This week we decided to bring you something different: horse racing fiction. Our multi-talented handicapper for New York, Noel Michaels, is also the author of Fix Six, a racy farce about a small-time professional gambler whose plans to go straight must take an unfortunate detour when his misfit college buddies land him in an overly ambitious race-fixing scheme that goes horribly - and hysterically - wrong.
For a break from speed figures and track biases, we hope you will enjoy this excerpt from Fix Six:
Four men walked through the Aqueduct Racetrack grandstand turnstiles early on a Saturday afternoon. Had it been a Quentin Tarantino movie, the quartet would have been walking in slow motion, and each stride would have been punctuated by jazzy background musical accompaniment. Since it was real life, however, the men walked into the racetrack at normal speed, and the near-empty grandstand was so quiet that you could almost hear a pin drop.
Regardless of the number of people on hand, the four men tried desperately to blend into the sparse crowd. They wanted to become one with the masses. Just four faces in the crowd. Four needles in a haystack. They had counterfeit tickets to cash, and they didn’t want to be noticed or make themselves stand out in any way, shape, or form.
Saturday was usually the busiest day at the racetrack, but that wasn’t saying much since only a few thousand fans showed up in person at Aqueduct even when it was busy. That was because the majority of bettors made their bets at OTBs, through phone or computer accounts, or from other racetracks around the country. The patrons who were at Aqueduct rattled around inside the cavernous structure that was built for bigger crowds from an earlier age.
Racetracks like Aqueduct are very utilitarian places. Unlike certain grandiose tracks that draw eclectic crowds, like historic Saratoga Race Course, Churchill Downs, or beautiful Del Mar where the turf meets the surf north of San Diego, Aqueduct is essentially designed to be a betting factory. The track provides patrons a betting product and a place to make their wagers. Then they do little more than open the doors and let the fun begin. There are few amenities offered to patrons other than those designed to make one’s wagers easier and more convenient to place.
The insides of most such racetracks contain all the atmosphere of an airplane hangar, and that is certainly true of Aqueduct. As Austin, Jimmy, Larry, and Tony passed through the building, they mainly saw a lot of television monitors and rows and rows of people standing in lines at windows that looked like teller’s windows at a bank. Some were manned by actual people while others were simply occupied by SAMs, or Self-Automated Machines, which are the racetrack’s version of ATMs.
The idea was for Austin, Jimmy, Larry, and Tony to blend into the Aqueduct crowd as soon as possible and then split up in order to cash counterfeit bets at SAM machines in different parts of the racetrack. Before they could split up, however, they wanted to get into a position where all four men would be equidistant from their target SAM. In order to get into position, the Dude-Men had to pass by a colorful assortment of racetrack characters as they weaved their way through the Aqueduct grandstand.
Horseracing is often called the Sport of Kings, but that term refers to the brand of horseracing practiced at showplaces like Saratoga, Del Mar, Churchill Downs, and a few others, like Arlington Park in Chicago, Gulfstream Park in Florida, stately Belmont Park in Long Island, and Santa Anita in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Outside of those places, and particularly at winter racetracks like Aqueduct, however, grandstands are primarily blue-collar havens filled with retirees and assorted lost souls, hoping that today is finally their lucky day. The so-called kings in the sport of horseracing — blue-blooded families like the Whitneys and Vanderbilts — were unlikely to show up at Aqueduct in the middle of winter.
Nevertheless, there is still a hierarchical class system at work at tracks like Aqueduct that usually depends on how high up you are in the building, or how close you are to the finish line. Higher up and closer to the finish line equals more classy. Lower down and farther away from the finish line equals no classy. Bigger bettors and simulcast players tend to gravitate to the high floors of the track or the slightly more expensive clubhouse where they can sit in dining rooms close to the finish line and remain in a relatively clean environment.
The lowest level of the racetrack hierarchy is always the ground floor of the grandstand. This level is regarded as a home to the two-dollar bettors, novice newcomers, and assorted racetrack lifers. This area of any urban racetrack usually houses enough weirdos to make the insane people look normal while at the same time making the normal people look like weirdos. Actually, at the track, even more so than other places, the line between normal and weirdo is extremely thin or maybe not even existent. In any case, the ground floor is a place where people lose their shirt, trash often does not find its way into the proper receptacles, and the prevailing smell is not always that of roses, Black-eyed Susans, and white carnations.
The four Dude-Men made their way up the escalator to the second floor of the grandstand where they instantly noticed a difference in the demographic. The second floor was quieter and offered a lot more seating than the first floor. The additional seating makes it a draw for the racetrack’s core group of older patrons. In addition to some lunatics who’d straggled upstairs from the ground floor, the gang noticed a lot of retirement-age men milling around on floor number 2. The majority of the men seemed to be there as much to socialize with their peers as they were to bet. Socializing in their case usually meant arguing, but it was still socializing, nonetheless.
Besides old men, the next-most-represented group in the second floor of the grandstand was the track’s large Jamaican contingent. Like the old men, they were also arguing with each other, but nobody around them even seemed to notice. This was either because everyone was already used to hearing the Jamaicans argue, or because nobody else could understand the Jamaicans’ form of English, which was clear only to them. Besides the arguing, the most memorable thing about the Jamaicans at Aqueduct was they reeked of ganja. This was good because if you wanted to sit by them and could put up with their bickering long enough, you would usually be rewarded with a bitchin’ contact high.
With munchies a constant concern for the Jamaicans, it was no surprise they usually hung around in close proximity to the track’s makeshift food court, which consisted of a Sbarro pizza franchise, a Nathan’s hot dogs, and a generic coffee/soda/beer stand. The Dude-Men passed by the Jamaicans and arrived at their mission’s preplanned staging point at the back of the food court.
“Where are all the women at in this place?” Tony said, feeling like a fish out of water.
“It’s the Aqueduct winter-spring meet, dumb-ass. The only women here are over seventy,” quipped Austin, who meant it as a joke but spoke the truth nonetheless.
“Okay listen, guys,” Jimmy said, redirecting the conversation back to a more relevant topic."We’re going to go our separate ways, just like we talked about. Everyone put on your gloves and check to make sure you’ve got your phony betting tickets with you. Remember, no fingerprints.”
Austin opened his wallet, Tony fished in his pockets, and Larry removed his right shoe and reached inside. All three pulled out and held up their own unique small white square of paper the size of a Post-it note. Each paper was blank except for some serial numbers and an intricate bar coding at the bottom consisting of five lines of alternating blank spaces and dashes.
Provided by Tony with the best code-breaking software money could buy, Larry had hacked into National Tote’s mainframe and run his software against every bar code encrypted in National Tote’s files. He then ran a master list of every uncashed winning ticket in National Tote’s archives. Larry not only looked for big payouts, but he was also looking for the older outstanding tickets.
Winning tickets are good for one year, and not all winning tickets get cashed immediately. The older an uncashed ticket gets, however, the greater the probability that the ticket is actually lost and not still sitting in the pocket of some random procrastinating horseplayer.
The whole operation took Larry less than a week. When he was finished, he not only had found four valuable lost tickets, but he also knew the corresponding bar code that identified each ticket. On his home computer, he printed the bar codes onto four small squares of paper the same exact size and shape of real pari-mutuel tickets. For one day, they had the ability to turn worthless pieces of paper into real money.