by Bill Barich
VI
Emery Winebrenner had hit a big exacta, four figures, and he was papering the Home Stretch with fifty-dollar bills. He bought drinks for Richard Labarr and for Labarr’s two clients and for Bob Ferris, who was drunk and shoeless, and for anybody else who expressed the tiniest desire for something liquid. When I came in he paid for my beer and told me five or six one-liners in rapid succession, all of them terrible, and then launched into a longer joke about a man who walked into a bar carrying his son. The poor boy had no arms or legs or appendages of any sort but he could speak just the same, and when his dad set him down he asked for a whiskey. As soon as he took a sip, pop, he sprouted an arm. Terrific, the boy thought. He ordered another drink and pop, sprouted another arm, and kept drinking and sprouting until he was fairly smashed and almost complete. All he needed now was a penis, so he ordered another drink but this time, poof, everything disappeared, each of his new limbs, and he was reduced once again to his pristine limbless state.
“You get it?” Emery asked, his eyes twinkling.
“Get what?”
“The moral of the story.”
I thought it over but the moral escaped me.
Emery laughed. “Always quit when you’re a head,” he said. Then he slapped the bar. “Get it? Always quit when you’re ahead.”
“Can’t find my shoes, Emry,” Ferris said.
“Keep looking. They must be here somewhere.”
“Where’d you hide ’em, Emry?”
Emery winked. “I don’t think anybody hid them, Bob.”
An argument was going on in a booth along the wall. Jay Jsames, one of Labarr’s riders, was telling another man who wore only gym shorts and sneakers that he, Jsames, was the fastest jockey at Golden Gate and probably in the nation. “I can fly,” he said. Jsames was maybe twenty years old but he had flash. He put his ego out front, as a man might set his limbless son upon a bar, and played with it, half-seriously. He claimed to have had a brief career as a prizefighter, scoring several knockouts, and to have acted in movies, Hollywood movies, but more than anything else, he loved to ride. Labarr was getting him a few mounts, but it would be July before he held the reins of an animal who could really run. In the meantime he worked hard and cruised around in a Cadillac decorated with little American flags and threw down the gauntlet whenever his speed of foot was challenged.
Outside it was still warm; the air was choked with particulates. A phantasmagoric smog-set was occurring over the Bay and the clouds were riddled with agonized hues. Labarr paced off about seventy-five yards along the sidewalk, which was deserted at this time of day, and marked a finish line with Jsames’s shirt. Jsames and his opponent, Ed, loosened up, touching their toes and running in place.
“You cheap speed, boy,” Ed said.
“We’ll see,” said Jsames.
Then the money appeared. It jumped out of pockets in fat exacta rolls, and various people made book on the spot. No odds were given; it was even up all the way. Labarr, no doubt to be sporting, laid twenty on Ed, and Emery countered with twenty on Jsames. He kept saying what a crazy wonderful mixed-up racetrack thing this was to do. A dispute arose over how to start the race, how to make it fair for both runners, but this was solved ingeniously when a truck driver sitting behind the wheel of a horse van across the street offered to hit his horn as a signal. Jsames dropped down into a sprinter’s stance, his fingers touching the pavement, and Ed stood quietly next to him, one foot ahead of the other and his arms dangling at his side. When the horn sounded, they took off full speed down the sidewalk. For forty yards they were even and then Jsames pulled slowly away, winning by a reasonable margin.
“You cheated,” Ed said. “Let’s do it again.”
There was another round of heated wagering. This time Jsames won by a good ten yards, and on the way back to the starting line he needled the older man.
“Maybe you’re a router,” he said. “You sure don’t belong in sprints.”
“One more time,” Ed said. His thigh muscles were twitching uncontrollably.
I watched the greenbacks go round. In five minutes Labarr had lost forty dollars and Emery had won forty, but I couldn’t tell the difference by their expressions. This was how it went among racetrack gypsies. Their attitude toward money differed from most people’s. Millions passed through the pari-mutuel windows every day and was rerouted in part, but the gypsies knew that nobody’s life was ever changed. You could be ahead for a day, two days, a week, an entire meet, but sooner or later you lost. That Transformation Pie was still cooling on the windowsill, just out of reach. Money was paper, a government contrivance, something accountants and brokers pursued, but for gypsies it was useful only to keep score, to prove that for once you’d outsmarted horses, trainers, fixers, corporate thugs, and Trickster Process, forced a freeze on events, and imposed your own sense of continuity on the afternoon’s card. What could you possibly buy with your winnings? You could buy anything, the answer went, so why bother? Anything was nothing. You could get credit against your paycheck at the Home Stretch, and the cafeteria food was cheap, and tack rooms were free, so what good was money? You couldn’t hold on to it, that much was certain. Sooner or later you gave it back or spent it or had it taken away or woke up dead.
Jsames breezed home in the third race and we went back inside for drinks.
“I still don’t believe it,” Ed said, rubbing his quivery thighs. “I don’t understand it at all.”
“You better believe it,” Jsames said cockily. “You ain’t never gonna beat anybody fast as me.”
Ed knew this was true and he withdrew for a moment to consider other games in which age and technique might grant him an edge. Finally he hit on something and looked much happier.
“You know that whorehouse in Oakland?” he asked with a grin.
“I heard about the place.”
“Well, then, I’ll tell you one thing you’re not gonna beat me at.”
“Do tell,” said Jsames.
“Let’s you and me go over there,” Ed said. His grin took on beatific aspects. “We go in there, see who can make it last. I go all night long. You know what I mean, my man? I mean all night long.”
VII
For six weeks of the meeting my betting ledger looked like this:
Stake:
$500
Week One:
372
(— 128)
Week Two:
336
(— 36)
Week Three:
295
(— 41)
Week Four:
487
(+192)
Week Five:
522
(+ 35)
Week Six:
478
(— 44)
I attributed my rotten start to confusion, and Week Four’s big winnings to being in touch, but otherwise what I had in hand was a record of breaking even.
Breaking even, how I hated those words! They were the province of coupon clippers, gas hoarders, voyeurs, of the apothecary Landucci, who bemoaned the fact that during a festa women and children had witnessed a stallion servicing a mare. Sexless Landucci, Landucci the scrimper of soldi, Landucci who probably played only favorites when the Florentine palio was run. What good would it do me to break even? Coyotes didn’t break even, they went for broke. Money had little to do with what I was seeking, that much I’d learned, but I still thought it would indicate a failure of nerve if I went home with my stake intact. I felt trapped in The Grand Flat Middle, in Omaha, in Dubuque, with the corn silk of irresolution threaded in my hair.
My problem was epidemic among small-time gamblers. When you’re playing with limited cash—twenty dollars was a big bet for me, the sixty I’d laid on Bushel Ruler more than a tenth of my original capital—it’s difficult to win decisively, i.e., in quantities large enough to inflate the ego. A two-dollar bettor can pick four or five winners and if they’re favorites show a profit of less than twenty dollars. Knowing you’ve been right four
or five times and that what you win is indeed determined by what you wager somehow doesn’t compensate for what seems an unjust return on your investment. So small-timers make the mistake, as I was beginning to do, of shopping around for long shots. Too often I passed up horses I liked because their odds were short, eight to five, even two to one, and bet instead second or third favorites on the outside chance they’d improve enough to win. They seldom did. Then, too, I was getting bored, in need of larger shocks, riskier endeavors, to obtain the results (adrenaline rushes, accelerated heartbeat) I’d always gotten freely as a casual bettor. Seeing the same jockeys every day, seeing them ride horses I’d seen run before, seeing the same races over the same distances carded in the same way … I was like a man who’s lost the feel for his wife’s thighs, for sparks.
So I decided like so many plungers before me to up the ante. I would bet less frequently (no more crazy two-dollar show tickets on forty-to-one shots who looked good in the paddock; they added up) but in higher units. A twenty-dollar bet on an eight-to-five horse produced a not unreasonable payoff. Also, I would concentrate my bets on a group of trainers I knew would send their horses to post fit and well-meant: Martin, Jenda, Hixon, Brinson, Olen Battles, Gilbert, Taylor, Walsh, and a few others. And I would stop playing the outside posts in sprints (I kept doing this, in violation of everything I knew) except under special circumstances. If I could do all these things, I thought I still might be able to show a profit.
VIII
The next day I got some news from home. Out at the dam site “progress” was being made. The Corps of Engineers’ bulldozers were working round the clock, plugging up nature with anal fervor, and we’d even had our first suicide, some poor young woman who’d jumped off the bridge that had been built over the basin to be dammed. Her free-fall into dust and wild flowers struck me as a wholly appropriate symbol of a more general demise, of the specific sliding into the mass. The town’s planning commission, chaired by a realtor, was busily amending the general plan, changing agricultural zoning to residential or commercial to accommodate the developers and carpetbaggers who were lining up along the avenues; on the plaza we now had a T-shirt store and a jewelry store and a store that sold candles, macrame, patchouli oil, incense, roach clips, and sensitive photographs of the very land parcels that were being rezoned. The tack shop was gone, and so was Buck’s 311 Club and Western Auto, and the hardware store had been replaced by a “theme” restaurant whose owners apparently hoped to attract tourists with a clever arrangement of wine casks, wine bottles, and waitresses in short-skirted burgundy-colored uniforms. I thought of Piero di Cosimo in his vine-sheltered cottage. Of him the art historian Panofsky had written, “he considered the age in which he lived as depraved not by a willful departure from primaeval contentment, much less by a Fall from Grace, but only by the over-sophistication of a cultural development that had forgotten where to stop.”
IX
Because the fair meetings would soon be starting, certain incompetent riders were already hustling trainers for future assignments at rinks in Santa Rosa and Vallejo.
“I thought maybe with the fairs coming up you might give me a mount,” one such jockey said to a trainer. “I thought you might throw me a bone.”
“Son, if you knew what kind of bones I had back at the barn you wouldn’t want me to throw you one.”
“You don’t think they’d do much for my innards, eh?”
“No, I don’t,” said the trainer, rubbing a nose brutalized by Demon Rum. “Besides, I like you. You’re my pal. If I ride you, I’ll get on your case. Then you won’t be my friend any more. I need friends more than I need jockeys.”
Bob Hack walked by on his morning rounds and I joined him for a while. Ever since long-striding Ivan had dumped me into his lap, Hack had been kind to me, which came as no surprise. Everybody said he was a Nice Guy. They said it almost involuntarily whenever Hack’s name was mentioned. “Gee, he’s a nice guy,” they’d say, or “Bob Hack? Helluva nice guy,” and I began to wonder if Hack had some terrible secret they were trying to hide, in the way a small town pulls itself together to shield the village idiot. But no, it was just that Hack was … nice. He inspired awe because he was defying gravity. Nice guys were supposed to finish last, but there stood Hack as evidence to the contrary. The notion that niceness, perhaps even goodness, could be translated into greenbacks seemed to give people on the backstretch a spiritual lift. When Hack strolled by their barn they’d step out, smile shyly, and wave before returning to whatever sordid and nasty business they were perpetrating inside.
But Hack, when asked, credited his success to perseverance. “It looks so easy,” he said, almost with a sigh, stopping to talk to a trainer who wanted Richie Galarsa to ride a nice filly of his but was confused about where to enter her. Hack took out his notebook and a well-thumbed Condition Book, its green cover falling off, and after consulting his sources advised the trainer to run the filly in the sixth race on Tuesday. “So far that’s a weak field,” he said. “You want me to enter her for you?” Agents often performed this service, saving trainers time. The trainer nodded and tapped Hack’s shoulder gratefully. “Thanks a million, Bob,” he said.
Hack was expert at accommodating his clients. He had the comfortable feel of old shoes, but this was somewhat deceptive. He was always scouting for business, even when he appeared to be just having a chat with another agent. I never saw him standing still. Instead he moved about in balletic little arcs and pirouettes, up on the balls of his feet, his eyes peering over shoulders, around the crowns of caps, looking for somebody he’d been meaning to contact. His connections were extensive, forged over almost thirty years on the backstretch, beginning when his father, then a foreman for trainer Bill Molter, got him a job rubbing horses. After a brief impractical stint as a trainer—his “stable” consisted of a few cheap nags with names like Overhead—Hack graduated to agenting.
From the start he represented good riders, Charlie Tohill, Bobby Jennings, but with a growing family at home he needed a steady paycheck, so he began working afternoons, and still does, as a pari-mutuel clerk. This was his insurance, his hedge against catastrophe. The agent game was very risky, with suspensions, injuries, malice, relative popularity, and racing luck affecting your income, and Hack had almost quit on more than one occasion. Once during a low period, when his jockeys were cold, he’d taken a job selling tack at a backstretch shop. But he hated the sense of enclosure, of being in an office, and after a year and a half of self-inflicted torture he was back beating the shedrows for mounts. Now he was sitting pretty. Galarsa was live and Muñoz was steady, and Hack’s ten percent share of their earnings would more than compensate him for his earlier shuffiing. He liked being out in the morning, making his rounds, and he enjoyed the company of his peers, or most of them, anyway. “There’s only one guy I don’t like,” he said. “I don’t like the way he does business.” I knew whom he meant. Nobody liked the agent in question because he was a crook. He tried to bribe trainers, telling them he’d bet a hundred for them if they used his boy on a hot horse in a stakes race, and he stepped on everybody’s toes in the process.
Like most agents Hack had a parental attachment to his riders. When jockeys faltered, their agents took them in, giving them bed and board and steering them away from fast chickies and uranium deals in Pensacola, Florida. Hack was especially concerned about Galarsa, who was making big money now but might not get mounts so easily when he’d lost the bug. “I hope he’s banking some of it,” Hack would say wearily, the many lines in his face becoming abruptly visible. One of his best young riders, Juan Gonzalez, had been killed in a bad spill at the Pleasanton fairgrounds not so long ago, and Hack still flinched whenever Gonzalez was mentioned in his presence.
We stopped at the cafeteria for coffee and sat at a table with Jack Orloff, agent for Tony Diaz. Orloff, aka Camel Driver, aka the Rodent, had cultivated a style in contradistinction to Hack’s quiet self-effacement. He wore faded denim outfits, gold neck-chains,
and aviator sunglasses, while Hack kicked around in sneakers, khakis, and on windy days a baseball cap. Orloff’s natural habitat would be some steamy enclave like Marina del Rey, but Hack was better suited to a backyard in Anytown, USA, with steaks sizzling on the grill and a cold brew in his hand. Orloff was lounging around because Diaz had just been set down for five days, and he offered some of Tony’s mounts to Hack for Galarsa or Muñoz to ride. There was nothing curious about this gesture, except that when it happened, the agent dealing always traded down, reflecting once again the rigid stratification of the track. Diaz was more experienced and made more money than either of Hack’s boys, so Orloff could dispense favors with a kind of lèse majesté to agents on the rung just below him. Sometimes friendship or sympathy cut through the strata, and an established agent helped out a younger associate. Orloff helped Rogelio Gomez’s agent, aka the Vulture, perhaps because the kid had a dark tan and dark curly hair and wore modish clothes in a style similar to Orloff’s.
While we were at the table, the Vulture swooped into the cafeteria with his arms outstretched, moving in circles around the table. Apparently he thought vultures were raptors, not carrion eaters, and he swooped down at the Rodent as though to attack.
“Hey, it’s the Vulture,” Hack said.
“I’m here to prey on rodents,” the Vulture replied.
Orloff was unimpressed. “Did you do what I told you to do?” he asked.
“I did it.”
“And did you get some mounts?”
“I got them.”
“And what was it you said you’d do for me if I got you some mounts?”
The Vulture pretended to be puzzled. “What did I say?”
“What do you mean, ‘What did I say?’” Orloff frowned. “How can you say that?”