In Search of Sentinel Guy
You won't find him in any cryptozoological encyclopedia. Not yet anyway. And that's just a darn shame.
He's as elusive as the Loch Ness Monster, as enigmatic as Bigfoot and as ornery at the Monkey Man. I've never seen him myself, to be honest, but I know people who have. And the people who have seen him just call him "Sentinel Guy." It's frustrating?really, really frustrating?to have never seen him, especially since I've been with people who've seen him while I was standing right there with them. I always come away with the feeling that, no matter how good and accurate their descriptions may be, they're nothing compared to the horror and awe of seeing the real thing in the flesh.
He hangs out at Belmont Racetrack?at least that's where all the sightings I'm aware of have occurred. The most recent encounter took place on Friday, Sept. 7, opening day of the fall meet. Morgan and Gary and I had just gotten off the train and were standing in line at the gates, waiting to get in. We were surrounded by skells of all size and shape and color and odor. Those in the worst shape were trailing near the back of the pack, shuffling along with their canes and walkers. Belmont is not the place to go if you're looking for the beautiful people.
Up ahead of us, by the turnstile where you pay your buck to get in, we heard a ragged old voice ask, "What the fuck are you doin'?" It seemed to be directed at whoever was in the booth, taking the dollars.
We all looked up ahead to catch a glimpse of the source, but only Morgan and Gary saw him.
"It's Sentinel Guy!"
We'd?well, they'd?seen him before. I strained my eyes and craned my neck, but it was useless. By the time I sort of knew what I was looking for, he was already gone. Again.
"Sentinel Guy," I should probably explain, gets his name from the climax of the 1977 Michael Winner film, The Sentinel, in which an army of deformed and mutilated damned souls crawls out through the gates of hell (located in Brooklyn Heights) and try to talk Christina Raines out of becoming a nun.
Winner used a broad range of latex prosthetics and real human freaks to present a cavalcade of monsters who were missing arms, legs, eyes, chins?or, conversely, were cursed with great, dripping, waggling gobs of flesh hanging from their bodies.
Sentinel Guy, I'm told, fits into the latter category, with a great droopy flap of skin dangling from the end of his grotesquely distended nose. A flap that wiggles when he talks?and apparently wiggles even more when he's angrily screaming, "What the fuck are you doin'?" at people.
He was first spotted about a year ago, the first time Morgan and I dragged Gary to the track with us. Gary was amazed and delighted at the number of freaks who were mixed into Belmont's usual crowd of battered old skells. Dwarves, hunchbacks, a rich tapestry of deformity that Morgan and I had already learned to take for granted out there.
None of them, however, compared to Sentinel Guy.
Even then, with no line in front of me to block my view, with just the empty, gaping (if dimly lit) space of the building's interior to search, even with both Morgan and Gary trying to direct my eyes in the right direction, I couldn't see him.
He became a fairly regular attraction on subsequent visits ("There he is again!"), but only early in the day. Only before the first race. After that, he vanishes. We don't know if he heads directly for the clubhouse, or simply bleeds into the grandstand crowd. The latter is unlikely, though, given that the crowds at Belmont simply aren't big enough to hide something like that. We never see him buying himself a beer, and we never see him at the cashiers' windows. Still, knowing the parameters I have to work with, the closest I've come to catching a glimpse of Sentinel Guy was a quick flash of blue out of the corner of my eye. Maybe it was him, maybe it wasn't. I've never been sure. I might've seen his back once as he walked away?but who knows?
The fact that I've never seen Sentinel Guy has left him with an almost mythical status in my head, much like the Lake Champlain Monster, the Loveland Frog, the Beast of Bogdin Moor or Jesus. The greater my frustration, the larger the myth becomes.
I've reached the point, in fact, where I'm expecting?when I do finally spot him?to see the Amazing Colossal Man, or Yog, instead of some bitter, drunken horseplayer with an unfortunate tumorous growth on his nose. Sadly, I have the sinking suspicion that finally seeing?even meeting?Sentinel Guy will ultimately be as disappointing as the time I met Bigfoot.