Just before the show, he introduces Paul Rodriguez, the star of The Newlywed Game. Paul Rodriguez? What happened to Bob Eubanks? I’d expected Bob Eubanks. My God, I’d practically grown up on Bob Eubanks. Paul Rodriguez, it’s explained, is Bob Eubanks’s replacement. I can’t understand it. I can’t understand why they would want to replace Bob Eubanks. Bob Eubanks was a charter member of Chuck Barris’s roundtable. And always—I don’t know why, maybe it had to do with the set’s comic-strip style—vaguely reminded me of a youthful, humorous Dick Tracy. (It’s a syndicated show, it slips in and out of time slots, on and off channels. Once, two or three years ago, when I’d lost track of it, when I hadn’t seen it for a couple of years, I suddenly came upon it again, Bob Eubanks seemed old to me, as if something awful had happened to his expression, his incredible, unflappable takes. Then I got used to him all over again, and it was as if he’d never been away. This new guy, Rodriguez, is a kid, younger than the newlyweds. How’s a kid going to fill the shoes of someone like Eubanks?) Maybe, Andy offers, Eubanks is tired of newlyweds.
Sometimes I don’t know how I feel about things. Or if I feel what I say I feel. That stuff about my becoming this planetarium of focus? I think that’s how it was, but I don’t know, I could have been faking it. I fake things. I pretend, for example, to a lot more gratitude than I usually feel. I make out I’m this really swell guy, humble for a cripple, when in actuality I get a lot less mileage out of my disease than I believe I deserve. So there’s lots of phony good cheer and approval in me.
You’re just going to have to believe this. You’re just going to have to take this next one on faith.
When the show comes on, the set for The Newlywed Game, the set is beautiful! It takes my breath away, the set. You’d never be able to see it on television. I looked at it on the monitor and right away could tell how flattened out it all was, not only how details were all merged but also how even the colors looked as rancid as the colors on baseball cards.
But that set, well, that set was something else.
Well, it was the neon, of course, the gorgeous sticks of colored gases like so many wands of fluorescent Crayolas, or the shining, luscious waters of a swimming pool. That set, that set. If only the furniture were nicer or the place a little warmer, I think I could have lived there.
Do I know my echt Californians or do I know my echt Californians?
All six contestants on the show that day are Californians. (According to Bruce Starin, producer of the Newlywed and Dating Game shows, 98 percent of the contestants on these shows are California residents. It’s only a hunch, and maybe not as true as it used to be, but it’s my impression—I think it’s everyone’s—that the site of most television shows is California. Mork and Mindy lived in Boulder, Colorado, of course, and the yuppies on thirtysomething are supposed to live somewhere in Philadelphia, but Dallas or no Dallas and Hawaii Five-O or no Hawaii Five-O, one somehow has the feeling that the floating locale of all American dramatic life is a sort of platonic California.) They’re like the structure of a racial joke. (There’s this Indian couple, this white couple, and this black couple. . . . ) I have my choice of which to interview in the green room afterwards and, making racials of my own, immediately choose the white couple. (So as not to skew my perceptions of what an echt Californian is, I qualm. And something like this is true, I suppose, but only a little true. It’s because I don’t want to make waves. It’s because there’s even less I want to ask the white couple than the black or Indian couple.)
“I’m from Huntington Beach, California.”
“I’m from northern California. Palo Alto. Stanford Hospital area. And I went to high school in San Diego, and I went to college from San Diego to USC.”
“And that’s where you guys met, huh?”
“That’s right. She was a song girl, and I was on the football team.”
“Say your names.”
“Erin Johnson.”
“Matt Johnson.”
“How’d you get on this show?”
“I got a phone call at home. I believe they got our number from a bridal expo at the Disneyland Hotel. I wrote my name and phone number on a bunch of little slips to win prizes, and they called me and asked if I was interested, and actually my mom got the message, and I called them back and said, ‘Sure, why not? Give it a try.’”
“You had no reluctance to come on the show?”
“The only thing I was worried about was, I had to take a couple of hours off work, twice, to come up here. If we had had to come probably any more times to try out, we probably would have said ‘Oh, forget it, it’s just not worth it.’”
I’d always assumed people came on these shows for larks, for, well, the tapes, to build up, in effect, their home movies, their memories, planning ahead like folks thinking into their annuities, planting seeds of the When-I-Get-Too-Old-to-Dreams. When I asked if they were disappointed they hadn’t won, they said that they’d have been a lot more disappointed if the prize had been a major appliance. (It was a trip to the Poconos. Matt had been around the block; he’d played Penn State, he’d seen the Poconos.)
They understood they were supposed to give each other a going over. Echt Californians understand about show business and are in it, it seems, for the major appliances.
Erin, a legal secretary in Orange County, likes “the suburban Orange County life-style.” Matt, who has played in both the Rose Bowl and the Hula Bowl, tried for a defensive back in the pros for a year or so before he was released. Already he’s had arthroscopic surgery on his weakened knees. He has this faith in networking and believes people he met at USC will be there for him when he launches his political career. They call Costa Mesa home and live in “a typical Aztec-style apartment complex. All the usual amenities—weight room, Jacuzzi, club house with big-screen TV.” Ideally Matt would want to live in wilderness conditions in some house overlooking a lake in Oregon. Erin doesn’t agree. It’s not her sort of life-style. Each of these young people keeps saying “life-style,” but what did I expect? Echt Californians know about “life-style,” too. (And why not, for goodness’s sake? Because California is as much about Happiness as about anything else—Happiness, Fulfillment, Good Weather; the almost Constitutional givens, all warrants and the guarantees of being like doctor’s orders, necessary food groups, or the Recommended Daily Allowances. But no mere pursuit of happiness, finally, so much as a mission of absolute search and destroy!) They invented it, after all, and stand in precisely the same relation to life-style as Chuck Barris does to vulgarity and the conspiratorial, participatory heart. I only wish, I keep thinking, I’d had the togs and garment bags these kids do when I was their age. I only wish, I mean, I’d known about show business and the really major appliances.
“The only time I don’t work,” Milch says, “is at the racetrack. What you find is that you’re working at such an accelerated pace, you relax the same way. You’ve got to bet $10,000 a race, or $20,000 a race. Or if you start betting $10,000, at the end of the day you’re betting $40,000. There’s the same acceleration of expectation, and that’s horseshit. You can only do that for so long before you lose respect for other forms of reality.”
He lists California’s racetracks for me, their circuits and seasons like stations of the cross.
“My horses are stabled at whatever track is running at the time, the horses of mine actually running. The horses that are crippled are out on the farm being rehabilitated.”
We’re at the barns, low green sheds like contiguous houses on Monopoly properties.
“These guys are all undocumented aliens. Periodically the Immigration Service comes in and sweeps, and then the next day nobody’s got guys to lead horses around. Those are the outriders leading the horses over for the third race. The first race has been run, the horses for the second race are already being saddled.” He leans into his big car for the telephone. “I’m going to dial and find out the results of the first race. I’ve got a service which gives the call of the race. And the
horse that we want to hear is Sovereign Appeal.
“‘That’s Sovereign Appeal looking for racing room, looking for racing room.’ . . . Ah, we fucked the dog. My fucking horse didn’t even get third.”
Among Milch’s extensive holdings are several bushel baskets of carrots. In the barns he gives me some, which I then feed to Marvin’s Policy and Jet Charlie. Feeding the horseys is a sort of kiddie privilege. Why, though he’s at least fifteen years younger than I am, do I let him treat me as if he were my father? It’s all those carrots, all that explanation. This Milch, I think, is interested in a strictly monogrammed lore and legend. No truth, I suppose he supposes, like a home truth.
He tells me there are about fifteen hundred horses at Santa Anita, a horse population like a small town. Initially, at least, I’m delighted to be here. I mean it’s interesting. Some guy’s set up a shoe-shine stand just off the track’s mucky environs, probably the best location for a shoe-shine stand I’ve ever seen, a perfect example of economic synergy. The dominating maleness of the crowd is interesting. The racetrack’s specialized, zoned geography is. The outriders are interesting, the jockeys like some manly, human nubbins, their vaguely toreador presence. From the grandstand, Santa Anita itself looks like a giant, living game board, this open-air palace of fun and hope. There are flowers planted about the premises bright as racing silks. Even—money’s at stake here, so much it’s almost theatrical—how long a time it takes to change scenes is interesting. The bookies, laying off bets, tuned in to the world on upscale portable phones in their expensive carrying cases. All of it’s interesting. Like that first jolt of green vision that floods your senses when you step into a stadium and catch, full-force, the bright, spectacular apparency of a night game. But it wears and tears finally, such interest, and has no compounding. Milch, that good daddy, has tipped the wheelchair schlepper twenty-five bucks to bring me to the box. He offers hot dogs and cocoas and presses explanations. I feel like some Sunshine-funded kid out on the town for all of an afternoon. But this turf is his turf, he doesn’t let me forget. Everything is explained, everything.
“I bet so much money that if I put it into the machines where the odds are figured, it’d distort the price. It’d ruin my odds. What personal bookmakers do is book the bet themselves. They lay it off with organizations elsewhere, and those organizations book the bets themselves. Pari-mutuel just means ‘among ourselves.’ Betting amongst ourselves. That’s what it means in French. All that the people here do is, the track takes twenty cents out of the dollar and then . . . You’re spilling it on yourself.”
It’s not Milch’s fault, but I’m rapidly going into a sort of fugue state. No wonder I’m spilling my cocoa. Perhaps there are things wrong with me beyond even the things that are wrong with me. I can’t deny that for all his sealed, airtight obsession, David is a better host than I am a guest. Though the way Milch goes at it, being a host is obsessive, too.
“The most interesting thing today so far is what hasn’t happened. Which is, I’ve got a very strong tip on a horse in the sixth race. I’m out about five grand, but if this horse hasn’t been tipped around the track, that means instead of his odds being 5 to 1, which is what he’d be if he were tipped, maybe his odds will be 20 to 1. We bet three or four or five or ten thousand bucks the difference between 5 to 1 and 20 to 1 is very significant. So it’s interesting that so far it seems like the horse has not gotten around.”
Milch is away from the box as much as he’s in it. I’m given responsibilities, little-kid chores to occupy myself. I mind people’s binoculars, I hold their programs and racing forms, I watch their seats for them.
Milch is a kind of folk hero here. Everyone’s glad to see him, and, since I’m with him, they’re glad to see me, too.
During races on which he hasn’t bet, he cheers for his friends’ horses. “Come on, go faster, go faster! For Richie, for Richie! He didn’t make it. Richie got beat.”
“Who’s Richie?”
That guy. You should know. Richie was here. He got beat. He didn’t win.”
After the race, this guy shows up, so happy he can hardly contain himself.
“I hit the nine!”
I didn’t think you were alive with the nine,” Milch says. “Good for you, good for you.”
“Three, six, nine.”
“So what you get?”
“Fifty-two hundred.”
“Good for you!”
“He held on, didn’t he?”
“Oh yeah.”
“I went and bet everything like you said. You know, I put the two.”
“Yeah, you gotta save.”
“So I saved.”
“That’s called ‘dutching out.’”
“‘Dutching out’ that’s called? I dutched it out, baby. I put everything in my pocket.”
“Good.”
“Boy, I needed it too, lemme tell you.”
“Hey, Rich,” someone says, “can I borrow forty-eight hundred?”
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha.”
“Good boy.”
“I’m gonna go to the class,” Richie says. “I’m gonna learn how to read the numbers. Yeah, I’m gonna go do it.”
“The ‘numbers’ he’s talking about,” Milch explains, “is a system that is really changing the way people bet. It’s a way of evaluating performance that neutralizes the racing form. Every horse’s previous race is reduced to a single number, and then they analyze the pattern of the numbers. The argument is that when a horse runs the best race of its life, when people would typically bet the horse, in fact that’s a time to bet against the horse because they feel a horse has a characteristic channel of performance, and once it goes outside the channel and exceeds itself, it typically will exhaust itself by that effort and run badly next time instead of running well, so what the system does is tend to exclude favorites. The guy who perfected the idea is an old Marxist-Leninist who gave it all up and went into this thing. The way he gives the numbers is by the distance the horse runs out from the rail, so that if a horse is running in the eight path, he’ll get a much lower number. Well, it’s self-evident. The horse is running a larger circumference, and so if he finishes even with a horse that’s run on the inside, that horse has run farther, and so he should get a better number. So it’s a way of discounting apparent performance.”
New Wave Marxist-Leninist odds makers. Richie’s going to take the course. The New Wave State.
“A bookmaker will tell you,” Milch tells me, “out here nobody gets killed for owing money. That’s why bookmakers have trouble out here. One of the guys I introduced you to, he says, ‘Back home in our game, there’s an expression—that clubs is trumps,’ meaning if it comes to it, somebody gets hit over the head and he pays the money. Out here, if anybody uses violence they get arrested. So ultimately, it’s only a matter of honor. On the other hand, it’s so affluent that if even three out of ten people pay off, the bookmaker still winds up with the biggest house. Another thing is, there’s such an absence of tradition, such a pastlessness, you never know where people live, you never know where to find them, they move so much. With me, I’ve had it happen the other way. Bookmakers go belly up. I’ve busted three bookmakers out. You’ve just got to wait and hope they get well.”
He points out a kid teaching himself to call races. He questions him closely, advises him, invites him out to the viewing room at the studio, where the kid can watch himself, maybe pick up on some of the things he’s doing wrong. Together they chat about the man who calls the races at Santa Anita, Trevor Denman, a South African Milch regards as the best caller in the business. “What makes Trevor good is, he can tell when a horse is past it, when he’s expended himself. He can see the boy move his hands when the boy is asking, or if he’s asking too soon. And if he’s got a double handful like that, that means he hasn’t asked him yet, so if the horse is doing well and he hasn’t asked him, you know the horse is likely to perform well. And then when the boy moves, when he asks him, if the horse responds, then yo
u call the horse as optimistic in terms of his chances. But if the boy asks him and the horse doesn’t respond, even if the horse is in front, you know he’s done. So you’ll hear the guy call, ‘There’s so-and-so on the lead but not doing enough,’ or ‘So-and-so is on the lead and finding more.’ He’s extraordinary. Extraordinary.”
“So how come I didn’t hear him?”
“Because you don’t pay attention.”
I do to the tall tales, to the one about the 117-pound jockey whose weight is really 160 but is kept down by the killing fasts to which he subjects himself, all the ways he’s learned to absorb nourishment without actually taking in food—through its smells, the different noises it makes in fire. Milch and the kid scaring each other over accidents they’ve seen, bones busted as lessons jockeys teach one another. There are nice bits of jargon. Apprentice jockeys, for example, are often given a weight advantage, and an asterisk goes down by their name in the program. When the asterisk is dropped, the jockey is said to have “lost his bug.”
It’s racetrack theory I can’t take, the horsey universals Milch swears by.
“The thing about the track,” he says, “is it’s a completely exfoliated ecology. There are real artists out here. There are certain trainers who are extraordinary in the way they understand how to deal with a horse and there are a million different variables about how to change a horse’s performance, from equipment, to feed, to shoeing, the kind of bit that they use, what they do with them in the morning, and the guys that are good are amazing, just amazing. The other part of being a trainer is the science of dealing with the owners, and the psychology that’s involved there is amazing. I mean talk about hustlers, not just hustlers, human nature, understanding. There’s a fully developed vocabulary for the way you deal with an owner at different moments of the experience. Like when you say, ‘Cool out.’ That’s a racetrack expression. You know that an owner, when his horse has run badly, is going to be angry and sweaty, and the trainer has to find a way to give him the cool-out story, but if the owner knows he’s being handled he’ll get pissed off, so the trainer has got to seem to be talking about something else. ‘It looked like he was giving us everything he—I wonder if the boy asked him too soon.’ So now the owner’s got something to blame besides the defect in the horse. The trainer tells him, ‘Geez, I think we had some bad luck. I mean, it looked like he was just getting ready to move at the half-mile post, and the hole shut.’ You give him something to blame. What you’re trying to do is rekindle hope, as opposed to saying the horse is too fucking slow.
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