The Night the Bandit Dog Came In

Yankee, March 2001

The night the Bandit dog won for me must have been in March or early April — there was still old snow on the ground. I don’t remember the odds he went off at, or the race distance, or even the exact year. Just that his name was Bandit-something (or something-Bandit), that he had the longest odds in the last race of the night at the Wonderland dog track in Revere, Massachusetts, and that he came out of the pack like a car in the stretch to win by a nose at the wire.

The perfecta paid about $300 on a two-dollar bet. I had $10 on it. We took a cab from the track straight to Logan, and Frannie, my girlfriend, and I (betting the Bandit dog had been her idea) caught the late-night plane to San Juan and were in the La Concha Hotel casino before they closed the tables at four. I won $2,000 that trip playing blackjack, close to $4,000 total, if you counted my night at the dogs. Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. I was between colleges. That was a lot of money in those days.

Frannie’s long gone now. Married, divorced, remarried, somewhere on the West Coast. We’ve lost touch. But oh, could she pick greyhounds. She picked them just by looking, mostly — through these little red leatherette binoculars she’d bring to the track in her purse. She’d sit there squinting, elbows propped up on the table in the clubhouse restaurant where we used to sit between races, straight black hair falling down both sides of her face. All you could see was her mouth and those little red glasses homed in on the greyhounds as they were paraded in front of the clubhouse on their leashes on the way to the starting box.

“The three dog. See how his ears are pinned back? See how he’s pulling at the leash? I think the three’s ready to run.”

So I’d check the form to see if the three dog looked like he had a chance. And if he did, and usually even if he didn’t, I’d put at least five bucks on him. Or I might tie him up in the perfecta with some other dog I liked. Which is how it went the night the Bandit dog came in.

Anyway, that’s how we did it. I was the analyst; Frannie just went on looks. I don’t know which of us had more winners. But I know I never had a bigger score at the greyhounds than the night the Bandit dog came in on the front end of a $300 perfecta and we ended up, the pair of us, howling at the moon and stacking $100 bills at 4:00 a.m. on the beach outside the La Concha Hotel.

—

There are four patrons, all of them men, at the clubhouse bar, which I’m almost sure is where our restaurant used to be. But there’s no sign of a restaurant now: just a large, brightly lit barroom with a dozen vacant wooden tables, a wall-mounted TV tuned to a football game that only the bartender is watching, and four men drinking beers.

It is a Sunday night in September and it’s starting to rain. I am 54 years old with a job at a college in the morning and a good woman waiting in a sweet-smelling kitchen outside Boston 30 minutes away. The fourth race is an AA sprint. I bet the seven dog, a two-year-old brindle named Kodiak Kim, $20 across the board, and order a bourbon and some buffalo wings. Outside the barroom on the floor of the clubhouse, small knots of old men (there aren’t many under 70 and barely a woman in sight) squeeze around TV monitors that carry the odds and races from tracks in Arizona, Florida, Rhode Island, anywhere that greyhounds run on Sunday nights. The old men don’t cheer or jostle or talk to one another. They just stare up at the monitors in tight little huddles until a race is done, then shake their heads, make tired, disgusted faces, and turn and shuffle away.

Beyond the clubhouse is the grandstand where, on the nights that Frannie wasn’t with me, I used to base myself. It was dirty and crowded and busy in those days, and smelled of onions and beer. Outside on the asphalt apron that overlooked the track, every 20 minutes or so at race time the crowd would press out to watch: retirees, off-duty sailors, middle-aged men in baseball caps, and college boys with their dates — 5,000, 10,000, even more — the length of the stretch run, rooting home greyhounds that passed so close you could hear the dirt scrunch and smell the sweat on their flanks. The grandstand, I used to like to think then, was where the real gamblers passed their nights.

It is dark tonight, empty behind closed-off double doors. Outside along the railing, under the lights from the stanchions overhead, a single couple sit alone: a man in a wheelchair and woman in a small chair beside him who seems, from a distance, to be reading aloud from a book.

Kodiak Kim is blocked in the first turn and never recovers. I finish the last of my buffalo wings, order a second bourbon, and watch as Jamaica Princess, my choice in the fifth, gets bumped off-stride and finishes next to last. Behind me on the clubhouse monitors against a background of palm trees, plastic flamingos, and an
Arizona sky, a dog named Baby Cakes B is caught and beaten a step from the wire. An old man spits and throws his program at the screen.

Outside on the strip of asphalt that separates the clubhouse from the track — the same place where, decades ago, Frannie and I screamed ourselves blue as the Bandit dog caught the leader at the wire — the only spectator is an empty Adirondack chair.

—

The memories. it’s always the good ones that stay, like the winning seven-one perfecta on my birthday. I was born on the first of July. Betting $200, more than a month’s rent — the biggest bet I’d ever made — on an even-money favorite named Johnny’s Surprise that led from wire to wire . . . I felt like such a genius that night. A ten-to-one long shot named Miss Lone Star (I was in love with a girl from Texas then and would marry her three years later, as husband number two). The winning tip I once got from a woman in a Chinese laundry. The long, wet kiss I got from Frannie the night the Bandit dog came in.

But memory is selective and tends to be kind. The truth is, of course, there were far more losses than wins — at the horses, the casinos, but nowhere more than at the dogs. At first, during my college years in the 1960s, they were nothing to worry about: an occasional afternoon at the track with a roommate, a night or two at Wonderland. Then over time, the pace picked up and the days took on a rhythm: classes all morning, horses in the afternoon, the dogs or trotters at night. Then the classes stopped mattering. Bills went unpaid. There were loans from bad places. Then telephones cut off, a car repossessed, books and luggage pawned or sold. More lost afternoons at the horse track, more nights at Wonderland. Then a college expulsion. A psychiatrist. Lost girlfriends. A worried family. Then a family at the end of its rope.

The end came later, a year after college on a Tuesday in the fall of 1971. It was close to midnight. Wonderland was emptying; the last race of the night had been run. I had $3 left in my pocket, the cost of the shuttle ride back to Boston, where I lived and worked. I was 27, tired, depressed, and worried about the rent. My mouth was stale from too many cigarettes. I could smell myself. It was like 500 other nights.

The cars they used as shuttles in those days were beat-up black Caddies from the 1950s, the kind with jump seats. They were built for seven passengers — plus the driver — though the company sometimes squeezed in eight. If you’d lost and were broke and had no better plans for tomorrow, the Wonderland shuttle at midnight was not a place you wanted to be.

I was in back, between two men in worn-out suits who smelled worse than I did. I would have said they were old, in their mid-fifties probably, about my age today. They were talking across me; it was as though I wasn’t there.

They had lost and were angry: cursing trainers, cursing dogs, cursing their lousy f-ing luck — the f-word flew and flew. One of them said the last race had been fixed, that the dog he’d bet had been doped. You could tell, he said, by the way his head bobbed when he ran. The other man said he wouldn’t doubt it, that he figured it happened all the time. Then they began trading stories — other races, other tracks, other years — nearly all of them about losers and the ways they’d found to lose. The first man told one about a dog he’d bet once who’d been leading ten yards from the wire, “but then he stopped to take a leak.” You could tell it was an old story and that the other man didn’t believe him, but he went along just the same. “If a dog you bet don’t lose one way,” I remember one of them saying, “he’ll f-ing lose another.” Both men shook their heads and agreed it was a lousy business. Then one of them took out the form that previewed the next night’s entries and they began their talk about those.

I saw myself. I saw the future, and I was nearly sick. I got out at the first stop in Boston at a hotel that hasn’t been there for years now and walked the two miles home. It was five years before I went inside a racetrack again.

—

Frannie used to have this theory. she swore by it: if a dog pulls at his leash after the parade (which doesn’t happen often), it’s a sure sign he’s ready to run. And if he pulls hard — really tugs so that his handler has to work to restrain him — no matter his odds or his record, he’s worth the maximum bet.

There’s a dog in the sixth — the one dog, Zemonella — who’s pulling to beat the band. I bet him. He breaks first from the box and never trails. In the space of 30 seconds, I’m $300 to the good.

Then I do the dumbest thing. It’s a kid thing and I know it, but there’s no way I can help myself. I order a sidecar, Frannie’s old drink, from the bartender and hoist it in the air. And then I tell him: “Hey,” I say. “My old girlfriend, her name was Frannie. I haven’t seen her in 25 years, but she just picked that winner for me.”

The bartender nods and does his best to smile. “Here’s to Frannie,” I say then. “To Frannie, wherever you are.” Then I tell him to buy a round for the four other drinkers, order one for myself, and start in on the stories: of Frannie, the tight-leash theory, the night the Bandit dog won. By the time I leave to cash my bet nearly an hour later, it is sheeting rain on the clubhouse apron and the six of us are friends for life.

It’s close to midnight before I get to where I’m going for the night. There, in a suburban kitchen over a late-night supper of salad and warmed-up lamb, I am asked how my night went, and whether it felt like 27 again.

“Not exactly,” I say. But I did win some money, I made some new friends, and it really took me back.