Spectacular Bid was back in Baltimore, tired and sore. His hoof ached thanks to both his mishap with the safety pin in his New York stall and the pounding the sore hoof had taken in the Belmont.
Dr. Harthill had treated Spectacular Bid before the race on Saturday, sneaking into Belmont Park in the trunk of a car because he was banned from the premises. But on Sunday he drove right through the gates of Pimlico like the eminence that he was. He’d come at Buddy Delp’s request to operate on the horse’s hurt foot, but his back still ached from his clandestine journey on Saturday morning. Instead of operating on the Bid himself, he oversaw Buddy Delp’s talented day-to-day veterinarian, Jimmy Stewart.
Dr. Stewart was a young man, still in his thirties, but he and Harthill had known each other for many years. They had first met when Stewart was a boy. Young Jimmy had bought a pony to train and resell, but the animal developed navicular disease and was lame. As a special favor to Jimmy’s father, a trainer, Harthill came to Jimmy’s house and treated the ailing pony as though it was a top thoroughbred and not the prized pet of a child. Afterward Stewart’s grateful mother invited the hero-veterinarian to a hot, home-cooked meal.
After dinner, while she cleared the table, Mrs. Stewart tentatively asked Harthill, “What do we owe you?” The good doctor took out his pad and pen and wrote up a bill. He tore it out and handed it to her. “Paid in full,” it said, “for services rendered to Mrs. Stewart for a wonderful dinner.”
That was the Harthill that young Jimmy Stewart knew, a kindly and generous genius who would give his valuable time to a concerned child, save a horse’s life, and charge nothing for it. Other people may have had their problems with Harthill, but Dr. Stewart admired him, felt affection for him, and was eager to work with him.
When Harthill arrived at Pimlico, Stewart had already taken pictures of Spectacular Bid’s injured foot and had the X-rays in hand.
“What do you think?” Harthill asked before looking, a sign of deference to an “equal.”
“Well, I haven’t had him out of the stall yet,” Stewart responded.
So the two vets took the famous horse out of his stall and jogged him on the blacktop. They observed his movements and then looked at each other. The Bid clearly appeared lame to both of them. Stewart applied pressure to the affected hoof and found a sensitivity in the specific area of the wound but still could not see any visual evidence of it.
Based on the X-rays and his own pressure test, Dr. Stewart knew where to go, and he cut a small, curved opening on the hard surface of the hoof. Harthill, nursing his aching back, looked on and supervised him. There was no liquid inside the incision. That told the two doctors that there was no abscess.
Stewart cut farther, and a millimeter or two down he saw a spot. He continued on until he could finally see the pin’s distinct path. The small, sharp metal had made its way about a quarter of an inch down, all the way to the bottom of the horse’s sole. Fortunately the path stopped just above the laminae, where there would have been a far greater possibility of infection and a threat to the horse’s mortality. Instead, he could see that the pin had hit the coffin bone, causing it to take a sharp right turn.
Stewart cleaned out the area and prescribed the appropriate medications to ensure against the possibility of a post-operation infection. And just like that, the traumatized hoof that had changed racing history was addressed, and Spectacular Bid was on the mend.
Ronnie Franklin had injuries resulting from the pursuit of the Triple Crown too, but his weren’t so easy to see or treat. The complex young man was physically and mentally exhausted. He had been publicly criticized all over the country for his supposedly poor ride in the Belmont. But it wasn’t until he went out to Southern California to participate in an all-star event and get some rest that the public got a glimpse of his biggest problems.
Taking a day off from work, Ronnie met up with California-based relatives to go to Disneyland. But instead of enjoying an idyllic and innocent day inside the park filled with innocent childhood icons, he and some of his cousins hung back in the car.
There, in the parking lot of the “Happiest Place on Earth” Ronnie took out a glass surface and a razor blade and a little baggy of white powder. He poured the powder onto the glass and used the blade to chop it up into fine particles.
The young jockey was dealing with his stress and unwinding just the way he’d learned to do it back at Buddy’s house in old Laurel. But just then, a security guard happened by and saw what was happening. He knocked on the window, and just like that an era was over. Franklin was arrested on the spot, and in an instant his public image as a likable young man was irretrievably shattered.
Cocaine possession in California was serious business, a felony. But even worse than that was the onslaught of negative publicity. Newspapers from coast to coast carried the story, many accompanied by harsh commentaries that piled on the troubled kid and detailed how unpopular he was in the jockeys’ room and throughout racing.
Ronnie wasn’t the only coke user in Spectacular Bid’s inner circle, but he was forced to stand in the harsh glare all by himself. Nobody stood up to protect him.
When the press turned to Buddy Delp for answers, the trainer’s initial impulse was to disavow his protégé. He talked about how unintelligent Ronnie was and how untruthful. He told the press that Ronnie was indefinitely “suspended” from riding any of his horses. And in particular he would be replaced on Spectacular Bid. And then there was the usual Delp-blabber about the foot-in-ass corporal punishment he would mete out as soon as he and Ronnie were in the same room.
Few if any journalists pressed Delp to find out how extensive Ronnie’s drug use was. Many merely accepted Buddy’s explanations that he didn’t know anything about the problem. In the meantime, Buddy spent twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with the kid. How could he not know?
No one asked that question.
Incredibly it was Delp, and not the media, who adeptly shaped the narrative of the story. Although Buddy had introduced Ronnie to cocaine and indulged in it himself, side by side with both Ronnie and his own teenage son Gerald, he feigned surprise by the arrest and claimed ignorance of the entire culture of cocaine. “I don’t know about that stuff [cocaine],” Buddy said, “but Ronnie tells me it was a quarter of a gram. I don’t condone fooling with it.”
Buddy utilized these lies to insulate and distance himself from the drugs. He made use of his crude but effective oratorical skills to rehabilitate Ronnie’s image. He called the kid “a victim of circumstance” and said that the boy was targeted only because he was a celebrity. “I don’t think he would have been arrested,” Buddy said, “if he weren’t Ronnie Franklin. I don’t think anybody would have made much of it if there had just been a bunch of teenage kids [in the car doing drugs].”
Before making any statement to the press, Ronnie conferred with Delp. When he finally spoke up, he didn’t spill his guts about the world of drugs he lived in (and paid for) at Delp’s house. He didn’t mention the fact that he had seen Harry Meyerhoff smoking a joint. And he didn’t breathe a word about the pervasive drug culture he saw in the jockeys’ room at the track more generally. He merely humbly said, “I’ve never used the stuff before.”
The media might have readily accepted these gross deceptions, but around Laurel and Pimlico’s stables they knew better. Ronnie’s old colleagues derisively referred to him as “the Cocaine Kid.” The backstretch workers all knew that Buddy and Ronnie were vastly different than the public’s sterling image of them as a fresh-faced kid and a paternalistic trainer.
In the weeks that followed, Delp created even more fiction. He said that at his direction Ronnie was living under a stringent-discipline structure. He claimed that Gerald was keeping an eye on Ronnie. He also said the jockey was subject to an early curfew that required him to go straight home after work each evening and then stay in for the night. And finally, Buddy discussed the fiscal discipline that he imposed on Ronnie. He explained that he allowed the boy only a $50 to $60 a week “allowance” while he looked after the rest of the kid’s considerable earnings for safekeeping.
In all these ways Buddy created the image that he was caring for a young man too hardened and ignorant to care for himself. Ronnie’s troubles, Buddy suggested, all happened when he was beyond Delp’s gaze and outside the protective walls of his home. And yet the truth was more or less the opposite of that.
Buddy’s house was the place where Ronnie had been introduced to cocaine and where its use was perpetuated. Fans didn’t know that Gerald wasn’t keeping an eye on Ronnie; he was the jockey’s middleman to the illicit and provided him the pills and the coke that the two boys, and often Buddy, happily indulged in together. No one knew that Ronnie’s money wasn’t really protected; it was evaporating. Ronnie’s paychecks were helping to fuel the good-times engine—the coke, the booze, and the pills enjoyed by everyone in the house.
Removing Ronnie from Spectacular Bid and replacing him with the unassailable Willie Shoemaker was another measure taken, supposedly in the boy’s best interest. Ostensibly it relieved Franklin of the pressures that had caused the drug use, though the official story was that Ronnie didn’t use drugs. But it wasn’t really Buddy who removed Ronnie from the Bid, and it wasn’t for Ronnie’s benefit. In fact, behind the scenes, Delp lobbied Harry Meyerhoff to keep Franklin on the famous horse.
It was Harry Meyerhoff who was adamant that Ronnie be replaced on the Bid. The owner was the one who decided it was time to move on from the teenage jockey.
Harry wasn’t protecting Ronnie in any sense. By making the change, he was looking after the best interests of his prize horse, his huge investment in his racing operation, and his own image.
Meyerhoff blamed Ronnie for the loss at the Belmont, believing that it was the boy’s fear of Cordero that had blown the race. But mostly he didn’t want to be associated with the kid’s drug use. He and Teresa were recreational drug users too, and the last thing they needed was any scrutiny applied to themselves.
As usual Harry’s instincts were right on the money. Ronnie’s removal from the Bid was a public relations stroke for the owners, who appeared concerned and compassionate, and it reduced their exposure should Ronnie’s problems flare up again and erupt into the public sphere. Even in a competitive sense, it was a net gain. Though Spectacular Bid had run exceptionally well for Ronnie, with Shoemaker aboard the horse would be in the most capable hands in racing.
Ronnie’s parents might have stepped in at this point, but they were at a loss as to what to do. As they considered what was in the best interests of their son, they saw nothing but bad options in front of them. Ronnie wasn’t easy to manage even when he was living right under their roof. By this point, however, he was utterly emancipated. He hadn’t lived with his mother and father on a full-time basis for years, since he was fifteen. And now he was a national celebrity, making a lot more money than they were. It wasn’t plausible to think that they could simply order him home and that he would comply. They also had to consider what Ronnie’s life would look like without Buddy’s patronage. He’d probably be back in his parents’ basement and putting on his old Roy Rogers uniform.
It simply wasn’t going to happen.
The Franklins might have considered confronting Buddy directly, but what good would that have done their son? Rocking that boat only meant alienating Ronnie’s best hope for a career and a future. Buddy might have been the source of his problems, but he was also Ronnie’s fount of opportunity.
Anyway, it wasn’t the Franklins’ nature to question authority. At root they were Dundalkians, and like their steelworker neighbors, who were utterly devoted to the plant that killed a thousand of them, the Franklins understood a workplace to be a dangerous and toxic environment by its very nature. They believed in the redemptive quality of hard work and in the chain of command. “I never had no dreams of being nothing until I came to a race track,” Ronnie said. And that’s the way his parents saw it, too.
As the memory of the Disneyland episode faded, Ronnie went back to work for Buddy, riding many of the trainer’s other horses, but nothing was the same. Ronnie was no longer a big star, and his many remarkable accomplishments were now viewed skeptically, through the lens of his fishy loss at the Belmont, his drug arrest, and his many lesser scandals.
Teenager Stevie Cauthen’s daring rides on Affirmed made him a media darling and pitch man for American Express. Ronnie was quickly becoming an untouchable, a pariah.
Despite Buddy’s best efforts to paint Franklin as wiser, chastened, and more mature, the kid was in fact descending into a devastating addiction. Getting high, using cocaine, drinking to excess, and gulping pills were all a regular part of his life, and worse than that, the drugs had become a necessity that he could no longer do without.
But if insobriety was Buddy Delp’s negative legacy to Ronnie, it wasn’t the only one. Buddy (and especially Barbara Graham) had made Ronnie a jockey, and a damn good one. But working so closely with Delp, Ronnie picked up his mentor’s swaggering arrogance. It was, to say the least, off-putting to the other trainers the kid hoped to court as clients.
Mark Reid was one of them. He was initially excited to have the famous young jockey ride horses for his up-and-coming stable, but that feeling quickly wore off. After one race that didn’t go particularly well, Ronnie came back to the paddock and complained about the colt. “This horse ain’t much,” Ronnie sputtered. “He stinks.”
Reid was put off by the unwanted feedback. “He sounded like a little carbon copy of Buddy Delp,” the trainer said.
It wasn’t a compliment.
“I didn’t like [Buddy],” Reid said, “so why would I like [Ronnie]?” After that, Reid didn’t use Ronnie very much.
While Ronnie struggled, Spectacular Bid reemerged in grand style. After an almost three-month layoff to recover and rest, he made his debut under Willie Shoemaker at Delaware Park and issued a warning that his historic run of dominance was far from over.
In an allowance race the Bid crushed the field by seventeen lengths. After it was all over, Shoemaker was almost as free with the superlatives as Buddy. “He’s as great as any horse I’ve ever ridden,” said the man who had ridden more winners than any jockey in history. After that auspicious start, Bid and Shoemaker won the Marlboro and Meadowlands Cups, defeating Coastal in both races. For some, those victories had only proven Ronnie’s ineptitude and reinforced the notion that a “competent” rider like Shoemaker on Spectacular Bid would have more expertly negotiated the demanding Belmont track and won the Triple Crown with ease.
That theory would get its real test in October, when the Bid returned to Belmont Park for the Jockey Gold Cup. The one-and-a-half-mile contest had the feel of a match race. It pitted Spectacular Bid against Affirmed, though the four-horse race also included Gallant Best, whom no one took seriously as a challenger, and Coastal.
The Jockey Gold Cup was a highly prestigious race, all the more so since it would almost certainly determine if Affirmed or Spectacular Bid was the “Horse of the Year.” That title was, in a sense, meaningless since it was decided by committee and not on the track, but it also carried serious financial repercussions. The “Horse of the Year” designation would certainly command top breeding fees for the winning horse’s owners and trainer.
This race crackled with historical import, and though there were four horses in it instead of two, it was reminiscent of Seabiscuit versus War Admiral in the Pimlico Special. Both the Bid and Affirmed were healthy and at the peak of their athletic greatness. They both had elite riders aboard, Laffit Pincay, a future Hall of Famer, on Affirmed, and Shoemaker, the all-time earnings leader and widely acclaimed as the greatest rider of all time, on Spectacular Bid.
Affirmed was trained by Laz Barrera. A Cuban American then in his early sixties, Laz had the feel of a much older man with his leathery, sun-beaten face and a long, zipper-like trail on his chest, a battle scar and badge of honor for having survived major heart surgery.
Barrera was born in Havana in 1924, one of twelve children of a jockey and his French-missionary wife. Laz was the ninth child and one of four boys who all grew up to be horse trainers.
Laz showed a great deal of intelligence and maturity, not to mention skill, at an early age. He started his career at Cuba’s Oriental Park, when he was only sixteen years old. Looking for more lucrative markets, he soon moved on to Mexico and won his first five races there. Nevertheless, he was suspended when officials realized he was still under twenty-one, below the minimum age for a licensed trainer in Mexico.
Barrera came to the United States in 1948, but success didn’t come easy. He soldiered on in obscurity for many years in the country, training claimers and lesser-known horses for decades. Finally, in the 1970s, he met a man who changed his life. Barrera was hired by Louis Wolfson, an enormously successful, though questionable, financier. Wolfson had made a fortune but had done so by pioneering hostile corporate takeovers, and he eventually spent time in jail for his business practices.
But to Laz Barrera, Wolfson was a deliverer, and the two proved a great combination.
Working for Wolfson, Barrera finally had access to a better class of horses, and he made up for lost time. With Wolfson’s stock, Laz’s skills finally became evident to the wider world. He won the Eclipse Award for outstanding American trainer, a career achievement for most others, but he won it four years in a row, from 1976 to 1979. From 1977 to 1986 he was America’s leading money winner five times. Over the course of his long career Laz would ultimately train 128 different stakes winners.
Affirmed, of course, was the greatest achievement of the Barrera-Wolfson partnership. Not only had the horse won the Triple Crown, proving his great worth, but he had demonstrated the qualities of a pugilist with a granite jaw in his hotly contested series with Alydar.
Anticipation for the Jockey Gold Cup was enhanced by the contrasting styles of the two protagonists. The race featured Affirmed’s will to win versus Spectacular Bid’s record-breaking speed. Though it had only been a few months since Coastal had whipped the Bid on the very same Belmont track, that was regarded as a rare misstep, an anomaly in Spectacular Bid’s otherwise almost flawless career. No one seriously considered the possibility that either Affirmed or the Bid would not win the cup.
The parade to the post reinforced that notion. Bid looked well rested, calm, and confident under Shoemaker; there was no sign of his lathery and manic jig to the starter’s gate back in June before his ill-fated Belmont ride. Affirmed, of course, with his rich red coloring, high haunches, and calm demeanor, looked like a king.
Shoemaker would start the race with one advantage. Angel Cordero and Georgie Velasquez were in attendance, but they weren’t on the track. They were safely tucked in to the broadcast booth, where they could do no mischief. So unlike Franklin, Shoemaker would have it relatively easy; he’d have only the great Affirmed to deal with and not the malignant, coordinated attentions of Cordero and Velasquez.
All four horses loaded with ease, but they didn’t all break that way. When the gates opened, Affirmed asserted himself. He took the lead from his very first step. The Bid, on the other hand, emerged tentatively, maybe even stumbling slightly. In the run to the first turn everyone was packed tightly together, though Affirmed led all the horses while Bid was in third. They got to the first quarter in twenty-five seconds. When the pack rounded the first turn, Affirmed was still setting the pace, but Gallant Best, the long shot, was behind him by only a neck.
Shoemaker, interestingly, took a very different approach than Ronnie Franklin had. Ronnie made it his business to find the outside. He’d gotten into trouble riding in the interior spaces, and he believed that the Bid didn’t like to run inside. In any event, Franklin’s reasoning was that the Bid crushed the best horses in the country and didn’t need to save fractions of seconds.
Shoemaker, on the other hand, clung to the inside, not hugging the rail exactly, but not fighting his way out either. This left him boxed in. Two horses were directly in front of him, one was to his right, and to his left was the rail. He appeared as he always did: cool and unconcerned, in command. He looked as though he was biding his time until his opportunity appeared.
Affirmed, still the leader, reached the half-mile in forty-nine seconds, a slow pace. No one was pushing him, so he enjoyed the lead, and at the same time he didn’t have to expend too much of himself to maintain it.
The four great animals went into the heart of the backstretch still running as a pack. When Shoemaker finally found his opening, he moved to the outside. Ruben Hernandez, looking like a canary in his feathery yellow silks, carefully watched Shoemaker, and when the Bid moved, he exhorted Coastal to also make his move.
For a long while Affirmed showed the fight for which he was famous. Spectacular Bid pushed him from the outside, but Pincay kept his horse moving at a lively pace, and he stayed in front, his lead never diminishing to less than a neck.
Meanwhile, Ruben and Coastal may have been overlooked, but they were about to prove that they were still relevant. With Ruben’s coaxing, Coastal moved inside, hugged the rail, and made a determined charge. It seemed like a good gambit, the right move at the right time. Coastal’s strides were long and fluid, and he gobbled up the gap between himself and the leaders.
As the race neared the second turn, Coastal and Ruben crashed the party. The white streak that looked like it had been painted with a broad brush down Coastal’s long face emerged right between Affirmed and the Bid. At first, it was a mere flash of white, peeking out, but then horse and rider impudently pushed their way in front of the two favorites who had, foolishly, been concerned only with each other.
This bold move had forced Coastal into the conversation, but Ruben had clearly expended too much horse, too early, and the burst for the lead was an impressive but unsustainable business model. Even worse, Coastal’s gunning for the lead only awakened his ferocious competitors. Only a few strides into the homestretch Spectacular Bid and Affirmed quickened their heels.
Despite his dissipations, Coastal gamely hung in far down the stretch and remained within striking distance. He kept it a three-horse race that was as unexpected as it was thrilling. But eventually Affirmed and Spectacular Bid came to their senses and restored order by picking up the pace to a point that poor, proud Coastal had no choice but to fade.
Everyone had come to Belmont Park to see the duel between the two superhorses, and there it was in the homestretch, stride for stride and neck and neck. But it was Affirmed who maintained a slight lead.
Typically, leading too early at Belmont was considered a poor strategy, as it had been in Franklin’s disaster. Yet in this race the pace was so slow that Affirmed was still sprightly heading to the finish. Meanwhile, Spectacular Bid had the burden of making up ground. He simply couldn’t do it. In the last electrifying moments Affirmed pulled away ever so slightly and won by less than a length.
It had been an incredibly suspenseful race, filled with dramatic twists and tension.
After it was over, Buddy had the temerity to criticize Shoemaker’s ride. “Anytime you let Affirmed go . . . a half mile in forty-nine seconds there’s no horse in the world that’s going to beat him,” Buddy said.
Delp also proved, once again, that he was a poor loser when he refused the victors their due. “The best horse finished second,” Buddy said.
Perhaps Delp genuinely saw the flaws in Shoemaker’s ride, but it might well have been frustration and disappointment doing the talking. The loss, as close and exciting as it was, cost him dearly. Affirmed won “Horse of the Year,” not Spectacular Bid. And Laz Barrera was named Trainer of the Year, not Delp.
All of those negative consequences were due only to a thin-margin loss at the Jockey Gold Cup. In fact, Bid’s year had not only been historic; it had also been epic. Besides the broken track records and the Kentucky Derby and Preakness victories, his streak of twelve straight stakes victories (all but two with Ronnie Franklin aboard) was an accomplishment matched only by Citation and Man o’ War. In addition to all of that, the Bid had won almost $1.3 million in purse money, more than any horse ever had for a single year.
Buddy might have been a braggart, but he had a hell of a case for much of what he claimed. If the voters for “Horse of the Year” couldn’t see it, the public certainly could. When Affirmed retired, rather than risk injury or tarnish on his record, Spectacular Bid was left as the marquee name in horse racing. And he was in high demand everywhere high-profile horse races were run.
Buddy Delp wasn’t an oil millionaire, but like Jed Clampett before him, he decided that California was the place he ought to be. It wasn’t Buddy’s way to load up some junker and go; he went to Beverly Hills decked out in a chartered DC-8 at a cost of nearly $70,000. That plane carried Buddy, twenty-four horses, Gerald and Dougie, Ronnie Franklin, exercise rider R. A. Smith, Charlie Bettis (an assistant trainer), a domestic worker who cooked and cleaned, and the family dog, Champ, to Los Angeles.
Something else snuck its way onto that private flight, something that Buddy was probably hoping to leave back in Baltimore: Ronnie and Gerald’s problems were all aboard too. Both boys had moved far beyond casual drug-user status and were showing the serious signs of addiction.
Removing Ronnie from Spectacular Bid and taking him out west might have relieved pressure on him, as Buddy would suggest, but it also allowed the kid a shadow in which to operate. Without the media scrutiny or even his parents close by, his worst impulses were given free rein.
Buddy rented a home in Arcadia, California, that was the western version of the Delp house back in Laurel. Gerald and Ronnie shared a room, just as they did in Maryland, and they continued to live like libertines. “On the weekends we’d get some dates and we’d get some blow,” Gerald said.
By this time Ronnie and Gerald had little if anything to do with Spectacular Bid, and yet their behavior distracted Buddy and threatened the horse’s success.
Gerald was only sixteen years old, but he often passed for a full-grown man. He was tall and thin with a thick head of brown hair. He also dressed above his years. Gerald didn’t wear athletic garb like most of the boys his age. He looked like a successful-but-relaxed businessman in dress shirts and shoes, nice slacks, and sport jackets. The illusion of his maturity was more than skin deep. Despite his bad grammar, Gerald spoke knowledgeably about adult subjects and had an expert’s understanding of everything that happened at the track or in the barns. He knew all the players in the racing business—at least in and around Maryland—and he was already in training to be a jockey’s agent. And he had plenty of money to splash around.
There was a lot of benefit in all of this for Gerald. He walked into any bar he wanted without being “carded” and romanced women far older than he was. But for Buddy the boys’ growing independence and experimentation was a complication, a distraction from his burgeoning career.
Buddy’s work was becoming more demanding and complex at the same time the boys’ issues were begging for his attention. Meanwhile, Delp was in the midst of his window of opportunity. This collision of fatherhood and work responsibility came into sharp focus for Buddy the evening before the Santa Anita Handicap. It was Bid’s first high-profile West Coast race. It included a rematch with Flying Paster, and it was projected to be on an extraordinarily wet and sloppy track.
None of those details stopped either boy from going out the night before the race and finding enough trouble to drive the indulgent Buddy to his breaking point.
Ronnie hopped behind the wheel of a rented car and picked up a girl. But by the end of the night he was driving alone and drunk when he hit something and blew out one of his front tires. He stopped on the side of the road to try and repair the damage. A police officer pulled over to assist him.
Two things immediately grabbed the lawman’s notice. Number one: Ronnie was visibly inebriated. And number two: the boy had already had an earlier accident in which he had blown out the other front tire. He told the cop that he had been so intoxicated he hadn’t even noticed the first accident.
Needless to say, Buddy was called down to the police station to bail out his contract jockey. And he wasn’t thrilled about it. Meanwhile, he had no idea where his son was. Gerald had gone out, but understanding what a big day was ahead the next day, he vowed to be home by 10 p.m. That didn’t happen. He was out with one of the female grooms, a girl much older than Gerald. She had a boyfriend, but that didn’t stop her from driving up into the secluded hills with Gerald, where they smoked a little dope and had sex in the front seat.
When Buddy got back from the police station with Ronnie, he was already in a foul mood, but he boiled over when he realized that Gerald still wasn’t back. By the time his son finally pulled up, hours after his promised return time, Buddy was waiting to bushwhack him. He sat in the dark until he heard Gerald’s key in the lock. Once his son walked through the front door, Buddy flipped on the lights and then flipped out. “Where the fuck you been!” Buddy thundered. “You were supposed to be back at 10.”
Gerald stumbled to respond. Delp could see how wasted his son was and he could smell the stench of booze and pot smoke wafting off the kid’s clothes and breath. “You got blew eyes,” Buddy derisively told him. “One blew that way, and the other blew that way.”
And then, bam! Buddy laid him out with half a fist, knocking Gerald clean off his feet.
Gerald was surprised by the violent attack but not sobered. Still in the bag and still on the ground, he baited his enraged father. “Hit me again, baldy,” Gerald said. “I deserve it.”
But Buddy had had enough violence for one night. He left Gerald alone to slink up the stairs.
When Gerald got to his room he was rumpled and red faced and his roommate, Ronnie, could see it.
“How are you, Doc?” Ronnie sympathetically asked him.
“How the fuck do you think I am?” Gerald replied.
“Well, look at me,” Ronnie said, and then he showed off his own lumps and scrapes and bruises and red blotches. He’d tangled with Buddy too, just a few moments before Gerald had gotten home.
Ronnie told Gerald all about it: the chick, the drunk driving, the accidents, and the cop. Gerald listened patiently to the whole twisted story and then shook his foggy head and uttered the only levelheaded sentence of the long night. “Well,” he said to Ronnie about the beatings they’d taken, “we both fucking deserved it.”
Gerald stripped off his clothes and left them on the floor. The two boys went to sleep with the sweet, sickly smell of dope wafting up from the discarded garments and swirling around the room.
The next morning, with the exhausted Delps and Ronnie watching from the stands, Spectacular Bid and Willie Shoemaker strode out into the soaking-wet bog of a track and effortlessly beat the field by three lengths.