My Year of the Racehorse (3 page)

WHEN PEOPLE ASK me what my parents think of my being a writer, I fear they want related an intergenerational immigrant clash in which I'm beaten with a bamboo rod, then banished to my room to practise violin.

The closest I ever got to an argument with my parents about my writing occurred when my father, making one of his semi-annual visits to Hong Kong to visit my grandmother, got me to sign copies of my first book for various aunts and uncles. I did so grudgingly, thinking that my father was foisting copies of a wordy book on non-native speakers of English. I now realize, perversely, that I was embarrassed of my father's pride in me.

“I don't like your attitude,” he told me softly. Then he turned away from me and the stack of books.

I don't know how people can say they've had no regrets in their life, because my life has had too many moments like this, when I've hurt the people who love me in order to protect a false idea of myself. This false idea includes arriving fully formed, not anybody's child.

But, of course, I have parents, ones who came from not only another culture and language but a far more alien set of circumstances. My father grew up in Hong Kong, the de facto oldest son of nine siblings after an older brother died as a toddler. His own father, a civil servant in southern China, struggled to find work in the British territory because he couldn't speak English. For that reason, my grandmother helped support the family by putting together bouquets of paper flowers at home with my aunts; my father once told me she had to work so quickly that she was terrified the bouquets would fall apart when the time came to deliver her handiwork.

Half of my father's school tuition was waived as a bursary; for the other half, his parents needed to pawn belongings. “You'd approach the pawn shop and the broker would be sitting on a platform,” my father once recalled, “so they could look down at you.” From the stories he tells, many of the friends in his youth were writers and filmmakers, some of them now successful and famous, and for a time he did English translations for a literary journal. (Maybe he wasn't such a great translator; he once joked about working on a passage from The Godfather and translating Don Corleone into the Chinese equivalent of Donald Corleone.) I've never asked him whether he harboured any aspirations to pursue a career in what they now call the “culture industry,” or whether he realized that it was a poor bet and he should instead study accounting while holding a full-time job. And I've never asked my father—who filled the house with English- and Chinese-language books, from pot boilers and popular histories to management manuals and crumbling paperback editions of Raymond Queneau and Henry Miller novels—whether at least some of the pride he feels in his son doesn't come from doing well enough to allow for him to take foolish risks.

Carl Jung suggested “the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents.” This quote comes to mind every year, when I get my dad to do my taxes. If, in fact, I've lived my own father's unlived life, I've done a decent job of transferring back that burden.

Every spring I come to my dad with bags of receipts roughly divided into these categories:

A. Expenses for office supplies

B. Travel

C. Drinking while on business

D. Car bills

E. Drinking while not on business

F. Mystery

In the mystery bag, I throw in everything else within squirting distance of deductibility, like an invoice for a steam-cleaner rental (nothing worth talking about) and a receipt for new sunglasses that were stolen from my car. There's another bag for pay stubs and tax slips.

One night that spring, after walking my parents' dog, I find my father at his desk, chest-high in my receipts.

“So,” I say, stretching out my jaw, “how's that going?”

My dad dresses as he often does around the house—in pajamas and slippers, under a brown corduroy jacket, the back hank of his hair pushed up. He looks like someone escaping a fire. “Fine, but did you keep a mileage log of all your work travel, like I asked you to?” he asks me, flipping through his notes.

“Uh, yes,” I lie. “I'll get that to you, um, tomorrow?”

“Okay. And why did you spend $900 at a butcher shop last July?”

Every four or five years, a friend and I have a big party where we invite everyone we know and serve them grilled meat for five hours. “It's kind of like the Olympics,” I tell him, “but for meat-eaters. Can you write that off?”

“Okay, well, I'll call it an entertainment expense.”

“And I've been through your car receipts,” he says. “Did you buy new tires?”

Earlier that year, I'd promised to replace my bald tires after an unseasonably icy winter in which my car hovered along slush-packed city streets like a curling stone. “Well, no, but it's not like I do much highway driving,” I explain. “It's not life or death. I'll just drive really slowly in the snow. The worst that could happen is that I rear-end another car... or maybe injure a cyclist.”

“You need to get new tires before winter.”

While my father's attention wafts back to my receipts, I casually mention that I'd purchased a racehorse. His head re-emerges from his son-induced pile of paper.

“That must be the stupidest thing you've done,” he says. “Do you know how much that will cost?”

“I only have a small percentage of the horse. Just a hoof.”

“You don't understand this world, these people. You're going to be ripped off.”

“That's not going to happen.”

“Why do you even want to own a racehorse?” he asks me.

Because of a lifelong inclination to try out every wrong decision before settling on the right one, I've given little room to talk myself out of this boldface blunder. I can tell my dad that the horse is fodder for some stunt journalism, a reality-prose project, but he'll see through this evasion. And then I will have to talk about his illness, and open up about the sorrow I feel because of my waywardness. We don't belong to a family that submits itemized reports on our well-being. So I say nothing instead.

My father begins to glower at me. Even now, I dread his simmering disapproval more than my mother's bare-knuckle dressings-down. My father's emotional range is outwardly narrow, and yet I feel its shifts acutely. He gives me the look of someone who resents his own generosity. His scowl could peel paint.

BACK AT BARN A, I linger around like caked manure in the backside pavement, watching the horses gallop, chatting with Randi and Nick when they're feeling amiable, or just eating lunch alone at Trackers, the backside cafeteria. I get to know people who pop into Randi's break room: there's Mikey the exercise rider, a ladies' man in the backstretch; there's Aki, the twenty-two-year-old aspiring vet who grew up around show horses; there's Ardenne, an owner and a friend of Randi's.

What am I looking for, and why do I expect to find it here? It's not as though I want to be a horseman. Randi offers to show me how to shovel shit so I can clean a stall and feel useful, but I watch her lesson carelessly. There's no reason for my presence except my not wanting to do what I normally do, where I normally am. There's nothing waiting for me in my apartment but books I don't want to read, and writing I don't want to write.

Right now, I'm more interested in making my horse like me. At Trackers, I buy apples and bananas for my Mocha Time, who gobbles them up sloppily and without an errant morsel of appreciation. In these interactions I know how it feels to be a divorced mom's new boyfriend. I may as well be driving a Miata, reading The Tipping Point on audio book, and bragging about going to high school with Michael Bublé. No one is being impressed.

“It must be nice to have a life where you can stand around and stare at things,” Randi says as she lugs out a bag of bedding from her tack room. “All you ever do is stand around.”

“Well, it does my circulation no good,” I say, chin tucked in. “I suffer for my art.”

Randi drops one side of her mouth, the way she does when she's about to laugh, but just lets out a bemused grunt.

“Do you think she's a good-looking horse?” I ask her, looking at Blackie. “Or is she, like, a but-her-face?”

“Well,” Randi says, not sure why I'm asking, “she's not bad-looking.”

On the Internet, you can find a truckload of information on equine conformation, with detailed, annotated charts that will point out the correct proportions of a horse's bone structure and musculature. Symmetrical shoulders, a broad chest, and a long neck seem obvious enough attributes, but these guides lose me when they nicker on about the angle of the hocks or the length of the withers (the highest point of the horse's back) to its croup (the top of its hips) relative to the distance between the withers and its poll (the top of its head). I doubt I'll ever tell a good-looking horse from a scrubby one—a Michael Phelps of colts from an equine Steve Buscemi.

As a specimen of horseflesh, Mocha Time would never qualify as pin-up stroke material. First off, she is relatively short, though she has a long back. This isn't such a bad thing at Hastings, with its undersized five-furlong “bull ring” (more prominent tracks have mile-long dirt tracks and often turf ovals that run inside them), where a bigger horse would have trouble with the tighter turns. More alarmingly, though, her toes are all set wrong. She toes in at the front and toes out behind (i.e., her front toes point in, and her hind ones go out). Her knees poke out when they should be in line with the rest of her legs.

All of this means she has a hideous racing form—a horrible way of going. Her knees go up too high when she runs, which is both ungainly and inefficient. By contrast, a horse with a good way of going is like a hockey player whose stride betrays no strain. Without this desirable, if not essential, quality, Mocha Time gets by on determination.

And for what she lacks in looks, she makes up in personality. At first, I'm not sure what Randi means when she talks about a horse's personality. Sylvester, for instance, has a sense of humour, while Grandy, a horse that will soon leave Randi's barn, is haughty, even among her breed. When I think of a horse with a personality, I picture a thoroughbred that collects antique radios, rides a recumbent bicycle, and, after completing her social-work diploma, spends a summer working at an organic farm in Spain. But Randi seems to value this quality.

“Does Blackie have a good personality?” I ask Randi, following her into her break room where we join Nick, who's lying on a couch watching a simulcast of a Woodbine race in Toronto.

“She's a little bitch, but we all kind of like Blackie,” Randi says, lighting another cigarette before she settles into the armchair. “The other day I let her kick me to make her think she was cool.”

I laugh. “Come on.”

“Of course I didn't,” she says. “What I meant was she kicked me and I didn't give her a smack. If you go around hitting them and stuff, they get wimpier. Most people would wallop her.” She starts cackling. “And she would deserve it.”

“But, May”—the horse I'd helped Randi put the cold cast on—“she doesn't have much personality?” I ask.

Randi shakes her head. “She's just blah. She's not stupid, she's just boring.”

“So if May were a person, she would be like an accountant or something like that.”

“Yeah!” Randi says.

“Or an insurance salesman,” I add.

“Yeah!”

Nick nods, getting in on the conversation. “A very run-of-the-mill type.”

“The best horses would be like rock stars or something,” Randi adds. “A preening sucker.”

“A little bit of rock star,” Nick says, chuckling. “Maybe one of them guys that dresses up like one.”

“The bar star,” I suggest.

Randi seems to enjoy the game. “Sylvester would be a hero—a cop or fireman; Grandy would be a fucking princess; and Riley”—a horse she owns who's forever injured—“would be a fucking roughneck, fucking drinking, fucking carousing fucker.”

“No, he wouldn't,” Nick says, waving at her dismissively with a cigarette in his hand.

“Yeah, he would. Blackie would be a little slut or something.”

On this point, Nick is in agreement. “She'd be a tramp.”

I, too, get swept away by the game of matching horse with human. If Blackie were a movie star, I decide, she'd be maybe Juliette Lewis. Parker Posey, on a good day. Not exactly beautiful, but irresistible nonetheless, with a slightly nutty, feisty side. The kind of woman you'd invite over only after hiding your valuables, your medication, and your sharp objects. Now that's something I can cheer for.

MY REAL-ESTATE AGENT, Harris, and I were originally acquainted in university, where we drank so many jugs of draught beer that, at a starry point in many evenings, we left our pants unzipped to save time. In our precious sober hours, we wrote excruciating one-act plays about people who were unable to feel.

As I persisted tilling that nutrient-rich territory through the first decade of adulthood, Harris decided to find a career. Out of school, he worked at a boutique advertising agency in Toronto. In Toronto, he met his future wife and mother of his children, Angie, who was a lawyer. After failing to derive inner peace from turning out copy, Harris enrolled in culinary school, where he learned to make good tagine. But when he finally decided to move back to Vancouver, he found work selling real estate with his father.

Before meeting Harris's father, I knew his face from the pads of stationery that he stuffs in apartment mailboxes that bear the image of his handsome, moisturized visage beside his real-estate logo. Harris himself had those good looks in tadpole form at university, but they were obscured by a goatee and the peacoat he never took off and submerged under his beer-drinking weight. We became reacquainted two years ago at a garden party thrown by a mutual friend. We had been out of touch for a decade, and at first I didn't recognize him. He was clean-shaven and had pared off fifteen pounds from his frame; he'd always worn glasses, but now he wore them as a celebrity does—to reduce the glare of handsomeness.