The Last Days of Video

by Jeremy Hawkins

  And with the grace of a dancer, Barney Wheat slid a foot into Pierce’s path.

  Pierce tripped over the foot. He contorted for balance. He squealed a pathetic sound—“Lueeeeah!”—and he dropped in a flapping heap.

  His body impacted the linoleum floor with a sick crunch. The mysterious brick catapulted from his grasp.

  The brick soared in a high arc across the room, spinning like a stick grenade—and clanged into the Sports Documentary section, a length of shelving that had been tottering, in need of repair, for years.

  The tall metal grating shuddered. Bolts pinged to the floor.

  “Of course,” Alaura said.

  The Sports section fell, like a gigantic domino, and slammed onto the floor.

  Surfing documentaries and Pilates DVDs and Star Video’s entire WrestleMania catalogue clattered to the floor like machine-gun fire.

  Alaura turned to Barney Wheat.

  “What fun!” Barney chirped, beaming at Alaura like he’d just won a giant stuffed gorilla at the county fair.

  When Jeff heard the crash in the back of the store, his first thought was that the ceiling had collapsed. Such a dramatic end—the literal obliteration of Star Video—seemed appropriate given the shoddy state of the building. Five minutes ago, Waring and Clarissa Wheat had retired to Waring’s office, to do God knows what, and in Jeff’s mind, disaster was imminent.

  But when he crept toward the origin of the sound, he rounded a corner and discovered that it was the Sports section, not the ceiling, that had collapsed.

  Out of nowhere, a shockingly handsome man in a black shirt appeared, knocking Jeff’s shoulder as he rushed past.

  “I’m done with you freaks,” the guy snarled.

  Jeff watched the handsome man flee.

  Then he saw Waring emerge through the Porn Room doorway. There was a wild look of terror upon his ashen face. His shirt was unbuttoned, his round white belly was exposed for all the world to see, and his loosened belt buckle clinked with each step.

  “Alaura!” Waring yelled. “Where are you, Alaura!? Are you all right!?”

  Am I all right? Alaura thought. No, I’m not fucking all right.

  She watched as Clarissa Wheat scurried out behind Waring, birthed by the same Porn Room doorway, both of them coming, Alaura knew, from Waring’s office. Clarissa Wheat was in a state of undress similar to Waring—shirt loosened, missing one gray shoe, and her silver cross swinging between a surprisingly full and youthful-looking bosom—leaving little doubt as to what she and Waring had just been doing.

  There they all stood, facing one another amid the shrapnel of the Sports Documentary section: Alaura next to Barney Wheat, Waring next to Clarissa Wheat.

  “Clarissa, darling!” Barney Wheat said happily. “I’ve just met one of Ms. Eden’s acquaintances. The poor guy took a nasty tumble, and now I don’t know where he’s gone.”

  “Oh hush, Barney,” Clarissa Wheat said as she futzed distractedly with her hair, trying to push it back into a bun and apparently unconcerned about the display of her (again, Alaura noted) unexpectedly impressive body.

  Barney Wheat smiled and teetered. Alaura placed a hand on his shoulder to steady him.

  “Don’t touch him!” Clarissa Wheat snapped.

  Alaura removed her hand.

  “She . . . she made me,” Waring said, looking at Alaura.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Clarissa Wheat assured him, and she approached her husband and took his hand, interlocking her fingers with his.

  “You’re lying!” Waring cried.

  “Like you’ve been lying to us, Mr. Wax?” Clarissa Wheat said pointedly. “What is purchasing product on credit and not paying it back, except a lie?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Clarissa Wheat shot him a startled glance. “Guiding Glow is a Christian organization, Mr. Wax, and your contract with us states explicitly that no pornography can be rented from any store under our distribution umbrella. And, of course, there’s the issue of your back payments.”

  Alaura glared at Waring.

  Waring looked down at the floor like a scolded child.

  “I’m sure Waring just forgot,” Alaura pleaded. “He can write you a check. Waring? Can’t you just sell some investments or something and write them a check?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Ms. Eden. None of this is even the real purpose of our visit.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We are here to inform you that, as of last Friday, Guiding Glow has sold its entire distribution network, including our two warehouse centers and our entire stock of DVDs, to Blockbuster Inc. It seems that they’re expanding their DVD-by-mail business in hopes of competing with Netflix. They made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.”

  Alaura gasped. She felt her own lips quivering.

  “Oh, Waring,” she managed.

  Clarissa Wheat continued, “Star Video is in breach of contract. Your account has been terminated. We will continue to fill the orders you’ve already placed for the next two months, at which time you’ll need to find a new distributor. Though incidentally, Mr. Wax, it doesn’t appear that your credit is in any sort of shape to qualify you for a personal checking account, let alone a contract with Ingram or one of the others. No matter . . . at the end of those two months, your entire debt to us will come due. In summation, Mr. Wax—”

  Alaura gripped Waring’s arm to steady herself.

  “—as of now, you are no longer associated with Guiding Glow Distribution. You are on your own.”

  Articles

  HOME>NEWS>OPINION

  Appleton Herald

  O N L I N E

  Editorial—Is Hollywood’s sudden descent upon Ehle County worth celebrating?

  Published: Sunday, September 16, 2007 at 3:30 a.m.

  When [name of film studio omitted] announced last week that the cast and crew of a Hollywood production titled “Not Tonight, Joséphine!” would film scenes in Historic Downtown Appleton, we were all excited.

  We were especially excited when the film’s star was announced to be Tabitha Gray—one of the silver screen’s highest grossing actresses. (Ladies, hide your husbands!) And of course we were excited about the likely boost to our local economy that the production would provide.

  But has anyone stopped to ask, why haven’t more details about this movie been released? Its other stars? Its director? Or anything about the movie’s plot? Why all the secrecy? What if the movie portrays the South or, in a worst-case scenario, Ehle County, in a negative light? Will this be yet another film where Southerners are portrayed as ignorant, backwards, racist caricatures, who in the end will be grateful to be enlightened by benevolent interlopers?

  The production refuses to answer any such questions. It seems content to arrive under a cloak of secrecy . . .

  CLICK HERE FOR FULL TEXT

  HOW ALAURA GOT HER GROOVE BACK

  “Where’s Karla?” Alaura asked Constance, an old drinking friend who was now (Alaura was just beginning to realize) a rather obnoxiously contented housewife.

  Constance stared back with a frozen frown, as if to say: Karla is your weird friend, not mine.

  Alaura and Constance were drinking mimosas in a hipster diner in West Appleton. The place boasted mismatched flatware, waitresses with Bettie Page hairdos, and paintings of dancing skeletons on the walls. Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” slithered from the jukebox, masking, but not completely blocking, the muted trombone of Constance’s yattering voice, like Charlie Brown’s teacher.

  “Whah-whah-whah, whah-whah-whah-whah film crew?” Constance asked.

  “No, I don’t know anything about the film crew coming to Appleton,” Alaura responded. “Just because I work in a video store doesn’t mean I know anything about the actual film industry.”

  “Whah-whah-whah, Tabitha Gray whah-whah?”

  “Aren’t we here to talk about my life, not Tabitha Gray?”

  “Whah-whah,
whah-whah Not Tonight, Joséphine!”

  Alaura sighed. “That’s probably a fake title. I think Not Tonight, Joséphine! was the working title for Some Like it Hot . . .”

  But her voice trailed off.

  It wasn’t that Alaura didn’t care about the movie crew coming to Appleton. She did care. But she couldn’t help thinking that it just didn’t matter. Star Video had lost its distributor. Waring was broke (or “maybe broke”—the bastard still wouldn’t admit the full extent of his life’s train wreck). In two months, Star Video would have to start buying movies from somewhere new, probably Walmart or Target, since it was likely that no legitimate distributor would ever touch Waring with a ten-foot pole.

  And she’d been drinking a lot. Too much. She’d smoked an entire pack of cigarettes yesterday. She’d been getting stoned, sleeping until noon, spending all day on her couch, avoiding work (because screw Waring), and, perhaps most worrisomely, she’d been watching DVD after DVD and weeping at every ridiculous plot turn. But nothing seemed to help. No meditations. No combination of chemicals. No movies. Not even catching up on fun shows like Lost or Deadwood, on silly but brilliant shows like Boondocks or The Venture Bros., on pretentious but obligatory shows like Six Feet Under or The Wire (though The Wire was turning out to be amazing) . . . none of it offered any solace, a definite indicator of looming depression.

  “Whah-whah-whah,” Constance was saying. “Whah-whah watched that Tabitha Gray movie on Netflix last night, whah-whah where she’s a grave robber—”

  “Wait, what did you say?” Alaura asked.

  Alaura focused on Constance, who was tall and plain and always smiling, with limp blonde hair, broad shoulders, and a long, Sarah Jessica Parker face.

  “The one where Tabitha Gray’s, like, a gun-toting grave robber who knows karate,” Constance said. “Her, you know, breasts are bigger than her head. And she’s, like, stick-figure skinny. How could she even lift a rifle—”

  “No,” Alaura interrupted. “You said you watched the movie on Netflix?”

  “Oh.” Constance winked. “My husband, he’s kind of a nerdy techie guy. He uses these hummadinger cords attached to our computer. I’m not sure what they’re called. But you plug them in, and you can watch movies on Netflix.”

  “You mean, like, on your computer?”

  “No! On our TV! It’s really neat. Netflix just started doing it. You press a few buttons, and zoosh, there’s a movie playing on your TV.”

  “Any movie?”

  “No,” Constance said. “They don’t have a very good selection, but whah-whah-whah, whah-whah . . .”

  Alaura tuned her out again. All at once, the implications crashed down on her. It didn’t matter if Netflix only offered one crappy Tabitha Gray movie online. Soon it would be ten other movies. Then a thousand. Then ten thousand.

  Every movie ever, zooshed directly to your television.

  Of course she’d heard about this. She’d known it was coming in exactly the way Constance had just described. But now it was here, like a wrecking ball on its downward descent to demolish Star Video.

  Alaura looked again at Constance. Her friend was now telling some senseless story, laughing about her husband/children/recent technological acquisitions, and she seemed completely unaware of Alaura’s distress. Alaura sighed. She had always attended to Constance’s complaints—about money, career, children, boyfriends, marriage, love affairs, everything—so she had not felt selfish initiating this bitch session. Not one bit. Now, for once, she needed Constance’s help.

  But brunch was not going according to plan. Thus far, Constance had seemed more interested in pointing out Alaura’s life errors, past and present, than in providing the compassionate understanding Alaura had always given her. Constance demanded that Alaura quit Star Video at once. She suggested job-search websites and wardrobe intervention. She stated again and again that she had “never liked that Pierce,” and she babbled that this confluence of events was “an excellent opportunity for cleansing,” a vaguely nauseating notion that Alaura, despite her background of religious wandering and herbal experimentation, did not understand in the slightest.

  Slowly Alaura was realizing that this “friend” hardly knew her anymore. How had that happened? True, Alaura hadn’t seen Constance at all over the summer because of how much time she’d spent with Pierce. But still . . . somehow Constance had become a minor character in the drama of Alaura’s life, unworthy even of backstory, multiple scenes, hard focus.

  “Where is Karla?” Alaura repeated, this time to herself, and she gulped a mouthful of mimosa, then signaled their waiter for a refill.

  Karla: her best friend. Karla had been out of the picture since beginning that weird life-training stuff over two months ago. But if anyone could straighten out this mess—straighten out Alaura’s life—it was Karla.

  Ten minutes later, Karla floated into the diner.

  As always, Karla was devastatingly beautiful, luminescent, the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent, her arms and hips barely on the healthy side of anorexia, her face narrow and firm like a graphite-framed structure designed to support her significant lips. She was the only redhead Alaura had ever known who did not look like an anemic alien—Karla, Princess of Pallid.

  The tablecloth rose and settled when Karla took her seat, as if by ghostly breeze.

  Men at nearby tables looked beyond their wives at the new glowing creature.

  “I have to tell you the most amazing thing,” Karla said, staring deeply into Alaura’s eyes.

  Karla’s voice broke the spell of her own entrance, and only at that moment did Alaura perceive that there was something very different about her friend. Karla sat more upright than normal. Almost rigid. She wore a broad smile rather than her usual sexy glower, for at heart she was a temperamental metal sculptor, given to rumination and self-criticism. And she gazed with otherworldly intensity into Alaura’s eyes, which was not necessarily out of character, though the creepy duration of the eye contact certainly was.

  “Are you okay?” Alaura said worriedly, finding it impossible to disconnect from Karla’s glistening green orbs.

  “Oh, my dear, dear friend. You’re the first person I thought of.”

  Karla hugged Alaura.

  Alaura felt the embrace shaking—her friend was weeping.

  “What is it, sweetie?”

  “Oh, Alaura,” Karla said, leaning back and reestablishing eye contact. “I’ve had the most wonderful, wonderful experience. Something has happened to me that has changed my life forever.”

  “Are you crying?”

  “These are tears of joy!”

  A man rushed toward their table waving a handkerchief like a surrender flag—Alaura shooed him away.

  “I’ve just finished the Advanced Experience at the Reality Center,” Karla explained. “The most amazing month of my life!”

  “You mean that life-training stuff?”

  “No, Alaura. It’s not training. It’s experiential learning. They show you, Alaura, they really show you. How to achieve transformation. How to live with intention. Real intention. And once you have real intention, you know how to be. That’s what I’m talking about, Alaura. Being.”

  Alaura realized she was nervously chewing her pinky nail. She forced her hand toward the table.

  “You have to come, Alaura. If you never do anything else that I ask, please come with me to the Reality Center. It’s exactly what you need, Alaura.”

  “What makes you think I need—”

  “Because I heard the sadness and pain and loneliness in all those voicemails you’ve been leaving me. And I know what your problem is.”

  “My problem?”

  “You hide in movies, Alaura. You escape into fantasy. You’re a victim of the fracturing of our modern world. We’re all cut off from one another. And movies are how you cut off yourself. You live through a television screen. Through other people’s stories. Alaura, the Reality Center has taught me that you must run toward your intention,
not away from it, because the future is today.”

  Alaura’s face warmed in embarrassment—both for Karla, who sounded pretty much like a crazy person, but also for herself, because something about what Karla was saying was not entirely bonkers. Alaura had been watching too much television, almost twelve hours per day, too many movies, polishing off the last of Almodóvar’s and Cronenberg’s crazy films like she’d planned to do for years, and binging on shows, finishing one DVD then starting the next almost immediately.

  And, as Alaura thought about it, all the wine and weed and cigarettes probably qualified as “escaping reality” as well.

  “Please come with me to the Reality Center,” Karla pleaded, smiling her intensely beautiful smile. “I know that you’re meant to do this, Alaura. There’s a glorious being of light within you, just begging to emerge.”

  “A being of light?”

  “A majestic being of light,” Karla said. “Our society is at a turning point, Alaura. Those who are willing to embrace the truth, and embrace one another, will lead us toward the future!”

  Alaura looked across the table at Constance. For once, Constance wasn’t smiling. Her lips were sewn shut. Her neck was tight as a rope. It was sweet, Alaura thought, how Constance was so obviously put off by Karla’s weird earnestness. And Alaura realized that, despite today’s awkwardness, Constance had been a good friend to her. Always a lot of fun, always honest (in her own way). One botched summer hadn’t erased all of that.

  Still, Alaura could see clearly how Constance rarely allowed her to talk about herself. Constance never asked questions. It was always Alaura’s job to listen—somehow Alaura had fallen into the role of caregiver with Constance as well.

  Karla was different. She radiated compassion. She was complicated but caring. She looked at life through a spiritual-artistic lens. She spent her days creating art and meditating and reading bizarre texts—the letters of Gauguin, the journals of Anaïs Nin, the Bible. And years ago, Karla had been the only one to listen—really listen—when Alaura had gone through her period of religious wandering, from Christianity to Wicca to Buddhism to Confucianism to all the others, and the corresponding history of tattoos—Santeria crucifix on her back, the Buddha and Chinese characters on her neck, Mother Goddess in the form of cephalopod on her right arm (which in truth had been inspired by an insane acid trip and a viewing of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). Karla, trim and delicate as she seemed, was in fact tough and perceptive and wise. A spiritual seeker, just like Alaura.