This story by Andy Plattner gives us the jinx. Funny, just the other night I was at a Braves-Phillies game with my wife, and Cole Hammels had a shutout going into the bottom of the ninth. I, of course, pointed this out to my diehard-Phillies-fan-better-half, who said nothing. When the Braves scored, all she said was, “Thanks for jinxing that.”

P=. +

When I was living in Ocala, Florida, one of my off-track betting parlor buddies was Denny See, a guy with a pretty profound birth defect. His wrists were bent backwards, and his fingers were half the length they should have been. He walked with a stooped posture. But he functioned well. He could hold a Racing Form and he knew how to angle his arm so those small fingers could turn over a page. He was married, though I didn’t know this until I saw him and his wife once in a check-out line at a Publix grocery. It would have been stupid to ignore him, so I ambled over, said, “Hey there.”

“Hey,” Denny said. It was awkward. He said, “This is my wife. Honey, this is . . .”

I said my full name because I guessed he did not actually know it. Maybe she could tell I was an OTB friend. She was lanky and tall and ruddy and had short blond hair. My eyes went to their cart. I was trying to find a way to make a joke, like I didn’t know you were a Blueberry Pop Tart man, Denny. They seemed to have regular items: milk, bread, potatoes. Nothing to really laugh about. Her eyes went to the basket I was carrying.

“I just buy meal to meal,” I said.

She glanced to Denny and he eased their cart back a little. She motioned for me to go ahead. “We have more,” she said.

“Thanks.” Right before I faced the cashier, I turned to Denny and his wife and he still looked uneasy, as if I was about to give something away . . . how much he’d been either winning or losing of late. “Well, take it easy,” I said.

“Oh, okay,” he said.

On my drive home, I thought about what Denny might say to his wife about me. He’s just a guy from the OTB parlor, hon. Plays long shots, doesn’t win a lot. She would picture my shopping basket and say, Obviously. Denny liked to win races—he didn’t focus on huge payoffs—so he bet favorites. He had a speed-figure system that he liked to talk about, especially after he won a race. The Ocala OTB parlor had cafeteria tables, so you were always stuck sitting with someone. There were two big rooms and built into every wall were TVs featuring races from different tracks across the country. Adjacent to the OTB was a larger brick building where horses were auctioned and beyond that was a little training track. Once in a while, when I pulled up to the parlor, I’d see a horse galloping around there, going through its paces. I never hung around to watch, though. One day I’d see that horse on a TV somewhere.

Before I moved to Ocala, I’d been warned that everyone there had a story. A gripe. I was pretty guarded. I was interested in Denny, though. Sometimes while he was intently studying his Form, turning it from page to page, I’d look at his knobby wrists. The skin on them was like elbow skin, calloused and craggy. His small palms were chubby and pink. He kept his money in his shirt pocket and he’d have to tilt to one side to work it out of there. He’d adapted. He caught me looking at him one time and it was too late for me to appear as if I was doing something else. He said, “Can I help you?” His voice was actually inquisitive.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t mean . . .”

“Forget it.”

After a while, I began to have the impression he kind of looked down on me in a way because I played long shots all the time. Once, when he was winning with everything and I wasn’t winning with anything, his attitude got to be a little too much. I tried to sound like I was joking around when I said, “Cool it, would you? Come on.” But, there was irritation in there. I couldn’t hide it.

It wasn’t like we’d got into this huge fight. In a second, he said, “All right.” He was a bit distant after that. Sometimes he even sat at a different table from me, though that might have been because someone had invited him. It was a shame I’d had that one semi-tense moment with him because the truth was I liked Denny. I thought about talking to him about it, just saying Look, that one time . . . I was just having a bad day. Not winning was wearing me out. But, I never did. I didn’t want the guy feeling sorry for me.

At the time, I had a job on a newspaper in Ocala, which lasted for a year and a half. I’d transferred there in the first place because the newspaper I had been working for in Louisville had closed its doors. A corporation owned both of these newspapers and a dozen more. When it was announced the Ocala paper was shutting down, some of the staff were offered jobs working on a website; others were offered positions with a newspaper in Houston. I’d done my work, covered the stories they’d asked me to, even if it was all community stuff. A garbage strike. A church expansion. A tax hike. I always wanted to do more but the one time I’d asked about it, the editor had looked at me like I was crazy. He’d said, This is what we have. He had some papers on his desk and he held them up. This isn’t someplace else, you know! I’d asked a simple question and he’d gotten all worked up about it. But that must have been a strike against me. The open jobs went to the non-complainers, I guessed.

After Ocala, I moved up to Cincinnati, which was where I’d gone to college, and I got a job at the Greater Cincinnati airport, working to start as a temp at an information desk. It was just inside the entrance to the Delta terminal and I watched the people arriving and departing. The person I replaced was a woman who had gone on maternity leave. After she had her baby and decided she didn’t want to come back, I kept the job. It felt like a new phase of my life was starting and it was a phase that was going to go by very quickly. I brought a Racing Form to work every day, kept it alongside the keyboard of the desktop computer. On my way home, I’d stop at the Latonia OTB parlor and drop some small bets on the late races at the West Coast tracks.

The Latonia OTB parlor was inside a prefabricated building adjacent to the empty grandstand of a racetrack that had closed a number of years earlier. The parlor must have once been used as a place where the track kept maintenance vehicles. Behind the rows of cubicles were garage doors and when the weather was nice, they’d open the doors, let in some air. The floor was concrete. A dozen rows of cubicles faced a single line of betting windows. The TVs were pretty nice, off-brand flat screens, and they were built into the wall above the betting windows. Pretty quaint on the whole, though to me it was further evidence that gamblers really had few demands.

On Saturdays, I would play at the Latonia parlor all afternoon. Someone I met there was a man who introduced himself as Hawk. Frequently, we sat in the cubicles next to one another. Sometimes, he even saved a place for me. He’d take a seat at the end of one row, set his jacket over the chair of the cubicle next to his. If I arrived first, which I sometimes did, I didn’t save a place for him. When I was there, I simply wanted to get lost in my own handicapping. He’d appear and take the open seat if there was one. We would talk for a few minutes and it almost always had to do with the big races coming up.

I ran into a little issue with Hawk and this was on one Saturday afternoon in February. By this time, I had known him for about nine months or so. On that day, he had arrived ahead of me, and when he saw me, he waved me over. I nodded to him, peeled off my jacket. Hawk was a bit overweight, had a thin mustache and pale hands and pale arms. Right after Christmas he had a big day of winning and, just caught up in the moment, Hawk handed me his business card. It said, Wayne Dammert, Accountant. There were a couple of phone numbers there. I put the card in a kitchen drawer where I kept odds and ends and I remembered once taking it from the drawer and looking at it and thinking, Right. That’s exactly what I need.

We chatted for a minute. He said I looked sleepy, a remark that did catch me off guard, and I simply decided to shrug. We chatted and I opened my Racing Form on the desk in front of me.

Hawk said, “Let’s get ’em today,” and I nodded and turned back to my Form. It was early and I was feeling things out. I had a little hit in the first race at Finger Lakes, but I was biding my time, just wanted to build up my resources for the races at Golden Gate and Santa Anita, tracks I’d been doing better at of late.

At one point, I was wondering about which horse had been scratched in the third at Laurel and I turned to Hawk. He had his eyes on the row of gamblers right ahead of us. In that row was a guy with gauzy white hair and nice-enough clothes. The guy was leaned forward, looking at his Form. He wore a blue button-down shirt, and there were a few wet-looking blood stains on the back of it. They had a greenish border, though that might have had to do with the color of the shirt. The guy had a skeletal frame and he wore glasses. I glanced around to see who else noticed. There was a thumb-long blood spot at each of the guy’s shoulder blades and then a larger one at the right side of his rib cage. The spots looked greasy and I wondered if they were spreading. I felt light-headed. The guy sat back, looked to the TV sets above the betting windows. Outside of what was happening to him, he seemed to be all right. “Bed sores?” I said and I could not tell if Hawk heard me.

“Probably escaped the hospital,” Hawk said. I nodded, but I couldn’t think what I ought to do. The OTB parlor gets you used to any and all kinds of people, but I had to admit I never had seen a guy show up at one while he was bleeding. The spots on the guy’s shirt were expanding some. He leaned back in his chair again. He couldn’t feel this? He even reached around with his bony hand and scratched near the spot at his ribs. The gamblers seated on either side of him . . . if they noticed they didn’t say anything. I decided to focus on an upcoming race, though it wasn’t easy to get back in the flow of things. Hawk’s expression was far away and helpless-looking.

“Hey, he’s all right,” I said. “He wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t.”

“Jesus,” Hawk said.

“Come on,” I said, “fourth at Calder is coming up.”

When a security man walked to the bloody-shirt guy, he was accompanied by a man in an evergreen parka. The bloody-shirt man seemed to know the man in the parka and they watched one another. The man in the parka had neatly combed hair and didn’t look unfriendly. The security man leaned down to the old guy, said something, and the old guy held up a palm and said something back. Maybe his buddies from the retirement home had called the track and said the guy was AWOL or maybe a gambler with a weak stomach had gotten concerned. The man in the parka seemed to know the score, he didn’t appear alarmed. The security man talked to the old guy and he reached for the old guy’s arm. The old guy leaned away. Then the man in the parka said something, one word I heard clearly: “Herbert.” The old guy seemed to go limp then. In another minute, he gathered up his literature. The gamblers sitting around him tried to look busy. The old guy stood on his own and followed the man in the parka away from there. A janitor appeared, wiped down the chair and desk. Hawk got up and went somewhere. Not ten minutes later, a middle-aged man, a real tub with thin red hair and a purple sweatshirt, took the place. The chair seemed small and the man didn’t have any literature, his eyes just went from one TV screen to the next. Every time I looked in his direction, he was watching the TVs. It was like he wanted to keep track of everything all at once.

“Hey,” Hawk said. He’d been back in his place for a short time. When I turned to him, I must’ve seemed preoccupied. “That was a bad beat at Aqueduct. See that?” he said.

“Uh-un.”

“I bet all my money on that race. I panicked.” This kind of talk could be a prelude for someone who was about to ask for a loan. I didn’t say anything. He said, “I’m feeling jinxed right now. What about you?”

“I’m down to practically nothing,” I said.

His shoulders were hunched forward and his head was turned in my direction. His expression suggested he could tell what I was thinking. “Lemme ask you something,” Hawk said. “What do you do when you feel unlucky? How do you handle that? Me, I’ve never figured it out.”

I said, “You mean like you wake up and know you’re not going to win but you go to the OTB anyway?” He watched me. “I try not to let that kind of thing bother me.”

“I press,” he said. “It makes me want to leave here.” Hawk was looking at me like he was superior somehow. I recognized the look; I saw it at the airport all the time.

“I can loan you fifty,” I said.

“I just told you I don’t feel lucky now.” It was up to him, I wasn’t going to say anything else. He looked straight ahead; his eyes went to the TVs. He shook his head and I decided to face forward myself. I looked to the TVs and then began to turn the pages of my Racing Form. At some point, Hawk stood and when he did, he took his jacket off the back of his chair. I didn’t glance in his direction and I knew he wasn’t mad at me. He walked off without a word. I imagined him thinking, Thank Christ I’m not that guy. I looked at some people and thought the same thing. I hoped that when I saw him again he wouldn’t have that superior look, the kind of look that said he knew something I didn’t. Anyway, I didn’t feel unlucky. When I did, the last thing I wanted to do was to sit around and worry about it.

+