My Year of the Racehorse (13 page)

“And Seth has helped you find your calling in life?” I ask innocently.

Carole gives me the kind of encouraging, dumbfounded smile you'd offer someone who lets a beach ball of obviousness evade him. “This is my calling,” she says. “I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up until Seth allowed me to be a channel through which to speak.”

Seth seems to work in a couple of ways. He can upload his thoughts directly into Carole, but, when she helps people communicate with dead relatives or, more pertinently to me, animals, he's more of a go-between—like the operator who connects a collect caller to the recipient. Carole communicates with Seth, who gets hold of the animal and then fades into the background.

“They love the fact that somebody is there to talk to them about them,” Carole tells me about the animals' reactions to her communications. As an example of her work, Carole tells me about communicating with a quarter horse whose owner was trying to get him to learn natural horsemanship, an approach to working with horses in which the animals get to make decisions. The quarter horse responded by being, at turns, aloof and belligerent. “It was very foreign to him. And this particular fellow said, ‘I'm twenty years old. I'm an old guy. I just want her to leave me alone and let me do my work.' He also feels like he's failed and gets the anxiety that he'll be sent away.”

“Horses have that anxiety?” I ask with some surprise. “In the racing world, that's a common reality.”

“Horses don't live in the same homes very often. You'd be surprised by their sense of abandonment.”

Carole's first conversation with an animal occurs without an actual meeting, though she likes to have a picture of the animal before her conversation. From her conversation, she then produces a transcript that she emails to the client. Although she normally charges $150 for the service, she's waived her fee for Blackie.

After my run-in with the Woman Who Hates Horseracing, I've come to Carole seeking assurance from Blackie that she actually wants to race. My view of psychics and the occult is they don't hurt. Even if it's all hokum, if you're prone to believing in such things, or even if you're not entirely disposed to not believing, it adds a confectioner's coating of significance to the meaningless Bundt cake of experience.

With a little prodding, I even convince Randi, who's profoundly skeptical about Carole's purported gift, to provide me with a couple of questions that she'd like answered by her mare: Does your right hock hurt? Does it hurt when you get near the end of the race or are you just tired?

But then, during our meeting, I think Carole's services might be used on Sylvester. After all, Blackie probably has gotten more attention than she deserves, and both Randi and I want to know why Sylvester is feeling so sluggish, whether it's not because of the lack of hormones. And since he's a gelding, I'd like to know, for empathetic male reasons, how he feels about that. He might not be the hero at the moment, but he's something better, at least in my opinion: complicated.

A FEW WEEKS after mentioning it, Nick gives me a copy of his writing assignment about the track. The essay starts at Santa Anita racecourse outside of Los Angeles. Sitting in the stands, he goes through the program and sees the names of trainers who've snatched some of racing's chunkiest pieces of silverware: the Triple Crown races, the Breeders' Cup, the Dubai World Cup. “Amongst all these familiar names was one that I was most familiar with,” he writes, “but one that in this arena nobody else would recognize: my own.”

Flashing back from this opening scene, Nick tells us about growing up as a devotee of the sport, reading everything he could find about horses. He picked up work as a hot walker at Hastings, before getting his own trainer's licence. One wizened racetracker he met there warns him about the entrancing smell of horses: “He was right,” Nick writes. “Once you are addicted to the smell, you crave it.”

Eventually, Nick arrived in Los Angeles with Twanger, a horse with enormous talent despite his undistinguished pedigree, whom Nick had trained well enough to win every local stakes race. When Twanger first appeared at Santa Anita in November, the Mexican grooms at the stables had never before seen a horse with a winter coat. “Why do you bring a bear here?” one of them asked Nick. “[T]his is a place for the horse.”

Coming from a piddling track in Canada, Nick's horse was so poorly regarded that no jockey was willing to ride him. “My head hung and I felt like a scolded child as I asked each rider's agent, and was given reason after reason why each rider would not take the mount,” Nick writes. “I began to feel ill, I wanted to get into a warm bed, pull the covers over my head and disappear.” Out of mercy, another trainer arranged for Twanger to be ridden by Laffit Pincay, Jr., one of the most successful jockeys ever, with 9,530 career wins.

Having trained Twanger for three months at Santa Anita, Nick is now in the stands to watch him make his racing debut in California. But even with Pincay aboard, Nick's horse quickly falls to the back of the pack—twelve lengths from the lead.

“What would I tell people, how could I excuse this?” Nick recalls himself thinking. “My eyes fell from the race. New shoes, black and uncreased. Why had I wasted money on these? Not to mention the new suit, shirt, and tie I was wearing. Who did I think I was? I was getting spanked for my arrogance.”

At the turn, however, Twanger pours on speed. Pincay swats the horse with the whip, and the horse, nostrils flaring and ears pinned back, responds instantly. The horse begins to make ground, picking off the favourites and closing in on the leader when they reach the finish line. Twanger comes in a close second.

Overjoyed, Nick runs into the unsaddling area of the track, where he takes hold of his horse, who's covered with dirt and sweat. Pincay dismounts and shakes his hand.

“Nice horse... He ran real big, man,” Nick recalls the Panama-born rider telling him. “I want to ride him again... anytime soon.”

The essay, while florid at times, is well written. I've kept reading because the version of Nick has a real stake in the story—unlike the stuff I write, with its ambivalent narrators who are too cautious to bet it all. And in this piece, I see another version of Nick, someone who was in thrall to racing's beauty and history. Nowadays, he seems more keenly aware of the racing world's pragmatic realities. He cares about his work as an agent and a trainer, and yet he seems at a remove from it, maybe because he needs to scalp tickets for extra money. The racetrack might provide a job and a way of life, but it's no longer a path to glory.

I want the story to end on a note of near-triumph, with Twanger's near-victory. Even if Nick and Twanger don't take over Santa Anita, I want to see them both leave with no regrets.

But Twanger is sent back to Vancouver. Nick lingers in Los Angeles for two more years until visa restrictions force him back north. Upon his return, he finds Hastings harmed by new competition from casinos being built around the city. Fewer horses are being bred, purses have been cut, racing schedules shortened. And yet Nick can't kick his addiction to that smell.

I see him a few weeks later at the casino, sitting behind an Egyptian-themed slot machine that flashes hieroglyphics in place of cherries. He smiles when I tell him how much I like the essay, but doesn't take his eyes off the screen.

“Whatever happened to Twanger?” I ask him about his horse, who still holds a track record for stakes wins.

“The owner bred him locally for a while, but he wasn't successful as a stud,” Nick says. “So he started racing again and broke down in a race in Seattle.”

I wish I never asked.

Nick presses a button at the bottom of the machine and hieroglyphs start spinning again.

“How are you doing on the slots?” I ask him, nodding towards the screen.

“Not bad today. I'm up a couple hundred bucks.”

“That's pretty good.”

“It's a stupid thing to do.”

Our conversation trails off, and he returns his attention wholly to the flashing, chiming machine. I wonder what kind of smell it gives off.

A COUPLE OF weeks later, I find a voice mail from Nick. “I'm calling with regard to Mocha Time,” he says in a clipped message. “Please give me a call back.”

The first thought I have is that the horse is injured, and I'm lightheaded as I dial his number. But Nick tells me that a couple of Blackie's owners, people I've met only in passing, have suddenly decided they no longer want to be her owner. “Now we're trying to figure out what to do with the horse,” Nick says. “Randi told me to handle it.”

“What are the options?” I ask.

“Well, I'm trying to figure it out,” he says. “The way it is now, Randi owns ninety percent of the horse, and that means not enough money is coming in regularly. We could sell the horse privately or race her low enough that she gets claimed.”

As Nick discusses the options, I recall a conversation I had with my father a few days ago. I was at my parents' house, watching TV, when he walked into the room and asked about my horse. I mentioned her last race and suggested she'd be racing again in a couple of weeks.

“That's too bad,” he said, “I'll be out of town.”

“Oh,” I said. “I wish you could make it.”

“Have I ever told you of the friend I have in Hong Kong?” he asked me, settling into the armchair next to the couch. “He's a really wealthy guy and owned a lot of racehorses. But he had one horse that he just loved. It was his favourite horse.” My father smiled at the memory. “There's so little land in Hong Kong that there are no places to send horses to after they finish racing, so when that horse retired, my friend sent it to a stable in New Zealand. But he missed seeing the horse, so he decided to buy a winery there to have an excuse to visit him.”

There's a pause on the phone between Nick and me. I feel as though I should volunteer to write a cheque. But until then, I thought I was only involved with the horse for the year, with an option for the next season. Nick has never called me before; until now, I've never felt greasy dealing with him, as though he were calibrating his words, or that I needed to be wary of him. Here and now, he's become cagey. What are the chances I'll see this money back?

Then again, why shouldn't Nick ask me for a cheque? I've spent the summer treating the horse's accomplishments, and the efforts of her trainer, as my own. Now I'm called upon to do the one thing an owner does, write a cheque, but am tripped up by my distrust and ambivalence.

This is, in my mind, a test of character. Will I act cautiously, on the assumption that all racetrackers are charlatans—or will I follow my passion and give my new friends a chance? Am I like the besotted owner my father described, someone whose attachment to an animal leads him to behave in a way that's not altogether expedient, or am I an owner only according to the paperwork, a tourist to horseracing, a guy with no true stake in this world—no true stake in any world?

With all that in mind, I offer to double my stake in Blackie.

Nick asks me to meet him at the track with another cheque. Before I leave, I dial Randi's number.

“I knew you'd be calling me,” she says. I can hear her huffing as she does her route.

“Is it okay for me to write Nick a cheque?” I ask.

“Probably,” she says, cackling. “Well, I think it should be cool.”

“That's a relief.”

“I won't let you get fucked,” she says. “Besides, this will give you a taste of what it's like to be in horseracing as an owner. You don't namby-pamby around.”

The amount of my money I invested was a sum that I was comfortable to part with; twice that much, without any promise of a return, is a different matter. Driving to the track, I think about how easy it could be for someone like me to be swindled by a racetracker. Then I tell myself that neither Randi nor Nick has ever been dishonest with me; I have no reason to distrust them—not yet.

At Hastings, I look for Nick at the track bar, Jerome's, but don't see him. Naturally, I head straight to the casino, where I expect him to be pouring his cash—and maybe my own—into a machine. I find him instead outside the other, upper-floor entrance to Jerome's and we settle at a table in the bar. It's an off-day at the track, and the basement bar is filled only with the punters watching simulcasts from other tracks.

“I really appreciate this,” he says. “You're helping us out of a jam.”

“Sure,” I say evenly. “Do I make the cheque to you or Randi?”

“You can make it out to me.”

I flinch.

“Did you bring a receipt?” I ask as I fill out the cheque.

“Oh. No,” he says. “I forgot.”

I don't mention that an hour ago, when we arranged to meet, he promised to put together a receipt. He borrows a strip of cash-register ribbon from behind the bar and quickly makes out a handwritten receipt for me and I return home, still unsure about my decision.

Before the day ends, a cashier at Money Mart calls me to verify the cheque I've just written. Nick's urgency to take my money isn't reassuring. To calm myself down, I sit in front of my laptop and start another pretend how-to book, What I Learned at the Track: A Manual of Failure.

LESSON ONE: Write a Cheque

Racetrackers had just bled several thousand dollars away from me after I went headlong into an expensive sport that I knew little about. I had purchased a racehorse to intentionally expose myself to a level of risk and commitment that I had so steadfastly avoided throughout my life. I hoped to show I was not the person I'd spent my life being.

This ultimately proved to be the point where my life completely unravelled. From here, I lost all the money I'd saved, fell into a slough of despair that left me unable to work for months and, out of shock, lost my ability to feel pain or smell, and then briefly dabbled in cocaine and sweater vests.