Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [94]
At the start of the third race, a young black man approached our box with a tray of mint juleps. They were in glass glasses, with tall sprigs of mint sticking up higher than the straws. Just like one of the Hats. I ordered a round for everybody except myself, because I don’t drink. As each julep was pulled from the tray, I saw that the glasses were encrusted with ice. Such civility.
As I sat in the box watching the glossy and ultramuscular horses blur past me, I thought about how unlikely it was that I was at the Derby in the first place. In one sense I am a highly likely candidate, since it would be difficult to find a person whose blood was a more perfect shade of blue than mine. On my father’s side I am a descendant of the original Jamestown colonists, who arrived in America in 1620, a few years before the Mayflower. My mother’s people owned enormous pecan orchards and Taralike plantation houses in southern Georgia. My ancestors were judges, doctors, lawyers, mayors, governors, and land owners.
Unfortunately, a wide streak of mental illness, alcoholism, and irresponsibility runs through my family tree like a sort of gypsymoth rot. So while I may, indeed, be a blue-blooded, purebred American with roots in the Great South, I no longer have my papers.
So I sat there in the Derby box feeling a bit like an imposter. “Got any more of those?” I asked the former inmate. He handed me a greasy stick of jerky.
During the seventh race, a man in a blindingly white suit approached our box and, seeing that it was full, stood at the opening of the box next to ours, the one just slightly ahead of the finish line. A murmur rippled through the box, and I heard the word “Daddy,” a word that for various reasons always gets my attention.
His diamond earrings flashed in the sun. Of course: P. Diddy (formerly Sean “Puffy” Combs), rap star, music producer, recently acquitted gun-out-the-window-thrower. A small entourage of impeccably dressed and very handsome black men huddled behind him.
A crowd materialized, and there seemed to be less oxygen in the air. The dozens of photographers in front of us on the track now turned around to face Puffy. Auto-focus lenses whirred into action. Flashes fired.
“Puffy!” yelped one of the debutantes. “A picture? Pretty please, Daddy?”
Puffy extended his arm, and the girl parted the crowd and slid right in. Flashes exploded on their faces. The light around us popped.
The crowd seemed to close in on our little box. Puffy signed autographs, signed anything passed to him. He held a cigar between his teeth. There was not a single smudge on his white suit. His Rolex shone. When he spoke, he sounded like a senator.
Even without his white, white suit, Puff Daddy would have been the whitest man at the Derby. And yet I couldn’t help but think: all these Hats, swooning over him, their faces melting into smiles, their bodies leaning into him, their eyes trained on his every gesture—these ladies wouldn’t give him a quarter to save his life if he were wearing sweat pants, a Fubu jersey, and a backward baseball cap. Yet now, I was certain, any of them would have been proud to bear his children. The men, too. Any one of them would happily shrug, “What the hell?” and be his bitch.
People sneer at “new money.” Until, that is, they are actually face-to-sneer with it. Puffy single-handedly stole the show from the Hats, who had themselves stolen it from the horses.
“Nice outfits, guys,” he said to Dennis and me, leaning over the railing that separated our box from his. He nodded and made an effort to reach over and shake our hands. He had the sincerity of JFK and certainly as much charm.
“Thanks,” I said.
We were dressed for comfort, with a nod to tradition. Puffy was dressed for tradition, with a nod to world domination. The ladies were dressed to impress and found themselves hopelessly in awe of a black man who had reinvented himself as the richest, whitest man at the Derby.
I didn’t feel so out of place