The Legend of Zippy Chippy (12 page)

On race days, Emily, who has also served as Felix's barn foreman, uses her cubbyhole tack room as a private retreat. She never goes to the frontside to watch the races, so once she's prepped the horses for the track, she escapes to her cool cubicle with its ten-inch TV, stuffed chair, and table, the top a laminated photo
of her family. Emily, who loves horses more than strangers, only locks the door when media types come asking about Zippy Chippy.

“I've never been off the hill,” she told me. Every day except for the track's dark days, when the horses don't run, Emily works the stalls and walks the horses of the two barns, where everyone, including her daughter, labors tirelessly from well before dawn to dusk.

Conversations on the backside might be a mix of Spanish and English, but the lingo sounds like it's from another planet. When asked how her mother and father met, Marisa said, “There was this trainer named Floyd Wright, and my mom was walking hot for him and my dad was breaking his babies.”

Translation: They met at the trainer's stable, where Emily was walking horses to cool them down after races or workouts and Felix was training two-year-olds, breaking them in to become racehorses. Just so we're clear – Emily did not have the hots for Mr. Wright, and Felix is quite fond of children.

These days, instead of sleeping in the back of Emily's old red Ford, Marisa drives her own Dodge Ram. On this day Marisa has been up since 3:45 a.m. to look after her own horses on her nearby farm. She is waved through the track's stable gate, and by eight, she has taken care of her trainer's twenty horses – she's fed 'em, watered 'em, groomed 'em, and mucked out their stalls. Working the shed row with her plastic toolbox filled with grooming materials, Marisa looks like a Molly Maid, but in riding gear. At twelve-thirty, she mounts Jazz, one of her two exercise ponies, and they trot up to the track, where she will spend the afternoon as one of the track's ten pony riders, escorting that day's entries from rail to gate before each of their races. Two outriders, one in front and one behind the post parade, are there to avoid a crisis,
more than likely a runaway, riderless horse. Since there is only one stable, Marisa's other pony, Gamble, is boarded at home until next month, when he and Jazz will switch places.

Mid-morning, trainers will wander in with instructions; in the meantime there are always last-minute tasks. The bandages on Mr. Hopps's knees need tightening; Isabella of Chance has an eye infection that requires a new poultice; the blinkers on Lady Lorna are not large enough for those big, beautiful eyes.

As at most tracks, the barns at Finger Lakes Racetrack brush up against the backstretch of the track, where a six-foot-wide gap in the metal railing allows horses being galloped to easily enter and exit from their stalls during training sessions. Zippy Chippy did not like to sweat on his days off. With his record of losses, it's doubtful he saw any point in workouts, so he developed a unique way of ending an exercise session.

“He'd be coming around the turn at a good clip, and as soon as he spotted the gap,” remembered Marisa, “he would just stop dead and buck off his exercise jockey. Then he'd bolt through that space in the fence and trot home to his stall all by himself.” There he would stand, fully saddled and in front of his pen, practically knocking on the door to get in. He did it so often it became routine, and the handler closest to his stall would simply remove his saddle and push him on in. The exercise boy would come by some time later and curse him out in Spanish.

Not long after getting comfortable in his pen, Zippy would become bored and go looking for a little adventure. Normally, the webbing of three leather straps across the door of a stall, all hooked on clips on either side of the sill, was enough to keep a horse penned. Before the full metal screen became a fixture on his stall (after, I'm sure, his handlers considered prison doors, barbed wire, armed guards, or a moat with sharks swimming in
it), Zippy figured out that with a little pressure from his broad chest, he could break the snap of the top two straps and pop the third one with his knee. Then off he'd go, as the Aussies say, on a “walkabout.” Exploring the backside on the trot, he would attract the attention of the horse handlers and the envy of the other horses peering out of their stalls. Yelling for help, the people in pursuit would grow to a posse that would finally end Zippy's brief escapade of freedom in some far-off, fenced-in corner of the track.

Having been summoned from his house, a very annoyed Felix would arrive and lead his horse back to the barn. Once there, he'd push him into his stall with a little more force than was necessary and slam the door in his face. And then the usual bulletin: “Zippy's been a bad boy … blah, blah, blah.” Sometimes, when the track staff became tired of his act, they'd just ignore him until he wore himself out and found his own way home. If Zippy's handlers could have made him sit in the corner of the barn wearing a dunce hat, they would have. And then, for their personal enjoyment, he would have eaten that hat.

Marisa was sure she had seen Zippy Chippy break out of his stall in every conceivable way – under the webbing, through the webbing, out an unlatched door, through a door that latched and locked. But then one day she saw him … break
into
his stall. Felix and his daughter had a daily routine of turning out their stable of horses into the shed row so they could go in and clean out their pens unimpeded. They stacked a makeshift barricade of two-by-fours across the door of each stall to keep the horses out while they worked. All of the horses except for Zippy. Felix would not hear of letting Zippy loose in the barn, because although he didn't know exactly what might capture the horse's curiosity, he knew only drama or devilry would follow. Marisa, showing early signs of becoming either a union leader or a civil rights lawyer,
protested that it was unfair to keep Zippy cooped up while the others got to leave their pens and play. After five days of hearing that he might be the cruelest trainer on earth, never mind the worst dad, Felix relented. Zippy was turned out to play with the other kids at recess while father and daughter mucked their stalls.

“He was fine,” said Marisa. “He was running around and rearing up and having a great old time.” For a while.

“I guess at some point he missed me, because we heard this crashing and banging, and … Zippy jumped the fence of two-by-fours and smashed his way back into the stall.” With the daring of a circus horse performing the ring of fire, Zippy the inmate, finally set free, had broken back into his own pen.
Why
, he must have asked himself,
would they let me just walk out the door when they know I much prefer an old-fashioned prison break?
Once inside, he was all over Marisa – chasing her around his stable and then out to the shed row and all around the barn. Unfortunately, so was Felix. “Boy, did I get yelled at that day!” she said.

For a horse – an animal with a small brain relative to its body mass – Zippy Chippy had a well-developed sense of curiosity. Equine experts believe that a horse with a low IQ is more submissive and therefore easier to train. By that measure, the untrainable Zippy Chippy may well have been a genius.

Why would I leave? I like it here
.

Writer Paul Sheldon to Annie Wilkes, who has shattered both his ankles with the flat side of an axe and has him hobbled and hogtied to his bed, in the movie
Misery

Zippy Chippy's favorite people made for a very small group: Felix and Emily, of course Marisa, an exercise rider named Carlos Carmello, and anybody with a box of donuts. Chris Roncone, the man with the unenviable job of caring for Zippy's feet, never made that list.

“Zippy was a huge pain in the ass to shoe,” recalled the farrier, the memory more matter-of-fact than fond. As the Finger Lakes shoeman, Chris would arrive at barn twenty with the names of a couple of horses that needed to be shod that day. Most animals cooperate with the process and the farrier needs only one “holder” to keep the horse still. Zippy often needed a team to hold him in place, but hardly still.

“Plus, it wasn't just for this track here. Felix had Zippy running in match races and trotting events and a bunch of other damn stuff. You need different plates for grass and different surfaces. So it was more often than the normal thirty or forty days that I had to work on Zippy. And man, he was a nightmare.”

Bent over while taking a hoof pick to Zippy's foot with his back to the horse, the shoeman was defenseless. When the shoeing sessions turned into wrestling matches, with Chris outweighed by more than nine hundred pounds, he strongly requested that Zippy be tranquilized. Felix refused.

“Plus, Felix would baby the shit out of that horse,” said Chris. “And the horse got away with murder.”

Well, maybe not murder, but Zippy definitely got away with a vicious assault on an expensive, inanimate object. With no love lost between the horse and the farrier, one bright and sunny day Chris pulled up to Felix's barn in his brand-new Chevy pickup, and Felix happened by with Zippy Chippy in tow. They were out on a stroll and having a grand ol' time.

“And it didn't help that Felix had a beer in one hand, Zippy in the other. Felix is jabbering away to somebody inside the barn, not paying attention, and yeah, that's when Zippy went after my truck.”

Marisa remembers the incident with the pickup truck all too well. When Zippy turned his back on the vehicle, she knew what was coming and yelled to her dad, but it was too late. “He didn't just kick it,” she said. Zippy turned, lined up the side of the shiny red Chevy with his ass, and then with both back feet – recently shod by Chris, of course – he …