The first trip, Thu 6/5 to Sun 6/8, was for my birthday and 1 year anniversary of dating Keiko. 6/5 was the anniversary of our first date, so I took Keiko to the same restaurant that we went to that day: Sette Mezzo, at 70th and Lex. It's a great restaurant owned and operated by the father of one of my former students, who now attends NYU business school. Last year, he had just finished working with me when we went, and his father recognized both me and Keiko and gave us free desserts. Extremely yummy, homemade Italian desserts, I feel obliged to add.
The reason he recognized Keiko, who normally does not interact with too many parents, and if she does, it's almost exclusively via phone or email, is that he would actually come each month to the office to pay personally. In cash. The reason he paid for his not insignificant bills in cash is that his restaurant is a cash-only place.
Funny thing is, I'd forgotten to look that up before we went out last year, and I, thinking I'd be putting it all on Mr. Visa, happily rang up a non-trivial bill. In NYC, my friends, that is a rookie mistake. A LOT of restaurants are cash-only, because it's such tight margins and credit card fees are outrageous, as I'm here to tell you (I actually accept payment ONLY by credit card in my office). So Keiko wound up having to pitch in for our meal. Yes, I am 100% class.
After dinner I took her on a walk down 5th ave, to see a building which my NYC walking guidebook was owned by my student Alix's family back in the day, and which apparently still had their family crest on it. I thought it was pretty cool that their family had a family crest, and I was pretty excited to go see it. And it seemed like a good excuse for a nice nighttime walk in the city. So we headed down 5th ave.
Along the way, we passed the southeast corner of Central Park, where the Armory is located. It's actually a pretty interesting building, with an interesting history, which is comprehensively detailed in a large sign in front of it. I stopped us in front of the sign and we began reading. About a minute later, we had the following conversation:
Keiko: "Wait, are you reading the entire sign?"
Me: "Uh, yeah, I was planning to. Why?"
Keiko: "coughcoughnerdcoughcough"
Me: "GEEK, not NERD. That's an important distinction, I'll have you know."
Keiko: "Uh huh."
So I read the entire sign. As I said, the building has an interesting history- it was built to house munitions, but has also been a police station, an art museum, and a bunch of other stuff I don't remember anymore. Then we continued on our walk down 5th until we got to the building I wanted to see, several blocks farther down.
Along the way, I had explained to Keiko about the crest, and how it would probably look pretty cool, and so when we got to the corner we crossed the street from the building and began looking for a large stone crest, which the guidebook had assured me was right on the front of the building. However, despite looking at the thing from every conceivable angle, there was nary a crest to be found. I kept us there a solid 15 minutes circling the building again and again, determined to find that damned crest, and increasingly humiliated that it wasn't turning up. Keiko was remarkably patient about the whole thing, but I imagined she was probably thinking "How the hell do I get away from this crazy person."
Desperate to salvage some respectability from all this, I fell back on my failsafe secret weapon: my sense of humor.
Me: "Well, that's pretty disappointing. I'm totally, well, crest-fallen." [insert boyish grin]
Keiko: "... ... ... wow."
[awkward pause]
Me: "Uh, yeah, so, uh, why don't I walk you home then..."
And that was our first date: Keiko more or less unexpectedly paid for her own dinner, I empirically proved my geekhood, I took her on a 20 block walk to see something that didn't exist, and then I tried to rescue the evening with puns. As I walked home from Keiko's, I figured that
(a) there would probably not be a second date, and
(b) this was solid evidence in favor of my hypothesis that I am fated to die cold and alone in a refrigerator box under the FDR, with no one to notice my passing until a few days later when joggers notice the smell. Though, on the bright side, there will eventually be a Law & Order episode based on my story.
As an important footnote to the story, the crest DOES exist; it's just made out of dark stone on a dark stone background, and it turns out that it's hard to see a dark stone carving on a dark stone background at night. But it's very clearly there in the daytime.
Anyway, a week later we were seated at the same table at a work function, and (unbeknownst to me) Keiko rearranged the name plates so that I was next to her, and so we chatted the entire evening, and then there was dancing afterward, and that's home court advantage for yours truly, so we got together that night and have been dating ever since.
So on Thursday 6/5, precisely one year after that eventful first date, I took us back to Sette Mezzo. And right about when it was time to order desserts (the father wasn't working that night, so no free desserts- damn!), I realized something Important:
I'd forgotten to go to the ATM.
Now, I did have some cash on me, since I had just arrived that day, and I almost always remember to take out cash when I travel. But I was frantically trying to tally up the meal so far to see if I'd be able to cover it. In the end, I opted not to say anything at first; I just let us order our desserts and then 'fessed up:
Me: "Uh, so this is kinda funny..."
Keiko: "oh no." [One year later, Keiko knows me pretty well.]
Me: "...yeah, uh, I forgot to go to the ATM."
Keiko: "You don't have enough cash AGAIN?"
Me: "Well, I'm not SURE I don't have enough cash. I won't know until the bill comes."
Keiko: "You really know how to sweep a girl off her feet. Are you going to take me on another walk to see the crest that doesn't exist?"
Me: "The crest EXISTS. I saw it a couple weeks later in the daytime. It's visible only in the daytime."
Keiko: "I'm sure it is, baby."
At that point, the bill came. I quickly determined that if I threw in every last dollar I had, I could cover the bill plus a 17% tip. Less than I like to tip, but enough not to hang my head in shame.
Me, in my best Dick Vitale voice, "YES!"
Keiko: "My baby has so much class."
Me: "I paid the bi-ill ... I had the muh-ney..."
And so went our anniversary dinner. Since I had caused Keiko to miss the opening of Sex & the City the previous weekend when all her friends went by asking her to come to the LA wedding, I promised to take her and so we went. As we waited outside the theatre, I surveyed the super long line we were waiting in...
Me: "There's like 5 guys in this line, and all of them are with their girlfriends. The entire rest of this line is female."
Keiko: "No, look, there's two guys waiting together."
Me: "Those guys are gay, baby. They count toward the women statistics."
Keiko: "You don't know for sure they're gay."
Me: "No, of course not, they just were hanging out having some beers down at Molly's and one of them said, 'Dude, let's bag SportsCenter and go watch Sex & the City.' And the other one said, 'Fuckin' hell yeah, man, I'm down for that.'"
Keiko: "grrr."
The movie was, I must say, mostly watchable, which was a big surprise for me. The dialogue only made me want to actually vomit once. A best-case scenario, really.
The next night we saw Kung Fu Panda, which we both enjoyed, and we had dinner with Ed and Alison.
The next morning, I woke up a newly minted 36-year-old. I don't get terribly excited about birthdays [especially as I get older] but I was excited to try my birthday luck at the Belmont Stakes. I figured it would be a good day to win some money, and maybe see Big Brown make history by becoming the first horse in 30 years to win the Triple Crown.
Of course, about 10 million other people had the same idea, so we had to get up somewhat early and take the train out to the racetrack on a super hot day. Ed and his buddy Matty have been going every year for a long time, so Keiko and I joined up with Ed and Alison and we took the 1130am train. Matty and his wife were already there; they had staked out some sweet seats.
We got there around 1230, and it was 95 degrees, with 300% humidity, and no shade. We'd brought plenty of water and provisions, including several large containers of Motts Apple Juice, which Ed had dumped out and replaced with beer, in order to get it through security. He was just praying they wouldn't notice the head on the top of the "apple juice".
Ed and Allison. And the rest of NY. In the heat. But hey, there's "apple juice".
So we began a 6 hour wait until Big Brown's race. His race was the 11th of 13 races that day, so there was a lot of time. Time which we had to spend defending our absolutely-no-shade-whatsoever area against encroachment. I whiled away part of the time learning about different horse betting strategies, and decided to try out the most compelling one, which is the wheel bet.
WARNING: The next bit is tutoring in horse racing betting strategy, so if that doesn't seem like an interesting topic to you, skip ahead to THE RESULTS.
Terminology:
Exacta: you pick the first-place and second place horses
Exacta box: you pick two horses, and are betting on both combinations of first and second place
Trifecta: you pick the first, second, and third-place horses
Trifecta box: you pick three horses, and are betting on all 6 combinations of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd
Superfecta: you pick the first, second, third, and fourth-place horses
Superfecta box: you pick 4 horses, and are betting on all 24 combinations of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th.
Betting to win: you pick the horse you think will win
Betting to place: you pick a single horse you think will finish either 1st or 2nd
Betting to show: you pick a single horse you think will finish 1st, 2nd, or 3rd
Examples:
Suppose we have 3 horses:
#5 horse is MKisGAY
#7 horse is EDlicksMYballs
#9 horse is HotKeik
The standard bet is $2, and all the winning amounts are posted assuming you're making a $2 bet. Of course, only cheap bastards make $2 bets, so naturally Ed and I made $2 bets all day. When you make a bet, you use this format:
"on the #10 race, give me a $2 exacta box with numbers 5 and 7"
In this case, you've just bet on the 10th race, and you've made TWO different bets at once: you've bet $2 on the #5 horse finishing first, and the #7 horse finishing second, and you've bet $2 on the #7 horse finishing first, and the #5 horse finishing second. So you cough up $4.
Another example:
"On the #8 race, give me a $2 trifecta with #9, #7, and #5."
Here, you've bet on the 8th race, and you've made only one $2 bet: that the #9 horse will finish first, the #7 horse will finish second, and the #5 horse will finish 3rd. Contrast this with:
"On the #8 race, give me a $2 trifecta BOX with #9, #7, and #5."
Here, you've made 6 different $2 bets:
9,7,5
9,5,7
7,9,5
7,5,9
5,7,9
5,9,7
Same kind of thing with the superfecta va. superfecta box.
So here's the thing- most people either make one bet, or bet in bulk using the box methodology. Thing is, any one bet doesn't have great odds, and there's a huge problem with the box, which is that it weights all combinations the same, regardless of probability.
Suppose you think that either #7 EDlicksMYballs and #9 HotKeik could finish first or second, but #5 MKisGAY is sure to finish 3rd. Then you don't want to bet a trifecta box, because 4 of the 6 bets have #5 finishing either first or second, and you're certain MKisGAY is going to finish 3rd. Instead, you use the magic of the wheel bet:
"On the #8 race, give me a $2 trifecta WHEEL with a 7,9; a 7,9; and a 5."
Here, you've made just the 2 bets you're interested in: 7,9,5 and 9,7,5. What the person behind the window hears is: I want to bet on all combinations that have either the 7 or 9 horse winning, the 7 or 9 horse finishing second, and the 5 horse finishing third. Wheel betting is pretty clearly superior from a purely mathematical perspective.
THE RESULTS...
It's a pretty flexible strategy. I used it in the first race I bet on, the fifth race, and that race finished with the top four horses as 7,8,4,2. That was almost the only combination of those four horses that didn't win me a trifecta, dammit. So close to winning like $300...
I had bet 6 combinations, for a total of $12, and I put down a similar strategy on 3 more races, including the Big Brown race. Having spent $48, I decided to take a super longshot and bet _against_ Big Brown by taking a straight $2 superfecta. With the odds so overwhelmingly favoring Big Brown, if i won it'd be huge.
The next race didn't come close to winning for me. But then the #10 race, the one right before Big Brown's came up. In that race, as I'd looked through the odds, I noticed that the 3rd highest odds horse was named "Dancing Forever".
How could I not bet on Dancing Forever?
So I bet a $2 trifecta wheel, with a 10; a 1,5,8; and a 1,5,8. Again, that was effectively 6 different bets:
10,1,5
10,1,8
10,5,1
10,5,8
10,8,1
10,8,5
And wouldn't you know it, but Dancing Forever won. And #5 finished second, and #8 finished third.
TRIFECTA!!!!!
Oh yeah. Winning big on my birthday...
My winning horses splashed all over the leaderboard. And the bottom row shows my $382 trifecta.
And like magic, the $2 I put on 10,5,8 turned into $382. Enough to cover my $50 of betting, the $20 of entrance fees for me and Keiko, our LIRR tickets, our provisions, and still nearly $300 profit. Now I see how people get addicted to the races.
Flush with victory, and heatstroke.
Next up was Big Brown. After 6 hours of sweating in the sun, we were ready to see him make history. Or, for me, to finish 3rd while the #7 horse won, thus winning me a fortune.
Big Brown. The small one. (#1)
Nearly 100,000 people came out that afternoon, and it seemed like all of them were crowded into our little area. We were standing on our bench, watching as they paraded the horses out. Horse races have varying lengths, and the Belmont Stakes is the longest at 1.5 miles. The starting gate is moved to different points on the track over the course of the day, depending on the length of the race, and presumably on giving each part of the grandstand a decent view of the starting gate at some point during the day.
Lining up in the starting gate...
Matty and his wife had done great work staking out a place close to the front near the center of the grandstand, so we got a great look at the horses, and the start of the race. There was electricity in the air.
AND THEY'RE OFF!
The crowd went nuts. We were all yelling, as Big Brown started off a little slow, but quickly got into third place. "The jockey always does this," said Ed, "He hangs back a little bit, and then at the end he makes a move." We were leaning forward as far as we could go without falling off our bench onto someone's head, breath held, as Big Brown headed for the final turn, still in third. There wasn't much time left to make a move...
And then the jockey pulled him up, and slowed him to a trot. He finished dead last. The audience collectively groaned. People were in shock.
For the record, the #6 horse won. I had the 3rd place horse correct (the #8 horse), though technically, #8 and #9 finished in a dead heat, tying for third. Aside from that, my superfecta got killed. But if you had bet the winning superfecta of 6-4-8-9 or 6-4-9-8, your $2 would have turned into $48,000. Why, oh why, couldn't I have picked those numbers???
Damn. So close to $48,000. OK, not really, but still.
We stuck around for the second to last race, but bailed out after that. Ed and Allison were headed to Brooklyn for sushi, but as someone with no particular affection for either Brooklyn or sushi, I was content to head back to the city with Keiko. But hey, a trifecta on my birthday- not so bad.
Sunday morning I got up super early and took the 540am bus to JFK, and got myself to the gate in a responsibly early fashion. As is typical, getting there early was a big waste, as the flight was way late taking off, and I ended up having to push back my tutoring that day. Although it wasn't a big deal, I want the record to note that once again, being early for a flight does NOT pay off.
Not for me, anyway...
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