The Legend of Zippy Chippy

by William Thomas

  Sometimes Felix, Emily, and the kids would arrive at the track in the afternoon, and as the van approached the barn, Felix would jump out and scare the bejesus out of the kids by suddenly appearing at their back window, making faces and waving at them while the vehicle went downhill fast, headed for the barn. It would be years before Marisa and Keri figured out that Emily had a hand on the bottom of the steering wheel and a foot on the brake while Felix did his Charlie Chaplin routine, running beside the truck.

  Almost as soon as she learned to talk, Marisa’s job description included standing at the entrance to barn number twenty, pointing to the shuttered-up stall seven and explaining to anybody who wandered by, “Zippy’s been bad again. He’s locked in his room and can’t come out.” Emily had one rule for the children: they were never to leave the tack room until eleven, when all the chaotic business of prepping the horses in and around the barn was finished. Once all the horses were stabled, the barn became their very own romper room. They could roam anywhere their young and curious hearts desired. Okay, there was a second rule: never go near the problem known as Zippy Chippy.

  Once, while Marisa’s aunt was feeding Zippy when Felix was away, the horse had trapped the poor woman in the corner of his stall for three dark and eerie hours. It took two handlers with batches of food to distract him long enough for Nancy McCabe to safely scurry out of the cell.

  Occasionally Marisa was allowed to walk Zippy, but only with her dad on the lead. Once in a while she was permitted to pet him, just as long as there was a fence or a barrier between them. But at this point in her life, Marisa was not just curious but fearless. As the young savior of stray dogs and injured cats, she was drawn to the horse that was most unlike the others. She absolutely adored Zippy Chippy.

  It was early on that damp November morning in the barn when Felix lost sight of his half-pint helper. Felix’s routine was to start his day by scanning the trainer’s board in the main tack room to see which horses were running that day and which ones needed to be exercised on their day off. He thought his daughter was right beside him. And she was, until she noticed that the protective screen across the entrance to Zippy’s stall had gone missing. No other horse on the shed row needed this extra security across the door of the stall. Somebody, probably the new groom, had mistaken Zippy Chippy for a normal horse and used only the webbing – two chains attached to his nameplate – to keep him secured in his pen. In a heartbeat, little Marisa scooted in under the webbing and ran to the far corner of the stall, looking up into the surprised eyes of the horse that seasoned handlers would feed only by delivering food at the end of a rake.

  When Felix noticed that Marisa was missing, he panicked. “Anyway, I can’t find her, and I look everywhere,” recalled Felix. “And then the worst idea come to my mind, and I run to Zippy’s stall, and there …” He choked up a bit and tapped a finger on the table. Felix, a man who had been around horses most of his life, froze in fear, standing motionless in front of the webbing emblazoned with ZIPPY CHIPPY.

  Later, he couldn’t recall how long he had stood there, quiet, motionless, staring into the dark. He thought he should call out for help, but any noise at all might spook the horse.

  There, in that moment of sheer terror when the mind goes numb and the limbs go limp, Felix saw the feet of his little girl in the far corner of the dark stall, with Zippy looming over her. He started to call out for her, but no words would come. Zippy’s broad backside was blocking Felix’s view of his little girl, a wisp of a thing, cornered by this hulking horse. The stall was ghostly quiet, not a peep or a movement by any of them. Felix was almost relieved not to be able to see the terrified look on his daughter’s face. Still he didn’t do anything. Speechless, he just stood there helplessly. At one point he thought he might grab the horse by the tail and make himself the target. But if the animal wheeled around violently, he’d surely take Marisa with him.

  Throw a bucket at the other wall, Felix thought to himself, and when the horse turns in that direction, snatch Marisa from Zippy’s blind side. There was a rope on a hook on the wall, and if he could get a noose around the neck of …

  And then Felix heard something that made him listen carefully, so he could make sure he wasn’t dreaming.

  Stunned, Felix heard his little girl laughing and giggling. And when Marisa walked toward her father, Zippy didn’t try to block her path or, worse, raise his kicking foot to her face. Instead he pranced around her, nickering and snickering like a frisky little foal. And they waltzed around on the straw floor of the pen like that, the child laughing and hanging on the horse’s mane and Zippy strutting beside her and nuzzling her in play. The source of Felix’s tears switched quickly from fear to joy as he watched them play together in the stall that had always been off limits. Marisa scolding Zippy, pointing a finger at him and calling him “a very bad boy,” was indeed a sight to behold. Zippy, blowing and snorting, seemed to be agreeing. They put on quite a show for Felix, one that came with uncommon relief and a great big lesson in life.

  “And that,” said Felix, hitting the table with the palm of his hand, “that was it. I never see that horse the same anymore.”

  “Yeah, everything changed that day in the stable,” said Marisa. “Everything seemed better somehow.”

  While Zippy had always been part of the extended family, the barn people’s favorite black sheep, he was now Marisa’s new best friend and protector. On that fall morning before the school bus arrived to pick up Marisa, Zippy Chippy’s last name officially became Monserrate. “That’s when me and my mom knew that Zippy had a good forever-home with us,” remembers Marisa. And Zippy, of course, was still more the black sheep than the brown horse of the Monserrate clan. He would continue to disappoint Felix, anger Emily, and confuse Marisa – so, yeah, they were definitely a family.

  And the “getting rid of him” option?

  “He wasn’t going anywhere,” recalled Marisa. “My daddy would never get rid of that horse.”

  “No,” agreed Felix, nodding then shaking his head. “I can’t do it.”

  Eighty-two losses or a hundred and eighty-two losses – it never mattered after the eight-year-old kid and the six-year-old pony became inseparable friends for life that day in the straw-strewn stall on a hilly spread in the rural community of Farmington, New York. After that serendipitous moment – a very close encounter that could have proved horrific but turned out to be quite magical – Felix staunchly defended his horse against all criticism.

  To anyone – from an angry bettor to a skeptical track official, from a groom with a bandaged hand to a reporter broaching the subject of futility – Felix would always present his favorite analogy: “Say you have three children. One is a lawyer, doing well. The other a doctor, very, very successful. But the third one, not so smart, so he’s working at McDonald’s. What do you do? Ignore him?” Then Felix would pause and reach around and scratch the scar on his back and say, “That’s the one you gotta help the most! That’s Zippy Chippy.”

  Although Felix’s often-repeated analogy would not win him a free coffee at McDonald’s, the man was right as rain. Felix nailed the secret of the family right there! Who’s the better father – the one who pays for the gifted son to get through college or the one who pays the steeper price of time and attention, struggling to see his unblessed boy through life?

  With Felix and Zippy, it was not only about horse racing; it was about friends and family. An odd family, mind you – the kind where you notice in the Christmas card photo that the adopted son’s head is the size of a laundry basket and his pedoinker is hanging out – but a family nonetheless.

  Felix could not know it at the time, but that lightning strike of kindness and love that touched both his favorite horse and his dearest daughter sealed Marisa’s fate for life. Today, the kid who once fit nicely into a food tub is a highly respected pony rider and groom at Finger Lakes Racetrack, well on her way to becoming an owner and a trainer. Marisa loves her work as much as her parents like to brag a
bout their special daughter. With Marisa raising two small children and caring for a menagerie of pets at the same time, there’s a lot to be proud of here.

  Only a modicum of Zippy’s goofiness has rubbed off on Marisa. Occasionally, along with another Finger Lakes pony rider, and only because it’s so close to the track, she will ride her horse through the drive-thru at … you guessed it, McDonald’s.

  Much to the chagrin of wise track people, Zippy had always been Felix’s pet. It just took time and a whole bunch of losses for the man to admit it. Thanks to Marisa, who first touched and then revealed the very soul of this baffling beast with a child’s laugh instead of a trainer’s tight lead, the horse was now firmly ensconced in his owner’s household. Not literally, of course, because that crazy bugger could still kick the screen out of the television set faster than Elvis could change a channel with his .44 Magnum handgun. (Yes, Elvis actually did that, and on more than one occasion.)

  Watching his little girl and his big-butted horse frolicking in the same stall where Zippy had once pinned him to the wall for sixty terrifying minutes had a dramatic effect on Felix. He saw their relationship differently after that, even changed the way he trained the horse. That single small act of affection – a little girl brushing the horse’s face with a loving hand – was not lost on the track-hardened father and trainer. Once he might have given Zippy a bit of a spanking or instructed a jockey to go heavy on the whip; there would be no more of that from now on.

  “Zippy, he stands up for himself. You better treat him with love or fuhgeddaboudit.” And then, with a bit of a crooked smile, he added, “But he still bite me.”

  That didn’t mean Zippy was through trying the man’s patience. Indeed, the next few races would cast Felix in the role of the Puerto Rican Job, with racetrack challenges of biblical proportions. While he still dreamed of his horse winning a race, Zippy may have felt that unnecessary, what with the lineup of fawning fans snapping his picture these days and calling him their “boy.” And oh, those handfuls of crunchy carrots from strangers, the fresh ones with the stems still on.

  It’s difficult to determine who the best prankster was back then, the horse or the kid with those big, misbehaving eyes. “It wasn’t long after that that my dad caught me feeding Zippy carrots with my teeth,” said Marisa. “I thought he was going to have a cow!”

  I ONCE HAD

  A DOG LIKE THAT

  He was big and strong – half border collie, half Australian shepherd. He was every bit as handsome as a racehorse, and oh, how Jake loved to run. Fast and furious, he was, like a fox in a forest fire.

  He was so fast that I introduced him to the game of flyball, a team sport for dogs in which they run a relay course against other teams of speedy canines. It’s a very well-organized sport, with state, national, and international championships. Flyball is quite entertaining to watch and would be a more action-packed Olympic sport than, say, curling or golf.

  At the flyball arena, Jake and I sat in the bleachers, and he couldn’t take his eyes off the game unfolding in front of us. He was mesmerized by the sight of dogs of different breeds and sizes ripping down a track and over hurdles to retrieve the prize of a tennis ball at the far end of the track. At one point – and he may have been crying out for a penalty – he actually barked. Fun? Wow! Jake did everything but start the wave.

  So I took him down to the practice area, where a trainer was going to put him through a few paces, and Jake ran … well, he ran back up to the stands and sat down. Turns out he loved to watch, not play, flyball. As far as training and practicing and securing a spot on the team – that he would leave for other dogs, dogs who had attended some Ivy League obedience school and didn’t know how to enjoy a rip-roaring run at a flock of screaming geese on a beach.

  I swear, if I could have run a tab for him at the dog track – good for a cold beer and a burger with everything but onion – Jake would still be there, sitting in the stands and slamming his paws together in sheer sedentary delight.

  EIGHT

  Meet [trouble] as a friend, for you’ll see a lot of it

  and had better be on speaking terms with it.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes

  Zippy’s home for three years and seventy races at Finger Lakes was stall number seven in barn twenty, on the backside. Just like at every thoroughbred track in North America, the backside (or the backstretch, as it’s sometimes called) at Finger Lakes serves as the stabling area and living quarters of the pony people, a small, strange, and solitary world not unlike the jerry-rigged lot of tents and trailers where circus workers live temporarily. This is the place where the callused, unseen hands of horsemen and handlers make the sport of racing horses work. Finger Lakes’s backside is a timeless and shabby little village, far from the property’s glittering casino. While thousands come to play the slots every day, few people attend the races, and almost nobody goes to the backside.

  It’s a quirky little community consisting of twenty-one long, rectangular barns, four one-story concrete residences with twenty dorm rooms each, a few circular equine playgrounds linked by roads that are usually muddy or rutted hard. A spacious canteen called Cilantro serves grilled meats and tacos as well as a lot of leafy, healthy foods so riders can keep their weight down. Here in the “kitchen,” listening to salsa music, men in mismatched tracksuits shoot pool or play pinball machines, ignoring the bank of simulcast monitors broadcasting races from other tracks.

  The front windows of the tiny rent-free apartments have long been filmed over by cigarette smoke, and beat-up bicycles lie on patchy lawns or stand propped up against rusted-out air conditioners. The uneven grass is trampled, not mowed. A mottled old couch and ripped-up recliner sit soaking from last night’s rain under a battered umbrella. The living conditions in almost all North American racetracks are and always have been an embarrassment to the industry. Arlington Park in Chicago has been called “the Taj Mahal of racing” because of its fine track and clubhouse, but its backside, where a single bathroom once had to accommodate one hundred workers, mostly Latinos, has been described as a “ghetto.” Arlington has made significant improvements to the workers’ residences, but it still took the American Civil Liberties Union to win the right for four hundred children to live in the backside with their parents during the racing season.

  The Finger Lakes barns, however, are spotless, with two wide aisles running the length of each barn, separating rows of stalls on each side. The bobbing heads of horses stretch over the front walls of the stalls, demanding food or water, but mostly just attention, with a variety of sounds, from a high-pitched, anxious neighing to a softer, contented nickering. And they get everything they want, almost on demand. Here, the horses are the high-priced talent. A loud complaint from one stall brings a bough of fresh hay, kicked beneath the horse’s feet under the webbing that keeps him in. A stomping fit attracts a groom with a garden hose, to fill the bucket on the wall. A few horses prefer to drink from the nozzle of the hose, soaking themselves and the handler in the process. The stall floors are repeatedly mucked and replenished with fresh, golden straw.

  Suddenly, shouts are heard outside: “Loose horse. Loose horse!” Workers swarm the steel-fenced exercise circle to corral a horse that has snapped his lead and is running wild inside, threatening to collide with another horse still hooked up to the circling bar.

  A girl, maybe twenty, runs to the ring and shuts the machine down with the slap of a hand. She slowly walks through the gate toward the rampaging horse, talking softly but showing no-nonsense body language. Calmly, she corners the big black stallion, who surrenders to her touch. “Nice work!” yells a guy from a neighboring barn, and it’s all over in less than a minute.

  There are eight tack rooms in each barn, the largest being the trainer’s, with harnesses and nosebands, saddles and stirrups hanging on all four walls. Drop nosebands and tongue-ties keep the horses from swallowing their unusually large tongues. On the wall for all to see is that day’s worksheet, a list of which
horses need to be primed for races and which need to be walked, galloped, or worked out in the exercise barn. Around every corner inside the barns are stacks of baled hay reaching nearly to the rafters.

  The tiny tack rooms located near the four entrances to each barn are smaller than the stalls of the horses. There, trainers, pony riders, and grooms keep their gear. Small fridges contain snacks, sodas, and medicine for the horses. Most have cots, some have TVs, one has an air conditioner. This one belongs to Emily. “Mom” has spent every week at the track for most of her life.

  There’s a pleasantness around the barns in the morning as the work routines are infused with good-natured banter. “J-Rod” chides “Butch” about his favorite filly, who came in last yesterday. “Diesel Dave” and “Muscleman” jar at each other as “Mom” walks laps inside the barn, five horses every day. And yes, there’s always a “Mom” in the backside, to whom others bring their troubles.

  Except for the grooms and the hot-walkers, the pony riders and the trainers, people who can be identified by the crust of muck and crap on their boots, the only others to visit the backside are the vets and farriers. The track officials and stewards never come here, except in crisis. Even here at Finger Lakes jockeys have their own comfortable digs closer to the track, complete with lockers, a kitchen, TV monitors to watch themselves and the competition, a sweat box, a hot tub, a sleeping room with bunk beds, a pool table, an ice machine, and windows onto the paddock. The silks room where the jockeys’ uniforms are kept is managed by the “Color Man,” and the all-important weigh station is operated by the “Scales Clerk.” Some jockey rooms have “spit boxes” or “vomit stalls,” the second-quickest weight-loss program known to a rider. The first is a white pill that contains the egg of a tapeworm.