“That’s rich,” I told him. “Yesterday you said polo was the sport of Gods and Kings. No wonder you limp-wit horse freaks end up in debtors’ prison.”
“Please,” he said. “Try not to be coarse. You embarrass me. Let’s drive over to the beach and find some teenage girls.”
“What?” I said. “Are you nuts? The game is about to start.”
He nodded thoughtfully and then shrugged. “Oh, well,” he said. “More’s the pity. Maybe tomorrow.”
I turned away. Harriman had given me the creeps more than once since we’d met, and the profoundly squalid image of a 102-year-old criminal man stalking innocent teenage girls on a foggy Long Island beach while they dally and laugh on the way home from school made him even more repugnant to me.
Or maybe he was only 72; it made no difference. There was something cruel and lascivious about the way he talked sometimes, and there were nights when he gave me The Fear. I was no longer sure who he was or what he was doing with me, and his incessant, violent ranting about the president screwing his wife was beginning to get on my nerves. I wanted no part of it. It is bad business to get involved in other people’s domestic squabbles, and he was not the first man I’d met who thought the president was fucking his wife.
My homeboys hit the field at top speed and jumped out to a 3–1 lead after two seven-minute chukkers. Memo ran wild, scoring all three of the Aspen goals, and Tiger Kneece played defense like Deion Sanders on a good day. Even Doug Matthews was a hero.
We ran up a comfortable lead in the first half, and I spent most of the third chukker in my box, sipping absinthe and discussing the Meaning of Sport with a man named Lipsyte from the New York Times. He refused to gamble with me because he said he’d heard it was fixed.
“Nonsense,” I told him, “you must be out of your mind. These people are pure as the driven snow. The only thing they can win here is a cheap silver cup. It is worthless.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “Nobody in his right mind would spend a million dollars to win anything that cheap.”
“Welcome to polo,” I said. “It is a sport of Gods and Kings.”
By halftime the thugs from White Birch were reeling from constant attack and appeared to have lost confidence. They were acting spastic and demoralized. I figured the game was over and began working the crowd in an effort to double up on my bets. It was a wonderful feeling, and I wallowed in it, but I was careful to be discreet.
I spent most of the languid halftime break in a Lamborghini jeep parked under the VIP tower, smoking opium and eating strawberries in Devon cream with a sultry woman called Jane and some girls from Saudi Arabia.
Just then my friend Earl Biss knocked on the thick bulletproof window of the jeep. He was out on work release and had plunged deeply back into gambling. I opened the door, thinking to ask him in, but he seemed confused, and he was motioning for me to get out.
“They’re ripping us to pieces,” he shouted. “We’re losing everything.”
I hurried back to the game with him and saw to my horror that White Birch had somehow taken the lead. The score was 4–3, and my homeboys were coming apart at the seams. Memo had fouled, Tiger had missed a tap in, and Matthews was being heckled by the crowd. Our morale had collapsed. I could sense drastic change in the air. The worm had turned with a vengeance. My dream of victory seemed doomed.
The game was getting wild, and the crowd was becoming undisciplined. I went down for more gin, and when I came back to the box, I found a stranger in Harriman’s seat. He looked like a foreigner, and he was so intent on the game that I had a hard time getting through to him. “Get out,” I said. “This seat is taken.”
He looked at me strangely, as if I were some kind of toad.
“Get out,” I said again. “You don’t belong here.”
He continued to stare at me but said nothing. He was a handsome boy with a look of wandering royalty about him, and I could see by the glint in his eyes that he wanted to have me killed. But then he stood up and slithered lazily over the rail like a rat gone down a pipe. I felt vaguely guilty for some reason, but just then a roar went up from the crowd as Bautista Heguy, a small, speedy man sporting dreadlocks and riding a tiny horse, burst out of the pack and scored a goal for White Birch, putting them ahead 7–6 with just 1:06 on the clock. I abandoned all hope at that point and slumped down in my seat as the crowd began chanting triumphantly: “White Birch!!! White Birch!!!”
As the clock ticked down, I thought of leaping off the grandstand and running into the woods to avoid the fate of a Loser—which is no longer death but certain degradation . . . And then it happened—one of those magic moments in sport that no human being who saw it can ever forget. My man Carlos captured the ball and raced upfield while Memo came from the other side. The Gracida brothers were off on a Fast Break, and it was an elegant sight to see. Separately, they were each world-famous ten goalers—together they should be rated about thirty, far more than the sum of their parts.