by Bill Barich
Hack had other barns to visit, so we left the cafeteria and went down another shedrow. A hundred yards away I saw a big bony colt acting up. He’d just returned from a gallop and he was feeling good. He pranced along with that challenging winner’s gait. Thoroughbreds are athletes and they probably share with other athletes the brief period of illumination that follows a satisfying workout. The parts of your body mesh so freely, with such perfection, that you seem made of light. Surely this colt was light-headed, tipsy on oxygen. He wouldn’t go into his stall, and his groom, who was falling behind in his work, was getting impatient and losing control. The colt reared once, and the groom cursed and yanked on his reins. Then he reached for a shank. Horses on the hotwalker in front of the barn sensed that something was wrong and slowed their pace. The groom made a fearsome face and approached the colt, brandishing the shank, but still the cold wouldn’t budge. The groom cursed loudly and lifted the shank and then the colt broke loose. He galloped along at full speed for about thirty-five yards, then stopped and looked around. He seemed to be confused and a little panicked, as though he hadn’t understood where his resistance would lead him. Other grooms came out of their barns and talked to him, trying to keep him from damaging their stock. An old man with a long white beard, the birdnesty beard of a wizard, walked toward him, talking all the while in a gentle singsong voice, but when he had the reins almost in hand the colt took off again. He was moving faster now, out of a greater panic, making split-second turns to avoid equipment and grooms. I thought for sure he’d break an ankle. An exercise rider saw him coming and tried to head him, but the colt switched directions again, crossing over to the opposite side of the shedrow and galloping right toward us. I froze. Hack grabbed my arm and pulled me back under the shedrow roof. The colt passed within inches, close enough to draw a breeze under my chin. Two grooms were waiting for him at the end of the shedrow. They stood right in his path and waved their arms back and forth in semaphore. The colt kept right on coming, still galloping for all he was worth, and I thought the grooms would have to dive into the hay, but at the last possible second the colt pulled up. He flared his nostrils and shook his head around and began pacing in circles, giving himself over to containment again. A third groom took his reins, and he allowed himself to be led back to the barn. All the way back he pranced, raising his haunches high. I looked over at Hack, who was adjusting his baseball cap.
“I’m scared chickenshit of horses,” he said.
X
Horses kept breaking loose in Florence, too, all the time, barreling riderless over the cobbles toward families dining in the streets, trashing furniture and scattering chicken bones and the bones of geese and pigeons, and driving small children up against the wall. Men rode off to war on horseback and when they returned, their brides met them at the chapel riding fine-looking chestnuts and bays. (Patriarchal tradition dictated, however, that a bride follow her new master home on foot after the ceremony.) Indeed, it was said in Florence that a husband who understood his wife “knew the trot of his mare.” Before Lorenzo’s marriage to Clarice Orsini, a tournament was held, and horses clashed as they clashed in Uccello’s paintings. Horses were used for carrying mail and diplomatic pouches and notes of assignation, for transport and trade, for pleasure riding and hunting and leisurely trips to the countryside, and served in mute partnership on drunken revels and night raids, saving many a nobleman from certain death at the hands of a wrathful cuckold. Their manure mixed with the human excrement flowing in gutters to the Arno; their essence permeated the city.
XI
This was Pichi’s big day. Headley had decided to run her over a distance of ground, a mile and a sixteenth. She’d never gone so far before, not at Del Mar or Hollywood Park, but she was running against a delicate field of maidens, fading beauties who’d already had ten chances to lose their virginity, and even a couple of the Form’s expert handicappers thought she might win. Hermis picked her first, and so did Handicap. In the consensus she ranked second behind Button Face, a funky little roan of no appreciable class. Everything seemed propitious, and then early on the morning of the race Jimmy Colaneri, the jockey, came by the barn to show off his swollen jaw. It was black-and-blue, the result of an impacted tooth. He told Headley in a mumble that he wouldn’t be riding Pichi partly because of his toothache, but mostly because the stewards had just set him down for bumping another rider in the ninth race the day before. Colaneri felt bad, but Headley told him not to worry. At the same time Headley’s brain was clicking wildly ahead in search of a replacement rider. He hated to lose Colaneri, who’d done such a good job last time out. Moreover, Colaneri had the bug, and his five-pound allowance would’ve meant a great deal to Pichi, especially in a route race. She was likely to sink under a heavier load.
But Headley couldn’t find an available apprentice to his liking, and settled at last on Mel Lewis, a skillful rider who was sixty-two years old and a mighty favorite of the Golden Gate publicity department. Whenever reporters from surrounding newspapers dropped by for their semiannual visit, they were offered, as subject matter for feature stories, Lewis (human interest), Efa, the twelve-year-old horse (equine interest), Mahorney (the Bionic Man, scientific interest), Aragon (noble Peruvian), and the clubhouse chef (gourmet interest). When Steve Cauthen came north in 1977 to ride in the California Derby, he and Lewis were forced into posing together in a youth-and-age tableau, and in the ensuing photograph both jockeys look as though they’ve eaten too many burritos. Headley had faith in Lewis’s ability to handle a finicky filly, but the added weight gave him pause. The Sandomirs expected a victory and now he wasn’t sure Pichi would deliver.
“At least they’re not crazy like some owners,” he said. “They won’t fire me if she loses. I had this one owner, he took his horse away from me after a claiming race because the horse didn’t win by far enough. Can you imagine that? I had another owner, his horse was a router but he’d only let me run him in sprints. Then he’d yell at me when the horse lost.”
“Why’d he do that?”
“Because he was crazy is why.”
Bo was busy in Pichi’s stall. He was combing her mane, drawing strands of it forward so they fell prettily between her eyes. I asked him how long she needed to rest between races.
“Depends,” he said. “This time she only did rest six days. Next time, we’ll have to rest her up ten, fourteen days, before she’ll be ready.”
“You remember Rob Bob, Bo?” Headley asked.
“Rob Bob was a nice kind of a horse.”
“He used to run at the fairs. Rob Bob ran with less rest than any horse I ever saw. One time I saw him finish second on Friday and come back to win on Saturday. He must’ve been thirteen or fourteen, too.”
“Rob Bob had forty-eight wins. Two more and he’d of made the Hall of Fame.”
“How’d he die, Bo?”
“I think he cracked a bone. I think he just broke down.”
Before the race I watched Headley in the paddock. Most trainers at Golden Gate didn’t win often enough to be cavalier when their horses really had a shot, and Headley was a case in point. His tics and gestures were all exaggerated. He moved with the quirky precision of an instrument wound too tightly, performing under tension. He chain-smoked and chewed gum, popping the wad with his teeth, and stuttered more than usual. When Lewis entered the stall he introduced the jockey to the Sandomirs and then repeated, adding rhetorical flourishes, the instructions he’d given earlier: whip the horse left-handed and watch her in the gate. Lewis did a better job of acting than he’d done in the youth-and-age tableau. He crossed his arms, furrowed his brow, and let a rapt expression play across his features, as though committing Headley’s words to memory.
The gate for the race was set up near the middle of the grandstand, and I had a fine view of Pichi going into the three hole. She made no complaint. In fact, she looked almost relaxed, turning this way and that to sniff at her opponents. Spring was a difficult season for fillies. “They’s got other
things on their minds besides racing,” Bo told me once. A few days ago I’d seen a filly trying to invert the natural order by mounting a pony during the post parade. The horses in this race were showing similar signs of distress. When the gate snapped open Pichi took them by surprise. She broke slightly to the right but earlier than the others and had a head out on the lead. Immediately several jockeys who’d broken from outside posts began challenging the horses inside, hoping to sweep past them and take a position on the rail, and Lewis made a split-second decision to keep Pichi out front. He touched her lightly and she ran. The decision was questionable because it had demanded an expenditure of energy—speed—that might better have been saved for use later on, but Pichi appeared none the worse for wear. She trailed Bargain Belle, a filly with good early foot. Rounding into the first turn Lewis asked her and she came on to take the lead. She wasn’t ahead by much, but she was ahead, and the sight was one I thought I’d never see. She was striding elegantly, gliding along, her legs fully extended, and for the first time she looked like a racehorse, a thoroughbred, an animal invented for the single purpose of running, her body geared precisely to the flow of the action and unfolding by perfect and apparently unlabored increments. When horses ran this way, I thought they must have no sense of competition, of other horses on their heels. They moved so gracefully forward in the matrix of their flesh that it was easy to forget, watching, that every stride exacted a price.
The first quarter went in .23.3, a creeping pace, perfect for platers, and I thought Pichi might have enough left to hold on. Going down the backstretch she was still gliding, and Lewis was just beginning to restrain her in an attempt to bank something against the future. He took back on the reins, lifted his butt off the saddle and let his weight settle down through his legs and rest more heavily on her. She dropped back to second. A few strides later she was third. I wanted to believe her retreat was tactical, but moments later Annie Get Your Gun, the favorite, came up to challenge. When she passed Pichi, the two horses were held briefly in juxtaposition and I could see how tired Pichi was. Her tail drooped and her gait was now awkward and out of rhythm. She looked like a battered club fighter coming out for the tenth round, wobbly-legged, not caring about winning any more, trying only to finish. She was all used up, and when Annie Get Your Gun’s tail waved in her face, she quit a little more. For her the race was like a series of debilitating body punches. Lewis wouldn’t think of whipping her. She dragged home eighth, beating only a few cripples and Bargain Belle, who’d also bloomed too soon.
Although Lewis had made a costly error in judgment by asking Pichi too early in the race, drawing too heavily on her reserves, it was difficult to hold him responsible. Rating a horse is a complex affair, and to do it successfully a jockey must know his mount well. During the course of a race he has to decide how best to apportion a finite quality, his horse’s speed, over the distance of ground to be covered. Moreover, he has to make adjustments in the rate of apportionment according to the rate at which the race evolves, within the context of its pace. His job is to correlate one notion of time with another and achieve synchronism. Here Lewis had failed. Pichi had never been a front-runner, and he was wrong to take her out on the lead. If she was ever to win she’d have to come from off the pace, making her move in the stretch, and the pace would have to be slow enough not to exhaust her.
I saw Headley later and he looked glum. He’d begun to think a terrible thing about Pichi, that she was a late-breaking sprinter, the sort of horse destined forever to lose because she burned up if pushed too early, and came on too late when saved for the stretch. “I don’t know what’s next,” he said gloomily. Bo was unwrapping Pichi’s legs. “She never was a router,” he whispered, touching her ribs. “Look what a skinny son-of-a-bitch she is. How’s a filly going to run that far when she don’t eat?”
XII
Like the horses, Art Lobato let you know when he was feeling good. One afternoon he won a stakes race on Fleet’s Delight, and after dismounting he jumped up and clicked his boot heels together in full view of the crowd. He did it again, and once more, then waved to the fans and disappeared into the Jockeys’ Room. The stewards called down to scold him for showing off, but Lobato didn’t care. He’d just earned eight hundred dollars doing what he loved. It was his biggest payday in a long time. Once he’d been a live rider with a purchase on the future, but now he was hustling for nickels and dimes. “I could go up to Portland and do fine,” he told me once at the Home Stretch. “Lonnie Arterburn, he couldn’t cut it at Golden Gate, but he’s in the standings at Portland Meadows.”
“So why don’t you go?”
He shook his head. “I want to make it here.”
For him it was a matter of pride. This was a quality shared by all jockeys, but it was particularly prominent in the smaller ones. They were caught in a curious bind. The minute they left the track, they were stripped of the extra dimension riding granted them and were stuffed back into the real parameters of their bodies. Out in the world, buying jeans in the boy’s department of Macy’s, they were just short men, strange children, and had the same problems of integration as tall basketball players and sensitive poets. Pride became a means of coping, a defense against the limits of the flesh.
Lobato’s career had been affected by an accident similar to Bill Mahorney’s. On April 13, 1974, he shattered his leg in fifteen places while working a mean two-year-old, Thunder’s Roar, for Jake Battles. Battles planned to race the colt soon, and as a test he wanted him set down hard over five furlongs. He told Lobato to apply the whip whenever necessary. The colt resisted from the start, and Lobato hit him twice, knifing him on the flank. The third time he brought down the whip, Thunder’s Roar ducked sharply to the left and broke through the infield railing. Lobato fell, rolled ten yards, and crashed into the base of the starter’s stand, a big wooden structure on the grass. For a minute he lay still, staring at the sky. When he looked down he saw bones poking through his skin. A gateman ran over and tied some cardboard around his leg so the pieces wouldn’t fall apart on the way to the hospital. Several operations were necessary before the bones finally began to knit; the episode consumed two years of Lobato’s life and left him with a leg not much bigger around than his wrist. Gradually he built it up again, but he still walks with a barely detectable limp.
Listening to his story made me aware how tough it could be for jockeys to stay on top. A slip, a fall, a streak of bad luck, and down you tumbled to the bottom of the hill. Riding was a quicksilver occupation. Once you were known to have problems, however minor, they tended to become definitional. “I wish I had Lobato’s head in a sound body,” one trainer told me, making excuses. “Then I’d give him a ride.” You heard such statements all the time, good deeds that perished on the tongue. What Lobato needed was not sentiment but a few decent mounts. He was almost thirty, and there were days when he wished he’d stayed with carpentry or electronics instead of trying to make it as a jockey. Soon the nightmares would begin, but for now, high on Fleet’s Delight, he was optimistic. What could compare to winning a race on a horse who fit you truly? It felt like riding along on your instincts, like the best sex you ever had, and it confirmed you in a vision of self, even as hitting an exacta confirmed a gambler’s sense of genius.
“I’m not quitting yet,” Lobato said. “It took Merlin Volzke fifteen years to make it.”
He told me about watching Cauthen ride in the California Derby. Cauthen was just a kid, slim and hairless, but he sat so still in the saddle you could balance a full glass of water on his head without spilling a drop. He rode effortlessly, with a silken effect, and Lobato had been very impressed. He knew he’d never approach Cauthen’s stature, but the fact that Cauthen was around encouraged him, and he kept right on plugging, jogging from barn to barn instead of walking, hustling for mounts every morning, running in that funny way he had, hobbled a little, one leg shorter than the other.
XIII
So jockeys went about their business, visibly
rising and falling, blown about by fate, pinfeathers in a Bay wind, and still there were those in the grandstand who held them accountable when the horse they were riding ran too slow. “You bum, Diaz,” these mechanists shouted, “why the hell didn’t you speed up on the turn?” Pistons, cylinders, combustion, racetracks as freeways, horses as semisophisticated machines. Jockeys as drivers, motorists. Winning as an exercise in downshifting, being in the right gear. “You let out the clutch too fast, Galarsa.” Life as a giant V-8 engine, torpid, sluggish.
For me each race was a sentence written in an ongoing history, extending by virtue of its utterance the possibilities of speech. Handicappers as grammarians, frantically parsing. The sentences were familiar but appealingly varied, and the language of which they were the substance went backward and forward in time, recapitulating the past even as it posited the future. Jockeys provided the syntax, the structure, holding things together.
XIV
On Preakness Saturday I bumped into Arnold Walker at the clubhouse bar. He had forsaken his usual pin-striped suit for a dark-green Lacoste shirt and complementary trousers, and he had with him a “really terrific babe,” June, who’d already caused a furor by trying to order a frozen daiquiri. June wanted Indigo Star to beat Affirmed. “That’s such a beautiful name,” she said. I was carrying a copy of Eddie Arcaro’s ghost-written autobiography, I Ride to Win, and I told Arnold how Arcaro’s life paralleled the lives of the jockeys I’d been talking to. He was small and everybody said he should be a jockey, so he got Pop Arcaro to take him to Latonia Downs, where he served an apprenticeship with trainer Roscoe Goose. It was a very Dickensian tale until Eddie hit the big time. Then anecdotes about Hollywood stars, junkets to Texas to inspect oil wells, and fishing vacations in Florida took over. Arnold wondered if a jockey would be strong enough to haul in a tarpon.
“Tarpons are killers,” he said.
Around us a crowd had gathered and we seemed to be sailing as a body toward Baltimore, where the post parade at Pimlico was just beginning. I felt the press of warm scented flesh, and it seemed to mitigate the usual iciness of TV transmission. Affirmed and Alydar were decidedly not Laverne and Shirley. They looked dense, real, steeped in history. When they went to the gate, the crowd made a distinct humming sound and their juices flowed more quickly, raising the temperature and wafting perfume and clove-based cologne into the air. The flag went up, People pressed in more tightly still, a hip thrown against a stranger’s hip, bonding like atoms in a molecule, losing themselves. This was the pivotal function of the event, of any legendary event, to draw the mind out of its turnings and point it toward some notion of the eternal, however false that notion might be.
