Whirlaway

and over-smiling tarts standing out front under the jacaranda trees, pulling at their stockings, waving at the taxis, and shoving with palms the bottom of their hair. Though I sensed that they all disliked me, I picked the one who seemed to dislike me the most, a “repetition compulsion” as Fasstink would’ve labeled it, or a subconscious method in other words to symbolically reenact the early days with my mother and get her somehow to like me so she would not leave or perhaps leave her before she could leave me. Either way there was probably something to that. She said her name was Carmelita. Squat, fleshy-cheeked, flat-nosed, and slightly cross-eyed, she looked like a Veracruzana. She had a gap between her teeth and smelled of four differently colored melons. She wore a red locket around her neck the size of a pocket watch. She must have been about twenty-six. I asked her if she wanted to go somewhere, a restaurant or the beach. She said osteones, which might have meant either, and quoted me a price. I paid her double up front out of discretionary funds, said vamanos, and off we went to an oyster bar that she knew of not far from the sea.

Afterward, I felt drained and ashamed and found a church, where I slumped in a pew at the back near the candles. The Virgin Mother towered gold above me. The light coming through the windows was like dust from a box of Cap’n Crunch. I thought about driving south and abandoning my truck and just living on the beach for a while. Maybe the ocean would cure me. But I had had those kinds of thoughts before and recognized them as precipitous, especially since I could not swim. So I made a quick prayer to the Mexican God who is more forgiving than the American One and went to find my truck. Maybe when I got back on my feet I would become a better man.

9.Gigantic Australian Counterclockwise Stampedes

EVERY NIGHT I CAPPED THE RACING FORM, AND EVERY MORNING I checked the results in the newspaper. I’d usually have two or three winners, not all of them favorites. After about two weeks of this I drove over to the satellite facility on the Del Mar Fairgrounds to test my methods. The place was packed. It was a posh spot with plush carpet, plenty of tables and chairs, scores of televisions, and many vendors selling food, booze, and news. I recognized a few faces. No one recognized me. I would not have recognized myself either. Gravity and antipsychotics had served to pull down my heavily scarred face. I was flushed and at the same time sallow. And my nose, the only thing rigid about me, stuck out of my face like a bird beak. Trembly and disheveled, I looked like an old stressed-out Irish mariner or Barbra Streisand after electroshock therapy.

I had never been in a room with so many televisions, each one with a different picture. There were races from all over the country and all over the world, including Australia, where they ran gigantic counterclockwise fields in virtual stampedes. Though they had betting machines, I felt more comfortable at the windows, letting the live human push the buttons for me. Everyone shouting or rooting for a different race jammed my signals and I could not pick a single winner. The flickering of the television screens robbed the electricity from my brain. I switched from Santa Anita to Turfway Park and then to Hialeah but I had no luck anywhere.

Then I saw my father in the paddock at Santa Anita helping saddle up an entry in the seventh. Mercy Blast, a two-year-old, was seven to one. My father was good with first time two-year-olds, but I did not bet first-time two-year-olds, so naturally he won.

While I was watching a crazy backward Australian race, someone swatted me across the back with a program.

I turned to see a short-legged, middle-aged fellow with hickory-flecked green eyes, a nose that looked to have been broken more than once, a bit of a paunch, a deeply cleft chin, and a mangled yellow smile. He wore brown corduroys, clumpy dress boots, and a red plaid short-sleeved shirt with snap pockets.

“That you, Eddie?” he shouted in the voice of Norton on The Honeymooners, tipping his head over and flipping back a long strand of oiled hair that immediately dropped back into his eye. “Eddie Plum, I don’t believe it.”

“Shelly Hubbard,” I returned.

“Man have you changed,” he said, waving his program under his chin. “I wasn’t even sure it was you.”

No one from my ancient past would have been a more welcome sight, for Shelly was as much of a screwball and more of an outsider than I was. “You haven’t changed at all,” I said. “You still dealing records?”

“Oh yeah, babe, what else am I gonna do?” He looked around. “Last I heard, you were up in Frisco.”

“Yeah, got married and lost my mind.”

He cackled. “Shouldn’ta got married. Hey, just saw your dad. Won the seventh with Mercy Blast.”

“Yeah, I didn’t have that one,” I said.

“Me neither. Seven to one. Sheezus.”

“Still don’t like the two-year-olds?”

“Not with your money. Who you like in the ninth?”

“I’m done for the day, lost thirteen in a row.”

“Me too. What do you say we go get a beer somewhere?”

10.Hermaphrodites, Bikers, and French Teachers

ABOUT A MILE INLAND FROM THE TRACK, NOT FAR FROM THE SAN Dieguito River, on a hillock overlooking the marshy maritime mists of the estuary, stood Moby Dick’s, a punk bar with a leviathan chipped bluecement whale-mouth entrance. I had seen Siouxsie and the Banshees here back in 1980 before someone threw a smoke bomb and the show was canceled. Del Mar is a stodgy old town inhabited by many rich and famous geriatrics, but Dick’s still attracted freaks, not only masqueraders with patches on their eyes and safety pins hanging from earlobes but ghouls, goths, hermaphrodites, bikers, and French