My Year of the Racehorse (18 page)

“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.”

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.