Well it would have been all right maybe if we’d stayed in Milan and ridden at Milan and Torino cause if there ever were any easy courses its those two. “Pianola, Joe”. My old man said when he dismounted in the winning stall after what the wops thought was a hell of a steeplechase. I asked him once, “This course rides its-self. It’s the pace you’re going at that makes riding the jumps dangerous Joe. We aint going any pace here, and they aint any really bad jumps either. But it’s the pace always—not the jumps that makes the trouble”.
San Siro was the swellest course I’d ever seen but the old man said it was a dog’s life. Going back and forth between Mirafiore and San Siro and riding just about every day in the week with a train ride every other night.
I was nuts about the horses too. There’s something about it when they come out and go up the track to the post. Sort of dancy and tight looking with the jock keeping a tight hold on them and maybe easing off a little and letting them run a little going up. Then once they were at the barrier it got me worse than anything. Especially at San Siro with that big green infield and the mountains way off and the fat wop starter with his big whip and the jocks fiddling them around and then the barrier snapping up and that bell going off and them all getting off in a bunch and then commencing to string out. You know the way a bunch of skins gets off. If you’re up in the stand with a pair of glasses all you see is them plunging off and then that bell goes off and it seems like it rings for a thousand years and then they come sweeping round the turn. There wasn’t ever anything like it for me.
But my old man said one day in the dressing room when he was getting into his street clothes, “None of these things are horses Joe. They’d kill that bunch of skates for their hides and hoofs up at Paris”. That was the day he’d won the Premio Commercio with Lantorna shooting her out of the field the last hundred meters like pulling a cork out of a bottle.
It was right after the Premio Commercio that we pulled out and left Italy. My old man and Holbrook and a fat wop in a straw hat that kept wiping his face with a handkerchief were having an argument at a table in the Galleria. They were all talking French and the two of them were after my old man about something. Finally he didn’t say anything any more but just sat there and looked at Holbrook and the two of them kept after him, first one talking and then the other and the fat wop always butting in on Holbrook.
“You go out and buy me a Sportsman, will you Joe?” my old man said and handed me a couple of soldi without looking away from Holbrook.
So I went out of the Galleria and walked over to in front of the Scala and bought a paper and came back and stood a little way away because I didn’t want to butt in and my old man was sitting back in his chair looking down at his coffee and fooling with a spoon and Holbrook and the big wop were standing and the big wop was wiping his face and shaking his head. And I came up and my old man acted just as though the two of them weren’t standing there and said, “Want an ice Joe?” Holbrook looked down at my old man and said slow and careful, “You son of a bitch” and he and the fat wop went out through the tables.
My old man sat there and sort of smiled at me but his face was white and he looked sick as hell and I was scared and felt sick inside because I knew something had happened and I didn’t see how anybody could call my old man a son of a bitch and get away with it. My old man opened up the Sportsman and studied the handicaps for a while and then he said, “You got to take a lot of things in this world Joe”. And three days later we left Milan for good on the Turin train for Paris after an auction sale out in front of Turner’s stables of everything we couldn’t get into a trunk and a suit case.
We got into Paris early in the morning in a long dirty station the old man told me was the Gare de Lyon. Paris was an awful big town after Milan. Seems like in Milan everybody is going somewhere and all the trams run somewhere and there aint any sort of a mixup, but Paris is all balled up and they never do straighten it out. I got to like it though, part of it anyway, and say it’s got the best race courses in the world. Seems as though that were the thing that keeps it all going and about the only thing you can figure on is that every day the buses will be going out to whatever track they’re running at going right out through everything to the track. I never really got to know Paris well because I just came in about once or twice a week with the old man from Maisons and he always sat at the Cafe de la Paix on the Opera side with the rest of the gang from Maisons and I guess that’s one of the busiest parts of the town. But say it is funny that a big town like Paris wouldn’t have a Galleria isn’t it?
Well, we went out to live at Maisons-Lafitte, where just about everybody lives except the gang at Chantilly, with a Mrs. Meyers that runs a boarding house. Maisons is about the swellest place to live I’ve ever seen in all my life. The town aint so much, but there’s a lake and a swell forest that we used to go off bumming in all day, a couple of us kids, and my old man made me a sling shot and we got a lot of things with it but the best one was a magpie. Young Dick Atkinson shot a rabbit with it one day and we put it under a tree and were all sitting around and Dick had some cigarettes and all of a sudden the rabbit jumped up and beat it into the brush and we chased it but we couldn’t find it. Gee we had fun at Maisons. Mrs. Meyers used to give me lunch in the morning and I’d be gone all day. I learned to talk French quick. It’s an easy language.
As soon as we got to Maisons my old man wrote to Milan for his license and he was pretty worried till it came. He used to sit around the Cafe de Paris in Maisons with the gang there, there were lots of guys he’d known when he rode up at Paris before the war lived at Maisons, and there’s a lot of time to sit around because the work around a racing stable for the jocks that is, is all cleaned up by nine o’clock in the morning. They take the first batch of skins out to gallop them at 5.30 in the morning and they work the second lot at 8 o’clock. That means getting up early all right and going to bed early too. If a jock’s riding for somebody too he can’t go boozing around because the trainer always has an eye on him if he’s a kid and if he aint a kid he’s always got an eye on himself. So mostly if a jock aint working he sits around the Café de Paris with the gang and they can all sit around about two or three hours in front of some drink like a vermouth and seltz and they talk and tell stories and shoot pool and it’s sort of like a club or the Galleria in Milan. Only it aint really like the Galleria because there everybody is going by all the time and there’s everybody around at the tables.
Well my old man got his license all right. They sent it through to him without a word and he rode a couple of times. Amiens, up country and that sort of thing, but he didn’t seem to get any engagement. Everybody liked him and whenever I’d come in to the Café in the forenoon I’d find somebody drinking with him because my old man wasn’t tight like most of these jockey’s that have got the first dollar they made riding at the World’s Fair in St. Louis in Nineteen ought four. That’s what my old man would say when he’d kid George Burns. But it seemed like everybody steered clear
