Tommy the Turtle is having a bad day. His horses are running slow and his money is going fast.

The Turtle, who gets his name from his bug eyes, huge black-framed glasses, and slightly pointy face, has to make a decision. Standing in the middle of an Off-Track Betting parlor on Court Street in Brooklyn, his eyes dart from television screen to television screen. Each is tuned to a different track across the country; each just a few minutes from a race.

On one screen, it’s two minutes to post time for the sixth race at Belmont; on another, it is nine minutes to post for the seventh at Calder, and a third shows 28 minutes to the start of the eighth at Finger Lakes.

He flips through his $2 betting program, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth and a straight-brimmed blue baseball cap pushed back on his head. The Turtle can’t decide which race to play, so he does the only practical thing: He bets on all three.

The Turtle and the other regulars who populate the OTB shop – Mike the Bus Driver, Jonesie, Freddie the Philosopher, and Red Hook Richie – are the flip side of what A.J. Liebling used to call Telephone Booth Indians. But instead of inventing any manner of tricks to make a dollar, the Pony Parlor Poorboys seem bent on spending every cent on any horse running anywhere.

The city’s OTB parlors are day-care centers for the old, the unemployed, the ne’er do-well, or the small-time bettor who bets a little and loses a lot while cursing the jockeys, the horses, and their bad luck. It gets them out of the house, away from their wives or their loneliness, and gives them something to do.

Once, OTB was the only bookie joint in the world that lost money. Now, with simulcasting and lots of automated betting machines, OTB is profitable, handling more than $1 billion a year in wagers and taking some 1.5 million bets every day.

They’ve actually used some of the money to build bathrooms, so their customers don’t have to keep running into a nearby bar or, worse yet, go home early. They’ve also put in pay phones, which some of the smarter Poorboys use to place bets with their bookies or with a telephone betting account to avoid the much-hated OTB Tax – a 6% surcharge on winning bets.

None of this is on the minds of the Turtle or the Poorboys as they search for the horse that will send them home a winner, jokingly berate one another, and chatter about everything from horses and women to taxes and politics.

With less than a minute to post at Belmont, the Turtle walks through the sea of losing tickets on the floor to a betting window. He places $1 trifecta bets combining the 6 horse with the 1, 3, and 4, and $1 exacta boxes of the 6, 1, 4, and the 6, 3, 4.

This costs him $16, and he hurries back to one of the TV sets as the horses spring from the gate. His key horse, the one that topped the trifecta bets – in which you must pick the first three horses – is the 6, also known as Russian Sweetiepie. For Tommy to hit the trifecta, Russian Sweetiepie must finish first. For the exacta, two of the three must finish first and second. As often happens with the Turtle’s horses, Sweetiepie breaks slowly, gets trapped on the rail, and doesn’t make a move until the horses swing for home.

“C’mon, Sweetiepie, c’mon, Sweetiepie,” the Turtle pleads, his voice lost in a chorus of cheering for various horses. “C’mon,” the Turtle tries once more, his voice getting softer as it becomes clear it isn’t Sweetiepie’s day. She finishes second and his other horses do even worse. The 5 horse – improbably named Everybottiwins – wins the race, and Tommy’s crumpled tickets soon hit the floor.

“Everybottiwins and everybody loses,” one smart aleck says as the horses run under the wire and Tommy curses Johnny Velazquez, the jockey who rode Russian Sweetiepie.

Five minutes later, the Turtle pushes through another $16 on various combinations of the 5 horse with the 1, 7, and 8 in the seventh at Calder, followed by another $16 on the 3 horse, with the 1, 5, and 8 in the eighth at Finger Lakes.

While waiting for the races to go off, the regulars engage in banter on every topic imaginable.

On horses: “I like the fast ones,” says Jonesie, a skinny man in his 60s who combs what’s left of his hair forward to cover his long-ago-receded hairline. “You know, the ones that break out so fast they go in the front every time. But then they quit; they don’t win, they lose. And the ones that come from behind, they get stuck in traffic.”

On taxes: “You can’t beat this game,” says Freddie the Philosopher. “They take out roughly 25 cents on the dollar for the track and the taxes before the gate opens. They win; you lose.”

On gun control: “It’s a statistical fact that doctors are 10 times more likely to kill you than a gun,” the Philosopher says. “They want to abolish guns. They ought to abolish doctors.”

“Okay, enough,” the Turtle says, as the gates open for the seventh at Calder. The Turtle’s key horse, the 5, Mystical Beauty, chases the leaders from mid-pack, gets as close as third, but then fades to fifth. Another $16 gone. A few minutes later, it’s the same story at Finger Lakes, where the Turtle’s top horse never gets close.

“Bah,” the Turtle says, flinging the tickets to the floor.

“Jeez,” grumbles Mike the Truck Driver, who did no better; his horses finishing second, third, and fourth. “Second, third, and fourth, that’s the story of my freakin’ life.”

The Turtle heads for the door; not to go home, but to finally light his cigarette and try to regroup.

“Hey, Tommy,” one of the wiseguys yells, pointing out the window at an armored truck that had just made a pickup at the parlor. “There goes your truck. Look, it’s taking your money away.”