Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Pimlico

We rode the subway to the bus station, and took the bus out to Pimlico, home of the Preakness. I don’t even know what the Preakness is, and I’m pretty sure I don’t care. I only know that it has something to do with horseracing. It made me think of Charles Bukowski. I liked to think that it made me more like him, but I’m sure it didn’t. We weren’t going to see horseracing anyway. We were going to a music festival. The track housing the festival is surrounded by what appears to be a pretty rough neighborhood. The tickets to this show were $100 a piece, for just one day. They were $180 for both days. We got the one-day tickets for the second day. It seems safe to assume that everybody attending the festival is relatively affluent. If you’ve got $100 or $180 to blow on a festival, you're clearly not strapped for rent money. Most of the people on the bus were headed to the festival, and thus most of those people were white. In the back of the bus there was a group of three frat boys who were extraordinarily loud. They thought that they were hilarious. They weren't. They were just loud. They were obnoxious, laughing white asses on a bus riding through a ghetto, on their way to an expensive day of leisure. When the bus stopped and we got out, it became apparent that we’d need to walk about a half-mile around the perimeter of the race track to gain entrance to the festival. The frat boys left the bus immediately behind me, and become strangely silent and well-behaved as we all proceeded down the sidewalk. It was fucking glorious. I wanted to turn around and applaud. Nothing shuts up privileged, self-absorbed, obnoxious, Caucasian, suburbanite frat boys like a walk through an all-black housing project.
 

All content copyright 2009 Michael Scuro - All Rights Reserved