The racetrack chaplain, he’d make rounds. Everything going okay? He was concerned about the backside, our personal attitudes, problems, hard times we were having, good times. If we wanted to talk, he was available. The chaplain’d say, We’re having a service tonight, seven o’clock under the grandstands. We’d be dirty in our work clothes but he’d say, Just come as you are, we’d love to have you. And he’d make sure the service was held after our chores were done. It wouldn’t be on a Sunday because there was races on Sundays. It’d be on a dark day in the middle of the week.

Before a race card started, the chaplain would hold a prayer service in the jockeys’ room. A lot of the jocks joined. Most of them — I think all of them — would sit and say a prayer together. It didn’t matter what they believed.

FIVE

I OUTGREW THE POSITION

I met the jockeys and seen what they did to make weight. They slap on glycerin and cling-wrap and sit in their cars with the heater blasting when it’s a hundred in the shade — they pass out. They go in the hotbox — it’s like a refrigerator with a spot on top for your head to stick out. Once, a jock caught on fire when the hotbox short-circuited. He had terrible burns all over his body.

The jockeys flip their food or they don’t eat at all. They get so good at puking they brag about it — I can flip the rice but leave the beans!

For a few weeks I stopped eating, thinking I could shrink myself. But I was tall — though we do have some tall jocks — and I was muscular doing all that work. The jocks are muscular too of course but they’re smaller-statured. There was no way I could keep it up without getting sick.

Sometimes a jockey hasn’t ever been on the back of the horse he’s riding. They don’t develop a close relationship. I loved to gallop the racehorses, and I ponied, too. I got to work them, open them up, breeze them. I took them to the starting gates. I did everything a jockey does except ride in a race.

THEY GET CHILLY