26 Years Online
••• The International Writers Magazine - American Dreams

How does it feel? • kab So, pretty girl, what does making America great again mean?

Once upon a time a call cost a dime. For that we could also get a Coke or Milky Way. In those days we would saunter down the street and Howl at the girls while our fathers laughed, “watch yourselves boy’s, they’re the wolves and you’re the prey.” Our band of jugglers and clowns trounced the streets like the merry pranksters charged up on Panama Red and spiked milkshakes. Cat-calling the girls didn’t cost us a dime but while we were in our prime and ready to take over a world that we saw as foul, full of pain, and being run by slime, those girls took our blood and souls and left us begging for Gethsemane.

You and your greaser boy toy would throw the bums in the park a penny or two, never a dime. You were dressed to kill, to the nines, a stiletto in high heals. Beware doll, that’s what people would say. Tasteless and crass, bright bold red, green, and yellow, your torpedoes were loaded, and we thought of you as more glass than flesh. But you didn’t care. 

I don’t declare we understood the world, nay the universe. Us hometown kids who would hang at the corner store sharing drags on Camels and pissing in the alley didn’t give a shit about understanding. For kicks we would cop a Mars bar and give it to Audrey’s little brother. We’d try to give her a dime for a blow, but she’d do it just to watch the show. It was a laugh and a cry, but nobody gave a crap. Audrey’s cackling laugh as Cal dropped his shorts and strut around like a rooster showing its nobility brought us to tears. Those cavorts would stick in our gut and we would shake our heads at the improbability. Cal would poke her bombers, and she would slap his ass, and we heard they later hooked up and got serious. But that was summer in our carefree days when we no longer were interested in playing with Barbie’s and GI Joe’s. We were learning to play with each other. 

Perhaps you think we’re kiddin’ you and you may just laugh about it, but we were just hangin’ out. It was summer blasting and night carousing escapades watching the pub crawlers upchuck into chained up trash bins then rollin’ in the grass of the meadow. You would sit on the park bench waiting for Lancelot thinking high and mighty and tellin’ us we were sewer rats and wolves. Your bright red shoes sparkled in the lamplight, but you were just hoping to get a good f***, just like everyone else.

Where are you now? we asked on a recent winter morning waiting for the bus to arrive as we shivered dreaming about a full moon summer evening snatching a quick one in the bushes behind the boathouse in the dim light of broken street lamps where shadows from passing taxis’ strobed  and we briefly saw the ecstasy on our partners face. While you used to get juiced up and hid in the shadows as your head was blown to, well you know, turn on, tune in, drop out, we mooned the cops patrolling the park looking for whatever the fuck they were in the mood for. Sometimes they would laugh at us and yell their own obscenities, sometimes they would mock us and give us the finger, and sometimes they would chase us into the woods yelling they knew who we were, and they were going to squeal to our parents. Like they gave a fuck.

Are you scrounging for your next meal? Are you without a home? Have you become a complete unknown?

Dean rolled around on the sidewalk pissed as a rocker and about to get slammed by coppers who only wanted to keep people in their living rooms watching Ed Sullivan when being perverted meant thinking about fucking my sister, and the Beatles gave you an orgasm better than I ever could have. Yeah, like she would let me touch her panties. That was the South for you and our dirty little secrets you held as your dad watched you get undressed at night. I was better off next door with Dannies mother who like to touch me with a twinkle in her eye. She would give me long hugs squeezing her chest into my face, making me walk off hard as a hammer.

So, pretty girl, what does making America great again mean? Is it James Dean covered in Texas oil, Easy Rider doing a drug run on Route 66, little John-John holding JFK's hand, Mrs. Robinson beguiling Ben, or is it watching our neighbor's wife undress from my bedroom window with my father's binoculars? I think she looks right at me and smiles. Then she turns as her husband grabs her, but her eyes stay locked on me as they fall from view. Perhaps it means going back to the days of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling, the Marx Brothers reaping havoc, and Clara Bow catching the eye of Prince Charming. Those were all in fun and innocent in their way. But behind the boardroom doors it was all about raking in gobs of money and learning how to manipulate the masses. Today the media know how to pull our strings and make us dance. Just suggest the victim was not God fearing and they quickly get the blame. Even suggest they were in some way weak, and we will be convinced they deserved it, whatever it was. 

You might ask what this is all about. You, who's gone to the finest schools only to end up on the floor begging for a better deal. You crashed on our street hoping to do tricks, selling alibis while staring into vacant eyes. Life is about feeling or trying not to feel. Some seek absolute pleasure while others want nothing that is real. They search for the potion that makes her grow and then shrink for how else could she break that seal? But life isn’t neat and tidy. It isn’t clean. I stand naked in front of my window wondering about that unspoken agreement. I can see her standing in her underwear, as she slowly lets her bra fall from her chest. I’m in the dark, she is unaware, yet why does she leave her blinds open?

You used to let other people get their kicks for you. Then you discovered where it’s at while left with nothing but the cloths on your back and the only thing left to sell was your vanity.

How does it feel? 

How does it feel?

There’s your man parking his van as you make your plan and you both think you got it made. Drinkin’ and thinkin’ and trying to look pretty, you got the goods but it’s a fool who’ll play your game. We used to get our kicks in the concrete jungle while junkies shot themselves deadbeat jumbles looking like they had nothing to lose. TV evangelists, the popes of America, were selling more than salvation. They were peddling more than holy booze. The junkies were expendable but us punks were the ticket for them to line their pockets while they hypnotized living room pews. There’s a world out there that won’t refuse to accept the gifts of Jesus and his goons. You were going to the moon and were sure of a holy boon. But those are the kinds of gifts you couldn’t pawn in a saloon. Today the popes will sell you a rag and call it a diamond ring, letting the MAGA faithful with their AR-15’s and cruising in their Ford F’s to find a new way to fuck you. They no longer distinguish the denominations, as long as you’re in the cult and worship the new Messiah of The Deal.

We grew up, as odd as that sounds, and have taken the streets to the office and learned to fuck over people in the legal way. Your secrets are out and if you think you’re invisible, it’s only because nobody really gives a hey. What we’ve got is nothing, really. We play the game, just as Hunter did in LA and Jack did with Moriarty. The American Dream isn’t a house in the burbs with two kids and a dog. It’s in Sin City where you learn to take as much as you can and to hell with the rest of the world. We don’t care if the world is heating up. We cheer it on since it means our portfolios are growing and it increases the value of real estate in fucking Greenland. We don’t care if faith is no longer about loving your brother because winning is what it’s all about. 

I’ve news for you; the world isn’t what it was yesterday and again, the times they are a-changin’. God blessed America and the Devils in the details. If you think you’re winnin’, well I hate to break it to ya, there are no winner’s when the cool-aid you’re drinking is Hydroxychloroquine.

© kab September 2025

kab writes, plays, and works in New York City and Long Island.
You may contact kab at: kab.sbli at gmail.com

Mad and starving I watch the starry dynamo in the machinery of Night
• KAB

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