Category: Gay/Lesbian/Bi Publisher: Borders Personal Publishing
ISBN-10: 1605520047
Type: Fiction
Pages: 212
Copyright: May 2003
ISBN-13: 9781605520049
Reality Strikes My Dreams is the story of Harry Brown who has always known from the time in first grade during the air-raid drill, to the name calling in junior high, he's different. What follows is a story of training racehorses, love affairs, persecution from the racing commission and a growing self-awareness that leads him to stop hiding and rebel against an environment where being different was more obvious then ever before.
Excerpt
Chapter 1 It's September 1979; we had just celebrated Labor Day. I remember that because the races at the state fair ended on that day and I had gotten my trainer's license the month before. I was a groom for a trainer who had stalls at the fair so I just walked down to the steward's office one morning after I got my work done and told them I wanted to take the trainers test. They all sat behind gray metal desks in a room painted pea soup green with dirty beige carpet on the floor and looked at me kind of strange, cause they had never seen me before cause I was new, not new to the racetrack but new to going into the racing offices; never gone there cause I was afraid to talk to people, ‘cause I stutter especially when I'm scared, and going into those offices scared me... I worried most of the night and kind of half ass did my work the next morning. My boss asked me what was wrong. I told him I had taken the trainer's test. He shook his head. The exercise boy and foreman Donald heard what I said and laughed and went and told the other groom Vicki, who was his girlfriend. Both of them looked at me, pointed their fingers and said, “Little faggot… Albert Ferguson Esq. motioned me over to the chair alongside his desk... “You got the highest score anybody has ever achieved on their written test, a 98. But that still didn't mean you passed. Any smart kid like you could memorize a condition book. You had to have done as well on the barn test, not just gone through the motions, but really showed that you knew your stuff. So I checked with Charlie Phelps to see if he thought you'd be all right to train a racehorse.” The smirk changed to a frown and I thought for sure he was gonna flunk me. “Seems he's stabled in the barn with you and told me about how conscientious you are and how the guy you work for keeps on promoting you and how the other grooms don't like you because of it. I hope that's the only reason they don't like you,” he says as he gives me the once over. I shook Albert Ferguson Esq.'s hand just 'cause I thought it was polite to do so. I really didn't want to. There was something about him I didn't like...
