My parents met at the racetrack.

This is a key element in their story, in our family mythology, a central metaphor. It has never been explained in detail, of course, has always remained benignly emblematic, a mere starting point.

I'd often wondered about this—wondered if my parents' meeting was just a simple story, like any couple's meeting; a story which I, in my writerly way, had embellished into a metaphor, a romantic first line for any writer's biography:

"His parents met at the racetrack."

Or was there actually more to it? Was the way I'd come to think of it, undetailed, totemic, an intuition of some deeper significance, a beginning of an explanation?

I decided to ask my parents.

And they told me.

When my father graduated from high school, in I935, he got a job at Suffolk Downs, at the hot-dog stand. He was there the day they opened. They were still painting the fences.

My mother often visited the track with her family.

Neither remembers the exact moment of their meeting, the incident. The floor behind the concession stand was recessed. My mother recalls the first time she saw the "hot-dog boy" standing on level ground. His height amazed her.

On their first date they went to see Gunga Din. After that it was mostly the track. They'd met there, it was already their story.

Hearing this now, I can almost see them there again, as I'd always imagined them: the pre-war girl in her gigantic picture hat, the depression boy in his baggy gabardine pants. They are whiling away the long, innocent afternoons at the track, the racing days.

The war ended it. My father was drafted. In I 944 they married. The next year I was born. For seven years they didn't go to the track, they couldn't afford to. When they started going again, very occasionally, it was the fifties. They were older, had begun living different lives, the lives I think of them living.

Buried in this story is the significance I'd always intuited. I would not exist if there was no such place as the racetrack. And my birth stopped my parents from going.

My first trip to the track was in the mid-fifties. I was nine, or perhaps ten. It was the Weymouth Fair, the bottom rung. We'd undertaken a family outing, much anticipated, fiercely organized. There would be rides, outlaw cuisine, a full day of undiluted dissolution. If horse racing was mentioned, I took no note of it.

Yet there we were, at twelve sharp, on the finish line, following a full morning of Tilt-a-Whirl and geek gawking, of sheep-shearing demonstrations and mustard-pickle panorama—the perfunctory 4-H rationales.

The racetrack was at the east end of the grounds, a half-mile oval with a sad little grandstand. From the paddock you could see the entire midway: double-decker Ferris wheels with pastel neon tubing, distracted carnies flirting with giggling farm girls, giant taffy-pullers twisting in endless suggestive loops; whitetrash heaven.

I was given two dollars to lease my acquiescence. It wasn't necessary. I already knew I loved the place, the vast expanse of the track, the conspiratorial buzz in the grandstand. The fair was exciting. The track was thrilling. I took the deuce.

The idea was that I could bet with it, on any horse, keep my winnings, not complain if I lost. I loved the notion, though I knew nothing of gambling, how to do it, or why. I knew only that it involved this place, and these horses. It was what adults did when they acted like children.

Just as the first way you tell a joke is the right way, the first bet you make is made your way. It's how you're meant to bet, before you learn how you're supposed to bet. You spend the rest of your life trying to recapture it. Or shake it.

I didn't bet on the first race of course, little adult that I was. Nor did I hazard the second, or the third. What was I waiting for? Parental suggestion? Divine revelation? More likely I was waiting not to lose. I watched the grooms bring their horses to the paddock, watched the plungers line up at the fifty-dollar window, watched, waited.

In the sixth race I knew it was time. The horse was April Fool, the favorite. Did I know this? Or only sense it? I couldn't read the Racing Form, couldn't even decipher the odds. What made this horse the horse? Not his looks certainly, or his name. Perhaps I'd heard him being tipped in the walking ring, misread some handicapper's certainty as real certainty, as beginners will. I didn't hesitate. I bet two dollars on April Fool to show. Actually I didn't make the bet myself, being too short. My father made it for me. But he gave me the ticket to hold. Someone hoisted me dizzyingly aloft to watch the race.

April Fool won easily, leading every step. I never took my eyes from him, heard no other horse's name. He paid $z.60 to show. I put the two dollars in one pocket, the sixty cents in another. I left both sums where they were. I didn't want to bet again. I felt I'd discovered some pivotal secret, the clarity of which I might blur by pushing my luck. I spent the rest of the afternoon stooping for tickets, like a nine-year-old.

If I'd quit then I'd still be ahead. But I didn't. I couldn't. Who could? I'd won the first time. That's powerful medicine. Not that I thought it would always be like that. I just thought it always could be.

I remember few other details of the afternoon; just the thrilling vastness of the track, the coziness of the grandstand, the fervor of the crowd, and dreaming of it all for months and months afterward. It was like everyday life lived at fever pitch.

What I recall more vividly are its abstract attractions: the festive air of spectacle, the physical sense of contest, the challenge of beating a system, of pursuing communally that noblest of ideals: something for nothing. Plus the pervasive erotic element— the unknown, the tension, the danger. The idea that my family did this made any story possible.

When I recall this incident to my father he denies ever attending the Weymouth Fair. He's been to the Marshfield Fair, and the Brockton Fair, but never the Weymouth Fair. My father is not wrong about such things. For a moment I feel the metaphor physically threatened, done in by the banalities of misremembered detail. I must either shift the memory to the Marshfield Fair, or excise my father from it.

I decide to do neither.

Shortly after my first bet (in my memory at least), my Great Aunt Kate, my father's aunt, gave me a certain book, a discard from the library of the Saltonstalls, for whom my Great Aunt Kate worked as a seamstress.

This book was The Godolphin Arabian by Marguerite Henry, a fictionalized biography. In it the Godolphin, one of the foundation sires of the British turf, is rescued from death by a young Arab stableboy. They rise to prominence together, with ultimately dolorous consequences. On its final page, a page I always dreaded reaching, began steeling myself against in the very first chapter, yet also anticipated with voluptuously melancholy relish, there was an uncaptioned portrait of the two standing together, staring into the setting desert sun, as they had earlier in the story, before reality intervened. This picture always conjured up feelings of family attachment in me, feelings of affinity, and its costs. It seemed like an allusion to a story yet unknown, a story of adherence.

I read the book a hundred times. It became the book for me. Slowly, inexorably, its qualities combined—the solitary boy, the perfect horse, my Great Aunt Kate, the Saltonstalls—all blended smoothly into the racetrack story, before I knew there was a racetrack story to blend into.

I didn't go to a real track until I was fifteen. In those days minors weren't allowed. Then one day, freed unexpectedly from classes (a power failure? a principal's death?) I learned that Suffolk Downs was holding "fan appreciation day." I quickly talked my mother into going, into sneaking me in as though I'd reached majority.

I disguised myself as my father, thinking his trench coat and soft hat made me look thirty, when in fact, they made me look twelve. We approached the grandstand gate with inappropriate confidence. The ticket taker wasn't fooled for an instant.

"Lady," he screamed, "this kid is about fourteen years old."
My mother was speechless. I was immobilized. I thought we might be arrested. But then the racetrack spirit, as it will, prevailed. The man behind me, buoyed by the antic richness of the scene, its screwy piquancy, said, "Aw, let the kid in."

Instantly those behind him took up the chant.

"Let the kid in. Let the kid in. Let the kid in."

The gatekeeper was adamant. He was doing his job. It wasn't right. I'd tried to fool him. On the other hand, my mother seemed like a nice enough lady. And nobody important was watching. He released me.
"OK kid. Go ahead in. This time."

The crowd cheered.

I was in.

I remember nothing else of that day, not a race, not a bet. The big thing was that I'd gotten in, gotten into the track. It was an adult thing to do, and also childish, and there you have it. Later the entire incident became part of the family mythology: "The day Brendan got dressed up in Dad's clothes and snuck into the track." It was my first entry into the story. I instantly sensed its appeal, and its power; its distortions, and its accuracy.

As soon as I looked like I could be twenty-one, I started going by myself. Right off I went in a big way—sixty-six consecutive days, still my record.

I slipped easily into the numbing routines of mechanical attentiveness, rising in the late morning, walking to buy the Racing Form, taking the early afternoon subway to the track. I had a night job.

I slipped just as easily into the alluring obsessiveness of the gambling, began noticing the covert characteristics it brought out in me: how I bet, how I won, how I lost. Overall I did lose, though not much. It didn't matter.

I also appropriated a horse.

I was standing in line to cash one sunny October afternoon, sharing the smug camaraderie of the win window, when I heard the man behind me stage-whisper to his companion.

"He looked like the old Business Deal out there today, didn't he?"
The "old Business Deal." It was all I needed to hear. Here was a story appropriate to my fantasies: of former eminence in tragic decline, of heroic struggle against incalculable odds. I'd clearly bought my way into this story with my bet on Business Deal. I was hooked.

I never looked up Business Deal's actual history. I just kept imagining it. It seemed better that way. He became my horse.

I bet him every time he ran, and usually won. Then I began noticing his patterns, and always won. I had him timed. People noticed. They'd tell me, "Hey, Business Deal is running again tomorrow," or ask, "How's that horse you always bet doing these days?"

Then he disappeared.

At first I thought he was just laying up for a while. I was tempted to ask his trainer, or somebody else, anybody. But the longer I didn't, the more afraid I got to. I just put it off, and put it off, as I'd always put off the last page of my book. The truth is, I didn't want to know, because, of course, I already did.

When that meeting finally ended, numb, yet still wired, in desperate need of perspective, I gave myself a horseplayer's holiday. I began working on a system.

For weeks I collected countless charts, extrapolated endless statistics, worked every day on it. I was looking for "the way." I made many discoveries, uncovered many patterns. But none of them led anywhere. There was no "way." There were only ways. The story remained elusive, beyond control. The elusiveness of the story was the story.

My sole concrete memory of that period is of sitting at a folding card table, scribbling away at my calculations, looking up occasionally to see ghostly astronautical figures floating across the television screen. Men were landing for the first time on the moon.

Then I met a girl. We didn't meet at the track, though we might as well have. We went constantly. The track was the part of my story I featured to her. It seemed to fit.

She loved it, the track, the story. I loved taking her. It was like showing her where my mind and heart met.

I won all year, couldn't lose, had the best year ever, as seemed fitting. We decided to go to work on the track, like in the movies, or in a children's book. We wrote a letter, outlining our ambitions, a coy beginner's letter, appealing to the beginner in all who read it. We sent copies to selected trainers. One answered, sympathetically, though not encouragingly.

So we took our case to the track, walked the backstretch, quickly hired on to a cost-conscious trainer, Al Culp, from Elgin, Texas.

Our job was to walk the horses, clean the stalls, pick the feet. We were apprentice grooms, $2.50 an hour, thrilled at the thought. We came over at dawn on the subway, worked until ten, ate in the track kitchen, took a horse to the races occasionally, went to the races even when we didn't.

I liked the idea. But the reality very quickly lost its charm. The insularity of the backstretch felt oppressive. Turning a fantasy into a chore felt cannibalistic. It seemed like something that would make a wonderful story some day, but wasn't one now.

We kept at it though, knowing each day might be the last. Finally, after two months, one day was the last. We quit. Part of the story had finally been refuted, had bumped up against its boundaries.

To make up for this, we went straight to Saratoga, stayed the whole month, played at being mythic sportsmen instead of anonymous drudges. We stayed in a small room in a big house on George Street, went to the track every day, bet every race, had an ideal four weeks. It was a perfect story, yet something about it had gone strange. Working at the track had depleted the story for me, had forced too much significance on it. Immersion in the betting life wasn't reversing this process, it was deepening it. It was just too much.

When I left Saratoga I knew it was time to go on to something else, to leave the story alone, to stop enlarging on it. I knew that if I didn't, I risked losing it entirely, draining it of its true meaning, plundering the allegory.

I wasn't meant to be at the track all the time, I now realized. I was meant to think of myself as someone who could be.

There have been many stories added since, of course, adjustments to the mythology, but just adjustments.

For that is the real story of the racetrack for me—that it cannot be, and should not be, entirely real. It has always been as much a story as a place for me, a collection of stories actually—of Arab stableboys and successful first bets, of sneaking in and getting hooked, of indomitable claimers and surefire systems, of how I once worked at the track, and of how my parents met there.

When you tell a story too often it loses its spontaneity, achieves polish, becomes, not a feeling, but a performance. When you live a story you bring the outside world into it, forfeit its legendariness, cut off your escape route. This particular story, true as it was, couldn't stand the rigors of repetition, or of excess tangibility. It would cease to exist for me then, in the way that mattered most, in story form.

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