You can learn more about the degenerative side of human nature from any two paragraphs in the Kentucky Derby Piece than in a full year of investigative reporting at Cuyahoga County’s shiny East 9th Street office. (Here’s a tip: It’s all degenerative. The plot moves in one direction.)
I read this classic Thompson yarn each year around this time. It’s a healing ritual.
“The clubhouse bars on Derby Day are a very special kind of scene. Along with the politicians, society belles and local captains of commerce, every half-mad dingbat who ever had any pretensions to anything at all within five hundred miles of Louisville will show up there to get strutting drunk and slap a lot of backs and generally make himself obvious.”
Read on, as published by Scanlan’s Monthly, vol. 1, no. 4, June 1970.
Sandy 