Laughing in the Hills

by Bill Barich

  I went to the windows, still smelling soap, and bet the selection I’d made the night before. Moonlight Cocktail chose to run and won by a half-length, closing fast and paying $14.20.

  VI

  Though I hadn’t yet learned to distinguish hot tips from cool ones, I was learning other things about handicapping at Golden Gate Fields. On hot days when the track baked to an unyielding consistency the color of pie crust, I looked for front-runners because their speed seemed to last and they weren’t so easily caught from behind. On foggy days the track was heavy and moist, deep and dark as chocolate, and then I looked for horses who’d been running in the Northwest, at Longacres near Seattle or Oregon’s Portland Meadows, because they were used to heavy strips and often ran better than the Form indicated they might. I stopped betting any exacta race in which the favorite went off at less than eight to five because, for reasons inexplicable to me, these races almost never ran to form. I quit playing the ninth altogether because it was another exacta, the fourth of the day, a crazy last chance for bettors to win back what they’d lost; the Racing Secretary usually carded a long route, a mile and an eighth, a mile and a quarter, and the jockeys often rode in such a controlled and controlling fashion that the outcome was more than a little suspect.

  But my major insight to date was something I called the Bandit Syndrome. It occurred most frequently in maiden claiming races and involved horses who’d done poorly at Hollywood Park or Santa Anita and had been shipped to Golden Gate for the express purpose of breaking their maidens against cheaper competition. These horses robbed their victories, and when I noticed their presence I was often able to cash in. The most flagrant example of the syndrome I ever witnessed took place one balmy afternoon, when a Ross Brinson-trained filly, Miss Raedine, was entered in a sprint for two-year-olds. Though her past performance charts showed that she got out of the gate well, she’d faded badly in both her starts, finishing fifth and then sixth by eleven lengths. I bet her heavily to win, reminding myself that she’d been running against the best stock in the nation. With five minutes to go her odds began to drop and by post time she was down to two to one. Approaching the gate she suddenly became fractious and threw her rider, Bill Mahorney, then slipped past the handlers and sprinted the wrong way down the backstretch, her mane flying, until a ponyboy headed her and, as in a roundup, herded her back to post. This unscheduled romp would’ve drained most horses and knocked them out of contention, but Miss Raedine was raring to go. Mahorney dusted himself off, boarded her again—again she tried to unseat him—held on tight while the handlers pushed her into the slot and then boomed out in a manic burst of speed when the gate flapped open. The next morning I read the Form’s chart of the race and it made me feel good inside.

  VII

  Late in April Headley gave Pichi her first start of the year in a maiden race to be run at six furlongs for a purse of six thousand dollars. He engaged Jane Driggers to ride and she wore the Sandomirs’ colors, yellow and black stripes topped with a black cap. Pichi drew the outermost post, twelve, which wasn’t as disadvantageous as it seemed. She lugged in toward the rail, listing always to the left, so she’d at least be as far away as possible from that particular problem. Whether it would influence her performance was unclear. Bettors shied from her in great numbers, depositing their money instead on Sailing Flag, who’d been bred in Kentucky and had some Fleet Nasrullah blood, and letting Pichi go off at eighty-five to one. Sentiment overtook me and I put two dollars on her nose.

  She behaved well in the gate, much to Headley’s relief, and broke well too, second after the buzzer, but she got into trouble immediately, blocked by other horses, and dropped back into the pack and disappeared. A speedy filly named Hut’s Girl took command, and according to the Form’s subsequent description, “proved much the best under intermittent urging,” winning by eight lengths and leaving Sailing Flag unfurled in the dust. Pichi finished eighth, fifteen lengths behind, but she did make a tiny move in the stretch, expending a minuscule atom of acceleration, and gained a little ground. Her showing, while not a cause for celebration, wasn’t nearly as bad as Exclusive Delight’s, who trailed the pack and fashioned a running line that read like a numerological rendering of oblivion, 12-12-12-12, last at every point of call. I saw Headley after the race and expected him to be shattered, his long months of conditioning proven worthless, but on the contrary he seemed pleased and promised better things from Pichi in the future. “I told you she’d need a race,” he said. “You watch her next time out.” Hope, I thought, that’s what you purchase at eighty-five to one.

  Before the next race I fell victim to confusion once again. I was torn between the rational order of things and my intuition and what it proposed. A sensible reading of the Form had convinced me to play Top Delegate, who’d been running well against allowance-class company and was dropping down to his proper level, but I kept returning to another horse, Little Shasta, because the name reminded me of Mount Shasta and the fine trout waters around it. Names could be irresistible. I remembered the time my brother and I had rented a boat and tooled across Lake Shasta and then up into an arm of the Pit River, where we camped for the night. We were fresh from Long Island, still unused to the sight of mountains, and our only camping experience was of the backyard pup-tent variety. At dusk we heard howling in the foothills, a wild blood-chilling sound that increased after dark. “A killer dog,” I said. “You’re right,” said my brother, and we broke camp immediately and slept in the boat, anchored safely some fifty yards from shore. It had only been a coyote howling, but I didn’t realize this until much later when the call had become familiar. So Little Shasta spoke to me of innocence, of lakes and wildness and pines and the few things in life I’d come finally to know. On the other hand, Top Delegate reminded me of Henry Kissinger, and I was fighting this associational bias all the way to the windows. I got into line and while scanning my program I noticed that Little Shasta’s post position, four, corresponded to the number the boy with the bass had given me at San Pablo Reservoir. Suddenly I was face to face with a ruddy-skinned ticket seller in a black cardigan sweater. “Eight,” I said and then watched in misery as Little Shasta went wire to wire, winning as decidedly as Pichi had lost.

  Every now and then the structural pattern was broken by instances of pure vision, gifts, and I kept rejecting them, time and again. Arnold Walker understood. I bumped into him at the bar at Spenger’s. “You’re not talking about luck,” he said, chewing on a swizzle stick. “That’s when you win because the horse in front of your horse falls down and breaks a leg.”

  “What am I talking about?”

  “What you’re talking about is magic. When your horse is the only horse in the race.”

  VIII

  Later that night I found myself in a Berkeley “repertory cinema” with torn seats and atmospheric reefer smoke, watching a low-budget horror movie, Tarantula. Giant spiders were taking over the earth. They did all sorts of damage in the process, but their peregrinations were as difficult to handicap as those of horses. One day they’d eat a city and the next be gone, returned to secretive arachnoid plotting down in filthy earthen caverns. For a while it looked as though they might succeed in ridding the planet of humans and vegetation, so troublesome were they to detect. When the film’s heroine, Mara Corday, threw up her hands and announced disgustedly, “Well, I’ve had enough of the Unknown for one afternoon,” I felt the beating of a kindred spirit within her breast and thought I might run into her when I stopped in at the Home Stretch for a nightcap. She wasn’t there, but I stayed anyway, right until closing time, cleansing my mind of spiders and thoroughbreds. When I got back to the Terrace, all the rooms were pleasantly still and the air smelled of tar and gasoline, the urban essence of spring. I sat on the steps by my door, wanting to talk to somebody. I thought about calling my wife but she would be asleep and the woman who operated the motel switchboard would also be asleep. Almost everybody was asleep, even the horses. I should’ve gone to bed myself, but instea
d I sat on the steps and thought about the Unknown and realized that I was pushing at the track, still trying too hard. My disappointment came from expectations, from proposing a shape for the experience I was seeking and then feeling let down when the experience arrived in a shape other than the one I’d proposed. The Unknown had only been doing its job, existing as a transformative condition—not an end-stopped province like the future—and delivering me to the cusp of mysteries. I had a terrific urge to get into the car and drive through the streets until I’d found Mara, or her image, and share my revelations, which would give her the courage necessary to face the spiders again, but this urge escaped, too, with the slacking of heat and the first sloughing-off of spent brain cells.

  IX

  In the morning I didn’t want to see Mara Corday. I ate a breakfast of mammoth cholesterolic proportions and eased my conscience with Plato. God gave us the lower belly and bowels as a safeguard against intemperance, the philosopher said, so that we wouldn’t be destroyed by disease before our mortal race had fulfilled its end, whatever that was. I went to the track and locked all my money in the glove compartment. Being cashless, and hence without portfolio, seemed to free my eyes and I saw many wondrous things: horses quitting at the head of the stretch, horses racing wide or lugging in, perfectly positioned horses failing to respond when asked, horses going wildly off stride, and Big Bruiser pulling up lame in the ninth, a fitting close. An awesome randomness was on view. At the clubhouse bar, I ran into a trainer of my acquaintance. His face was splotched, his eyes were bleary, and in his fist he held a wad of crushed exacta tickets. It took a long time for him to speak, and when he did his boozy voice soughed like the wind.

  “I gave that horse everything he could want,” the trainer said, “and look what the bastard went and did to me.” He let go of the tickets, several hundred dollars’ worth, and they fluttered to the floor.

  Even princes, Machiavelli thought, were subject to the vagaries of fortune. It was good to be adventurous and embody the primary virtues, but someday, inevitably, the river would rise and wash away trees, buildings, plans, and schemes. “All yield to its violence, without being able in any way to withstand it; and yet, though its nature be such, it does not follow therefore that men, when the weather becomes fair, shall not make provision, both with defenses and barriers, in such a manner that, rising again, the waters may pass away by canal, and their force be neither so unrestrained or so dangerous.” This struck me as an accurate metaphor for the work of trainers. It was canal work they did, an attempt at channeling energies beyond their control, but they were only intermittently successful. The pulse kept its own rhythm, somewhere deep inside.

  Chapter Five

  The cripples always amazed me, there were so many of them. They arrived early, well before the first race, and were wheeled or otherwise assisted across the parking lot and then past the three hucksters selling mimeographed sucker sheets. A tall radish-cheeked man sold Bob’s card, and a man whose skin was almost cream-colored sold Bull’s, but they were generally ignored in favor of the unsavory man in a trench coat who was stationed closest to the door. “Hoymet!” the man cried, picking at his chin, “Hoymet heah, five winnahs yestahday, Hoymet has da double for ya,” and the cripples reached into their pockets and donated a dollar for the Hermit’s daily words of wisdom. They were plentiful, these words, because the Hermit usually offered two selections in every race and threw in five combinations for the daily double, as well as a smattering of exacta numbers and exacta suggestions and long-shot exactas, below which, in bold block letters, the following cautionary sentence was printed: TANFORAN RACING ASSN. DOESN’T SPONSOR THESE SELECTIONS.

  Inside, the cripples stationed themselves along the clubhouse rail, their wheelchairs lined up near the finish line, and began quietly sorting through their materials: Forms, programs, suggestions clipped from the daily papers, and the sucker sheets. They had a dignity about them, a stillness that remained undisturbed even as the action around them increased. While watching them assemble I thought of their ranks, of all our ranks, being duplicated at racetracks across the land. Every day twenty-six thousand of us descended on Santa Anita, ten thousand more stopped in at Calder in Florida, and another twenty-one thousand made their deposits at Oak Lawn Park. Even the poorest tracks had a following—four thousand a day at Latonia in Kentucky and a thousand at little Rillito Downs in Arizona. Many greenbacks made the rounds; four million dollars would be handled at Santa Anita alone. In a given year we’d watch some sixty-nine thousand races, in which sixty-two thousand horses would start a total of six hundred thousand times for purses totaling three hundred thirty-six million.

  A short fat man breezed by, on his way to cash in a winning ticket from the previous day. “You see that race?” he asked. “Our Star Chuck? The one who paid a hundred fifty? I had that horse.” He showed me the ticket, grasping it protectively between his thumb and index finger. “I rode in with this guy, he’s not even a friend of mine, really, but his name’s Chuck, so for the hell of it when he bought a ticket on the horse I bought one, too. Then the horse comes in. I couldn’t believe it. The horse came in. Twenty-seven years I’m handicapping, I never once hit a big winner. Not once. Then the horse comes in. I couldn’t believe it. So that’s how it happens, I said. I think my hair was standing up. I couldn’t believe it. Hell with this, I said, went out, sat in the car the rest of the afternoon.”

  In the men’s room the stalls were all occupied by students, clipboards balanced on their knees, and an old guy with ratbreath was washing his dentures in the sink. “I was born in Wichita,” he said. “My mother was a Cree. She never touched alcohol. It made her crazy. I love racing but if I ever win any money I’m going back to Kansas. If you don’t believe me you can ask Don.”

  Riding down the elevator I studied the toupees on display, the worst I’d ever seen, worse even than those in burlesque houses or on the TV weathermen in small towns. They inspired disbelief. These were clown rugs, the kind of mustard-colored mats that were plastered to heads, then whisked away by fishing hooks or blown sky-high by studio wind machines. Stunning polyester and doubleknit ensembles were also on parade, the Spiegel catalog come to life. A young man with a wolfman pompadour and an expensive but tasteless suit was putting the make on a classically cheap-speed blonde. “I went to Vegas over the weekend,” he said. “You know Wayne Newton? The singer? I hang out with his bodyguard’s brother-in-law.”

  Turnstiles were clicking briskly down on the ground level, where people strode determinedly off buses from Oakland, Richmond, and San Francisco as though they’d been promised a big slice of Transformation Pie and couldn’t wait to bite into it. “I dreamed the numbers last night,” said a balding lady in a heavy fur coat and mittens. “Four and six, clear as could be, only I never did dream what race they was in. Going to cost me twenty dollar to find out. Be worth it, though. Last week, one exacta, it paid a thousand dollar. A thousand dollar. I said a thousand dollar! You know how long it take me to make that kind of money?”

  Upstairs members of special groups were being led to their tables in the special groups’ section near the Turf Club. Most of them had never been to the track before, or maybe just once during the Second World War when Uncle George rolled into town and dragged everybody to Bay Meadows, and as they picked their seats they seemed openly thrilled by the excitement at hand, the raciness of racing. They lived in bedroom communities and were dressed simply unless they belonged to a group that believed in funny hats or badges or other emblematic attire, and they would spend the afternoon eating and drinking and betting on pretty horses and long shots. One of them—it was impossible to say at the outset which one—would win a hundred dollars and become an addict. “It started at Golden Gate,” he would say later, “over creamed chicken on toast.” Management took good care of special groups and named a purse in honor of each of them: Rotary Club of Piedmont Purse, Nomads of Santa Rosa Purse, Women in Construction Purse, R.J.’s Cocktail Lounge Purse, Fashionette
s Social Club Purse, Standard Oil Wives Purse, NARF Fun Groupe Purse, and Mary and Bob Franchetto’s Fortieth Birthday Party Purse.

  Right after the national anthem, the black kids who seemed to live under the paddock got ready to work. There were three or four of them, streetwise jivey kids with hair done in cornrows and dreadlocks, and each day they staked out a square of macadam directly below the runway leading from the Jockeys’ Room to the paddock. When jockeys strolled down the runway before a race, the kids were on their case immediately, hooking fingers through the chain-link fence and pulling themselves onto the concrete ledge and beginning their interrogation.

  “Hey, Mahoney,” they yelled at Bill Mahorney, who walked the runway like a condemned man, as though a thirty-pound weight had been embedded between his shoulder blades, “you gonna give that horse a ride today? You gonna ride him right? What about that horse, Mahoney? He sound? He feelin’ all right? Last time out he was limpin’, Mahoney. C’mon, tell the truth, don’t be lyin’ to me now.” Most jockeys stared off into space, but a few seemed to enjoy the exchange. “’Rique, my man, hey there, Muñoz, hey, ’Rique my man, you gonna get that horse out of the gate this time? I’m askin’ now, ’Rique, you dig? ’Cause if you don’t get him out, that sucker don’t stand a chance. Aw, don’t be makin’ faces, ’Rique, you can talk to me.” Every once in a while they charmed a jockey, one who knew what it was like, and the jockey winked or muttered a few syllables out of the corner of his mouth and the kids ran off to bet. We were all pilgrims in our way.