Two Things About Living in Romeoville, Illinois
#1
I used to work at a bar/liquor store called The Carousel.
It was in Romeoville, Illinois — a Chicago suburb.
I worked in the back area, stocking the coolers.
Sometimes I’d have to go out into the bar to hook up kegs or clean the bathrooms too.
There was a bartender there named Robin.
She was in her fifties.
The guy who got me the job at the bar — Carmen — he told me Robin was in some porno movies.
He wanted to prove it to me even though I didn’t say I doubted him.
So one day after work, me and him went across the street to a small supermarket.
There was a bagger who worked there and he collected porn.
He was the one who told Carmen about the porno.
A few days later the grocery bagger guy brought the movie over to the bar and gave it to me and Carmen in the back area, where trucks delivered alcohol.
Carmen said thanks and took a small bag of cocaine out of his pocket, smashed a little rock on the top of a broken down refrigerator in the back area.
The guy sniffed the cocaine and left through the backdoor.
After work, I went to Carmen’s house in town to watch the movie.
The movie opened with a young Robin lying in bed.
She was wearing a red “sexy” lingerie thing and the bed was in a large, open, unfurnitured room.
It panned away from her in bed, to the window.
In the window, there were two guys looking in.
They were dressed like trainrobbers from an old movie.
They had robber-masks on and were talking in secret.
They crept into the room and walked up to where Robin was pretending to sleep.
She woke up and looked at them.
She put her hand to her mouth and said, “Oh no, am I being robbed.”
Carmen said, “She looks really young.”
“She looks good,” I said.
Then the movie cut to a shot of her on her knees with both the robbers’ dicks in her face.
She started jerking both the dicks off — fingernails on her hands, red and long.
When the dicks were hard she put them both in her mouth.
Then she took one out and kept one in, pushing her mouth all the way up against the guy’s pubes.
“Yeah she looks really young,” I said. “Her butt looks the same.”
“Yeah it looks weird,” he said.
“No I meant I like how it looks. Big hips.”
Carmen cleared his throat and said, “Oh.”
Something else was happening in the porno, but I was thinking about gnawing on Robin’s hips.
Only, in the thought, I didn’t have any teeth, I was gnawing with my gums.
Carmen said, “That guy at the supermarket said her husband made her do pornos. He said he knew her husband and he’d make her do it because he didn’t work. I guess if you mention it to her, she gets pissed.”
“Robin’s nice,” I said. “She always tips me more than the other bartenders.”
He cleared his throat. “Yeah.”
I watched Robin getting fucked in the ass and mouth at the same time.
I said, “Hey I pissed in the Bloody Mary Mix a couple days ago.”
“Yeah?”
“Ha, yeah. This one guy at the bar called me a faggot because I had a pink shirt on I think. So I took my plastic thing of juice into the bathroom and emptied it then pissed in it and when I made the Bloody Mary Mix I dumped it in, because the guy who called me a faggot, I know that’s his drink.”
“Cool,” he said. “I think I’m going to make a porno too, man.”
I watched Robin have sex with two guys and I thought about the guy who called me a faggot, drinking my piss.
Working at the bar wasn’t that bad.
They paid me in cash and I found what became one of my favorite shirts in a garbage bag in the backroom, for some clothing charity.
It was blue (the shirt).
Not too long after that, I had nowhere to live so Carmen let me move in.
I lived in the basement.
The other people who lived in the house were rarely there.
One was a masseuse.
One was studying to be a pilot at the college the next town over.
And random other people on and off for a few weeks at a time, who I really didn’t know.
Carmen and I didn’t get along.
As people, we were not amazing.
He was someone who always had to have someone else around to whine to, and I was someone who was whined to because as a person, I was someone who didn’t care what was happening.
Carmen didn’t like me because a few years earlier, he was going to a college close by (the same college as the pilot guy, Lewis University) and I went to visit one night and got him expelled from the school.
After he got expelled he started working full-time at the bar.
Then he got me a job too, not because he liked me but because he knew then I could move in and listen to him whine.
To pay rent, we worked at the bar, sold cocaine and stole a lot of alcohol from the bar and sold it to people around the town, mostly kids Carmen knew from the college.
We made seven thousand dollars the first two months, not including our paychecks.
We just lived and didn’t really do anything, didn’t try either.
Carmen had a nine millimeter pistol at the house.
He bought it off someone at the bar.
He said he was going to sell it for more.
It was shitty.
It was heavy and black with the serial number filed off and the front of it was all chipped and damaged.
He kept it in a sock in his closet.
One day when neither of us had work, we took the gun and drove out to a quarry nearby.
We only had one clip.
I shot it three times fast into the quarry then handed it to Carmen.
Carmen shot the rest of the clip, single shots with long pauses.
Then we got back into his car and returned to the house and ignored each other the rest of the day.
He never sold the gun because it got stolen during a 4th of July party we had.
The night after that same 4th of July party, Carmen was in the basement standing over my bed.
“Hey man, come upstairs I want to show you something,” he said.
There was still some shaving cream around his earlobe and his hair was slicked back and wet from a shower.
I stretched out over my twisted blankets and looked up through the window-well.
I’d slept all day.
The basement was quiet and dry and Carmen looked dead.
He sat on a cardboard box of mine, filled with books.
I slowly woke up and got out of bed.
There was a huge bruise and cut on my knee and I didn’t know why.
We went upstairs and I poured myself some cereal before we went down the hall to his room.
“I made a porno,” he said.
He was bent down by his vcr.
I ate a spoonful of cereal. “I get to see you naked.”
“You bet,” he said, taking a remote control off the top of the vcr and getting into his bed.
“Awesome,” I said. “I can’t wait to see you naked. I want to see your dick.”
I sat on the floor and ate the cereal.
My stomach felt carpeted and wrinkled.
The video opened with Carmen walking away from the camera, in his room.
The room was a blue that was almost black.
I checked the video, then the room, and gathered the camera was positioned on his bookshelf, hidden by some laundry.
Carmen had a bunch of other stuff on his bookshelf too.
Trophies from little league and what looked like a basketball trophy and a picture frame that said “Boyfriend” all over it with inspirational quotes.