Caged Birds

"You sound like hell,” one of my editor-friends announced.

I rested the phone against my shoulder as I lined up the arrows on the Tylenol bottle. “The day job. You know.”

“Bad day?”

“A very normal day,” I said. “Everything went as it always does. There were no crises. There were no issues or problems. It was a very normal day. And... and I..."

"You know that sentence in Seabiscuit, how Laura Hillenbrand wrote that Johnny Pollard was a caged bird?" he said finally. "That's you. Caged bird. Caged, blonde bird."

I pointed out that I was highly unlikely to start shrieking "He fouled me, Tom! HE FOULED ME!!!!" at Chris Cooper anytime soon.

He did not laugh. “Listen, Tink,” he said, “get out of there. This is killing you.”

I stared at the ceiling some more.

“They’re paying you—what—twelve bucks an hour?”

“The most money,” I reminded him, “that I have ever known. And I'm still paying off the move from the Cape--”

“Crap,” he said. Then: “This is ridiculous.”

“I know.”

“You have a master's degree.”

“I know.”

“Caged bird,” he said again.

We hung up. I looked around my office, my very nice, very chair-filled office with the four walls and the birthday flowers from the boss and the catalogue of dental providers in lower desk drawer. My editor worries about me overmuch--possibly because he is fully aware that no one else on this Earth willingly kicks out fifteen hundred words every other day for Nike factory wages-- and did not need to know that earlier in the week, my day job supervisor had summoned me for a reckoning.

Her voice through the office intercom was quite normal, was extremely Wednesday afternoon, and I had long since wearied of being beckoned to this woman’s desk in varying shades of terror by what sounded like a very angry vocal range, only to be asked my opinion on brochure color schemes.

That day I leaned my head into her office, eyebrows raised. There were no brochures in sight.

“Close the door,” she said.

I closed my eyes instead.

“Sit down.”

I sat.

There had, it seemed, been complaints. I was distracted. I was making mistakes. I was not taking initiative. I was not purchasing the company spiritwear. And I was, for the next forty-five days, on probation.

“You are completely unmotivated,” my supervisor told me. "It's like you're fighting your own job. I'm getting the impression that you're not happy here."

I did not disagree.

"You’re going to need retraining," she said.


In New York at that moment, a high school quarterback of a Thoroughbred stood outside the starting gate of Belmont Park. He was massive. He was hunky. He was Rock Hard Ten, and he was rapidly developing a reputation as a wondrously talented, hugely athletic head case.

The Rock—“lightly raced,” the press calls him, to the point where one begins to think these words are part of his name—the Lightly Raced Rock Hard Ten has had his problems. Bumped out of the Kentucky Derby after a DQ in the Santa Anita Derby, he pounded his way to a many-lengths-behind finish behind Smarty Jones in the Preakness.

The Lightly Raced Rock Hard Ten’s big gigantic media moment in the Preakness, however, came before the race went anywhere at all. He took being the last to load in the starting gate with excessive literalness. The Rock took one look at that unforgiving metal filing cabinet of a stall and did not cotton to it in the slightest. He kicked. He spun. He balked. He did everything but ask his rider, Gary Stevens, for one more story and a glass of water before lights out.

This is not a stupid horse. This is a large horse, seventeen hands and then some, I am told. The angels touched his four hooves to this Earth to run upon it. He was not, however, made for a starting gate. It was like watching somebody try to maneuver an SUV into a parking space for a Yugo.

Every now and then a horse and a jockey, saddled and legged up by the trainer but paired by God, will wrap their consciousness around one another, their souls connected through the thin leather of a racing saddle. They will talk together, these two. Pollard and Seabiscuit had it. Antley and Charismatic had it. George Woolf had it with everything on four legs and a steady hay diet.

The best of them have it with many mounts. They form a nearly telepathic relationship with the horse, seeing the hole along the rail in a single fluid glance, writing the race in beautiful tandem cursive, creating the win as one. I do not possess this type of intelligence—the only thing a horse has ever said to me was “Bombs away, beyotch,” when she did her level best to scrape me to ground beneath a pine branch at a high trot—but sometimes if you lean in real close you can overhear the conversation:

STEVENS: We need to get in the gate now.

RHT: Mmmmmmmmmmmm... no.

STEVENS: Seriously. I flew eight hours to ride your overgrown ass for two minutes. Get in the gate.

RHT: I don't wanna. Gary, I don't want to get in the gate.

STEVENS: GET IN THE GATE. GETINTHEGATEGETINTHEGATE.

RHT: NONONONONONONONONONONONONONO....


They resorted to physical force, in the end.

Six grown men locked arms behind the Rock and just manhandled him into the gate. For all his natural gifts, for his big huge open stride and rugged win-making, The Lightly Raced Rock Hard Ten simply could not bear to be closed into that tiny little space. He was having none of this business of being trapped—even if a big fat winner’s circle check was waiting for him once he was sprung free. He didn't care about the money; he just cared about not getting into that scary-looking box.

I watched all this, sitting on my futon with a notebook in my lap, heavy in the knowledge that the day job loomed there steely and cold a mere thirty-six hours away. I saw Stevens watching his mount get into the gate without him and the other horses standing quietly and I thought: “Have a nice run, soul foal.”

****

I drive to work wearing high heels. It’s a tough thing, you know, driving in high heels. They get caught under the accelerator and rub against the floor mat and sometimes you can’t get the dirt out of the backs of them.

It's a bad scene, my car in the morning. Some days I just stand there with my key in the driver's side door, the gorgeous morning I am about to be shut away from just barely kissing my face: Do I really have to do this all over again? Really?

“I wish I could write like you,” people have said to me, and I thank them sincerely and tell them not to ask me to attempt any long division, and all the while I am mentally shaking my head, for nooooo, you don’t. You really, really don’t. I do not wish professional writerdom on anybody. I live it, and thank God for it, and cannot imagine anything else; but on no other human being do I wish this daily business of attempting to cram a beach ball into a coffeemaker. That’s daily existance on a day job, for a writer. "I can handle it, " you think, "I can handle it I can handle it,"until you just can't anymore. In the meantime you just stop bothering with mascara in the morning because it gets all cried off by the time you get to the parking garage anyway. It’s simply a matter of shoving yourself into that little space to in order to make the rent, day in and day out, with the prospect of a couple minutes of free and clear running on the other side of it.

****

If Rock Hard Ten was pulling these stunts beneath the steadying hand of his buddy Gary Stevens--watching them together, you kind of get the feeling that they hang out at happy hour once the racing is done, Gary and the Rock, smoking cigars and talking fillies-- then there was no frickin' way he was relaxing under Alex Solis at the starting gate of Belmont, located approximately four millimeters from all the noise in the world.

And so he was retrained.

They took him to the gate. For days before the race, NYRA consulting starter Bob Duncan led him in, assistants petting him all the way. They stood him, turned him, talked softly to him. Pet pet pet. There was wine and after-dinner mints. You see, Rock? This is not so bad. This is not so bad, is it?

The Rock reconciled. I can do this! I can do this I can do this. It will suck but I can do this. He settled down, stopped resisting, stopped pouring his considerable might into fighting a battle he could never really win.

And on the big day, at the Belmont, before the world, when it really counted, when the paycheck was on the line… he fought and kicked and spun and bucked. Solis, too, had to dismount before Rock Hard Ten at last consented to enter his cell.

They could retrain him, they could shove him, they could coax him, they could bribe him, this lightly raced Rock Hard Ten.

But they could not change who he was, and how badly he wanted to just get out.

mb@blondechampangne.com