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Track Conditions : A Memoir by Michael Klein β€” book cover

Track Conditions : A Memoir

by Michael Klein
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Overview

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.

About the Author, Michael Klein

Michael Klein is an award-winning poet and author. His poetry collections 1990 and Poets for Life are winners of the Lambda Literary Book Award. He lives in New York City and teaches memoir writing in the summer program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

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Book Details

Published
May 1, 1998
Publisher
Ballantine Books (P)
Pages
192
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780345423832

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