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When the waitress left we started talking horses. Rob, it turned out, was a big poker player and he told me a story about a game he was in down in Atlantic City at Caesar’s Palace. Then Steve told me how he was down in Florida last week, visiting his mother at a condo, and he made it over to Gulfstream Park a couple of times and hit a triple for two thousand dollars. I told him about the last time I was in Florida, six years ago, and how I hit Calder, Pompano Park, Tampa Bay Downs and a few dog tracks. Our food came and we kept bullshitting about gambling and horse racing. We started talking about next year’s Triple Crown races and the new crop of three-year-olds.

Sitting there, talking horses, I felt like I belonged. When I was at the bar, checking IDs, or at auditions with all those phony pretentious wannabes, I felt out of place. But sitting here, with a bunch of guys who loved horse racing, I felt like I fit right in. I even thought Alan was cool, definitely not as stuck-up and into himself as I’d thought he was.

“We should probably get down to business,” Alan said, then he waited until everybody at the table stopped talking and was paying attention to him. “As everyone here probably already knows, Tommy here is the fifth and final person on our little ownership team. Just to update you, Tommy, we’re planning to claim our first horse next week. Bill Tucker, the trainer we’re planning to use, has been watching a few horses in the twenty-five to thirty-five range and when he’s ready to put a slip into the claiming box he’ll let us all know. Now what else did I want to discuss? Ah, yes, insurance. I spoke with several—”

“Can I just ask you one question?” I said.

“Of course you can, Tommy. What is it?”

“You were talking about Bill Tucker. When do we meet him?”

“Well, we all met Bill a few weeks ago out at Aqueduct,” Alan said. “But we’ll all meet him again when we go to the track to claim the horse.”

“And about the horse,” I said. “You said Tucker has a few horses he’s watching. Do we get to help decide which one he claims?”

“We’ve discussed that already,” Alan said, “and if you don’t have a strong objection we’d prefer to leave that decision up to Bill Tucker. The way we figured it, we’re not down at the track every day, watching the horses train, so we might as well leave the hands-on decisions to someone who knows more about the business than we ever will. It’s like owning a baseball team. When the owner starts jumping in, making decisions for the manager, the whole team gets screwed up. But when the manager makes the on-the-field decisions the team has a chance of winning.”

I asked Alan which horses Tucker was thinking about claiming and he told me the names. I’d heard of all of them, except the one Tucker liked the most—a filly named Sunshine Brandy. She had a great pedigree, Alan explained—her grandfather was out of Secretariat—and she’d recovered from physical problems that had plagued her early in her career. She had done most of her racing down in Louisiana, which explained why I never heard of her. Tucker thought that if we could claim her for thirty or thirty-five grand it would be a steal.

Alan started to talk about insurance again, then I said, “I have one more question. Let’s say we claim the horse for thirty-five K. We have fifty K in the pool total, right? So what happens to the other fifteen Gs?”

“Good question,” Alan said. “Training costs, insurance, a lot of other expenses that the packet I’m going to give you will get into more. You know owning a race horse isn’t inexpensive. Owning just one horse could cost as much as twenty grand a year with various fees and expenses. Hopefully the horse’ll be making some money so we can get some of that back, but we also have a bimonthly billing plan worked out that we’ll adjust against any profits at the end of the year.”

Everybody was talking at once and I was busy day-dreaming about what it would feel like to be a horse owner, to sit in one of those owner’s boxes, smoking a cigar.

Then I heard Alan say, “Before we go I just have to say something that needs to be said and if no one else is going to say anything then I will.” He was quiet for a couple of seconds, then he looked at Pete and said, “I really don’t want to embarrass you, but I’ve brought this up with you before and you haven’t done anything about it so I have to say something again. Can you do us all a favor and start wearing some deodorant?”

Rob and Steve were trying not to laugh and I thought it was pretty funny too.

“What?” Pete said, sniffing his underarm. “I don’t smell.”

“I don’t want to argue about it,” Alan said. “You might not think you smell, but other people think you smell, and if other people think you smell then you smell.”

Rob and Steve couldn’t hold back anymore and they started laughing hysterically. Alan was smiling too, but I could tell he was really upset.

“Nobody else thinks I smell,” Pete said to Alan. “You’re the only one who thinks I smell.”

“Do we really have to go through this at every meeting?” Alan said.

“I don’t smell,” Pete said. “If I smelled wouldn’t my wife say something to me?”

“Maybe she smells too,” Rob said. Now I couldn’t hold back—I started cracking up, and Alan started laughing too. The only person who wasn’t laughing was Pete.

“Hey, don’t make jokes about my wife,” Pete said.

“Come on,” Rob said. “Where’s your sense of humor?”

“Seriously,” Alan said to Pete. “Why can’t you put on some deodorant?”

“Because I don’t smell,” Pete said, “and I’m sick of you guys saying I do.”

“All right, you want to get an objective opinion,” Alan said. Then he looked at me and said, “Tommy, your honest opinion—do you think Pete smells?”

I played it good—with perfect comic timing. Everybody at the table got quiet. Then I looked at Pete, staring him down, and said, “Like a hot piece of shit.”

Everybody at the table laughed, including Pete. I really liked these guys a lot.

Finally, we all settled down. Pete said he’d start wearing some cologne if it would make everybody happier. The waiter came to take our dessert orders. I was handling my food pretty good so I ordered two scoops of vanilla ice cream.

The waiter came back and put the desserts on the table. We were all laughing it up, having a good time, then I said to Alan, “Before I forget—I want to give you the money. You know, the ten grand.”

“Oh, right,” Alan said. “I guess that’s a good idea.”

I reached under the table, picked up the gym bag, and started to pass it across the table to Alan. Everybody stopped eating and was looking at me.

“‘What’s this?” Alan asked.

“It’s a gym bag,” I said, “but don’t worry—it’s been laying around my closet forever. Toss it out when you get home—I don’t need it.”

“I don’t mean the gym bag,” Alan said. “I mean what’s inside it?”

“The ten grand,” I said, wondering what the big problem was.

“You brought cash?” Alan said.

“Yeah,” I said. “You told me to, didn’t you?”

Alan smiled.

“This is a joke, right?” he said.

“No, what kind of joke would this be? You told me to bring you the money, I brought you the money.”

“I thought you’d bring a check.”

“I don’t write checks,” I said.

“Then a money order, whatever. I can’t accept your money in cash.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t.”

“It’s real money,” I said. I unzipped the bag and took out some wads of bills. “See?”