The backstretch workers are an odd and fascinating lot, vagabonds with seasonal jobs that move with the horses and the weather. For these grooms, hot-walkers, and foremen, the days begin at four in the morning and end around six at night, seven days a week. They are poorly paid, and holidays and sick days are unknown to them. First and foremost, there is an immense respect for animals here, a common thread that bonds together these backside workers, an endearing link between the racers and their caregivers. Secondly, come hell or high water, birth, illness, and death – the backsiders are there for each other. They are all they have. They intermingle and intermarry and watch each other’s back. They are matter-of-fact, friendly, weary, but always polite to a visitor. Most of them have had hard lives; all of them have stories. Fights and petty crimes are common. Many are locals not afraid of hard work and accepting of low pay. Others drift from track to track, followed by the “bad paperwork” of warrants, unpaid child support, and immigration issues. On one of my visits to the Finger Lakes Racetrack, a stabbing had occurred in the backside the night before. Nobody died, but the barn people were much more upset about the cops being called in than about the assault itself.
The language of the backside is mostly Spanish, the dress code is dirty denim, and the smell is an inoffensive combination of urine and liniment, hay, and horse buns. In fact, some back-stretchers believe it brings good luck if you step in it! The round-the-clock rhythm changes from hectic between dawn and eleven in the morning to tranquil from six until dusk.
From a post time of one o’clock until the completion of the program’s ninth and last race at about five-thirty, the backside is a shuttle service. With a 5:00 a.m. breakfast and a 10:00 a.m. light lunch, horses are kept hungry for the afternoon races. Horses leave for the track, excited and feisty, and return a half hour later, still pumped up and soaked in sweat. A cold shower and a big dinner await them in the barn. After dark, the only sound heard is a troublemaker trying to rouse the others; the only movement is the beam of the security guard’s flashlight as he makes his nightly rounds, checking on the expensive inmates.
Race day is game day, and the backside looks like the backstage of a Broadway play. That day’s stars, one or two from each of the track’s twenty barns, are primped and fawned over, braided and gussied up and talked to like actors about to take the stage. The afternoon matinee, with curtain-up announced by a bugler, is about to begin. Not yet saddled, that day’s racers are led from the barns to the track by stable hands wearing bright oversized jerseys, each numbered in order of the horse and its post position. It’s a ten-minute walk to the track, and the horses are on edge, their muscles rippling and coats shining as they nicker and nudge their handlers with their long, gorgeous snouts. With a jerk of a harness and a harsh word, they are told to cut it out.
Once horse and handler arrive at the paddock area, the trainer saddles up his mount in an open stall and talks to the jockey about the race, now a half hour away. If the rider wants to keep working for the trainer, he listens to the instructions and follows them closely once the starting bell goes off. The horse does two turns around the circle paddock, where bettors get a chance to size him up, the first time led by a stableman, then the next with the jockey up.
A bright blaze of color from the jockeys’ silks and the horses’ saddlecloth moves slowly down the chute to the track, where the bugler blasts his call to post. The post parade looks like a fashion show, with bettors still judging the strutters and high-steppers as they make their way to the starting gate. Preening, posing, nodding knowingly to their riders, the horses are the stars of this festive extravaganza, and they know it. The bell rings and the pageantry of the race explodes on the track as the audience goes silent in anticipation, all eyes focused on the pack. The horses are rarin’ to go. Each will perform in one colorful, breathtaking swirl around an earthen oval, winner takes top prize.
After the track’s camera stops flashing at the finish line, some of these sleek and silky characters will be applauded for their efforts, a few might be booed, but most certainly one will go to the winner’s circle to be photographed with the jockey, the trainer, and the owner’s entourage.
On race days, Emily, who has also served as Felix’s barn foreman, uses her cubbyhole tack room as a private retreat. She never goes to the frontside to watch the races, so once she’s prepped the horses for the track, she escapes to her cool cubicle with its ten-inch TV, stuffed chair, and table, the top a laminated photo of her family. Emily, who loves horses more than strangers, only locks the door when media types come asking about Zippy Chippy.
“I’ve never been off the hill,” she told me. Every day except for the track’s dark days, when the horses don’t run, Emily works the stalls and walks the horses of the two barns, where everyone, including her daughter, labors tirelessly from well before dawn to dusk.
Conversations on the backside might be a mix of Spanish and English, but the lingo sounds like it’s from another planet. When asked how her mother and father met, Marisa said, “There was this trainer named Floyd Wright, and my mom was walking hot for him and my dad was breaking his babies.”
Translation: They met at the trainer’s stable, where Emily was walking horses to cool them down after races or workouts and Felix was training two-year-olds, breaking them in to become racehorses. Just so we’re clear – Emily did not have the hots for Mr. Wright, and Felix is quite fond of children.
These days, instead of sleeping in the back of Emily’s old red Ford, Marisa drives her own Dodge Ram. On this day Marisa has been up since 3:45 a.m. to look after her own horses on her nearby farm. She is waved through the track’s stable gate, and by eight, she has taken care of her trainer’s twenty horses – she’s fed ’em, watered ’em, groomed ’em, and mucked out their stalls. Working the shed row with her plastic toolbox filled with grooming materials, Marisa looks like a Molly Maid, but in riding gear. At twelve-thirty, she mounts Jazz, one of her two exercise ponies, and they trot up to the track, where she will spend the afternoon as one of the track’s ten pony riders, escorting that day’s entries from rail to gate before each of their races. Two outriders, one in front and one behind the post parade, are there to avoid a crisis, more than likely a runaway, riderless horse. Since there is only one stable, Marisa’s other pony, Gamble, is boarded at home until next month, when he and Jazz will switch places.
Mid-morning, trainers will wander in with instructions; in the meantime there are always last-minute tasks. The bandages on Mr. Hopps’s knees need tightening; Isabella of Chance has an eye infection that requires a new poultice; the blinkers on Lady Lorna are not large enough for those big, beautiful eyes.
As at most tracks, the barns at Finger Lakes Racetrack brush up against the backstretch of the track, where a six-foot-wide gap in the metal railing allows horses being galloped to easily enter and exit from their stalls during training sessions. Zippy Chippy did not like to sweat on his days off. With his record of losses, it’s doubtful he saw any point in workouts, so he developed a unique way of ending an exercise session.
“He’d be coming around the turn at a good clip, and as soon as he spotted the gap,” remembered Marisa, “he would just stop dead and buck off his exercise jockey. Then he’d bolt through that space in the fence and trot home to his stall all by himself.” There he would stand, fully saddled and in front of his pen, practically knocking on the door to get in. He did it so often it became routine, and the handler closest to his stall would simply remove his saddle and push him on in. The exercise boy would come by some time later and curse him out in Spanish.
Not long after getting comfortable in his pen, Zippy would become bored and go looking for a little adventure. Normally, the webbing of three leather straps across the door of a stall, all hooked on clips on either side of the sill, was enough to keep a horse penned. Before the full metal screen became a fixture on his stall (after, I’m sure, his handlers considered prison doors, barbed wire, armed guards, or a moat with sharks swimming in
it), Zippy figured out that with a little pressure from his broad chest, he could break the snap of the top two straps and pop the third one with his knee. Then off he’d go, as the Aussies say, on a “walkabout.” Exploring the backside on the trot, he would attract the attention of the horse handlers and the envy of the other horses peering out of their stalls. Yelling for help, the people in pursuit would grow to a posse that would finally end Zippy’s brief escapade of freedom in some far-off, fenced-in corner of the track.
Having been summoned from his house, a very annoyed Felix would arrive and lead his horse back to the barn. Once there, he’d push him into his stall with a little more force than was necessary and slam the door in his face. And then the usual bulletin: “Zippy’s been a bad boy … blah, blah, blah.” Sometimes, when the track staff became tired of his act, they’d just ignore him until he wore himself out and found his own way home. If Zippy’s handlers could have made him sit in the corner of the barn wearing a dunce hat, they would have. And then, for their personal enjoyment, he would have eaten that hat.
Marisa was sure she had seen Zippy Chippy break out of his stall in every conceivable way – under the webbing, through the webbing, out an unlatched door, through a door that latched and locked. But then one day she saw him … break into his stall. Felix and his daughter had a daily routine of turning out their stable of horses into the shed row so they could go in and clean out their pens unimpeded. They stacked a makeshift barricade of two-by-fours across the door of each stall to keep the horses out while they worked. All of the horses except for Zippy. Felix would not hear of letting Zippy loose in the barn, because although he didn’t know exactly what might capture the horse’s curiosity, he knew only drama or devilry would follow. Marisa, showing early signs of becoming either a union leader or a civil rights lawyer, protested that it was unfair to keep Zippy cooped up while the others got to leave their pens and play. After five days of hearing that he might be the cruelest trainer on earth, never mind the worst dad, Felix relented. Zippy was turned out to play with the other kids at recess while father and daughter mucked their stalls.
“He was fine,” said Marisa. “He was running around and rearing up and having a great old time.” For a while.
“I guess at some point he missed me, because we heard this crashing and banging, and … Zippy jumped the fence of two-by-fours and smashed his way back into the stall.” With the daring of a circus horse performing the ring of fire, Zippy the inmate, finally set free, had broken back into his own pen. Why, he must have asked himself, would they let me just walk out the door when they know I much prefer an old-fashioned prison break? Once inside, he was all over Marisa – chasing her around his stable and then out to the shed row and all around the barn. Unfortunately, so was Felix. “Boy, did I get yelled at that day!” she said.
For a horse – an animal with a small brain relative to its body mass – Zippy Chippy had a well-developed sense of curiosity. Equine experts believe that a horse with a low IQ is more submissive and therefore easier to train. By that measure, the untrainable Zippy Chippy may well have been a genius.
NO, YOU NEVER GET
EVERYTHING YOU WANT
No matter how hard you try, you never get the whole package. Years ago, I wrote a baseball film called Chasing the Dream that chronicled the careers of three young minor leaguers trying to break into Major League Baseball with the Toronto Blue Jays.
For the documentary, I did the color stuff: interviewing ballpark eccentrics, like the amateur barber who gave free haircuts to fans at home plate during the seventh-inning stretch, and the guy who swallowed enough air to burp the national anthem. At East Field, home of the Glens Falls Redbirds Single-A franchise, I came across baseball’s only season ticket–holding dog.
Dutch and Biddie Herman lived near the ballpark and loved to attend the Redbirds games, but they hated leaving Pete, their aging French poodle, home alone. I remember the couple well because Dutch referred to his wife as “the old Biddie,” and every time he said that, she found it in her heart not to kick him in the balls.
So my on-camera interview was going quite well as Dutch explained how he and Biddie had sat down with Redbirds officials and worked out a deal in which they could purchase a season ticket for Pete, which would allow them to skirt the “no pets” rule. As we spoke, Pete was barking his head off behind the backstop and chasing foul balls down the lines, his season ticket secured to his collar. The fans loved the scruffy-looking mutt, the Redbirds tolerated him, and the opposing players drove him nuts by barking all the time.
Mid-interview, Dutch started wandering off topic, so I tapped the cameraman on the knee to signal that this one was a wrap. That’s when Dutch leaned over to me like he was about to spill the Fourth Secret of Fatima and whispered, “And the best is … when we did the deal we worked Pete’s age out in human years.” He looked around to make sure other ticket holders were not listening in. “Yeah. That way we got him the senior citizens’ discount, too!”
I immediately got into a fight with the cameraman for shutting down the camera too soon. To no avail. I got the interview, but missed the punchline. And in the end, the director of the film scrapped the whole bit. So for Pete’s sake – and Zippy’s too – learn to live with the fact of life that you never get all that you want. Go for it all, settle for half, and you’ll never be disappointed.
NINE
Why would I leave? I like it here.
Writer Paul Sheldon to Annie Wilkes, who has shattered both his ankles with the flat side of an axe and has him hobbled and hogtied to his bed, in the movie Misery
Zippy Chippy’s favorite people made for a very small group: Felix and Emily, of course Marisa, an exercise rider named Carlos Carmello, and anybody with a box of donuts. Chris Roncone, the man with the unenviable job of caring for Zippy’s feet, never made that list.
“Zippy was a huge pain in the ass to shoe,” recalled the farrier, the memory more matter-of-fact than fond. As the Finger Lakes shoeman, Chris would arrive at barn twenty with the names of a couple of horses that needed to be shod that day. Most animals cooperate with the process and the farrier needs only one “holder” to keep the horse still. Zippy often needed a team to hold him in place, but hardly still.
“Plus, it wasn’t just for this track here. Felix had Zippy running in match races and trotting events and a bunch of other damn stuff. You need different plates for grass and different surfaces. So it was more often than the normal thirty or forty days that I had to work on Zippy. And man, he was a nightmare.”
Bent over while taking a hoof pick to Zippy’s foot with his back to the horse, the shoeman was defenseless. When the shoeing sessions turned into wrestling matches, with Chris outweighed by more than nine hundred pounds, he strongly requested that Zippy be tranquilized. Felix refused.
“Plus, Felix would baby the shit out of that horse,” said Chris. “And the horse got away with murder.”
Well, maybe not murder, but Zippy definitely got away with a vicious assault on an expensive, inanimate object. With no love lost between the horse and the farrier, one bright and sunny day Chris pulled up to Felix’s barn in his brand-new Chevy pickup, and Felix happened by with Zippy Chippy in tow. They were out on a stroll and having a grand ol’ time.
“And it didn’t help that Felix had a beer in one hand, Zippy in the other. Felix is jabbering away to somebody inside the barn, not paying attention, and yeah, that’s when Zippy went after my truck.”
Marisa remembers the incident with the pickup truck all too well. When Zippy turned his back on the vehicle, she knew what was coming and yelled to her dad, but it was too late. “He didn’t just kick it,” she said. Zippy turned, lined up the side of the shiny red Chevy with his ass, and then with both back feet – recently shod by Chris, of course – he …
“He double-barreled that thing!” said Marisa. “Bang. The noise scared everybody, and nobody said anything right away.” Then Felix started laughing, and the farrier, well, he became
livid. Mad? Let’s just say Felix was lucky that the next time he had an X-ray it didn’t show a horseshoe hooked around his prostate.
Somehow, the forceful backward buck did not shatter the windows, but Zippy’s hooves left two deep dents in the truck, one on the driver’s-side door. The horse may not yet have won a race, but in the ongoing battle with his farrier, the final score in this match was Zippy Chippy 1, Chris Roncone 0.
Zippy wasn’t the only member of the Monserrate family who gave the farrier fits. When they were based out of Emily’s tack room, Marisa and her cousin Keri, the five-year-old misfits, were constantly playing tricks on the overworked shoeman.
“The worst was when Keri fixed my hand up with a clip-on two-inch nail that came out both sides, with fake blood dripping down my arm,” said Marisa.
When the bleeding child approached him, crying and falling to her knees, Chris started screaming for help. The kids panicked and quickly gave up the joke, believing he might pass out from the sight of blood. While Zippy took care of the farrier’s red truck, the kids helped turn the man’s hair gray. In fairness, Chris never quit on the horse, and he continued to care for Zippy’s feet as long as the horse ran at Finger Lakes.
Prancing and shifting from side to side, Zippy was wearing a new pair of shoes on June 23, 1998, for the third race on a fast track at Finger Lakes. It had been twenty-four days since the collision of his back feet with a new truck and his eighty-first loss, in which Last Shallbe First came in third and the last-place finisher, by the name of Saw Your Act, seemed to be taunting Zippy from behind. It had been exactly ten days since his eighty-second loss, when Bangzoomtothemoon bumped him at the start and Hilary’s Kid (no, not Chelsea) beat him to the finish line by sixteen and three-quarter lengths.
The Legend of Zippy Chippy Page 8
