Readers Up #4: No Easy Trip
One of my favorite Millennial measuring sticks is D.A.R.E. You know, Drug Abuse Resistance Education? Love that shit. My copy of King of the Wind has a D.A.R.E. sticker inside the front cover, so I must've been covertly rereading it in an assembly of the “you will freebase… and die!” variety. Chuck Klosterman’s Catholic education instilled him in a belief that Satan was around every corner; me, I figured that hard drugs would be a much more prominent feature and temptation in my life than they’ve ever been. Given that ninety percent of my social circle and broader generation received the same post-Reagan brainwashing, I didn’t expect a blow resurgence, of all things, in my corner of the current day. Nevertheless, more than one adult of my acquaintance has admitted, blandly, that boy do they ever enjoy cocaine.
I mean, sure. Why not? We’re all slowly oxidizing out of existence anyway.
No Easy Trip is an exercise in grim satisfaction. Its jacket blurb suggests more sensation that the text really delivers: the coke-dusted life and death of jockey Daniel Beckon is a frame story rather than the book’s sole topic. Jean Sonmor, its journalist author, approaches her story with wide eyes, taking it as a given that few readers or racetrackers have applied much thought to the internal landscapes and private lives of race-riders. Not an unfair assumption, even today, when a Paulick Report article on a rider’s milestones likely nets zero comments, while one about a suspension, drug positive, or violence brings out the armchair shrinks and moralizers. Like Ride to Win and the simply-titled Jockey, No Easy Trip is about riders as a group (or a class) rather than one particular rider, albeit riders in a specific time and place. Canadian racetracks in the late 1980s is a topic I know nothing about, but No Easy Trip is filled with sinister familiarity, the same improbable stories, blood-thrilling highs and bottle-bottom lows, and poignant travails told about Woodbine and Fort Erie jocks as their southern counterparts. Thirty years after its publication, there are still comparatively few books about Thoroughbred jockeys, with the vast majority of racetrack literature being devoted to the horse. Somewhat incredibly, there are no ratings or reviews for Sonmor’s text on Goodreads, though surely it must’ve gotten at least few reads in 1988. It begins with the air of an exposé, but develops quickly into what feels, for modern readers, like banal reality. Little has changed in the intervening years. As a newcomer to the sport and shameless jockey enthusiast, I find myself asking questions that inevitably have the same answer. As an avid reader whose gateway into racing was books, I collect rider-centric titles (this one fell into my hands at a Syracuse used bookstore, upon which a delighted cooing sound emanated from the sports aisle). As a writer, it’s been difficult--more so than it should’ve been--to cobble together factual, empathetic, vivid narratives about jockeys. At the same time, my collection of fragments resolves, when held against true-life accounts, into an eerily accurate portrait.
It’s pleasant to be right, but not about the depth of a specific brand of human suffering.
From No Easy Trip:
“In the jocks' room everybody watches everybody else. It's part of the business to know what the guy who lockers next to you does to keep his weight. To know who's struggling and who isn't. It's part of the edge everyone is constantly trying to assert.”
From a project I completed last summer, which featured a similarly powdery 1980s setting:
“There’s no shame in the jocks’ room, nothing hidden, not the wet retch of the habitual flippers and not a moan following flesh against flesh, laxatives swapped and choked down, a murmur of you got anything, you know a guy. Rennie spots Alex every time they lift weights, knows how much he can bench. He’s watched him cook egg whites and not eat them, sits with him in the hotbox because Alex hates heaving…”
Rennie and Alex, more by accident than anything else, slip seamlessly into the story of Danny Beckon, if not those of Robin Platts, Avelino Gomez, and other Canadian Hall of Famers. But maybe it’s not by accident, and maybe I’m not giving myself enough credit for paying attention--or maybe racing’s ambient culture is so poisonous to its riders as to permeate fan mentality whether we want it to or not. A particular attitude toward jockeys, a certain narrow view of them, seems as heritable as a chestnut coat. New fans, upon walking through the turnstile, are furnished with a copy of the Form, an overview of exotic bets, and an understanding that the guy on the number six’s back is going to cheat you out of an honest ride. Hypersexual, violent, crooked, obliged to criminals, egoistic, addicted, uneducated and unskilled: the character card of the Common Jock forms a laundry list of attributes ripe for excusing the dominant class its exploitation (fold in racial history, gender intersections, and compulsory heterosexuality, and have yourself a field day). The racetrack is a crucible which created and perpetuates its own norms; it was normative for Sonmor to write in 1988 of the Canadian jocks wintering at Hialeah being “shut out” by the local Hispanic colony, and it’s normative in 2018 for Robby Albarado to refer to the Churchill Downs jocks’ room as “segregated.” It was once typical for trainers to control underage apprentices through indenture contracts, while it’s now at least not atypical for trainers to, apparently, only pay a fine after assaulting riders. While marveling over that last one, Jessica Chapel pointed out to me the language used to describe Solis and Jude’s relationship. It calls to mind intimate violence, partner violence. The body of the rider is to be used at discretion until there is no more use.
For racing fans, Albarado is associated with Curlin, Cajun country, over five thousand wins, and domestic violence. More than one jockey in Sonmor’s text is described as abusive. Rennie’s character function is not to lionize a damaging archetype or to redeem an incorrigible asshole, but to examine a violent cycle.
Confirmation bias lurks at the back of my mind whenever I read books like No Easy Trip. Perhaps, suggests my internal Joe Horseplayer voice, you’re just looking for ammo for your theories about how everyone in this industry wishes jockeys didn’t exist, full stop. Perhaps your half-baked I-don’t-even-have-a-degree-in-this Materialist critique can’t be extended to particular bodies operating in this specific space. Perhaps you are overrating the significance of the phrase human capital. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the greatest height a racehorse can reach is attaining the Triple Crown, while the best a rider can achieve is a dollar value greater than that of their colleagues. Perhaps racing will never permit its jockeys the transcendent, only the tangible.
Still wondering if the Aqueduct jocks' room is literally just a cave beneath the grandstand,
Diana