by Bill Barich
Already Labarr was looking ahead to the seventh race.
“Let’s baseball one-five-seven,” he said, suggesting they buy tickets on all the possible combinations.
“Can’t,” Emery said, “five’s been scratched.”
I asked him if trainers could remove a horse from a race even if the horse wasn’t hurting, and he said yes, scratches were used as tactical maneuvers. If another entry clearly outclassed yours, it made sense to withdraw and wait for a better day. The stewards didn’t care, he said, unless you scratched your horse from a short field, one with only five or six entries. Scratches were often legitimate, though.
“I scratched a horse once because he just looked bad. An old groom told me he wouldn’t last the night and then the vet came and told me the same thing. The horse was hemorrhaging internally. I was with him when he died. All of a sudden he started kicking. I had to dive out of the stall head first. He started bucking around, bouncing off the walls, just like a big fish flopping on a boat deck. It lasted about thirty seconds and then he shivered and died. You go through strange things with horses. One time I had a colicky horse and he got so congested we had to hold him up and walk him back and forth along the shedrows just like you’d walk a junky.”
By the ninth race we were both down and I gave up any hope of winning. When we left the grandstand the wind was blowing hard off the Bay, very cold for April, and blown-about programs took brief flight with the gulls before sinking into the whitecaps.
“I never get cold,” Emery said with a laugh as I pulled on a sweater. “I don’t know why. People are always kidding me about it. They don’t understand it at all.”
We stopped at the backstretch cafeteria for something to drink, and a small man, uninvited, sat down at our table. His hair was wet and freshly combed and he wore round scholarly glasses and chewed nervously on his lip. He looked as if he’d taken four thousand night school classes, the eternal student. Emery seemed to know him but it was a while before I recognized Bob Ferris behind those lenses. He’d slipped into a new identity, something different for a Home Stretch Saturday night. The transformation was shocking. It reminded me of Emery’s house in the hills.
“Once I lived in a tack room,” Emery said. “This was before I got my trainer’s license. I had that room all fixed up. I had a color TV, a hot plate with two burners, a tape deck. I even had a coffee can to piss in so I wouldn’t have to stumble around in the middle of the night.” I could see that he was winding down now, collapsing toward those crystalline structures. “I don’t really mind living alone. I go places in my head. I love my work, you know, but I don’t know if I’ll ever really be happy. It’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, I just don’t know.”
I listened for a bit longer, stirring my coffee, until I was convinced nothing would be resolved by hanging around. Later I wondered why I had spent so much time with Emery, what I’d expected to learn from him. The answer was clear, though. We were both struggling; his confusion resembled my own.
VIII
On Sunday I went exploring. People were out there after Nature, crowding into Tilden Park above Albany and spreading their blankets under the trees and cracking open one beer after another because the weekend was almost over and the dismal part of the cycle was about to begin again. The carousel was still in operation and children were clamoring for rides. They climbed into the saddles or were held in place by attentive parents, and they went round and round to the music, which was the same fulminating Sousa-type stuff that had been playing for the last half-century. The horses were splendid, though, with braided manes and tensed legs and heads thrown back. They appeared to be smiling, but that was the woodcarver’s improvisation, a touch of anthropomorphic color for the masses.
At San Pablo Reservoir I saw a boy at the fish-cleaning table gutting a huge black bass. He’d caught it earlier on a Jitterbug. There weren’t many bass in the reservoir and he’d been lucky to get one. He showed me where he’d caught it, back in some reeds.
“Here’s the exact spot,” he said. “I’m going to try again tonight.”
“Give me a number,” I said, thinking his luck might rub off on me.
“A number?”
“Any number. First one that pops into your head.”
“Four,” he said. “Is that right?”
In the valley below there was a stable offering pony rides and again the children went round, this time circling a fenced oval strewn with manure. They rode more cautiously than they had on the carousel, holding tightly to the reins, and each backward glance they took seemed a daring enterprise. Kodaks clicked. The ponies looked worn and tired, and green flies as big as thumbnails trailed them wherever they went.
All the shopping malls were busy, and in them a different music obtained, thin and reedy. It had the consistency of aural linoleum and played at varying tempi because the tapes were old and hopelessly fouled and sometimes skittered from “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” to “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’Round the Old Oak Tree” without any segue. Nobody cared; they were busy consuming electric hot-dog cookers and cases of STP and room deodorizers that smelled like the aspens being felled in the Sierras to make way for ski condominiums.
At dusk I drove through Oakland. The first hookers were out and they wore wigs and hotpants and had long legs and impressive bodies. Johns cruised the avenue, maybe the same husbands who’d been shopping earlier, and in separate cars their teen-aged sons, drunk on two beers and dribbling down their shirts, too frightened of the ladies and their legs to do anything but insult them. They pressed beery faces to the windows, and as desire receded into their bones they got a little crazier, a little more mean. In the future they’d build empires, but for now the cops would protect them from error, arresting the hookers instead and turning the experience into something slick and voyeuristic as a centerfold. “I like to see movies, then read the books they are made from,” said Vicki Witt, the Playmate-of-the-Month, enunciating the American dilemma, the valuation of illusion over substance, what can be touched.
IX
And then it was night. When did the switchback occur, I wondered, lying alone in bed remembering spring nights long ago and the warm hazy unforeboding darkness of neighboring territories. Playing stickball under a streetlight, chasing a bright pink rubber ball beyond the arc of the visible, searching for it in pitch-black yards with the smell of grass in the air and no threats studding the dark, the night infrangible, serene. No races to go to, the racing all inside. When did the switchback occur? Not in Florence when I walked the streets after midnight with pockets full of lire, funny money, and not later in Africa when I stumbled home from Edwin’s shop with its shelves of tinned corned beef and viscous condensed milk, stumbling blindly into the bush of snakes and keening sounds, brain stunned by Star beer or palm wine or native weed. What was I doing there? What was I doing here? When did the switchback occur? Headley was right, all sorts of things were waiting for you just outside, many serious possibilities, guns, sharks, muggers, tumors. Renaissance Florentines were preoccupied with death, with its repetitions and flourishes, and devised improbable theories to account for same. Even the French were “concerned.” Bodin, Method for the Easy Understanding of Histories, 1556, turned to numerology, danger zones on the biological grid. “No one considering this matter attentively doubts that the death of men occurs in multiples of seven and nine: as 14, 18, 21, 27, 28, 35, 36, 42, 45, 49, 56. But if the seventh concurs with the ninth all antiquity agreed that it was a most perilous year.” Sixty-three, the climacteric, Aristotle, Boccaccio, Erasmus, Luther. Six and three, seven and nine, exacta probables, inescapable failings. What I was waiting for now was not sleep but the next switchback, acceptance.
Chapter Four
I came to think of trainers as Renaissance princes who ruled the backstretch. Walking the shedrows I saw that each barn resembled a principality, embodying a unique blend of laws and mores, an individuated style. Brightly colored placards bearing trainers’ names or initials or d
evices shone in the sun, and it was possible to intuit the flesh of a prince from the sign he displayed. If Eldon Hall’s escutcheon showed a white dollar sign on a green background, then it stood to reason that Hall would be tall and lean and southern, wearing an expensive Stetson and specializing in speedy Kentucky-bred two-year-olds. Jake Battles’s colors of red and optic blue suggested a feisty raw-faced character who rode his pony belligerently and wore a monumental turquoise ring on the finger of one hand. Emery Winebrenner’s placard was simple, the letters EW rendered in sunny yellow against a field as black and sunken as night.
Inside the barns I always noticed the music first, rock, soul, or jazz if the help was young, MOR if older, and mariachi or salsa if Spanish-speaking. Grooms sometimes had a fiesta going on, with liquid refreshments and the smell of burning hemp in evidence, but more often a barn’s atmosphere was determined by the trainer and reflected his personality. At the Stewarts’, where the whole family worked together, the area around the stalls was neat and clean and felt like a suburban living room. There were no beer cans blocking paths, no syringes left lying in the dust. Tom Stewart was neat and clean and soft-spoken, and so was Bonnie Stewart, mother and assistant trainer, and so were the Stewart children, who helped out after school and on vacations. As a hobby, the family raised lop-eared rabbits, and three rotund specimens, Samantha, Tabitha, and Pumpkin, gazed out at the passing world from a mesh cage by the stalls. Plumpness was a primary characteristic of the breed, something to be encouraged, and these bunnies had it in abundance. They looked to me like mutant creatures, victims of radiation or BHT.
Some trainers filled their barns with female assistants, courtly ladies-in-waiting. Winebrenner always had at least one looker working for him, and Eric Longden and Craig Roberts could usually be counted on for one or two. Women, it was rumored, as though their presence needed excusing, had wonderful hands, healing hands, and a gentle way with nervous fillies, but this sort of myth always prevailed in masculine enclaves. A few women trainers worked at Golden Gate, including aces like Kathy Walsh, but they weren’t yet a challenge to the old guard, and the backstretch remained for the moment the dominion of princes. Bill Mastrangelo carried himself erect as a soldier, with a slight swagger to his step, and ran his crew with military efficiency. Chuck Jenda, an ex-radical from Berkeley who used to pledge ten percent of his Santa Anita handicapping earnings to the Cause, favored the style of a taciturn football coach. He wore a Michigan Wolverines’ cap and spoke of his grooms as his “team.” “Was I bluffing or not?” asked Jenda, after dropping down a sound horse to steal a claiming race. “Only the people on our team knew for sure!” Jenda had gotten his start walking hots and working as a groom, and so had most other trainers, including Headley and Winebrenner. Bobby Martin, perennially the top trainer at Golden Gate, had said goodbye to Kansas when he was seventeen, jumped into a souped-up Mercury with foam dice above the dashboard, and driven nonstop to Chicago. But Chicago was cold even in the fall, and Martin, who’d had enough frigidity on the plains, packed up and headed for California, Land of Warmth and Opportunity, where he landed a job breaking yearlings. Next he was galloping horses and then training them. Mastrangelo was a former jockey whose father had taken him to tracks and hustled him rides. Bobby Jennings had been a jockey, too, a six-footer who’d had to starve himself in order to make weight. Jennings’s agent had been Bob Hack, whose uncle, Claude Turk, another jockey, had gotten Hack his first summer job as a groom….
In fact the backstretch was as intricately nepotistic as the Medicis’ Florence. Eric Longden, Johnny’s son, trained a string of horses for his mother, while his father trained at Hollywood Park and Santa Anita, sometimes for his wife. Cliff de Lima trained for his wife, too, or so it said in the Form, and so did Ross Brinson, whose boy Clay—another son had been a jockey—worked down south among the Longden, Whittingham, and Barrera clans. Allen Auten, a handy apprentice, often rode for his father, Vern, and so many varied offspring worked for parents and uncles and aunts and grandfathers and grandmothers as part-time grooms they couldn’t be counted. I kept expecting the Jukes to roll into town any minute, pulling horse vans behind their ratty pickup trucks.
Princes were busiest in the morning. Some of them liked to be right out there on the track, side by side with their stock, watching their horses exercise. Bobby Martin always commuted back and forth from the barn on his pony, along with his assistant, Les Silveria, who wore chaps and looked like a range rider. Bike Hixon, in snap-brim hat and cardigan, surveyed his charges from a saddle while devouring a big cigar. Walt Green-man often ponied his own animals, holding them by the reins while he galloped next to them, his thatch of prematurely white hair flying. This was the West, after all, or its last coastal echo, and these cowboy trainers were instinctual men. They distrusted language. Horses didn’t talk anyway, or rather they spoke in gestures and signals which were best interpreted by touch. Sometimes a brief ride told you more about a horse’s condition than hours of observation.
Other trainers, less physical types, congregated at the rail near Slaughterhouse Red. These princes had a taste for intrigue, for whispered conversations, for secrets. Among them quiet deals went down. Art Hirsch, duded up in Anaheim Moderne, jeans rolled into six-inch cuffs and silver hair arranged into an astoundingly mimetic duck’s ass, beckoned to jockeys or agents, saying “Come on over here, let’s talk for a minute, let’s do a little business.” Somebody else sidled up to Slaughterhouse and asked how fast Tornado, that mare of Trainer Y’s, had worked, and Slaughterhouse put in a call to the clocker, whose job it was to record the workout times. “How the hell should I know?” the clocker complained, his disembodied voice floating out of a dented speaker near Slaughterhouse’s ear. “There’s so damn many of them out there!”
Trainers sometimes had difficulty keeping their principalities intact. Grooms got drunk and vanished, bouts of flu made the rounds and always lingered too long, deadly illnesses like founder shot forth from the clouds to skewer stakes-level performers, and crazy owner-kings were always demanding tribute, a table at the Turf Club or lobsters at Spenger’s. Good stock was scarce at Golden Gate and it went mostly to the Martins and Mastrangelos, while lesser lights scrambled to make ends meet. Cheap horses were a nuisance. They went easily off form, stopped running the first time they met any opposition, and usually had no heart. The legend of Hirsch Jacobs and his horse Stymie, bought for fifteen hundred and returning almost a million, wasn’t really any consolation. A patient trainer might squeeze one win per season from each baling-wire beauty, but the purses offered in low-level events were small indeed and barely covered costs. Pichi, when she deigned to eat, cost as much to feed as Alydar. Trainers charged owners about twenty dollars a day, plus veterinary bills, to stable a horse, but even the stingiest among them had trouble extracting a living wage from drips and drabs of double sawbucks.
Temptation, then, was everywhere, in every shedrow, and certain darkling princes were known to succumb on occasion. By sending a fit horse to post at high odds they could recoup at the pari-mutuel windows what they’d lost in feed. There were several time-honored tactics for influencing the outcome of a race. Superior workouts, for example, might not be listed in the Form; clockers made mistakes, especially at dawn. Horses could be worked until razor sharp at private training tracks, and trainers were under no obligation to make this information public. Sometimes unwary bugboys were given misleading prerace instructions and told to keep a rail-shy horse on the rail. Sometimes a trainer rode a bad jockey for a race or two, then switched to a pro. Sometimes a jockey was told that it might be beneficial to make slight errors in judgment coming into the stretch, to hold the mount in check too long or use him up too soon or go to the whip too late or not go to it at all. They made such mistakes genuinely and it was almost impossible to separate true from false. There were hundreds of ways to make a horse’s past performance chart read like a clinical account of lameness, and it was surprising, given the ease with which the muddying cou
ld be effected, that most trainers chose to operate honestly.
Masking a horse’s true condition was not considered a capital offense, but sudden form reversals, those miraculous wake-up victories that resulted in big payoffs, were punishable by law. They occurred nonetheless. Jockeys slapped batteries equipped with wire prongs—the device, held in the palm, was called a joint—to their mount’s rump at the proper instant and held on as best they could while the poor electrified beast romped home. New drugs were constantly being developed, drugs for which no equine testing procedures had yet been devised—undetectable drugs—and these were administered in dark stall corners and soon thereafter sixty-to-one shots zoomed out of the gate like angels hyped on amphetamines. Those nags ran. They ran once and once only before slipping back into nagdom forever, but a hundred bucks selectively invested repaid six thousand big ones at any cashier’s window on the grounds. These victories stood out, clearly evident, but stewards were slow to investigate. The unwritten rule around racetracks, not only at Golden Gate, seemed to be that you could get away with anything once, but repetition would cost you dearly. The penalties for such offenses were supposed to act as deterrents. Princes could be fined or suspended or banished from California, stripped of their license and sent packing to distant provinces where the summer county fair meet was the nonpareil of thoroughbred racing. Still, there were always a few backstretch blackguards who were willing to take the risk. Of them it could be written, as Burckhardt once wrote of the notorious Ludovico il Moro, that “no one probably would have been more astonished to learn that for the choice of means as well as ends a human being is morally responsible.”
Most trainers, though, worked hard and chose to be scrupulous. They’d never have the chance to win a Triple Crown, but their honesty might someday be rewarded with the trainers’ championship of Golden Gate Fields. “In so artificial a world,” wrote Burckhardt, “only a man of consummate address could hope to succeed; each candidate for distinction was forced to make good his claims by personal merit and show himself worthy of the crown he sought.”