do the sport much good. Imagine where tennis, golf or baseball might be if the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods and Randy Johnson were retired after winning the big one and put out to breed? On second thought, let’s use Pedro Martinez for the baseball example. (If Randy Johnson was put out to breed, it might be the end of the line.) Anyway, this breeding thing is why a horse that earns perhaps $2 million or $3 million a year can be sold for sums rumored to be $60 million and up. The irony is that the almost priceless value of the horse creates a syndrome that is helping to destroy the sport itself.

On top of this, racing has two other serious problems that converge in a thing called off-track betting, or “OTB” as racing people often say with a sneer that makes it sound as if they were talking about a hoof and mouth disease. Off track betting, simply, makes it possible for too many people to bet without ever showing up at the track. The ambiance, the atmosphere, the mystique that makes racing what it is is dissipated in its entirety. For one thing, there are no longer crowds at the racetrack. The Garden State Track in Cherry Hill, N.J., which first opened 60 years ago this Friday and has for decades been considered by many to be the finest thoroughbred racetrack in the world, is literally falling apart in the middle of one of the country’s richest communities. Frank X. Keegan Jr., horse owner and president of the New Jersey Thoroughbred Horseman’s Association, explained, “In its heyday,” (which he identifies not with the ’20s and ’30s, which featured legendary horses like Sea Biscuit and Man O’War, but with the affluent ’50s and ’60s) “you’d get 12,000 to 15,000 a day here during the week. And you’d get double that on Saturdays. You’d get the regulars — people who might come four, five or more times during the racing season. Today, you’d get a lot of people betting a lot of money on a lot of races, but fewer and fewer people actually come to the track.”

Keegan referred to studies that indicate that racing now draws on about 3 million regular fans and perhaps 5 million that are referred to as “lapsed,” as in lapsed Catholics. The lapsed “show up occasionally, maybe for a big race, the way some Catholics show up at Easter Mass. I don’t know if we’re losing the majority of them to off-track betting or whether they simply haven’t got the time anymore.”

Time — people just don’t have the time for racing any more. You hear it any time readers, trainers or jockeys talk about racing and its future. The irony of the sport is that its biggest showcase, the Kentucky Derby, the one that attracts 18 million to 20 million viewers to racing, is over in a couple of minutes, but for that race to mean something to the overall industry, it must exist in a milieu where a great many people are willing to spend up to five and six hours a day at one or more of the 25 spring or 25 fall seasonal racing days.

“We call people who only follow racing by tuning in the Derby ‘lights,’” says Buddy Di Francesco, a longtime racing fan who, in his words, practically lived at the Garden State Track in the spring and fall back in the ’60s. “The Latin Casino, the greatest nightclub in the world, or at least in the East, was right over there,” says Di Francesco, pointing south in the direction of what is now a building that houses the Cherry Hill corporate offices of Subaru of America, Inc. “I saw Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bill Cosby. You made a day of it, a weekend of it. You planned your whole season around spending the day at the track and the night at the nightclub. Now, who’s got that kind of time? Five, six, maybe seven hours a day. People want to gamble, they hop on a bus to Atlantic City, play the slots for an hour and a half, go hear a singer in a show, hop on a late bus, and get home by midnight. Who’s got the time? You gotta be a king to live the lifestyle.”

Which is maybe why they called it the sport of kings in the first place.

Specials

Grab the Mic: A Hip-Hop History (noon, repeated 7 p.m., Sat., MTV) looks back at the rise of the genre and its influence on pop culture. Dr. Dre, Chuck D, Salt ‘n’ Pepa and Eminem are among those interviewed. The miniseries Steve Martini’s ‘The Judge’ (9 p.m. Sun., NBC) stars Chris Noth as a lawyer defending his former adversary, a tough judge (Edward James Olmos) accused of murder. Costarring Lolita Davidovich and Sonia Braga. Kimberly Williams stars in the new TV movie Follow the Stars Home (9 p.m. Sun., CBS), about a woman raising her terminally ill daughter alone after her husband abandons them. With Campbell Scott, Eric Close and Blair Brown. The four-part miniseries Armistead Maupin’s ‘Further Tales of the City’ (10 p.m. Sun., Showtime) continues the serial about a group of San Franciscans — gay, straight, transgender — and their romantic misadventures. This installment is set in 1981, and AIDS is rearing its ugly head. Laura Linney, Olympia Dukakis, Billy Campbell, Mary Kay Place and Paul Hopkins are among the stars.

Sports

Baseball:
Cardinals at Braves (7:30 p.m. Fri., 7 p.m. Sat., 1 p.m. Sun., TBS)
Yankees at Orioles (1:30 p.m. Sat., FX)
Red Sox at A’s (8 p.m. Sun., ESPN)

Horse racing:
The Kentucky Derby (5 p.m. Sat., NBC)

NBA playoffs:
Raptors at Knicks, Game 5 (8 p.m. Fri., TNT)
Hornets at Bucks, Game 1 (12:30 p.m. Sun., NBC)
Kings at Lakers, Game 1 (3 p.m. Sun., NBC)

NHL playoffs:
Kings at Avalanche, Game 5 (8 p.m. Fri., ESPN)
Penguins at Sabres, Game 5 (1 p.m. Sat., ABC)
Maple Leafs at Devils, Game 5 (7 p.m. Sat., ESPN)
Avalanche at Kings, Game 6 if necessary (10:30 p.m. Sun., ESPN2)

Talk

Rosie O’Donnell (syndicated) Stevie Nicks, Will Ferrell
David Letterman (CBS) Joan Cusack, Shuggie Otis
Jay Leno (NBC) Kathie Lee Gifford
Dennis Miller (HBO) Al Michaels
Politically Incorrect (ABC) Mos Def, Pauly Shore
Conan O’Brien (NBC) Eric McCormack
Craig Kilborn (CBS) The Rock

All times Eastern unless noted.

“SIX. SIX. SIX. SIX.”

Behind him, a group of elderly Italians slouches in a row of black leather chairs, lined up movie-theater style along a giant plate-glass window separating them from the busy street. Some watch halfheartedly, while others bury their faces in white, pocket-size books, diligently studying the fine print while the crowd swells around them, expanding like a giant lung.

“The six is a bum.” A short Puerto Rican, with immense buckteeth and a pair of oversize glasses that make him look like Jiminy Cricket, stands in front of the Italians. “I had him two weeks ago. That bastard can’t run to save his life.”

“Shut your trap,” someone yells from the back of the crowd. Jiminy Cricket laughs.

Near the doorway, a cripple paces back and forth before hobbling toward the crowded semicircle of onlookers with the aid of a cane. His hair is a sulfurous orange, and his mouth opens to expose a gold tooth. Flashing a grin at an old Latino man with a face like Hemingway’s protagonist from “The Old Man and the Sea,” he shuffles over to the group glued to the TV. As he fights for an unobstructed view, shouts and curses bounce off the walls and the crowd grows louder and wilder until the tension in the room becomes unbearable. Then, as if on cue, a great silence falls over the room, expanding like a giant soap bubble until it is burst by a terse yelp from the toothless man.

“Fuck!”

With that, tiny pieces of paper are thrown to the floor, feet shuffle away from the screen and mouths explode in chatter. The room hums again.

Welcome to the world of off-track betting. Or, rather, welcome to a betting parlor in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, one of dozens around New York’s five boroughs, and a mecca for the local gamblers and diehard horse racing fans of my neighborhood. This is home plate for the kind of hard-luck pricks whom life has shortchanged from Day 1. Every day they plunk down a crisp bill, crossing their fingers for luck, on one of those magnificent, powerful beasts in hopes of hitting it big and changing their lot in life. It’s an act as futile as pissing into the wind.

Spending my Saturday and Sunday afternoons at OTB for two months now, I have joined a cast of characters who look like they walked off the pages of a Nelson Algren novel, a dozen Frankie the Machines and Sparrow Saltskins in the flesh. I’ve landed the plum role of the wayward kid they try to set straight.

“You should go to the park or visit a museum. This is a rough game,” they say. “Don’t start betting; you’ll never stop.”

Judging from the turnout at the OTB parlor, they may be right. It is open seven days a week and, unlike other businesses, has no trouble holding onto its customers. Even a Monday evening bubbles with energy, and on weekend afternoons the joint is positively electric. Italians, Poles, Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans — a half-dozen languages bounce off the walls, spoken by a half-dozen nationalities all focused on one thing: What horse will win the next race?

The OTB on Court Street has eight TVs broadcasting races. Not more than three ever show the same race at once. This means when one race ends, someone can walk across the floor and bet on the next race about to go off — and the next, and the next. It’s like a cafeteria line for gamblers.

The regulars bet on races piped in via satellite from places like Gulfstream Park and Hialeah in Florida and Santa Anita Raceway in California nearly 365 days a year. Some places even stay open until 3 a.m. to catch races going off in Australia. It’s been five months since the Breeder’s Cup, two days since the Kentucky Derby, but for the diehards, the Derby and the Cup — the marquee events of the racing year — are no different from any other day of the year. If you’re holding a winning ticket it’ll pay off, and that’s what matters.

For the uninitiated, here’s a brief lesson in playing the ponies. A buck fifty buys a program at the OTB parlor. After looking over the printed information (past performances, class, breeding, etc.) and choosing a horse, there are three main ways to bet. You can pick a horse to win, meaning it must come in first; pick to place, meaning it must finish second or better; or pick to show, meaning the horse must finish third or better.

Seasoned horse players rarely bet any of these, though, as the payoff on a heavy favorite is minimum at best — maybe 5-2 or 2-1. They prefer, instead, to lay their money on exactas, trifectas and pick-sixes, with the exacta — which requires correctly picking the first and second finishers — being the most popular. Based on how much money is wagered collectively on any given horse, the odds then slide up and down right until post time.

The real trick is to find the races with the best value, that is, to find the quality horses hidden within the day’s program that haven’t been heavily wagered on. That’s the beauty and the allure of playing the ponies. Unlike dice or roulette it’s not so much a game of chance as one of calculated risk. Stories of someone picking Pretty Paula, a 50-1 long shot, because that was the name of their first lay, and then winning $500 when the pathetic nag beats the rest of the field by three lengths are, for the most part, fiction. The guys don’t bet on whim; they bet by poring over statistics.

These guys are scientists. A horse’s lineage, past performance, whether it’s on medication or wearing blinders, the conditions of the track, the distance of the race, whether the horse is a sprinter or a distance runner, among other things, are carefully weighed before making a decision. The smart gamblers take all data, no matter how small, into consideration. They’d sneak into a horse’s stall and analyze its stool if they thought it’d give them an advantage.

Above all they decide for themselves. Never once have I seen a seasoned horse player like Jiminy Cricket or Toothless wager based on the opinions of the public handicappers, guys like the New York Post’s Anthony Stabile. When it’s their money, it’s their decision. Immense pride and respectability come with being a stately handicapper. Everyone inside that dilapidated storefront knows the kings from the jesters.

When it comes to handicapping, a slight Italian man named Jimmy is the king of Court Street. He dresses sharply, decked out in a pair of amber glasses, a tan turtleneck and a brown driving cap that rests squarely on the top of his head. He is thin and not physically intimidating, but moves with a casual confidence that suggests he has commanded the respect of others for many years. He is soft-spoken and laughs with a devilish grin. He is wise about horses and is often asked for his opinion. He comes late and leaves early. His socks are made of silk. He is the closest thing to class the joint has ever seen. For Jimmy, OTB is more about socializing than striking it rich. His playfulness is in stark contrast to the wrecking ball of emotional intensity that is Toothless and the hysteria of Jiminy Cricket, who, when he loses (which is often), jumps around the linoleum floor like a hyperactive child, berating the jockeys with a litany of insults. “Chavez, you prick,” he yells at the top of his lungs, “where did you learn to ride a horse, you fucking midget?”

With its subtle pecking order and shared history, the Court Street OTB is, in many ways, like a corner bar. The races at the popular tracks like Aqueduct don’t begin until noon or 1, but when the regulars swing through the doors on a weekend afternoon, they’re greeted with smiles and warm embraces by the guys who’ve come to play the early cards. For most, it’s a chance to talk horses and be around others who’ve been bitten by the gambling bug. Empathy is an important, and not often found, emotion for gamblers, and, judging from the looks of disbelief on the faces of passersby when they see 60 men gathered around a TV set in the ugly, sweltering room, it must be nice to have someplace to go to feel understood.

Horse racing, like boxing, has long been a sport with an image problem, stemming mainly from its running courtship with legalized gambling. Though the owners, trainers and broadcasters would like to believe that it’s the sport of kings, adored by aesthetes who relish the surging power, nimble grace and superior breeding of a prize thoroughbred, it’s closer to the truth to say that if the tracks didn’t allow gambling, interest would likely rival that toward synchronized swimming.

Watching a pack of slobbering animals run around a dirt circle, no matter how awe inspiring their physical prowess, is awfully boring without the rush of a sawbuck on the line. And the throngs of down-and-outers who cram the off-track betting parlors daily, screaming and cursing with a lack of self-consciousness that comes only after years of hardened gambling and thousands of dollars pissed away, don’t do much to help.

“OTBs have ruined racing,” a man named Paul who played the ponies for 20 years and who now answers phones for the Gamblers Anonymous hot line, told me. As many as “10,000 people used to attend a weeknight race at Belmont; now it’s more like 800. No one goes to the track anymore; they all stay home and place their bets from OTBs.”

Perhaps OTB didn’t ruin the sport, as Paul suggests — it just forever altered it. For the most part, the parlors are run-down and dingy places. The addition of a water fountain would likely spoil the regulars rotten. But whatever harm off-site betting did to the “let’s go down and chat with the trainer and jockey” camaraderie of old that existed at the track, it had the opposite effect for gamblers. By eliminating the traffic, weather concerns and food, parking and beer prices at the track, OTB made it easy for race fans to do what they like best: gamble.

During my first few visits to the parlor I refrained from betting, preferring to play by pretending to wager. It was utterly boring, like being at an orgy and opting to read “The Joy of Sex” instead of joining in. It wasn’t long before I needed the adrenaline rush of betting with real money to sustain my interest. When your hard-earned money is at stake, the juice coursing through your veins as the horses thunder down the track takes over your brain — and your body. The minute the thoroughbreds hit the stretch, the OTB regulars dig deep within themselves for what can only be described as a good-luck spasm. Lips flutter, faces shrivel, torsos and necks twist and turn in completely unnatural ways. One middle-aged man works himself into an ungodly position during each race. Crouching low, he rocks back and forth (slowly at first, then, as the horses enter the last quarter mile, frantically), straining with his entire face and torso as if trying to unlock months of constipation. It is a truly disturbing sight to witness, and goes completely unnoticed by the others, who are doing their own versions of the chronic gambler’s two-step.

It’s 15 minutes to post time now for the fifth race at Aqueduct on this balmy Saturday, and it’s a real washout. Only three of the horses have even finished in the money in their last six runs, and none has ever won. Worse, they’re all equally lousy, so picking a favorite is like a crapshoot. Good handicappers hate these kinds of races because the numbers don’t mean anything. These are more like Vegas odds.

Jimmy has closed his program and is skipping the fifth altogether, preferring instead to talk to his buddy, an Italian with a white mustache that rests upon a dour, down-turned mouth, about the great ass on some 20-year-old whom he flirts with in church.

The rest of the guys know the race is a dud too, but they can’t stand to be out of the action. They’d bet on a sewer rat if it could be relied upon to run in a circle, so they’re walking around the room, scratching their scalps and fussing and fidgeting, just like the animals they’re betting on.

It’s 10 minutes to post when the maitre d’ from Marco Polo, the fancy Italian place across the street, walks in, black tux and all, and heads for the betting window. No one even bats an eye. On the way out, he stops and talks to the Hemingway-esque old man about a hot tip on a horse in the sixth before darting back across the street to work.

The racing day is half over now and, from the long faces that pepper the room, it’s not hard to tell who is going home flat busted. One guy with rotten teeth can’t stop talking about the trifecta he missed two races ago. He wanted to bet it, but didn’t, and his caution cost him a $200 payoff. He goes over the story again and again, and you can hear the quiver in his voice and almost see the tears welling up in his eyes each time he tells it. It’s the only thought he’s had for over an hour now.

There is a sickening desperation that grips the room every so often, and now, just before the fifth, it has returned. The day gets long and the air inside the OTB parlor grows thick and claustrophobic, polluted with a collective guilt, regret and frustration. Some walk outside to combat the plague, but they can barely stand to be away from the TV screens for more than five minutes, so they inhale their cigarettes as quickly as possible before rushing back for their next shot at financial salvation.

Two minutes to post and the room starts buzzing with the lifers taking roll call and offering last-minute speculations: “Who’d you bet on? Did you box the exacta? I like the four horse, good speed numbers. Who does Jimmy like?”

Up on the screen the jockeys have mounted and the horses are prancing near the gate, shaking their heads and hips and preening like the stars of the moment they are. I often wonder if the animals sense the hurricanes of emotion that twirl around them on race day, the suffocating weight of a thousand men teetering on the brink of financial ruin as they huff and puff around a dirt oval for a brief minute or two.

Jimmy is holding court now over by the bay window, busting the Cricket’s balls and waving his winning tickets in front of those gigantic choppers. “Ah, fuck off, Jimmy,” the Cricket retorts, secretly glad that it’s his balls the old man chose to bust. Amid a sea of sweaty brows and worried eyes Jimmy looks as relaxed and peaceful as a baby in his mother’s arms.

Just before the race starts, as the regulars are going through their good-luck rituals, Toothless strikes up a conversation with a big, oafish Pole. Jimmy may be the king of the OTB on Court Street, its undisputed ringleader, but its heart and soul is Toothless. In his cheap, fake leather coat, white-knuckled desperation and undying devotion to the unseen dollars waiting to be collected from the payoff window is as concise an explanation for why these men gather here every day as you will ever find.

Turning to the Pole, he begins to speak in a slow, somber voice. “My daughter is getting married in a month, and my wife says the caterer wants $400 to do her wedding,” he confides. “Do you believe it?”

“Yeah, but it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event, you know,” the Pole says consolingly.

Toothless’ mouth contorts in a sudden flash of anger, his wrinkled face looking worn out and old in the dim light, and he unleashes on the Pole.

“Where in the hell am I going to get $400? Huh?”

He lets the words hang in the air for a moment, standing in complete silence as the final odds flash on the TV screen above his head, before shuffling off to the betting counter just in time to lay $20 down on a long shot in the fifth.

Specials

Cast members from the Miami, Boston, Seattle and Hawaii editions of “The Real World” get together for a Real World Reunion 2000 (2 p.m. Sat., MTV; repeats 9 p.m.). Mix up a pitcher of mint juleps, it’s the 126th running of the Kentucky Derby (4:30 p.m. Sat., ABC). The original “When Animals Attack,” Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (8 p.m. Sat., ABC), has a 25th anniversary showing featuring added footage and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the 1975 blockbuster. A delightful aquatic caper, fun for the whole family! The documentary On Hallowed Ground: Streetball Champions of Rucker Park (10:05 p.m. Sat., TNT) follows the Entertainers Basketball Classic, an annual summer-league championship played on the legendary Harlem court where hoop dreams are born. Andre Braugher narrates. Drew Carey plays the lonely toymaker who carves a boy out of wood in the new “Wonderful World of Disney” musical Geppetto (7 p.m. Sun., ABC) with Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the Blue Fairy and Seth Adkins as Pinocchio. The two-part miniseries Jason and the Argonauts (9 p.m. Sun., NBC) brings Greek myths to life in the same special-effects-heavy manner as last week’s “Arabian Nights” (both were produced by Robert Halmi Sr.). Jason London plays Jason (dude, we have the same name!). The new TV movie Cupid and Cate (9 p.m. Sun., CBS) stars Mary-Louise Parker as an unadventurous woman who lives in the shadow of her more successful sisters. But things change when she meets Peter Gallagher.

Sports

Baseball:

Phillies at Braves (7:35 p.m. Fri., 7:05 p.m. Sat., TBS)

Cardinals at Reds (1 p.m. Sat., FX)

Astros at Dodgers (8 p.m. Sun., ESPN)

NBA Playoffs:

Sonics at Jazz (8 p.m. Fri., TNT)

Kings at Lakers (10:30 p.m. Fri., TNT)

Knicks at Heat (12:30 p.m. Sun., NBC)

NHL Playoffs:

Red Wings at Avalanche (8 p.m. Fri., ESPN; Noon, Sun., ABC, if necessary)

Stars at Sharks (9:30 p.m. Fri., ESPN2; 7:30 p.m. Sun., ESPN2, if necessary)

Devils at Maple Leafs (7:30 p.m. Sat., ESPN2)

Penguins at Flyers (Noon, Sun., ABC)

Talk

Rosie O’Donnell (syndicated) Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Anne Bancroft

David Letterman (CBS) Joaquin Phoenix, Mighty Mighty Bosstones

Jay Leno (NBC) Human cannonball family, Moby

Politically Incorrect (ABC) From Maricopa County (Ariz.) Jail

Conan O’Brien (NBC) Tyra Banks, Peter Gallagher, Roy Nathanson with Elvis Costello

Friday at legendary Churchill Downs was consumed by the Kentucky Oaks, the preliminary all-filly race. The place was already saturated with pre-hats, hats spectacular yet not too spectacular, worn by women who were saving their real head regalia for Saturday. There were repeated announcements enticing the Oaks viewers to meet LeRoy Neiman, the “Official Artist of the Kentucky Derby.” Most of Louisville (say: Looahville) was there for the Oaks: There were a record-breaking 92,000 people in attendance. The Oaks is a Derby weekend party prerequisite, but the event seemed to be far less about horses and gambling than about the Scene of thousands of monied Southerners milling in and out of the stand boxes in a floral blizzard of loud spring suits, kissing and trashing each other with equal relish. “Hi Guuuuurl! Hayah ARR yew? Yew luk grite! … (Sotto voce): She OUGHTA luk grate, she’s been fuckin’ that big Negro behand her husband’s back for two months.”

Mendacity seems to be the goal and intent of Southern Orthodontry. All Southern girls have the same block set of huge white teeth, erected to form a flat and carnivorous edifice across the front of their faces, surrounded by Liner and Gloss, the Danger camouflaged like a Venus Flytrap. Rabid trophy alligator stewardess smiles. The majority of these women are roiling with violent personal unfulfillment, due to their construction pattern. First they go to elite all-girl Catholic elementary and high schools. Somewhere in that time they attend cotillion and social dancing. Then they go to a prestigious university, and since most of them have pretty sharp academic skills, they actually get prestigious degrees, but these are used as purely ceremonial husband-bait. Then they get married and relentlessly remodel their husband’s homes, room to room and back again, until they get pregnant. Once they have children, they send them to boarding schools and get miserably loaded on pills and bourbon and hate their husbands for having destroyed their lives. Their husbands cheat on them, then they re-activate whatever drive got them their degrees and devote all of their suppressed sexual and creative energies toward legally (and not-so-legally) destroying the lives of their soon-to-be-ex-spouse. This is all anybody talks about at the Oaks when the horses come in, save for the odd mention of a business deal among the gentlemen.

Darla and Eileen were not these women, but the Bad Women with whom the husbands cheated. Much to their own bewilderment, they had both found themselves on the fast track to matrimony. However, their talent for drinking and narco-sucking was equaled only by their aptitude for self-sabotage, which constantly kept their fiancie status in a precarious position.

darla operated all weekend in a keenly balanced fusion of Prozac, cocaine, Xanax and Tavist-D, with an omnipresent screwdriver, which she kept in the beverage slot next to the passenger seat in Hal’s Oldsmobile, next to Hal’s plastic tumbler of Maker’s Mark. You’d never guess how stoned she was. “Yew gotta meet mah best friend Eileen,” she gushed with specious articulation. “And when you do, take a luk at her engagement rock. It’s the biggest damn thang you ever saw.”

We found Eileen, a striking, 6-foot, greyhound-cheekboned blonde, near the finish line in the midst of a seat of hats. Eileen was similar to Darla, but lacked the depth of her criminal mind. Eileen was always getting caught: so was Darla, but Darla cared less. The whites of her eyes were showing all the way around and her tongue was vibrating visibly. Eileen was clutching a stack of racing forms that her computer program had just spit out as if they were the Lost Scrolls of Judea. “She’s got this computer program that does all the handicapping for her, but she never wins,” explained Darla in a stagy gossip whisper. “Gurl, you got some money?” Eileen asked Darla, with The Fear crawling up her sequined skirt.

“How much you want?”

“Two hundred.” Then into Darla’s ear with frightening intensity, “Don’t tell Bernard! He can’t know how much I lost today, I’m gettin’ slaughtered.” Darla pulls me aside. “That girl’s been geeked up all weekend on coke. Her fiancé doesn’t know, so she’s all paranoid.” Eileen grabs Darla and looks very intently into her sunglasses. “Ah swear, everybody’s fukkin’ starin’ at me.” Darla pulled away from her and whispered in my ear: “The last time I came to the Derby I had been up all night on mushrooms, and a friend of mine broke into my apartment and tried to kill herself by taking all my pills.” I guessed that Darla had one of those huge, restaurant-quality stainless-steel subzero refrigerators, full of more triplicate-perscription narcotics than an AIDS hospice. “I had to get dressed and be ready to be picked up in an hour! So I called the emergency people. What a pain in the ass! I had to kick her body over trying to look for my shoes. When they finally came, I didn’t want her to have to come back when she got her stomach pumped, so when she was on the stretcher I hung her handbag on her foot.” Eileen’s engagement ring was the hugest diamond I have ever, ever, ever seen. Bigger than a canine molar. You could have constructed a ship inside it. “Bernard is a kind man,” she says about it, bored.

Drinks and dinner were the order of the day after the Oaks races. Everybody had a party going on. Everybody in Kentucky grew up with each other and knows everybody’s business, down to current bra size and venereal infection, and gossip is as pervasive as it would be in medieval Russia. All through dinner, and after, in front of each other’s faces, everybody was playfully insulting, all the time.

Dean: “Ah’d lahk you tuh meet mah fraynds, Johnny Ray.” Johnny Ray (carrying tumbler of Dewars, red, weaving): “Whut? YEW got FRAYNDS?” (backing up, spreading eyes wide and pursing lips together as if to say, “Am I the rascal that just said that?”). And comments of the like, from everybody, all night long.

“Yew don’t LAHK us to be together, DEW yew?” hollered Darla at Bernard and Hal, as the two of them conspired at midnight outside the restaurant to drag their respective mates home for a night of sleeping, something Eileen and Darla considered to be a stupid waste of time. “Aww C’MON honey, it’s LATE,” whined Hal, obviously wishing for some Kwality Time with his Gurl, a sentiment Darla had been dervishly oblivious to.

“It’s a CONSPIRACY, Eileen. They’re AFRAID of us when we’re together.” There is a long, long sordid history of Things That Happened when Eileen and Darla were left to their own devices, things I heard about in giggly snatches through the weekend. Vacations nobody is ever allowed to mention again. People torched, dogs shot. I was grateful when Hal finally wrestled Darla into the Olds.

Despite Hal’s efforts, Darla stayed up all night with another house guest, chopping lines and furtively conversing at the kitchen table, while Hal fumed alone in the bedroom until 6 a.m. Eileen called in the middle of the night, suddenly deeply upset, at 5 a.m., over her pre-nuptial agreement. “Fahve thousand dollars is all ah get if ah’m with Bernard three years! Don’t yew think that’s insulting? Ah feel lahk ah’m being punished!”

“You can see WHY,” said Hal, discussing the conversation with us the next day. “That girl is a 50-1 shot at best.”

I was the second person awake on Derby day, and went down to the kitchen to find Hal picking up objects and putting them down again with unnecessary noise and force. “They’d better be gettin’ up soon, or we’ll miss the whole damn Derby,” he muttered darkly. The five-foot television in the living room showed a sign that said “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, life is too short, so party we must,” tacked onto the side of a trailer with all of the shades drawn parked outside Churchill Downs. “All of Kentucky was partying pretty heavily last night, it looks like,” said the newscaster. “We don’t expect the Derby attendance to pick up until after 1 or so.” Darla came downstairs a short while later, a perfectly assembled vision in expensive celery green, her sunglasses already on over her Wagner-volume headache, with no evidence of the previous evening’s festivities save for a small red sore spot under one nostril.

“Hel-looooooooo.” she said sweetly. “May I please have mah mornin’ cocktail, Hal?” Hal looked at her and chuffed.

I imagined the bounty of repair work and groveling she would have to do before she regained his good will, and shuddered.

The Kentucky Derby itself was a huge peacock of an event, embodied by one tall, devastatingly sexy older aristocrat woman whose appearance cold-cocked me. She was wearing a huge light green lifeboat of a hat, covered with pink tulle and exuding monstrous feminine charm and wealth, tipping her head back, laughing low and big and deep. My heart exploded at the sight of her so I snuck up and got a sly Instamatic shot. Ten seconds later she grabbed my arm. I thought she was going to push me effortlessly into hell by sticking one of her long coral fingernails into my forehead and leaning. “I’m sorry! I had to take your picture! You … you look TREMENDOUS!” I stammered.

“So do YEW. Ah thought you were my DAUGHTER,” she said, pushing her beautiful, agelessly stretched face close to mine. “Well come here, gurl,” she said hotly with sweet alcohol breath, pulling my hips close to hers for a photograph.

“AH’M your mama NOW. Let’s show off our nahce long BODIES.” It was very confusing to be sexually teased by somebody offering to be my mother. I needed several juleps to get over her.

The Kentucky Derby is, after all, without the Scene, a horse race. Following the lyrics on the enormous monitors, I sang “My Old Kentucky Home” as loudly and abrasively as possible, earning the dirty looks of a couple of frigid wives in square little pillboxes and nubby little Chanel casings sitting unplayfully next to us. My horse came in. It was one minute and 23 seconds of raw excitement. The best part was the behavior of an older woman sitting behind us, who also won. “Go,” she said huskily, at first. Then she stood up. “Go … GO … GO! … GO!! … GO!!” she was stomping rhythmically and breathing like a horse and her chest was heaving and when her horse came in, she climaxed with the kind of erotic power that only an older woman for whom sex is a huge, personal dynamic convergence of hot, pre-menopausal life-zeniths can have. Of course this was the South, so it was all about the money.

After the Derby, we were all slightly relieved, because Darla had hit the end of her 8-ball. Now there will be rest and repair, I thought. Now she and Hal will make up, and everything will be right with the world. Ten minutes after the last line was chopped and consumed, at around 11 p.m., Eileen called from the cell phone of her Mercedes. Her teeth were clacking through the receiver.

“Gurl, I’m GEEKIN’! Ahm sittin’ here in a parking lot! I’m gettin’ more SHIT!”

“Well, bring your bad self on over then,” purred Darla.

“All right, SHIT! Bernard’s gonna KILL me!” Darla hung up the phone.

Hal walked out of the bedroom, purple with rage. “Ah HEARD you.”

“Whuuuuut?” chirped Darla sweetly.

“Yew ENCOURAGED her,” recriminated Hal, who knew he’d be sleeping alone again and was bristling with hurt exasperation. Darla lightly reprimanded him for listening in on her private conversation. Hal scowled back into the bedroom.

Hal reappeared in purple-necked rage at 4 a.m. “That is not MODERATION, Darla!” he hollered at the top of the stairs before loudly slamming his bedroom door again. Darla hunched her shoulders over the little mound of drugs, with her eyes wide and that childishly wicked little smile on her face. “Ah’ve never seen him so MAD before!” she snorted brightly.

Eileen woke the coke dealer back up at 7 a.m. on Sunday, from Darla’s house. A two-second phone call. “Hey, Stubby. Eileen. Listen … don’t tell Bernard! OK. Thanks.” Click.

The next phone call Eileen made was about 7:30. “Bernard? Bernard? Tell me you’re not mad at me. Please? OK, tell me you love me then. Please?”

Sunday morning, I was expecting to see Vuitton luggage packed and ready for dismissal next to the door, repentant departing Darla in tears on the couch, Hal tossing her jewelry into Tupperware containers to facilitate the Big Break. Instead, I knocked on their bedroom door at noon. “Come on iiii-yun!” came the sing-song voice. “Darla, honey?” I asked as I crept in. “Everything OK?” “Oh yessssssss.”
“What HAPPENED?”

I could not imagine a reprieve. Hal had been too angry. She had misbehaved far too badly. Her recidivism rate was too damning. “Oh, Eileen gave me some ammunition. She told me a little somethin’ that Hal did while I was away. Somethin’ that he LIED to me about. So at 8 a.m., when I came into bed, I said, ‘I’m comin’ into bed now, honey. By the way, yew LIED to me about such n’ such. Nite nite.’ I was bad? He was BAD bad. So he can’t say nothin’ to me about last night. See? It all evens out in the long run. All forgiven.” Big, big smile.