'He's Gonna Win for Me, Ya Know?'

"Give me a horse!" -SHAKESPEARE, Richard III (Act IV, Scene iii)

"THEY'RE nearing the gate... They're at the post... They're in the gate... They're off! And it's Some Kinda George in the lead, followed by Windon Tide, Heaven Again third, Bail Me Out fourth, then it's Robert Kope, followed by Pippin Orchard, followed by... They're turning into the stretch... They're into the stretch. And it's Windon Tide, then Some Kinda George.... They're battling it out. And it's Some Kinda George by a neck...."

A rising excitement grips the crowd near the finish line. A little boy holding a brown paper bag jumps about wildly, trying to hold onto his package and wave his arms in the air at the same time.

"Come one, Heaven Again!"

"Ride him, Ramos, RIDE him!"

"And it's Windon Tide, then Some Kinda George. And the winner is Windon Tide!"

The train ride to Suffolk Downs Race Track isn't much. You take the blue line out from Government Center and roll past the sleek silver cylinders nosing down at the Airport, the junk-covered beaches of Wood Island, and the abandoned playgrounds of Orient Heights.

At the Downs you scurry along with two hundred other people to find a place on the Surrey, a miniature trackless train which ferries people back and forth between the track and the subway. You pay the $1.50 admission price unless you're a senior citizen, in which case it's only 75c), push the turnstile, and you're in.

I went out to Suffolk Downs early one Saturday morning and walked down the road to the stables. Nothing is more peaceful than a stable in the morning. As I passed the rows of stalls, the sweet smell of fresh hay floated up from the hay bins. Dogs and goats lolled in the bright sun. I watched a horse flick its tail lazily. He munched quietly on his hay, grinding the stalks with horizontal sweeps of his lower jaw. Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" drifted over from the Track Kitchen.

IRVING is a black groom who works in the stables. His friends call him "Red." He has an uncle-whom he calls "Unkie"-who has worked on the track most of his life. Unkie started out to be a jockey but got too heavy and had to quit.

"Aaab, were you sleepin'?" Irving whispered to a horse in the stall in front of me. "Well, if you're all right now, we'll turn you out." He opened the stall and inside were a horse and a goat.

"The goat keeps the horse company,' he explained. "This horse used to pace round and round in his stall. The goat quiets him down. A racehorse is kinda like a woman, ya know. He's temperamental, he's aggressive, and sometimes he's a dog and he makes you hate him. And sometimes you love him."

Irving led me over to his bunk, one of several tiny rooms near the stalls. "This is a 24-hour-a-day job," he began. "We get here at 4:30 in the morning to feed and water the horses. After their exercises, we have to wash 'em, cool 'em, and brush 'em. Then we do 'em up. We rub their legs and bandage 'em with cotton and wraps. At 10:00 we feed and water the horses again. Before the race in the afternoon we get 'em ready. Then we wash 'em and walk 'em after each race. Feeding time might go up till 7:00 or 8:00. This is no life on the backside." Irving opened a bottle of whiskey and took a swig. "Then they wonder why the groom gets drunk."

"A groom has to be real trustworthy to the trainer. There're a lotta secrets around a track. A groom has to be half a doctor, half nurse, and a babysitter too. You have to love the animal first; he comes before you. When a mother loses her child, she's sad; when a man loses his horse, he's hurting' too," he added, echoing the old cowboy ethic. "A horse comes to us all ugly and with long hair. We're the ones who make him beautiful enough for you to bet your money on."

Irving has been around the track since his boyhood. After nine years in the army, he returned to racing in his middle twenties. He tried leaving the track again. He became a painter for a summer, then switched to carpentry, made a lot of money, and bought a bar.

"I was away about a year," he said. "But when the races turned back to the fairgrounds in New Orleans, I took a ride out just to see 'em. The first sniff of a stable and I was back again, 24 hours a day." He took a deep breath of air and exhaled slowly. "The smell of manure is great to me. It's like fresh air; that's how used to it I am."

IRVING has a pregnant wife and three children in New Orleans. He is home 130 days of the year, between October and March. His wife used to be upset about his being away from home so much, but she hasn't bothered him for the last two years. "She gets pregnant every time I'm home now, and that keeps her mind occupied," he explained.

"Being away from home so long makes me shut out the world," he continued. "The one thing is to make money. When I do good, I have a party, and everybody does good. When I do bad, I might ask 'em for a buck, and they better not refuse 'cause one day I just might walk up with three grand and give 'em a hundred."

Irving looked at his old pink shirt and dirt-stained dungarees. "Don't think we're low-down 'cause we're all tattered," he said. "If you deal with shit, you got to be shit. When I step outta here with a three-or-four-hundred-dollar outfit, I'm just as good as Mr. Rockefeller way up there." And he pointed off somewhere beyond the haybins and the horse stalls.

Irving makes $125 a week ($115 after taxes), and he sends home about $80. "I work for a bet on my horses," he said. "It's a guessing-and-waiting game, but I bet my horse whether he's ready or not. I always keep two dollars in my pocket to bet on my horse."

He had made $800 on a $50 bet the night before. "Once in Chicago I won $2,000 on a couple of bets," he said. "But I was arguing with my wife. And when I dropped the tickets in my pocket, I missed. Someone picked 'em up and cashed 'em, though-some stooper. That's what I call 'em."

There is a certain hostility between the grooms and the jockeys. "The rider don't make the race," Irving said. "The horse makes the rider, the trainer, and the owner. The jocks do exactly what the trainer says. They get all the glory; we get all the crap."

"Sometimes a jock'll pull a horse," he continued. "If the groom finds out, the jock might get a punch in the mouth. Racing is like dice: you roll craps and you're out; you roll seven or eleven and you're a winner."

"A jock comes down here when he's 17 'cause some guy says he can ride, and he thinks he's another Eddie Arcaro," Irving said. "A jock isn't born; he's made by a trainer and a racehorse."

"When that little jock makes the big time, he don't remember the groom who said, 'Drop your arms' or 'Don't pull the horse; he's got a tender mouth.' Three years from then if you go up to him for a buck, he might say, 'Get outta my face.'"

Irving admires girl jockeys, however. "Barbara Jo Rubin has as much heart as men have. In New Orleans, she took the stake. She outslicked Robert L. Boyd, the slick himself. She let him go out there, took him off the pace at the eighth pole, crowded him at the sixteenth, and beat him at the wire."

"Racing's fast, it's hard, and it's what I want," he finished.

Unkie walked in and told Irving to hurry up with his work. "You're gonna get him fired!" Unkie said to me. I apologized and hurried back to the track.

The sign on the big board said the track was fast. I loked up at the cloudy sky. Twenty-four American flags whipped in the wind at the top of the grandstand, and eleven more flapped in semi-circle in the parking lot. It was early; the big crowds hadn't come yet.

By noon the stands were beginning to fill up. Old men and young boys were hawking the Record American, the Herald Traveler, and WilsonWaldo's tip cards at makeshift newsstands underneath the grandstand. I bought a program and walked outside to look at the track.

The track is a mile-and-an-eighth long. The area it encloses is sparsely landscaped with thin leafless trees and neatly-clipped evergreens. A small artificial pond glitters behind the big board. Constantly changing lights on the board's surface indicate the odds on each horse, the amount of money bet to win, place, or show; the time of day, post time, the condition of the track, and the numbers of the first four horses to cross the finish line.

Upstairs in the grandstand the straw-hatted ushers wearing candycane coats check the tickets of people going into the box-seat section. Most of the trainers and owners reserve box seats in the first few rows. I wandered towards the upper tiers of seats, which are reserved for plebcians and tight-wads.

Suspended over the grandstand seats is a red iron walkway leading to a structure that looks like a red caboose. Inside are the press box, the stewards' box, the photo-finish darkroom, and the announcer's box.

THE announcer, Jimmy Hannon, is one of those fat, jolly people who make you want to laugh when they laugh.He was singing as he came into the box. "Oh. the horses have no tails, have no tails. Oh. the horses have no tails, have no tails. "He stopped singing and began grinning. Then he stopped grinning and began talking. He had just finished a poker game and was planning to shoot crap after the races.

I asked Hannon's sound engineer if people around the track bet much on the races. "When I first started working here, it was both pockets out, you know?" he said, pulling out the insides of his pockets as though he were dropping money on the ground. "But you can't afford to bet all the time."

The announcer must give a running description of the race because without binoculars most of the people in the grandstand can't determine the order of the horses. "To be able to identify the horses is a bit of a knack." Hannon said. He identifies them by the colors of the jockey and the color and build of the horses. A good announcer can glance at the colors listed in the program before a race and be able to distinguish the horses five minutes later. Hannon is a good announcer.

His face tensed as the horses approached the gate, and I watched him do the routine. "They are approaching the gate.... They're in the gate.... They're off!" ... His voice droned out the places and started over again with the new order. As the horses came into the stretch, the rumble of the crowd grew louder. Isolated cries drifted up to the announcer's box, and then all was lost in a general confusion of voices.

"At the eighth pole it's Blinking Excuse... Home Chat is taking the lead.... And it's Home Chat!"

He was studying the next field of horses with his binoculars as I went out.

Charlie Maffeo isn't even five feet tall, but he's a big man at the Downs. He has more wins than any other jockey at Suffolk this year. And he's not even a full-fledged jockey; he's a bugboy, an apprentice. When a bugboy wins 40 races, he becomes a regular jockey.

Maffeo had never been on a horse until two-and-a-half years ago. A friend of his got him a job down at the stables, and he worked his way up.

I asked if he was superstitious. "No." he said; and then his small, sharp face broke into a grin. "Well, I don't like the number 17," he said. "It's a bad-luck number in Italy." He smiled sheepishly and toyed with the cross and religious medal which hung from his neck.

We talked about running a race. Maffeo has no fixed strategy when he shoots out of the gate. "You gotta run a race the way it comes up and the way the horse rides," he said.

He prefers long races. "In the one-and-a-half you have time to think; you just sit there. In the half-mile you kill yourself."

Maffeo also prefers not to race younger horses. "You can expect all kinds of tricks from those crazy bastards," he said, shaking his head.

JOCKEYS think the rider is always crucial to race. But Dick DeStasio, a trainer, disagrees. "Most of the time it's the trainer who counts," he said. "He rides the horses all the time and knows how they run. But there's that time when only a good rider can win. That kind of rider has good communication with the horse. That's the one intangible thing that you can't give him. We call it 'hands.' It means horse run for you, and they like to run for you."

I met George Handy, twice winner of the leading trainer award, in his section of box seats, Handy is grey and fiftyish. His bright red shirt and red-and-white tie contrasted sharply with his grey jacket and tan face. He seemed uncomfortable in a suit.

Handy began talking about girl jockeys. "I call 'em jockettes," he said laughingly. "They lend color to the races. I don't mind if they compete, but I don't think they're too much competition. It's a boy's game. I don't think they're strong enough to handle a rogue who lugs in and out. They get along okay with easy riders, though." Handy waved to a woman in the next section of box seats. "Hi, honey," he called to her.

Handy thinks a horse has got to have "heart" to win. "Some horses are 'morning glories,'" he said. "They break watches in the morning, but you can't find 'em in the afternoon. They're chicken. When they're hurting they don't put out. Others are different. I had a horse once who couldn't walk for three days after a race. I'd poultice him, and bathe his feet in Epsom salts, and let him stand in ice, and then in hot water. And then in about four or five days he'd be like a tiger. He had so much class, that horse," he sighed. "Iron Band was his name. He was named good. And he was tough, too."

"Racing is a dog-eat-dog business," he continued. "You have to be careful what you say. Everybody's trying to outsmart everybody else. There are people you say 'hello' to, but you wouldn't tell them your business. Of course with friends it's different," he added hastily.

Handy bets on his own horses-a little. "It's a tough way to make a living," he said. "The guy who tells you that he makes a living betting doesn't live too long. Betting'll break you."

"Come on Rene," he yelled suddenly, cheering the jockey who was riding Pescado Rey. "I like the old horses," he said, sitting down quietly.

Before I left he showed me the gold bracelet and gold ring he won as leading trainer several years ago. Pescado Rey lost.

Most of the spectators were elderly people. Many of them were limping or hobbling. The men smoked cigars and exchanged tips; the women talked about their children and going to Florida. On the whole it was a nice crowd.

Two girls walked by. The blonde one wore a pair of bell-bottoms with one red leg and one blue leg. When they got close I saw they were really about 40. They were both heavily made up.

"I once knew a guy whose mother could really pick 'em," a middle-aged man in a brown corduroy jacket was telling his friend. "The old lady would go down to the stables before the races and pick the winner. She didn't know nothing about horses, and she was always right."

"Hell, I'm here to have fun. I ain't here to make money," his friend said. "You can't go by odds; you gotta pick 'em. Go on, take a long shot. Carrozzella ran a good race last time."

A snatch of Spanish floated over. Two men gesticulated wildly.

"I should be sending this money home to my mother," the man next to me told his wife. "But if I win I'll send some home. I love my mother!"

I asked a policeman standing next to me if there was much trouble at the track. "Not since 20 years ago," he answered. "They sold beer in bottles here then. The people didn't like the way a race went, and started throwing bottles. They sell it in paper cups now."

A Grant Wood couple strolled by, arm in arm. The man disengaged himself to shove a cigar into his mouth.

I walked up to the window and put two dollars on Red Beret. (His parents were Thinking Cap and Rebel Rose; that's where they got the name, I guess.) The odds were 10-1.

I watched Red Beret being led past the crowd at the paddock. His eyes looked sad. The identifier checked the tattoo on his lips, and he joined the other horses.

"He's a stick-out to win," said a small hunched man next to me, pointing at Great Mystery, the favorite. "He's gonna win for me, ya know?" He tapped me affectionately on the arm and walked away.

THE horses approached the crowd on their way to the starting gate and broke into a canter. Overhead, a plane was advertising for the dog races-"Change Your Luck; Raynham Opens Tonite." The track was smooth and brown and neatly furrowed. I looked at the big board. The crowd was betting the favorite. The odds were 7-5 on Great Mystery.

The space underneath the grandstand was empty. Everyone was either out near the track or watching the closed-circuit TV monitor.

"They're at the post.... They're in the gate.... And they're off!" "And it's Sitka D. on the outside, followed by Great Mystery, followed by Freezing Rain, then it's..." As the horses approached the stretch, the crowd began responding to the announcer's litany. "And it's Great Mystery, then Sitka D...."

"Come on Red Beret. Come ON!"

"Way to go, Sitka!"

It was Great Mystery. I tore up my ticket and watched Phil Grimm, the winning jockey, being led before the crowd.

"That's the way to ride him, Phil."

"Atta boy. You can eat 'em up here. Go to Aqueduct. You'll make some bread there."

A little boy held Mystery's halter. "Hey, Billy, did you ride him?" someone called. The boy shook his head.

A cloud of confetti blew into the air. Grimm doffed his cap. A groom led him over to the paddock where he posed for a picture with two squirming little girls in yellow Easter dresses. Flash, and it was over.

OUTSIDE, the wind wrapped the newspapers around the poles of the arcade. An old woman was selling pencils by the gate.

The crowd boarded the subway. "Everybody push. Hurry, hurry," an old man said sarcastically. "Push like hell. It's an emergency."

"Him and me had a couple drinks," the man next to me was telling his neighbor. "He's a nice fella. Jesus Christ, what a hell of a nice guy. So how ya been?"

"Oh, we're getting along all right."

"Yeah, ya gotta enjoy life." And he sighed.