IF YOU KNEW Harris was a real-estate agent and saw his angular, bespoke visage, the home you would conjure for him in your imagination would be a penthouse suite in an envy-inducing edifice of glass and steel. In your mind, you would furnish it with geometrical leather furniture, framed emulsions of oil splatter mounted on the walls, and a gnocchi maker.
In reality, he bought the fifty-year-old North Shore home he grew up in, a four-bedroom rancher set deep behind a phalanx of alder trees. (Purchasing the home allowed his parents to move into a condo tower that has its own on-call dog-groomer.) To his wife’s dismay, he insists on keeping much of the furniture that came with the house, like the butterscotch-coloured corduroy couch in the living room, the kitschy landscape painting his parents bought in a Havana street market, and the upright piano where he’s maintained his younger sister’s figure-skating trophies next to baby pictures of his own children, Jack and Liam. I don’t know whether this is because Harris is thrifty or sentimental; I’ve seen him both ways. Angie did succeed in getting him to buy a new bed for their master suite.
“I printed out a copy of my manuscript,” Harris tells me as we hover by his grill. It’s May, a few days before I leave for Kentucky.
“Oh good,” I say, watching him plant his meat thermometer into a bison burger with a nutmeg-Swiss core that I imagine pulsing with goo like a beating heart.
He taps down each patty with his flipper, the scent of nutmeg making me think of Christmas, and closes the grill. “I’m sure you get manuscripts all the time.”
“Well, I don’t get them none of the time.”
“I want you to be honest.”
“You can’t handle the truth.”
I deserve the fake laugh I get. “Mind if I email you the story as a Word doc so you can use track changes to make notes? I can’t read your handwriting.”
It’s not quite warm enough for outdoor cooking, but Harris bought the grill last week and paid extra so it would be connected to his gas line in time for the weekend. Angie sneaks onto the deck with two more beers in one hand. She has dark hair that she wears in a stylishly updated Beatles mop, the stringy, braided musculature that comes from running, and brown eyes that remind me of, well, a racehorse. Never having had the taste for beer, she’s made herself a Negroni in a short glass. The boys are inside watching Ratatouille.
“So,” Angie says, handing us each a Grolsch, “tell me about your trip to Kentucky. I’ve been promised gossip.”
“Yeah, I’m visiting the Kentucky Horse Park, where all the retired thoroughbreds live, and Churchill Downs,” I tell her. “I’m also seeing a friend.”
“Harris says you’re looking up an old girlfriend.”
I cringe. “She was never my girlfriend,” I yelp, hating myself for the falsetto I lapse into when flustered. I’m always talking this way.
“But you wanted her to be, right?” Harris says, opening up the grill and plating the burgers. Normally, he wouldn’t tease me about this, but maybe he’s sore about my grim reaction to his manuscript. “You had it bad for her, right? She was dating someone else. And then she married another guy, but the minute you find out they split up, you book your ticket. Do I have my timeline correct?”
“Yes, yes,” I say weakly, “but you’re taking facts out of context.”
Angie watches Harris disappear into the dining room, the burgers sitting proudly on his serving platter like Olympic medals. She passes her eyes over me, with a mixture of pity and amusement, as though I were a lapdog chasing his own tail. Maybe I only believe she’s looking at me that way, but I don’t believe I’m only believing it.
As expected, dinner, with yam fries, a spring salad, and a peach and blueberry cobbler, is so good I swear to hate my next three meals out of loyalty. Harris’s older kid, Liam, likes to eat his burger with a knife and fork, and with mint jelly smeared all over the patty. Jack, who has Angie’s darker colouring and wears wire-frame glasses, doesn’t say much at all.
After dessert, Angie puts the kids to bed. Harris and I cross the backyard to his “workshop”—the tool shed that his father had converted into a space to smoke his pipe and look at girlie magazines. Now Harris uses it to smoke weed and keyboard his fiction. He has furnished the workshop with the stuff from his old room that had to be shuttled out of the house: the RoboCop 2 and Guns N’ Roses posters, the Haight Street sign he stole on a high-school graduation road trip, and a taped-up beanbag chair.
“I think Liam is weird,” he says to me with crinkly, stoner eyes. Because I don’t smoke weed, he pours me a mug of Jameson’s, from the bottle he keeps in his desk drawer. “I look at him and think, ‘Did all the weed-smoking degrade my sperm when we conceived him?’ By the time we made Jack, I’d stopped my wake-and-bake routine.”
“Isn’t it a natural reaction to think your child odd?” I say, sitting uneasily in his beanbag chair. I balance my mug of whisky on Harris’s four-hundred-page manuscript. “I’m positive your dad thought that about you.”
“I’m getting a vasectomy.”
“That’s an extreme reaction.”
“Angie wants me to get one.”
“She does?”
Harris nods madly. “Two is our max,” he says. “I mean, we originally only wanted one kid. Angie’s an only child; she says she loved getting all the attention.”
“But then you had another one.”
He shrugged. “Considering how weird Liam turned out to be, it worked out okay.”
If Harris lived in a glass high-rise, I’d envy his life less than I do. Of all of his enviable qualities, it’s the effortlessness he projects I’d steal from him first. I’ve seen him on hot summer afternoons, and he barely sweats; he only sweats a little, on purpose, to make other people feel less self-conscious. Without being phony or slick, he acts as though he were born dry-cleaned. His own father shares this quality, and I’m sure it’s what allows them both to move million-dollar bungalows.
Only a decade ago, we were at a roughly equivalent place and now he possesses a comfortably imperfect life—one that isn’t exactly what I want, but not far from it. In the meantime, I’ve spent that time struggling to write books, hustling for freelance assignments, stammering through classes. Strain and striving clog up every itchy pore of my being. And yet I’ve chosen to put myself on a plane to seek out an unrequited love, an acquaintance I lost touch with for good reason.
I HAVEN’T SEEN Celeste in nine years. The circumstances of our first meeting, at an Archers of Loaf concert in a long-demolished indie-rock club called the Starfish Room in 1997, now have the unmistakable tang of a more awkwardly dressed era. (Later that year, she would be the first person I ever sent an email to.) It was outside the Starfish Room that she introduced herself, wearing a faded college-football jersey and a second-hand leather jacket.
“What’s your story?” I asked her, in an oven-mitted attempt at banter. Keep in mind I was only twenty-two.
“My story is trouble,” she told me, after shaking my hand.
Right away, after she gave me her phone number, that moment was cast in the burnished light of eventfulness. I felt like the bookish, sensitive narrator in the kind of novel I used to love reading—and now try to avoid writing. Over the next couple of years, with occasional lapses into common sense, I filled my days and nights with a suckering ardour for her.
When I knew her, she had a boyfriend with a ponytail who tortured her with the iron-fisted ambivalence necessary to engulf her heart. For a while, his absences and the shortcomings of that relationship were offloaded to me—her neutered helpmate, movie companion, and airport-limo driver. I dedicated flaccid poetry to her, bought her magazine subscriptions, proofread her essays. She got me an ice-cream cake on my twenty-third birthday. At times, she was blunt about her lack of interest in me. But, in moments of distress, she related her platonic feelings more ambiguously, with a sentimental gloss and open-endedness that I was free to distort into a kind of suppressed reciprocation.
One evening around Christmas, 1998, after I’d come back from a term away, she was excited enough about my return to remark that a lighted ornament on a tree reminded her of an orgasm. Later that night, we even shared a kiss in my car at an intersection. It’s a moment that has become almost threadbare from recollection. For years after the fact, I regretted pulling away from her when that light changed. Why didn’t I just let the cars behind me pull around and breeze by? Maybe we’d still be kissing now.
Is nine years, the brunt of my adult years, a safe enough time apart? Actually, it’s not worth finding out. I realize this even before my three flights to Charleston, West Virginia—the last tiny plane I board is basically a mini-van with wings—where I rent a car at the airport to cross states into Kentucky. Celeste has warned me that her townhouse is part of a subdivision that’s so new it doesn’t appear on any maps. When I get to that development, my GPS only takes me to the nearest major intersection before the animated display shows only empty space. As far as my device is concerned, I’m off-roading in the Sahara. In a panic, I pick up my phone.
“I knew you would call me,” she says. “Where are you?”
“Nearby, but I’ll need to be talked through this.”
“Do you see the supermarket?”
I turn to see a strip mall in my rear-view mirror. “Yes.”
“Pull off on the street behind it.”
I make a U-turn and then another turn down a street full of empty lots. “Okay.”
“Do you see a sign for a hideous housing complex?” she asks.
“Calumet Estates,” I recite, “Two-bedroom bluegrass palaces from $225,000?”
She sighs. “Don’t need to rub it in.”
The billboard directs me down a hill, where I turn into a roundabout that leads into clusters of brick row houses with beige detailing and flags hanging from poles like rooster wattles. They are near identical.
“Confused yet?” she asks. “Turn into the last cul-de-sac.”
The phone is still stamped on the side of my face when I catch sight of her outside. She’s wearing a white cotton golf shirt and jeans, and no makeup besides a little lip gloss. I have one hand on my bag so I hug her with only my free arm.
She leads me down an alley lined with air conditioners to her back unit where I dump my bag next to the futon I’ll be sleeping on. Her place is sparsely furnished in a manner befitting an academic nomad. For the last seven years, she has followed her estranged husband, a mathematician, across the Western world as he completed his Ph.D. and post-docs. They set up camp in this Kentucky town, where she found a job in student admissions. At the end of the year, he resigned his position for a better job in Frankfurt and told her he no longer wanted to be married.
“I’m here until I figure out where I go next,” she explains, fingering the wedding ring on her hand. “Do I make for a gay divorcee? Or do you think I look hideous?”
“Not at all.” She’s still tomboyish, with a high forehead and her Jean Seberg–style bob. She doesn’t look too different from the girl I kissed once, unforgettably, over a decade ago.
Celeste smiles. I tell myself that I am here for completely selfless reasons—to prop up the spirits of an old friend going through a hard time. I bury any intentions I have to rewrite the past. I am here instead to prove how different I am from then. I am no longer a passenger to my desires, but the pilot—failing that, maybe the flight attendant.
“You look hungry,” she says, her grey eyes like pinpricks.
Although I grabbed a chicken burger at the airport, I nod dumbly. She gives me two restaurant options: the colourful wine bar with so-so food or the French bistro that has better food but is overpriced.
I pick the second place. “I’m on vacation,” I explain.
She shakes her head, regretting the fact that I was given any choice. “It’s too expensive. We’ll go to the first place.”
The restaurant is not even half full when we arrive. While sidestepping any awkward incidents from the past, we catch up on our lives since we last saw each other: the bad apartments, the meaningful and far-flung excursions, the people who’ve passed through our lives like cheap wine at a house party.
As we speak, I realize that the essence of her allure is a combination of her slim-hipped girlishness and her candour, the immediate intimacy she can create with a jibe or a giggly expression of disdain, which often edges into callousness.
If anything, I fell in love with her voice, which is still squeaky and still trips over hard consonants—like she’s got an invisible toothbrush in her mouth. Even now, her favourite word is “heinous.” For years after we lost contact, I kept arguing with her in my head, getting in the final word at last. At dinner tonight, listening to her talk, I feel as though I’ve caught a long-forgotten favourite on the oldies station.
“I went to riding school when I was twelve and fantasized about being sent to boarding school,” she says as our plates are removed. “Why are you so interested in horses?”
“It’s an excuse to see you,” I say. Then: “I’m joking.”
“You were always good for flattery.”
“And yet it never worked.”
To italicize this remark, I bang my fist on the table, but it doesn’t come off quite as playfully as I intend it to. Celeste, in fact, shudders.
“Maybe it didn’t work the way you wanted it to,” she says, loosening her grip on her wine stem, “but it left an impression on me.”
The truth is, I do know she cared about me, but then there was the part of her that stoked my ardour for cheap thrills. And when I became too demanding, she would shut me out for months, even years, before picking up the reins of our fraught friendship when she found herself ear-high in neglect.
It seems like this might be one of those moments.
After her third glass of Malbec, Celeste leans across the table and drops her voice. “I think Jacob has a new lover,” Celeste says, referring to her erstwhile spouse. “She’s a former colleague who he would go on and on about. He would use words like ‘bubbly’ and ‘energetic’ to describe her. The truth is, Jacob always felt I was a lazy lover.”
I claw at my neck nervously and try to come back with my own saucy anecdote, the kind I was woefully short of a decade ago, in an effort to stay flush with her frankness. “I once fell asleep during a hand job,” I chirp back. “It was early in the morning and very relaxing.”
“I probably didn’t have enough motivation.” She changes the subject. “So, what time are you leaving for Lexington to visit the horse museum tomorrow?”
I tell her I’m leaving in the morning. Celeste hasn’t decided whether she can travel with me.
“I have a meeting tomorrow afternoon,” she says, “but I can leave anytime afterwards.”
It’s Friday evening when we embark on the three-hour drive into Lexington, where we’re visiting the Kentucky Horse Park before stopping at Churchill Downs in Louisville. Dusk wraps a purple sarong over the horizon, and the arid, hilly terrain near the West Virginia border gives way to Kentucky’s rolling, horse-pocked pastures and its bluegrass, named for the colour of its flower heads when it grows tall. The bluegrass feeds off limestone deposits, which, in turn, are supposed to fortify the bones of foals. White fences cut through those hills, rising and dipping with the soft curves like thick thread.
After checking into a La Quinta in Lexington with two double beds (I call in advance to make sure we aren’t sharing a queen-size mattress), we find a book-lined tavern with a back patio that serves sandwiches and bourbon-accented beers.
“I was a little worried about how we would get along after all these years,” Celeste says over the garage rock piped in from the jukebox inside, “but it’s as though nothing has changed.”
A waiter comes with sandwiches, barbecue chicken for her and Italian sausage for me. Celeste eyes my overcooked sausage on its kaiser and tells me she’s reminded of her husband’s damaged penis. “Jacob’s mohel had a drinking problem, so the circumcision was like a Zorro movie,” she explains. “That probably accounted for his problems with intimacy.”
I lift my eyebrows. “I once dated a girl who liked to be bitten,” I offer as a rejoinder. “One time I bit so hard I broke skin and we needed to stop fooling around to apply Neosporin.”
“No one ever called me a lousy lay before him,” she continues. “I never had any complaints. None that I can remember.”
I feel something tremble inside me, like the revving motor of a car on cinder blocks.
“You seem to remember the past better than I do,” Celeste says. “I’ve always been so forgetful.”
“I guess I do.”
“Do you remember if we ever kissed?”
We’re both surprised by my reaction. Celeste was probably angling for a carefully wrought recreation from yours truly, her personal laureate and historian. The best thing to do would be to laugh off her absentmindedness, but I can’t. To my shame and embarrassment, the hurt I’ve felt about her since 1998 has been sitting in deep freeze, and it defrosts in front of us, then and there. Afraid that my voice will crack, I don’t say anything. I ask for the bill and start for the car.
“I may have been an asshole to you back then,” she says, following me outside, “but you were always important to me.”
I already know this from the phone conversations we’ve had and emails we’ve exchanged in those nine years. We get into the car and turn back to the motel.
“I can’t explain to you why I’ve always felt one way, but never another,” Celeste continues. “I just don’t know why.”
I sleep poorly that night, only partly because of the ice machine rumbling outside our room. The next morning, we don’t talk much as we take our complimentary continental breakfast—shrink-wrapped bagels and muffins with plastic shot glasses of orange juice.
From there, we set off for the Kentucky Horse Park, a theme park for horse lovers. Its attractions, spread over the 1,200-acre property, include a museum devoted to saddlebred horses; a Parade of Breeds; four new art exhibits; pony and trail rides; and monuments for famous racehorses, including Man o’ War, whose grave here is marked by a giant statue. All of this would be appreciated by someone in a better mood than me.
“Let me pay for this,” Celeste insists, as we line up for admission. “Do you want to go on the farm tour at one?”
“I guess,” I mumble.
“Or would you rather go trail riding?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
At the International Museum of the Horse, we trudge up a spiral walkway that begins with a replica skeleton of the horse’s zoological ancestor, the eohippus, a four-toed creature that inhabited cypress jungles about 45 to 55 million years ago and was the size of a dog. A few exhibits up, I learn that horseracing has been around since the mounted chariot races in the Greek Olympics of 638 BC. The English, who’d brought Arabian horses back from the Crusades, also liked fast horses, and in their pursuit of the swiftest steeds created the modern thoroughbred by cross-breeding three foundation Arabian stallions with seventy-four English, Arabian, and Barbary mares in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Today, ninety-five percent of today’s male thoroughbreds—there are presently about half a million thoroughbreds in total—can trace their lineage back to one stallion: the Darley Arabian, which was brought to England from Syria as a four-year-old in 1704 by Thomas Darley. Modern thoroughbred racing—on turf, then dirt—followed soon afterwards.
Later, at the Hall of Champions, we snap photos of Funny Cide, the 2003 winner of the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, and Cigar, the 1995 winner of the Breeders’ Cup Classic. Both horses have been relegated to this equine retirement home instead of the more glorious thoroughbred afterlife on the breeding farm. In Funny Cide’s case, it’s because he’s a gelding. Male horses are castrated, usually as a last resort, to make them easier to train. Cigar, who worked a year as a stud and produced no foals, was discovered to produce bowlegged sperm. The Italian consortium that purchased his breeding rights cashed an insurance policy and dumped him here.
My mood lifts that afternoon, and after visiting the retired champions, I linger in the gift store, which is stuffed with silkscreened images of dewy-eyed horses on T-shirts and coffee mugs, and bumper stickers that read, BEWARE THE MARE and THE HORSE ATE MY PAYCHEQUE. In this retail stupor, I forget about the farm tour that Celeste signed us up for. I rush outside.
She’s standing by the bus. “I told them you were using the men’s room,” she says. The rest of the bus glowers at me. Two teenage sisters in the row behind us tap their watches, on cue; I later ask Celeste if they rehearsed it; they didn’t. “It’s a good thing she likes you,” one guy in a golf shirt and khaki shorts says, nodding at Celeste.
The bus leaves the theme park. The properties surrounding the Kentucky Horse Park consist of immodestly sprawling ranch-style homes, subdivided by white fence, and pristine barns that seem better suited to storing antique tea tables and powdered wigs than live animals.
“There’s sixty miles of white fence in the horse park,” our guide, Sean, calls out in a soaring baritone from the front of the bus. “It costs you $18,000 a mile to paint a white fence, $6,000 a mile to paint a black fence. You paint the white fence every three or four years, and you paint the black fence every seven or nine.”
“So, is it a status symbol?” someone on the bus asks.
Sean smiles. “Yes, it is.”
As we leave the park for the surrounding pasture, our guide delivers thoroughbred trivia to us like polished marbles. Of the thirty to thirty-five thousand foals born every year, he says, only fifty-five percent eventually win races, and only seven to eight percent make money for their owners. A mare gestates for eleven months and is capable of running races into her seventh month of pregnancy. A female horse can produce eighteen to twenty foals in her lifetime, compared with the hundred-plus babies that studs can sire in a single year. For this reason, broodmares don’t get the same press as the stallions (a colt becomes a stallion at age five—unless he becomes a gelding first), even though they contribute equally to a foal’s temperament and conformation.
There’s more information. For classification purposes, all horses have their official birthday on January 1st (in the southern hemisphere, it’s August 1st) because, in their first couple of seasons, they compete exclusively with other thoroughbreds born in the same year—thus, a race for three-year-olds in March could have horses that don’t biologically turn three until April or May. To keep these equines roughly at the same level of physical maturity, the thoroughbred breeding season is thus compacted into the beginning of the year, from mid-February to mid-July.
“Eleven days after mares give birth to foals,” Sean says, “they go right back to the breeding shed and get impregnated.”
“Oh my God,” says a woman across the aisle, who shakes her head in disgust.
Sean lowers his eyes, in a theatrical flourish. “I know, I know.”
Our first stop is Hurricane Hall, a farm framed by those thrifty black fences with a guest house built in 1765. Black with red trim, the breeding shed is a converted tobacco barn that serves as the workplace and boudoir for a $5 million horse named Bellamy Road, who belongs to New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, and a $10 million horse named English Channel.
Inside, the barn feels less lived-in than an IKEA showroom. Sectioned off for the different stages of the breeding process, it is blocked out and monitored with exacting care to protect the well-being of the stallion. Of course, if safety was your utmost concern, you’d have your gazillion-dollar stud hump a dummy and then FedEx the frozen semen to the owners of the mare for artificial insemination, but officially registered thoroughbreds need to be produced through “natural cover.” They say it’s to ensure genuine bloodlines and preserve the value of the stud horse, but everyone knows horses like being romanced.
We’re first taken into a kind of foyer section of the barn that’s subdivided by a wall with a sliding window in it. The mare is led into one room; on the other side of the wall, a teaser pony named—get this—Gigolo is brought in. The window slides open and Gigolo, wearing a front-covering cape that shields his bits, sniffs the mare to see if she’s ovulating. If the mare isn’t feeling receptive to male attention, Gigolo, and not one of the studs, gets kicked.
If the mare’s good to go, then she’s led to the actual breeding shed—a bright, airy room that takes up most of the barn—where the dirty deed is overseen by half a dozen staff members. The floor is covered with the same rubber sand used to reduce fatalities at some tracks—it doesn’t freeze or turn to mud. From a row of tools hanging from the wall, our guide brings out a twitch—a chain attached to a long wooden handle that fits around the horse’s top lip like dental headgear—that is fixed on the mare to release endorphins. One of the mare’s legs is tied back to keep her off-balance before the stud enters her. Booties, like boxing gloves, are placed on the mare’s hind legs in case she kicks. A cushioned “breeding roll” is placed between the stud and the mare to prevent the male from entering her too deeply.
The whole act can take between twenty or thirty minutes, our guide tells us. “I promise you all,” he says, proudly, as though each of us had our own ovulating broodmare waiting outside in a trailer, “Bellamy is one minute or less. Buckle up, he’s the fastest stallion I’ve ever seen in the breeding shed. What you want is a stallion who goes in and out of here really fast because a lot of them play around a lot.”
As I stand in this tittering crowd, I am visited by a strictly theoretical longing to have children. I imagine how it might feel to know you’ve passed on your genetic code to hundreds of babies. If a stallion could grasp that level of abstraction, I’m sure it would give him a boner. Putting aside the unintentional kinkiness of the breeding shed, I think of all those descendants carrying on my name, extending my own reputation with their accomplishments, succeeding where I might have failed— hundreds and thousands of sons and daughters to live through. For a moment, I edge myself into a reverent dazzle.
But when I notice the camera on the wall above that’s used to record the breeding process, my thoughts tumble into the septic tank. Somewhere, I realize, there’s an office or a hard drive in the premises that contains hours and hours of horse erotica.
INT. BREEDING SHED. DAY
Bellamy Road enters and meets Mare.
BROODMARE: Hey, good-looking. Nice place you got here.
BELLAMY ROAD: Yeah, I’m thinking of putting in a media centre, but it’s okay.
BROODMARE: What can I do you for?
BELLAMY ROAD: Wow, you’re forward. My buddy Gigolo says you’re in the market.
BROODMARE: I might be. It’s been eleven long days. My womb just feels so empty, like a big bucket of air. I hear you’ve got a quick draw.
BELLAMY ROAD: Well, I’ve been told I’m fast out of the gate.
BROODMARE: I like the sound of that. But I’m not sure I’m ready to rush into another relationship. After all, I’ve been hurt before.
BELLAMY ROAD: Don’t worry about that. There’s a guy with a cushioned roll.
BROODMARE: Well, that’s what I wanted to hear. What are we waiting for? Can someone here hold up my leg?
Cue wah-wah guitar.
“I’m really glad you suggested we go on the farm tour,” I tell Celeste, as we board the bus again.
“Me too,” she says. “This is the most fun I’ve had in a year.”
“What happened last year?” I ask out of reflexive jealousy.
“I mean, this is most fun I’ve had in at least a year.”
“Oh. Me too.”
She looks at me. “It’s nice to see you smile.”
We’re led outside where we meet Bellamy Road and English Road, and the kids—plus Celeste—get to pet them. We’re not afforded the same luxury on our next stop, WinStar Farms. From its gated entrance, the barn on the 700-acre farm looks more like a country club: one long peaked roof studded with windowed turrets, bisected by another peaked roof that juts out into the driveway. We step into a waiting room. Inside, our guide uses a flat-screen TV above the entrance to the actual barn to replay footage of Tiznow, a twelve-year-old stallion who’s won $6,427,830 over his career, winning the Breeders’ Cup Classic in 2000 and 2001.
Then we’re taken inside the barn, where a groom leads Tiznow, a dark brown horse with Man o’ War bloodlines and four white socks on his hooves, to the middle of another draughty, spotless room.
“He’s used to people taking photos,” Sean says as we slowly reach for our cameras. “He likes flashes.”
After this build-up, we’re all excited to see the biggest money-earner at WinStar, Distorted Humor. But for insurance reasons, the horse isn’t allowed to be brought out. Instead, we’re only allowed to glance at him in his stable several feet away, from an angle. The champion studhorse is like a celebrity who has forbidden his underlings to make eye contact with him.
Distorted Humor nicely highlights the difference between a champion racehorse and one that produces champions. Secretariat, who together with Man o’ War regularly enters any bourbon-soaked conversation as the greatest thoroughbred ever, only fathered a couple of decent runners. Like many champions, the 2004 winner of the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, Smarty Jones was retired as a three-year-old—even though thoroughbreds tend to peak physically in their fourth and fifth years—to protect his value as a stud. In his first year at Three Chimneys Farm, about a mile away from WinStar, he sired 110 mares at $100,000 per foal. But according to a May 2009 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, his progeny have collectively “won 18 races, only four have won more than once, and they have collectively won just one stakes race, in Puerto Rico.” The beloved champion, who still receives thirty pieces of fan mail per week, has seen his stud fee reduced to $40,000.
By comparison, Distorted Humor was a relatively undistinguished runner, winning eight races and earning $769,964 before retiring to stud as a six-year-old in 1999, but his babies, which include 2003 Derby winner Funny Cide, collectively won $6,901,568 in 2006 alone. With some of his progeny selling as yearlings for seven-figure sums at the Keeneland auction, the horse is worth between $125 and $150 million and earns $6 million a week. This tycoon wage comes even after his $150,000 stud fee was lowered from $225,000 because of the weak economy.
With the tour completed, we board the bus back to the Kentucky Horse Park. Celeste tries on the kitschy necklace in the shape of a horse that I buy her at the gift shop. “I’ve always wanted something like this,” she says stiffly. “I’m not joking.”
Our guide asks us if there are any questions. When no else has anything to ask, I raise my hand like a keener in math class. “So, does the sperm of an older horse degrade as he ages?” I ask.
Our guide pauses a moment, the light in his eyes dimming. “Yes, it does,” he says, reluctantly.
Celeste shakes her head. “You know, there are kids on this tour,” she says. “Why do you have to bring up semen?”
“Sperm,” I correct her. “It’s the proper term. Besides, we are on a tour of breeding farms. We’re drenched in horse sex.”
“Yeah,” Celeste says, “but they’re taking pains to speak about it in the most discreet way, and you kind of ruin it by using words like ‘semen.’”
I catch a couple of dirty looks from the parents around me, who instinctively lean over and shield their kids from such crude language.
“Sperm,” I tell Celeste again.