Wisdom of the Aged by Craig Hattersley - HTML preview

Carlito and I had managed to gather around us a crusty bunch of Canandaigua misfits. We didn’t hobnob with the town’s finest teens, who hung out at the country club or yacht club during the summer or the Bristol Mountain ski lodge in the winter. The product of a lower-class upbringing, we had no money to speak of to buy the many things classmates sported as accouterments of the good life. None of us dated much (my first date would be a disastrous senior ball). We had no clue how to interact with any of what we considered the desirable girls. We weren’t part of any “in crowd,” but we worked hard to make sure they maybe liked us—or at least tolerated us. We opted instead for Friday-night penny-ante poker games rotating among our houses.

We gravitated smoothly to gambling associated with the racetrack that opened up eight miles outside of town, immersing ourselves in literature on handicapping horse races and booking bets amongst classmates. This fit in well with the underworld-cool persona we sought to project. It would’ve been better if we could have actually made money doing it.

And even better if Mom had not gotten so wrapped up in track life. Her favorite bar lay within spitting distance of the track, and she began drinking there with some of the shady characters who worked on the backstretch—the barn area—with horses. Her mother died about that time, leaving her what amounted to a tidy sum derived from Texaco stock she’d squirreled away, nearly $80,000, a handsome stash in those days. She used a small chunk of it to buy us a house, a small three-bedroom ranch-style house just outside town. But the rest she quickly frittered away on one drunken boyfriend or another, blowing a big part of it on a string of horses for a smooth-talking trainer down on his luck—who promptly shipped them out of her life for parts unknown.

I was aghast, as were my siblings, but had myself felt the allure of the backstretch and maybe understood better than they her boozy inclinations. I had been writing for the town’s weekly paper as the local kid voice (speaking truth to power when the YMCA raised the price of ping-pong from a nickel to a dime) and then added a column on horses to watch at the track—a poor man’s betting guide. And when an older neighbor came back one morning with fifteen dollars in his pocket made working for just one day at the track, I headed for the big time.

In comparison, the paper route I’d thrown for years paid a meager six or seven dollars a week, tops. And it meant getting up daily at 5:00 a.m. to make the rounds, as well as chasing down deadbeat customers in the evenings to collect. If I had to get up early to work, why not make it worth my while . . . This new source of quick cash attracted many of the town’s teenagers. The trainers at the track needed hotwalkers, people who walk the horses around the shedrow each morning to limber them up while their stalls are cleaned. For walking a horse thirty minutes, you could make a dollar; ten horses a day, a minimal effort, paid a princely wage for those times. Young Canandaiguans, thumbing rides, dotted the road to the track every morning when school was out. And before long, we all wore boots, spit a lot, and spoke in a fair drawl (for New Yorkers).

The first two summers I worked there, I really had to hustle to get into the backstretch. To pass the gate into the stable area, you needed a pass, and to get a pass, you had to be sixteen. So I skirted the gate and climbed the fence in remote corners of the spacious grounds to avoid security guards. The first summer, I walked horses for whoever paid me, from the seediest of low-life hucksters to the brassiest of the big-money operators, who wheeled and dealed horses like used cars.

I could never be sure I’d make it into the backstretch every morning. The guards caught me jumping the fence several times, lectured me, and booted me out—only for me to return to hit the fence again the next morning. I wore a cowboy hat two sizes too big in the hope that it would cover my youth as well as my head. In the cafeteria, I carefully sat with my back to any guards who might be in drinking coffee. All in all, I stayed pretty much invisible for two years of summers and weekends.

Much of the time, I walked horses for Mario, a Canadian sharpie who shipped five horses a week in and out of higher-class tracks in Canada. He often led all trainers at our track in wins (as well as in bets placed, no doubt). Mario wintered in New York, choosing not to migrate to Florida tracks with the majority of trainers. He exercised his horses during the winter by riding them cross-country through snowdrifts to muscle them up. The dude was tough, and he was brutal.

Horses that didn’t win for him when he expected were likely to get knocked around. You didn’t cross Mario—a few kicks in the gut, a lashing across the head with a bridle, sometimes an out-and-out whipping. The horses trembled at his command.

When I started working with him, he had managed to purchase an expensive filly cheap because she had undiagnosed problems and couldn’t run. He babied her along for a year, feeding her lumps of sugar and apples, never as much as raising his voice at her. She nuzzled right up to his coddling and pampering. Mario never allowed anyone else to even touch her, and she soon became a ferocious bitch.

He finally discovered that she had a cyst in her ovaries, which the vet removed, and his precious could run again—like the wind. She beat the best competition at the track so badly that no other trainers would enter their horses in a race against her. She was the class of the track.

But only Mario could get near her. Whenever I ducked into the stall to feed her, she reared up and came after me, all hooves and teeth. I still carry around a dent in my head from one of her flailing attacks. I took to feeding her when Mario wasn’t around, so I could defend myself with a shank or bridle. Better not let Mario catch you going after his darling.

Finally one day, standing near her stall with my back to her, holding a horse for the blacksmith to shoe—just as Mario approached—she lunged out against the webbing at the front of her stall, jaws spread, and nailed me in between my shoulder blades.

The pain! Wheeling quickly and ignoring Mario’s shout, I put every ounce of strength into one solid punch that landed with a thud square on her snout. She stopped dead, her knees wobbled, her eyes glazed over, and she staggered back, shaking her head. I dropped the reins of the horse I held and resigned my position, with great satisfaction. I didn’t like the way Mario handled horses anyway.

After overcoming my initial fear of these giant, skittish beasts, I’d learned to love them. Racehorses have been inbred over the years for speed and endurance and are, consequently, high-strung animals. Many young Canandaiguans found they couldn’t control thoroughbreds and wound up being dragged around the stable area a few times before they decided to find employment elsewhere.

Early on, I mastered what police call a “command voice” and managed to add some conviction to it. A horse has to know who’s boss, or he’ll make his own rules. At the same time you have to respect them because every year stable hands die when they stray into the path of a flying hoof. You always have to stay on top of a racehorse—be in command. But Mario took mastery of his horses to the extreme; he had no feeling for his stock.

I had turned sixteen and wanted a steady job, as well as the gate pass that went with it. More, I wanted to work for a level-headed trainer. So, I went to Johnny Rowne, an old-timer I’d helped on occasion (and who had a soft spot for my mother—and she, him). He liked me because I’d shown him I could handle horses. But, more important to him, it seemed he saw something in me. Johnny’s horses were his pets, his children almost. He didn’t want anyone working for him that didn’t think his way. He hired me because I affectionately clowned with his kids.

Of course, that meant getting a haircut. You couldn’t get a pass if your hair hung past your collar or fell down on your forehead. They didn’t want any no-account besmirching their reputations. This rule would remain in force until, several years later, they tried to muscle a jockey with money who showed up for work and took them to court. But for that gate pass, and to work for Johnny, I hit the barber and cleaned up my act.

Johnny, then in his late sixties, was a plain little man with simple tastes. A full-blooded Cherokee, he had worked with thoroughbreds for fifty years, beginning as a jockey not long after the turn of the century. He lived in a small room at the track so he could be close to his horses. Every morning during the summer, I’d knock on Johnny’s door at 5:00 a.m. He always popped right out, dressed in gray work pants and a gray jacket zipped up tight, the tiny collars paralleling the jut of his chin. A battered gray Stetson, pinned up in front like Gabby Hayes’, covered half his head and a mop of still-black hair. His weather-hewn features and dark complexion contrasted to an eternal beard stubble, which bristled gray.

Johnny cut quite a comical figure: the grizzled pint-sized dude with a rollicking gait, not quite convincing anybody with his gruff manner. Everyone knew Johnny was a softie.

Each of his horses had a nickname. Johnny’s “Big Horse,” a towering brown gelding named Part Time Indian, he dubbed “the Injun.” The old bitty of his string, Flora Bonda, was “Mother” (though when she occasionally tried our patience, the nickname became somewhat stronger). Our favorite, a small, stout, black gelding named Freedom Rider, we called “Junior”—he being the friskiest of the family.

Johnny raced “the Injun” for nearly ten years, setting a couple of track records in the process. By the time I hired on, though, the horse approached retirement. Johnny had made him into a big, lazy pet. You didn’t even need a shank to lead him around the shedrow; he just followed you, stopping when you stopped. Finally, a year or two before Johnny legally had to retire him, he put the old trooper out to pasture. I noted—but was too young to really share—Johnny’s anguish when his Big Horse died.

“Mother,” a squirrely old mare, also had won some big races for Johnny. The years I worked with her she spent recovering from bowed tendons, a common problem in the fragile front legs of thoroughbreds. Because she couldn’t be run, or even exercised, she became quite rank, hard to handle. Just when her legs finally healed, she went berserk in a thunderstorm and threw her hip out, permanently disabling her. So, Johnny shipped her out to end her life chewing grass on a farm.

“Junior” had real personality, always shuckin’ and jivin’, nippin’ and playin’. At one time, he ran at class tracks against high-dollar horses, but problems with his front knees gradually devalued him. Seven days a week, Johnny would spend hours after the chores were done rubbing and wrapping Junior’s knees, keeping “the porky little devil,” as he called him, healthy.

Every morning at five as Johnny and I appeared at the shedrow to dole out dippers of breakfast oats, there’d be Junior, grinning, bobbing his head, and stomping his feet, as if to say: “Let’s go, you guys. Let’s get this day on the road.”

“Shit, Craaaaig,” Johnny would say, always stretching my name out four or five a’s, “You’d better air out ol’ Junior first this mornin’, or he won’ be worth two dead flies.”

Junior always performed well for Johnny, earning a steady flow of cash. He ran so well one particular season that another trainer claimed him for $2,500. (Horses running in claiming races, the majority of them, can be claimed before the race runs, changing owners after.) Johnny didn’t say much—it’s all part of the game.

Over the next few months, Junior ran for his new owner against a slightly higher class of horses. All along, he ran like a palsied cow, badly beaten in every start by a class of horses he should have competed well against. The new owner dropped him back down to the $2,500 level, but could still barely get him across the finish line ahead of the meat wagon. Johnny chuckled, saying, “They just don’ know ’bout them knees, Craaaaig.”

Finally, the new owner—perplexed that a horse that earned $9,000 in the previous year couldn’t win back a penny of his investment—dropped him down into a $2,000 race. Johnny immediately claimed him back, pocketing the extra $500. Junior then proceeded to win another $10,000 in the next year. Older hands at the track, who’d seen it all happen before, knew better than to claim one of Johnny’s horses: Nobody could get them to run as well as the Indian did.

It had little to do with Junior’s knees, really. Anybody at the track can rub knees. But not everybody knew which farmers in the county sold hay with just the right mix of alfalfa in it (Johnny said too much alfalfa gave the horses gas). Nobody else but the Indian knew the country roads that hid patches of wild clover the horses so loved. Few others spent every waking hour puttering around the shedrow, attending to small hurts and cares. Johnny entwined his life around the lives of his charges; he left himself time for little else.

We worked together over the next two years, the two of us maintaining nine horses. Racetrack routine often tied up sixty hours a week and was rough on a young man’s night life, but working conditions made it seem more a way of living than just a job. But the wages paid certainly wouldn’t have allowed me to retire young.

The next summer, I quit to earn real money, as an apprentice carpenter on a high-rise construction job. I lasted a month. When I returned to the track, Johnny had my job waiting for me. He knew I’d be back. I was hooked.

Not that Johnny and I made a rosy couple. We had our differences. On the afternoons we had horses entered in races, we returned to the shedrow after lunch for preparations: extra rub-downs, brushings and combings (no braids or flowers in the mane for Johnny’s horses), and pep talks. Some horses ran better when their legs were iced, so we’d hold them standing in a tub for hours before racetime.

But on afternoons we didn’t race, negotiations began in earnest. I usually tried to skate into town, following the urgings of my youth, although Johnny would want me to stick around and learn always a little more about horses.

I’d tell him I loved horses but I’d make my money with my head. I’d be a rich lawyer and maybe own a string of horses—which Johnny would train. He always just chuckled and gave me that “crazy-kid” look.

I didn’t apprentice out to a blacksmith who asked because blacksmiths are a nervous bunch, and all seem to be missing a finger or two. I didn’t apprentice out to the vet, who was interested, because I couldn’t hack the many years of science classes. And I wouldn’t commit to Johnny because the racetrack offered no way to get rich quick.

As noted, I was a mercenary little bastard. The Indian had to barter with me to get me to mow the lawn, and any extra tasks that he needed help with on off afternoons had their price. My free time cost him dearly. I didn’t really know the value of what I had.

Postscript: When I decided to move on, to check out life in New York City (detailed later), Johnny couldn’t believe it: “What you goin’ do that for, Craaaaig? You don’t belong down there. They ain’t like you.”

He sighed and shook his head, too tired for the crazy-kid look.

After my first aborted year in the city, I returned upstate, looking to head back under the shedrow. I finagled my way into the backstretch, but was shocked to find our barn now occupied by a fat Florida trainer. Searching the stable area, I finally found Johnny, head down, drinking coffee by himself in the kitchen. His beat-up Stetson was mashed down further than usual, covering his eyes. His dark complexion had turned ashen, with a frightening tint of yellow.

This wasn’t the Johnny I’d sat next to on overturned buckets, eating fresh corn-on-the-cob and laughing at the kittens skittering from stall to stall in hot pursuit of invisible monsters.

He talked in a slur about doctors and medication, saying he had retired. “I sold mah tack, Craaaaig. I don’ feel so good.”

I filled the conversation with questions about Junior and the rest, trying to keep it light and easy to conceal the horror in my heart. Haltingly, yet clearly attempting to comfort me, he said they were all turned out to pasture on a friend’s farm.

Remorse and grief choked the words from my mouth. I could say little more, except, finally: “Damn, Johnny. Take care of yourself.”

He reassured me, saying: “Them doctors was pretty smart. They got me on all kinda treatments. Don’ worry ’bout me.”

Feeling useless, powerless, I managed to blurt out something about calling me if he needed anything. I felt hollow, facing a man with so much of what must be peace of mind and love in him (something that had heretofore eluded me), reduced to holding a cup of coffee with two hands to steady it. I held back my tears only out of respect. I wished then I’d never left Johnny, and that we could spend the rest of our lives together clowning with the horses.

I heard soon after that Johnny had died. I swore that someday, somehow, I’d find the words to describe what he meant to me. But they just don’ make words like that anymore.