At the age of five, I got trapped in a stall for forty-five minutes with a huge horse named Buddy, who went suddenly crazy and kicked himself to death with terrible shrieking noises while I huddled in the urine-soaked straw right under his hoofs.
My uncle Lawless, a kindly dairy farmer, was flogging the brute across the eyes with a two-by-four and trying to get a strangle rope around his neck, but the horse was too crazy to deal with. Finally, in desperation, he ran back to the house and got a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun—which he jammed repeatedly against the horse’s lips and teeth until the beast angrily bit down on the weapon and caused both barrels to fire at once.
“So much for that one,” he said as he dragged me out from under the dead animal’s body. I was covered with blood and hot, steaming excrement. The brute had evacuated its bowels at the moment of death . . .
No one seemed to know why it happened. “It was a suicide,” the vet said later, but nobody believed him. Uncle Lawless loved animals, and he was never able to reconcile murdering that horse with his basic Christian beliefs. He sold his farm and went into the real estate business in southern Indiana, and finally he went insane.
The main problem with horses is that they are too big to argue with when they’re angry—or even bitchy, for that matter, and highbred horses are notorious for their bitchiness. Which might be cute or fey in a smaller animal, but when a beast that weighs 1,200 pounds goes crazy with some kind of stupid pique or jealousy in a room not much bigger than the handicapped stall in the Denver airport men’s room, bad things will happen to anybody who tries to argue with it: fractured skulls, broken legs, split kidneys, spine damage, and permanent paralysis. The kick of a horse at close range, a hoof flicked out in anger, is like being whacked in the shins with a baseball bat. It rips flesh and shatters human bones. You will go straight to some rural Emergency Room, and you will be in a cast by nightfall . . . if you’re lucky. The unlucky will limp for the rest of their lives.
Another little-known fact about horses is that the shape of their eyeballs makes them see human beings as six times their actual size and two or three times closer than they actually are. The multiples vary from horse to horse due to gene differentials, age, and eyeball size, but guaranteed pain awaits those who fail to grasp this bizarre truth of nature. Imagine how you would relate to your dog if you thought it was six times bigger than it actually is.
Fifty Years Later
On some days you find too much queerness in your Life. It happens suddenly—or at least it seems that way. But in truth it is like a boil bursting—an eruption of foul juices that were there all along and then suddenly erupted for many eyes to see.
And so it happened in the summer of ’94 that I found myself happily wandering the back roads of the professional polo circuit, looking for weirdness and action. It was dumb, but so what? Dumb is a nice way to travel in some neighborhoods, and on some days, just looking for action is almost as good as finding it.
In any case, I spent many scorching long afternoons last summer driving around the mountains in my old 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood Eldorado convertible, looking for signs of people who might be engaged in some off-duty polo action—a practice drill in one place, an unscheduled game in another—back and forth in the sun along dusty narrow roads, across high-mountain pastures with humming electric fences and the occasional tin-roof animal shed every two or three miles, but on weekday afternoons there was rarely any sign of human life.
Only animals, filthy stupid animals. And the rotten blazing sun. The thirst, the anger, the crippling sense of helpless bovine dumbness when you pass the same deserted barn for the third time in forty minutes and then suddenly run out of gas on a rutted uphill grade overlooking nothing . . . The nasty rush of fear when the 5,200-pound Cadillac loses its power brakes and steering as it rolls backward down the hill and almost off a cliff.
I was looking for my homeboys, the Aspen Polo team, which was rumored to be on its way to Long Island to compete in what some people said was the Super Bowl of polo, the high-goal U.S. Open. There was even talk of winning, prevailing, beating the best in the world on their own turf and galloping off with the prize.
I must have been bored last summer, because I became oddly fixated with the idea. As a betting proposition, it was not as goofy as it sounded. Aspen Polo turned out to be a gang of big-time polo mercenaries who looked good enough on paper to beat anybody in the world. Doug Matthews, the mysterious aircraft-industry tycoon from Atlanta, had stunned the polo world by brazenly hiring both of the legendary Gracida brothers, Memo and Carlos, to play on the same team, along with a twenty-three-year-old hot rod out of South Carolina named Tiger Kneece, whose lame six-goal rating was rumored to be suspiciously low.