“I‘ve dropped sixty at Golden Gate Fields. Hitchhiking back to San Anselmo it begins lightly raining. A cowboy in a silver Dodge work van picks me up outside San Quentin. I’m thinking now I’m down to thirty. He’d gone to the track once. He’d tapped out by the seventh. The guy that took him didn’t want to leave until after the ninth. He told this guy he’d wait out in the car. He went out and after the ninth his friend comes out, breaks a two-by-four off one of the parking barricades, and starts in on the car with it. He’d jumped out, got hit, had his arm and jaw broke. He’s lying on the ground, near unconsciousness, when the police arrive, arrest him, and book him for willful assault on private property before taking him to Emergency. The friend isn’t arrested, saying, All I know is we both went broke but he left after the seventh and I just got out here. He musta gone crazy. At Bay Meadows, just before the end of the fall meet, leaning on the rail watching the horses being walked around in the saddling paddock before going out to post, the sixty-year-old man next to me, nicely dressed in a conservative gray suit and expensive-looking shoes, turns to me and quietly says, I lost it all, his face choked and sick. Hell, I tell him, it’s all right. You’ll make it back. No, he says, you don’t understand. I lost it all, all of it, everything. That’s what I’m thinking about while the cowboy tells me his story. Getting out in San Rafael, I start walking toward Fourth Street to hitch into San Anselmo. The only thing I can come up with to tell Carol is that I can’t trade off, well, whatever it is, right, you know what I’m talking about, for love and rent any longer. Or else not say anything, just get my gear and adios it. Maybe it’s just that easy. It probably is.”