I took a sip from the cup of coffee I’d bought at the 7-Eleven and puzzled over the third race: ten-thousand-dollar claimers that’d raced against each other for the last three years in mixed fields at three different tracks and each time a different horse had won. I’d seen and written about this type of contest so many times I felt I should know the outcome. “The race is not always to the swift,” wrote Damon Runyon, “but that is the way to bet it.” Except horses are herd animals, obliged to natural pecking orders, which means that a faster horse will often defer to its deemed superior. This is the basis of the concept of class, the crux of class-speed continuum analysis, and why the Plum Variable is a useful handicapping tool, as it automatically sorts fields and adjusts class values pertinent to the track you’re playing. Still, the codes of primodromes such as Santa Anita, Del Mar, Saratoga, and Belmont Park are the hardest to crack because, unlike the mezzodromes and the llamadromes, the quality of competition prevents too many of the entrants in the field from being eliminated.
At a cheap-purse track, with inferior animals of dubious fitness assembled from diverse tracks, speed (the fastest horse) will prevail 90 percent of the time. At a middle-purse track, as the quality of stock and racing conditions improve, the percentage falls to 50. High purse tracks are all about class (algorithmically determined from pedigree, overall record, and average winnings measured against status versus contenders), so I didn’t concern myself with which horse had the best off-track record, neither did I care who was wearing mud caulks, had switched to blinkers or Lasix, or which had the best closing fractions. At the primodrome I ignore Beyer figures and workouts, except as an indication of fitness and form. All things considered, it’s usually the best animal, the dominant-superior of its group, the owner of the highest Plum Variable, that wins these contests, if the break isn’t too bad, if the field isn’t too large, if the trainer doesn’t tell the jockey to go easy, if the meds are right, if it isn’t raining, if if if.
I thought back to the day before at Del Mar satellite. Though I’d lost all thirteen races, I’d not handicapped badly. Most of my horses had hit the board, and the ones that had run out had gotten boxed in or pinched or had bobbled at the start, or the jockey hadn’t switched leads, or the battery in his buzzer was dead down the stretch, or he was hungover or blowing kisses to his sweetheart in the grandstand as he passed. Even when you’re playing and handicapping well you need luck to win.
And I knew I was going to win soon. Bring someone who knows nothing about horses to the track and usually they win. Flip a coin enough times. Bet the number two in every race. You can’t win them all, but you can’t lose them all either.
It was a sunny day in a quiet decaying middle-class neighborhood in the dappled shade of overgrown trees. My radio was off and staring at the third race I felt myself about to have a moment of prescience when someone knocked on my window. Startled, I looked over to see Shelly Hubbard, hank of balmed hair dropped into his face, Racing Form rolled and tucked under his arm, pen riding on his ear.
I wound my window down.
“Where’s the rain, babe?” he said, glancing up at the blue sky.
“In Spain,” I replied.
“I didn’t hear you drive up,” he said.
“Climb on in, son, unless you’re going to clean my windshield. You want to make the first race?”
He climbed on in, some sort of tissue-wrapped fast-food or gas-station sandwich in one hand, a styro cup of coffee in the other. He arranged his Form on the dashboard. He smelled in close quarters of mushrooms on toast.
I pulled out onto the boulevard, careful to observe all the traffic laws except for the feint I made at a squirrel that ran out in front of me. Sunday morning quiet. I turned on the radio and found it tuned to the NPR station and Prairie Home Companion, Hee-Haw for liberals, as my fellow inmate Sturtz liked to call it, so I pushed the buttons until I found an oldies station. Shelly knew the words to every song; he knew the name of the frontman, the history, the songwriter, the B-side, what label it was on. He’d say Chess records or Columbia, A&M or Roulette, Starlites on Peak records, Miracles on Standard Groove. He’d recite numbers, anecdotes, dates. Personally, he admired Brian Wilson, Ricky Nelson, and those doowop kings the Flamingoes. His most valuable record, a mint copy of “Rocket 88,” worth about five thousand dollars, he bought at a garage sale for a quarter. What was notable about the way he listened to music was that he seemed to take no pleasure from it, no singing along or tapping his foot, no snapping of fingers or bobbing of the head. I’d seen him in action on his record-buying circuits many times: his evaluation of a record was based strictly upon authenticity and condition. Possession diminishes passion, as any married person will tell you, or in other words, once something you love becomes your job, it’s not quite as much fun.
We drove along the ocean for a while, the view that draws so many to stay.
“I feel like a turd today,” Shelly said.
“Too many brewskis,” I replied.
“Had about seven more after you left.” He took a bite of his sandwich. “This is what I was wondering last night when I couldn’t sleep. After all those years in the bughouse, do you still believe in God?”
“I do.”
He seemed upset, as if I’d given the wrong answer. “After all the shit they put you through?”
“Look, man, I’ve seen him.”
“At the laughing academy.”
“Without spirit,” I said, “matter is just a blob.”
“With Steve McQueen.” He cackled for a while, getting teary eyed, then he wiped his eyes with his forearm and said earnestly, “Wish I could believe in God.”
“You know what we forgot to talk about last night?”
He got a gulp from his coffee. “What’s that?”
“Your love life.”
“Love life,” he roared.
“Ever since I’ve known you you’ve had a honey on the line.”
Shelly brightened, finger combed his hair, pleased that I would ask. “Well, I have been seeing this waitress every Tuesday for the last year or so.”
“You’re dating her?”
“Well, I go to the restaurant where she works.”
“You ask her out yet?”
Not having had the benefit of a normal family, and believing there was such a thing, Shelly relied heavily on television for instruction on how everyone else, the “lucky people” in his view, lived. Television also provided the basis for many of his identities. Most of the time he was David Janssen in The Fugitive, a hardcore covert loner misunderstood, estranged by fate from the comforts that most Americans take for granted. But now he was Bud from the family sitcom Father Knows Best, whipping back his hair. He finished the sandwich, balled up the wrapping, set it next to him on the seat. “Not yet.”
The rules were we couldn’t go too deeply into Shelly’s girlfriends, only his intentions with them, which was dating and eventual marriage and Jane Wyman scenes with tinkling martini glasses glittering with the dry vermouth of ideal love. In the few years I’d known him before I’d moved to the Bay Area he had described many of his love interests to me: an unidentified TV news personality, the wife of an unspecified friend, a go-go dancer, a barmaid, a cashier at a grocery store, a neighbor, a girl he met one night walking along Harbor Island. I’d never met or even caught a glimpse of any of these women and he’d never produced a grain of evidence that any had ever existed. Pressing him for specifics would only make him recede, so it was a game we played on the shallowest levels, like third-graders giggling about girls on the playground. Still, it was a long drive and, curious, I continued to probe into his fancy. “She married, your Coco’s girl?”
“How’d you know she worked at Coco’s?”
“You told me.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Okay. I guessed. I know it’s your favorite restaurant.”
“It’s not my favorite restaurant.”
“She married, your Coco Puff?”
“Really? Kids?”
“Two boys.”
“Interesting. “How old are they?”
“Not sure. One’s in college.”
“State?”
“Pepperdine.”
Good detail. Maybe the girl was real. “So she must be around forty.”
He bunched his lips, nodded for a while. An Italian sports car, flat black and all fiberglass, blasted past on the left with a zzzshiiiing.
This was hardly fantasy territory. I considered: forty-year-old Coco’s waitress, divorced mother of two. “What’s her name, anyway?”
He scrubbed his eyelid with a pinkie, offered a half smile that might’ve been chagrin but was probably closer to I’ve Got a Secret. We both knew he wasn’t going to tell me. The names and locations of his girlfriends were always concealed.
Shelly was fascinated with the black actress Roxie Roker, who played neighbor Helen Willis on The Jeffersons. Helen Willis’s husband was white, making this the first regular prime-time show to feature an interracial couple. Roxie was also the real-life mother of multiple-Grammy-award-winning musician Lenny Kravitz, whose father was white. Shelly’s whole suburban life had been as white as Pat Boone’s 1957 B-side single “The Wang Dang Taffy-Apple Tango (Mambo Cha Cha Cha),” a song he detested, but black was the very soul of all the music he admired and sought, so it was no surprise when he confessed to me once with a breathily anxious giggle that he’d been in love for many years with Motown diva and frontwoman for the Supremes, Miss Diana Ross.
I decided to loosen him with a little levity. “She’s black, right?”
He let out a squeaky laugh that was almost a cry. His green eyes glittered.
“Hey, maybe we can double date. You bring the black chick, I’ll bring the dead one.”
He jiggled from laughter. He had to crack his window an inch. He seemed to be having trouble getting air. It was all this talk about women and love that made him breathless.
“Babe, babe, babe.” I assumed my psychiatric voice, calm but firm, trying to shake his carousel of imps, poses, and caricatures and get to the bottom of his girlfriend. “How can we have a serious discussion about someone you care about if I don’t even know her name?”
“Deborah,” he blurted, grinning wildly, showing off his wrecked and gapped smile, his eyes swinging side to side.
“Where does she live?”
He wagged his finger at me. I was getting too close.
A CHP unit zipped past us on the left, emergency top lights blazing.
“I need to know what to put on the wedding invitations,” I said.
He barked a laugh, his eyes widened in terror, and he was replaced by a more somber version of himself. Whenever he shifted like this I was reminded of his insistence that he had a multiple personality disorder, that he might be seven or eight, maybe twenty or two hundred distinct personalities, each independent and unaware of its neighbor.
It was difficult to read his thoughts, there were so many curtains and walls and infested vapors I doubted that he knew what the truth about himself was. I had granted him the overworked phenomenon called “compartmentalization,” a theoretical process by which the essential personality is fractured through a series of traumatic events in childhood. This theory is also sometimes applied as an explanation of the operation of habitual, recreational killers. Note also the Russian and American Cold War experiments to create “super agents” by similar processes, especially the CIA’s MKUltra mind-control programs, which may or may not have produced brainwashed patsy assassins such as Sirhan Sirhan. Create a genuine multiple personality disorder and you have an agent who can operate indefinitely without remorse or memory of the deed. In the case of Shelly, however, I’d never seen evidence to confirm that one personality was not aware of what another was thinking or doing or had thought or done. Raised by the television, it seemed more likely that these “personalities” were simply assimilations of TV characters he admired from the 1960s.
I didn’t doubt for a second the accounts of his sadistic upbringing. Still, it seemed that too much of his self-perception relied on being an outsider raised by cruel parents. He also read too many shaky and sordid pop-psych bestsellers such as Sybil. He didn’t realize that most of us are formed by stress and pain, most of us perceive ourselves as outsiders, most of us have suffered major parental failures, most of us have felt crazy or broken down or on the brink of yodeling off into the night, and that most of us lead multiple lives.
I had to slow for an accident up ahead. Shelly stared at the once graceful, now mangled black Lamborghini. The driver, as far as I could tell, was still inside. Five miles down the way, in a dream voice, he said the same thing he always said when we talked about his imaginary girlfriends. “Where do you think I should take her?”
“Does she like the horses?”
“Hmmm,” he said, as if this had never occurred to him.
“Movies are good, too,” I offered. “You don’t have to find out how truly incompatible you are for a couple of hours.”
He raised an eyebrow at me and shook open his Form, squinting at the numbers, then looking down at the radio as if it were transmitting alien signals. He said, “Who you like in the first?”
12.Marvelous Marvelle / Let the Sunshine In
SANTA ANITA WAS THE MOST ELEGANT OF THE THREE MAJOR southern California racetracks. Hollywood Park, with similar purse structures and a nearly identical list of competing jockeys, trainers, and owners, sat in a bad part of town and had none of the glitz of its sister to the north. Del Mar will always be my favorite — intimate, foggy, right on the ocean, its season short-lived as happiness, the ghost of Bing Crosby crooning the rinky-dink jingle “Where the Turf Meets the Surf” before the start of each card. Santa Anita didn’t have the atmosphere of Del Mar, but they’d dumped the cash in: Clydesdales, cobblestone, a panoramic view of the San Gabriel mountains, even a guy with a long-necked bugle announcing the post parade.
Santa Anita, Del Mar, and Hollywood Park were on a circuit in those days (the track at Hollywood Park has since gone dark) and there were many people — jockeys, trainers, clockers, grooms, vendors, waiters, and margarita girls — who followed that circuit to make their livings. The three tracks took turns throughout the year, never running contemporaneously. Many bettors would follow this circuit as well and we’d nod or wave or exchange a few words with a familiar face. Though Shelly was socially facile, he became reticent around those he did not know well or trust, fearing that they might steal and undeservedly benefit from his hard-won knowledge and the fruits of his research. For many years Hollywood Park had a special Thanksgiving card: a free turkey dinner with admission, a sad feast with all the misfit gamblers who sought on this day not those they loved but to wring a few more precious drops from their adrenal glands. Shelly and I had attended three of these cheerless Styrofoam-tray repasts. My father, I would lay heavy odds, never missed a single one.
Shelly and I didn’t look for a place to sit or camp. We had to move, Shelly getting more and more excited as the first post approached. He threw his Form over a concession table, took the pen down off his ear, and made a quick inspection of his previous night’s calculations. A slow transformation began, as if fire ants were replacing the iron molecules in his red blood cells. “Bet some doubles today?”
“Yowp.”
“Who you want in the first?”
“I like ’em all except the favorite and the Chilean shipper from Bay Meadows.”
“Favorite off eight days.” He smacked his program. “Hasn’t won twice in a row for three years.”
“Front wraps, too,” I added. “Digest marked them off last time out.”
Significant eyebrow work of the gambling addict here. Throw out the lame favorite and you’re getting somewhere. Shelly was about to drool. He jerked his head and threw that stray lock back. “And roll some pick threes. You want to split a few?”
“I’m up.”
His e
yes flicked wider and wider, the fluid in his joints warming to blend with his saliva. “A pick six?”
“They got the one-handed betting machines in the bathrooms if you want to get rid of your money fast, babe.”
He nodded at me as if he were sucking on a funny-tasting gum drop. He wanted to bet bet bet bet, but he knew I was right. To have a crack at winning a pick six you need a multiple base ticket investment of at least $128, and once you’ve outlaid that much with your actual odds of hitting six races in a row still somewhere around a million to one, it’s a lit match to your cash. The challenge of the game was what mattered to us. Money was simply the method of keeping score.
The bugler came out at twelve minutes to post and I ambled down to the rail to have a look at the horses in the first race, examining coats, eyes, ears, and looking for neck and kidney sweat. As soon as I saw the Chilean shipper, Mata Morose, I knew he would win. His ears were pricked, his coat shone, and he was pumped up and almost nuts that the trainer had given him some M&M’s, the colored shells of which were still stuck in his teeth.
I ran back up and told Shelly I thought the Chilean shipper would win. He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. We argued, but I couldn’t say, until long after we’d cashed our winning tickets that Mata Morose loved M&M’s because M&M’s had caffeine, a prohibited substance and a distinct and unfair advantage. The horse would probably be disqualified after its mandatory urine test. Mata Morose was 36-1, meaning he would pay thirty-six times the unit you bet on him (plus your bet back, making a two-dollar wager worth seventy-four dollars if he won). I left Shelly shaking his head and ran to the window, where I bet five dollars on the nose (to win) thirty seconds before the race went off.
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