The Legend of Zippy Chippy (10 page)

A dog looks up to a man. A cat looks down on a man.

But a patient horse looks a man in the eye and sees him as an equal
.

Anonymous

His worst moment ever still brought fear into the eyes of Felix Monserrate when, years later, he remembered that dreary day in late November 1997, during one of Zippy Chippy's worst losing streaks. In the midst of one of his horse's most cantankerous spells, Felix lost sight of his darling daughter Marisa. With her chubby cheeks and dark hair, she was precious, a sparkle of kindness in his rough world of soiled stables and vocal disbelievers. A dervish in rubber boots, one second she was beside him and then she was instantly gone.

Every day before she scooted off to school, Marisa would help Felix clean the stalls and feed the twenty or so horses her father boarded and trained at the family farm near the track. Marisa was only seven years of age and in grade two at the time, but in the barn she was a fully developed groom, washing horses and shoveling shit with the best of them. Home from school in the late afternoon, she would again plunge into her chores, doing the job of a stable boy, working alongside her dad.

Even then Marisa was small for her age, a fact comically confirmed by a photo of her standing in a feed bucket in the corner of a stable, half of her below the rim, holding on to the edges.

When Marisa was ten, she mesmerized the rest of the kids at Victor Elementary School by riding Peanut, her big, black Quarter Horse, into her grade six classroom for show and tell. Every kid in the world wants a pony; Marisa had her own horse. The plan was to have Peanut appear for only an hour, but when the word got out she had to take him into every classroom in the school, and they spent the whole day on tour. Marisa wanted to bring Zippy Chippy to the event, but schools back then did not have a security routine known as “lockdown.”

Marisa can't remember a time when she was not smack-dab in the center of the business of horses. As a two-year-old she would sleep in the cap of Emily's red pickup truck, parked beside Felix's barn. They would arrive at the dark hour of five in the morning, and Marisa would sleep off and on until eight. Beside her was her cousin Keri Cordero, six months older and the niece of the Hall of Fame jockey Angel Cordero. They talked about their favorite horses and played hide and seek, crawling around the truck's floor like two lumps under a bank of blankets and giggling until they cried. Once the girls were awake, Emily would bring them into her tiny tack room and give them a cereal breakfast before she was due back on the hot-walk circuit. The kids played games and watched TV in what can only be described as a glorified shed.

Sometimes Felix, Emily, and the kids would arrive at the track in the afternoon, and as the van approached the barn, Felix would jump out and scare the bejesus out of the kids by suddenly appearing at their back window, making faces and waving at them while the vehicle went downhill fast, headed for the barn. It would be years before Marisa and Keri figured out that Emily had a hand
on the bottom of the steering wheel and a foot on the brake while Felix did his Charlie Chaplin routine, running beside the truck.

Almost as soon as she learned to talk, Marisa's job description included standing at the entrance to barn number twenty, pointing to the shuttered-up stall seven and explaining to anybody who wandered by, “Zippy's been bad again. He's locked in his room and can't come out.” Emily had one rule for the children: they were never to leave the tack room until eleven, when all the chaotic business of prepping the horses in and around the barn was finished. Once all the horses were stabled, the barn became their very own romper room. They could roam anywhere their young and curious hearts desired. Okay, there was a second rule: never go near the problem known as Zippy Chippy.

Once, while Marisa's aunt was feeding Zippy when Felix was away, the horse had trapped the poor woman in the corner of his stall for three dark and eerie hours. It took two handlers with batches of food to distract him long enough for Nancy McCabe to safely scurry out of the cell.

Occasionally Marisa was allowed to walk Zippy, but only with her dad on the lead. Once in a while she was permitted to pet him, just as long as there was a fence or a barrier between them. But at this point in her life, Marisa was not just curious but fearless. As the young savior of stray dogs and injured cats, she was drawn to the horse that was most unlike the others. She absolutely adored Zippy Chippy.

It was early on that damp November morning in the barn when Felix lost sight of his half-pint helper. Felix's routine was to start his day by scanning the trainer's board in the main tack room to see which horses were running that day and which ones needed to be exercised on their day off. He thought his daughter was right beside him. And she was, until she noticed that the
protective screen across the entrance to Zippy's stall had gone missing. No other horse on the shed row needed this extra security across the door of the stall. Somebody, probably the new groom, had mistaken Zippy Chippy for a normal horse and used only the webbing – two chains attached to his nameplate – to keep him secured in his pen. In a heartbeat, little Marisa scooted in under the webbing and ran to the far corner of the stall, looking up into the surprised eyes of the horse that seasoned handlers would feed only by delivering food at the end of a rake.

When Felix noticed that Marisa was missing, he panicked. “Anyway, I can't find her, and I look everywhere,” recalled Felix. “And then the worst idea come to my mind, and I run to Zippy's stall, and there …” He choked up a bit and tapped a finger on the table. Felix, a man who had been around horses most of his life, froze in fear, standing motionless in front of the webbing emblazoned with Z
IPPY
C
HIPPY
.

Later, he couldn't recall how long he had stood there, quiet, motionless, staring into the dark. He thought he should call out for help, but any noise at all might spook the horse.

There, in that moment of sheer terror when the mind goes numb and the limbs go limp, Felix saw the feet of his little girl in the far corner of the dark stall, with Zippy looming over her. He started to call out for her, but no words would come. Zippy's broad backside was blocking Felix's view of his little girl, a wisp of a thing, cornered by this hulking horse. The stall was ghostly quiet, not a peep or a movement by any of them. Felix was almost relieved not to be able to see the terrified look on his daughter's face. Still he didn't do anything. Speechless, he just stood there helplessly. At one point he thought he might grab the horse by the tail and make himself the target. But if the animal wheeled around violently, he'd surely take Marisa with him.

Throw a bucket at the other wall
, Felix thought to himself,
and when the horse turns in that direction, snatch Marisa from Zippy's blind side
. There was a rope on a hook on the wall, and if he could get a noose around the neck of …

And then Felix heard something that made him listen carefully, so he could make sure he wasn't dreaming.

Stunned, Felix heard his little girl laughing and giggling. And when Marisa walked toward her father, Zippy didn't try to block her path or, worse, raise his kicking foot to her face. Instead he pranced around her, nickering and snickering like a frisky little foal. And they waltzed around on the straw floor of the pen like that, the child laughing and hanging on the horse's mane and Zippy strutting beside her and nuzzling her in play. The source of Felix's tears switched quickly from fear to joy as he watched them play together in the stall that had always been off limits. Marisa scolding Zippy, pointing a finger at him and calling him “a very bad boy,” was indeed a sight to behold. Zippy, blowing and snorting, seemed to be agreeing. They put on quite a show for Felix, one that came with uncommon relief and a great big lesson in life.

“And that,” said Felix, hitting the table with the palm of his hand, “that was it. I never see that horse the same anymore.”

“Yeah, everything changed that day in the stable,” said Marisa. “Everything seemed better somehow.”

While Zippy had always been part of the extended family, the barn people's favorite black sheep, he was now Marisa's new best friend and protector. On that fall morning before the school bus arrived to pick up Marisa, Zippy Chippy's last name officially became Monserrate. “That's when me and my mom knew that Zippy had a good forever-home with us,” remembers Marisa. And Zippy, of course, was still more the black sheep than the
brown horse of the Monserrate clan. He would continue to disappoint Felix, anger Emily, and confuse Marisa – so, yeah, they were definitely a family.

And the “getting rid of him” option?

“He wasn't going anywhere,” recalled Marisa. “My daddy would never get rid of that horse.”

“No,” agreed Felix, nodding then shaking his head. “I can't do it.”

Eighty-two losses or a hundred and eighty-two losses – it never mattered after the eight-year-old kid and the six-year-old pony became inseparable friends for life that day in the straw-strewn stall on a hilly spread in the rural community of Farmington, New York. After that serendipitous moment – a very close encounter that could have proved horrific but turned out to be quite magical – Felix staunchly defended his horse against all criticism.

To anyone – from an angry bettor to a skeptical track official, from a groom with a bandaged hand to a reporter broaching the subject of futility – Felix would always present his favorite analogy: “Say you have three children. One is a lawyer, doing well. The other a doctor, very, very successful. But the third one, not so smart, so he's working at McDonald's. What do you do? Ignore him?” Then Felix would pause and reach around and scratch the scar on his back and say, “That's the one you gotta help the most! That's Zippy Chippy.”

Although Felix's often-repeated analogy would not win him a free coffee at McDonald's, the man was right as rain. Felix nailed the secret of the family right there! Who's the better father – the one who pays for the gifted son to get through college or the one who pays the steeper price of time and attention, struggling to see his unblessed boy through life?

With Felix and Zippy, it was not only about horse racing; it was about friends and family. An odd family, mind you – the kind
where you notice in the Christmas card photo that the adopted son's head is the size of a laundry basket and his pedoinker is hanging out – but a family nonetheless.

Felix could not know it at the time, but that lightning strike of kindness and love that touched both his favorite horse and his dearest daughter sealed Marisa's fate for life. Today, the kid who once fit nicely into a food tub is a highly respected pony rider and groom at Finger Lakes Racetrack, well on her way to becoming an owner and a trainer. Marisa loves her work as much as her parents like to brag about their special daughter. With Marisa raising two small children and caring for a menagerie of pets at the same time, there's a lot to be proud of here.

Only a modicum of Zippy's goofiness has rubbed off on Marisa. Occasionally, along with another Finger Lakes pony rider, and only because it's so close to the track, she will ride her horse through the drive-thru at … you guessed it, McDonald's.

Much to the chagrin of wise track people, Zippy had always been Felix's pet. It just took time and a whole bunch of losses for the man to admit it. Thanks to Marisa, who first touched and then revealed the very soul of this baffling beast with a child's laugh instead of a trainer's tight lead, the horse was now firmly ensconced in his owner's household. Not literally, of course, because that crazy bugger could still kick the screen out of the television set faster than Elvis could change a channel with his .44 Magnum handgun. (Yes, Elvis actually did that, and on more than one occasion.)

Watching his little girl and his big-butted horse frolicking in the same stall where Zippy had once pinned him to the wall for sixty terrifying minutes had a dramatic effect on Felix. He saw their relationship differently after that, even changed the way he trained the horse. That single small act of affection – a little girl
brushing the horse's face with a loving hand – was not lost on the track-hardened father and trainer. Once he might have given Zippy a bit of a spanking or instructed a jockey to go heavy on the whip; there would be no more of that from now on.

“Zippy, he stands up for himself. You better treat him with love or fuhgeddaboudit.” And then, with a bit of a crooked smile, he added, “But he still bite me.”

That didn't mean Zippy was through trying the man's patience. Indeed, the next few races would cast Felix in the role of the Puerto Rican Job, with racetrack challenges of biblical proportions. While he still dreamed of his horse winning a race, Zippy may have felt that unnecessary, what with the lineup of fawning fans snapping his picture these days and calling him their “boy.” And oh, those handfuls of crunchy carrots from strangers, the fresh ones with the stems still on.