Of Mice and Men . . . and Horses

I saw my first horse race at the New Orleans Fairgrounds, the year they put Money Broker in the Derby to stop Native Dancer from winning it. I was 18, still young enough to be shy about taking a leak in a plain view privy. Over the next seven years I worked my fool head off at wishing and dreaming sawdust into gold. Saying it straight, I lost my ass, every ass I ever owned.

I don't recall that I particularly enjoyed all that losing, but common sense suggests I must have. Otherwise, why stay at it so long?

But that way of saying it amounts to nothing but euphemistic bullshit. I'm talking about seven years of losing, going bust and walking my stupid ass seven miles from the racetrack out in Gentilly all the way to the L&N station. Seven goddamn miles! Broke! Nothing but a folded train ticket to get me home, juke boxes all along Rampart street blaring Hearts of Stone so loud you want to go in and jump through the red and blue lights of the Wurlitzer and kick the shit out of the woman singing, smash her heart of stone into little pieces of gravel, but keeping on walking right on along Rampart Street, down on past the honkytonks and whore houses, walking fast, trying to keep pace with the National Guard boys all spiffed out in their soldier suits and marching six abreast down the middle of the street, heading off for camp, their shiny boots clopping bravely against the pavement, a sergeant with stripes half way down his sleeve belching Hup! Hup! the boys slapping rhythm on their rifle stocks, keeping time, and me, stealing looks, sneakily, as if my mother were watching me do it, me, peeping over my shoulder at the naked whores waving their underwear out the windows like flags to signal the boys up for a goodbye fuck.

I made that death walk hundreds of times, in a dozen places, Baltimore, New York, South Jersey, everywhere. Different streets, maybe no soldiers or whores, but the same flushed pockets, the same hollowness wallowing around inside, searching for and changing places with any warm spot it finds, knowing it won't do any good to swear off, stuck like a puppet, high on the narcotic of rock-bottom depression.

That's what I'm talking about, life and death, and all I've got to say is, "I must have enjoyed it." Bullshit! I almost killed my stupid self! Came within inches too many times to remember how many. I could lie and say a smidgen of hope kept me breathing, but it wasn't hope. I was too scared, too goddamn, puke-faced scared. Like a little kid staring into the snake cage at the zoo, too frightened to speak or to cry out and too fascinated to run away, paralyzed in ecstasy, a "pore little lost kid," set out like a seed in an evil garden, struggling to stay alive like the good organic thing he is, but doomed, right from the first time they opened the gate and let the horses loose, right after they sounded the bell that locked the tote and sealed the dream....

Who will ever figure out how the derelict I was threatening to become transformed into a Mouse noted for his confessions of mendacity? I guess every now and then life throws a hittable curve ball to an unsuspecting, and undeserving struggler. Pity that he holds only the shadiest remembrance of the moment that changed him from a sure out into a – well maybe not into a homerun star, but certainly into a good singles hitter, and a treasure in the clubhouse….

Or so they say.