“Then you get trainers who get sick of that, of having to handle owners, and yearn for the owner who’s got all the money in the world and doesn’t give a shit, and doesn’t need a big story every time, so then you get big society trainers. It’s a whole spectrum.”
It is not a whole spectrum. It’s not even a fraction of a spectrum. Tops, it’s an itty-bitty piece of what isn’t even a primary color.
Here’s what happened:
The rough formula is that at a distance of a mile, five pounds is supposed to be worth about a length. All else being equal, a horse carrying five pounds less than his competitor should beat him by a length.
Here’s what happened:
Milch’s very strong tip on the horse in the sixth race—I put $50 down on it to win, but David doesn’t even give me its name until practically post time, this despite the fact that I’d need the wheelchair and the wheelchair guy both if I were going to tip it around the track—is that it has been turning in good times even though it’s been carrying thirty-five extra pounds during its morning workouts. Seven lengths, according to the rough formula.
Here’s what happened:
The horse goes off at 9 to 1. Milch bets $50,000 on the horse to win.
Here’s what happened:
It’s difficult for me even to see the horse, let alone read its numbers, let alone pick out the colors of its racing silks. So I’m listening for Trevor to call the horse. I’m paying attention, and listening for Trev to call Milch’s horse. (Not my horse, understand, Milch’s! Not my merely 50-buck nag, but Milch’s full-fledged, $50,000 horse!) Then he does, he says its name, and I explode into cheering, urging, encouragement, whatever the word is for the will thrown into gear like that, whatever the telekinetic forces are for this sort of simple, engaged, innocent-bystander energy.
“Come on. Come on. Come on,” I yell. “Come on, come on, come on. Cmon, cmon!” I scream. “Cmoncmoncmon!” I act out.
Here’s what happened:
I clap Milch on the back and excitedly, crazily, mistakenly, congratulate him. “You won!” I yell. “You won, you won!”
“What the hell do you know about it? You lost fifty bucks, I lost fifty thousand.”
It’s just a momentary flash of anger. He recovers immediately, is once again good father to this little orphan-outing’d, Sunshine-funded boy. In the car on the way back, we’re polite to each other but have little to say. So I’m thinking about all those palm trees, California’s bearded botany, and the locations I’ve scouted—The Newlywed Game, Reagan’s bar mitzvah at the Beverly Hilton, Los Angeles’s empty streets. I’m thinking of the production assistant Milch offered to have stand by on twenty-four-hour call in the lobby of the Bel Age Hotel to adjust my cummerbund or fix my studs should the need arise. Then, out of the blue, Milch says to me, “You know, Stanley, California isn’t really any different from anyplace else.”
II
The San Francisco Bay Area, I’m thinking on the plane, is the experimental mother-lode matrix, the SiliconValley of the New Age. I’m about to enter this duty-free zone of the olly-olly-oxen-free anarchies, the source of all the bold, outrageous, five-and-plus-year plans of the neo-chic, a Jerusalem newer than Blake’s, with a claim to the highest territorials—northern California as the West Pole. But first—
The flight from LAX to Oakland is a straight shot, but the airline loses my bags. It loses my Lanoxin. It loses my Valium and dipyridamole. It loses my Procardia. (This is the establishing shot. I’m flat on my back at ground level, and God and the world are taking potshots. It might not be any safer here than back in L.A.) I let B.K. and her husband, Charlie, handle it. I let them deal with the lady in the missing-luggage department, play Pick the Shape of Your Suitcase from the chart the airline has worked up from untold thousands of valises it’s lost over the years. I don’t know why, but these charts depress me, remind me of those silhouettes of enemy aircraft air-raid wardens study during the wars. I suppose it’s the futility of the exercise, how I can’t conceive why being able to recognize what just bombed the shit out of you, or picking out the give-or-take, more-or-less, sort-of-a-profile the airline offers of what used to be your suitcase (almost), could ever do anyone any good. It’s just more mug shots, is what I think.
So I sit this one out on the edge of the baggage carousel, taking my ease, saving my strength. Because it ain’t but 9:30 or so in the morning, and I can already see this is going to be some day.
And it is.
Charlie drives us to the St. Francis Hotel to register. I’m impressed. Lots of hustle-bustle in the lobby. Very downtown sort of place. I can almost cotton to spending a few days here. Naked. Tuxless. Suitless. Shirtless and pantsless and shortsless. But Lanoxinless? And without all the other chemical whatnot that keeps me alive, that winds my watch and eases my blood past its tight squeezes and narrow situations, threads it through all the eyes in all the needles of its obloquy? What a piece of work is a man! I’m here to tell ya.
So Charlie takes my Gold Card to the hotel pharmacy with the 800 number to test the waters, see is it true I’m caught short without my prescriptions they’ll get me fresh ones? Anywhere in the world; it could be Mindanao, it could be Argentina, it could be California. I feel all the spurious defiance of David Horowitz challenging a commercial.
Meanwhile, I’ve seen the bathroom, and—shades of the Fall!—it’s without grab bars, sans the shower orthotics. I’m sorry, but once burned, twice shy. Plus, the room ain’t made up yet. (Because I’m this fastidious cripple who’d never stretch out on the other guy’s sheets, this suspicious fastidious cripple who’s lost his bags, who gave, in a sense, at the office and honestly believes—listen; we’re talking honestly believes; faith, the heart’s sour, grounded orthodoxy—he ought to be exempt from ever having to give anything ever again ever, who has this license to take and to kvetch and maybe even to kill and who thinks, for all that the airline vows otherwise, he’ll never see his bags alive again!) It’s a large room; but unmade, crowded with twisted sheets, with blankets kicked to the foot of the beds, with an extra cot and strewn newspapers, with opened cans of nuts and mixes, with flattened club soda, packets of potato chips, empty pony bottles of booze, and even the absolutely meaningless telephone numbers and code words one scribbles to oneself on hotel notepads with hotel ballpoints, drenched, I mean, in all the anonymous detritus of invisible, hungover lives, seems oddly cramped, close-quartered, no place even to sit (so that one perches on some cleared-path edge of things), never mind stretch out.
So I’ve seen the bathroom, and there’s a call in to housekeeping, the engineers.
Charlie comes back with the prescriptions, enough for four days. And here’s housekeeping, too. We’re feeling so good as things start to fall into place that B.K. goes to the minibar and pulls out stuff to nosh—juices, crackers, and cheeses.
But man don’t live by no bread alone. He don’t live by even the illusion of kemptness. Or I don’t. Though neatness—I was toilet trained by nine months, but I bet you knew that—counts. Yeah, and cleanliness is too next to godliness, or maybe I wouldn’t be so skittish about that shower. But when the engineer comes with the handicap bench, it, with its grips, is more like a gymnast’s horse than a proper transfer bench. If I could swing my legs up over its big concatenatory handles, I wouldn’t need any cripple-friendly shower prosthetics in the first damn place. Fully clothed (well, not fully clothed; I don’t have my tux or my suit or any of the rest of my hijacked apparel), and in my shoes, and with an assistant manager and the engineer and Charlie and B.K. to witness and, should the need arise, help out in an emergency, I demonstrate my high-wire act. I can get in, all right, but out’s out of the question.
The assistant manager, summoned by B.K. (in whom I’ve somehow awakened an outraged, born-again advocate of gimp toilet rights), a sympathetic, fatherly man in his early fifties, vaguely Oriental-looking and dignified as a scholar, seems interested in a just solution to my case. Clearly something has occurred to
him, but it’s a long shot, and he’s reluctant to say.
“What?” I ask.
Doubtfully, he mentions a number to the engineer. As soon as I hear it, I know it’s some experimental room, or haunted perhaps, but just the ticket. I’m invited to take a look at it.
Oddly, it looks as if it’s being aired out. The furniture, pulled in, is at queer angles to the walls. Stripped, the bed looks like something in a summer house after a year’s vacancy. It’s a trade-off, maybe a third the size of the room I’d be giving up, but it has a stall shower. Unfortunately, there’s this two-foot step to get into it, sharp, dangerous-looking tracks upright as knives on which the shower door slides, and, as the faucet and fixtures and shower head would be behind me as I got out of the stall—I do another dress rehearsal for my captive, not uninterested, audience, who suggest possible gravitational compromises, slick finesses, all the jujitsu bathing leverages—there’d be nothing to grab on to. “I’m sorry,” I tell the assistant manager, “but as you see . . .”
He understands, he assures, and I believe he does. Back in the original room, he speculates about alternative configurations. If they put a grab bar here, if they drove a handle into the side of the wall outside the tub there . . . Would that help? That would be perfect, I tell him. Is it feasible? he asks the engineer. It might take a few hours . . . Would a few hours make that much difference to me? Heck no, a few hours, heck no, absolutely not. Well, he’d have to speak to his boss, of course. . . Of course. “Well, then,” he says.
“It’s just too bad,” I say, “there was that huge step to get into that shower stall. If I could just have stepped into it. If there’d just been a drain at the bottom of the stall . . . ”
“Yes,” the assistant manager says, “like the one in my house.”
“You have one like that in your house?”
“My son,” he says, “is a quadriplegic.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I tell him. “Oh, Christ,” I say.
Then the two of us are practically sobbing at each other, all lumps-in-the-throat and mutually moved, and it’s good he has to leave to make the arrangements because I can’t even talk to the guy, I’m so ashamed. It’s not as if I were a real cripple. I’m a goddamn disgrace to the handicapped, is what. B.K. wonders if he’s handing me a line, and it would be better all ’round if he were, but boy, I hope she’s wrong. I just hope to hell his son can’t move a muscle, that even his hair is paralyzed when they try to move a comb through it. Because I’m a sucker for a moment, is why.
Tracy and Emily, from the magazine’s San Francisco office, have joined us. We’re supposed to go to lunch, but my bags still haven’t come, and I want to be here when they work on the room. We do room service instead. I order exquisitely, if I do say so. As if I had no appetite, or just exactly the sort of appetite a classy, exquisite-raised gent like me ought to have, this food-doesn’t-matter soul drill I do for company once in a while if I’m not very hungry. Oh, perhaps a sandwich, maybe a small salad, a glass of iced tea. Emily, this tough, young, streetwise waif—who lets you know it, demonstrates it, I mean, who drives, for a waif, a big, improbable station wagon, who parks it and leaves it for hours in front of hotels without so much as a by-your-leave to a doorman or cop—orders heartily. (It’s Emily, low girl on the magazine’s totem pole, who brought up the idea of my doing something for California in the first place, and who, I take it, contacted me before she ever said anything about it to her bosses. Emily and I go back, too. I met her when she was a graduate student in Ohio and she asked me to do a piece for the Bowling Green literary magazine and I declined. Then, after graduation, she wrote me when she worked for Arrival, a short-lived, San Francisco–based magazine too counterculture for someone like me, still trying, even at fifty-eight, for an upward mobility he can call his own.) Emily’s an enthusiast, a kind of throwback, at once this believer and skeptic, who seems to require demons, cultural straw beings, not personally paranoid—anything but, considerate, kind, generous, helpful—so much as suspicious on behalf of others, on behalf of mankind, perhaps, some feisty patriot of the other guy’s country. She reminds me of someone from the sixties. This attractive, old-fashioned girl on the cutting edge. (Emily believes an important new genre is the adult comic book. Emily, Emily is a pistol.) Tracy looks Californian, smart, capable, and centered as some sitcom shrewdie with the best lines. Of the three of us—there’s been a changing of the guard; B.K. and Charlie have left—I’d guess only Tracy orders precisely what she wants off the room-service menu, not like me, who’s showing off, and not like Emily, who may be thinking about the doggie bag.
Against all odds, my bags arrive.
Then, late in the afternoon, the assistant manager comes back. He’s all remorse and apology, but his boss has told him that changing the bathroom around isn’t a good idea. They can’t guarantee the new equipment they’d have to punch into the tile will support me. They don’t want me to fall. I’m welcome to stay, of course, but meanwhile they’ve contacted the Hilton, a newer hotel where the tubs all have grab bars and there’s a ramp in the guts of the building so guests can drive right up to their floor. He makes it sound like some Big Rock Candy Mountain for the disabled. In addition to picking up the tab for my first night’s stay at the Hilton, the St. Francis will be happy to absorb all the charges I’ve managed to put on the magazine’s account in the seven or eight hours I’ve been in possession of the room—all B.K.’s and Tracy’s calls, the juices and crackers and cheeses from the minibar, our three lunches. In addition, he tells me, they’ll throw a stretch limo into the bargain to take me there. I’ll need help registering, I inform. Perhaps the ladies? he suggests. Sure, they agree. But what about afterwards? I lay on. The driver, he says, will be instructed to wait, he instructs.
When we get there, Emily, seeing no point in my having to tip the guy, lifts my two big suitcases and carries them up to the room herself. Tracy, wisely, doesn’t lift a finger.
Though I hate to think it’s so, some people, by dint of sheer geography, may lead luckier lives than other people. A pal, Herb Bogart, interviewing for a job at San Francisco State years ago and asked why he wanted to leave the University of Illinois campus at Champaign-Urbana, told his prospective employer, “Because when I look out the window it’s too beautiful and I can’t get my work done.” Well. The Bay Area really is beautiful. World-class views. One day, crossing the bridge back from the Marin headlands (where I’d seen surfers in wet suits, where I’d seen Sausalito like a hip Italian hill town, where I’d seen an Army post, abandoned and sad against the Bay and hills as if it had recently been conquered, overrun, left to stand in the weather like a wooden ruin) to San Francisco with Tracy, the full force of this gorgeous city hits me in the eyesight like a blow. It doesn’t seem fair that one can see all this and get his work done, too. A silly twist of fate, of geology, some perverse variation on the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God’s; an accident, I mean, to be a San Franciscan rather than a Hoosier. Tie goes to the guy with the view. Nothing as important as life should be wasted. And it strikes me that California is a choice one makes, a blow one strikes for hope. (Oh, St. Louis, where I’m from, is a choice, too, but not in the way California is. Unless a job’s waiting, or he has other, very specific, reasons, no one ever wakes up one day and says, I must move to Missouri. No one chooses to find happiness in Maryland. And California, whether it delivers or not, is about happiness, as America, whether it delivers or not, is about freedom.)
One morning, Emily, Matt (another California staffer), and I drive out to Berkeley. We cruise by the Krishna Copy Center, the Cheese Board and Juice Bar collectives, People’s Park. Up and down the Atlantic Citiness of this western campus town we go, and I have an impression of having come in the off season—the university is on break—to this odd zone of the not historical, exactly, so much as the nostalgical. I learn there’s talk of making a Palestinian refugee camp on the West Bank Berkeley’s sister city, and this strikes me as fitting in a community so fixed on itse
lf as a place on the cutting edge of conscience. Social fiddling has lent it the air of a one-industry town, some Las Vegas of the ideological, almost, at least between terms, blowsy, fat with assumption. In a way I can’t explain, it seems to me like a sort of graduate-student theme park—of the young, by the young, and for the young. I’m not uncomfortable here, quite the reverse, actually. I feel larky. For all my grampsy, gruntled ways, I have a sense of tolerance, safe passage, letters of transit in my pocket, the ease of one with all the bona fides of his blemishes working for him. Berkeley, I sense, is a big support-group town. I can just imagine the different hot lines in its telephone directory.
We drop by Peet’s Coffee & Tea, not, as its name and campus-town locale might suggest (and what I expect), a coffeehouse in any eighteenth-century, Dr. Johnson sense of the term, but a kind of Häagen-Dazs of coffee. Except for a bench outside the store and an even smaller one inside, there’s no place to sit. The newspapers, astonishingly various—I count fourteen—and dispensed from vending machines rather than fixed to wooden wands, round out a sense one has of Peet’s’ penny-arcade aura, some coffee shooting gallery, say. With its stock of gleaming, stainless-steel coffee machines, cups, boxes of filters, and all the rest of its assorted cappuccino paraphernalia, it might almost be a coffee hardware store. Matt, who went to school in Berkeley, recognizes regulars, as I, who didn’t, almost do myself. I mean, they all seem like regulars, people hanging out. These people strolling up and down examining the beans, looking over the different teas displayed in shallow glass cases like ant farms, wired on caffeine, on coffee so strong it smells, not unpleasantly, like a kind of rancid bacon, are mostly lanky guys with a sort of folksinger look in their eyes.
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