My Year of the Racehorse (6 page)

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.