Laughing in the Hills

by Bill Barich

  V

  Jay Hoop, DVM, a tall gentlemanly figure in his sixties, dressed nattily in checked slacks, blue blazer, and Dobbs hat, had his office in the receiving barn, a rotundalike structure with numbered stalls all along its interior circumference. The barn was painted dark red, and restrictive signs were plastered near the entrance. A security guard in rent-a-cop gray was posted nearby to make sure that unauthorized parties stayed out. Before each race, horses scheduled to run were brought to the barn and examined by Hoop, the official veterinarian, prior to going to post. If any horse looked unfit to run, Hoop scratched him from the field and placed him on the Veterinarian’s List, which, according to the California Horse Racing Board, was not “a punitive device but a protection for the racing public, for the physical health of the horses, for the jockeys who ride those horses, for the continuity of racing programs, and for the investment of racing owners.” A horse on the vet’s list couldn’t start again until he’d recovered from his infirmity.

  In addition, Hoop was responsible for overseeing the elaborate post-race testing procedure. An assistant took a urine specimen from every winning horse, from the second finisher in exacta races, from the first three horses in stakes races, and from any horse who showed the sort of form reversal that might indicate tampering, as well as occasional random samples. The specimens were flown to Truesdail Labs in Los Angeles, where they were subjected to analysis by gas and thin-layer chromatography, ultraviolet, infrared, and mass spectrometry, and crystalline and color-reaction reagents. The tests were done either singly or in combination and were supposed to reveal any foreign substance present in a horse’s system. A positive finding of a so-called prohibited drug set in motion a criminal investigation conducted by the Board. Violators could be charged with felonies and imprisoned. Penalties for the abuse of permitted medications were not so harsh, although recidivists were sometimes suspended or stripped of their licenses.

  When I went to visit Hoop, Ruling Don’s breakdown was still on my mind. I had come to believe that of the official reasons given for placing a horse on the vet’s list, only two really had any impact at Golden Gate, the last two, those that protected owners and the Tanforan Association. It seemed to me that a subtle balance had gone awry, that the track was grinding up horses for profit, cannibalizing its own best interests. I thought that horses, and the jockeys who toppled with them when they broke down under unwarranted stress, deserved better.

  Hoop thought I was overstating the case. He agreed that California drug laws were broadly written but believed that the penalties for violating them were severe enough to frighten off most would-be offenders. All medications used at California tracks were classified either as prohibited or permitted. Prohibited drugs were more tightly controlled—they had a more immediate and telling effect on performance—and included stimulants, depressants, narcotics, and local anesthetics. Horses being treated with them couldn’t race within sixty hours of their last dosage. Phenylbutazone, on the other hand, was permitted and occupied the same catch-all category as steroids, aspirin, muscle relaxants, furosemide (Lasix, a diuretic given to horses who bled from the nostrils under exertion), vitamins, analgesics, and other medications linked less directly to performance. Bute had to be given steadily, not in an arbitrary, on-off, on-off fashion, and it couldn’t be given at all on a race day. If it was, said Hoop, it would be detected at the official racing laboratory in Truesdale. Since the start of Tanforan only one infraction had been detected, when excessive levels of bute were found in Moonlight Cocktail’s urine after she’d won her race. The stewards decided the extra dose had been given accidentally and fined Steve Gardell, the trainer, two hundred fifty dollars, less than his share of the purse.

  “This whole bute thing is blown way out of proportion,” Hoop said in annoyance. “It’s nothing special. It doesn’t make a horse run any faster.”

  “Doesn’t a horse run faster when he’s not feeling any pain?”

  Hoop adopted a more vigorous tone. “It doesn’t make a horse run any faster. That’s all there is to it. Bute reduces inflammation, nothing further. It’s just that everybody’s prescribing it now. These fads happen all the time. Once, down at Hollywood Park, the rumor got around that Bobby Frankel was only using three nails in his horseshoes. Frankel’s a successful trainer, so the next thing you know everybody’s using just three nails.” Hoop smiled. “Didn’t help, though.”

  The California Horse Racing Board refused to supply bettors with any information about drugs. I asked Hoop why.

  “The drug list is confidential,” he said. “We believe certain things shouldn’t be made public.”

  I asked again.

  “It’s our policy.”

  This seemed unfair to the fans. Certainly a chronically sore horse running on bute for the first time would show an improvement, and California bettors should be made aware of such things. Some eastern tracks gave drug specifics right on the program, along with scratches and equipment changes.

  But what bothered me most in talking to Hoop was his apparent trust in technology. This was the modern romantic affliction, I thought. Nose cones were replacing gushing cataracts as objects of admiration; soon motel walls would be decorated with canvases depicting astronauts blown about like Michelin men in the starry recesses of space. Clearly, the development of new drugs—whether they were anti-inflammatory, analgesics, depressants, or stimulants—would always be a step ahead of the scientific testing procedures necessary to detect them. There was a logical flaw in the Truesdale scheme as well, in that the tests were skewed toward finding doped winners, when in fact many a race was fixed by inhibiting a few key horses. Moreover, it was extremely difficult to pin a drug-related crime on an owner or trainer, even with a positive test in hand. Excuses were manifold, ready-made. Maybe a groom who didn’t understand English very well mixed up the medications, or maybe he was acting in consort with some other trainer, or on his own, or as an agent for a syndicate, or as part of the Grooms’ Liberation Front, and maybe he was gone now—certainly he did it!—lost in the palm-thick jungles of Guatemala. The defense could rest and most likely get off with a fine for negligence. It was a bad idea to turn over your responsibility to machines housed in a plant five hundred miles away.

  After an hour I realized that Hoop and I were talking at cross-purposes. His job, as he saw it, wasn’t to scratch every sore animal who came into the receiving barn, but to keep a steady procession (ninety-two to a hundred head a day) of what he called “raceably sound” horses moving toward the starting gate. Again it came down to a question of language, of definition. I think I would’ve defined “raceably sound” far more stringently than Hoop. It wasn’t that Hoop was a bad man or even a negligent one. He was only a man of his times, it seemed to me, loyal to what Chief Justice Marshall had defined in 1809 as “that invisible, intangible and artificial being, that mere legal entity,” the corporation.

  Hoop invited me to stay around and watch him give a pre-race examination. We left the office and I saw grooms leading horses through the arched doorway and around the barn. They wore strained expressions and were on their best behavior. Nearby a man in gray khakis leaned on a push broom and yawned. He was the manure-sweeper. “Not a very interesting job,” he said, “but it keeps you busy.” Hoop told me he’d be looking for wet bandages, welts, bumps, and other signs of tampering, as well as noticeable lameness. At a signal from him the grooms took their horses into the stalls. He moved to the center of the floor, gave another signal, and watched as the horses came out of the stalls and were led around him. They moved like spokes, and Hoop studied them, concentrating on their legs and scratching his chin with a program. He didn’t touch any of them or alter in any way the distance he’d established at the start. After two minutes’ observation, he sent the horses to post. They were in the hands of the Racing Vet now, and it was up to him to scratch any animals he thought were too lame to run. But he was a Tanforan employee, and the association hated last-minute scratches—they fou
led up the bookkeeping, necessitated refunds, and reduced the handle—so it was safe to assume that Hoop’s assessment would not be undercut.

  VI

  I had always imagined the great Florentine horse race, the palio of St. John the Baptist, held yearly on June 24 and named in honor of the prize bestowed on the winner, a piece of crimson fabric trimmed with fur, silk, and gold worth three hundred florins, as a majestic event, a ringing forth of bells and horses. The corso began at the outskirts of Florence and wound through the streets, stitching together the various districts—Dragon, Golden Lion, Shell, Viper, Unicorn, and so on—into a briefly harmonious whole. After the midday feast spectators drifted out of their houses and took up positions all along the racecourse. Women wore their jewels—pearls, emeralds, rubies—and long embroidered gowns, and men their crushed-velvet caps and capes fringed with mink or ermine. Bright banners hung from windows, and flowers were scattered on the cobbles. The horses were assembled at the Porta al Prato. Their tack consisted of a single lightweight bridle. The jockeys, dressed in white caps and tights and blousy shirts in diverse colors, rode bareback, digging in their heels, and because of this they were respected more for courage than for skill. When the bells of the Palazzo Vecchio rang three times, the horses were released in a pack. Boys climbed the Palazzo’s campanile and flashed signs to the crowd below, calling the race. At the finish line a group of magistrates sat like stewards, waiting to name the winner, while around them the city lost itself in pageantry and the echo of hoofs on stones.

  But in my reading I’d learned other things about the palio, how brutal, ugly, and corrupt it could be. Hard-paved streets were tough on horses’ legs, and there were so many obstacles along the corso—dogs, cats, chickens, children, drunks—that horses often tripped or went off stride, breaking down. One contemporary painting showed a fine white horse spread-eagled on the cobbles, his two front legs bent back and his jockey thrown forward and sprawled across his neck. Riders, too, were expendable. They were constantly getting caught in a pinch or pushed against a wall and thrown or trampled. In some races they carried clubs to use on one another in the pack. Incompetence and limited tack kept sending them off on side trips into the crowd, where they crashed and were spilled again. This happened so often that the Council of Siena once passed an ordinance absolving jockeys of any responsibility for killing or wounding spectators during a race. Sometimes a palio was inverted and run as a parodic contest, featuring the most flea-bitten nags available. Then the body count soared. Florentines loved to gamble, and as the amount of money bet on races increased, fixers appeared on the scene, making their usual time-honored arrangements.

  VII

  After Clarence Pementel picked up Ruling Don’s body he hauled it to the San Jose Tallow Works. Pementel had been collecting dead horses for fifty years, as his father had done before him, and he would make this round trip, from his ranch to Golden Gate to San Jose and home again, many times during the course of a racing season. At the tallow works, Ruling Don’s hide was stripped and his flesh and bones were ground into a meal that would be sold as poultry feed. A small amount of tallow was rendered from his carcass, and it would later be exported to India or Egypt or Korea or some other country where tallow was still used in the manufacture of soap. The bottom had dropped out of the domestic tallow market when the detergent companies switched over to cheaper substances like coconut oil. Business was so slow at the tallow works that customers had to pay to have their dead stock processed. As for Pementel, he was paid by the track.

  VIII

  I wanted to forget about Ruling Don but his breakdown kept coming back to me, relentlessly, the sight of him balanced on a stump of bone and the formidable sense of helplessness and betrayal I felt while watching him stumble around. Of course there was no single place to fix the blame. Drug abuse, inadequate supervision of stock, demands of trainers and owners to make a buck, of racing associations to make a bigger buck, the industry’s inability to police itself, the pressures of year-round racing, the choice of expediency over nurturance, quantity over quality, I could name twenty-five other contributory factors off the top of my head, but in the end they added up not to an answer but to a familiar syndrome, libraries closing, rivers dammed, condominiums going up, all in the cold blue glow of flickering tubes.

  IX

  Some months after Laudomia Strozzi of Ferrara rejected him as a suitor, Girolamo Savonarola, then twenty-two, awoke in the night to cascades of freezing water spilling onto his head. This acqua frigidissima was only part of a dream, but it had a cleansing effect anyway, dousing the carnal fires that had been troubling Savonarola since adolescence. A short time later he entered the Convent of San Domenico in Bologna and dedicated his life to a vision of spiritual purity, the soul liberated from tormented flesh. When he came to power in Florence following Lorenzo’s death, he offered up his vision to mourning citizens. An Antichrist would soon appear, he said, but the city would hold fast against the onslaught and be transformed into a new Jerusalem that would serve as a Christian exemplar for all the peoples on earth. Florence would become an Ark of the spirit, with a government enlightened by personal sacrifice and the grace of God. Savonarola’s audience was receptive, and his vision was embraced. “Courtesans and gamblers went into hiding,” wrote the historian Ferdinand Shevill, “ribald street songs were replaced by pious hymns; men and women alike adopted a plain and modest dress and were untiring in their attendance at mass and sermon.” Botticelli surrendered to the spirit, and so, too, did Pico, while more skeptical Humanists retreated more deeply into an idealized past, forsaking the present entirely.

  But the politicians in Florence allowed Savonarola his freedom only so long as he stayed outside their sphere of influence. The minute his constituency pushed him to the fore, his days were numbered. Soon he was caught up in political intrigue and locked into a power struggle with the Pope, Alexander Borgia, a lusty corrupt robber baron who’d bought the papacy and was eagerly making it pay. Savonarola advocated Florentine support of Charles VIII of France, whom he considered the instrument of God, a leading general in the army of reformation, while Alexander, embarrassed earlier by Charles’s forces, had already thrown his support to the anti-French league (Venice, Naples, Milan) and wanted the Arno government to enlist on his side as added protection against future French incursions. In the next few years Alexander waged subtle and not-so-subtle war against the friar, challenging his authority, excommunicating him, and when his support dwindled at last, charging him with heresy. Savonarola was found guilty by two church commissioners, and on May 23, 1498, a gallows was erected in the Piazza della Signoria. Beneath it wood and brush was arranged in a pyre. Along with two other Dominicans, Savonarola was hanged, then burned. Scavengers collected his ashes and threw them into the Arno, to be carried out to sea.

  In 1522 the first of a series of plagues struck Florence. By 1530 the city was blockaded and food was scarce. Ass-meat was a delicacy, all the cats around had been eaten, and people spent hours hunting the countryside for swallows, owls, falcons, anything with meat on its bones. An egg cost ten soldi, a rat thirteen. Among Florentines in need of explanations it was said that the plague was not of local origin, but had been brought in by a stranger from Rome.

  X

  From the curved windows of Clifford Goodrich’s office I could see the track and the Albany hills, and in the other direction, looking south, the Bay and San Francisco. This was the executive suite, with plush carpeting, a new desk, comfortable furniture, a bathroom, and to the rear of the suite a darkened nook where the directors of the Tanforan and Pacific Racing associations sometimes held their meetings. None of them were seated around the table now, but in the silence that money buys I could feel the power of their connections, the interlocking of stocks and bonds: Director, Hyatt Corporation of America; Partner, J. Barth & Co.; Director, State Savings & Loan; President, British Motor Car Distributors, Ltd.; President, Zellerbach Paper Company; Director, First Western Bank & Trust; Member,
Commonwealth Club. These connections, inherited, married into, purchased, bartered for, occasionally earned, were more important than the directors’ names, fixing them more firmly in time and space. They seldom visited the track anyway, unless a horse they owned was running or an “occasion” like the California Derby appeared in the pages of their social calendars. On these days they traipsed past the press box heading for the executive suite, for the big picture and the comfort of a 270° view, dragging hangers-on behind them and smoking big cigars.

  Goodrich, general manager of both Pacific and Tanforan, was the directors’ man on the spot. The job was a tricky one for anybody who retained, as Goodrich seemed to, a respect for honesty. He was intelligent, reasonably direct, and still young enough, at thirty-five, to look ill at ease when he had to skirt around the edges of a potentially incriminating question. In college he’d been an ace pitcher—physically, he resembled Don Drysdale, with the same rangy southern California quality to his frame—but he had suffered an arm injury and, instead of signing a contract, had gone to work at Santa Anita after graduation. He’d worked there since summer vacations in high school, starting at the turnstiles, and at six or seven other tracks before settling in as general manager at Golden Gate in 1977. Presently Goodrich was having a rough time of it. Figures showed that attendance at Pacific’s winter meeting was down 8.1 percent, with a concomitant drop in the handle, and early returns at Tanforan gave no indication of reversing the trend. So Goodrich found himself in a bind, caught between running a racetrack properly, as he’d learned to do from the ground up, and hedging in order to satisfy the directors’ and other investors’ dissatisfaction about decreasing profits.