Track Conditions

by Klein, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780892552252
• ISBN10: 0892552255
• Edition: 00
• Format: Hardcover
• Publisher: PERSEA

Summary

In 1979, Michael Klein, an aspiring singer/songwriter living in New York City, was broke, friendless, and drinking too much. When his lover, Richard, left him to work on a race track, Klein followed, and so began his extraordinary five-year sojourn on tracks in Ohio, New York, Florida, and finally Kentucky. At the 110th running of the Kentucky Derby, where he was groom to the winning horse, Klein was led from the winner's circle into the center of a tragic mystery, and then into a new life. "The race track put me in a kind of awe...It was a world inside a world...a labyrinth of luck, into and out of which the horses I walked every day were leading me". Among dissolute hired hands, in shedrows and tack rooms where men who care for horses also have sex, and in smoky after-hours bars, Klein tries to stop drinking, but can't; he tries to stay with Richard, but can't. He begins to have a recurring dream, strangely prophetic: a horse appearing as Richard disappears. And he revisits his past: his step-father introducing him to gambling and sex; his mother's sudden death. Then the dreamed-of horse arrives.

Table of Contents

One Runaway Groom	3	(6)
Two New Rules	9	(10)
Three The Labyrinth of Luck	19	(8)
Four First Race, First Dream	27	(6)
Five After the First Death	33	(8)
Six Second Dream	41	(12)
Seven Stars	53	(16)
Eight Spoils of War	69	(16)
Nine Dead Dogs and Thrown Riders	85	(16)
Ten Teachers	101	(2)
Eleven Aiken Breezes	103	(8)
Twelve Swale	111	(6)
Thirteen Swale's Heart	117	(12)
Fourteen Swale in Mind	129	(16)
Fifteen Swale in Time	145	(12)
Sixteen In Swale Time	157	(12)
Seventeen No Horses	169	(4)
Eighteen Merton's Fan	173