There’s a lot of pain and pill abuse. You learn some of them are drunks. They show up to hot walk and they’re drunk. When they say they’re hungry, you don’t give them money. You take them to get a bite instead.

The leg paint I used on the horses had alcohol in it. One morning I came in at four and said, Where’s Thorby?

I finally found him passed out in an empty stall. I thought he was dead. He’d gotten into my tack box and drunk up all of my leg paint.

If you had a wild one, you gave it to Thorby — he’d jump on and hoot and holler. It was like he was glued to the horse. He wouldn’t ever fall off. Horses responded to him. Thorby was gentle but when he got drunk he’d pick a fight with a cigarette machine or a jukebox.

MIRACLE PERSON

My friend Bobbie Mackintosh was galloping a three-year-old and the three-year-old spooked. Bobbie’s foot got tangled in the irons and she got dragged. Her neck broke — a hangman’s break. She’d just gotten married the week before.

They life-flighted her off the racetrack and took her to the hospital. She was in a coma four months. She had a brain injury. When she woke up she was paralyzed except for her arms. She had to learn how to talk again. The husband dumped her, of course. He dumped her right away.

She got hurt in January. In late November, she showed up at the racetrack in a wheelchair. They let her work the pari-mutuel window. She talked real slow, but she remembered me. We used to hitch a ride to the racetrack together every morning at four back when we were staying at the El Rancho Motel — her and her boyfriend and me and the idiot I was with. She was the one who’d given me goat milk when I was sick. I knew her quite well.

Bobbie had to have surgeries all the time, and she was in therapy the rest of her life. She got a medical support dog and she got remarried, too. She was always working on her arm strength. You can read about her on the internet. Her doctors wrote testimonials about her determination and how she made history. She was known as a miracle person.

She just passed away last year. She wanted to write a book about her life. Anyway, she was from Minnesota.

HE WAS LIVING HIGH