four star
I am inundated with hate mail, and I haven’t even had breakfast. Jeremy and I walk to Katz Bagels.
R: Everybody loathes everything I write.
J: Go eat worms.
R: Okay. Perspective. One of the readers at a mid-Western literary magazine I’ve never heard of, and the founder of a small Canadian software company, have ridiculous and insubstantial objections to some things I wrote.
J: And the rest?
R: …all my other stories got published.
J: You need to write some more!
R: I thought of writing up that weekend I spent in Kentucky at the Rolex. I wanted to call it Four Star. I thought up some great characters, a dorky divorced dad who keeps embarrassing his thirteen-year-old daughter, and a crazy ingenue riding school instructor from California, and her leathery eventing trainer. And her trainer’s horse, that they’d bought as a yearling, that bites and kicks so that even though he’s really talented, no one likes him.
J: And the dorky Dad could say, break a leg, and they do.
R: Yes! They’d all be watching the water combination, and the competition would stop for ages and ages and they’d gradually realize that someone had had a bad fall, and it would turn out be the trainer, and this fun frivolous weekend suddenly turns into something else.
J: And the dorky Dad comes into his own.
R:Wait. Is this getting heart-warming? I HATE heart-warming.
J: No! Dorky Dad could be a brain surgeon! He could operate right there on the cross-country course!
R: He could transplant the horse’s brain into the trainer’s head! The horse could give its life so that the trainer could live!
J: Now you’re going too far.
R: Oh.
J: He should just transplant a leg.
We hop gracelessly and giggling down Valencia Street, although it’s unclear whether we are humans trying to run on one horse leg or three-legged horses attempting to trot.
