PARKED THREE WIDE

“Whatever are we going to do, Phineas?” 

Trouble. I usually go by Finn. When Helen uses your proper name, she’s scared. And whenever I get reminded that I’m (distantly) related to P.T. Barnum, I get sloppy. 

“Do, Helen? What we always do. We will go forth with our shields and come back to sleep on them. It shouldn’t be that hard to come up with an extra three Franklins every month. That reminds me, do you still have that red dress from New Year’s Eve 1999?” I gave her a wink and she tossed me back a smile. 

Disability Digs is two “Classic Six” apartments joined at the hip occupying a full floor in a limestone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The seven of us pooled our disability, social security, pensions—not much in that column, that’s for sure—and section eight housing vouchers. Picture a 1960s San Francisco welfare commune but without the dope smoking (well, without most of it) and not so many shirtless people, but with lots more prosthesis and muscular-skeletal stuff. Helen had lived in Digs 1 since she was born in 1969 and was entitled to remain there for life at a rent controlled monthly payment of $113. Digs 2 had slipped out of rent control during the conversion of the building to condos, but still the “stabilized” rent was only $765 a month. We were owned by a woman in How Loon who had apparently hired every real estate lawyer in Manhattan to try to get us out. We understand she paid one point seven million for the combined units and was stuck for $1,400 a month in common charges.  Plus assessments. 

Our main occupation was shucking and jiving, zigging and zagging, and generally misdirecting any attempt at tossing our butts out on West 111th Street. Helen’s Digs 1 half was safe, But Pat, Kim, Tia and myself had not been getting AARP junk mail long enough for one of us to have our rent frozen under state law.  Boris and Natasha, Helen’s Rat Terrier and Pat’s Maltipoo, respectively, were blissfully unaware of our tenuous hold on having a home. 

The doo-doo dropped on the doilies, finally, when one of the Chinese lady’s shysters tried to use the city’s “number of unrelated people” rules to finally get us out. That part was easy; Tia and I took the subway to City Hall, got married, then went across the street to the courts building and petitioned to adopt Pat. We knew this was just an exploratory move and we had to get ready to fend off what could be the Dragon Lady’s “Final Solution.” This came in the form of new energy-efficient refrigerators, stoves, lighting fixtures and windows. The dreaded MCI, major capital improvement charges. We would have to come up with an extra $372 a month we did not have. Then came the error in judgement. Pat, on disability, was allowed to work 15 hours a week without losing her benefits; she did three days a week at a pre-school. One afternoon four parents called to say they would be late, and Pat stayed with the little tykes she loved so much. And another agent of Red China managed to spot the overtime payment and threatened us with it. 

We held the war council in Digs 1; moving from 1 to 2 or 2 to 1 could be treacherous since Digs 2 had Moorish arches and Digs 1 had just regular arches. I catered the meeting since the last job I had after I lost my license to practice law was a cook at Aqueduct Racetrack; I was pretty much the cook for Disability Digs since I was least likely to leave the stove on. My big accomplishment was the year my Aqueduct Clam Chowder (basically mixing what was left of the Manhattan and the New England together) edged out Block Island Chowder in the Clam-idiarod. I was laying out sandwiches, a crudité, pita chips with caramelized onion humus and Aunt Annie’s pretzel dogs. As hostess, Helen poured Depression-era flutes of champagne from a bottle she kept on ice for special occasions. My roommates started filing in, carrying stuff. 

“Kim, is that what I think it is?” 

“Yes.  What are a bunch of old stamps compared to a place for friends to live in some level of comfort and peace?” Kim had a year-by-year set of Holy Land stamps, Ottoman, Mandate Palestine, State of Israel from 1947 with all of the tabs still attached, every commemorative, even the current stamps from the territories. Three thousand dollars if it was a nickel. 

“Put it away, Kim. We’re all educated people, we should be able to make up the shortfall.”  She set up the videoconference, took her album, and sat back down. Tia tossed her engagement ring onto the Chippendale dining table and it bounced into the humus. Not the ring from out City Hall trip, but from her late, unlamented husband.  

“He was a prick. This’ll do us a year.”   

Pat chimed in. “It’s like a Stone Soup moment. But the Stone Soup people could look forward to a spring harvest. We can’t, Finn.” I felt four and a half pairs of eyes on me. 

“Don’t shoot me, I’m just the cook, okay? We’re gonna pump up this souffle together and we’re not gonna let it fall.   Hold on, we’ve got Florida on Google Duo.” Chad and Stacy were prepared; I could see a spread of dark-background sparkly canvases on their flokati rug. These I wouldn’t lobby to preserve. 

“We’re sick of them, Finn.” Chad was always to the point. “And he’s dead, they’re now worth over ten times what we paid for them.” Stacy made a face at the pile of art. “If I never see another enchanted cottage or a snakey cataract cascading a liquid iris into a Nyad-infested pool again, I could die a happy death.  We’ll be back in the City next month, we want there to be someplace for us.” 

“Stone Soup for real. But I agree with Finn, we shouldn’t have to hock anybody’s stuff.  altough it’s comforting to know it’s there. Phineas?” 

“Why does it always come back to me?” It was now six and a half pairs of eyes auguring into my conscience. “Alright. There’s something you don’t know about me and something you do know about me. I cooked at Aqueduct and Saratoga for five years. And as a lawyer, you have to know how to Cuisinart statistical arguments.  Which means you should know your way around a hyper-geometric distribution. Comrades, we’re going to gamble our way out of this.” 

I go everywhere by bike, and Helen hadn’t been on a subway since before Metrocards. Pat, my new daughter, took the opportunity to do a few subterranean sketches and made a show of going “Lookit, Dad!  Lookit my pitcher,” which got more laughs than scowls and stares from the other passengers, and Tia, my blushing new bride, practiced her silent flirting technique. Eventually, Billy Strayhorne’s mighty A Train pulled in at the Aqueduct station. I led the party to the Clubhouse entrance and with my honorary owner’s card from the chowder win, we made our way to the big kids’ section.  We had two hours until the first race. 

“Finn, what does this mean?” We were having coffee and I was explaining how to read the past performances in the Daily Racing Form. 

“Those are the quarter times, Helen. When a horse races at, let’s say, a mile and a quarter and then switches to seven-furlong race, you can get an idea of how fast the horse can go at the new length. 

“A long which, Finn?” 

“Furlong. An eighth of a mile.” This was going to be tough. I decided to walk them around and give them the speech. I took them to the stands and had them watch a couple of late workouts; I took them to the paddock, showed them the guide ponies, had them meet some of the jockeys. Tia, my beloved new wife, was salivating, and possibly more, and demanded to be one of the people giving the finger-lace boost to a Jock. Helen, apparently, was carrying around a bit of racing strategy. 

“Finn, which is it, if a horse pees before a race or if it poops, which one means it’s going to win or not win?” At least they were getting the idea about decision-making in racing. 

“Anything that sheds weight before a race is a good thing for the bettor.  It’s when the horse gets a boner before the race that you’re in trouble. Unless the chalk is a filly.” 

“Chalk?” 

“The horse favored to win.” Oy. I talked them through the different kinds of races, stakes, allowance, claiming; assigned weights, the ever-important apprentice bug, how to figure out from the conditions of a race if it was custom ordered for a specific horse to win, how you have to handicap the trainer, really, and not the horse, but we weren’t going to be doing any handicapping. It wasn’t necessary. 

We got back to the table and I tried to make the explanations more enjoyable.   

“Horse racing is the only good gamble. Pun intended. About 30% of the handle is bet by people who like a horse’s name or a lucky post position. The lottery gives you back less than 40% of the take. The track gives you 85 cents on your dollar, and sometimes they have to take a loss and pay out more than the take.  So you’ve got a bunch of dough up for grabs, much of it not really trying to win. Get ready for the important part. Here it comes. It’s easy to pick a likely winner, but useless if you’re risking money at 12 to 7. The smart money waits for the post time odds to back a horse that could not only win, but win at a good price. Because people are betting their college sweetheart’s name.” I used to be a lawyer. I should have been able to communicate this clearly. But it didn’t matter, I wasn’t going to matriculate anybody into Horse U today. One more trot to show off some of the characters: The Ouija board guy in the wheelchair, a couple of touts, and especially George and Lenny; not their real names. Lenny picked up every unripped ticket that didn’t make it into any of the many trashcans. He would scan each one, typically collect on four or five bets dropped or mistakenly tossed, then give the losers to George. Any big winners would have George cash the ticket for a 5% fee. George, possibly the last Guys & Dolls guy in New York, would have Lenny’s suitcase full of losing tickets to show counterbalancing losses the IRS. 

“Hey Finn! I’m all set.  I hope this works; that tote board is using light bulbs Edison probably made by hand in New Jersey. I had to write a drop-out algorithm.  You should be able to get the tabulation to Pat in about five seconds.” Kim could do anything, apparently, including turning a low-res tote board display into usable numbers. Those numbers passed on to my Chromebook to come up with the answer to the question, at 1 minute before post, which horse had the deepest plunge in odds. That was the horse.   The Chromebook would text-to-speech it to Pat and her new Mom’s Bluetooth headphones. I made the mother-daughter team practice getting to the hundred dollar windows and calling their bet properly, fifty to win and a hundred to place. I divvied up the cash we had scraped together as a stake. 

Phuket Bay came in second; Odds had nose-dived from 17:1 down to 6:1; we were up $300 on the $150 we bet. Fabius Cunctator got a hard-on at the gate. I knew I shouldn’t have told Helen that story. The rough beast, his post time come ‘round at last, wouldn’t get out at the bell, and was declared a non-starter. We got our money back. Sea Lapper in the third won handily, but my algorithm worked to well; the odds went down to 5:2. We were only up another two hundred. Still, a day like that once a month would do us. Just as I was enjoying that thought along with some of my own signature recipe chowder—on the house, of course—Skid Row came in sixth. The method isn’t perfect, of course. I used my discretion in the next race. Swiss Frank was being ridden by a triple bug in an allowance race with a $75,000 purse. A rank novice atop that horse. Someone knows something. My side action paid off at 39:1. I abandoned my post for a bit to have a talk with George. 

When I got back to the table, with $32,000, less 5%, my true and chaste, I assumed, wife was in a tizzy. 

“Finn! What’s our owner’s name?” 

“Sharon Qi Liu, why?” 

“Look at this.  Long March is owned by Sharon Qi Liu. You said a claiming race means you get the horse if it wins, right?” 

“It’s a little more complicated than that, and you have to pay for it, you don’t win it.  And you have to already be an owner to claim a horse. 

“Finn, my upright husband, you have an owner’s license.” 

 Our owner was doing something fishy, but I didn’t know what. If I paid the $20,000 claiming price, I could still stable the horse for a few months, some of the stable guys whose families I made sure got fed might could take care of Long March for a bit without too many questions needing to be answered. And I might be able to flip the bird to someone who severely needed flipping off. I went for it. 

We were all lined up at the rail preparing to scream and cheer for “our” horse. I could see the balls-up immediately after the far turn. Long March was parked out three-wide from the rail, not trying too hard, but not able to come inside where the distance to run would be shorter. It looked like our owner was trying for a sting, keeping a good horse back, but not too much back, with the odds increasing on each successive race. The jockey must have been ordered to come in fourth; piece of the purse, but nothing to write to China about. Their only chance was to go outside the blocking horse and then try again to come in. The jockey did exactly that, but then couldn’t slow the lathering colt down. Long March won by 12 lengths, blowing away every record at that distance and class. Disability Digs found itself in possession of an extremely valuable carrot and apple munching young horse who needed nose pets from everyone. As long as we were in a gambling environment, we took bets on when we would get a call from How Loon proposing a trade…