The sun hadn’t quite begun to set outside the tour bus window when Juanna Rumbel lost her train of thought, leaned out of the backseat, and sank her teeth into Broken Cherry’s ass.
The women talked a little more shit, then got back to the subject of track dimensions.
“I understand the big picture,” said Rumbel. “But I also have to say that what we really need to focus on in the next year is, How do we get Chicago fans to be here?”
“I love you guys so very much,” she continued. “And if I’m ever an asshole just come up and punch me.”
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Gomez (aka Juanna Rumbel), who’s 30, was an army brat and a loner outside Richmond, Virginia, who wanted nothing to do with sports. “I’d come home and go to my bedroom,” she says. “And I learned to read very intensely. I loved books on philosophy, poetry, art–things that would just take me into another world.” She tried a couple of semesters of art school in Philadelphia before dropping out and moving first to Virginia Beach, then to Los Angeles. “I was having a really good time and I had to pull out of there,” she says. “It was fun, but it came to a point where I had to go.” In 1996 she moved to Chicago for no better reason, she says, than that she’d never been here before. Three weeks later a guy she’d been dating in LA followed her. He was going to find his own place, but one day while strolling downtown they decided to get married and applied for a license. A month later they tied the knot at City Hall, celebrated with steak and eggs for breakfast, and then shot pool in a bar.
About a year after Gomez’s arrival she was hired to answer the phones at a printing company where Simmons used to work as a salesperson and still dropped by to visit occasionally. “I just couldn’t stand her,” says Gomez. “I thought she was everything that I hated–Miss Banana Republic, Ann Taylor, a preppy chick who liked her china and her BMW. We just couldn’t relate to each other.”
Later, when Simmons said she’d done it, Gomez was impressed: “She’d actually respected me enough to listen to what I had to say.”
