Track conditions
Subtitle: a memoir
By: Michael Klein.
Publisher: Persea Books
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 178
Subjects: Klein, Michael, 1954 Aug. 17-; Poets, American -- 20th century -- Biography.; Racetracks (Horse racing) -- United States.; Gay men -- United States -- Biography.; Race horses -- Grooming.
Description: 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.