Later, when the hospital sent me home, my racetrack family had to feed me and help me because I couldn’t sit up on my own. I was renting a trailer in a court not far from the track, but I stayed next door with Tim Tucker and his wife for the first few weeks. They took good care of me — the Tuckers and some of the other guys’ wives, too. They’d wheel me out to the track so I could talk to people and get some sun. One time they took me to a zoo.

THEY’D RATHER HAVE THE PISS

Healing up, I hung around the racetrack. You’re not supposed to work in the test barns if you’re a stable hand because you might be inclined to let the horse’s piss run on the ground so they’d have to draw blood instead. Some drugs will show up in urine but not in blood — they’d rather have the piss. But they made a spot for me so I could earn a little bit of money. I had nothing coming in while I was in the hospital, and all the money I’d saved up — which was quite a chunk — it didn’t take long to deplete it.

I was home for a week at Christmas when a friend from the Nebraska circuit called me. He’d heard I got hurt and said, You need to come down to Florida and winter up here, work for JR Boyd and Ransom Farms. This was a chance to be with the big-time horses, the big-time trainers. JR Boyd paid for my plane ticket and I went.

I was hired as a groom. I got every other afternoon off. Oh! the horses were so sound! I rubbed a horse worth five million. No need to whirlpool them or ice them or freeze them or run bandages. It was so easy. If a horse is in bad shape, the owner gives him the time he needs to rest, and if a horse’s racing days get cut short, the owner makes his bundle on the horse’s sexual services instead.

STOP MY WORLD, LADY!

There was a lot of wealth. The owner of the Yankees was our neighbor. I met a lot of famous people. Some of the wealthy owners were common, down-to-earth, but some strutted around in their hats. The trainers didn’t wear blue jeans. The trainers wore suits. It was elaborate.

If a horse takes a dump in his stall, the groom immediately goes in and gets it out. It’s not tolerable to a trainer or owner to walk by and see their horse standing in a pile of shit. You can’t use a pitchfork near the animals — they’re too valuable to risk it — so you take the horse out of his stall, then go in and get the piles.