Sam Pink - Hurt Others

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 4 thof July party we had.

The night after that same 4 thof 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.

In the photo, he and some old girlfriend smiled — their greasy faces idiotic with hope that the picture would one day remind them that for three seconds they acted happy and thought it final.

“Hey have you thought of a name yet,” I asked.

He turned and hung over the side of his bed facing me.

“What.”

“A name. For the movie.”

“No, I haven’t thought about it.”

I set the bowl down and put my elbows over my propped knees — then held my left wrist with my right hand. I said, “How about, Carmen Hopefully Doesn’t Reproduce Himself.”

He laughed.

“No wait I wasn’t finished,” I said. “It’s Carmen Hopefully Doesn’t Reproduce Himself, Because That Would Suck Because He’s An Asshole.”

“Sounds good,” he said. “I like it.”

“Nice soccer trophies by the way,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You should’ve put the camera on the other side of the room so people could totally see your trophies,” I said. “That’d make the whole thing so much more awesome. That way they could be like, oh man, and trophies.”

“They wouldn’t shine the right way in video, I think,” he said. Then he coughed once, loudly, and went, “ehh” to clear his throat.

“What are the trophies for, is that soccer.”

“Baseball,” he said. “Pretty much everyone on the team got one, if they showed up to the last practice and stuff.’”

In the video Carmen and a girl came back into the room.

They talked on his bed for a little bit and then Carmen started taking her clothes off.

The girl in the video wore a blue bra.

Carmen took it off her as she lay face down on his bed.

Both of their faces were poorly lit and there were circles around their eyes.

She laughed at something and pushed her hair back, folding her arms underneath her chin.

He took off his clothes and rubbed her ass with both his hands.

Then he put his dick in her from behind.

She looked behind her, eyes closed.

There was no sound in the video.

He said something in the movie, but it was soundless.

“Nice moves man,” I said. “I totally would’ve done that if I were filming myself having sex with someone and then knew I was going to show it to my roommate.”

“Yeah man,” he said.

In the video, the girl had her face down in the pillow and her hair was all over and it looked like her head had melted then froze.

Carmen cleared his throat and rewound part of the movie. “I wish I could draw on the screen like a sports broadcaster,” he said, lying back down. “Right here, I make the ‘West-side’ sign, see.”

In the video, he made the ‘West-side’ gangsign, looking at the camera.

I surveyed the trophies on his bookshelf.

Besides the trophies, there was also an old map of Illinois folded up on the bookshelf and some crossword/wordsearch puzzle books. And three volumes of an encyclopedia — the complete E and W and Br-Ch.

“Be right back I have to use the bathroom,” he said.

He went to the bathroom.

My stomach made sloshing sounds.

The video was paused — the girl’s head in the pillow and his hand on the back of her head.

She lay face down in her hair.

I was reminded for some reason that a long time ago I seemed to put off thinking about things and said I would come back to them, but never really caught up.

In the video Carmen was facing the camera — his mouth open as if screaming, “No.”

Static widened his face and the hole of his mouth, brushed them across the screen.

The video was paused in-between frames, and they flipped back and forth.

Blending.

Carmen’s open mouth and half-open eyes occupied two areas on his skull.

They whirred fast enough to almost glow.