anywhere.
She was big and she was rangy and the year Hoop, Jr. won the Kentucky Derby, Gallorette beat him. A few years back she was Champion Female Horse. This year, she was still knocking ‘em over like bowling pins.
I made a fool of myself. I cooed at her. Called her darling. Dug out a handful of the peppermints I’d brought to the track and offered her a few. It was like making an offering to a goddess.
“Hey you! Get away from that horse! Who do you think you are?”
“Sam?”
“Are you nuts or something, Sam? This here’s Gallorette and she’s in the Whitney about an hour from now. You want her sick on sugar?”
I got away from her. Next to Gallorette, I wasn’t anyone. Just a lonely PI in paradise. One where jocks were getting killed.
Chapter 9
My life was measured out by Kentucky Derby winners. World events, women, jobs, places I’d been—none of ‘em counted as markers.
I told time by the Derby.
I wish I could say I was born the year Man ‘O War won, but since he didn’t start in the big race, I couldn’t. A horse called Paul Jones won. I’d tried hard not to be bitter, but being born in the year of Paul Jones got my goat. I made up for it a little bit by my first escape from the Staten Island Home for Hopeless Kiddies. That was the year Reigh Count came home with ease. Lino and me, we got dragged back when the Count took the Saratoga Cup.
We spent those few months on the streets of New York City with some newsies, sleeping in alleys under cardboard, eating out of trash cans, learning how to choose the right mark and boost a wallet or two. We learned how to roll a drunk. But nicely. I’ve always had a nice way about me. Lino wasn’t so nice, but being a cop at heart, he felt guilty. Sometimes he’d take the money but find a way to get the wallet and all its pictures and cards and stuff back to its owner.
I discovered girls the year Brokers Tip took home the roses. What a race. The two leading jockeys, Meade on Brokers Tip and Fisher on Head Play, punched each other all the way down the backstretch and across the finish line. As a kid, I loved it. Hey. I loved it now. I also loved Rosemarie for about three months.
I learned a lot from Rosie. She learned nothing from me, but she was real sweet about it. She wasn’t so sweet when I went off with Ellen. And then Ellen didn’t like Corrie. Corrie paid her brother to beat me up when I met Angela. That was a banner year for girls.
In Omaha’s big year, all on my lonesome, I made it out of that place they called a home. I got all the way to Monmouth Park, hitchhiking, hopping trains. They didn’t find me for months. During those months I haunted the barns meeting George Montgomery Labold and George’s pals. One of ‘em was a claiming trainer, training horses at the bottom end of Thoroughbred horse racing. Even so, from Carl—claiming trainer’s name was Carl Hessing—I’d learned enough so I got to get up on a glossy back now and then to exercise some better horses than Carl’s horses, high bred nags that took a stakes race now and then. Someone must have snitched. Only way Mister Zawadzki could find me and haul me “home” in his Model T dump truck.
Thinking back, that was the time of my life.
Why would Mister and Mrs. Z want me back? Because the Zawadskis were paid by the head and every once in a while someone came counting heads. (As for those missing, Mrs. Z’d already made that one easy, even for Lino. Few asked and when they actually did, they got the same answer: little sonofabitch ran away, din’t he? Or din’t she? Until Pamela, it always worked because one or the other of us was always trying to run away.)
My final escape from the ancestral home was with Bold Venture. We weren’t world beaters, that horse and me, but we were survivors. It was a lucky year for horse and boy; our competition was preoccupied with
She was big and she was rangy and the year Hoop, Jr. won the Kentucky Derby, Gallorette beat him. A few years back she was Champion Female Horse. This year, she was still knocking ‘em over like bowling pins.
I made a fool of myself. I cooed at her. Called her darling. Dug out a handful of the peppermints I’d brought to the track and offered her a few. It was like making an offering to a goddess.
“Hey you! Get away from that horse! Who do you think you are?”
“Sam?”
“Are you nuts or something, Sam? This here’s Gallorette and she’s in the Whitney about an hour from now. You want her sick on sugar?”
I got away from her. Next to Gallorette, I wasn’t anyone. Just a lonely PI in paradise. One where jocks were getting killed.
Chapter 9
My life was measured out by Kentucky Derby winners. World events, women, jobs, places I’d been—none of ‘em counted as markers.
I told time by the Derby.
I wish I could say I was born the year Man ‘O War won, but since he didn’t start in the big race, I couldn’t. A horse called Paul Jones won. I’d tried hard not to be bitter, but being born in the year of Paul Jones got my goat. I made up for it a little bit by my first escape from the Staten Island Home for Hopeless Kiddies. That was the year Reigh Count came home with ease. Lino and me, we got dragged back when the Count took the Saratoga Cup.
We spent those few months on the streets of New York City with some newsies, sleeping in alleys under cardboard, eating out of trash cans, learning how to choose the right mark and boost a wallet or two. We learned how to roll a drunk. But nicely. I’ve always had a nice way about me. Lino wasn’t so nice, but being a cop at heart, he felt guilty. Sometimes he’d take the money but find a way to get the wallet and all its pictures and cards and stuff back to its owner.
I discovered girls the year Brokers Tip took home the roses. What a race. The two leading jockeys, Meade on Brokers Tip and Fisher on Head Play, punched each other all the way down the backstretch and across the finish line. As a kid, I loved it. Hey. I loved it now. I also loved Rosemarie for about three months.
I learned a lot from Rosie. She learned nothing from me, but she was real sweet about it. She wasn’t so sweet when I went off with Ellen. And then Ellen didn’t like Corrie. Corrie paid her brother to beat me up when I met Angela. That was a banner year for girls.
In Omaha’s big year, all on my lonesome, I made it out of that place they called a home. I got all the way to Monmouth Park, hitchhiking, hopping trains. They didn’t find me for months. During those months I haunted the barns meeting George Montgomery Labold and George’s pals. One of ‘em was a claiming trainer, training horses at the bottom end of Thoroughbred horse racing. Even so, from Carl—claiming trainer’s name was Carl Hessing—I’d learned enough so I got to get up on a glossy back now and then to exercise some better horses than Carl’s horses, high bred nags that took a stakes race now and then. Someone must have snitched. Only way Mister Zawadzki could find me and haul me “home” in his Model T dump truck.
Thinking back, that was the time of my life.
Why would Mister and Mrs. Z want me back? Because the Zawadskis were paid by the head and every once in a while someone came counting heads. (As for those missing, Mrs. Z’d already made that one easy, even for Lino. Few asked and when they actually did, they got the same answer: little sonofabitch ran away, din’t he? Or din’t she? Until Pamela, it always worked because one or the other of us was always trying to run away.)
My final escape from the ancestral home was with Bold Venture. We weren’t world beaters, that horse and me, but we were survivors. It was a lucky year for horse and boy; our competition was preoccupied with
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