Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [32]
EIGHTH RACE: Claiming $1500, for 4 year olds and up. Six furlongs
Post: 5:43 TIME 1:12 4-5
CAW CAW (Lewis)$18.60 7.40 3.80
FLYING HOME (Stout)…. 2.40 2.30
SUNDOWN LAD (Renick).. 11.10
ALSO RAN: Flying Doodad, Saint Nazaire, a-Rink, Mynah, a-Remonade Girl, Gray Law, Rownomore, Going Home. Scratched: Happy Jack, Truckee. a-Jack Lewis entry.
—or my newpapers would have headlines:
REPULSION ARRIVES FOR BIG ’CAP
Lewis Predicts Third Straight
VICTORY FOR THE KING
APRIL 4, 1936-Mighty Repulsion arrived today by van from his resting-place at Lewis Farms; accompanying him were Jack Lewis, owner and jockey, trainer Ben Smith and his trusty Derby-cups and assistants.
Bright skies and a fast track preceded the arrival of these tremendous luminaries upon the scene of a great week’s end of racing with a thousand dollars pouring from individual pockets of wild jockey club bets, while less swanky Turf fans (like me and Paw from Arkansas) hang on the rail, railbirds, steely-eyed, far-seeing, thin, from Kentucky, brothers in the blood on the score of hosses and father and son in a tragic Southern family left destitute only with two horses that sometimes I’d actually rig races by putting solid champion types in workouts’ among less luminous luminary marbles, and call the winner on my Tips’ corner for that honor and also for hardboot father-and-son who need the money and have followed my, Lewis’, advice– I was Jack Lewis and I owned the greatest horse, Repulsion, solid ballbearing a half inch thick, it rolled off the Parchesi board and into the linoleum as smooth, and soundless but as heavy as a rumbling ball of steel all tooled smooth, sometimes kicked poor aluminum-marbles out of sight and off the track at the hump bump of the rampbottom–sometimes kicked a winner in, too–but usually rolled smoothly off the plank and mashed any litde glass or dust on the floor (while smallest marbles jiggled in the infinitesimal lilhputian microcosmos of the linoleum and World) — and zoomed swiftly all shiny silver across the race-course to its appointed homestretch in the rockly wood where it just assumed a new rumbling power and deep hum of floorboards and hooked up with the finish line with a forward slam of momentum–a tremendous bull-like rush in the stretch, like Whirl-away or Man O War or Citation–other marbles couldn’t compete with this massive power, they all came tagging after, Repulsion was absolute king of the Turf till I lost him slapping him out of my yard into the Phebe Avenue yard a block away —a fabulous homerun as I say, turned my world upside down like the Atombomb–Jack Lewis, I, owned that great Repulsion, also personally rode the beast, and trained him, and found him, and revered him, but I also ran the Turf, was Commissioner, Track Handicapper, President of the Racing Association, Secretary of the Treasury–Jack Lewis had nothing lacking, while he lived–his newspapers flourished–he wrote editorials against the Shade, he was not afraid of Black Thieves– The Turf was so complicated it went on forever. And in a gloom of ecstasy. —There I am, clutching my head, the fans in the grandstand go wild. Don Pablo at 18-1 upset the applecart, nobody expected he’d even make it to the wall with his half gait and great huge chips, he’d a been 28-1 if it wasn’t for his old reputation as a battered veteran before he was chipped– “He went and done it!” I’m saying to myself in astonishment–boom!
SCENE 19 I’m at the Victrola putting in a new record, Swiftly, it’s The