My Year of the Racehorse (14 page)

After signing away money that I wouldn't get back, I should have run far, far away. I should have been content with my limitations, happy to be emotionally standoffish and self-contained, but in spite of this failure, I needed to poke and prod, to double down. Horseracing is described in an old movie as “a slow poison.” I let this toxic sport destroy me, slowly but fully.

This is my sad story...

BACK IN STABLE A, Alex's mood shoots up and down like a gunfight on a Ferris wheel. When he's grumpy, he's mute and unwilling to make eye contact. He and Randi feud throughout that summer, with Alex griping about money he feels she owes him. But in the past couple of weeks, his spirits have improved for two reasons. Reason one, the main reason, is that his twenty-year-old son Shawn arrived from Cloverdale, where the harness-racing track is located.

If people like Randi wind up at the track out of some absence in their own family life, there seem to be at least as many people here because of family connections, people who work with horses because their parents taught them how. My imagination congeals and scabs over trying to imagine Alex as a father, and yet he fawns over his son, whom he raised on his own without any evident catastrophe. Shawn's a friendly, polite guy, stoutly constructed, with a closely shaven head, a round, pale face. Like his dad, he walks horses around the stables and the paddock, and lives in a tack room, twenty feet from Alex. For dinner, the two of them eat tuna fish sandwiches and tomato soup to save their money for wagers, which brings us to reason two for Alex's buoyancy.

Alex scored big last week on a triactor bet on a simulcast race from Saratoga with the lucky numbers supplied by his dead wife. “Shawn is sleeping and I said I need someone to guard this fucking seat, and I comes running here, and I find Shawn,” he tells me, his eyes glinting, on the day Sylvester runs his first race in two months. “‘Mummy says to bet 2–3–6,' I tell him. She says, ‘Box it, Daddy.' I won $800 on the race in Saratoga. The 2–3–6 starts, and you can bet any fucking track. It's a spiritual thing. The point of it is you have to be consistent. Shawn's mother is now a saint. People don't talk to you from hell. They talk to you from heaven.”

I ask Alex, whose wife died when Shawn was four, how often she talks to him from the spirit world.

“Well, when she died on a Tuesday, she started talking to us on Thursday night.” His eyes suddenly brim with feeling. “She died of criminal negligence by the doctors,” he says, glancing away in disgust. “The hospital says, ‘We can cure your lung cancer if you come down to the hospital on Tuesday—you'll be cured by Thursday.' Thursday they called us to say she burned to death in a radiation chamber. It was an accident; it was turned too high.”

A FEW DAYS after our first meeting, on a special mid-week, Canada Day race day, I watch Sid Martin prepare one of his horses, A Cut Above, for the first sprint. Martin's wearing a latte-coloured turtleneck, a red cap, a pressed jacket, and aqua-coloured slacks. Other trainers, in comparison, work in jeans and short-sleeved plaid shirts and ball caps. Martin's actually dressed down compared with some of the winner's photos I've seen, even those from a few years ago, in which he looks like an Ocean's Eleven extra in a black suit and skinny black tie, a cigarette in his hand.

In a paddock stall, Martin places the cloth under the saddle and adjusts the horse's bridle. He notices me and points to the island of lawn where visitors linger in the paddock. “Stand back,” he says. “You're safer there.”

When the horse is saddled, he ambles over to me, shaking my hand. I ask him how he thinks the horse will do, which I'm quickly learning is a pointless, if not stupid, question to ask a trainer or owner before a race. Martin gives me the same kind of answer Randi gives me about her horses. “I can't let you know until after the race,” he says in his muted mumble. “She looked fine this morning, but she's probably the longest shot on the board.”

At his busiest in California, Martin had twenty horses at Hollywood Park and twenty at Santa Anita. “I used to say if that's success, I don't want it,” he told me when we first met. “I had ulcers, kidney stones, hemorrhoids. They're all behind me now.” After twenty years in California—in his opinion, “the best twenty years of racing ever”—Martin returned to Canada and Hastings Park (then called Exhibition Park) in 1986. “I missed the seasons,” he said. Although he was semi-retired, Martin was active enough to be the second leading trainer in 1990, the year he was inducted into the B.C. Horse Racing Hall of Fame, and win the B.C. Derby with Flying Sauce in 1995. This year, however, has been tough, with only one win coming early in the season.

Martin's jockey for the race, Giovanni Franco, comes to receive his instructions. Because of the multitude of variables in a race, the trainer's advice often needs to be disregarded by a jockey, whose own good judgment takes precedence. A trainer's advice is, thus, delivered offhandedly, in the same imprecise, encouraging manner you would direct your house-sitter to water the plants.

“Don't push too hard if you're going head-to-head, you know what I mean?” says Martin, who's worried about the language barrier with Franco. About half the jockey's colony at Hastings is Mexican, and while the more veteran riders speak good English, the younger ones often get by with nodding and smiling. “Just get comfortable.”

Martin suggests that we watch the race from his box seat. As we step out of the paddock, he hands me a folded piece of paper. “This was from Glen,” he mumbles. “It's a poem.”

I found out about the murdered son of Sid Martin a few days after our initial meeting, and had been seeking a tactful way to broach the subject. Now with this opportunity hand-delivered by Martin himself, I follow the racing legend to the stands, watching his feet pedal in a sprightly manner as he jogs up the steps to the clubhouse boxes. As usual, people nod and call out his name. We sit down at a box already occupied by another friend of Sid's, someone whose name I now forget.

Martin plucks a cigarette from his shirt pocket. “I'm just going to light this,” he says, smiling. “It's illegal, but what the heck.”

The gates open. With Franco on him in Day-Glo orange silks, A Cut Above takes the lead going into the clubhouse turn, but he falls to second, then third, in the backstretch, and by the time they reach the top of the lane, he's passed by the rest of the field. Martin watches, leaning forward on the railing of the box seat. His expression is all mass, no motion. The eyes are still narrowed, his bottom lip flat as a horseshoe.

“He was in a little tough,” he says after a drawn-out pause. “If he hits a sloppy track, it's gangbusters.”

LATER, READING GLEN'S poem, it occurs to me that, even when you choose to fight with your father, you do so on his terms. It's your father who picks the rules for you to break, each one of them another plot point in his unlived life.

In many ways, Sid Martin's oldest son seemed to conscientiously refute his father's clean-cut, soft-spoken example. From what I've been told, Glen was boisterous, overly generous, and social. He also dealt drugs at the track, which led to his death. It's worth nothing, however, that even while he was rattling his father's well-being, he was doing it at the place they both loved.

Glen's poem, written for his father in honour of his return from California, shows him in a more unctuous mood:

At FIFTY-SIX, You've made your mark!

So now you're back at Exhibition Park!

Settled down, semi-retirement is due!

I know Vancouver is home to you.

Your friends and relatives all are there!

People like you we all find rare!

I have come to respect you for the man you are

Following your advice will take a man far!

A good reputation, honesty and class

Those are traits, I hope you have passed.

Learning by examples, that you set

I've followed your lead, on that you can bet.

Now that I'm older, my feelings have grown

Your philosophies are followed, I call them my own.

So as you look back on your cherished past...

Realize the teachings, your shadow has cast.

Your influence has not been lost.

I'm also a survivor, no matter the cost.

I value the knowledge you have imparted

A good foundation for me to get started.

In the future, you will see

The effect your training has had on me.

For what you stand for, I believe!

And that I will follow until I succeed.

I'm always proud to be your son

To me you are considered #1!

On your birthday, I hope you are glad

Receiving this poem about my Gemini Dad.

“Glenny was a sweet guy,” Randi tells me in her break room after I watch Sid's race. The track simulcast plays on her TV. “It's sad he's gone. He was always wanting to please his dad. I think that's why he got his trainer's licence. But he was a good horseman, too.”

“So he and Sid didn't get along?” I ask her.

“I wouldn't say that, don't put any fucking words in my mouth.”

“I didn't know how to bring up Glen,” I tell her. “I wasn't sure Sid wanted to talk about him.”

“Until last year, he used to have his stalls up in this barn and he would come by and talk about Glen. He must miss him a lot.”

If Martin has been welcomed into racing's most glorious precincts, the death of his son acquaints him with its seamy side, the part that comes in tow with the track's transient workforce and their happy-sad, feast-or-famine lifestyle. That season, I hear about one exercise rider who's suspended for thirty days for using cocaine and another gallop boy who blamed a rival trainer for slipping drugs into him. Hastings has its own addiction counsellor and weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. It also has random drug tests that are routinely administered to backstretch workers, swabs that can be used to track any narcotics use in the previous four days. The testing doesn't seem to derive from any desire to enforce morality or improve workplace safety so much as to pick off the sketchiest personalities.

The temptations that Sid successfully avoided were the same that pulled his son under. In November 2002, Glen and his girlfriend, Julie Smith, were gunned down. Their bodies were left in the trunk of Glen's abandoned car and discovered two days later when it was impounded. Almost five years later, a former jockey's agent named Michael Joseph Wilson was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder. “Parents, siblings and friends of the deceased wept—as did Wilson's supporters—as B.C. Supreme Court Justice Donna Martinson read her verdict,” wrote Susan Lazaruk in the Province in 2007. Later, Lazaruk wrote that “Martin was shot at close range six times, Smith 11 times, and both were hit in the head with a hammer. Smith, [who] was ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time,' also was stabbed in the leg and garrotted with a wire.”

According to the article in the Province, Wilson was caught by the RCMP in a “Mr. Big sting.” Undercover Mounties, posing as gangsters, egged Wilson to admit to a past crime to prove himself badass enough to join their ranks. In court, Wilson claimed he exaggerated his role to the undercover cops and fingered another track figure, his uncle Mark Patzer, a one-time leading jockey at Hastings, as the actual killer.

The Crown prosecutor asserted that the younger Martin, who was forty-eight when he died, owned a marijuana grow op in a farmhouse he leased outside the city in Pitt Meadows. Wilson lived in the house and ran the grow op with Patzer. Glen became unhappy with their partnership, which angered Wilson and Patzer enough that his life had to end. Wilson insisted that he wasn't the triggerman, that he lent his pistol to his uncle, who killed Martin and Smith. According to Wilson, Patzer killed Sid Martin's son first in the lower level of the house. Wilson was with Smith upstairs, with the television's volume turned up to obscure the noise of the killing. Patzer then called Wilson on his cell phone to bring Smith down.

Although he was declared a suspect, Patzer has never been arrested for the murder. Wilson testified that he was only guilty of disposing of their bodies, which his uncle forced him to do. But he also told the RCMP that immediately after the killing “he bought a CD by Papa Roach, with its title track, ‘Getting Away with Murder.'”

“Asked by the undercover officer why the slaying happened,” Keith Fraser reports in another article in the Province, “Wilson told him that he and his uncle were concerned about the reputation of the track.”

THE NEXT TIME I meet with Sid Martin, I bring my laptop to Trackers's patio, where he's waiting with a fresh cigarette ready. Martin said he's never seen a replay of his Triple Crown, so I found them all online and downloaded them for him. Randi happens to come across us while she's sipping a bottle of iced tea. “Having fun with my friend here?” she asks him as they light up their cigarettes in tandem.

We squint at the video. The video resolution is low and the glare from sitting outside washes out the screen.

“Is this the Derby?” Randi asks.

I nod.

She turns to Martin. “Brings back old memories?”

“Not good ones,” he says.

We get to the point where Diabolo and Avatar are running neck and neck. Avatar would go on to win the Belmont. After surgery to repair a shattered pastern, Diabolo was put to stud in Arkansas. Martin studies the race with the same stoic concentration that he did watching A Cut Above race a week earlier.

“Oh, look, you're fucking out in front,” Randi says.

A few racetrackers have gathered around us. “Is this YouTube?” one guy in a train conductor's cap asks. “I've got a video for you after this.”

“This is when Sid's horse gets bumped,” I say to Randi as the video shows the race at the final turn.

“Yeah, he did get fucking bumped. You still did fucking good,” she tells Martin. “Let's watch the one where Forego beat Honest Pleasure in the Marlboro Cup.”

“Just punch in Silky Sullivan,” says the guy in the cap.

After the crowd loses interest, Martin is even more laconic than usual, and I realize maybe I got it wrong. I thought that someone who kept such thick scrapbooks of the past would be eager to return to it, but it could be those records are Martin's way of flash-freezing that time, locking those memories down with the exception of a few pre-made anecdotes and quips. Or maybe it makes for a better story to tell everyone you've never seen a replay in all these years. Who am I to squelch this lie of convenience?