injured riders as unionizing, and they were ready to ban any jockey who took steps in that direction. So jockeys went without insurance and made do with what they had, passing the hat when one of their colleagues went down. Women like Helen could only hope there would be enough.
Helen ran to the front door, jammed the key in, and rushed inside. The empty house frightened her, and she nearly fainted when the landlord’s parrot spoke to her in the dark. She went upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom.
“If I didn’t have him,” she said as her mind rolled back over that night, “I was alone.”
Red Pollard and George Woolf had signed on to a life that used men up. But for all its miseries, there was an unmistakable allure to the jockey’s craft, one that both found irresistible. Man is preoccupied with freedom yet laden with handicaps. The breadth of his activity and experience is narrowed by the limitations of his relatively weak, sluggish body. The racehorse, by virtue of his awesome physical gifts, freed the jockey from himself. When a horse and a jockey flew over the track together, there were moments in which the man’s mind wedded itself to the animal’s body to form something greater than the sum of both parts. The horse partook of the jockey’s cunning; the jockey partook of the horse’s supreme power. For the jockey, the saddle was a place of unparalleled exhilaration, of transcendence. “The horse,” recalled one rider, “he
On the ground, the jockey was fettered and muted, moving in slow motion, the world a sensory vacuum after the tenfold high of racing speed. In the saddle, emancipated from their bodies, Pollard, Woolf, and all other reinsmen sailed eight feet over the world, emphatically free, emphatically alive. They were Hemingway’s bullfighters, living “all the way up.”32
(NORAH POLLARD CHRISTIANSON)
LIGHT AND SHADOW
Sooner or later, just about all the bug boys went up the hill. When they began the journey the first time, following the narrow dirt road that turned up from the racetrack, they probably looked very young and somewhat breathless. When they came back, they were half a dollar poorer, twenty minutes older, and decidedly more swaggering at the walk. And the stories they could tell!
At the top of the hill, as everyone knew, stood the big cinder-block building that stared down on the track at Tijuana, or “Tee-a Joo-ana,” as they called it. The building was the home of the Molino Rojo, or “red mill,” a shag- carpeted shrine to the world’s oldest profession.1 It was by far the largest house of prostitution in the world, and probably the most successful. Hovering right over the old Tijuana track, consuming half a city block, topped by an immense spinning windmill and decked out in flashing red lights that were visible clear across the border, the Molino Rojo must have been to the racetrackers what the North Star was to the magi. It took effort for the riders to avoid looking right at it every time they rode in morning workouts or circled the barn walking hots. The jockeys called it “the house of the wilted pigeons.”2
The Molino Rojo had no madam. The girls ran the place themselves, and they did so with the cunning of robber barons. It was no surprise to them that half the people at the racetrack were unsupervised hellraisers gripped in the ferocious throes of puberty. Surely it was more than happy coincidence that the price of admission—“fifty cents, straight up,” remembers one former bug boy—was precisely equal to the pay for galloping a horse. Any rider who made it up the hill had his beer paid for, compliments of the house. And in the unlikely event that a lad wasn’t quite in the mood, he would be ushered into the house theater to be inspired by an exotic blue movie. There were so many girls to choose from, every conceivable nationality, that a kid would have to gallop three hundred horses to afford them all. He could walk down the long, narrow halls, off of which were countless fabulously appointed bedrooms, listen to the girls beckoning in soft Spanish, and simply take his pick. “You went through there,” remembers one client, “like you were going through a grocery store.”
The girls took customer service seriously. Velvet-Tongued Velma and Chi Chi Grande needed no introduction. A girl the riders called One Wing Annie did a brisk business despite missing one arm. One girl told a bug boy that if he could track down $5, she’d show him something he’d never forget. Five dollars was the kind of money you could live on for a week back then, but practical considerations were unlikely to occur to a bug boy in such a situation. Within moments, a herd of jockeys packed into a room at the mill and showered $5 worth of nickels and dimes on the girl in question. She promptly stripped naked, lit up a cigarette, and blew smoke rings from a place into which only a creative-minded and supple-bodied prostitute would think of placing a cigarette. It was the greatest day of the bug boys’ lives. “What talent!” recalled a witness. “Of course, I had to change my brand of cigarettes after that.”
The Molino Rojo set the standard for Tijuana. The jockeys lived high and hard, riding by day, roaming the town in dense, noisy scrums by night, pouring into the Molino Rojo, then the Turf Club saloon, then on to wild exploits in town, chasing giggling girls buck naked down motel corridors, stealing all the room keys to the town’s biggest hotel. Among the riders were Red Pollard and George Woolf. It was to this strangely bountiful place that they came each winter, and they thought of it as home. Riding there from fall to spring every year, they defined themselves as athletes and as men.
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In 1928, their first full season together, they took the racing world by storm. Settling into his niche as a miracle worker for tough and neurotic horses, Pollard earned assignments on nearly three hundred mounts and guided them to more than $20,000 in total purse earnings. His fifty-three winners placed him in a tie for twentieth in winning percentage among fully employed riders in North America (those with one hundred or more mounts). He was a complete success. But Woolf was supernatural. Though in the big leagues only a few months, Woolf was signed on to ride more than 550 mounts, many of whom were stakes horses of the highest quality, and won with more than 100 of them for total purse earnings of $100,000. His winning average of 19 percent ranked him in a tie for sixteenth among fully employed riders. As the weekday wonder and the money man, Pollard and Woolf established themselves in the uppermost tier of North American racing.
They also carved out their own respective roles in the social world. Pollard, with his books, his stories, and his
