Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (71 page)

When you start talking to middle-class people in Lexington, the words are different, but it’s the same script. It’s like talking to a poor person in Pike County or Missisippi. The schools are bad. Okay, they’re bad for different reasons—but the schools are bad.

The middle class is fighting powerlessness too. Middle-class women, who are in the Lexington fight, are more alienated than lower-class women. The poor woman knows she’s essential for the family. The middle-class woman thinks, If I die tomorrow, the old man can hire himself a maid to do everything I do. The white-collar guy is scared he may be replaced by the computer. The schoolteacher is asked not to teach but to baby-sit. God help you if you teach. The minister is trapped by the congregation that’s out of touch with him. He spends his life violating the credo that led him into the ministry. The policeman has no relationship to the people he’s supposed to protect. So he oppresses. The fireman who wants to fight fires ends up fighting a war.

People become afraid of each other. They’re convinced there’s not a damn thing they can do. I think we have it inside us to change things. We need the courage. It’s a scary thing. Because we’ve been told from the time we were born that what we have inside us is bad and useless. What’s true is what we have inside us is good and useful.

 

 

I work all the way from two in the morning until two the next morning seven days a week. (Laughs.) I’m not a martyr. I’m one of the few people I know who was lucky in life to find out what he really wanted to do. I’m just havin’ a ball, the time of my life. I feel sorry for all these people I run across all the time who aren’t doing what they want to do. Their lives are hell. I think everybody ought to quit their job and do what they want to do. You’ve got one life. You’ve got, say, sixty-five years. How on earth can you blow forty-five years of that doing something you hate?

I have a wife and three children. I’ve managed to support them for six years doing this kind of work. We don’t live fat. I have enough money to buy books and records. The kids have as good an education as anybody in this country. Their range of friends runs from millionaires in San Francisco to black prostitutes in Lexington. They’re comfortable with all these people. My kids know the name of the game: living your life up to the end.

All human recorded history is about five thousand years old. How many people in all that time have made an overwhelming difference? Twenty? Thirty? Most of us spend our lives trying to achieve some things. But we’re not going to make an overwhelming difference. We do the best we can. That’s enough.

The problem with history is that it’s written by college professors about great men. That’s net what history is. History’s a hell of a lot of little people getting together and deciding they want a better life for themselves and their kids.

I have a goal. I want to end my life in a home for the aged that’s run by the state—organizing people to fight ’em because they’re not running it right. (Laughs.)

There was an accident at the track today and I don’t know really how the boy came out. At Hawthorne today. His horse fell and he just sailed. I don’t know if he was conscious or not. The ambulance picked him up.

 

 

I been having a little problem of weight the last three weeks. I’ve been retaining the water, which I usually don’t do. I’m not losing it by sweating. My usual weight’s about 110, with saddle and all. Stripped naked, I’m about 106½. Right now I weigh 108. If I try to get to 106, I begin to feel the drain, the loss of energy. But you waste so much energy riding that I eat like a horse. Then I really have to watch it.

I’ve learned to reduce from other riders who’ve been doing it for twenty-some years. They could lose seven pounds in three hours, by sweating, by just being in the hot box. All the jockeys’ rooms have ’em. Or you can take pills. It weakens extremely. It takes the salt out of your body and you’re just not completely there.

Riding is very hazardous. We spend an average of two months out of work from injuries we sustain during the year. We suffer more death than probably any other sport. I was very late becoming a jockey, at twenty-two. They start at sixteen usually. At the age of sixteen, you haven’t enough experience in life to really see danger. At twenty-two, you’ve been through harder times and you see if you make a wrong decision you might get yourself or somebody else hurt. When you’re sixteen you don’t really care.

I been lucky until last year, almost accident-free. My first accident last year came in February, when I broke the cartilage in my knee in a spill, warming up for a race. The horse did somethin’ wrong and I fell off of him and he run over me—my knee—and tore the ligaments in my ankle, broke my finger, bruises all over. About three months later I fell again. I had a concussion, I had lacerations in the temple, six stitches, and I had a fracture in the vertebrae in my back. (Indicates a scar.) I just did this Saturday. A horse threw me out of the gate right here on my nose. I had all my teeth knocked out. (Laughs.)

 

 

The most common accident is what we call clippin’ of another horse’s heels. Your horse trips with the other horse’s heels, and he’ll automatically go down. What helps us is the horse is moving at such a momentum, he falls so quick, that we just sail out into the air and don’t land near the horse. We usually land about fifteen feet away. That’s what really helps.

You put it off as casual. If I were to think how dangerous it is, I wouldn’t dare step on a horse. There’s just so many things that can happen. I’ll come home with a bruise on my arm, I can’t move it. I have no idea when it happened. It happened leaving the gate or during the race. I’ll pull a muscle and not know it happened. I’ll feel the pain after the race. Your mind is one hundred percent on what you’re doing. You feel no pain at that moment.

I’d say the casualty rate is three, four times higher than any other sport. Last year we had nine race track deaths, quite a few broken backs, quite a few paralyzed . . .

A real close friend of mine, he’s paralyzed. Three days after I fell, he fell. Just a normal accident. We all expected him to get up and walk away. He’s paralyzed from the waist down. It’s been a year and some months. We had a benefit dinner for him. Gettin’ money out of those people—track owners—is like tryin’ to squeeze a lemon dry.

He gets compensation if he’s a member of the Jockeys’ Guild or the Jockeys’ Association. Of the two thousand or more jockeys, about fifteen hundred belong to the guild. I’m the representative here in Chicago. The guild comes up with fifty dollars a week and the race track gives us fifty.

Only fifty bucks compensation! We don’t have a pension plan. We’re working on one, but the legislature stops us. They say we’re self-employed. They put us in the same category as a doctor. There are old doctors, but there are no old jockeys.

Some tracks still object to the guild. A lotta time the tracks get so hazardous that we refuse to ride on ‘em. They usually wait till two or three riders fall, then they determine the track’s hazardous. Sometimes nothin’ happens to riders, other times they break bones. The rains, the cold weather, sometimes it freezes and there are holes. It’s plain to see it’s just not fit for an animal or a human being to work on these conditions.

Bones break a little casual. You get used to it, a finger . . . What most breaks is your collarbone. I fractured it. I could name you rider after rider, that’s the first thing that goes, the collarbone.

I prep horses for a race. Three days before, I’ll go a half mile with the horse I’m gonna ride, or three-eighths of a mile. The owner wants me to get the feel of the horse. I do this day in and day out through the year. So I’m a good judge of pace. He knows I’m not gonna let a horse go three seconds too fast. He might loose all his energies out, and when the race comes up he’s empty. I’ll average two or three in the morning. Most of the time I’ll just talk to the man and he’ll tell me, “How did my horse run the other day?” or “I’m gonna ride you on this horse and he likes to run this way.” I don’t work for one man. I ride for anyone that wants me.

If I ride within the first four races, I have to be back at twelve-thirty. The first race is two-ten. They want you at least an hour and a half before. You have about a good thirty, forty-five minutes to get dressed, get your weight down, get prepared, read up on the charts of the horses that are gonna ride that day, plus your own. You look for speed.

You know their records, because more or less you rode against them before or rode them themselves. Does he like to go to the front? Does he like to come from behind? Does he like to stay in the middle? Does he like to go around? Does he like to go through? Then the trainer will tell you how he likes his horse rode. If he’s a good trainer, he’ll tell you the habits of the horse, even if they’re bad habits. A bad habit are horses that lug in, that like to ride around instead of inside, that don’t break too good. It makes it more dangerous—and a little more difficult to win races. There’s more ways of getting beat.

You have only a minute and ten seconds sometimes to do everything you have to do. The average race is three-quarters of a mile, and they usually are a minute and ten or a minute, eleven. You make the wrong decision, that’s the race. You really don’t know where you’re gonna lay or how the horse is gonna react from one race to the other. Your first thing is to get him out of the gate. You have to look for position. Where can I be? There’s ten, twelve other horses that would like to have the same position. There’s maybe six horses that want to go into the lead. The other six might come from behind. You can’t be all in the same place at the same time. You have to wiggle your way around here and there.

You ride around, you find the race is half-over. If you’re layin’ near the leaders, you’re gonna wait a little later to move. If you’re way back there, you have to move a little earlier, because you have a lot of catching up to do. Here’s what makes riders. You must realize there are other jockeys as capable as you are in the race. So you must use good judgment. You have to handicap which horses are gonna do what in front of you. Which ones are gonna keep runnin’ and vacate that space that you can flow through. Or which are stoppin’ and you have to avoid.

You must know the other jockeys, too. They all have habits. I know jockeys I can get through and jockeys that don’t let you. I have a habit. I’ve been known as a front running rider, that I can save a horse better. I got a good judge of pace when I’m in front. But I feel I’d rather ride a horse from behind. A horse is competitive. It’s his nature to beat other horses. That’s all they’ve been taught all their lives. Usually at three years old they start going in pairs. When they start gettin’ ready in the morning workouts, we’re matchin’ ’em up against each other. You can see the little babies, two year olds, they are trying to beat each other, just their instinct. One tries to get in front of the other, just like a little bitty game. One will get so much in front and he’ll wait. The other will get in front. And they’ll go like that. They’re conditioned to it.

Sure the animal makes a difference, but if you have two horses alike you have to beat the other rider. You have to wait for his mistakes or his habit. I’ve learned patience. I know other people’s habits a lot better than mine. I’m sure they know mine a lot better than they know theirs.

If a jockey’s in trouble and he hollers for help, that other rider has to do everything in his power to help—whether it’s gonna cost him the race or not. One possibility: there’s horses all around him, he’s in the middle, he can’t control his horse. So he’s gonna run into another horse, he’ gonna clip the other horse’s heels. If he does this, he’s gonna fall, and the people behind him are gonna fall over him. That’s what happened today.