My Year of the Racehorse by Kevin Chong Page A

that suggests your lyrics are good—”
    â€œNo problem.” He sits up and squints at me. “Are you okay?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I ask him, dabbing my brow with my shirtsleeve.
    â€œYou’re sweating.”
    â€œSorry,” I say. “I’m a little hypoglycemic and didn’t eat breakfast. I should have brought a granola bar with me.” Should I ask for something to eat? It would be too unprofessional. But what if I pass out? “Do you mind if I have some grapes?”
    He finally notices the fruit plate, the cling-wrapped object of my ardour, by his feet. His gaze pitches back to the door through which the publicist exited, before returning to me. “Dig in, man.”
    I’ve always wanted to be someone who could politely turn down free food, but I fail at every test. With a jittery motion, I pull four or five grapes into my hand and cram them in my mouth like popcorn. “So, about that song, can you talk about what inspired it?”
    â€œSure,” he says. “It’s about staying relevant. My first album came out almost twenty years ago, and I feel as though I was late to the party even then. All my favourite music was made before 1972. The White Album, Let It Bleed, Pet Sounds—”
    â€œAnne Murray,” I joke, wiping the grape juice from my chin.
    He smiles for the first time, but doesn’t seem to get my joke. For all he knows, Anne Murray is the Janis Joplin of Canada—and not just our mulleted Linda Ronstadt. “Yes, yes.”
    â€œSo you’re saying you’re among the last of a dying breed?” I ask.
    He curls his hand in front of his face, the way I’ve seen him do in concert films when he emotes, shaman style, before his mike. “Yeah, like that, except not in such a clichéd way.”
    â€œAgreed. Flaubert had that feeling, too,” I suggest. “A sense of belatedness; that feeling of coming to the party an hour after the orgy’s ended.”
    â€œYeah, man. It’s like a congenital, dying-world thing.”
    It’s in this inopportune moment that I have a private epiphany. For the first time, I realize that my own interests, both professional and personal, have a unifying theme. Like this rock star, I like unpopular things that used to be popular, things that inch along a cultural continuum between staleness and a revival, because I am someone who wants to be adored but also reflexively scorns adored people, who shrinks from fads but reveres institutions, who likes popular things but not the ones you like. This explains my interests in books and rock music. Horse-racing is no longer an outlier interest, another of my dilettante dabbles, but part of a family of aging glories I cherish.
    I wag my finger in the air; the desire to share this insight overcomes me.
    â€œYou know what your song really is about?” I say. “Horseracing.”
    â€œWhat the fuck?”
    â€œYeah, just follow me. I’ve gotten into it and it’s kind of seen its best days in the past.”
    â€œWell, yeah,” he says, dipping his cigarette into an ashtray, “I don’t know much about the sport.”
    â€œIt’s kind of like the rock ’n’ roll of sports,” I say. “The most glamorous and most tragic one. Did you see Barbaro breaking down at the Preakness two years ago? It seemed like he would recover, but he died. So, so sad. Like Kurt Cobain’s final days.”
    The rock star is visibly uncomfortable with a journalist talking about himself. When the publicist arrives with her latte and his smoothie, he looks as though he’s been retrieved from an ice floe.
    â€œI hope you got what you needed,” she says, watching the rock star stand up, briskly shake my hand, and retreat into his back room. “If you want some photos, there are some in the press kit I sent you.”
    She leads me out towards the door, but I stop. “I really have to