When you put straw down you pack it, you pack it — it’s got to be perfect. You beat the stalls until you can bounce a quarter off the bales. Mrs. Milkie was a richie-rich and one day after I’d put her horse away with a fresh bed, I heard her saying, Oh my god, oh my god!

I run over there and JR Boyd runs over there, too. We said, What’s wrong? What happened? And she said, There’s a piece of straw in Percival’s tail!

STUPID CAMERAS, BIG LIGHTS

A local news channel sent a crew to the farm every few weeks. We’d bring a horse out and parade him around and say who he’s out of and who he’s by, grandson of so-and-so, and the horse’d be nervous because the newspeople were idiots with their cords and microphones and their stupid cameras and big lights that blinded the animal.

There was a horse I introduced as Hell Mountain, but after the newspeople left, some trainers came up to me and said, Who’s Hell Mountain? Where’d you get that? That ain’t right.

Down there they don’t say, What’s his name? They say, What his name is? The accent is thick. So I’d asked, What his name is? But instead of H-A-I-L, I heard H-E-L-L.

There was a lot of drugs in Florida. We were all getting ready for the trip to Kentucky for the Derby in the spring. Workers at the farm would buy cocaine to sell in Louisville, Lexington. There was all these money scams, illegal schemes. It’s how a lot of people got by.

GRAB THAT THING

JR Boyd was a five-time Indy 500 winner. His son did the training, but it was the old man, the race-car driver, who’d invested the money and started the farm. Both were named JR Boyd and there was the little one they called Hemorrhoid, the grandson.

One day a greenhorn gal came around asking for a job. She didn’t know much about horses but she loved them and thought they were beautiful — she’d taken riding classes as a kid. Between spits of tobacco, Old Boyd said, These ain’t riding horses. But the gal was pretty so he hired her as a hot walker.

When you walk them you’ve got to put a chain over their nose and under their lip to keep pressure on it and jingle it — the gal was struggling. Old Boyd was watching her. Then he said, See that horse over there? He pointed to a stallion, a little two-year-old, with its dick hanging out. The stallion kept slamming his dick up to his belly and bringing it down again.