Quiet, and Kind of Creepy
In other words, a typical weekday at the track:
I went out to Bay Meadows recently — my first visit to a track in years, I admit — and things were so sedate I thought I’d lost my hearing. Most bets are placed at electronic touch screens now, so there were no wishful last words or giddy collection scenes at the windows, no general clamor or charge. It was more like some horse-theme mall, with gift shops and ATMs. What I took to be Bay Meadows habitues were seated at long tables near a vacant bar in isolated cones of silence, like men at an old porno movie house, their glazed eyes trained on banks of television screens that relayed the labors of horses at distant tracks — Hollywood Park, Belmont, Churchill Downs.
