She was mud sliding across the infield at the Kentucky Derby in her American flag bikini. It had been raining that day and turned the ground to a mix of mud and shit, what percentage I couldn’t say was what. It was near the port o’ potties. But she seemed to be having a great time. She wasn’t young, maybe forty if I had to guess. I’d lost the gal I came with, but it had been an awkward sort of date anyways. She had these cut across bangs all at the same level with silver streaks running through her hair. Funny bitch, that’s for sure.

We looked up at the stands, funny bangs girl and I, where all the fancy people were drinking their fucking mint julips with their fancy hats sticking out and placing money at the booths. I liked the immediateness of knowing whether you won or lost. Taking your cash up to the booth and telling them what you wanted. Them telling you that wasn’t a thing and telling you what you were trying to do instead. And you saying, sure that’s fine, I don’t quite know how to do this, and them being real used to sloshed ass people coming up and having to explain things in the simplest way possible. Then after you placed your bet, you could go back and look at the horses, so tall their gleaming backs, the beauty, and they could stomple you near to death if they wanted to, except they had ‘em all under control, the stable boys, or the jockeys, I don’t know the names for what the things people do back there are. I figured I’d wasted enough time and money and went back to look for funny bangs girl and that’s how I ended up watching slip and slide bikini lady hit the bump and take a dive through the crocodile mile of drunken former frat boys’ cheers. I kept moving in and out amongst the crowd to where my funny bangs girl had been before. She could tell a story about an abortion and make you laugh, one time where she shoved a giant wand up her cooch and they had to disinfect the whole thing and I laughed a lot from the way she told it, though I didn’t quite understand what procedure she was there for exactly. I shoulda brought her back a hot chocolate. Said she didn’t want anything when I left her. There was other people there with little pickles and shit I call whore ‘derves on account of the fancy sluts that was eating ‘em, but I was distracted by all the hats and ribbons and tassels and I had taken my coat off and suddenly felt myself swinging it in the air hollering loud, a shrieking rebel yell. The Chads had all shed their vests and were carousing in the sloppy broth. I saw a girl pull her friend’s lavender hat out of the way just in time for her to hurl. She stroked the brunette’s ear gently and whispered that one day she’d be up in the seats with the real bankers, but for today they should probably be done drinking.

The whiskey-glazed breath of the man next to me kept insisting that I had to try a Hot Brown. I asked was that like a Cleveland Steamer? And he got real red in the face and offended at the suggestion. It’s a dessert they have. You have to get it at some hotel that closed down. They don’t sell it at the racetrack, which doesn’t make any goddamn sense because if that’s what you’re known for as a town culinary-wise, why wouldn’t you sell it at your most famous horse racing event? Just then I saw my funny bangs girl and remembered her name, it was Quinn, which was an odd boy/girl sort of name, but as I looked up and saw the jockey getting covered in a rose blanket on TV, and the owner next to him with his face tanned from all the steroids he was shooting up the horses ass I guess, they said its name. Built for Pleasure they said, and Quinn started slapping her knee like that was the goofiest shit she ever heard. American flag bikini was getting carried off by a simian strongman who promised her some beers, and it was right then that Quinn looked up and saw me, smiled and screamed BUILT FOR PLEASURE, can you believe it? Built for pleasure! She said, “We won seventy-two dollars!” She was the only one that bet on anything, but what the hell, I like to feel like a winner too. It wasn’t a trifecta or nothing, but it sure beats laying slop down outside the port o’ potty, your tits covered in mud, and your ass in the air and nothing but freedom around you, everyone looking at you showing your ass all the way from the start to the finish of my old Kentucky home smeared right across your eyelids.