LESSON FIVE: Fail to Appreciate Your Horse.
Until the year I became an owner, I felt I was a connoisseur of under-appreciation. My abilities, attributes, and contributions had been routinely overlooked; accolades had been given to people with shinier hair who wrote their own Wikipedia entries.
And yet I was also a chronic under-appreciator in my own right.
The indisputable fact that people who think horseracing equals animal cruelty were fools didn’t preclude me from being an indisputably massive fool myself...
FROM WHAT I LEARNED AT THE TRACK:
A Manual of Failure
WHEN I FIND out that Blackie is racing in the second race that Saturday, I am irrationally exuberant about her chances. She’s running in a six-horse field, back at a $5,000 claiming price. And, according to my freshly purchased copy of the Form, she has the highest Beyer Speed Figure of all the horses in their most recent races. After almost winning without a stick on her in a ten-horse field, she ought to knee-cap her competition today.
An hour before the gates discharge, Randi warns me that the race is evenly matched, and that several of the horses in the race like to run up front like Blackie, which is why Sultry Eyes, who’s beaten and been beaten by my horse, is a favourite. I treat her pessimism as verbal static and spend the afternoon with my ears pricked as though a victory is predestined.
With half a dozen friends, I watch Blackie saunter down the post parade, looking sharp as she nudges against the pony. “So, when Blackie wins,” I tell my friends, “I want you guys to come down with me for the photo.”
Everyone’s placed money on Blackie, and I put down $130 of my own and other people’s money.
With Perez on her again, Blackie breaks out well from the five-hole, rushing to the front of the pack before settling for third at the clubhouse turn behind two other frontrunners, Grayross Gal and Archery. The first quarter comes at 22.19, which, I realize later, is too fast for her. Perez makes his move midway through the backstretch, loosening his hold on the horse. Blackie moves to second at the turn, then at the top of the lane, where she runs fifth from the rail. All the horses are closely bunched together.
With the horses coming into view, my friends and I get up to scream for Mocha Time by her stable nickname. Others around us, with their plastic cups of beer held to their chests like nursing infants, yell out the numbers they picked with tender, albeit impersonal, coaxing: Come on, two... you can do it, two! Don’t give up ground... come on, two! The ones cheering on their exotic wagering picks sound even odder, like orgasmic safecrackers: “One–four–seven! One–four–seven! Yes... yes... yes!”
Even though we’re screaming on a first-name basis, it doesn’t help. Blackie has used up her burst of speed. Beautiful Breeze comes in through the inside and takes the lead, while Sultry Eyes, the rater, also advances past her. According to summary results, Blackie finished fifth by three lengths. It’s her worst performance this season.
Having talked up the horse’s chances, I apologize to my friends who lost money. “I accept full responsibility,” I say, in my blazer with sunglasses on my forehead, “which doesn’t mean I’ll reimburse you.”
“It’s all right,” one friend tells me.
I drain a beer, then another one. Down $130 for the day, I start betting wildly, placing $20 on a long shot to win, then another $20 on the favourite. Both lose. Things don’t improve when I run into a friend who struts by us after hitting a $2 triactor for $150. His other friend has a $6 box on that same bet.
It’s not as though I’m fully out of control, but I’m not my usual thrifty self. I’m like the shy, quiet co-worker who starts dancing with his shirt off at the club and ends the night trying to trade his laptop for cocaine. Or the garrulous optimist whose eyes go dead after four glasses of whisky.
“Hey, we want to see the horse,” a friend says.
I push my face farther into my copy of the Form. “Sure, sure,” I tell her, “after the next race.”
“I don’t care if you’re hungry,” another friend jokes, adopting an angry authoritarian’s voice. “We’re not eating until Daddy wins his money back.”
“Okay, fine, let’s go.”
In the stables, as Blackie is being walked, my friends feed apples to Randi’s other horses. I approach Randi, who isn’t as unhappy about the race as she had been the last time, when Perez dropped the stick.
“What happened?” I ask her outside the feed room.
“We just didn’t get any luck,” she says with a fatalistic flatness as she fills up buckets of feed. “She was five wide at the turn.”
“I mean, did Perez do something again?” I ask insistently.
“Nope,” Randi says.
Her voice rises in irritation. I shouldn’t be testing her temper but the dropped stick from the previous race emboldens me. “Is it because she had too long of a layoff?” I ask. “What went wrong?”
“I wish you’d quit fucking thinking there’s something wrong,” she says, carrying out one of the buckets to one of her new horses, Rooster. “You always think she did something wrong.”
“I don’t mean in that way...” I say.
“The fucking thing tries her little heart out.”
“Then why didn’t she win?” I blurt.
Rooster backs into the stall as Randi dumps his dinner into his tub. Alex returns Blackie to her stall, and my friends become preoccupied with petting and photographing her.
Blackie, I am fairly certain, loves having her photo taken. At the sound of a lens focusing automatically, she preens and makes faces. Her ears prick and her nostrils flare, she tosses her forelock over her eyes and bares her big buckteeth.
I glare at my mare, thinking to myself that she doesn’t deserve the attention. It’s only because of me that anyone is making a fuss over you. But the horse doesn’t seem fazed by my sour mood. As Blackie continues to ignore me, Randi steps in front of me.
“In all my fucking life,” she tells me, “I’ve never had to deal with such trouble from some guy who don’t know fuck-all about horses and horseracing, and only has ten percent of a horse.”
“I’ve got more than that now,” I remind her. “I wrote another cheque.”
“Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten,” she says, disappearing back into the feed room to prepare Blackie’s dinner. “You just don’t get it.”
FOR DAYS AFTERWARDS, I sulk over Blackie’s poor performance and avoid anything that reminds me of my humiliation. Out of a need for distraction, I finally attend to long-delayed errands, which include retrieving three heavy boxes’ worth of paper from my parents’ house. I don’t have enough space in my apartment to keep this material, which means slowly weeding out the essentials. Most of it I relinquish easily: copies of guitar magazines and old English essays.
A few items, though, invite tricky feelings. This includes a cache of letters and postcards that Kulwant sent me a decade ago. In the early days of email, Kulwant held out from electronic correspondence longer than most. The notes come from around the world, his cramped, neat scrawl filling out pages and postcards.
Reading through his messages, I remember how funny he could be—he would whiteout the dialogue bubbles in Peanuts strips and write in references to hand jobs and gonorrhea—how his own strident view of the world encased a precise and idealistic sense of purpose.
A surprising number of his letters were encouraging. Before I became the self-satisfied person Kulwant likes to ridicule, I was the insecure, needy person he coddled and hectored positively. Sifting through a batch of letters that Kulwant wrote to me when I first moved away to grad school, I reread his attempts to cajole me into good spirits with a walking tour of fictional landmarks near my student apartment (e.g., I lived three blocks from Dylan Thomas’s falconer and across town from Miles Davis’s favourite yogourt stand), and, later, the patient critiques he offered on my novel-in-progress, which he hated but still helped improve. In all these letters, the parts I loved about him co-mingled and overlapped with his most obnoxious and self-inflating qualities.
On Kulwant’s meticulously updated website, I find a listing for a performance in a converted east side deli. I bring with me a friend, Antonia, a live-music blogger working on her dissertation in art history. The place is crowded with hollow-eyed beardos and women with chopped bangs and plastic-rimmed glasses that stand out on their pale faces. We take a space behind the deli counter, which is crammed blindly with CDs, cans of cheap lager, and a houseplant.
“How do you know this guy?” Antonia asks me. “Is he one of your golfing buddies?”
My face cracks with disbelief. “I don’t golf.”
“Really? I figured you would,” she says. “This better not suck like the last music thing you coerced me into attending.”
Six months ago, I convinced Antonia to be my plus-one for a concert I was reviewing by a British singer-songwriter whose songs all seem to be about eating warm buns while waiting for a ferry. As retribution, I was forced to sit with her through the Julia Child biopic that was screening that summer.
Kulwant gets onstage accompanied by his detuned Telecaster and a woman with kohl-smeared eyes holding a violin but standing behind a drum set. At first, the underwater notes he picks on his guitar, played to no discernible rhythm, sound intentionally unpleasant. The violinist begins to play a swirling figure as the guitar’s chord pattern begins to shift. Kulwant, in a dark button-up shirt, steps to the microphone and closes his eyes.
His voice is gravelly and Springsteen-ish. The song is stirring but perhaps too simple, and yet Kulwant’s mere presence holds the attention of everyone in the room.
“He’s not bad,” Antonia says, as Kulwant changes guitars between songs. “How do you know the guy?”
“We’re old friends,” I ask.
“But all your other friends are so horrible.”
“I’ve been hiding him from you. I wasn’t sure you were worthy.”
“He’s cute, too.”
Something inside her purse blips. She reaches for her iPhone for the fifth time that evening.
“Who are you texting?” I ask.
“Some guy from Craigslist who wants to buy my van,” she says. “But he keeps flaking out on me about the price. At this point, I’m willing to give it away.”
KULWANT AND I both realize we’ll never be as close as we once were. He’s still the accidental horseman and artist; and I’m a writer hot for a big score. Our views on ambition and glory put us in rival churches.
In an effort to win a convert, Kulwant convinces me to accompany him to the Fraser Valley Auctions, which happens to be held on the same Sunday as the B.C. Derby. Only a fifteen-minute drive away from the equestrian facility where the yearlings were sold, this auction house sells livestock such as cattle, chicken, sheep, goats, and rabbits. Every four months, it also takes bids on previously owned horses. If the yearling auction is like a new-car dealership, this place is a junkyard sale, where people sift through cast-off animals for bargains.
“It’s not a given these horses will be turned into dog food, right?” I ask Kulwant on the highway. “Some of them can be retrained, right?”
“I called the auction house this morning,” he says. “I asked the person who answered what kind of horses they sold there. ‘All kinds of them,’ the guy said. And then I asked him what happens to the horses. And he told me, ‘All kinds of things.’”
The auction house has a quaint, frontier-style facade connected to a low-slung holding barn with a corrugated aluminum roof. We pass through the entrance into a kitchenette that serves hamburgers and sliced hot dogs on hamburger buns. A cook behind the counter directs us to a door in the back.
We find ourselves in a cramped, windowless room with a thick band of yellowing caulk smeared on the walls below the ceiling; it’s as though someone were trying to hold the building together with Krazy Glue. Around us on steeply tiered benches that descend from one corner are guys in cowboy hats, mothers with their kids, and young couples. In the other is a fenced-off dirt floor. Flies plump as coat buttons circle in the air. By the fence at the foot of the benches, a woman sits cross-legged on the floor with her baby in a car seat.
Behind the fence, a door opens and a young woman in a cowboy hat and a windbreaker rides in on a chestnut-coloured horse with an orange tag on her hip.
“The next horse we have is Alicia,” says the auctioneer, whose delivery is slightly more percussive than the one at the yearling auction. “She’s a six-year-old mare. She’d be great for trail riding. She has received thirty days of professional training.”
She goes for $500. Bidders eyeball the horses like the audience in last week’s auction, only this time they’re looking for meat and not conformation. They hold up blue cards when a horse captures their fancy. Four thoroughbreds are spat out of the door, a mare and three geldings that have only been halter-broken and are being sold as lot. They bobble against each other as they circle the pen. All four of them go for $400.
While horses occupy an awkward space between pet and livestock in the U.S. and Canada, the slaughter of horses, including those sent from the States, is only permitted north of the border. Some of the meat from these animals is sent to countries like France and Japan, where it is prized for its sweet flavour and low fat content; colts and geldings provide the most delectable meat.
Many racehorses, which have been bred to be ornery and high-strung, can’t be converted into jumpers or trail horses no matter how hard an organization like New Stride tries. After they have dropped to the lowest class and travelled to the smallest tracks, there’s no place left for them. Given the medications and hormones that racehorses get, slaughtered thoroughbreds are often turned into dog food or rendered into products like crayons and lubricants.
Randi is still horrified by the memory of inadvertently helping a friend prepare a bow-legged horse for a meat auction. “He was hard to control, but he always liked me,” she told me earlier that year. “I give the guy driving the truck the horse’s papers. He goes, ‘He’s not going to need papers where he’s going.’ When I saw his little nose in the trailer window, I started fucking crying. I’ll never forget that. Now when people take horses from me, I always ask them for some money. There’ll be people who’ll say I want a horse, they’ll bring their kids, and then they’ll bring them to an auction and collect five hundred bucks. If you get some money from them up front, then you know they aren’t doing that.”
Despite these oppressive surroundings, the crowd has the same optimistic tone as the yearling sale. The bidding for a fifteen-year-old white draught horse that spent years pulling a carriage around Stanley Park grows over $1,000. “Come on, folks,” says the announcer. “Here’s a horse you can ride at night. A horse that’s so big you can survive a collision with a car.” People chuckle nervously.
The woman who eventually claims the horse gives her friends that look of self-amazement you exude when you’ve talked yourself into a big-ticket purchase.
Standing out in my chunky, plastic-framed glasses and cashmere sweater, I am ill at ease. Why? Is it because I’m not yet desensitized to the horror I’m witnessing, or is it a sentimental reaction? I believe it’s the latter, but when a skinny young yearling, almost deer-like in her build, is sold for $60, I pull aside Kulwant to leave.
“You see what I mean?” asks Kulwant, who has watched the auction in grave silence, as we step into my car.
I’m not yet sure what the point of our visit was, if it wasn’t only to depress me. No one at the auction looked to me like a dead-eyed horsemeat merchant. Horse people are farm people, who love animals, just not any one animal. And while it’s worth supporting rescue groups like New Stride, even the slaughter of horses makes sense when the alternative is to abandon the animals in a field to starve to death.
We get to Hastings in time for the B.C. Derby, the province’s most lucrative competition of the year. This year, the Grade III stakes race belongs to Winning Machine, an out-of-town horse from Seattle who edges out Jersey Town, another “shipper” from New York. Local favourite Tommy Danzigger fades in the lane and finishes seventh.
I’m glad to be here, around horses that have travelled a long way from their first auction—with time to go before the next one.
AFTER A WEEK of rain, Blackie’s next race occurs on a clear and crisp day. The late-afternoon sunlight, which was washed out like a lager through the summer, now has the depth and richness of a pale ale.
After my argument with Randi, I decide to avoid her today, lingering by the paddock fence as I watch her speaking with Fernando Perez.
The night before the race, Carole Serene sends me the transcript of her first communication with my horse. “She’s an open book, she is,” she tells me in an accompanying email. “While I didn’t set out to help you with your ‘wagering,’ Blackie has divulged exactly how she will run based upon her position in the pack. Strategy can be worked out so that her rider gets her to the front early, a place she will endeavour to keep herself in for the full race.”
After the opening preamble with Seth, Carole speaks with Blackie. She asks her whether her hock was hurting, as Randi had suspected earlier in the year. Like Sylvester, Blackie speaks with a slightly formal voice reminiscent, perhaps, of an exchange student from Scandinavia or the computerized voice of Stephen Hawking:
BLACKIE: Oh yes, but that is not a sore hock anymore—it seems to be well now.
CAROLE SERENE: Do you like racing, Blackie?
BLACKIE: Oh, enough I guess.
CAROLE SERENE: Do you want to be the fastest horse in the race?
BLACKIE: Doesn’t matter.
CAROLE SERENE: Oh, you don’t care if you win or not?
BLACKIE: Well, for me to win is to finish and get back to my house and eat and not have pain. That is my winning.
CAROLE SERENE: Blackie, Kevin and Randi tell me that you fade at the end of the race sometimes, and they ask if you do this because you are tired, or maybe you are sore. Can you tell me about that?
BLACKIE: Fade?
CAROLE SERENE: Yes, to go slower.
BLACKIE: Oh, well it just doesn’t matter so much if I’m not at the front of the group; then I know I will be at the back or the middle, so it won’t make me faster or able to get to the front, so it really doesn’t matter then.
CAROLE SERENE: So you stop trying?
BLACKIE: Looks like it.
CAROLE SERENE: What has to happen for you to try harder to be at the front of the horses and maybe come first or second?
BLACKIE: I like to run in the front of the group—if I can get there early I will try to stay there, but if I don’t, well it just doesn’t matter anymore.
Blackie’s lackadaisical response is disappointing and alarming.
CAROLE SERENE: Does your rider ask you to wait before you go really fast, instead of starting really fast?
BLACKIE: Seems like it. When there’s a big crowd of horses at the beginning we seem to wait for them to thin out before heading for the front—too late.
CAROLE SERENE: So you don’t mind pushing through the thick crowd of horses at the beginning of the race?
BLACKIE: Not at all—I can do that, you know—I’m a big girl!
In the races she’s run, with the possible exception of her most recent start, Blackie isn’t normally too far from the front, nor does it make sense for her to go all out in the beginning. I begin to feel there must be static on the spiritual line between the horse and medium.
CAROLE SERENE: Do you like to meet the people Kevin brings to see you?
BLACKIE: Oh yes and they bring treats too—this is good—Kevin treats me nice.
CAROLE SERENE: Is there anything you want to tell Randi or Kevin now?
BLACKIE: Hello.
This part does please me. I want to believe she knows and likes me. Faith in this transcript: restored!
I’M AT THE fence when the race begins. Blackie breaks well, taking the lead and hugging the rail, while a 15-to-1 long shot called Sheisrough also races up ahead. Midway up the backstretch, Beautiful Breeze, the horse that won Blackie’s last race, makes her move and passes Blackie. At the top of the lane, Beautiful Breeze overtakes Sheisrough, though both are far ahead of my horse, who fades, but still hangs onto third. As with the previous race, she just doesn’t have enough luck or talent today.
Lingering by the rail when Perez dismounts, I see how hard Blackie is breathing, the sweat that coats her shanks, the dirt splattered on her front quarters. This time when I watch her I see thoroughbreds as the brittle creatures they really are—running backs with ski poles for legs. For me to win is to finish and get back to my house and eat and not have pain. That is my winning. Watching Blackie now, I have no doubt that Carole Serene knows a horse’s heart.
I also watch her with the image of the slaughter auction in mind. Who was I to think there was nothing at stake in a claiming race? If a big-time horse rides for glamour and prestige, then the claiming horse rides for her life. If she doesn’t win enough races and earn enough money, she faces eviction from her stall.
Randi, who yells at and defends her animals with equal ferocity, had every reason to be angry with me. To believe that thoroughbreds live to race doesn’t mean one should discount the effort and strain involved in their work. I took that for granted. A horse like Blackie, not the most gifted runner, could easily give up against stronger competition, and yet she keeps herself in every race. She races for her life, but she also races for Randi. And through Randi, she races for me. How could I think I deserved better?
I take my time before heading to the backside. When I get there, the horses who’ve raced that day have all been walked and fed and the shed row is empty. From her stall, Blackie has a sleepy expression on her face, but her ears prick up when she sees me.
“That was such a good race,” I tell her, placing a hand on her neck. My voice cracks and I’m glad there’s no one around to see this. “You ran so well. I am so proud of you, and I’m so glad you didn’t hurt yourself. You’ve never disappointed me. I’m so glad I’ve known you. You need to know that, okay?”
Blackie pops her head and nips my blazer, looking for a treat. “Hey, I just got that dry-cleaned.”
It’s still not clear whether Blackie likes me, but the more I think about it, the more it becomes irrelevant. Maybe wanting a horse to love you is like wanting your favourite song to be written about you, wanting the narrator of your favourite book to be your best friend: a fanciful notion, a wholly unnecessary one. What’s really important is how much you love that animal, and how loving an animal changes you.
I lean up against the stall gate and wrap my hands around the horse’s neck. A horse’s neck is all muscle, a hidebound tree trunk. Hugging a horse reminds you of how it felt to cling onto a parent as a toddler.
“Don’t die,” I whisper to her. “Don’t ever die.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
I turn to see Randi, looking tired, and sucking on another smoke.
“I’m drunk,” I lie. “I get this way when I’m drinking.”
“You’re funny,” she says.