Gothic in its decay, Suffolk Downs is a beautiful ruin.
The only thoroughbred horse-racing track in Greater Boston, Suffolk Downs is a collapsed cathedral of pseudo-science and pure chance, of bitter old men and clouds of cigarette smoke, of nausea and human tragedy--and occasionally, of proof that hope springs eternal. Suffolk Downs is, to the uninitiated, no doubt an intimidating place, towering over East Boston, framed by the tracks of the blue line outbound for Wonderland. To the regulars, though it is a decrepit mass, it is also a place where the possibility of instant money--and more importantly, instant redemption-is omnipresent.
The action comes in various forms. There are basic bets like win, place and show, which correspond to a horse's running first, second or third. Then there are the "exotics," like the exacta and trifecta, which are bets on the first two and first three runners, respectively. On the last race of each day's card, every track offers a superfecta-picking the first four finishers, in order. Nearly impossible to hit, the super inevitably pays off at better than $1,000, and I've seen it go as high as 50 times that. On Feb. 4, a full-time loser named Ticket Out of Here went off at 99-1 and rallied from the back to finish fourth, rounding out a super worth $3,939.60. The implausibility of the moment was astounding.
My grandparents brought me into the fraternity of horse-players when I was about six, whisking me from midtown Manhattan to Aqueduct Racetrack in Jamaica, Queens. We would make the 45-minute bus ride on a 20-passenger van owned and operated by a man named Gus, who, I would learn years later, died of a heart attack in the men's room at The Sands in Las Vegas. Gus had been married several times, and his last marriage ended when his wife gave him an ultimatum: me or horses. Gus chose horses.
Like many players, my grandparents followed what my high school theology teacher would have called an authoritarian method for picking horses. Before hopping Gus' bus, my grandfather would pay $2 for a handicapping sheet xeroxed on bright orange paper in the cigarette store across Second Avenue from his apartment. This sheet, which was compiled by "Clocker Lawton," tipped three horses in each of Aqueduct's nine races that day. Lawton--the only clue to whose identity was a grainy photograph of a man in a trenchcoat and a wide-brimmed hat, a cross between Elliott Ness and John Wayne, printed above his picks--mystified me with his expertise. Invariably, Lawton would recommend a rank outsider, a horse sent off at 15-1, which would proceed to stun the field. With each improbable pick, Lawton gained in stature, until his tips assumed the weight of ex cathedra pronouncements, to be ignored at one's peril. My grandmother's favorite reproof to her husband, to be intoned didactically: "But George, you didn't have it? You know, Lawton gave us the four."
Like veterans of a long war, we accumulated stories. My grandmother once collected several hundred dollars when she was misheard at the ticket window and given a trifecta she hadn't asked for, but which hit anyway. The entire Habib family got rich when an exacta combining Sweet Charlie (my father's nickname) and Texas Gentleman (my uncle then lived in Houston) defied long odds. I once made the mistake of playing an exacta straight instead of both ways, and was roundly rebuked. To each story was ascribed a moral: never correct a wrong ticket, always pay attention to the names and always box the runners in an exacta. Everybody seemed full of oral histories, from the Rockaway Beach set in their sharkshin suits to the Rastafarians who ringed the downstairs paddock and called out insults and encouragement to the jockeys before every race.
It was the richness of Aqueduct's Turf Club that enchanted me 15 years ago; it is the grittiness and dirt of the Suffolk Downs grandstand that captivates me today. The attendance on any given day is 95 percent male and the average age of patrons is 50, and it's the last place in Massachusetts, I'm convinced, where profanity and chain-smoking are not only tolerated but encouraged. No sentence spoken without using "motherfucker" can be taken seriously; no bettor without a Lucky Strike dangling from his mouth is respected. Some players are cool and rational and know how the pace in a particular race will break and where a given horse will fall in and bet accordingly; others scan the tote board for good odds or good numbers and convince themselves that they're investing their rent money wisely. The deadest of the deadbeats stick to Keno and scratch-off lotto tickets--the no-brainer slot machine--pullers at the track.
Were it not for the embarrassing trendiness of conflating the academic with the plebeian, I would call Suffolk Downs postmodern, since everything there is virtual. Massachusetts thoroughbreds run live races four days a week, but nobody watches them. Instead, since the majority of on-track wagering is done on races beamed in by satellite from the major tracks in New York, Florida, Louisiana and California, the regulars watch all of the races--including the ones happening 50 feet away--on television. The tracks have names which are alternately pastoral and geriatric: the Fair Grounds, Bay Meadows, Oaklawn Park, Turf Paradise. Races go off like firecrackers on the Fourth, and watching four big-screen TVs and handicapping four sets of horses simultaneously induces a curiously pleasurable dizziness. I've seen a hobbled man pushing 80 scream for the duration of one race at Laurel, sling a wad of losing tickets into the air like confetti, then turn his attention to a stretch run at Santa Anita without missing a beat.
The oscillation of fury and elation is apparently revitalizing.
Last Saturday was the most singularly successful day I've ever had at a racetrack. After scouring the Internet for solid handicaps, I stumbled across a site called horsestats.com. For $50 a week, Geoffrey Rout, genius that he is, gives you one mortal lock. Since we are "problem gamblers," and since anything that expensive must, we reasoned, be worth something, we subscribed. As I forsook Lawton, the oracle of my childhood, I knew how Judas felt.
Saturday, Rout's play was Unshaded, a 3-year-old who won a maiden special weight race Jan. 29 at Gulfstream and bumped up in class to this $36,000 allowance race. Rout was positively prescient in his analysis: "I like the way that No. 9 Unshaded broke his maiden over seven furlongs last time, and think that the extra three-sixteenths of a mile will suit him perfectly. There is every reason to be confident that he will improve here. I would say that if he goes off at 5-2 or a little better he is worth taking a risk on." As Rout predicted, the crowd loved the No. 1 Patent, ridden by the veteran Jerry Bailey. Patent went off at even money, and Unshaded, ignored by the bettors, was sent off at 6-1.
Unshaded is what handicappers call a "deep closer"--a horse that breaks slowly from the gate and sits at the back of the pack for three-quarters of the race, then makes its move over the last 200 yards. When a deep closer wins, it's like a bottom-of-the-ninth home run or a buzzer-beater--everyone knows it can happen, but no one thinks today will be the day. Unshaded rallied around the last turn and slaughtered the field down the stretch, winning by a good 10 lengths. As he pulled away and I stood shouting with pure joy at the wall of TVs, I noticed that just one other man was making noise--a grey-haired black man with a Caribbean lilt was calling out for Unshaded, too. When it was all over, he turned to me and drawled, "Easy, easy." Behind me, a 60-something veteran from Eastie patted me on the shoulder and smiled, "Good work." Unshaded paid $15.40 for a $2 win ticket and my roommate and I collected $231 between us. I felt greater pride than I will when I graduate.
Walking out of Suffolk Downs, past rows of men poring over their Daily Racing Forms and Boston Heralds like Talmudic scholars looking for an esoteric pattern to the endless stream of numbers, past piles of losing tickets littering the puke-green floors, I feel somehow enlivened. I know that, in the best of all worlds, I'll make the 100-yard walk to the T poorer twice as often as richer. But I also know that tomorrow, I could make the super and catch my own Ticket Out of Here.
Daniel G. Habib '00 has never been richer. He drinks unfiltered water, writes unfiltered prose and smokes, unfiltered, like a ham. Despite the attention brought by his muttonchops, however, his origins and his intentions remain--even to his closest compatriots--utterly unknown.
