Laughing in the Hills

by Bill Barich

  But horses don’t see very well. They are often astigmatic and suffer, too, from color blindness. To them the backstretch—the barn area behind the racing strip that also functions as a meeting ground and sometimes home for trainers, jockeys, grooms, and other track habitués—appears as a band of varying shades of gray, light differentiated. They don’t register individual items like pails, hoses, or saddles, but they know when their groom is moving by changes in relative brightness and tone, the swath his figure cuts into the fixity of things. A horse’s ears are concave and can move in any direction like dish antennae, picking up sounds at a great distance, a mouse scratching five stalls down. When a horse pricks its ears, its nostrils flare simultaneously, permitting the receptors to work in tandem. Stallions can smell a mare in heat miles away if she’s upwind, and even an average horse can locate water and snakes by following its nose. Horses back off from strong-smelling substances, though, and have a curious inability to distinguish edible plants from poisonous ones.

  While I watched the horses come and go, business around me was booming. Jockeys’ agents carrying small notebooks with hand-tooled leather covers moved from barn to barn booking mounts. If they represented a live rider, a kid who’d been winning lately, trainers met them eagerly and even offered them a cup of coffee, but if they were pushing a loser, their eyes were often sunk in rummy sadness and they were treated like pariahs. “Lemme know if you get something Richie can’t handle,” they shouted to Bob Hack, the agent who held Richie Galarsa’s book, and Hack steered them on occasion to a needy trainer. Everybody wanted to use Galarsa because he was live, i.e., hot, and still had the bug, a five-pound weight allowance granted to apprentice riders, called bugboys, who hadn’t yet won forty races. Some trainers thought the bug was more important than skill. If they couldn’t have Richie, they’d ask for Enrique Muñoz, Hack’s other boy, or try to corner Tony Diaz or Bill Mahorney or another of the handful of pros at Golden Gate who knew the difference between race-riding and just sitting on a horse’s back and saying “Go.” It was tough for middling-ability jocks like Art Lobato, who’d lost the bug and now spent mornings doing his own hustling, but it was even worse for those who clearly weren’t going to make it. They stood near me at the rail, wearing caps stitched with their names, Ed, Rodrigo, Julio, and they were always solemn and moved their whips idly through the air. “Catch me a little later, I’m busy now,” trainers shouted at them, disappearing into the cafeteria even as these jocks would later disappear, dropping through the levels of the track, Portland Meadows, Yakima Meadows, until they slipped at last into space.

  Trainers had more important things to do than to mess with simpering jockeys. They had horses to clock, agents to contact, grooms to supervise, orders to place with tack salesmen and feed suppliers, and they had to be ready when the vet arrived to examine sick or damaged stock. And they had to waste precious time trying to read the Condition Book, which was about as cleanly written as an IRS pamphlet. The Condition Book set forth the eligibility requirements for future races, and it was updated every ten days. You needed a postgraduate degree to unscramble its sentences.

  Starter Allowance, Purse $9,000, for four-year-olds and upward, non-winners of two races at one mile and one-eighth or over in 1978, which have started for a claiming price of $16,000 or less in 1977–78 and since that start have not won a race other than maiden or claiming or starter race exceeding $16,000.

  Jay-sus! the trainers cried, dumping the book into an empty feed bucket. Most of them relied on agents when it came time to enter a horse. “Where do you think I ought to run ole Wind Chime?” they’d ask, and Hack or somebody else would set them straight, presenting the options.

  Trainers (they were the first to tell you) had a rough job, even top guys like Bobby Martin and Bill Mastrangelo. Maybe Mastrangelo seemed relaxed when he walked around the barn singing Jerry Vale ballads at the top of his lungs, but he felt the pressure anyway. He had to feel it because he had to deal with owners, who applied it. Owners were almost always trouble. Sure, they looked classy when you saw them on TV at the Kentucky Derby, rich, polite, soft-spoken, but this image was deceiving. In fact they were part of the incomprehensible freeway universe, and ninety percent of them knew absolutely nothing, nada, zip, about horses or racing. Five of the remaining ten percent thought they knew something but didn’t, and four of the final five percent were jerks with money to burn. They’d buy a rickety colt as a tax loss, and when the colt broke his maiden, finally winning his first race after sixteen tries, the jerks thought they owned another Man O’ War and ordered the trainer to jump the colt to stakes races, where the competition was much tougher, and then when the colt lost repeatedly, by grotesque margins, they blamed the trainer or fired him or moved the colt to another track and skipped out on the balance of their bill. What could you do, take them to court? So trainers were to be forgiven, at least by other trainers, if at the end of workouts at ten, they left their stock in the care of grooms and ducked over to Spenger’s for a few belts of confidence before the first race.

  Inside the track cafeteria, a resonant humming of hot tips bounced off glass and Formica surfaces, and various intrepid characters huddled with their brokers, studying the day’s program. All-night newsboys of indeterminate age distributed papers from pouches slung over their necks, looking a little like Hummel figurines. Best chance play of race. Three-star special. Romero’s best. Discarded front page sections littered the floor, but you couldn’t find a sports page anywhere. “I don’t think the five horse’ll stop today,” one plunger said. “I think he’ll keep running right to the finish.” Every now and then the Racing Secretary’s voice—he was responsible for writing the Condition Book and carding the races—came over the loudspeaker to make a plea. “Gentlemen,” he might say, “your attention, please, we need help in the fourth on Tuesday, we’re short two horses,” and some trainer who owed him a favor or had a horse he wanted to run for exercise would go to the office and enter the nag to fill out the field. Management liked large fields, especially in exacta races, because they made for wacky odds and bank-breaking payoffs. “I had that exacta the other day,” somebody said, “the nine-hundred-dollar one, only I didn’t play it.” The hay wagon roared by outside, collecting dirty straw, followed by the water wagon, dust control, whose driver seemed to like nothing better than dousing people. Everywhere last-minute connections were being made before the security guards chained shut the two backstretch phone booths, sealing off the community from bookies and would-be fixers until after the ninth race.

  II

  Gary Headley, the trainer, and his groom, Bo Twinn, were having coffee the first time I visited their barn. They sat in lawn chairs, smoking and reading the Form, and rested their cups on a round low-slung table made from a salvaged telephone-cable spool. There were doughnuts on the table, and empty almond packs and soda cans. Both men looked tired and dirty after the morning’s work. Headley’s blue nylon windbreaker was creased as though he’d slept in it, and his blond hair wandered off in random shocks. Bo hadn’t shaved yet and his face looked old and raw. It was the sort of face that occurred in hot dusty places. I’d seen it before in Depression-era photographs. Over the years Bo had developed a crusty personality to match his face, and he could be formidably short-tempered on occasion, but he loved horses and they loved him. “If you was smart, you wouldn’t have to ask that question,” he would say, pursing his lips like a school-marm. Headley, who was in his late thirties and younger than Bo, took great pride in employing him. “Best groom on the grounds,” he’d say confidentially, hiding his mouth behind a hand, “and the best paid, too.” There was no way to substantiate such statements and besides, Headley made them all the time.

  He was a hyperbolic and something of a flake, not the best trainer at Golden Gate but also not the worst. His life so far had been a model of fluctuant behavior. His brother Bruce, a respected trainer on the southern California circuit, had hired Gary out of high school, taught him the trade, and in
troduced him around, but Gary had never been able to commit himself absolutely to the track, not for any length of time. He’d work for a while, building up his business, then wash out and drift through odd jobs in the real world, or (if he had a little money saved) stay in his apartment behind closed curtains, sipping wine and watching TV. Then he’d decide that training horses really was right for him, and he would go back to work, starting at the bottom, and keep at it for a few years before becoming disillusioned or bored or upset and washing out again. Headley recognized the pattern but seemed incapable of breaking it. This was his major problem. The track, like any subculture, extracted a mean price for ambivalence, and Headley had been paying it too long. His marriage to a legal secretary, a woman who knew nothing about racing, had recently fallen apart, and the failure bothered him. “First divorce in the family in seven generations,” he said, as though reminding himself. These days, almost in compensation, he seemed more dedicated than he had in the past, although the odds were even that he might flipflop momentarily, disappearing from the backstretch without leaving a forwarding address.

  “It’s a lot safer in here than it is outside,” he said, stuttering as he did when he got excited. “Take a walk through downtown Oakland some time, you’ll see what I mean. You’ll probably get your throat slit. You ever see any of those movies about racing? They’re not true. All the trainers wear striped suits. They have molls around and screw them in the stalls. Maybe that happened once, but it’s not that way, not really. There’s a few bad apples, but you can still leave your tack room unlocked, and when you come back your stuff’s still there. It’s much worse outside. If you don’t believe me, go take a walk in Oakland, you’ll get cut up so bad you’ll look like spaghetti.”

  Bo had other problems. He lived in a tack room, a compact space, fifteen by twenty feet, ordinarily used for storing saddles, bridles, and the like, and two female cats had adopted his residence as their own and presented him with ten kittens. “I got all kinds of cats,” he said, showing me the litter nursing on his bed. The room smelled overpoweringly feline. There was a TV set on the bureau, a few shirts hanging from a rod inside an open closet, and pictures of horses taped to the walls. “The two mama cats, they take turns nursing. I never did see anything like it before. One nurses and then the other. This kitten here’s the prettiest,” he said, picking up a long-haired calico by the scruff. “I might even keep her. Don’t know what I’ll do with them others, though. I got ’em in every possible color. That little guy over there, he’s the runt. They push him around. Maybe you’d like a cat for your house?”

  Headley took me around his barn, which he shared with Bud Keen, another trainer. Keen kept a goat in his section to help quiet a high-strung filly, and when the goat saw us coming he backed off, making goat noises. Headley had six stalls, and the horses in them were all hurting in one way or another. “Think this horse is sound?” he asked rhetorically, stopping in front of a bedraggled-looking mare. “She’s raced twice in six months, that’s how sound she is. I could get a better class of horse but I don’t want the hassle. I used to train a big string at Santa Anita, but the owners drove me nuts. See this?” he asked, pointing to a deep cleft between his eyebrows. “I got this from worrying.”

  Next he showed me a handsome two-year-old, Urashima Taro, who hadn’t raced yet. “I think this colt’s a winner,” he said. “This colt’s my dream horse. I already nominated him for the Derby, the Belmont, and the Preakness. It’s cheaper to pay the entry fees now than waiting.” We continued down the shedrow. “See this filly? She was crazy when she came in. I couldn’t even touch her. She was wrecked. Her owners are nice people, though. For a change. They gave me plenty of time with her. Now she’s rounding into shape. What are those people, Bo? The Sandomirs. What are they? They speak Spanish, but I know they’re not Mexicans. The wife speaks English pretty good. I think they might be Panamanian. Are those people Panamanian, Bo?”

  “All’s I know is they’re not Mexicans,” Bo said.

  “No, they’re not Mexicans. I think they might be Panamanians.”

  “What’s the filly’s name?” I asked.

  “Pichi,” Headley said. “Don’t ask me what it means.”

  III

  I never met Gregory Sandomir, a native of Argentina, but his wife, Mary, once explained his involvement in racing quite succinctly. “My husband has the feeling since he’s very young,” she told me. “He likes the horses very much.” Sandomir, who manufactures Rolling-brand blue jeans in Los Angeles, had always wanted to own a thoroughbred, and in the summer of 1976 he began shopping around. He knew some trainers, and they sent him to various breeding farms and ranches to look at the stock for sale, but it took a while before he found what he wanted. At Sledge Stable and Walnut Wood Farm in Hemet, California, he fell for an eight-month-old chestnut filly by Dr. Marc R out of Atomic Jay. Sandomir knew little about conformation (the ideal physical structure of a thoroughbred) or bloodlines (its all-important heritage), but this served him well because the filly had nothing much to commend her except for a distant, minimal relationship to War Admiral, which might have accounted for her willful nature. She was pretty and excitable, and Sandomir, thoroughly smitten, made the purchase and named her Pichi. This had been his daughter’s nickname and she was married now and gone from his house.

  As a two-year-old, Pichi was consigned to a Hollywood Park trainer who had no tolerance for her vicissitudes, and soon she was locked into a battle of wills. She resisted most stringently at the starting gate. She hated the machinery and balked whenever she went near it. Instead of trying to ease her in, comforting her, the trainer apparently used force, which aggravated matters. Horses who have an aversion to the gate can usually be counted on to break poorly in a race, sometimes a half-second behind the field, and Pichi followed the rule. In her first race, a five-and-a-half-furlong sprint (eight furlongs equal a mile), she finished eighth by thirteen lengths, and two weeks later, against weaker opponents, she loped home tenth, twelve casual lengths behind the leader. Sandomir became concerned about her condition. She didn’t look well. There was no reason, he thought, to extract victory from a horse’s hide, so when the meet ended and the action shifted to Delmar, he arranged for Pichi to be trained by Ross Fenstermaker, who ran her twice at a mile. She improved, breaking better both times, but she was still far from winning a race or even finishing in the money. Fenstermaker would’ve stayed with her, but he got an offer to train a string of first-class horses for Fred Hooper, an owner of some prominence. Owners like Hooper tend to demand exclusivity from their trainers in exchange for the privilege of working with quality stock, so Fenstermaker had to get rid of his outlaw. His old friend Gary Headley was just getting back into the game at Golden Gate, and he urged Sandomir to give Headley a try. The competition was much cheaper in the north, and Pichi would have a better chance at breaking her maiden. Fenstermaker gave Headley a single caution: Watch this filly, Gary, she’s murder in the gate.

  Pichi arrived by van in February 1978, toward the end of a long cold wet winter that had broken the back of a two-year drought. Rivers were running again, the snowpack was deep around the Sierras, and Pichi, who’d spent a few months standing in mud, had an awful-looking pair of hind legs, raw and infected. Headley led her to his barn, Number Twenty-Five, a cobwebby structure located in nonpreferential territory among the shops of feed merchants, tack salesmen, and purveyors of riding silks, at least a quarter mile from the track. He examined his new charge and thought, Shit, another cripple. He had plenty of cripples on hand already, representing varying degrees of unsoundness, here a grapefruit-size knee, there a quarter-cracked hoof, and Pichi fit right in. She hadn’t raced for half a year and was in miserable shape. Headley found a crescent-shaped scar on her rib cage and figured that somewhere along the line a groom must have hit her with something heavy and broken her rib. But the rib appeared to have mended on its own, although imperfectly. She had other imperfections as well. The tip of her tail was missing, nipp
ed off in a starting gate accident, and when she ran, her uterus opened abnormally wide and she sucked air through it, which caused muscle spasms in her back. She also had what Headley called “psychological” problems. She was tense and feisty and wouldn’t let anybody touch her. Nor would she eat, no matter what was served—oats, hay, some special mix—and she was mean-tempered and kicked at Bo whenever she could. When she wasn’t acting up, she remained aloof, staring at the rear wall of her stall like an infanta trapped in a tower, her regal bearing violated, and she flicked her tail at passersby and pinned her ears at the slightest provocation.

  Fortunately Headley liked working with cripples. They were puzzles to him, engines in need of tinkering, and it gratified him to watch a jockey boot home a horse who only a month before had been hobbled and sulky, totally unfit. He would’ve preferred working with good stakes horses, but such animals were not his current lot and he was realistic enough not to suffer from their absence. He liked Sandomir because Sandomir didn’t push. Some owners demanded that their horse run every ten days regardless of condition, even if it meant injecting an unstable joint with cortisone, but Sandomir was willing to accumulate feed and veterinary bills, which could be staggering, until Pichi felt better. So Headley proceeded slowly. He began by having a vet sew up her uterus, mitigating the air-sucking problem, and gave her Robaxin, a muscle relaxant, for her back. Then he started her exercise program, walking first, then some light galloping. Bo worked on her legs, applying poultices, liniment, and bandages, talking to her in his cranky old flatlands voice. “She’s a radical son-of-a-bitch,” he would say, mixing genders freely, but he was pleased when at last he could clean her stall without expecting to catch a hoof in the middle of his forehead.