Day At The Races

[December 3rd, 2008]

“I was doing really good yesterday. I even bought myself lunch out there,” Willy Vlautin tells me as he drives us onto the Fremont Bridge toward Portland Meadows horse racetrack. “But I have this tendency, when I really get going, to just push harder.” The 40-year-old author and musician looks both amused and regretful, his eyes squinting to see through the drizzle. “Gambling is all about restraint.”

Vlautin always speaks this way. Well-chosen words open up his life with the same plaintive wisdom one gets from reading his novels, Motel Life and Northline, or listening to his music, both solo and with his longtime rock band Richmond Fontaine. He’s exactly the guy—sharp, work-worn, heart-on-sleeve—you’d hope him to be. When he talks about racing, he leaves enough room around the words so that they might just apply to life in general.

We pull into the huge gravel Meadows parking lot and Vlautin points from the cab of his white Toyota pickup toward a lonely-looking pink one-story home at the lot’s edge. “I used to really want to buy that house,” he says. “I was dating this girl at the time, and we came here and I told her that. She just started crying. Like, ‘What kind of man am I with?’”

Vlautin usually visits the Meadows twice a week. It’d probably be three times if not for his current girlfriend—with whom he shares a home in Scappoose—who likes spending Sundays together...away from the track. “I take people out here every once in a while,” he says. “Most of them never come twice.”

Which is fine with Vlautin. He comes to the Meadows to write, putting modest wagers (“you can stretch $20 all day if you’re smart about it”) on the jockeys, trainers and horses that he has come to know. One such horse, Lean on Pete, is lending its name to his next novel. It’s about a 15-year-old boy who works on the back side of the track. When Vlautin told Pete’s owner, the man scoffed. “Why would you name a book after that horse? You can’t rely on that horse to win nothing.”

But Vlautin seldom writes about winners. His characters are stuck, broke, hovering in the shadows of society. But they’re not without pride—Vlautin’s stories and songs are empathetic, and one gets the feeling he spends a lot of time with the people in them before they wind up on the page. This is most recently evidenced by A Jockey’s Christmas, a seven-song EP that spends its first 40 minutes telling the story of J.D., a gambling jockey on a bad-luck streak who’s home for the holidays. It’s a stark recording—Vlautin tackles the vocals somewhere between an audio book and a poetry reading—with guitar flourishes here and there to give it movement and a sense of place. The story found its inspiration from some of Vlautin’s own visits home. “I really did lose my Christmas-present money at the casino,” he says of the opening track, “Trying to Get Back Home.” “But I didn’t buy my dad lunch afterward.” His sharp smile calls attention to a strong, stubbled chin and eyes that wrinkle at the corners.

The EP blurs the lines between Vlautin as songwriter and author (a pot he stirred earlier this year by including a soundtrack disc with a special edition of Northline). He’s been at the former for nearly 15 years with Richmond Fontaine (a post-show conversation with Crackerbash frontman Sean Croghan in Vlautin’s native Reno is what persuaded him to relocate to Portland and form his own band), but says he’s “by far the worst musician in [his] own band.” And the word “author” always seemed a bit lofty. So Vlautin, who has struggled with confidence issues his entire life, is never sure how to tell people what he does for a living. “When I’m writing bad songs, I’m a writer,” he says. “And when I’m writing bad stories, I’m in a band. So it depends.”

Vlautin is endlessly self-effacing, but it hasn’t led to self-destruction. He says he knew he could never be the best at anything from a young age. He tried hard in school, he says, but he barely scraped by: “I always felt like if I didn’t have talent, at least I’d have honesty. And so I’ve kinda stuck to that rule. And some [songs], when I look back on them, seem overly dramatic. But hell, I was young and overly dramatic. I was crazy and half-drunk and half-suicidal a lot of the time.”

We lose $2 bets on horses with names like Lightning Johnny and Prince Smiley. It sticks with Vlautin a bit, but as we head down to take a parting look at colts awaiting their next race, he’s laughing it off. “Just goes to show you not to listen to anybody,” he says. And again, I’m not sure whether he’s talking about gambling, or just life in general.