Shitholes has, of late, entered the curled stage of a paperback’s life, lending itself to the ass pockets of tired jeans. It ages well, looking less like a serial romance or gas station horror, more like the sturdy manual to some gray machine. Sun-faded, water-worn, and dirty, I shake it occasionally to find discarded dollars, receipts, and notes that I’ve written myself but forgotten. The notes read like a concerned mother: ‘don’t forget to water the fern,’ ‘buy sunblock, batteries,’ ‘call home.’
Sometimes, on the backs of these notes, I find words of encouragement. Other times, I find derision. Good or bad, I read them and then throw them away and start over. My system of bookmarking Shitholes needs work, in that regard. At some point too many bookmarks is the same as none at all.
I find a stick of gum in my pocket and I chew it into shards and eventually into mash. I write, on the wrapper, ‘use fewer bookmarks,’ and I flip through Shitholes until I find the entry I’m looking for.
“Have you, reader, ever considered the curtain? A piece of cloth, a veil, to obscure or cordon off, the curtain, I put forth, is more metaphor than reality. Consider the example at hand: ‘The Tape Hub,’ an independently owned video rental store, the last of a dying business. More specifically, consider the room to the right of Comedy, unsigned and… curtained.
The small gaps on either side provide the narrowest of glances, a flash of color, old carpet, dim lights. The curtain provides no physical barrier and it offers no instruction. The only thing required to pass through a curtain is a willingness to see what is on the other side.”
“You can’t just read in here, sir.”
I startle at the voice, the high, nasal tones of a teenager.
“I was trying to remember the name of a movie,” I tell her, “Is remembering allowed?”
“Do you have a membership?”
“Not yet.”
“You need to start one before you can rent.”
“I want to make sure you have the movie I’m looking for, first.”
“What’s the name of the movie?”
“I’m still trying to remember.”
She knows, somehow, that I’m lying but leaves me to my browsing and I pocket Shitholes in an attempt to meet her halfway.
I was done reading anyway.
The problem I face currently is that there is no curtain to the right of Comedy, no curtain anywhere in the store, as far as I can tell. I’m not naïve to the sort of set-up Shitholes describes, we’re talking about the porn section, the guiltiest room in small-town America. Well, a decade ago maybe. The internet has brought our guilt back to the bedroom, as god intended. If video shops are a dying breed then porno-closets are their vestigial appendages and I’m starting to think ‘The Tape Hub’ gnawed off its own some time ago.
That is, until I notice marks in the carpet. The place has seen a poor man’s renovating and shelves have been moved. I take a look around with fresh eyes and eventually I spot the curtain- behind the counter. The girl from before has re-stationed herself there and she watches me with an amount of boredom.
“Remember that movie?” she asks.
“No,” I tell her, making as if to browse the end displays on my way to the counter, “I was actually in here a long time ago…” I lie, “And I feel like things have moved around.”
“I’ve worked here for three months.”
“You didn’t come in before that?”
“I don’t rent movies from here now,” she says, “And I could do it for free.”
“Is that curtain, there,” I point, “Open to customers?”
“You want a tan, dude?”
“There are tanning beds back there?”
“Yes.”
“Uh…” shit, this has gone south, “Anything… else?”
She looks at me for several seconds without saying a thing.
“You can go and look,” she says, finally.
I walk past her, trying to summon the gait of an exasperated customer and not someone who has just indirectly asked for porn from a minor. The shame lessens with the protective obscuring of the curtain between us. I find myself facing a bathroom at the end of a short hall and two rooms, further curtained, on either side. To the left I find the tanning beds and, to the right, I find the porn.
It’s a small room, and dark until I switch on a light, aptly dim. An impressive amount of smut lines the walls, cases crammed in and overlapping. The titles themselves seem run-of-the-mill, not that I would know any different. A lot of big tits, a lot of faux-reality titles, and a lot of ass stuff. I make out a few strictly male productions in one corner but see lesbians peppering the room at large. If there was ever a method here it has long since fallen into disuse.
Finally, and to my mild surprise, there is another curtain, a thin one, on the far wall. A strip of darkness underneath suggests a room beyond.
“You’re into some weird shit,” the girl says, as I move to pull back the second curtain.
“I’m not…” I begin, “I was just looking.”
“Cool.”
“Are you even allowed back here?”
“I work here.”
“That…”
“You think the little brown bag for hiding your case means I don’t see the title flash when I ring it up?”
“Words are different.”
“Depends on the words.”
Finding I can’t disagree, I wait for what she has to say.
“Are you going back there?” she asks, after a moment.
“I was considering it.”
“Well?”
“Well, are you going to follow me?”
“Look,” she sighs, “Just don’t do anything creepy, okay dude?”
She leaves me feeling distinctly creepy already.
Past the second curtain is another room, dimmer and even closer than the last. The walls, again, are packed tightly with pornography, floor to ceiling, and, absurdly, there are two narrow curtains to the right and left: two more rooms. I choose the left, noting that the content of this place is becoming more graphic, more niche, as I travel between rooms.
A man, I think, or a woman brushes past me as I move through the curtain. I linger on the threshold and look back to the room I was in before but they have gone, already. There is a fan whirring in the new space, hardly more than a closet. The videos here seem focused on car accidents and, loosely, on strangulation. There is another curtain ahead, cut from a heavy cloth.
Someone is crying inside.
I enter, carefully, and see the room is lit by a flickering television. A woman cries on the screen for several seconds before it switches to a man, moaning despair into a pillow. They are both nude. The titles on the wall are all of the same genre: ‘The Boy Who Cried Daddy,’ ‘Sobbing Skanks 2.’
The next curtain is damp to the touch.
This room has a fish tank in the center; neglected and dirty goldfish swim inside. The room is nautical-themed and humid, somehow pleasanter than the last. There are two curtains once again, one cloth and the other bead. I push past the beads with a rattle and find another television.
This room is all ‘caught on camera’ stuff, black and white videos of people screwing in bushes or in cars. The TV, though, appears to be a live stream of the room with the tanning bed.
And as I watch, the bed opens.
A man emerges, a man with a sagging pot-belly and jeans. He heaves himself onto his feet, shaking his naked, drooping front as he does. And then he exits and, because this is an angle very much meant to let me know, I see him pass through the hallway and into the curtained porn room.
I hear rattled breath, my own, and am frozen. I remember the rest stop and the way I could run when I wasn’t limping. Finally, I move, keeping the sound of the crying actors to my back.
I pass through curtains: silk, net, plastic. I feel other bodies here but I never see their faces. Rooms become tight and then widen. Some are as long as hallways, other are short so that I have to crouch. Genres change, and mediums. There is a room for laserdiscs, for flipbooks, for thumb drives scattered on the ground like startled roaches. As soon as I pass through I hear someone behind me, dragging brown, dusty shoes through the cheap plastic. There is a smell, like sweating skin, and an intimate clamminess.
I come to a dead end, a curtain with a wall behind. I hide there as the man enters. No doubt he hears the rustle of the thin fabric, no doubt he sees my boots sticking cartoonishly out from under it. He steps forward and pulls the curtain back.
It is the teenager.
She eyes me with confident disgust, my actions, no doubt, fitting well within her definition of ‘creepy.’ In my relief I move awkwardly and knock cases from the wall. They clatter to the ground, piling at the soles of her sneakers.
Laid bare, I weep.
-traveler
