Cool drinks, huge hats and longshots

THERE ARE many good things about returning home from a business trip. The puff of a familiar pillow. The scent of your wife’s hair. Children and pets, running joyfully to greet you, grateful for all you endure. Around our house, nothing a parent does for a kid ever goes unappreciated. Often, they send up rockets.

“Dad, you bring me a pony?” the little girl asks.

“I brought you something better,” I say.

“What?”

“Hotel soap,” I say.

“Yo, Dad, I think she’d rather have the horse,” her brother says.

Fatherhood: sport of kings.

Meanwhile, their mother helps unpack my bags. I didn’t bring her a pony either. Just dirty socks and shirts that smell like a Kentucky saloon. That’s where the business trip was. Kentucky.

The sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home,

‘Tis summer, the people are gay....

At one point in our business meeting, we all rise together to sing that moving ballad. We stand in the 90-proof humidity and sweat good Kentucky bourbon into our crinkled cotton shirts, surrounded by old money and second wives. The wives look like Grace Kelly, elegant and a bit bony in the shoulders. Atop their heads, manhole covers the size of hats.

The corn top’s ripe and the meadow’s in the bloom,

While the birds make music all the day ....

In the paddock area, one woman appears to be wearing a peacock on her head. I’m pretty sure it’s dead. If it wasn’t when the day started, it is now. No peacock should ever die that way.

“Go, Gallant Secret!” the peacock lady screams. “Gooooooooooo!”

She frowns when her horse finishes second. It’s a Mona Lisa frown, dignified but with a profound sadness. She is replaced at the paddock fence by a woman with a hat that looks like three plates of linguine. Better.

“I’m boxing an exacta,” my buddy Don says.

“Which ones?”

“6-4-2,” he says.

“Good luck,” I say.

My buddy Don and I are in Louisville on a business trip. There are lots of daddies in town on business trips, here on the first Saturday in May. Oddly enough, the Kentucky Derby is this weekend. Coincidence? You decide.

“Let’s check out the infield,” Don says.

“Right behind you,” I say.

“And they’re off,” the track announcer says.

Now, if you know anything about the proud people of the commonwealth of Kentucky, you know they’ll bend over backward to help you. And when they do, they’ll often fall to the ground, arms flailing. In the infield, we find tens of thousands doing just that. In the warm broth of a spring rain.

“Get her!” someone yells. “Get her!!!” Off to the left, two women are mud wrestling in the infield. They look like swamp creatures attempting to waltz. For some reason, stuff like this always attracts a decent crowd.

“Go! Go! Go!” the crowd chants helpfully.

The infield at Churchill Downs is an exciting place, packed with people just being people. If you’ve never been, it’s hard to explain the infield. Try to imagine 30,000 people with attention deficit disorder, holding a drink in each hand. That’s the infield.

“You know, I think I’ll have a drink,” my buddy Don says.

“They let you drink here?” I say.

“Sure,” he says.

Which is how I met my first mint julep. The mint julep is to the Kentucky Derby what diamonds are to love. A catalyst. A fuel. A mint julep tastes like Gatorade and kicks like a mule. Within an hour, the fingers of my right hand are cemented together by the juleps’ sugared syrup. Bourbon fills my eyeballs.

“What are you doing on the Derby?” Don asks.

“What Derby?”

“You need to pick a horse,” he says.

“They’re horses?”

In front of us, a well-dressed lady throws a shoe, her juleped ankle now splattered with mud. She curses softly and slips her foot back into a red high heel. A guy nearby reports that the infielders are throwing mud clods at the millionaires’ tents. It’s yet another French Revolution, held in a town named for a king.

Weep no more, my lady.

Oh, weep no more today.

We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home,

For the old Kentucky home, far away.

In the distance, we hear a dude playing the trumpet. Post time. Our cue to get down to business. Naturally, I bet a longshot. They’re the guiding passion of my life: longshots.

“I like the longshot,” I say.

“No kidding,” says Don.

“You?”

“I’m putting it all on 15,” says Don.

“Everything?”

“The whole thing.”

And that turns out to be a sound and profitable business decision. Should’ve listened. Should’ve separated business from emotion. Should’ve bet the mortgage.

Because Don’s horse comes from behind to win the 130th Kentucky Derby in dramatic fashion. Derby Don collects a couple of grand and spends the night limping through Louisville with a wad of hundreds in his left front pocket.

My horse? Apparently, my horse believes he is a dairy cow. Three days after the Derby, the horse I picked is still on the track. He stops to nibble on clover along the rail. He stops to let children pet him and stroke that itchy spot beneath his chin. If he maintains his present pace, oddsmakers expect him to cross the finish line some time in June.

Lord, I love a good longshot. When I find one, I’ll let you know.

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Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.