Stories off the beaten path – by Bob Carson

Let’s skip the details of the twisted tale that lead to my incarceration and subsequent immersion into the relatively obscure sport of harness horse racing. Suffice to say, when your erratic girlfriend of three weeks goes into a bank to make a withdrawal, it would have been helpful to know that she did not have a bank account – but she did have a water pistol in her purse.

On another front, it was a bad idea to light a joint sitting outside of that bank in a car with the motor running. Also, a lovely, tearful woman trying to mitigate her crime can convincingly portray herself as a victim of a wastrel who, “Sort of made me do it.”

Court-appointed attorneys can be hit or miss. Lois Le Croix was a miss. She looked like Nicole Kidman, but she had the legal skills of a grilled cheese sandwich. In my opinion, she was under the influence of chemicals or a cult, maybe both. My trial did not have a jury, only a judge named Carl Lattemore. This spared a dozen citizens from witnessing her barrage of inane questions.

“Were you alone in the car or by yourself?

I said, “Um, both.” She nodded knowingly and continued with a rambling soliloquy about why marijuana should be legal. The judge interrupted, “There are no drug charges pending.”

Lois was back on the case, “So – your girlfriend was gone until she returned?”

With an audible sigh, Judge Lattemore looked away from my attorney and asked me, “Son, let’s make this simple, how do you plead?”

“Insanity. This woman is nuts, I want a mulligan.”

The judge laughed; apparently humor is in short supply in the courtroom. He turned to my attorney as she shuffled some papers on her desk and asked, “Ms. Le Croix, do you wish to comment on the defendant’s motion?”

Lois looked up from the folder, gave him a dazzling smile and said, “I'm sorry Your Honor, I wasn't listening.”

Her answer sent Judge Lattemore into a spasm of laughter, one of those scary, gasping, laughing jags. When he pulled himself together, he cut me break after break; a lower plea, and a six month sentence to be served in a “Tier Three facility”, a level of incarceration where men bitch constantly and write legal briefs instead of stabbing each other. I was innocent but I took the plea.

You are probably wondering what this has to do with harness racing. Stick with me.

The prison had computers in the library, old models with limitations. They were configured so that inmates could receive information, but nothing could be sent out. For example, several guys played chess. They could play against the computer but they could not use the computers to play against other humans on the outside.One day, Elmore Trixton, a droopy insurance scammer we referred to as ET, did a web search on his name. He did not find himself. He did find several links to a big time racehorse named Trixton. For some reason, this excited ET. He kept poking around the web and to his delight discovered that the horse was a champion and was racing at a racetrack named Woodbine in less than an hour – and that he could watch the race on the computer.

In a minimum security prison, events like these pass as big news. A dozen of us gathered around the computer to watch the race. When the horses came out for a pre-race parade, ET kept poking the screen and shouting, “It’s that horse. Trixton is the one in yellow, number six.”

The hazing began.

“Hey Trixton, your getaway car only has two wheels.”
“I see the resemblance.”
“Did you peddle a bogus policy on him?”
“Maternal or paternal side?”
“Nine to five he goes to stud before you.”

Trixton won. There were high fives all around, a happy few minutes for Tier Three. ET beamed like a proud papa.

Now this could have been the end of the story, but AckAck, who had the annoying habit of half coughing, half clearing his throat about every three minutes and whose previous occupation was a small meth lab in his garage, had an idea.

“Everybody give me a dollar.”

Of course, nobody had a dollar, so AckAck walked over to an abandoned monopoly game, snatched a fistful of ones and numbered them from one to eight with a pen. He folded them tight, took ET’s ball cap, held the cap high and jiggled it like he was breading fish.

“Pick one, and when you do, write your name on it; these are officially credits to be paid upon release.” He pointed to the horses being introduced for the next race and said, “Winner takes all.”

Ron Winters won. Ron was a taciturn fellow with large muscles and a head like a cantaloupe. Nobody knows why Ron was incarcerated and he was not sharing. Ron was one of the few inmates who did not have a nickname, because Ron appeared as if he would not like a nickname.

However, when his horse, number two, named “In Flux” won by two lengths, Ron came dangerously close to a smile. He collected seven endorsed, semi-real dollars, stuffed them into his pocket and grunted at AckAck, “Again.”

AckAck quickly numbered eight more monopoly dollars. We were off.

We were limited to tracks that had their own live computer feed. We stayed with harness horse racing because that was the type of race we first used and the guys got to like it. For some reason, we always referred to them as “Buggy Races.” The races became quite the rage on Tier Three; mindless fun, picking numbers out of a hat, endorsing Monopoly money and cheering or groaning after each race. Then things changed.

Undoubtedly the cream of the criminal crop is a tad brighter than those of us in Tier Three because, after all, they are not there. But a few of us wanted to shine. We used the computers to dig deeper into the sport of harness horse racing. Obviously, once we had the inclination, we had the time. Learning the sport was not rocket science. Soon we could tell trotters from pacers, recognized post position bias, and all the minutia of true devotees of the sport. Yeah, it was fun, but those of us who dug deeper into the sport had the age-old ulterior motive – we wanted an edge.

So here’s what happened.

Four of us broke off from the regular “Buggy Races.” We formed our own little group which was unflatteringly referred to as the “Buggy Brains.” Our shtick was different; we turned into what those in the real world refer to as handicappers. We did not pull numbers from a hat, we devised a complex system (way too complex to explain) where the four of us wagered against each other. We became slightly obsessive and the deeper we dug the more gold we found.

Time flew. Good behavior sliced off a month. My parole officer hooked me up with a part-time job driving a van with books between library branches. My new girlfriend showed no signs of psychosis or larceny. One evening I decided to take her to the local harness track. I had never been to one in person, a very enjoyable evening.

As we were heading to the parking lot, I spied a vaguely familiar face getting into a blue Acura. I shouted to him,

“Hey, Judge Lattemore, are you alone or by yourself?”

It took a few seconds until he recognized me without my orange jumpsuit. He walked over and shook my hand. He was a racetrack regular. We made some tentative plans to look for each other in the grandstands. He shook my hand again and headed towards his car.

The judge stopped, looked back, smiled and said, “You know, with that lawyer you could have gotten life.”