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bites at your neck and pokes its dirty little fingers in your eyes. You keep feeding it, but instead of leaving the monkey only gets bigger and bigger and you get weaker. You can’t hear the people around you, the people who care, for all the chattering and screaming the monkey does. It becomes your life, and even though you hate it, you keep feeding it, even when it craps all over you. Eventually it kills you. The monkey.” Danny didn’t like the graphic way his father talked about his alcoholism: it always gave him the chills.
    “So what about the monkey now?” Danny asked on the ride home.
    “If it doesn’t kill you, you stop feeding it. It sits there on your shoulder and you starve it. Stop giving it what it wants. It gets quiet, stops its chattering. But you have to tell yourself that it never really goes away. It’s going to be perched on my shoulder as long as I live, which is just as well, because it’s a reminder of what I need to do for myself and my family. And that’s to not drink .”
    Danny felt a chill again, remembering the incident.
    Also on the corkboard was a postcard of the Tampa Greyhound Track. “Greetings from Tampa, Florida, home of the country’s top greyhounds.” The photograph was of a mass of dogs, bursting around the curve of the track, a wave of green, red, and yellow jackets. Danny could see the power in their stride, and thought of Long Shot’s grace and speed.
    “Tampa was quite a time in my life,” Jack said, startling Danny who hadn’t heard his footsteps on the stairs. He looked at his father’s face. Jack coughed, his skin looked ashy, and the lines on his face were etched more deeply into his skin than Danny remembered. He tapped the postcard on the corkboard. “The track was full of characters. There was this one guy, Renaldo, who was from the Bahamas. He hung around the track, from open until close. Wore a flowered shirt, and Bermuda shorts and sandals. He would win, and buy everyone drinks, and sometimes he would bring a lady with him, and buy her dinner. And when he lost, he would stand by the rail, spindling his program into a hard weapon, and then tap the rail with it, tap-tap-tap . Like he was waiting for things to change. I’d watch Renaldo and others, like the security guard, Langston, in his crisp blue uniform. He had a thing for Maggie, the girl who sold tickets and handed out little American flags at the front. Langston was ripped — big, tight muscles that stretched against his blue cotton shirt. Always had a smile on his face, even when he was throwing out an unruly customer. And Jennifer behind the counter, who served up roast beef sandwiches and thick potato wedges. Jennifer had come all the way from Washington State to be in Tampa, ‘to be in a place where the sun shines all the time.’ And my best buddy, Jake, who spent time on the streets of San Diego. An uncle sent him to Florida to work on a cousin’s fishing boat, paid for Jake’s trip on a Greyhound bus. Jake worked part of the time at the track, part of the time on the boat. Eventually he bought his own boat. All of these people were in transition. Even as they stayed in one place, they were still changing, the world was changing around them, and around me.”
    “Why did you come back?” Danny asked.
    “There was no ‘back’ to come to, really.” Jack sat down in a swivel chair and rested his elbow on the desk. “I was going there to get away from a tough situation at home. I worked hard and saved money, and even though there are temptations to spend it everywhere, I scraped my money together then moved north, went to college, and studied advertising. It was looking at these people, good people they were too, but seeing a bit of me in them, and knowing that at some point the race is finished, and where do you go from there? After a while, I knew it was time for me to leave.”
    His father paused. “You seem edgy, Danny. Everything ok?”
    “I just don’t know what I have to feel