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09/06/2003: "The Track"

Tomorrow, for the first time in my adult life, I'm going to "the track" to watch the "ponies" run. I'll be able to find out for myself whether it is indeed "The Sport of King's" or just a place for unemployed squirrelly-looking guys to gather and talk out of the sides of their mouths to one another about what they know that no one else knows. Of course, it will be somewhere in between, but there is a lot of room between camo and flowers. The racetrack is Arlington Park, located in Chicago's northwest suburbs. The Chicago area has four race tracks, at least, and I'm a newbe. I'm going with friends because they want to go and I have no idea why I've never gone before. No, I haven't seen the movie about Sea Biscuit. Maybe if I had, I wouldn't have my background color so confused but I doubt it. I have always loved horses, but "my heroes have always been cowboys," and not the characters in Damon Runyon storys. Kentucky bluegrass and bookie joints being raided in the movies just don't mix. Let's kick this around; click more.. below.

I rented an apartment once from a woman who owned four or five race horses and spent every afternoon at one or another racetrack sitting in the bar with other horse people. Her boyfriend was an ex jockey and juice freak whose racing career ended suddenly when he was caught with a nine volt battery in his riding crop. I'm told that when you get the boot from racing in Illinois, you get the boot for life, and this guy crawled right into a bottle. He has a new career now on an oil rig off the coast of some South American country since she, my landlady, threw him out. Every once in a while I would have a drink with her and she would always try to sell me a piece of one of her horses when she started feeling good. I don't know if she needed to get out from under, or she just couldn't think of anything else to talk about.

I used to hang out at a bar way out south where the Sunday bartender (part-time) was an "exercise boy" in real life. He would go to the racetrack at 4 AM and exercise race horses. I guess he was too big to be a jockey, but that's a pretty colorful way to make a living in any case. He was a good-looking kid and personable, as far as I could tell, but for some reason all the girls who worked there didn't like him. They talked a lot about not liking him but not about why they didn't like him. Maybe it was just in style or maybe it was a mood thing because none of them were ever too happy about working on Sunday. He didn't talk out of the side of his mouth, but was there still something about horse racing that hung about him?

When I was a kid, I read every book I could get my hands on about horses, and there were a lot of them. There was always a kid, sometimes male and sometimes female, and a horse with some kind of problem. Everyone but the kid would give up on the horse and blah, blah. I loved that stuff. And as I said before I've always been a sucker for westerns. Did you ever hear the soundtrack by Willie Nelson from Electric Horseman? I guess that's my problem with the track; I just don't like people getting my dreams all dirty.

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