I’ve never walked into Hawthorne Race Course without pitching a quarter to the blind beggar who sits outside the grandstand. As they hunch toward the gate, most horseplayers ignore the clatter of coins in his tin cup, his long woodwind cry of “Please help the bliiiind!” I think he brings good luck. The first time I tipped him, I had a winning day, so I’ve been doing it since.
“I’d like to interview you for my newspaper,” I said. “I’ll give you a 20 if you’ll let me ask some questions.”
“When my sight started going blind, I’d just started hiking coal,” he said. “I’d make 30, 35 dollars a day. My sight just left me gradually. Each day would get dimmer and dimmer. My sight was good enough for me to find that coal and put it in the wheelbarrow. I was working half blind, but they didn’t know it.”
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“I didn’t know anything about playing the horses till I went blind,” he said. “I figured I had to do something to make money. I bet a 1-2-3 trifecta, and it won. It paid $270.”
Every afternoon, Lewis plays the Daily Double, trying to pick the winners of the first two races. He depends entirely on numerology to choose his horses. The day I met Lewis, he had his friend Eli read him the Sun-Times’s “Hawthorne Line,” which ranks each race. He asked Eli to add up the numbers of the three favored horses in the first race, and the worst horses in each of the first three races. The sum was 24, so he told Eli to count down, starting at the top of the first race, to the 24th horse on the page.
Lewis told Eli to run up to the grandstand and bet a 7-6 Daily Double. He touted his number to friends who walked past. An acquaintance named Annie scraped up the ramp, moaning about the ache of her feet and the emptiness of her pocketbook.
“I thought you loved me, baby,” Annie pouted.
