Readings: Barich I
“All week long I kept winning. It had nothing to do with systems, I was just in touch. When I walked through the grandstand I projected the winner’s aura, blue and enticing. Women smiled openly as I passed. I drank good whiskey and ate well. One night I went to a Japanese restaurant and sat at a table opposite Country Joe McDonald, the singer who’d been a fixture at rallies in the sixties. Joe had a new wife with him, and a new baby who refused to sit still and instead threw an order of sushi around the room. A chunk of tuna flew past my ear. Even this seemed revelatory, the domestic roundness of a star’s life, his interrupted meal, carrying the baby crying into the night, and I knew that someday soon Tuna or Seaweed or Riceball would appear on the menu at Golden Gate and I’d play the horse and win. Things fleshed themselves out before my eyes. In a liquor store I bought two bottles of Sapporo Black and went back to sit on the Terrace steps and listen to my upstairs neighbor’s piano exercises, the dusky fastness of ivory. This tune, I thought, will never end.” — From “Laughing in the Hills,” by Bill Barich
