by Jack Kelleher
Eunice was my mother’s sister and disliked children—particularly me. In fairness, I returned the favour. I disliked adults, particularly grandmother, frog eyes, fish-faced Eunice. Later, Sue and I secretly dubbed her Dirty Eunie, but never in adult company. There were, as the Mexicans say, malas ondas from jump street between Eunice and me. Maybe I’d murdered Fudgie, her narcoleptic Cocker Spaniel, in a previous life. I didn’t like him much either.
The adults soon sank into their boring palaver, adrift in a miasma of cigarette smoke and tedium that left me restless and underfoot. To buy themselves peace, someone suggested I be taken down the street to see a horse—but not just any horse. This was Trigger, Roy Rogers’ famous Wonder Horse.
Roy was “the singing cowboy” with a white hat, fancy boots, and a guitar. But he was a grown-up and therefore suspect at best. For us kids, Trigger was the real star—Roy’s better half.
When I was five, maybe six, my parents took my sister Susan and me on a visit to my Aunt Eunice and Uncle Axel. They lived in the San Fernando Valley, a considerable expedition from our home in Pasadena in that long-ago time before freeways laced the L.A. basin and housing tracts smothered the fields and orchards of sunny SoCal.
At the corral, Trigger towered over me, golden and glowing, the biggest animal I had ever dared approach. I wore my shiny black cowboy hat with a cap-gun shootin’ iron strapped to my waist. In my imagination, I was the kid sheriff of Deadwood, swaggering down a dusty Main Street in search of Black Bart and his gang of malefactors to pistol whip and gun down. Inside, I was terrified, but I refused to show it.
Just then, as my nerves stretched to the snapping point, Trigger leaned down, blasted me with furnace-hot breath, and with his gigantic yellow incisors plucked the hat right off my head. He whinnied and reared, tossing his head high with my hat clamped in those monster choppers, taunting me. Then, satisfied with the gag, he dropped down and neatly placed the hat at my feet.
I was starstruck, terrified, and honoured all at once. That horse was a mountain to me—and a movie star with a sense of humor. The grown-ups laughed, and then I did too, because Trigger had chosen me for his joke. In that instant, I became a junior member of Hollywood royalty. Nuts to Auntie Eunie!
Back home in Pasadena, I told my best friend Larry that Trigger himself had stolen my hat. Larry’s eyes nearly fell out of his head. For a week, I was famous by association—the lucky kid who shared a gag with Trigger, Hollywood’s greatest horse.
