John Keresty was my best friend for over twenty years, much too short a run on the planet, in my opinion. John had been one of the youngest newspaper editors in chief in the country at the Ridgewood News. He chose to write most of the paper’s sports news, because he liked sports, and, man, he absolutely loved to go to the racetrack.
Keresty had a system for betting horses that was genius, at least if you wanted to have some fun at the track. Let’s face it, though: people aren’t there to have fun—they are at the racetrack to suffer and lose.
Here’s the Keresty method. He’d look at the tout sheet for each race, then figure out which horse had the biggest discrepancy between the tout-sheet odds and the current odds at the track. His theory was that in all but the highest-stakes races, most of the better horses were pretty much equal. So he would bet the decent horse with the best odds. And he’d bet win, place, and show. That meant that much of the time, he’d get to go to the window and collect some money instead of tearing up the betting slips in disgust. Even if you lost a little, you’d make it up in fun. I don’t go to the track often, but when I do, I use the Keresty method.
A couple of years ago, our friends Jim and Irene Karp named one of their horses Patterson Cross. PC turned into the most beautiful grown-up horse, and against all odds, he won races at Gulfstream and Sarasota.
I had to go against the Keresty method to bet on Patterson Cross because he sometimes went off as a favorite or close to it. He was trained by Kentucky Derby winner Bill Mott at Claiborne Farm in Paris, Kentucky. When Sue and I visited Claiborne Farm with the Karps, we were shown a graveyard there for famous racehorses. I guess the Karps thought any mystery writer worth his salt would want to visit a horse graveyard.
As it turns out, they only bury the horse’s head (intelligence), heart (courage), and hooves (speed). With one exception. When they interred Secretariat in 1989, they buried the entire horse. That little nugget of horse history was definitely worth the trip to Paris.
Kentucky.
Getting back to my friend Johnny Keresty: He didn’t have much of a singing voice, but he loved music. Every year around Christmas, he’d invite several of us to the Brandenburg Concertos performed by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Before the show, John would treat the group to a big meal at the four-star restaurant Shun Lee West.
At the end of the feast, the restaurant always serves fortune cookies. One night we opened the cookies and none of us could believe what we saw. The paper messages went something like You will get a blow job tonight and You will stroke a beautiful penis. Now, you have to understand, Shun Lee is a pretty fancy New York restaurant—but Keresty had found a way to get them to deliver “blue” fortune cookies to his table. That was my friend, and I have lots of Johnny Keresty stories.
I only wish I had more.
Here’s the best I’ve come up with about recovering from the death of somebody we love. It goes like this.
When we’re little, maybe one or so, we learn how to walk. Somehow we figure out how to get up on our two feet and take a scary step forward.
Maybe we fall down. But we get up again. We take another step.
We move forward. We move on.
We just don’t forget.