Wild Horses

The good, the bad, the in-between

Before the indictments, the conviction, and everything else, there was me and there was my little sister, standing in swimsuits and sneakers at the horseback riding booth, waiting our turn. She was 12 and I was 14, and we were completely feral.

We were not used to this sort of thing, a luxury vacation to a tropical island off the coast of Queensland, Australia. My mom had a new husband – number three of six – a banker named Dale who carried a fat money roll with a $500 bill in the middle, was missing a ring finger, and looked exactly like Kirk Douglas. My sister and I were watching him closely.

For now, though, we left Dale and our mom playing backgammon by the hotel pool. We wandered off to find something to do, rather than waste our vacation hunched over some dumb game, rolling dice.

“What kind of rider are you?” the man assigning horses asked me. He pointed to a sign strapped to the thatched ceiling above his head showing a spectrum from beginner to expert, each with its own illustrative graphic.

“Expert,” I told him, looking at the galloping person-horse combo. There was zero basis for this, other than having seen The Black Stallion many times.

“We’ll give you Domino,” he said. “Just a heads-up: he’ll want to run on the beach. You good with that, mate?”

“Of course,” I said, shrugging.

Most of the ride was on trails up and down Mt. Kootaloo, winding switchbacks through the rainforest. Domino was locked into a swaying amble as sulphur-crested cockatoos screeched and flapped in the trees around us, warning us off. I patted his sweaty, twitching neck. All muscle. I liked this horse.

Domino began snorting when we got toward the bottom of the hill, where the rainforest opened up to white sand and a turquoise bay. He started a sort of equine tapdance to get out from behind the lead horse. He was snorting and whinnying now, a full-body tremor overtaking him.

“You’re okay, boy,” I said, patting his neck again. Expert, I thought happily, settling into the saddle.

Domino didn’t agree. He stomped grumpily a few times, then muscled the horse in front of us aside and bolted for the open beach. I pulled the reins, but Domino lifted his head high, flinging it side to side. He then dropped his head slightly, ears perked, gave one final snort, and we were off. Flying.

We tore across the beach, through a pack of sunbathers, galloping and leaping over limbs, towels, people crying out in fear and shouting curses after us. 

“Sorry!” I yelled helplessly into the wind. I was no longer the rider now, just the hanger-on. As this massive, chaotic beast thundered down toward the water’s edge then cut left along the break, we tore into a full Kentucky Derby gallop. We rode into a fierce wind, hoofbeats underneath, sprays of seawater, me chanting to myself quietly, “No no no no no....” I dropped the reins and grabbed the saddle horn, gripping with both hands. This is it, I thought. This is how I will die.

We thundered through ankle deep emerald water and seafoam. I felt sure Domino would trip, sending us end over end, but he only surged faster. A single, dumb thought entered my panicked mind: You need to jump.

Luckily I was frozen in fear, clutching the saddle horn and whimpering softly to myself. In the deafening rush and whistle of the wind, I became aware of some nearby sounds, hoofbeats behind me, off to the left. Someone is coming to save me, I thought. They pulled up next to us, this other horse and rider. I chanced a quick peek and saw my little sister, reins in hand, grinning like mad.

“Whoooo!” she yelled. I heard her laughing into the wind as they passed us.

We reached the end of the beach, our horses slowing to a canter, then a trot, then obediently parking themselves near the next trailhead, panting, as they’d done hundreds of times before.

“Oh my god, that was crazy!” she said. “Wait, are you crying?”

“What? No!” I said, wiping my face. “It’s just the salty air.”

My sister and I fought often and fiercely, unless anyone else criticized one of us, in which case we became a gang of two and turned on them. We shoplifted together. Threw things at cars. Made dinner for ourselves. We were completely lawless, always unsupervised.

In the past year alone, we’d gone from living in a tree-smashed house, with a plastic tarp over our buckled roof, to vacationing with this new banker stepdad on a tropical island. We still barely even knew him.

When it came to our mom’s boyfriends and husbands, my sister and I were like two meerkats watching a shadowy creature approaching. We lived on high alert, assessing every expression, every utterance, all in service of answering the most important question: Is this someone we need to worry about?

There had been a whole mess of difficult men, a few dangerous ones, the occasional decent one. I saw that Dale was, above all, good and sweet. Harmless. In assessing people, I was truly an expert—or at least felt myself to be.

I wasn’t wrong about Dale, exactly. In the darkest of my teen years, when my mom and I were in the course of a particularly vicious verbal exchange, I said something I can’t recall, some deep insult to her character that silenced the dinner table. Dale then came the closest I ever heard to him raising his voice.

“Oh for gosh darn sakes, Rob” he said to me, barely above normal speaking volume.

My sister and I looked at each other and cracked up. I saw Dale’s unhappy surprise at our laughter and felt immediately ashamed. He is so good and kind, I thought, and I am neither.

Nonetheless, Dale stuck with us. He moved us into a big, beautiful house in Holmby Hills, down the street from Tori Spelling’s mansion, which had a zoo and a bowling alley. My sister went to birthday parties there.

In this new life, around this undeniably good man, I had a deep, unsettling sense: I deserve none of this. I am a liar, a thief, a bad person. I confirmed this daily by stealing from the massive coin jar Dale kept on his dresser, plunking stolen quarters into arcade games at Westworld.

In my junior year of high school, I was driving to the beach with friends when one of them mentioned seeing Dale in the L.A. Times. Something about the casino he was a partner in. My friend used the word RICO, which was new to me. I thought of the Spanish word, which just like in English, means both kinds of rich. Qué rico, I thought. 

The feds seized our house and all of our assets, arresting Dale on our front lawn. How had I been wrong about him? If I was bad, what did this make Dale? Can someone who only ever treated me wonderfully be a bad person? 

Either way, I knew this feeling: everything falling apart. Like going from a leisurely trail walk to utter chaos at full speed. I’d been on this out of control ride many times before. Like always, I wanted to jump, but at a certain speed, all you can do is hold on. 

There was a trial, a conviction, another divorce. Federal prison. My mom would go on to marry Dale’s mob attorney, and then two more men after that. She was on her own wild ride.

Over decades, with seasons of loss, joy, chaos, and occasional calm, I began to remember differently, to see differently. We were all often just hanging on: Dale, my mom, my sister, and I. How could any of us be anything other than a person deserving of love? 

This is the thing about going through things: it feels less lonely as you start to recognize it everywhere. Seeing what everyone endures, labels become meaningless: good, bad, victim, villain, beginner, expert. Each of us is both all and none of those things.

Somehow, here we are, all of us hanging on dearly while trying to remember how to be brave, how to become one with this galloping horse, how to laugh into the roaring wind.

Many thanks to

Alex Michael

of A Questionable Life for ultra-helpful feedback on an earlier draft.