Big Brown Bronson

The infield at the Preakness, as Bobby pointed out after the fact, with which Your Charles concurred, is a mixture of Bar Harbor, the Jersey Shore, and Sodom and Gomorrah, only with less rules... It is a drunken, seething morass of depravity, complete with pushing, fighting, passing out, making out, pissing, puking, trampling, titties, crying, yelling, appeasing, chugging, ducking, staring, flashing, betting, eating, dodging, sunburning, horseplaying... Imagine, if you will, a skyfull of somersaulting, spilling beer cans, rising and then arcing from all directions smacking heads of the unawares and wares. Imagine girls punching guys because they can, and the swirling, yelling, pushing throng that follows. Imagine the endless funnelling of Busch Light and the boxed-in beer pong games on stolen ABC garbage boxes. And because the boxes are stolen, imagine the hundreds of thousands of beer cans, with no obvious place to put them, littered on the ground, glittering after being crushed underfoot by the tens of thousands of seething drunks.

Then imagine: You, Charles Bronson, try to avoid all the madness and just shotgun your beer in relative peace, but instead someone yells, "Incoming" and a mortar beer smacks the girl you are talking to, completely taking her out, and then you turn to see some guy next to you going after someone in the neighboring group and you have no idea why, and you see a female with sunglasses and a tank top emerge from the scrum to defend her rockhead man and you put your arm out to stop it but she slips trying to avoid you and everyone thinks you pushed her down, so an army of ten fat guys now wants to fight you but another army of fifteen shirtless guys wants to stop them, so you give a wry smile and slip out and are grabbed by some other girl with sunglasses and a tank top who says, "You're so good looking," and kisses you and you pull back and are handed a beer, which you chug because it's sunny out and you are thirsty.

Then the horses blur by and people raise their hand and cheer and then five people ask you what just happened, and you say it was number 7 that won but have no clue, and you turn and grab a water because it's really hot out now, but the Poland Spring Bottle is really warm vodka and you gag so instead you reach for a two liter of Diet Pepsi which you chug even harder because the warm vodka was so nasty but the Diet Pepsi turns out to be Diet Pepsi and Rum and Rebel Yell and warm which you spit out all foamy on some dude passed out in a lawn chair getting all lobster.

You realize you have to piss because you drank fifteen Busch Lights in the last twenty minutes, but the portas are a dense swim through 60,000 people away, so you go down to the fence nearby which is lined with National Guardsman and BPD, separating this rowdy, blighted morass from the horse track and all of humanity and you piss towards the law and they don't blink perhaps because, you reason, they are happy that you don't storm through the fence and start attacking them like you are attacking that bottle of Rebel Yell still in your hand and upended into your mouth

Sometimes largess depravity can be a cultural concern, one that overwhelms in its reckless, fratty entitlement. Certainly, any one Bronson's quest for salvation through such depravity can be championed, but when it is in the context of such empty collusion, your Bronson must cringe. The cheap booze and cheap thrills were meant to amuse, and, though the passionate and aggressive manner of the multitudes was at times amusing, it was also a sick look at our collective bankrupcy - encircled like an eye, with horses running all around it. Your Charles was a contributor and also an observer and felt good about neither. In fact, later that night, he threw up.