Exquisite Angst

CRAZY OVER HORSES by Sam Toperoff. 209 pages. Atlantic-Little Brown. $5.75.

As an embittered horseplayer recently remarked, "If they raced rats and placed Tote machines in Madison Square Garden, they could fill the joint with suckers every night." He was getting at a basic truth about the fascination of gambling. But what clearly eluded him--and what Sam Toperoff conveys with love in this oddly winning novelistic memoir--is the peculiar delight, the exquisite angst that horses (and wagering on them) give a really dedicated race-goer.

Toperoff is now a college teacher. For years, though, horses were his Harvard and his Yale. At the age of thirteen, to help finish school, he took a job mucking the stalls of race horses at a New York track. Soon he was lost in the miracle of watching a chosen horse break loose from the pack and thunder home first across the finish line.

Later, in the Army, and afterwards, working in a paint factory, he saves his earnings to bet the horses. He spends all his spare hours on handicapping systems or figuring ways to beat the odds. Friends help. Nick Carter, a paint labeler, explains to him: "Never bet a slow starter from an inside post position in a sprint." Mulligan, a caricature Irishman who is handicap expert for the International News Service, instructs him in the folly of following "expert" advice--by not putting money down on his own published selections. "Do you think anybody who knows what he's doin' would give you good information for a nickel?"

Toperoff suffers through it all--setting out each morning in the delusion that he is a god who will ordain the outcome of the race, often going home at night a broken peasant, cursing the fates. In effect, he becomes existential man, laughing at his own rueful destiny. When Mulligan dies, he makes Toperoff promise to bet all his meager savings in one last post-mortem race. It is his horseplayer's fitting, feckless (not to mention luckless) bid for immortality.

Toperoff comes to another conclusion. Though no true horseplayer ever truly reforms, his passion for wagering eventually is spent. He ends up buying an old pony--as a personal companion. "Today I discovered an old pile of Lucky's manure," he writes. "It was turning back to grass. And I saw it was a miracle." Somehow this becomes a touching ending to a delightful book. An alternate epitaph might be the horseplayers' eternal lament, "I shoulda had him."

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