The boss sat in cargo shorts under his little umbrella. To us, the sun was a friend, and the day spread encouragingly overhead. Our job was to sell the pink newspapers that contained the names and records of all the horses racing that afternoon. With an air of affected enthusiasm, our hunkered supervisor dispensed the day’s assignments, and we groggily cantered to various gates, street corners, and parking lots.

At 15, the city had unfolded around me like an envelope opening. In the morning all my anger was a gift from God. In the evening I traced my hand against lined paper, watching the concentric rings move towards the margins. Each shift began with a hazy, drifting look at the farthest point in the distance, where I would gauge the business of the day. My personal belongings–book, water bottle, granola bar–would be arranged around the base of a convenient street sign or lamppost, any little edifice to keep things in place. Then I simply wait for the thin tide of neighborhood residents to disappear and the rhythms of tourism and industry to surge.

Papers cost one dollar. Sometimes two for the men in white linen suits and their large-hatted wives. A man would sidle up, harrumphing, and unearth his money clip, lick his thumb, and flip through bills with the coarse gesture of a match being lit. A women would bend to my height, bearing her teeth in a menace of superior friendliness, forcing me to pretend that our transaction was a hilarious gift exchange. In either case I would feel myself sliding to the left of my diminishing body. I would watch the four hands distantly perform their trade. Sometimes, the boss would cruise by and squint from his white van.

We watered our little indignations. Trained ourselves to savor the burden of being serviceable. One kid, brimming with fresh proletarian identity, planted his feet before the boss’s cart and hurled his stack of papers to the ground. Virginally hoisting two middle fingers, he slowly marched away. We applauded the gesture, but he was unable to bring up the incident with his mother, who continued to drop him off for every day that summer. Eventually, he brought a lawn chair to bask in. The parking lot was actually someone’s front lawn. We figured they must’ve made at least fifty grand letting people trample their grass every summer.

The sidewalks gave way to an array of dandelions that had been brought in by tight-lipped Protestants, sewn into skirts and trafficked out of papal England. They were planted in kitchen gardens and harvested for greens or tea or bitter wine, or tinctured for an early taste of spring in the new horror of winter. Now they were allowed to grow fat and tall, running to seed, and burrowing their enormous taproots through the stony upstate soil. By the time the track season began, their leaves were baked in the sun, tough, and good only for horses.

The boss distributed cheap plastic ponchos when it rained. Someone caused a scene. With the boss distracted, I pilfered extra ponchos from the cart, and sold them each for twenty dollars.

The races began in the early afternoon. Bleachers were filled and horses jostled at the starting stalls. The buzzer was pressed and they bolted out over the backstretch, careening under the rising tumult of the onlookers. As they pressed into the homestretch, the crowd would stir in a manner that exceeded the sum of their parts. The tumbling tone of their hoofbeats reverberated across the gates and alleyways surrounding the racetrack.

At last, the horse buckled under its own numb weight. Three hundred years of heritage and a life of exacting training had molded him into an edifice of strength destined for inexorable collapse. It was a catastrophe. Furosemide had been administered to prevent his massive heart from filling his lungs with blood, but with every dose good ventricular tissue gave way to fat and scarring. His overtaxed suspensory ligaments were relaxed back into usefulness with an injection of phenylbutazone. Although the resulting weight loss gave his handlers hope of an advantage, this anti-inflammatory, analgesic, diuretic barrage was useless in the face of sheer force. The animal felt a swirl of vertigo resulting from an arrhythmia and one crooked footfall utterly destroyed the tenuous remaining connections in his ankle. He slid helplessly to the ground, trampled loam funneling into his ear.

As each competing jockey encountered and cleared the obstacle of his body, they felt a succession of terror, relief, and, finally, the possibility of victory. A wave of gamblers and tourists swelled in tumultuous witness on a nearby grandstand. In the training course nearby, a mare in season rubbed her lonely organ against a fence post, pheromones mixing with blood and manure wafting on the incongruous summer breeze. Staff erected a dark green tarp over the fence to shield the crowd from images of the thrashing gelding.

The fallen horse’s spirit balked, still clinging to his body but confused by the disorderly hum of the bleachers. A carousel of images rose up from the disturbed soil: champion Go-For-Wand, 1990, suffering an open fracture on the track and throwing her rider after twelve paces; Ruffian, 1975, who snapped her sesamoids but refused to stop running and carried her panicked jockey at full tilt while her bones splintered through torn skin; A specter from eighty years earlier, a groom arriving at the stables before dawn, scanning the rows with a gas lamp and finding every stall empty. Fearing for his job, he runs out the pasture, finding a field of equine corpses, each drained completely of blood and bearing no wounds or signs of illness, with no tracks marking any travel to their place of death. An FBI agent insists the mass mutilation is simply an act of revenge by racketeers, although he’s too disgusted by the smell to come within a hundred yards of the carcasses. For their part, the racketeers display more genuine anguish than anyone over the desecration of the horses, regarding the animals not only as reliable sources of wealth but also as intimate friends and spiritual guides. These and other mirages, increasingly more real than the impossible spectacle of the present, swim through the horse’s large brown eyes. He exhales. The rumble of the raceway conceals a choral repetition of its founder’s final words: I am running neck and neck with death and rapidly tiring.

At the wake-houses of Tipperary, young hearts held their gazes over the aphrodisiac deceased. Lap to lap, playing the old Ring game, turf torn up and hurled at understanding windows. Elderly uncles awoke with their laces tied together and their mustaches missing. In a trespassed pasture a child was conceived, covered in marriage, and carried in infancy to the new world. Over the tenements: bells, crows, a father’s path laid out. The unpainted walls and the wallpaper factory, spitting from the fourth story window. The bells of the iron works rang in perpetual adoration from Watervliet to Rensselaer, echoing the ancient piety of the emerald isle’s exiled masses. Everyone’s hands were raw with lye. Mothers winkingly chastised their children’s bloody rivalries. North and south forever finding a good reason. Eventually John Morrisey had seen enough of the same old fights and went to work on a steamboat, shipping down the Hudson and back. And of course falling in love with the captain’s daughter.

Manhattan was filling from the bottom up. Another ship spilled out over the pier, another hundred families warmly shaken down. Dia is Muire duit. Go raibh maith agat. Despite shaved teeth and the threat of damnation, there were a lot of fiddles and people had a good time. Loose associations of neighborhood partisans dispensed bread and beatings. A vote is a fair trade for protection and a decent living! If the parties crumble the country crumbles, and it’s right that when a party wins its workers get their due. At a silo in the workhorse district, grain left to rot exploded in the heat, sending furniture and silver careening into the homes of the more fortunate. Finally, exhausted by the rapes and pleasures of the docks, John began to daydream about finding large sums of money on the ground.

Seeking a new world within the new world, where gold flowed enthusiastically from the splayed land, he was discovered in steerage, grounded in Panama, and forced to consider the long journey north. A series of card-table accidents produced the money necessary to ship out; he applauded himself. The night before departure, a withdrawal of luck restored him to destitution; he cursed the people and gods of all jungle nations. Stowed away again and discovered near Guadalajara, he was rescued by a mutiny which erupted among the poorer passengers. Abandoning all allegiances, he offered his strength to the captain, overcame his fellow travelers, and arrived in San Francisco in a balmy first class cabin.

Much of the drinking was an anodyne against the ocean being on the wrong side of things. One man got too near a woman with too little warning, and fainted. Of all the games, Faro was played on an oval table blanketed in green felt. With his round white gaucho and brown vest, the banker was not trusted to distribute the cards. Instead, an arcane mechanical box was relied upon, mysterious to the players and therefore respected. The only rule to know is never to bet on the banker’s card. Best of all to be the banker. It was in this way that John Morrissey got his own ship. Circumsailing customs in the open night, the crew set out for Sitka. An open slope of water traversed by ten canoes: the land was unapproachable. In later years he would enjoy a phlegmy laugh when recalling the last recalcitrant Tlingit Chief hurled overboard. They did not even find enough gold dust to sneeze.

On re-arriving in New York he was elected Representative on the merit of his many boxing victories. Disinterested in legislation, he ran simply because so many people had asked him not to. The clubhouse in Saratoga Springs was lifted beam by beam, bulwarked by a wave of Wall Street winnings. His own horses ran out their lives on his own track, cheered and damned by thousands of visitors who placed their bets in his own ledgers. His later years slid by in a series of successes, punctuated by the occasional riot, investigation, or political intrigue. The Harlem Rising, the raid on the Canfield Casino, the betrayal of Tammany Hall. The loss of a son is mentioned in passing, as is the maintenance of a wife, the captain’s daughter. On May 1st, 1878, as he took his last breath, John Morrissey clasped the hand of the attending priest. A life roughly lived had left his skin hard and his mouth creased, but throughout the morning he had appeared to grow healthier by the hour. All present attested that by his dying moment “Old Smoke” had regained the countenance of early manhood. Even those whose noses he had bent in youth wore the somber glow of admiration as they traveled north from Troy to the memorial in Saratoga Springs. In their obituary, the New York Times referred bitterly to his “checkered career”. Nonetheless, the State Senate was swift in issuing a statement of grief and respect for their departed colleague.

Joan Kelsey is a writer and musician living in Seattle. Their Instagram is @joankelsey7777777.