A jockey took me out to a movie once, but I fell asleep in the first ten minutes. Jockeys get their naps in — they’re galloping and working the horses at five o’clock in the morning, but after that they can leave, do what they want. The rest of us — a lot of us — were there twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day.

Last dash of a night race ends around 7:30, but you don’t just feed the horse and throw him in a stall — you’ve got to cool him out, walk him, water him off, do up his legs, put him in ice or in a tub. By the time you’re done, it’s midnight, 12:30.

One night after last dash I went home, didn’t even eat — I was exhausted and had to be up again at four. I was renting a room from an old lady who knew the people I worked for. I lay down, slept, got up, got dressed, went back to the track. No one else was there except for a guy grilling hamburgers near my barn. What time is it? I asked him. It’s 2:30, he said.

Sometimes my folks would come to the races and we’d go out to eat afterwards. It’d be eight o’clock at night and I couldn’t even talk. I’d be falling asleep on the table.

OUR PERSONAL ATTITUDES

You get hit. I got kicked in the head. The horse was kicking at a fly and my head got in the way. Riders would go down. They’d get steel rods put up their spine. You were on top of the world or the bottom. You’d get hurt and be laid up with no money coming in, but there’d be other weeks where you made real good.

It’s a sport, you’re competitive — you want to be tops, you want to win, you want your name on the program, in the standings. A trainer’ll try to swipe an owner from another trainer. A jockey’ll say to another jockey — What the fuck are you doing, sniffing around my stable? Bad feelings, hard feelings, friction — nobody loves everybody. But if someone gets hurt, laid up, down on their luck, loses a loved one — even if their truck breaks down on the way to the next track — we’d work together to help. We’d have a big benefit.

I’d pull manes — ten mane jobs, ten sheath cleanings — and the money that would’ve been my fee would go into the pot. When I got hurt, people covered for me. They fed my horses and got them out to exercise. We stuck together.