Back in her gown, she comes up behind him, puts her arms about him and lets her breath run like a warm bath down his neck. Though Time and The Goat have seared her and her face is a bit lopsided with its secret load of gin, he will still see her walking naked through the rainbow-colored air. From her cheap perfume he’ll catch an ancestral magic. When she captures his cap gently and says, “My name is April. What’s yours?” he’ll give the Budweiser full tilt to his lips, drain it, and answer, “Mark. Just Mark.” And beam. Just beam.
Now here’s one doll wise enough to know that some men can stare harder for companionship than for sex; and will pay for it where they won’t pay for sex. A solitary like this may be affected more by the touch of April’s hand saying, “I’m on your side, Marky dear,” than by the offer of her breast.
Look, Marky dear is buying the buck-six-bits’ stuff, a shot for himself and a shot for her. Well, good.
For the jukes are blowing the blues away, and now is the Daddy-Can-I-Have-One-More-Hour. Now is the Of-Course-I’m-Single-Honey time. The Daddy-Let-Me-Have-Your-Little-Cap, Please-Don’t-Ever-Leave-Me hour. Now is the What-Color-Are-Your-Eyes-Little-Daddy, I-Live-With-An-Aunt-Who’s-Out-Of-Town time. When single-O cats get their fur stroked just like married ones. For an hour.
Yet the whiskey in the glass goes dry. And neon, though it burn ever so scarlet, burns less red against the ordinary day. Trumpet man and drummer grow weary. Yet the jukes keep trying to blow the blues away.
Taxis will wheel back from the curbs; even the pullers will begin giving up. A bar-broad will lay her head on her arms and nod off, and the bartender will just let her nod.
Sooner or later someone will hear crossing bells. Someone will yawn, “I’d rather be in bed than be riding a passenger train.”
And the big jukes will sleep in their stables.
AIN’T NOBODY ON MY SIDE?
They tell me that Russia’s Sputnik has placed us in gravest peril; that unless we win the missile race we are lost; that the nation whose flag is first planted on the moon will inherit the earth.
Yet I feel the race is not for the skies, but for the hearts of men. Not amidst meteorite and star, but in those forests of furnished rooms behind the billboards, burning all night long. That so long as we remain dedicated to the proposition that every man is entitled to the pursuit of his own happiness, in his own fashion, we are unconquerable. So long as every man is innocent until proven guilty, all is well. But that when the innocent man must prove his innocence or stand convicted on the word of an unseen accuser, though we own the moon, we are lost.
I suspect we are well on our way toward gaining a moon and losing ourselves. For nowhere before has there been such a monstrous division between the actual lives of a people, and representation of those lives as purveyed by Cinerama, Colorvideo, Life, Time or The Reverend Peale. Though ten thousand voices announce our national contentment coast to coast, every hour on the hour, through editorial, headline and the fashion magazines, actually we are living today in a laboratory of human suffering as vast and terrible as that in which Dickens and Dostoevsky wrote.
“I say,” Walt Whitman prophesied, “we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there more hollowness of heart than at present, and here in the United States. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believed in nor is humanity itself believed in.… It is as if we are being endowed with a vast and thoroughly appointed body and left with little or no soul.”
Surely never before has any people lived so tidily in the midst of such psychological disorder. Never has any people deodorized, sanitized, germproofed, cellophaned and hygienized itself so thoroughly, and still remained stuck with the sense of something dead under the house. Never have so many two-baths-a-day people gone to so many analysts to find out how to quit washing their hands. Never have so many analysts made appointments with other analysts. How can we be so satisfied that God is on our side, and at the same time be so apprehensive lest he be not?
No other people, I suspect, has set itself a moral code so rigid, while applying it so flexibly. Surely nowhere before has any people possessed such a superfluity of physical luxuries companioned by such a dearth of emotional necessities. Never has any people been so completely at the mercy of its own appliances.
“ ‘Those who now decry our methods will be the first to imitate them,” Adolf Hitler warned the Western Powers. And what people has ever taken such a deep pride in its heroes, while permitting the enforcement of its laws to depend upon professional informers?
It looks like Walt was right. It looks like Adolf wasn’t far wrong. So long as we are more passionately concerned with the latest type of tail-fin than we are with the girl who asked, because our narcotics courts provided no defense to the penniless—“Ain’t nobody on my side?”, we are in the shadow of a peril more terrible than that cast by any Sputnik.
“Except as you, sons of earth, honor your birthright,” an ancient Babylonian told his people, “and cherish it well by human endeavor, you shall be cut down, and perish in darkness, or go up in high towers—a sacrifice to the most high God. Look you well, therefore, to yourselves in your posterity. Keep all close to earth, your feet upon the earth, your hands employed in the fruitfulness thereof be your vision never so far, and on high.”
So sput me no Sputniks, mutt me no muttniks. Spare me all flying saucers and spacemen dangerous or kind. Just hire a good lawyer for the girl who got trapped by the narco squad. We need her on our side.
STOOPERS AND SHOEBOARD WATCHERS
“E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose/Never to stoop.”
—Robert Browning
You may spot him, the man who never looks at a horse above the knees, studying the shoeboard a few steps from the saddling paddock. He’ll have pencils behind both ears and he never calls it a shoeboard. To him it’s the plateboard, for horses don’t wear shoes. They wear plates. Mud calks, jar calks, block heels, block-heel stickers or bars.
“How can you bet a horse without you consult the board?” is what he’d like seriously to know. “I lose a bet, I want to know was he wearing the right plates. I find out he’s wearing no stickers on a soft track, I got a beef. That trainer cost me money. You don’t read the board how do you find out why your horse didn’t come in? For every dime I lose I can account—that’s my philosophy.
“I’ll give you another piece of philosophy. Lay off No. 6. Somethin’s wrong. Otherwise why they putting bar plates on her? You don’t put no bar plates on no horse on a track like this unless her hoof is spreading. Lay off hoof spreaders. That’s my philosophy too.”
The man is really gone. If you let him get any closer he’ll take you behind the paddock and offer you the Dancer’s right foreplate for five dollars. “It’s a block-heel sticker,” he’ll tell you if you don’t pull away. “Ain’t that worth a fin to show your friends?”
He’s not the only one around the paddock whose living is below the knees.
Equally dedicated but not nearly so gone is the player who doesn’t care whether a horse is barefoot or wearing basketball shoes. If you showed this one a horse he’d say, “For God’s sake what’s that?” He thinks a paddock is something you put on a stable door to keep it locked. When he comes out into the light he doesn’t look up. He’s never seen a cloud.
His habitat is in the shadows under the stands, below the boxes or beneath the seats, high in the mezzanines or under your feet. But he knows something neither you nor the plateboard player knows. And never even could guess. That is simply that you don’t beat the horses by going to the seller’s window. You beat them by going to the cashier’s cage. And only the cashier’s cage.
Meet the stooping man.
With the ticket you just threw away.
You say you only threw one good ticket away in your life and that was only because you were wearing your wife’s bifocals? You’ve probably tossed off more than ever you’d let y
ourself suspect. The better you feel, the more likely you are to develop indifference toward your ticket.
Thirty million men and women bought over two billion dollars’ worth of mutuel tickets at American tracks last year. Of every quarter million wagered, roughly $400 in tickets went uncashed. Three and a quarter million in outs—that’s the figure to which the stooping class, in a disinterested hope of adjusting the national economy, has dedicated itself.
The Daily Racing Form once carried this item: “A flashlight concession would have made plenty after the last race Friday. When the 3–1-shot Tornabuoni was disqualified, moving up the 11–10 choice, Sir Miron, stoopers galore were in action. It was pitch dark and there were still plenty of hopefuls searching. Today all the stories were of how many fifty-dollar tickets were thrown away on the favorite.”
It needn’t be dark for the American bettor to rid himself of his ticket. Seemingly, he has an innate contempt for it. As a fool for his own folly.
Say you have a two-dollar ticket on a long shot to show. The Tote board lights up: No. 1 to win, No. 2 to place, No. 3 to show. Your horse was fourth. You drop the ticket at your shoes and wonder what made you go for a dog like that just because a Chinese gentleman in front of you went.
Five minutes later the Tote board blinks: INQUIRY. You blink back.
Somebody’s hollering.
Another ten minutes while the judges have a beer and talk about the point in the picture where the front-running jockey is bringing his whip down on the skull of the second-running boy. “Finish your beer, Doc, the poor brutes are waiting.” Lights go on again all over the Tote board. Claim allowed. No. 1 is placed last, No. 2 moves up to win, No. 3 to place—and your horse is fitted snugly into the show slot with the best price on the board—$19.40 to show.
Where’s your ticket, chum?
Don’t bother kicking your big flat feet about in the drift of mutuels—The Stooping Man is at the head of the line with it.
Talent may show up anywhere.
When grandstand lights come on overheard, to light the last trip to the window for all true sports still trying, and newsies cry “Keep your hat dry with the box skawr!” here he comes, not caring is his hat dry.
Stopping all over Sportman’s or Hawthorne, stuffing his pockets with handfuls of hope. Hope for later scoring; in some room where the lighting is still by gas. And where he’ll find one for $8.80 to show before morning. “Everyone has just so many doubles to hit” is the foundation of his faith.
Photo finishes and dead heats also help buy his dinner. And combination tickets too (win, place, and show), for these never cease to confuse the square who thinks he’s betting on the nose and drops his ticket because the horse only placed. The California Racing Board, always anxious to show it is on the square’s side, experimented with printing instructions on the back of the Tote ticket itself, advising the bettor that a place ticket has value even when his horse has won. That didn’t help the true square.
The true square will keep right on losing the ticket in a pocket among tickets he failed to throw away from earlier races or a previous day; so that when he actually tries to recover it he’ll be more confused than ever and will rip up the whole batch in disgust, including a pawnshop receipt for his father’s watch. If you’re square you’re square, that’s all. Resign yourself.
In the last ten years Illinois bettors alone have contributed $1,101,081 in uncashed winning tickets to charity. The Annual Report of the Illinois Racing Board for 1953 noted:
“To the experienced race-goer the … amounts seem incredible when it is understood these sums represent the value of ‘good’ tickets which the original holders failed to cash. The health and recreational benefits which this fund has made possible to veterans … are incalculable in a monetary sense, but in the final analysis it is the money which … contributes to another bright chapter in the story of thoroughbred racing.”
New York State’s chapter since 1945 comes to over $2 million: that’s even brighter.
According to the true stooper’s code, once a ticket is misplaced, on or off the buyer’s person, the buyer has automatically forfeited the right to cash. He is no longer entitled even to tear it up. He is disfranchised. It belongs, ethically at least, to The Loyal Order of Willing Stoopers. Whose best friend is darkness.
And even better than dead heats and darkness are races where the barrier holds more horses than the Tote board provides numbers. There may be four or five entries and five or six field horses making a total number of twenty or more horses, but only twelve betting units.
The bettor sees No. 14 has won and gets rid of his ticket because it says 12, forgetting that his ticket covers No. 14 too.
“It’s a science,” the stooper can tell you, “it takes eyes and memory. You have to remember color and number, and you don’t have time to consult your program every time you see a likely looking color. You don’t stoop every time you see the right color. You have to judge on the flip.”
A true stooper can flip a ticket with the point of his shoe high enough to catch its detail before it drifts back to the cement.
“I can flip between 1,500 and 2,000 tickets between races,” one pro estimates. And he can, too. He wears out three left soles to one right, being a left-footed flipper. And finds Santa Anita easier on both shoes than other tracks because of the grass infield. “Hottest day I ever had,” he recalls, “was the time I picked up two little daily doubles stacked together on the Santa Anita rail. Six hundred eighty bucks apiece and I didn’t even have to stoop. Other times you go three-four days without scoring.”
“What would you do if you went a week?”
“Keep stooping.”
“A month?”
“Call the F. B. and Eye and have them bar me off the turf for life.”
Stoopers or stable owners, all the same, everyone has just so many doubles to hit. “I had this dream when I was a sprout, I’m pickin’ up pennies around a newsstand. I had that dream till I was twelve. Then I started pickin’ up nickels and dimes. One night I picked up a ten-dollar bill. Next day I quit school. I been at the calling ever since.” It’s a calling all right. A calling within a dream. As well as being a barometer of the societal attitudes of communities being stooped. Resort tracks, for example, regard the man who openly makes his living by stooping as belonging to the same caste as the one who runs gutters looking for snipes. You have to dress like a hotel clerk at places like that, for you’re among people too proud to bend. Even if you happen to drop a ticket knowingly you have to consider—What if someone I know should see me stoop and mistake me for a TV scriptwriter?
Between California and Florida tracks there is as much difference in stoopers as between California and Florida oranges. The Californian is a stroller, flipping casually as he strolls. The Florida hand has the floorwalker’s stately mien. He never bends until absolutely certain—and then does a deep stoop of such grace as to do real credit to le sport.
Between these two are the unmentionable places where you bring your own sack and go on all fours. In the Midwest, stooping is honest toil. To bump heads with someone you know, while on your knees, need cause no embarrassment and little conversation—“How you doin’?” “Caught me a double”—and then just pad on by.
In Illinois even the track police stoop. One of the Cahokia Downs nabbers put his fifteen-year-old son to work last summer, and the boy’s earnings for the season topped those of his daddy. Another nabber, seeing that, put his eight-year-old to work. But the younger boy wasn’t as sharp as the older sprout. The best he could do was to heap tickets into a potato sack for sorting over weekends.
That sack averaged a yield of fifteen dollars for each weekend. Moreover, it got the family up early of a Sunday to get at those culls. It was like Christmas. Everybody was alerted to the long one that won the photo in the sixth.
But nobody could start till the old man said so. He was the official starter. As he’s a true stooper, he didn’t stand on the family findings. H
e sorted the sortings. And when he was through, loyal to the code, he never threw away the culls. He deposited them, neatly sacked, on a newsstand, a shelf in the public library, or in a cab. Anywhere a square would find them and so cancel all appointments while he sorted secretly. All squares, of course, sort in vain.
This is known as The Stooper’s Revenge, and it proves something. It proves there’s a little stooper in the proudest of us and some pride left in the most stooped of us.
Naturally, track sweepers have the inside rail in the trade. At one track an attempt was made to force stoopers to sweep without stooping: merely to place their tickets in sacks which were turned over to the union steward, a sort of self-appointed superstooper.
It was asking too much of human nature. The result was four sweepers transferred to housing projects and the others having their brooms taken from them. For several weeks a hose was used instead of brooms, washing all tickets, good and bad the same, down all drains. But, luckily for the calling, this left the stands so damp the squares complained and the surviving sweepers were given a type of foot-operated dustpan which makes bending unnecessary. You just can’t trust anybody.
The Future Stooper
The man who will bring dignity on a national scale to the calling has not yet appeared. But he will be the superstooper who, having gotten an organization behind him and a public relations bureau established in New York, will sent out a limited number of representatives to each track that qualifies, and these will be above bending: they will not deign even to flip. They will carry gilt-initialed briefcases of Moroccan leather, their English will be impeccable, and they will address themselves to a client in the manner of a major general who wants something done without throwing his weight: “Sorry to trouble you, old boy. But you’ve misplaced that ticket in your hand twice. If you don’t mind—” and the bag will be open for you to drop the mutuel no longer legally your own.