Entrapment and Other Writings (26 page)

Meet the stooping man.

With the ticket you just threw away.

You say you only threw one good ticket away in your life and that was only because you were wearing your wife’s bifocals? You’ve probably tossed off more than ever you’d let yourself suspect. The better you feel, the more likely you are to develop indifference toward your ticket.

Thirty million men and women bought over two billion dollars’ worth of mutuel tickets at American tracks last year. Of every quarter million wagered, roughly $400 in tickets went uncashed. Three and a quarter million in
outs
—that’s the figure to which the stooping class, in a disinterested hope of adjusting the national economy, has dedicated itself.

The
Daily Racing Form
once carried this item: “A flashlight concession would have made plenty after the last race Friday. When the 3–1-shot Tornabuoni was disqualified, moving up the 11–10 choice, Sir Miron, stoopers galore were in action. It was pitch dark and there were still plenty of hopefuls searching. Today all the stories were of how many fifty-dollar tickets were thrown away on the favorite.”

It needn’t be dark for the American bettor to rid himself of his ticket. Seemingly, he has an innate contempt for it. As a fool for his own folly.

Say you have a two-dollar ticket on a long shot to show. The Tote board lights up: No. 1 to win, No. 2 to place, No. 3 to show. Your horse was fourth. You drop the ticket at your shoes and wonder what made you go for a dog like that just because a Chinese gentleman in front of you went.

Five minutes later the Tote board blinks:
INQUIRY
. You blink back.

Somebody’s hollering.

Another ten minutes while the judges have a beer and talk about the point in the picture where the front-running jockey is bringing his whip down on the skull of the second-running boy. “Finish your beer, Doc, the poor brutes are waiting.” Lights go on again all over the Tote board. Claim allowed. No. 1 is placed last, No. 2 moves up to win, No. 3 to place—and your horse is fitted snugly into the show slot with the best price on the board—$19.40 to show.

Where’s your ticket, chum?

Don’t bother kicking your big flat feet about in the drift of mutuels—The Stooping Man is at the head of the line with it.

Talent may show up anywhere.

When grandstand lights come on overheard, to light the last trip to the window for all true sports still trying, and newsies cry “Keep your hat dry with the box skawr!” here he comes, not caring is his hat dry.

Stopping all over Sportman’s or Hawthorne, stuffing his pockets with handfuls of hope. Hope for later scoring; in some room where the lighting is still by gas. And where he’ll find one for $8.80 to show before morning. “Everyone has just so many doubles to hit” is the foundation of his faith.

Photo finishes and dead heats also help buy his dinner. And combination tickets too (win, place, and show), for these never cease to confuse the square who thinks he’s betting on the nose and drops
his ticket because the horse only placed. The California Racing Board, always anxious to show it is on the square’s side, experimented with printing instructions on the back of the Tote ticket itself, advising the bettor that a place ticket has value even when his horse has won. That didn’t help the true square.

The true square will keep right on losing the ticket in a pocket among tickets he failed to throw away from earlier races or a previous day; so that when he actually tries to recover it he’ll be more confused than ever and will rip up the whole batch in disgust, including a pawnshop receipt for his father’s watch. If you’re square you’re square, that’s all. Resign yourself.

In the last ten years Illinois bettors alone have contributed $1,101,081 in uncashed winning tickets to charity. The Annual Report of the Illinois Racing Board for 1953 noted:

“To the experienced race-goer the … amounts seem incredible when it is understood these sums represent the value of ‘good’ tickets which the original holders failed to cash. The health and recreational benefits which this fund has made possible to veterans … are incalculable in a monetary sense, but in the final analysis it is the money which … contributes to another bright chapter in the story of thoroughbred racing.”

New York State’s chapter since 1945 comes to over $2 million: that’s even brighter.

According to the true stooper’s code, once a ticket is misplaced, on or off the buyer’s person, the buyer has automatically forfeited the right to cash. He is no longer entitled even to tear it up. He is disfranchised. It belongs, ethically at least, to The Loyal Order of Willing Stoopers. Whose best friend is darkness.

And even better than dead heats and darkness are races where the barrier holds more horses than the Tote board provides numbers. There may be four or five entries and five or six field horses making a total number of twenty or more horses, but only twelve betting units.

The bettor sees No. 14 has won and gets rid of his ticket because it says 12, forgetting that his ticket covers No. 14 too.

“It’s a science,” the stooper can tell you, “it takes eyes and memory. You have to remember color and number, and you don’t have time to consult your program every time you see a likely looking color. You don’t stoop every time you see the right color. You have to judge on the flip.”

A true stooper can flip a ticket with the point of his shoe high enough to catch its detail before it drifts back to the cement.

“I can flip between 1,500 and 2,000 tickets between races,” one pro estimates. And he can, too. He wears out three left soles to one right, being a left-footed flipper. And finds Santa Anita easier on both shoes than other tracks because of the grass infield. “Hottest day I ever had,” he recalls, “was the time I picked up two little daily doubles stacked together on the Santa Anita rail. Six hundred eighty bucks apiece and I didn’t even have to stoop. Other times you go three-four days without scoring.”

“What would you do if you went a week?”

“Keep stooping.”

“A month?”

“Call the F. B. and Eye and have them bar me off the turf for life.”

Stoopers or stable owners, all the same, everyone has just so many doubles to hit. “I had this dream when I was a sprout, I’m pickin’ up pennies around a newsstand. I had that dream till I was twelve. Then I started pickin’ up nickels and dimes. One night I picked up a ten-dollar bill. Next day I quit school. I been at the calling ever since.” It’s a calling all right. A calling within a dream. As well as being a barometer of the societal attitudes of communities being stooped. Resort tracks, for example, regard the man who openly makes his living by stooping as belonging to the same caste as the one who runs gutters looking for snipes. You have to dress like a hotel clerk at places like that, for you’re among people too proud to bend. Even if you happen to drop a ticket knowingly you have to consider—What if someone I know should see me stoop and mistake me for a TV scriptwriter?

Between California and Florida tracks there is as much difference in stoopers as between California and Florida oranges. The Californian is a stroller, flipping casually as he strolls. The Florida hand has the floorwalker’s stately mien. He never bends until absolutely certain—and then does a deep stoop of such grace as to do real credit to
le sport
.

Between these two are the unmentionable places where you bring your own sack and go on all fours. In the Midwest, stooping is honest toil. To bump heads with someone you know, while on your knees, need cause no embarrassment and little conversation—“How you doin’?” “Caught me a double”—and then just pad on by.

In Illinois even the track police stoop. One of the Cahokia Downs nabbers put his fifteen-year-old son to work last summer, and the boy’s earnings for the season topped those of his daddy. Another nabber, seeing that, put his eight-year-old to work. But the younger boy wasn’t as sharp as the older sprout. The best he could do was to heap tickets into a potato sack for sorting over weekends.

That sack averaged a yield of fifteen dollars for each weekend. Moreover, it got the family up early of a Sunday to get at those culls. It was like Christmas. Everybody was alerted to the long one that won the photo in the sixth.

But nobody could start till the old man said so. He was the official starter. As he’s a true stooper, he didn’t stand on the family findings. He sorted the sortings. And when he was through, loyal to the code, he never threw away the culls. He deposited them, neatly sacked, on a newsstand, a shelf in the public library, or in a cab. Anywhere a square would find them and so cancel all appointments while he sorted secretly. All squares, of course, sort in vain.

This is known as The Stooper’s Revenge, and it proves something. It proves there’s a little stooper in the proudest of us and some pride left in the most stooped of us.

Naturally, track sweepers have the inside rail in the trade. At one track an attempt was made to force stoopers to sweep without stooping: merely to place their tickets in sacks which were turned over to the union steward, a sort of self-appointed superstooper.

It was asking too much of human nature. The result was four sweepers transferred to housing projects and the others having their brooms taken from them. For several weeks a hose was used instead of brooms, washing all tickets, good and bad the same, down all drains. But, luckily for the calling, this left the stands so damp the squares complained and the surviving sweepers were given a type of foot-operated dustpan which makes bending unnecessary. You just can’t trust anybody.

The Future Stooper

The man who will bring dignity on a national scale to the calling has not yet appeared. But he will be the superstooper who, having gotten an organization behind him and a public relations bureau established in New York, will sent out a limited number of representatives to each track that qualifies, and these will be above bending: they will not deign even to flip. They will carry gilt-initialed briefcases of Moroccan leather, their English will be impeccable, and they will address themselves to a client in the manner of a major general who wants something done without throwing his weight: “Sorry to trouble you, old boy. But you’ve misplaced that ticket in your hand twice. If you don’t mind—” and the bag will be open for you to drop the mutuel no longer legally your own.

Excuse me, sir—would you mind moving your foot?

Between seven and eleven a.m. it is quiet on the street; the cats are sleeping the strange light sleep. They have their hour now of neither fever—dream nor dread. Till the sleeping blood begins to stir and they wake up sneezing with watering eyes. Jack-The-Rabbit is on his way.

Loot is heavy and risks are light, grift is fast and The Nab greases easy. Around the corners where ghosts have ghosts and something is always about to burst, whether you push or whether you peddle, times have never been more lush.

“What do you do all the day?” I heard the judge ask the sixteen-year-old in Narcotics Court.

“I lean,” the boy replied, still adrift on a rain-blue cloud, “just lean. I find a hallway or washroom ’n take a shot. Then I lean. Lean ’n dream.”

An evening country where ten a.m. looks like five in the afternoon. Where purple jukes just lean ’n dream.

“How did you get on stuff in the first place?” I asked a girl, some rain-colored cat between cash-register and juke.

“There were so many little troubles floatin’ around,” Not-Yet-Twenty explains, “I figured why not roll ’em all up into one big trouble?”

“Why should a young girl like yourself want to live like this?”

“Don’t bother me with
why
. For God’s sake, only tell me
how
.”

It is afternoon in the purple tombs.

Afternoon in the land of the strange light sleep before the piano-men come to work.

“You’re scared of the way I live,” the rain-colored girl goes on. “
I’m
scared of the way
you
live. If I lived like you live, I’d be crying all the time. Now, I never cry at all.”

In the lights and glooms of the little bar the juke box, too, looks armored.

“What became of Johnny Ray?” she suddenly wants to know. “He’s the only man ever made me cry. Not when he sang about that little white cloud—that left me dry. It was when he came on pretending to be happy, like ‘Walkin’ My Baby Back Home’—that was what used to break my heart. It wouldn’t just make me cry, either. It would give me the blues. And I don’t mean
just
the blues. What I got one time was a whole
set
. What became of him anyhow?”

“I guess he came down with a set himself,” I took a guess. “How did you get on stuff in the first place?”

“Too much vitality. Vitality was runnin’ away with me. I’d go three days ’n nights without sleep ’n knock off for two hours ’n be ready to go again. I got into more hell than the Alamo for no reason—just to make something happen was all. Now I go two hours ’n I’m ready to knock off for three days. To hell with that Alamo. What happened to Coleman Hawkins anyhow?”

“I didn’t hear much about him after Lester Young came along.”

I sat watching her having her lunch: five bennies, five nembutols, two and a half grains of morphine.

“How can you walk with all that stuff in you?” I wanted to know.

“How can I walk without it?” the rain-colored wanted to know. “Tell me, how do you think Coleman Hawkins felt when Lester Young came along?”

“I guess he just had to change his style,” I took another surmise.

“That’s how it is all the time,” she took a guess herself. “Every now and then something comes along and you got change your
style. I used to be a real shy chick, so scared of everything. Everybody I knew was making sixty–seventy a week and all I could make was twenty-two-fifty. Some days I couldn’t lay by a dime. Now I make more than that some days before noon. Stuff makes a real little go-getter out of you. And you don’t have to go so far to get it. Actually I’m not a dope fiend at all. I’m just a broad who goes for anything.”

Down in the caves where water drips between old walls and a cellophane moon sends a misting light. They were raised in the ruins and know their own country’s caves as well as you know yours.