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And it was a sunny day, I remember, the sky a perfect California blue, a brilliant Technicolor blue, as if the ocean had been sucked from its bed in the west and inverted over us. You could smell the ocean all the way east to Inglewood when the wind blew right, the air flowing over four miles of farm fields and arriving still salty and wet and full of adventure past the ticket turnstiles, over the paddock, through the great building, and onto the track and the infield, a green mound of grass and a manmade pond. The flamingos with their pink backs and stick legs picked their way through this prison habitat, visited by gulls or pelicans who wandered in from the coast on the breeze. Over a thousand horses were housed here, and when the wind blew the other way, you could smell that, too.
When my father was winning, riding a good streak, every one of his picks coming in big, he would stroll the track, and with each step he took at the turnstile, the paddock, the Study Hall, the grandstand, men called out to him, “How you doing, Ike,” came up to shake his hand, asked him who he liked in the fourth or the fifth or the sixth. But when he wasn’t winning, he hunkered down in the back corner of the Study Hall on the bottom level, the concourse, like a delinquent student serving detention. He smoked his cigarettes at his table overflowing with racing sheets, made desperate notes with his worn-down stub of a pencil in his lucky red notebook, always the same kind, which was always fat with money in the morning and by the end of a bad day, thin with nothing but its own lined leaves of paper.
On those days, the bad luck days, he wouldn’t leave his table, and he’d send me around to bring him his lunch, and when we went crawling home to my grandfather’s house, we knew my grandfather would be there waiting, would look at us sternly as we pulled up the drive behind his big black Plymouth, shaking out the cuffs of his crisply ironed pants and fingering his wide checkered tie, his eyes an icy blue and his narrow mouth pulled over his teeth in the grimace of displeasure.
“So,” he would say to my father, “Seabiscuit lose again?”
To which my father would invariably reply, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” and saunter on past to the garage.
“This isn’t Rome!” my grandfather would call after him in his heavy Austrian accent, but my father was gone.
By the seventh race that fine Saturday afternoon, the day almost over, my father was hiding in the Study Hall and sending me out for our late lunch.
So I knew things weren’t going well in Rome.
When I ran past the big Negro shoeshine man, he called out to me, “Comeer, Miss Movie Star,” wanting me to come visit with him, which I sometimes did, sitting high up in the big chair until a real customer came by, listening to the big man’s jokes while he pretended to polish my shoes.
But not today.
I just held up the dollar bill my father had entrusted me with. And the man nodded and said, “Go get yourself your dogs, little girl.” Everybody knew what my father and I ate for our lunch, every day, winter and summer. At the time, I didn’t find anything strange about this, or about the fact that I spent my days at the track with my father or on the studio lot with my mother. And because I was small for my age, luckily for my parents, it was rare for me to be questioned by some adult about why I wasn’t in school. Especially at the track, where everybody was playing hooky from something. But if I happened to be asked, my father had coached me to say I was home sick. And to cough.
I headed to the concession stands far below the elegant clatter of the Turf Club, which was where my father believed he really belonged, with its statues of jockeys and its paintings of horses, where Robert Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable, and Bing Crosby sat and where we had never been, to the counter that sold the Lunch of Champions. Irma, an older lady with a hairnet, stood there all afternoon with her gleaming forceps, pulling hot dogs from the big steaming vat, shaking the water from them, and sticking them into long warm buns. Above her the sign laid out your choices:
Hot Dogs 10 cents.
Relish
Mustard
Tomato
Lettuce
Onions
Chili
We always made the same choice.
Before I even reached the counter, Irma had our four dogs ready in their fluted white paper trays, and she shoved the mustard container toward me. “Here you go, honey. How’s your dad doing today?”
I looked over through the big windows of the Study Hall and then back to Irma. “Good,” I said, even though he was not.
But I would never tell Irma that. I would never tell anybody that. My mother had impressed upon me that we never discussed family matters with others. Besides, it was bad luck to say you were having bad luck. I smiled at Irma. She kissed the air. Sometimes Irma called me around the counter so she could comb my hair, using the tail of the comb to unravel what she called my rat’s nest of dense snarls. I can only imagine what compelled her ministrations, what I must have looked like, hair unbrushed, shirt on backwards, my neck strung with a hundred necklaces in imitation of my mother, a silk flower pinned to my wild coiffure. No one at home ever questioned or edited my sartorial selections. Sometimes Irma even washed my face with a soapy dish towel.
“All right,” my father said, when I finally arrived with the hot dogs. He slapped his hands down on the table, setting his pile of cigarette ash shaking in its cheap tin tray. He wasn’t much interested in his lunch; mine was gone in seconds. I was never exactly sure when I would eat again. “Baby doll, it’s Number Four across the board. Win, place, or show. Thundermaker.” And with that my father gave me his famous grin, and then we stood in line together to bet, my father pulling that big juicy wad of pawnshop money from his checkered shirt pocket and handing it over to Carl, his lucky clerk, at the window, ready to make that wad of money even juicier.
And Carl, black shoe-polish hair and a toothpick in his mouth he didn’t bother to remove, said, “Got a sure thing, huh, Ike? Whaddiya know?”
But my father only smiled and winked and said, “Put it all on Number Four in the seventh.”
To which Carl responded, “Magic Ike! Thundermaker going off at two to one in the seventh,” and printed out the ticket, handing it over to my father with a flourish. “Strike it rich, buddy,” he said, and my father kissed the ticket, putting on a big show, making Carl and everybody else in line laugh and wish us good luck.
I was nervous.
My father didn’t usually go in for single bets, didn’t like what they called bridge-jumper shots, putting all his money on one horse. If you put enough down, doubling it could mean a fortune. But if the horse didn’t run well, a man lost everything and ran himself to the nearest bridge to jump off.
I tugged unhappily at my father’s hand, but he didn’t want to look at my pinched face. He’d had enough of that.
My mother had worried all night about our furniture sitting out on Orange Street, picked over by our neighbors, who, transmogrified into hook-beaked vultures, she was sure, were busy pulling at the threads of our clothes and picking at the stuffing of our mattresses before flying off with my grandmother’s silver forks and knives, the one part of my mother’s inheritance we had managed to hang on to. Until now. My father had had to promise her over and over again that it would all still be there, every twig of it, we would retrieve it all tonight, and we would not have to sleep in that hotel room again. And it was up to him to make it so. So tugging worriedly at his hand made me querulous. Worry was a cloud and my father liked a clear, sunny day. And a smile. A Shirley Temple. Worry was a jinx, as was a frown.
So he ignored my fear, handed me the ticket, and winked. Cahoots, even though I didn’t want to be in cahoots. “Hold on to it, baby girl, and wish for what you want.” I knew what he was wishing for. Rent money. I knew what my mother was wishing for—the return of her ring. And maybe a new car, a Cadillac just for her. She liked to say, “Cream for me, please. I want a cream-colored ride.” What did I want? I wasn’t even sure. Maybe to be returned to my grandfather’s house of two years ag
o before my grandfather became a ghost at his own dining room table.
My father folded my fingers around the paper stub and said, “Let’s watch this one from the rails.”
So I followed him past the concession stands, past my big Negro shoeshine man, who gave us a salute, through the crowd of scruffy men to the fence right by the track, beyond the wooden grandstand into the big open space to the left, to the apron, where rows of wooden benches made up the cheapest seats, closest to the track and the fence around the track, so really they were the best seats, but the poorest people sat in them. Or stood by them. Or milled around close to the fence where they shouted into the wind whipped up by the horses as they ran past the men toward the finish line.
The pavement beneath our feet roiled with paper cups, wrappers, and racing guides, and mixed in with that were betting tickets, just like the one I held in my hand, those losing tickets thrown down and blown in all directions, little white waves making an ocean all their own. We worked our way now toward the fence, weaving through the legs of the men, their faces above me nothing but black shadows made by their hats. They stank when they lifted their arms to push back their hats or rub their chins, laughing, strolling, still hopeful because it was never over until the last race was over. And even then, there was always the next day.
“Well, would you look at that,” my father said, nudging me and then pointing behind me at a man who was sitting bare-headed in the first row of the grandstand, the long shadow of the Turf Club just starting its journey over the boxes but not yet reaching that row, which was still glowing with light, light the small man with the barrel chest and the broken nose seemed to have gathered up all for himself, along with the attention of the people around him, their faces turned or tipped toward him as if involuntarily, tulips to the sun. “You know who that is? It’s Mickey Cohen,” and he winked at me. “I heard Chicago sent him back here to be the muscle for Bugsy Siegel.”
Mickey Cohen. My father had told me stories about how Cohen had run craps games and numbers in Boyle Heights during Prohibition while his mother served brew out the back door of her pharmacy, and how he later boxed as The Jew Boy so everybody would know Jews could be tough, tough as nails, how he ran stickups with a Tommy gun in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago for Al Capone’s brother—Al Capone’s brother! So I knew who Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen were long before we met them, men who made their own way, like my father, Jews who stood up for themselves, refused to be peddlers, pushed back against the world that wanted to hold them down. Boyle Heights was full of those types of men. Maxie, Izzie, and Joey Shaman. Hooky Rothman. Champ Segal, Curly Robinson. My grandfather hadn’t approved of any of them, all of those hoods hanging out at Louie Schwartzman’s bar on Brooklyn Avenue, making money from running numbers and prostitution now that Prohibition was over and drugstores were drugstores again and Mickey Cohen’s mother was scooping ice cream in hers instead of pouring drinks.
All Prohibition ever did, according to my grandfather, was make bootleggers the richest criminals in America. Stupidest legislation ever enacted. Put money and guns in their pockets, and now J. Edgar Hoover’s got to run around after them all with a dog-catcher’s net. Well, where was J. Edgar with his dog-catcher’s net now? In Washington, D.C., while Mickey Cohen was here, glad-handing his way along the rows of the Hollywood Park grandstand, taking his sweet gangster time! And why should he rush? No one was going to trifle with him. He probably had a gun in his pocket. A gun in every pocket. And two big boxer’s fists. And a wallet full of money. A gold pinkie ring. He was always a bit rough looking, unlike Benny Siegel, working his charm at the front of the house.
I had actually seen Mickey Cohen once before that day at the track, though I didn’t tell my father this. I’d been standing with my grandfather on the synagogue steps when a short man with a thick chest and thick arms and a broken nose that made him look like one of the bad guys in a detective comic came strolling down Breed Street from Brooklyn Avenue. The man wore a black hat with a big brim and a light-colored suit with padded shoulders, but he didn’t look comfortable in his suit, or at the shul, either, where he had arrived, apparently, to escort his aged mother home. “Who’s that?” I asked my grandfather, pointing to the man. My grandfather said, shortly, “Nobody. A bum,” and he turned and gave me a sharp tug to make me look away. But I couldn’t look away, and the man winked and smiled at me, and I couldn’t help but smile back. What was it with me and these men? And my grandfather called out to me again, and Mickey Cohen saw my grandfather’s disapproving face, and he put a finger up to his forehead in a salute, Boo to you, sucker.
But it wasn’t my grandfather who was the sucker, of course.
The uniformed bugler abruptly let out a string of notes that could be heard all over the track. Post time. The horses were led from the paddock down through the concrete tunnel and from there out onto the course. That day each horse looked as beautiful to me as the next, the horses, who, despite their baths and their rubdowns with liniments, gave off beneath those scents a nervous, animal smell. The horses were all much taller than I, with big rump muscles and long backs and snooty heads, and then those long delicate, knee-knobby legs with the splayed hooves, ankles wrapped to keep them from snapping as the horses ran forty miles an hour around the track.
The announcer spoke. “The horses are entering the gates. The horses are entering the gates. Post time one minute.” The men around us surged toward the fence, and we moved with them. No more of the man with a white handkerchief and a white chalk-mark starting line. Just this year Hollywood Park had started using an electronic gate, and the instant the last dancing horse was locked into his pen, a bell rang. The gates swung open and the pack of horses broke away almost immediately, surging forward into the straightaway, the shape of the pack gradually thinning into a line, as some horses moved toward the front and others fell behind them, for now. Rabbits and turtles.
The crowd of men around the fence began to yell, calling out the names of the horses they’d bet on, screaming, “C’mon, daddy. C’mon, daddy,” pleading with their horse to blow around the track, last chance to go home with money in their pockets, but it was more than that, too, it was the sound of the horses and their beauty and their speed, the comically accelerated voice of the announcer who called the races, the names of the horses spilling rapidly from his lips. You never knew which horse from behind might come up the outside or from the inside to overtake the big horse who started strong. Or when the strong might fail. Last week, in the stable after a race, one of the horses had had a heart attack and died, collapsed on the concrete floor covered with hay, its big eye staring up at his appalled trainer. And he’d just come in at 5 to 1.
The horses were headed around the curve now, their long mouths dripping with lather, the sound of their hooves on the turf beating inside me like a second heart. Like a number of hearts. I put both hands on the fence rail. And just then, as if I’d made it happen, one of the horses stumbled and sent its jockey catapulting from its back like an acrobat shot from a circus cannon, his horse running on for a while without him, out of habit, reins flapping, chasing the pack as it rounded the first turn. And then, a little bewildered without the whip or the spurs or the voice of the man who had guided him, the horse slowed and trotted awkwardly off into the grass. I backed up a bit. At this distance, you couldn’t quite see its number, or any numbers, the horses blurred, the numbers at yards and yards away indistinct. The jockey was on his feet and men were running onto the field after the rogue horse, grabbing at the reins while the horse held up one foot. Something was wrong with it. I couldn’t watch the race anymore, only that horse and the white ambulance that religiously followed the horses around the track now pulling up next to it.
All around me, men were shouting and roaring because the other horses were still running, still in the game, and they made the final turn and were coming fast toward the finish line, and our horse, the black horse, Thundermaker, Number 4, was first and my father’s voice was
cracking. He was winning, he was winning, a winner, Magic Ike!, and from my vantage point down below him looking up, his face seemed feverish and crazed, skin reddened, mouth open in a scream. But by the next curve, his voice had faded, and I looked back to the race to see that Thundermaker, too, was fading, suddenly dropping back, losing the lead. I started whispering his name. To no avail. He was second place now, then third, the jockey not even whipping him, not even leaning forward anymore to whisper in his ear, Please, and then, finally, the horse was lost in the pack of turtles at the back. My father had by this time stopped shouting, by this time having figured it out. Another horse, White Soda, had come from the outside and won. Up in the grandstand, Mickey Cohen was shaking hands all around and having his back slapped, and I saw my father looking at Mickey Cohen, too, and then down at the racing sheet. “White Soda. Twenty-eight to one,” my father said. “That’s got to be a fix.”
What wasn’t a fix in the world of bettors and gamblers?
I watched my father purse his lips and look speculatively up at the grandstand where Cohen stood winner. I knew what my father was thinking, that he’d lost because Mickey Cohen just happened to stop by Hollywood Park that day and open up his fat wallet to Thundermaker’s jockey. To all the jockeys. Tip sheets and racing papers and calculations in the red notebook were really a waste of time, the pathetic fiddlings of a man on the outside and being on the outside was like being a horse on the outside rail. It was just too hard to win from there, the distance around the track so much longer.
Meanwhile, the ambulance team was erecting a white folding screen around the injured horse so the public wouldn’t have to see the horse that was no longer a horse as it had been just seconds before but was now just a body without a soul, a carcass to be dragged away by a tractor. My father was watching this, too, shutting his useless notebook, the full magnitude of his losses bearing down on him like, well, like White Soda to the finish, and he said to me, ruefully, “When they’re done there, they might as well come over here and shoot me, too.”
The Magnificent Esme Wells Page 4