Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
Mike Turner sets up the track, bright green and lit with carnival bulbs. The night’s first racers are already doing laps on exercise wheels. A ginger mouse named Trailer Trash runs unceasingly. There’s also Cat Bait, a white mouse with red eyes; Thatsawinner, a gray mouse who mostly grooms his haunches; Fast Jerry, a sleek black mouse; Fat Freddy, who’s dun-colored (and yes, a little dumpy); and Bigtime, white with brown spots. The rest of the crew are hanging out in a cage under the racetrack, next to a giant dispenser of hand sanitizer and a spray bottle of Windex.
A guy in a Hawaiian shirt holding a Solo cup of beer inspects the night’s first competitors, but everyone else is far more interested in the food. Sterno cans warm pans of pulled pork, slaw, and mac ’n’ cheese; the line winds all the way out to the end of the hallway, where moms, wearing chocolate-colored jerseys stenciled with #TEAMPIRATES in glitter, are busy taking tickets.
The night’s emcee, Joe Bertel, points folks to the back of the room, where they can place their bets with “funny money” ($2 minimum).
“Less than 10 minutes to get your bets in,” he urges. “Those mice are ready—they’re at the gate, rustlin’ around!”
Turner ceremoniously picks up each mouse by its tail and transfers it from pen to starting line, announcing its name and number. A bugle—just like the one at Fairmount—sounds, giving way to urgent, pounding techno music. The gate is about to open when…the breaker flips.
The track goes dark, and the music stops. A collective howl: “Awwww!”
Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
Turner and his assistant, Ray Gillespie, coolly work to get things up and running again. In past years, the St. Louis Pirates youth baseball club held its mouse races at the Maryland Heights Community Center, but that fell through this year. But, after some nimble last-minute improvisation, one of the baseball dads secured a space in a tech startup in Ballwin, where there’s a big open-plan office and the smell of fresh paint still lingers in the air.
Turner and Gillespie pop open plastic totes and extract extension cords. “We’re working on it!” Turner tells the crowd.
He doesn’t do this for a living—he runs a towing business—but he keeps Gateway Downs Mouse Racing alive as a sort of family legacy. His grandfather Harvey Coffee was St. Louis’ first mouse race organizer. People magazine profiled Coffee in 1995, photographing him with a tiny checkered flag and two of his mice, Hot Pants and Streaker.
“Mouse racing is as old as kings and queens,” explains Turner, who started at age 16 and now has 200 mice of his own. “We’re the only company that replicates horseracing,” he says, adding that, rather than being funneled into separate tracks, the mice interact with one another—and sometimes the crowd.
“I’ve had mice get loose,” he says, explaining that mice typically run in a circle, confused, when they escape, “but after about 10 minutes, the wildness kicks in, and then you can’t catch them.” But, he says, they haven’t had mice escape in a long time. (Anticipating questions about whether racing’s mean to mice, he says, “These are feeder mice—if they were not here, they’d be fed to snakes.”)
Onlookers hang at the edge of the track.
“Your little fat guy is going to win.”
“Anyone need a beer?”
“I’d be on the edge of my seat, but I can’t find a seat!”
Then the bulbs zap back on. “Let’s hope this is the last of our disasters tonight,” Turner sighs. The techno fires back up, and the little metal gates pop open.
They’re off!
Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
Through his headset, Turner calls the race as fast as an auctioneer, his words running together. At first, peppy Trailer Trash seems a sure winner—before getting distracted by an exercise wheel halfway down the track. He runs on it for the rest of the race. In the meantime, Cat Bait skitters over the finish line, taking the race by a wide lead. (The “little fat guy” brings up the rear.)
Turner begins setting up for the next race as Bertel leads the crowd in a round of “Happy Birthday” for a woman named Donna, who’s turning 70.
The second-race mice—Bill, Alexander the Great, QT Pie, Lorenzo, Professor Squeak, and Cheez Whiz—are in their boxes. The winner will eventually face off against the fastest mice of the night. Bill gets lots of hoots and hollers, and so does Cheez Whiz. Oddly, Professor Squeak is greeted with near-silence, perhaps because he has a brown spot resembling a shiner near one eye or because he’s scrawnier than the others.
As Trailer Trash proved, though, you can put your funny money where you want. At the end of the day, all bets are off. Every mouse is 10 minutes away from wild.
