Torn Up
In search of answers to his country's financial crisis, Charles P. Pierce goes to a place where he, and only he, can control his gains and losses.
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Money, he thought to himself, has moved into the third person.
What he thought of as My Money wasn't really his money. Not anymore. It was Their Money, moving around as digits and pixels into the various markets and funds that he couldn't begin to understand, lost in a great current of commerce moving at a distance from him so great that he felt like a Plains Indian contemplating what he'd heard about the size of the Great Lakes or the power of the Mississippi, a place where feckless and inscrutable gods worked in their feckless and inscrutable ways. That was where they'd taken what he used to think about as My Money and made it Their Money, a place where he did not know the language, was a stranger to the vocabulary, and was tangled and bound in the syntax they'd created to transform the money from the first person to the third person. He was lost, is where he was. He might as well read the entrails of a goat or burn incense as try to understand what had happened. What he knew was that what he had thought of as My Money wasn't anymore. It was Their Money. He was lost, is what he was.
And it wasn't Their Money in the comforting way that Jimmy Stewart explains it during the run on the bank in It's a Wonderful Life, where everybody's money is helping everybody else. "You're acting like I've got the money around here in a safe," Stewart pleads. "Why, your money's in Joe's house. That's right next to yours. And Mrs. Maitland's house." There, in the fictional Bedford Falls, the money stayed in the first person. It just pluralized itself. My money became Our Money. But, he thought, that was not the way it was working today. For two days, he'd been inundated with the clamorous rumors of a distant Gotterdammerung. Somewhere, out there where what he used to think of as My Money had been sluiced away into the great torrent of Their Money, the earth was shaking and the rocks were cracking and the crows were sitting upon the Capitol. Financial institutions were groaning and tottering. The Secretary of the Treasury, a Wall Street high king named Paulson, proposed to solve it with a $700 billion plan over which his control would be absolute and unreviewable. All he needed to complete the image was a white uniform and a balcony in Buenos Aires. The President of the United States, Henry Paulson's nominal boss, was reduced to a station somewhere between a traffic cop and a minor priest of Baal, pleading for relief and succor. The Congress of the United States tied itself in knots trying to find the right thing to do, only to fail utterly on the first try, the House voting down a $700 billion bailout plan that was slightly less Peronist than the original one Paulson had proposed, which caused the stock market to drop 777 points in a single day.
Seven hundred and seventy-seven points, he thought.
The mark of the beast, plus 111. An upgrade. The apocalypse rolls a triple natural.
Every word was suffused with anguish. There was grim music being played in the distant temple, all minor chords and dread. And every solution that was being sold, he noticed, involved reversing the curious process that he'd noticed in the first place. Suddenly, they were talking about Your Money. What was this going to do to your future? Your kid's college? Your retirement? Now that they were done playing with it, the money was his again, and he was told he had to use it to rescue that land where the great current of commerce had gone foul and brackish. All of a sudden, everybody on Wall Street and in Washington and on the financial tout shows in cable television was George Bailey, trying to keep Bedford Falls afloat. "You're acting like we've got the money around here in a safe. Why, your money's in
Think of it, they said, those masters of the universe who used to joke about Other People's Money, as Your Money.
It was moving backward through the declensions in the general direction of his wallet.
Your Money.
This is all about Your Money.
My Money, he thought.
Now it's My Money again.
He'd been frugal. He saved as best he could. He had not lived beyond his means. Every morning, he arose to greet the day and thanked his wife in his mind for having negotiated a fixed-rate mortgage 15 years earlier. All those spiffy adjustable-rate thingamabobs all sounded like Free Money Here games of chance. He did not plunge into the market. The high-tech boom passed him by, as did the Greed Is Good '80s and the go-go Internet '90s. But, gradually, little by little, what he thought of as My Money became Their Money, and now that they'd toyed with it and manipulated it and bled it white, they were telling him it was his again, and that he should give what he again thought of as My Money back to them as Our Money. He felt like he was being robbed at gunpoint by a gang of armed pronouns. Suddenly, he thought, now that the erstwhile masters of the universe are staring into a Porscheless abyss, we are all in this together again.
To hell with it, he thought. I'm going to the track.
We'd all been to the track anyway, he thought. The entire country. The people he was seeing on television, lost and forlorn on the trading floor, looked no different than the people he'd seen in the paddock at Rockingham or the grandstand at Santa Anita, except that there were fewer bowling jackets on the trading floor. The cable touts on CNBC differed very little from the tipsters on TVG, the horse racing channel. They all talked fast and loud and in a language that was just far enough away from actual English to serve their purposes. At the track, he thought, you could look out at the tote board and see what you thought of as My Money turning into Our Money. Parimutuel betting worked that way. It only became Their Money when your horse came around the far turn into the homestretch and then, suddenly, lost interest in his work, and you could see that happen right in front of you. What you thought of as My Money was now Their Money, the two guys hollering and spilling their beer all over each other. It seemed a more clearly honest transaction. He could even understand it, after a fashion.
The day after the Dow fell, he walks out onto the wide expanse of lumpy asphalt that slopes down toward the track from the grandstand at Suffolk Downs. There are about 150 people there, most of them older than he, standing in small groups, their voices drowned out occasionally by the roar of an airliner over their heads, outbound from Logan, or the rattle of a Blue Line train behind the trees along the backstretch. There is a staleness to the place that almost adds up to a kind of timelessness. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out five $20 bills.
Some are crisp and some are worn. Some are sharp and some are faded. He idly folds and unfolds them. He counts them again to make sure he hasn't dropped one on the floor of the car when he'd gone through the Allston tolls that morning. And then he thinks: This is My Money.
This is My Money. I can see it and I can touch it. If I hand it over, I can see it go into the cash drawer. If it put it at risk, I can see where it goes, out there on the battered gray clay of the track, on some horse that I'd never heard of before this morning but about which I know more than I know about all the huge institutions crying mercy on the television set. I know the horse's parents. I know his grandparents. (A grandchild of the great Secretariat is running in the fourth race on this very afternoon.) This is My Money, he thinks, and I can watch it grow or watch it go, right there in front of me.
He walks up to the betting window. It is the second race of a Tuesday afternoon at a battered old outpost of a staggering, dying industry, and there are no lines to worry about. He puts $15, $5 across the board, on a 40-1 long shot named Quartier Blanc. Get a hunch, bet a bunch, the old horseplayers once told him, and he has the feeling that they used to say that at lunch at Lehman Brothers, too, except that they didn't have hunches. They had derivatives. He walks back through the empty lobby beneath the grandstand and out onto the asphalt piazza along the backstretch.
The first thing he hears is "Quartier Blanc has thrown his jockey." The horses come around the far turn, and here comes his, flying free, ahead of the field, but without a jockey, and therefore disqualified. Quartier Blanc, outrunning them all, but a loser, because the person who was supposed to control him had fallen off at the beginning of the race. He sees a metaphor there, but he declines to pursue it.
Leaning over the paddock is the best way to study the horses. More to the point, leaning over the paddock is the best way to look like you're studying the horses, as though you know enough about them to judge from their gait and general demeanor how they're going to run. It is also the best way for people who don't know how to study the horses to eavesdrop on those people who do. George Shaw and Charlie Tibbiano are angled up against the tall white railing, and they don't like what they see very much.
"That guy," says George, pointing at one of the trainers, "he's been here longer than I have." He's talking about making money now, and about missed opportunities, which come thick and fast here.
"We all missed a chance to get rich," George says. "I saw something to buy gold cheap a few months back. Now, with everything that's going on, it's up to $1,000 an ounce."
George is a Suffolk Downs lifer. The track opened on July 10, 1935. There were more than 35,000 people there. George Shaw was one of them. But he wasn't supposed to be. "They didn't let kids in here," Shaw says. He was a teenager, he says, "but I had a friend who worked here, and he snuck me in down there by the barns. When nobody was looking, I walked in with the horses before the first race." Shaw built a career as a longshoreman on the docks along Commonwealth Pier, unloading the merchant cargo that came in from the Atlantic and from the Pacific east through the Panama Canal. Gradually, the jobs along the docks died away. But George kept coming to the track, day after day. He's 89 now, straight as an iron bar, and he's squinting out at the tote board, where the odds have dropped on a horse in which he'd briefly been interested.
"Look at that," George says to the fellow who's come to the track for the day because it seemed to be the only place where what he thought of as My Money was not Their Money. "Somebody just dropped 200 bucks in there. You can't make any money on that horse now."
It has not been a good day for the man who came to the track. He lost $15 on a horse called Oh So Sybil because the horse was the daughter of a great horse named Silver Charm, who'd won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness in 1997 and who'd once stuck its head out of a barn in Kentucky and tried to bite him. This, he thinks, is a slow-acting omen. So he bets on the daughter of the horse who'd tried to bite him, and the daughter finishes up the track. He thinks he now hates this whole family of horses.
He wanders down toward the paddock again. George is talking about how he's managed to stay as sharp as he has. "I spent my life doing muscle work," George explains. "I worked with my arms, and I worked with my back. Today, nobody does that. Nobody works with their backs anymore." And he listens for a while to George talking about muscle work that nobody does anymore because most of those jobs have gone overseas, and the piers are now lined with luxury condos and the racetrack is a place for old men, and he thinks that he has come to rest for the day among artifacts of a lost world. And he wonders whether he's one of them, too.
Ah, he thinks, Dynapro, grandchild of Secretariat.
He's been standing down by the rail for a while, talking to the trainers and the hot-walkers, who mingle with the crowd here the way they never do at the upscale tracks. One of them points out Dynapro, shipped down from Donna Kutt's barn near Londonderry in New Hampshire. He also points out Kutt, standing near the top of the sloping asphalt and wearing a green windbreaker from the Breeders' Cup.
"It's been hard on us," Donna says. "Grain's gone way up. Just the cost of gas just to get down here. It's been hard, but it could have been worse. I could be in the stock market." She talks about her horse. She tells him that Dynapro is bred for longer distances than the six furlongs he's running today. Donna's worried that the horse doesn't have enough time to stretch out. He goes in to bet the horse, leaving her there, fretting.
Breeding, he thinks. That still has to count for something. There has to be something of Secretariat in his grandchild here, running in a $10,300 claimer in the middle of the card on a Tuesday afternoon. He does not worry at all that the horse has the same name as a food additive that they give to horses who are constipated. This is the grandchild of Secretariat, he tells himself. But Dynapro never quite gets there. He runs strong, but gains no ground. Finally, there's no ground to gain anymore. He loses $15 on Dynapro, grandchild of Secretariat. You should be able to count on breeding, he mutters. There are things you should be able to count on.
He notices now that enough trash has accumulated on the asphalt piazza that its rustling is drowning out the constant low murmuring of the thin crowd. He's down almost $40 on the day. The sun is finally breaking through, however. Another trainer named Jim Reagan wanders by, and they begin to talk about the industry. "This isn't a crowd," Reagan says. "To get crowds, you need the slots. That brings more people in and your purses get bigger. The tracks that are doing well, they're the ones that have the slots."
It's always something else, he thinks, as Jim Reagan walks off toward the paddock to saddle a horse for the next race. The racetracks need the slots because they need more people to come in, and more people won't come in unless there's something to gamble on more frequently than one horse race in the sunlight every 15 or 20 minutes. That's why you can bet all the other tracks from around the country on television at Suffolk. That's why there's a Keno parlor set up by the Massachusetts State Lottery underneath the concrete grandstand. Waiting for the live race to begin, you can get something down at Finger Lakes. You can pick six numbers and wait for them to pop up on the big screen. The slots will accelerate it. No waiting at all. It's always something else, he thinks. There's always a faster payday just around the corner, a bigger score out there just past your fingertips.
It is a little before 4:30 in the afternoon. He sits down at a concrete table with a hot dog and a couple of beers and counts up the day. He'd wheeled an Exacta in the fifth race, playing a horse named Change Your Image on top of all the other horses in the field, and Change Your Image won by here to there, and he put $40 in his pocket, which ultimately floated his losses for the rest of the day, keeping them manageable and not catastrophic. He bets the last race gingerly, one of the favorites across the board.
The horse runs to the lead, but gets overhauled late in the stretch and finishes second. He pockets a little more money anyway. At least I'm going out with a winner, he thinks, albeit one that lost at the wire. The track runs its last race at roughly the same time the market closes in New York. He'd come to the track that day with $100 to bet. He was going home with $75. It could have been worse, he thinks. It could have been much worse. But Change Your Image saved him. Change Your Image, he thinks, was his bailout plan.
Gambling used to be a formal business. There was a style to it, and eight races a day were enough to make an impression among the swells. These were the people with whom the young George Shaw mingled, the men in the long coats and silk hats. Now, he thinks, gambling is unremarkable. Everybody gambles, whether they want to or not. Their money is at risk in a hundred different places. The whole country went to the track for two decades or more, he thinks, and most of us didn't know, or didn't want to know, that we were there.
He sits at his table and wonders about them, all the young touts of the larger marketplace, out there wondering where all the sure things had gone. How do they think of money, he wonders. Whose money did they think they lost, now that they were begging for more and greed was no longer good? He wonders where they are now, in the dark cigar bars or in the dim evening light of the mahogany saloons, those masters of the universe. At least the sun shines here, he thinks, at the end of the day. He folds up the bills -- three 20s, a 10, and a 5. He puts them in his pocket.
My Money, he thinks.
This is My Money.
Charles P. Pierce is a Globe Magazine staff writer. You can e-mail him at cpierce@globe.com.
