The Stud Fee
A marble-floored veterinary genetics lab in Lexington, Kentucky at 9:04 PM, where a centrifuge is humming beside a cryo tank labeled PARLIAMENT — GALWAY LINE and a bill for $87,000 is taped to the refrigerator door.
Six months after selling Parliament to the Dubai syndicate, Double and Bust have received a call: Parliament's first crop of foals are showing 'unprecedented bite force metrics' and the syndicate wants to license the genetic line for a new program breeding ultra-aggressive polo ponies for the Saudi league. The licensing deal is worth $340,000 — but only if Double and Bust sign over the residual breeding royalties they negotiated in the original sale, a clause Bust insisted on that currently pays them $1,900 a month. The syndicate's geneticist, Dr. Khari, says the royalties will 'almost certainly' increase to $6,000 monthly once the polo program launches, but she also just accidentally revealed that Parliament bit through a titanium feed bucket last Tuesday.
“They're breeding ATTACK POLO PONIES, Bust. We got in on the ground floor of a sport that doesn't exist yet. Take the three-forty and let's ride.”
“We have a guaranteed income stream from a horse that eats metal, and you want to trade it for a lump sum based on a sport where the horses bite each other on purpose?”
The Saudi Ultra-Polo League lasted exactly one exhibition match before Parliament's son, Filibuster, bit through the mallet of a prince's nephew on live television, triggering an international incident and the immediate dissolution of the syndicate's breeding program. The $340,000 was clawed back from everyone who took it, while Double and Bust's royalty clause — tied to Parliament's conventional stud fees, not the polo program — quietly ticked up to $4,200 a month after Parliament's bloodline became infamous and every eccentric billionaire on earth wanted a foal that could eat titanium.
We should've taken the money AND bet on the prince's nephew getting bit — that's a parlay, Bust, we left money on the table.
Our retirement fund is a horse that commits assault, and somehow that's the most stable investment I've ever made.