What do you want to be when you grow up? Well, my best friend, Jackie Mercier, wanted to be a fireman until he started climbing trees and tying empty cans together with long lengths of string. Then, he wanted to be a telephone man. Jackie and I spent hours up in trees stretching string and what little wire we could find from branch to branch to branch. We had more string up there than all of Charlie Brown’s kites put together. Jackie’s next-door neighbor, Mickey Murphy, had a backyard full of large trees and vines and Mickey could swing from vine to vine like a magician. If there had been an olympic event in vine-swinging, Mickey would have won, hands down. When he grew up, Mickey Murphy, very short for his age, wanted to be Tarzan. None of the kids in the neighborhood wanted to be the first to tell Mickey that there might not be a booming market out there for a skinny, black midget Tarzan with nappy hair. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Joey Posluszny, who could beat everybody up if it came to that (it never did—we weren’t stupid), wanted to be a professional wrestler, like his Polish countryman, Killer Kowalski. There was a lot of TV wrestling in those days and Killer Kowalski was the bad guy who would destroy some poor, dumb punk with his nefarious “claw hold” and then come in for his interview and highly insult the fans, the interviewer, his opponent and, especially, whatever town he happened to be in at the time. “Boston (or insert whatever town here) is a dump, a filthy place,” Killer Kowalski would say. “And all the people who live in Boston are morons. They wouldn’t appreciate a good wrestler if they saw one.” Then he would leave the interview with some departure line like, “Clean up the streets!” This, of course, would guarantee that a sellout crowd would show up at Killer Kowalski’s next match, urging his opponent to tear his arms and legs off. This never happened. Killer Kowalski beat everybody. One day, the Boston Garden set up a match between Killer Kowalski and Yukon Eric, supposedly a tough guy from the Klondike who stood five-ten tall and five-ten wide. Yukon Eric’s center of gravity was such that you couldn’t knock him down with truck full of pigs. Somehow, however, Killer Kowalski had actually beaten Yukon Eric in an earlier match when he had kicked his ear off. I know this is difficult to believe what with it being professional wrestling and all but it’s true. I know this because I was standing outside the ticket lines at the Garden prior to the match and Yukon Eric walked right past me and, take it from me, he had no right ear. I can tell the difference.
Walter Babish, on the other hand, wanted to be a boxer. Walter was a latecomer to the neighborhood, a gentle soul, really, and given to crying easily. He was not particularly good at sports, despite a big strong body, and he was not particularly brilliant in school, but Walter was very likeable and got on well with the kids. One day, however, he said something which highly annoyed Eddie Ledwich, who could beat everybody up except for Joey Posluszny. Nobody really liked Eddie Ledwich very much and so everybody was dreading the inevitable confrontation between Eddie and Walter. Ledwich started out by pounding Walter in the face a couple of times, allowing a few tears to dribble down Walter’s cheek. But Walter, fists up and buoyed by a supportive crowd, held his ground, and Eddie, whose strength was knocking his opponent to the ground, couldn’t dislodge the heavier Walter. Eventually, Walter got in a couple of terrific shots and bloodied up the tiring Ledwich. the crowd was astonished as Babish seized his advantage and pummeled his smaller opponent into submission. This was all it took for Walter, the new neighborhood hero, to proclaim a career in the sweet science was in the offing.
I, on the other hand, always wanted to be a baseball player and, like most kids in New England, wished to play for the Red sox. I started out trying to be a pitcher since that’s where the action was. I was an okay pitcher but not a great one. One day, while we were playing at the Boston & Maine Railroad field, which we had carved out of clutter, a kid hit a line drive right at my head. I couldn’t get out of the way and it hit me right between the eyes, perfectly placed so as not to fracture an orbit, bust up my nose or make me blind. I was alright but it took awhile to breathe properly through my nose again. About a month later, another batter laced a screamer which caught me right in the middle of my chest, almost knocking me over. Placed a little closer to my heart, who knows? I decided to move to first base. If you’re left-handed, the choices are limited. My baseball career was fun but undistinguished. By the time I reached high-school, I realized the Red Sox would be looking elsewhere.
The Accidental Horseman
From the time I was small, I liked to read and write. Not counting first-grade primers, the first things I read in quantity were comic books, lots and lots of comic books, confined as I was to the house with Rheumatic Fever through most of the second grade. Batman was my favorite but I also like Captain Marvel, Jr. The Marvel family (which included the elder Captain Marvel and also Mary) could merely utter the name of an old wizard—Shazam—whom they had somehow discovered in an abandoned subway tunnel and a gigantic lightning bolt would come down, turning them into superheroes. It was the damnedest thing you ever saw. I used to check around whenever I was in the subway but all the tunnels I could find were in use. Some people have all the luck. But anyway, I got to be a pretty good writer, myself, not to mention the World’s Greatest Speller. Early in school, we had to write what the nuns called “compositions.” Unlike most of the other kids, I could write compositions til the cows came home, every word spelled perfectly. And thanks to the comic books, I knew more words than everybody else. It didn’t take long for a relatively observant student to realize the nuns would just pass out in ecstasy if you threw in the occasional four or five syllable word, even if it was something cheesy like, say, “aforementioned”. When you get a lot of praise for something, you have a tendency to like it so writing became Plan B when the Red Sox were no longer a possibility.
When I moved on to Oklahoma State University at the end of my high-school days, I began to work for the student newspaper, incomprehensibly named The O’Collegian. What’s with that? I mean, if it’s Notre Dame I get it. But while there, I got interested in working on the campus magazine, The Aggievator. If you think these publication names are bad, you should hear some of their songs. Anyway, the OSU administration had just decided to deep-six the annoying Aggievator and would not consider my appeal, so I decided I would just go out and publish my own magazine. I called it the State Charlatan. Along with a rag-tag posse, I sold it in the huge campus dorms for three issues until the administration relented and let me sell in the student union. Unfortunately, the first issue sold there featured on the cover an administration building going down in flames, the cut line announcing “The University Is Going To Hell.” They sent me a little notice advising me that any more of such shenanigans would result in a quick expulsion. I published one more issue and left Stillwater forever.
The Charlatan, unencumbered by State, reared its head again in Lawrence, Mass. for one issue and then, later, in Tallahassee and Gainesville, the Glory Years of the magazine. It provided a living but never with much room for comfort. In 1967, however, there was enough profit from magazine sales to open the Subterranean Circus, a long-lived retail store in Gainesville, 23 years in business. I never considered myself a “businessman,” really, despite the amazing success of the place. Retail business, to me, is pretty much common sense. But if I only considered my business career as something resembling a writer gone off the tracks (to his good fortune, of course), what would I call my career in the horse business, of which I knew nothing? Maybe The Agony & The Ecstasy.
The Holy Grail
Unless you live in Kentucky or Newmarket, England, or some such horsey place, it will never occur to you as a child that you will grow up to race horses. Who do you know who does that? Nobody. But just as life leads you down strange paths where writers become store owners and woodcutters become presidents, every so often you wind up at a station both alien and oddly fitting. If you are weaned on the New England psychoses, the Red Sox, The Celtics, the Bruins, you are going to have a hard time releasing the competitive instincts from your brain pan. And then one day, the intervention of the Fates places you a half-hour from Ocala, a new wife with a bent for horses puts you on a farm and a thoroughbred racing fan nudges you into the business. You may not be able to own the Red Sox but you might be able to own a race horse.
It will, of course, take forever and a day to come close to mastering this new infection. Truth be told, almost nobody masters it. People who are business geniuses fall to pieces in this one. Wealthy men, putting into practice the same good plans which have carried them to success in other fields, go broke in no time. To merely generate a modest profit over time is unliklely and to break the equine bank is an experience enjoyed by few. The Sheiks of Araby, with all the money in the universe, have yet to win the Kentucky Derby. Of course, to win the Kentucky Derby, you must be anointed by the Cosmic Force.
Now, I am 72. Since I have started in the racing business, thirty-seven years have passed. The end of the line is observable from this depot. I am no closer to winning the Kentucky Derby now than I was then, although now I am wise enough to know it. Now I have a horse, Cosmic Flash, who might be the best one I have ever owned. He might also be a Great Illusion, possessing talent unbound but a lack of good fortune. Time will tell. Maybe, next year at this time I will be gathering my resources and heading for Louisville, my first horse to run in the Kentucky Derby, my first time even attending the race. More likely, I will be right here at my television set, admiring the good fortune of others. As good as he appears, Cosmic Flash has a pedigree which suggests a mile-and-a-quarter might be a little long. But you never know. An unlikely horse named Spend A Buck, right out of Calder, took the lead at Louisville and never gave it back. A nonentity named Gato Del Sol came from impossibly behind to win the Derby and to win never again. And a horse by the same sire as Cosmic Flash, a horse named Jackson Bend, proved his mettle at the distance, although not winning.
The point being, Hope Exists. And Hope is the Elixir of Life. The old line alleging that “nobody ever commits suicide with an untried yearling in the barn” is accurate of those of us who partake. So, of course, most of us are fools and some of us are damned fools, but our folly carries us through our days, many of us old men and women now, mucking out stalls at a downtrodden training center, watching with an eye agleam as the newest champion returns from a blazing work. Go ahead, point and laugh at our boundless optimism from the bowels of your comfy recliner—we’re doing the Lord’s Work here, and it’s keeping us going through hell and high water. And sooner or later, the Lord will reward the work, the manna will be delivered, our hearts will be full.
We just hope it’s sooner than later.
That’s all, folks….
