Laughing in the Hills

by Bill Barich

  One morning when she seemed particularly calm, Headley decided to school her in the starting gate. He was a little apprehensive, recalling Fenstermaker’s warning, but she seemed so placid and yielding he thought she might be ready. When Pichi got to the schooling area, back in the shade of some twisted live oaks, she went wild. She attacked the gate, kicking and rearing, and when it failed to collapse under her ministrations she tried to jump over it. This was precisely as feasible as a cow jumping over the moon. Her exercise rider, taking up on the reins, managed to restrain her and lead her away before she injured herself. Headley was incredulous but he kept schooling her patiently, with greater supervision, until she went into the machinery without resisting and stood there moderately still, waiting to be released.

  IV

  Pichi’s aversion made me curious about starting gates, so I went to the schooling area—it was located near the Corporation Yard, where track equipment like harrows was stored—and talked to Bob Yerian, Golden Gate’s starter, about them. Yerian was from Montana and looked uncannily like Will Rogers. He told me the track leased two gates from the Puett company. Each weighed between thirteen and fourteen tons and had fourteen post positions. The rear doors of the pens were held closed by a latch-type affair. The front doors, the ones which snapped open abruptly at the start of a race, were spring-loaded and held together by electromagnets. When Yerian pressed his buzzer, the gate’s two power cells (two others were always charged and ready, a backup system) shut down, springing the magnets, and the front doors were thrown open all at once. An eight-man crew supervised the loading procedure, which took, under optimal conditions, no more than five seconds per horse, or about a minute for a twelve-horse field.

  Yerian would have gone on for quite some time, but he saw a worker over in the Corporation Yard trying to guide a water truck through a small space between his, Yerian’s, car and a tree, and he went running off, which left me standing next to a member of the gate crew whom Yerian had been calling Slick. I couldn’t see anything slick about him, but he was nice enough and full of interesting observations.

  “Today’s the only kind of day I really want a boat,” said Slick, looking out at the sailboats on the Bay and the San Francisco skyline behind them. “Isn’t it gorgeous out there? Look at that bridge. The city always looks different to me. Some days it’s right up on top of you and other days it’s way off in the distance.”

  This statement about the watery nature of apparently solid phenomena was pertinent to my situation. The Tanforan meeting was only five days old, but already I’d lost a third of my stake.

  V

  All gamblers look for signs, and I was given an appropriate one that first week when a filling from one of my molars popped out of its rightful place and into a wad of gum. My tongue, acting involuntarily, began immediate explorations of the hole. The image of emptiness should have been transported to my brain, but it was not and I kept losing steadily. Naturally I had alibis, and ample time in which to consider them, but in the end they had no effect on the ledger, which was negative, pal, negative. During one inglorious sixteen-race period I picked nine consecutive losers. Six of them finished out of the money entirely. Nobody else was doing so poorly, of that I was certain. Scrawny old guys in Panama hats and suspenders were cashing in at the fifty-dollar window and old ladies playing systems based on the sum of their nieces’ birthdays divided by the pills in an Anacin bottle were hitting the daily double daily. They jumped, they howled, they clapped their hands and shed joyful tears, and I wanted to bust their kneecaps with a baseball bat.

  Losers form strange partnerships; I formed mine with Arnold Walker. Together we licked our wounds. I thought Arnold resembled a diplomat in his elegant pin-striped suits and Caesar Romero locks, fog-gray and fragrant as pastilles. The Turf Club matrons loved him. He looked like an envoy sent from a far country for the express purpose of breaking hearts. If all gamblers share a common innocence, a nostalgic longing for a condition prior to habituation, then Arnold was a superior gambler by virtue of his superior innocence. He refused steadfastly to learn anything from experience, and even winning thousands of dollars did not satisfy him for long. What he wanted couldn’t be found at the track, but there was no telling this to him. He’d spent a lifetime avoiding the truth. He was fifty-three, thrice-married, and his face, tanned to a Boca Raton brown even in April, was entirely absent of lines.

  Arnold liked me because I was a writer. “Writers are class,” he said. During the Second World War, he claimed to have seen Hemingway in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria with a Gorgeous Broad on his arm and a glass of champagne in his hand, and he continued to believe that such events, bubbly and tit-ridden, occurred frequently in writers’ lives. One night he insisted on buying me dinner and made me order lobster. Arnold had inherited a chain of drugstores on the Peninsula and wanted to show me that money meant nothing to him, but of course it did. Over drinks he confessed to being down three grand for the year. “Down at Del Mar once,” he said, cracking a lobster claw, “I had the best day of my life. I hit two exactas big and won thirty-eight hundred dollars. Then I went to a party and picked up a movie star and laid her.” He looked cautiously around before whispering her name. I didn’t believe him for a second.

  Beyer and his speed figures were the first thing I threw out of my handicapping support system, not because Beyer was wrong or inaccurate but because using figures went against my grain. I was learning that to win you had to work within the net of your own perceptions. For me speed had negative connotations. It was too American a preoccupation, too insistently the grammar of motorcyclists and technologists. Passo a passo si va lontano, I heard them say in Florence, step by step one goes a long way, and this accent on the qualitative aspects of a journey was more to my liking. So I decided to concentrate on factors like class and condition, relegating speed to a secondary position except when it appeared to be the single factor separating one horse from all the others.

  But even after making this adjustment, I lost again the next afternoon. The track, it seemed, was just like life, unjust and aleatory. Muggers won handily, thieves tripled their bankrolls, and murderers walked whistling to the parking lot, their blades secured in fat green sheaths. I felt in tune with the grandstand ironist who saw two losers scuffling and shouted at them, “Cut it out, you guys, this is the sport of kings.” Then Emery Winebrenner, trainer, backstretch bon vivant, and self-proclaimed handicapper extraordinaire, said, “You’re losing? Come and sit with me in the owner-trainer section this afternoon and I’ll get your money back for you,” and again I had reason to believe.

  VI

  I met Winebrenner by accident. One morning I hooked up with Buck Ball, a horseshoer, and watched him work at several barns. He had a barrel chest and giant smithy arms and navigated the shedrows in an extremely lived-in camper. It took him about twenty minutes to replace old shoes with new ones. He stood in an uncomfortably stooped position while working and I was feeling sorry for him until I calculated that he probably earned twenty grand a year hammering nails into hoofs. This seemed another example of cosmic injustice. Buck stopped at Winebrenner’s to shoe a fat sullen nag who’d just returned from a six-month vacation on the farm. A groom named Bob Ferris held the horse steady. He affected a tough-guy pose, dangling a cigarette from his lip and speaking in a curt monotone, but he turned out to be the most literate person I encountered on the backstretch. Most of his reading had been done during a sojourn in the slammer. Ferris had a taste for bad jokes and he told me one about an Englishman who kept an aviary for breeding rooks. When the Englishman’s pals dropped by they always asked, “Bred any good rooks lately?” Ferris thought the joke was a real killer and he laughed and stomped out his cigarette. “Know what it takes to be a groom?” he asked. “Only two things: you have to know how to shovel shit and how to say whoa!” His eyes were watering a little. He really loved this stuff.

  Another man emerged from a nearby stall, blinking into the light. He was stocky and th
ick-chested like Buck, with a soft round face, a little mustache, and dark hair beginning to thin conspicuously at the crown. His eyes were brown, glazed, and abstracted. Because he’d been separating straw from manure I took him to be a groom, too, but this was Winebrenner himself. He had difficulty speaking.

  “I can’t talk today,” he said when I asked him about a horse of his I’d seen working out that morning. “Today’s a bad day. Maybe you could come by tomorrow. Tomorrow’s much better.” We shook hands and he wandered off and lifted the hood of his pickup and began tinkering distractedly with the spark plugs.

  Later I learned that such silences were not uncommon with Emery. He sometimes got deeply involved in interior processes and couldn’t easily extricate himself. I came to imagine entire worlds within his body, miniature crystalline structures of surpassing intricacy. When he wasn’t lost in silence he was out there hustling. He loved to hustle and the backstretch was his life. He rented a quiet house in San Pablo surrounded by oak trees, but he seldom went there except to shower and change clothes. Instead he preferred to wander the shedrows or work at his barn, even pitchforking manure, or go to the races. The house served him as a psychic safety zone and he was proud of it and the library he kept there. Often he reminded me that he owned every available book on training methods. “If you ever need a book,” he said, “just ask me. If I don’t have it, I’ll buy it and you can borrow it from me.”

  Emery was alarmingly generous, a manic spender who doled out free passes, hot tips, and spare change to almost anybody who asked. In the cafeteria once I tried to pay for my coffee and his soft drink and he countered by picking up the tab for everybody else in line, including a groom who was already well into the Old Milwaukees and listing badly to the left. Old Milwaukee could do this to you. It was a Schlitz second brand sold in the track cafeteria, and whenever I saw the Old Milwaukee slogan, “Tastes as great as its name,” I wanted to make a house arrest of the advertising geniuses who’d been paid a million dollars to think it up. Anyway, the groom was listing, and he lifted his can in salute. “Cheers, Emry,” he said. Nobody ever pronounced that middle “e.” The vowel was elided and Emery was given the same high-pitched nasal treatment filly got.

  In 1977 Winebrenner had had a fair year for a young trainer. He’d started his horses a hundred and twenty-three times, won seventeen races, and been in the money exactly one-third of the time. He’d earned a total of $74,347 in purses. But this year he’d been slow to start because a few of his old standbys, like Little Coop’s and Equivalent Model, were used up and not really producing any more. Soon he’d have to start dropping them in class, hoping they’d be “claimed,” or bought, by other trainers before their problems were more graphically revealed. At the same time he was scouting replacements. He had twelve head now and wanted more. Every day he read the Form and searched for horses who were being badly handled and cut short of their potential. Such errors showed up in the statistics. Golden Gate supported a small colony of incompetent trainers who survived by charm or guile or pure hucksterism, and sometimes they made such blatant mistakes that it was a simple matter to claim good stock away from them. They ran sprinters in routes and routers in sprints, sent horses to post without first teaching them how to change leads on the turns, let faders go right on fading without once trying to build their stamina, scrimped on feed and tack, and hired help whose talents were better suited to street fighting than caring for thoroughbreds. “You’re seeing me in a low phase,” Emery said on days when the dark depressive clouds were massed in his skull. “Last year I was really hot. It’ll be that way again after I make some claims. I bet I’ll be in good shape at Bay Meadows this fall. It just takes time.”

  I enjoyed visiting Emery’s barn. A radio hung from a hook near a stall and played rock and good jazz all morning long, and Ferris talked about books and racing and his Exactamobile, an old Chevy purchased with the proceeds from a thousand-dollar exacta. Most grooms had no transportation at all, so the Exactamobile was a heady sign of independence. With it Ferris could go anywhere, whenever he wanted, even back to his hometown, Port Townsend, Washington. The barn seemed to attract a younger crowd, people looking for work, people looking for information, people with scams and illogical systems, other trainers, jockeys, and even groupies, and Emery welcomed them all unless it was a bad day, in which case the barn doors were shut and the radio was turned off. Though he often traveled through the grandstand with an entourage, Emery felt his glad-handing image was at odds with his essential self, which was finer and more percipient. “I have lots of acquaintances,” he told me once, making what for him was an important distinction, “but very few friends. The acquaintances are good acquaintances but they’re not close to me. I’ve always been a loner.” Someday, he said, he wanted to live on a ranch in rugged isolated terrain, maybe in the mountains. He wanted to have a big garden and grow vegetables and raise cattle and stable a few horses. He didn’t know exactly how the ranch would come to pass but the vision, as he presented it, was a felt thing, immediately palpable, and when he spoke of it I could see its dimensions, the split-pine fence and rustic ranch house, and around it snowcapped peaks of granite.

  VII

  On the appointed day, the day I was going to get my money back, I didn’t have to stop by Winebrenner’s barn. I ran into him just after dawn. He was standing at the rail among other trainers, dressed in jeans and a western shirt, spitting snuff-tinged saliva into the dust, and watching Cohasset Prince, a nice two-year-old of his, work three furlongs. He seemed glad to see me. Overnight his spirits had regenerated and he was barely able to stand still.

  “You want to talk, eh?” he asked, hitching up his jeans. “Well, you picked the right guy. I love to talk. What do you want to talk about? Racing? I’ve always been into racing. First thing I raced was pigeons. That’s right, pigeons. I grew up in southern California, near L.A. My mother was Mexican and my father was half-Mexican and half-German. That’s where the Winebrenner comes from, the German. My parents were divorced when I was about one. My grandmother raised me. She was a typical Mexican grandmother. A lot of people don’t know I’m part Mexican. They don’t think I look it.” He paused to spit and watch a young blond girl walk by. She looked familiar, and then I remembered I’d seen her dancing at the Home Stretch. “Track’s much better than it used to be,” Emery said. “More young people around. Not so many derelicts, know what I mean?

  “I started with the pigeons when I was thirteen or fourteen. Every so often the different clubs get together and have a race. The start is really incredible. The starters take all the birds to a central place, then throw them in the air, all at once, hundreds of them, and they fly off in flocks at first but pretty, soon they get their bearings and start to home. I found a pigeon out here one day, by the barns, he still had a band on his leg. His wing was broken. I fixed it up with splints and let it heal and then I let him go. I guess he finished that race a little late.” Emery chuckled, rubbing his mustache. “You know what I raced after pigeons. Dragsters. You remember Don Garlits? Big Daddy Roth? When I quit with cars I took up with horses. You see how it worked? It was a logical progression.”

  That afternoon I joined him in the section of the grandstand reserved for owners and trainers. He was sitting with his friend Richard Labarr, a bearded black-haired former beautician in his middle thirties. Labarr was a classic case of somebody who’d given up a comfortable life in the freeway universe to become a racetrack gypsy. While running his beauty shop in Sacramento, he met a trainer who got him interested in racing, and then, on a whim, to impress a girl friend, he bought a horse for twenty-five hundred bucks. Horses don’t come much cheaper and at first Labarr wasn’t sure what to do with his bargain-basement purchase. After a couple of false starts he connected with Emery, and Emery got the horse into shape and the horse went on to break his maiden at the Vallejo fair, paying forty dollars to win. Labarr had bet fifty dollars across the board. I asked him how it felt. “Like an orgasm,” he said, “the b
est orgasm you ever had.” The horse won almost twenty grand in purses before Labarr had to get rid of him. Then he got rid of the beauty shop. Now he was hanging around Golden Gate and trying to make it as a jockeys’ agent. He represented two apprentices, Dennis Rond and a cocky kid named Jay Jsames, but neither of them was live and Labarr wasn’t getting them many mounts. So instead, to make ends meet, he played exactas, drew on his savings, and gave an occasional on-site haircut to trainers too busy to go to a barbershop.

  “I like the five-six, six-five,” Labarr said. “And maybe toss in the eight. What do you think, Em’ry?”

  “I like the one horse. You can’t leave out the three horses, either.”

  Emery told me that he played only exactas, the rest of the action was chickenfeed. He liked the figuring, the various possible angles, the maximal returns. For two races I sat still, waiting in suspense for pearly wisdom to drop from his lips, but he was losing himself and seemed to have forgotten his promise to get me even. When the horses went to post for the next race I left him to place a bet, and when the horse I played, Poppy’s Rose, won by a nose I was supremely excited.

  “Hey,” Emery said, “I thought you were losing.” He was amused that I’d showed so much emotion, violating the code of racetrack cool. Pros were supposed to accept even thousand-dollar payoffs without batting an eye. “Maybe you can help me,” he said, kidding.