LESSON THREE: Never Settle for What You’ve Earned.
While horseracing was in a shabby state, it still brought me into daily contact with those who were better off than I. The racetrack confirmed my belief that there was no positive correlation between industriousness and material prosperity. Randi worked two jobs, but deadbeat owners and gimpy thoroughbreds regularly put her behind on her own bills. Meanwhile, Hastings was a sandbox for people whose fortunes were derived long ago, and who transferred their competitive urges onto their horses—equine athletes that generally raced several notches above my own. The intrinsic value of my own efforts wasn’t recognized.
After resisting it for many years, I succumbed to the idea that life had its winners and losers, the prom queens and book-club members, the quarterbacks and the writing-workshop leaders, and the only reason to cry out against injustice was if it gave you an opening to pummel some groin.
Being a professional sports owner was grand, but I wanted to be vaulted into the winner’s circle of life. I wanted to be an overlord and not a vassal; the man behind the curtain and not the puppet with a hand in its rear. I pictured myself sitting impassively in an owner’s box, in a charcoal-grey suit and a camel-hair coat, chewing on the knob of my antique walking stick, unlit Cohiba in my fish stick-cold fingers, surrounded by my second wife; the children from my previous marriage; and the grandchildren from my children’s previous marriages. I wanted to make decisions and eat free popcorn.
I returned from my trip to the east coast ornery and dissatisfied. Summer was ending. I deserved a finer life.
FROM WHAT I LEARNED AT THE TRACK:
A Manual of Failure
FOR BLACKIE’S SIXTH race of the season, I rent a box seat with a view overlooking the eight pole. My friends and I might not get our own little TV screen to watch the simulcast the way we would in the boxes closer to the finish line—the ones people buy for the season—but waitresses come and take our orders for beer, and, for only $15, that small luxury makes me forget my owner inadequacy.
In the Form, I notice contenders from Blackie’s last race; an overwhelming amount of the money is going to a horse named Kokeeno, a six-year-old chestnut mare who’s dropping a class. Blackie nuzzles the pony as she’s led down the post parade. It’s a ten-horse field and she’s at her longest odds this year, 10-to-1, to win. The owners of the horses in the race are announced, and I stand up and wave to the disinterested crowd as my name is called.
With under a minute to post, I find Randi taking her spot at the picnic table facing the top of the lane.
“How did the Girl do?” I ask. Another one of Randi’s horses, Aubrey Road, ran in the first race, but I didn’t want to get to the track too early, lest I lose more money.
“Second,” she says. “That’s how it goes when you have no fucking luck.”
(At the time, I don’t know that the day after Randi claimed the horse she couldn’t even walk her. Randi turned her out to the farm for a month, Alex brought ice over on his bike for her legs—it was hours and hours of work just so she could enter the race. In this sprint, the horse is put in a ridiculous pace and is beaten by a horse that won five times.)
You don’t often hear trainers or owners talk about luck actually going their way, how their horse might have profited from another’s horse’s misfortune, but any bad luck they experience becomes embroidered into their own ill-starred life story, and the length of the race, from the opening gate to the finish line, is rife with opportunities for a personal persecution narrative—be it a common stumble leaving the gate or some extraordinary hex—like one trainer in Randi’s shed row whose horse led on the back turn until he hit a bird that had swooped down into his path. The horse was so rattled by the encounter that he allowed another horse to pass him for the win.
I have no time to commiserate before the race starts. Blackie starts well, coming out to an early lead.
“Don’t do that!” Randi yells at her horse.
Blackie settles down on her own, moving behind Kokeeno and Notis Me, who finished ahead of her in the previous race, before drawing back to them midway through the backstretch. At the far turn, when the horses look like ten stooges trying to funnel into the same doorway, she takes the lead. Randi, who’s not usually demonstrative when her horses race, steps towards the track and starts pumping her fist as she cheers Blackie on. Blackie should be pouring it on, but she just sits there.
We later learn that the rider, Perez, dropped his stick at the top of the stretch. Without the stick to “call on her for her best,” he tries to egg Blackie on by scrubbing against her neck with his hands, but she doesn’t understand this improvised cue. The two-horse, Flower Hill, and the four-horse, Quickens, pass her. Randi bolts towards the racing oval, screaming about the rider, even before the photo finish reveals that Blackie managed to hang onto third.
I happen to make $100 on my show bet, but I’m indifferent. For the first time this season, the race result doesn’t faze me. The horse could have won, she could have finished dead last. A sense of dissatisfaction sits in my chest like a throw pillow as I realize that my horse will never be one of the legends I’ve spent the summer reading about, not even a local hero whose soaring finishes and heart-wrenching close calls build up to a cathartic triumph. For a claiming horse, race one in the season is not much different from race six except for the changing seasons and extra mileage on your depreciating asset. Owning Blackie will not change my life. This is as good as it gets—for the horse and for me.
MY INTEREST IN owning a future equine legend leads me to the yearling sale, which is held in an airy barn at an equestrian park in Langley. Like most people here, I’ve come not only to gawk at the gawky colts and fillies but also to watch more prosperous folks blow their fortunes.
The horses auctioned today could end up never running, but they have the potential to become stakes calibre and win prestigious local races. Several years back, the eventual winner of the 2003 B.C. Derby, the biggest event in the local racing calendar, Roscoe Pito, was purchased here for only $2,993 by a group that included a bartender at Hastings; the lifetime earnings of the horse, who ended up racing in California, were $608,277. Unlike a claiming horse, a young horse purchased here won’t run until the following spring, if training goes well, and only in a handful of races as a two-year-old, if at all. In that time, you will be paying for its training and upkeep with no money coming in. If horseracing is a slow poison, then buying a yearling is cyanide.
The hamstrung economy doesn’t bode well for the auction. A recent sale in Alberta saw sales drop forty-five percent. Local breeders, whose horses are eligible for B.C.-bred bonuses and special stakes races, are likely selling at a loss. The horses, with numbered tags on their hips, are led onto a stage that has been decorated with leafy houseplants. Behind them in a desk, Mike Heads, the Hastings simulcast commentator, talks up a horse’s pedigree.
“Number eleven, property of Susi Schaer, Canmor Farms, agent, is the filly by the mare Flirtatious Wonder,” Heads says. “Flirtatious Wonder is a stakes winner of over $200,000. She’s the half-sister to Raise the Rent and In Gold We Trust. She’s had three foals to the races, two of them winners, $34,000 in earnings.”
As the horses are brought onto the stage and circled around, an auctioneer calls prices in a musical gargle:
“Awww, diggiddydown, diggiddydown, diggiddydown, diggiddydown, three thousand. Aww, diggiddydo, diggiddydo, diggiddydo, diggiddydo, diggiddydo, diggiddydo, two thousand.”
Standing in front of the stage are a number of assistants, dressed in the cowboy equivalent of business casual—suit jackets and ties with Stetsons and boots. When someone nods or raises a hand to bid, they pump their fists and yell, “YEEEAAAAHHHHHH!” Occasionally, a horse will whinny in response. Even though I have no stake in the bidding, my heart pulses with joy every time one of these assistants offers this celebratory, encouraging scream. I suppose that’s why it’s done.
The auctioneer goes down to a thousand before eventually selling the horse for $1,100.
Most of the bidders are seated in folding chairs within sight of the auctioneer and his assistants. Horatio Kemeny of Swift Thoroughbreds sits in the front row for most of the afternoon. He and his partner Mark Mache disappear to get lunch outside. After they finish eating, I meet up with him on his way back to his chair. In a dark shirt and blazer, Kemeny has light brown hair, a neatly trimmed beard, and a sturdy build. Mache is tall like an NBA power forward, but, with his shoulder-length blond hair, has an amiable, youthful aura. So far, they’ve purchased three horses for $6,500, $20,000, and $19,000.
“One of them was good value,” he says, trying to catch the attention of Mache without accidentally bidding. “The other two were fair value.”
I’ve largely avoided interactions with other owners this season, rationalizing to myself that they are normally alpha-male business types with no time for my low-earning ilk. And, if I did speak to them, they’d be so guarded to the point of brain-gouging dullness. Some racetrackers I’ve talked to back me up on that count, suggesting that the entrepreneurs and executives who get into the sport do so to acquire a contained burst of the unpredictability, zest, and eccentricity that they’ve so fastidiously squelched from every other corner of their life. But in absolute honesty, I’ve avoided meeting other owners because they call to attention my huge wannabe status as someone who might be able to impress friends with his four-figure investment for part of a bottom claimer, but is only an owner in the loosest definition.
The Swift Thoroughbreds guys definitely incite these intimations of poseurdom. While both of them are only forty, Kemeny and Mache’s attachment to the sport began in the early 1980s when Mache’s grandmother brought them to the track for the first time as twelve-year-olds. The two friends would ride across town on their bikes to the track, recruiting desperate horseplayers to place bets for them using money they collected from bottle deposits.
“The place was hopping back then,” Kemeny says. “There was racing on five days, the handle was a million dollars a day. Now I don’t think it’s more than $200,000. It was the only game in town. The truth was that you came here on a Welfare Wednesday”—the day of the month when welfare cheques arrived—“and you couldn’t move. Everybody wanted to be here.”
Later on, the two friends would team up to form MindSpan, a video game company that created the baseball video game HardBall. After they sold their business in 2002, they got into horses. Swift Thoroughbreds has forty-four horses listed on its website, each horse costing about $20,000 to maintain.
Kemeny and Mache not only employ an entire stable, but also bring in new horses that get absorbed into the pool of horses that change hands at the track. A couple of years back, they also belonged to the group of owners who helped restore the purses after a cut by track management. Maybe in other parts of the world racehorses remain fashionable instruments for flaunting wealth, but in this city and other places where the track’s lustre has been worn down to its grimy base, the Swift guys are eccentric benefactors of a precariously unpopular cultural institution, like chamber music or metered verse. According to backstretch gossip, the annual budget for their stable is $3 million—a sum that their annual winnings don’t come within fifteen lengths of matching.
Kemeny estimates that maybe half the horses he buys at the sale end up racing. “The other half we sell for cheap, find them good homes,” he says. Swift Thoroughbreds’s trainer, Dino Condilenios, comes the day before for the parade to look at the horses and, with Mache and Kemeny, compiles A and B lists. “Conformation is at least as important as pedigree.”
Pleasantly surprised by the turnout and the prices the horses are going for, Kemeny, who says he’s allergic to horses, excuses himself as he returns to his seat to bid on the next entry. “I don’t think he’ll come cheap,” he says, before returning to his spot. Kemeny keeps the assistants screaming as the horse goes for $42,000. At the end of the day, Swift spends $216,500 on ten horses.
Beyond the bidders in the folding chairs, on portable bleacher seats and in a beer garden to the side, are onlookers—trainers and jockeys and grooms who just want to be part of the fun. Compared with the auctions at Keeneland and Saratoga, where horses have been purchased for eight-figure sums, the amounts spent here are a trifle—barely enough to fill a briefcase with twenties. For most other people, these prices still equal their life savings or the equity in their homes, all of it kissed away with a nod to the auctioneer. Here, for now, everyone’s spent his money wisely.
AT THE AUCTION, I hear my name called and see Kulwant behind the beer garden gates. “Pick up any champion horseflesh?” he asks me.
“Just window-shopping,” I say, leaning over the fence. “What brings you here?”
He shrugs, rolling the bottom rim of his empty plastic cup of beer against his table. “I had some friends driving out here, so I tagged along,” he says. “This is cheap fun. At least for me.”
Kulwant lets me buy him another beer. Work ended for him a few hours earlier, and maybe it’s his fatigue and the beer, but his fangs are temporarily retracted. He even shows me a printout for a van that he’s saving his money to buy, as though it were his own yearling. We talk about sports and books and movies.
It’s in this hospitable conversational space that I allow myself to become philosophical.
“Do you ever wonder how much you’d be worth in an auction?” I ask him. “And whether you’d be worth your price?”
“A slave auction? Or the kind where you buy a date for charity?” he replies. “‘No’ to both.”
“Say these horses are like newly minted holders of bachelor’s degrees,” I continue. “Some of them come from good families, others have good grades, or display talent in their classes, and you bid high on the ones you thought would be the winners and avoided the ones with the weak knees. Do you think you’d live up to your potential? Would you have exceeded it?”
“Jesus, why do you always measure yourself against others?” he asks me. “Why can’t you be happy with all the cashmere sweaters you already own?”
“I’m just making an analogy—”
“It’s a bad analogy. If you or I don’t live up to expectations, old friends stop returning phone calls. That’s all that happens—no big loss.” He looks over to a chestnut mare being circled onstage. “You don’t want to know what happens to these horses when they can’t run.”
“I don’t return your calls because I can’t stand your bitterness,” I say. “You resent anyone who has even an inkling of success. You shit on them for wanting more.”
The scowl collects on Kulwant’s face like dust. He finishes his beer and gets up.
MY NEXT TRIP to Hastings comes when I attempt to introduce Randi to Carole Serene. Randi finds the animal communicator’s transcript amusing, but won’t believe that I didn’t tell Carole about Sylvester’s eyes. (The redness in his eyes after that race had long cleared away.) Still, she agrees right away to see her. “This is going to be hilarious,” she says.
Carole is en route from a meeting with the agent responsible for renting out her vintage Jaguar for movie shoots. We meet in the parking lot by the horseman’s entrance and, with my hot walker’s licence, I sign her into the backstretch.
“How do you feel among these animals?” I ask her as we move into sight of Barn A.
“I feel at home,” says Carole, who’s wearing a pink blouse and white slacks and open-toed slippers. She smiles at the horses in the barns with stalls facing outside. “I haven’t tuned into any of them, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Yeah, that was what I was asking.
“It’s quite a breakthrough that Randi is willing to meet with me,” she tells me, sidestepping a pile of fresh horse dung.
“Well, I wouldn’t call it a breakthrough,” I say.
“I’m under no illusion that Randi believes anything I do, but I would like her to give credibility to what I was told by Sylvester so that we can help him towards wellness.”
When we get into the stable, Randi is not to be seen, so I introduce her to Sylvester. She approaches him, placing her hand on his neck. “Hi, sweetheart,” she says. “It’s me, Carole Serene. Remember? How are you feeling?”
“What’s it like seeing the animal you’ve communicated with?” I ask her, as I look in the feed closet for a carrot that Carole can offer her friend.
“I love to see the recognition in their eyes,” she says. “And suddenly, now we have relaxation. Do you see that change?”
“Well,” I say, “his ears are all pricked up.”
Carole keeps her hand on the side of Sylvester’s face. Normally, at the sight of visitors, he’ll act like he’s front row at a Motörhead concert, but he watches Carole calmly.
“You want to talk some more, dear?” she says to him. “We can do that.”
As we wait for Randi, I ask Carole to explain a puzzling detail in her transcript—why Sylvester would understand the word “castrate,” but not “geld.”
“That’s a good question,” Carole says. “I think it’s a matter of what the horses hear around the stable. ‘Geld’ is more of a polite term. Usually, they use the word ‘cut’ in the stables.”
“So animals have vocabularies?” I ask.
“Yes, what they hear around them. Dogs have very good vocabularies, though not so much cats.”
“Why’s that?”
“Dogs have families, while cats have staff,” she tells me. “They don’t pay attention.”
“Do you think you could ask Sylvester for any betting tips?”
Carole thinks about it for a moment. “I was surprised by what Sylvester told me about how the horses know who’ll win,” she says.
“So, the horses fix the races?” I ask.
“I wouldn’t say that. But they know who’s feeling good. So, if I were so inclined, I could actually ask Sylvester who he thinks will do good in the race.”
“Really?”
“Your eyes just lit up.”
“I imagine they did.”
Randi returns from lunch, in her puffy vest and jeans, followed by Aki, her part-time groom. I realize soon after introductions are made that I’ve put everyone in an awkward position. Randi, while curious to meet Carole Serene, doesn’t accept advice from anyone, much less an animal communicator. Carole, on the other hand, isn’t used to dealing with skeptical clients. What I’ve ended up doing, in an unintentional but utterly careless way, is challenge the abilities of both of them.
“Blackie has the most adorable personality,” Carole says in Randi’s break room. “She’s very sweet, isn’t she?”
Randi slumps back on the couch, and then sucks back her cigarette. “No, she’s not that nice.”
“She’ll try to kick you,” Aki adds. At twenty-two, she is a brainy, aspiring vet doing a double major in English and biology.
“I didn’t think you guys were coming this afternoon,” Randi says to me. “I thought you guys were coming for the Friday night race.”
“I can’t go to the races,” Carole admits. “I’m too sensitive, I guess. When they’re stressed, I’m stressed.”
One half of Randi’s face drops as though she’s been personally attacked. “If you counted all the races in the world that run, it’s probably a very minute fraction of bad that goes on,” she says. “It just looks horrendous.”
“I just can’t cope.”
“It’s no more common than a guy walking across the street and getting hit by a bus. I love all my animals. I try my hardest not to put them in that situation, but shit happens. I broke down only one horse in thirty years and I hope to keep it that way.”
Carole nods. “I know.”
“They break their legs out in the field. You think you’re doing them a favour and they run against the fence and break a shoulder.”
“They get in a fight,” Aki adds. “They get kicked in the face.”
Carole tries to calm Randi down. “Your horses are so protected here,” she says. “They’re conditioned.”
“But still, anything can happen.”
I try to change the subject, but I pick the wrong one when I mention Sylvester’s possible retirement. Earlier this week, Aki mentioned to me that Randi was thinking about turning Sylvester into a show horse.
“Why is everyone so interested in what I’m going to do with Sylvester?” she asks. “I’m not going to kill him.”
Carole needs to make another appointment, so we step back out to the shed row, where Aki introduces us to the new horses that a Seattle trainer has sent Randi to race at Hastings. Carole turns back to Sylvester one last time, imparting her farewells to him with a hand on his head.
Randi glares at us, and then looks to her favourite horse. “They giving you a hard time, Sylvester?” she says. “They don’t know you won a hundred grand. Not a lot of horses can say that.”