I don't know where I got the suit or what make it was, but I'd put it on five days a week if they were running at Hollywood. Gogi belonged to the Turf Club, and always bought an extra pass for Karen, who had been going to the races with her mother since 1972 when she saw Quack win the Hollywood Gold Cup. Turf Club’s got a dress code, that's where the suit comes in.
Going to the track with Gogi was like being with a celebrity. Out there she was known as "Mrs. G." An alias used to keep her gambling habit on the down low. “Mrs. G’s car” the PA would echo as we walked out, and off they’d run to fetch her Caddy. We were “Mrs G's #2 car,” happily playing Robin to Gogi's Batman. We didn't even have a parking credential, just the little plastic wallet it came in. We’d flash that fat cat style and the guy at the barricades would give us the nod. If they did stop us, we'd say "We're friends of Art’s." Art was the big-eared Irish drunk who ran the valet stand. Gogi had tipped him so well over the years he would have pulled a hit for her, so looking out for us was no problem.
If you're going to be heroin addicts, having a mother/mother-in-law who's a gambling addict is helpful because there’s always cash floating around, and Gogi was pathologically generous. Watching her peel off c-notes after a big score got me as high as the dope we were going to buy with them. She’d hand Karen the main course, then slip me a hundred or two for dessert.
We went out there to make our habit, but I quickly fell in love with horse racing as a sport, embracing the entire racetrack mythology, and turning myself into a decent little handicapper, though not nearly as good as Karen, who at age eleven, had been taught to dope the ponies by none other than Don Adams, agent Maxwell Smart himself. (Don was a nice guy, and always bet an 8-6 exacta box for obvious reasons, though in my heart he will always be Tennessee Tuxedo.)
As soon as we sat down, Goag would give us three hundred to “play with.” I would have been happy to pocket it and run right to the connection, but Karen was her mother’s daughter and convinced she could turn it into thousands in whatever race was coming next. Of course, we always put a hundred away. We weren’t going to let ourselves be sick because a photo finish didn’t go our way.
I spent a good chunk of 1991 sitting in the Turf Club, strung out in a suit with my wife/running partner also strung out and probably wearing this wild green and mustard checked Richard Tyler outfit with pegged pants, pointy lapel jacket cut tight at the waist, and a long duster overcoat on top in the same pattern. It was an incredible getup and made her look like a gorgeous villain from Dick Tracy. Gogi was usually decked out in a brown leather pants suit, drinking black coffee and seeing if she could erase the scars of the holocaust by winning the “late double.”
The Turf Club was a trip. Hollywood Park’s was a little more showbiz funky than Santa Anita’s which was full-on Pasadena goyishe time warp, the men in pale blue sport coats and the women, hats, skirts and those conservative but slightly pervy pumps flight attendants wear. Our table number at Hollywood was A-47. Joe would bring the coffee in those pot-bellied plastic bottles like they have in cafeterias, that little corrugated cardboard dental cup on top to keep it warm. Joe was our waiter. An eastern European grandpa, he wore his black cutaway like a shlub and had a shuffling limp when he walked, his white seagull hair flying this way and that. Joe and Gogi had a contentious “ghosts of World War two, now we’re both in America, but you’re my waiter and I’m not going to let you forget it” relationship. It was a pretty great routine with their battling accents, Joe’s favor with Gogi directly tied to whether she was winning or losing. If I had a buck for every time she said of him, “this idiot” (elongating the first syllable, iiiiiidiot, in her Hungarian accent), well, I could bet a lot of exactas.
Sometimes we’d eat lunch, have a burger or club sandwich, those frozen, diner French fries that aren’t good, yet somehow irresistible. I remember one long stretch where all we ordered was bacon and eggs over easy, Gogi eating our little peel-open packets of jam with a spoon. One last thing about Joe is that his name was Joe, which was funny, because Joe was what Gogi called every waiter or parking guy whose name she didn’t know. To her “Joe” was synonymous for American working man and she doled them out with abandon.
The racetrack’s an interesting subculture. It’s one thing to see the same people every day like you would at work, but it’s another to see the same people every day when you’re all ditching work. A certain kind of degenerate solidarity gets formed. You also get to see each other in extremis. You want to get an insight into someone’s personality watch them as they watch the stretch run of a race they’ve got big money on. Are they a screamer, a leaner, a finger snapper? Do they call out to the horse, “Come on Wine Girl, come on Wine Girl!” or to the jockey “One time Eddie D, one time!” I loved watching this one Argentinian cat named Eduardo Sabal. An inveterate gambler with a playboy’s tan and velvet loafers, he would stand on his chair screaming “La fi feet, La fi feet” as he rooted the great Panamanian jockey Laffit Pincay Jr on to a hopeful score.
I was about to say when people gamble you see them at their best and worst but really, you’re seeing them at their worst and worst, either drunk from winning and the toxic joy of easy money or sniveling and pissed, their twenty to one shot getting nosed at the wire (the latter happening a lot more than the first). In fact, some people go out there with a profound need to lose, their torn-up tickets confirming for them the totally fucked nature of existence. One such cosmically screwed character was the actor, Vince Edwards, a once gorgeous TV Adonis who got famous playing Doctor Ben Casey back in the early 60s.
Vince was a dark cat and had the ecstatic bitterness of a man who’d lost everything: Looks, career, money, wife, all of it. He loved to bet the favorite, a surefire practice for going broke. Watching him blow his top when his 3 to 5 shot ran fourth was both tragic and exhilarating, a neon sign reading “Schadenfreude” flashing above his head.
One of my favorite Vince stories happened out at Santa Anita (a beautiful old Art Deco ship of a racetrack). There was a big horse in from England named Duckling Park running in the feature race. And of course, since he’s the favorite, Vince is all over it. “I don’t see how this Duckling Park can lose, he’s the best horse in Europe.” He’s talking loud enough for the whole clubhouse to hear. Vince asks Karen who she likes. “Tropical Holiday,” she tells him. Vince scoffs. “Ain’t beating Duckling Park.”
Tropical Holiday runs the race of its life, setting a new track record. Duckling Park finishes sixth. Vince goes nuts! “How does that horse lose!” he screams, slamming his fist on the table. “He’s the best horse in Europe!” He was appoplectic, yet at the same time getting some perverse joy out of it, his identity having morphed from TV golden boy to hard luck shmuck who can’t catch a break.
Vince never bet a 50 to 1 shot in his life but he was one out of sixty-four people who gets pancreatic cancer, and spent the last month of his life withering away at the Motion Picture Hospital in Tarzana. I know he’s cursing some even money loser wherever the hell he is.
Another great read. I want to see this film...
this is really one of your best. "the ecstatic bitterness of a man who’d lost everything"