“What was that beeping?” Waring asked. “That’s twice today I’ve heard it.”
Jeff replaced the notebook and beeper in his jeans pocket. “It’s for school,” he said.
“School?”
“Psychology class. I’m participating in a study. It’s a class requirement.”
“They’re studying the psychology of beepers?”
“No.”
“Beepers are annoying,” Waring proclaimed. “Also very out of date, from what I understand.”
“They’re not studying beepers,” Jeff said. “They’re studying happiness. Relative happiness or something. Every time the beeper beeps, I have to write down how happy I am on a scale of one to ten.”
Waring stood up from his director’s chair. “No shit?” he said with a strange smile.
Jeff nodded halfheartedly.
“What number did you write down?”
Jeff hesitated. He looked up to the television screen—Humphrey Bogart scrambled over the face of a blue-gray mountain—and said, “Seven.”
“Seven? What about the last time they beeped you?”
“Eight.”
“Why the drop-off?”
Jeff couldn’t assemble a convincing lie, so he reluctantly answered with the truth: “Because Alaura won’t be working this weekend.”
Waring rolled his eyes theatrically. “Tough luck, Blad. And how happy would you be to work extra hours this weekend because Alaura will be out?”
Jeff considered the question. “Honestly, I might bump back up to eight. I need the money. And I like working here.”
“Even if you have to work with me all weekend?”
“You don’t really bother me anymore.”
Waring held two fists in front of his face. “Tough guy, eh?” he said, then he dropped his hands.
Jeff shrugged.
They both turned their attention back to High Sierra.
A bit later, apropos only because Jeff had been trying to deduce it for a long time, he asked Waring:
“I was wondering . . . why do you own a video store?”
Waring scowled at Jeff, nostrils flared, as if he’d just been asked why he wore pants.
“Sorry,” Jeff said.
Waring shook his head and looked back at the television screen. “Because it’s Tuesday afternoon, and I’m watching a Humphrey Bogart movie,” he muttered. “Obviously, because I love movies.”
“Me too!” Jeff said happily. “Back home in Murphy, I had this small television, and I’d put it on my bed and cover myself—”
“I grew up in Manhattan,” Waring said, cutting Jeff off. “It was a damn movie mecca then. In the seventies. Lots of amazing stuff happening. A new groundbreaking movie every week. My mother, she always took me to movies. That’s what we did, we’d go around the city to see the latest Kurosawa and Taxi Driver and The Towering Inferno and whatever Vietnam movie was out that week. And man, if there was ever anything showing from the sixties or before, we’d always see that. Silent films, anything. This was way before video stores. You had to go to the theater. Or read your TV Guide to find out when movies were showing.”
Jeff nodded.
“Video stores popped up in the early eighties, after my mother passed away.”
“Oh,” Jeff said. “I’m sorry.”
“’Snothing,” Waring said, and he shrugged disinterestedly. “But she would have loved video stores. All those movies, and a lot of them back then were the classics, because they were public domain. Betamax. Now that was a good technology. Way better visual quality than VHS.” Waring clenched a fist and shook it at the sprawling store in front of him, as if in rebuke to all VHS tapes that might be paying attention. “Anyway, back then, I’d go all around the city, from video store to video store, looking for movies. Video Shack on Broadway, New Video in the Village, I’d hit all of them. I even worked at New Video for a few months, when I was about your age . . .”
Waring’s voice trailed off. His wistful expression quickly flattened.
“What was New Video like?” Jeff asked.
Waring sighed. “It was great, okay? And that’s why I bought Star Video. It was my lifelong dream.”
Silence.
“But why this store?” Jeff asked tentatively. “Why all the way down to North Carolina?”
“Jesus,” Waring said. “What’s with the interrogation?”
“Uh—”
“Because I saw an ad in the back of a trade magazine, okay? The original owner of this place was selling out because he was old as dirt. And there was no competition in Appleton, and business was booming, so, you know, I did it.”
“Oh.”
“I saw an ad,” Waring repeated. “And then some other things happened, and it just made sense, you know? You dream about doing something for a long time, and once you finally have the money to do it, which I was lucky enough to have, then why not fucking do it, you know?”
“Wow,” Jeff said. “That’s cool.”
High Sierra’s final credits rolled. Waring stood up and stuffed his hands in his pockets. Jeff noticed dark armpit stains on Waring’s grungy gray button-up shirt. The shirt was rumpled, like he’d slept in it for the past few nights.
“Jeff?” Waring said.
“Yes, sir?”
“I was wondering if I could get your help with something.”
“Sure. What?”
“What if I asked you to come to Blockbuster with me and plant pornography in their DVD cases?”
Jeff laughed.
Then he realized that Waring was completely serious.
At three p.m. that afternoon, Waring and Jeff approached the Death Star, aka Blockbuster. Five cars were parked on the Death Star’s brand-new, coal-black lot, five more cars than were currently parked in front of Star Video. Through Blockbuster’s crystal-clear windows, Jeff could see that ten or more customers perused the aisles and that no fewer than four employees wearing navy polo shirts were manning the front counter or shelving DVDs.
Jeff glanced at Waring, who was now scowling up at the huge blue and yellow sign that dominated College Street. Inside the angry man’s wrinkled pants pocket, Jeff knew, was a stack of particularly vulgar pornography—Real Raunchy Redheads, Lex the Impaler 2, Anal Blasters 6, and others. Waring had printed DVD labels for mainstream movies like The Prestige, The Passion of the Christ, and Bambi, as well as for some of that week’s new releases—We Are Marshall and Death Proof—and he had applied the labels to the porn. “Blockbuster stores their DVDs on the floor,” Waring had explained to Jeff, “not catalogued behind the counter like us, so I’d say they’re basically asking for it.” Waring’s brilliant plan, as far as Jeff could tell, was to infiltrate the Death Star and surreptitiously switch out the DVDs, so when customers popped in Bambi, they would instead encounter, well, Lex the Impaler’s impressive physiology. All blame would then fall to Blockbuster—perhaps shutting them down, or in the very least, causing them to spend days searching every DVD case in their store.
Now that Jeff was here, about to navigate into the Death Star, he had no earthly idea why he had conceded to act as lookout for such an obviously absurd scheme. But it was too late. Farley was watching Star Video, filming again around the shop with his video camera, and Jeff was Waring’s accomplice.
Yes, Waring’s plan was ludicrous. Repulsive. Almost certainly illegal. But sometimes you meet a person like Waring . . . who does whatever he wants. No matter what. Damn the consequences. Ef the police. Screw embarrassment—embarrassment doesn’t even fit into the equation. And these people—who really couldn’t care less about you or anyone else—are so rare that we are drawn to them, Jeff thought, like scientists drawn to a near-extinct, if nauseatingly grotesque, species of bat. They have a unique power that we envy. We can’t remove our gazes as they demonstrate their buffoonery. We are jealous. We ridicule their rejection of “normality” while simultaneously our chests ache with the possibility of letting go—letting go, for example, of the D grade Jeff
had just received on his Intro to Business exam, his first college exam ever. Letting go of Alaura’s likely hatred of him after The Corporate Visit, how he hadn’t lied for Waring. And letting go, especially, of Momma’s expectations, or rather her presumptions, and the presumptions of everyone else back in Murphy, that he would ultimately fail at Appleton University, that soon he’d be back up on the mountain and pumping gas or working at Kmart or cooking meth or whatever. All of which hung over him like a gray ghost.
How amazing would it be, not to care about any of these things?
As he wandered Blockbuster—keeping Waring’s lookout, but a lookout for what?—Jeff studied the sparkling, intentional layout of the place. Every detail seemed designed to inspire a sort of heightened relaxation: cool fluorescents, waves of color and candy, clusters of giant flat-screen TVs playing Toy Story. The shelves were less cluttered (and thus less intimidating) than Star Video’s. Not as large of a selection, of course, but much better organized . . .
The beeper beeped.
Jeff wrote down “8” in the notebook.
Waring legitimately wanted to puke. It wasn’t just the colors of the place, which were cloying, corporate, sickly electric. And it wasn’t just the light fixtures, which were so bright that they aggravated the fug of his hangover to the extent that his head might go all Scanners and explode. No, what really got Waring’s goat was that this Blockbuster was exactly like every other Blockbuster he’d ever had the misfortune to enter, down to the alphabetized candy displays and twenty flavors of microwaveable popcorn and the stupid graphic art on the walls and the theft-detection scanners at the front of the store . . . as if this were some jewelry shop or high-end electronics store. Like anyone gave a damn about Blockbuster’s crappy mainstream movies.
Then Waring saw a sign near the front counter, surrounded by yellow light bulbs and designed to mimic an old theater marquee. The sign read:
TIRED OF DRIVING? REGISTER ONLINE
FOR TOTAL ACCESS (WWW.BLOCKBUSTER.COM)
OUR DVD-BY-MAIL SERVICE!
So it was true. Et tu, Blockbuster? Going the way of Netflix!
Waring’s stomach churned, and he considered the merits of relieving his nausea upon Blockbuster’s floor. He took a deep breath. Then he crouched, removed a flask from his hip pocket, took a slug of bourbon.
When he stood up, he noticed a security camera clawing at the ceiling—it’s insect eye zeroed in on him. He took a few steps. The camera swiveled to follow.
First he searched for The Prestige, but he found no copies in either Drama, Action, or New Releases (and there didn’t seem to be a Why is Christian Bale Famous? section). Nor could he find The Passion of the Christ. Probably checked out, he thought, by one of those conservative nutsoes who used to picket Star Video’s Porn Room years ago.
Bambi. They must have multiple copies of Bambi. He saw a sign labeled “Kids,” walked there, found two Bambi show boxes.
He knelt to the floor as if to tie a shoelace, shielding his furtive enterprise from the camera. But when he tried to open the show box, it produced a tiny plastic groan and resisted his pull. He studied the box. It was secured by a yellow, magnetic tab. Waring yanked at the tab, twisted it, but the damned thing would not come loose.
“Sir, may I help you?”
Waring’s entire body shook. Bambi fell to the carpeted floor. Waring scrambled, hastily replaced Bambi on the shelf, and stood up.
“I was just looking for—” Waring began, but his voice seized when he saw the fiend who had addressed him.
It was the tall, dark-haired guy from that night a few weeks ago. One of the three bicycle-gang men. Their leader. He was tanned and muscular, his skin smooth and clear like he had never come within ten yards of a deep-fried sandwich. He was at least six inches taller than Waring, and he wore pressed khaki pants and a navy “Blockbuster” polo.
“I could have guessed,” Waring said, standing up. “So you’re the owner?”
“Paulsen Crick, franchise operator,” the man corrected with a cool smile.
“Could have guessed that, too. I actually own an independent video store. Own.”
“Are we going to have a problem, Mr. Wax?”
“That’s for you to say, cupcake.”
The man continued smiling—as far as Waring was concerned—like a villainous bastard.
“What were you doing to Bambi?”
“We’re fresh out of Bambi, and I’m craving cartoon tragedy.”
“To give context to your own life?”
“Ouch,” Waring said, forcing sarcasm.
Crick was formidable. Not as easy to intimidate as most dolts.
“Have you been drinking?” Crick asked.
“Not to your knowledge.”
“You have quite a reputation in that regard.”
“If I drink, it’s only in response to some people’s aggressive tactics to drive out a longstanding local business.”
Crick laughed, mirthful pity spilling from his chiseled face.
“You really have no idea what’s going on, do you?”
Waring shrugged like he couldn’t care less.
“You will,” Crick added. “As I said before, your day of reckoning is fast approaching.”
“Good God, I honestly thought I’d hallucinated you saying that,” Waring said with a laugh. “Adios, dipshit. Oh, and these are for you.” He removed the camouflaged porn DVDs and tossed them on the floor in front of Crick, where they fanned out or rolled in every direction. “Someone dropped them off at Star Video. Make sure you put them back out on the floor.”
And Waring strode triumphantly out of the Death Star.
Outside, he found Jeff standing on the sidewalk.
“Killer job on lookout, Blad,” Waring snapped.
“I though you were right behind me,” Jeff said. “I saw that guy from the other night. Does he work here?”
“Thanks for the support, Jeff.”
They began the short trek to Star Video. Waring jammed his fists into his pockets, grumbled to himself. It was getting dark, and the air was unseasonably cool for late September. Or was he in need of a drink? Anyway, feeling that first chill of the year meant it was almost time for his biyearly clothing run, when he would purchase several identical sweaters and pants to wear for the entire season. Tomorrow maybe. He would go to the outdoor store in Browne Mill Mall that Alaura had mentioned. But no . . .
That shop, Quick Dick’s, was also located in Browne Mill Mall. The fired customer, what’s-his-name, Mr. Prick, he owned Quick Dick’s.
And all at once, a few pieces fell together. Not the entire puzzle, only a vague outline. Mr. Prick and Paulsen Crick were friends. Biking buddies. And twice, Crick, franchise operator of Blockbuster, had insinuated that Star Video would be going out of business, or some other looming catastrophe.
Was a conspiracy afoot?
But how could they know the extent of Waring’s financial problems? Waring didn’t even know himself. The stock market was booming these days, or at least he thought he’d heard that. Maybe his stocks had ballooned despite his neglect. Maybe he had become a millionaire and didn’t even know it.
No, Waring thought. That was just stupid.
Almost as stupid as planting pornography in Blockbuster.
Back in his office, Waring cracked open a beer, drained it quickly. Then, on his desk, he discovered a stack of white tee shirts screen-printed “Cutters.” An unsigned note in Alaura’s handwriting, which she must have written before The Corporate Visit, read: “Bought these. Wear one tonight. Part-timers, too. Found them last week on eBay for ten dollars apiece. Free shipping.”
Waring balled up the note, tossed it across the room.
“Ten dollars apiece!” he yelled at the ceiling.
How had it come to this? That spending fifty dollars on stupid movie tee shirts felt like it might break the bank?
And Alaura? What the hell was she doing? That was the worst part of all of this. She meant it, Waring knew. She
was really angry this time. This time she was finally going to quit.
If Star Video didn’t go out of business first.
He pounded another beer.
Yes, she would quit. Of course she would. It was only logical. She wasn’t an idiot, like most people. She would flee this sinking ship, find a new job, find a new town, find a new boyfriend—some turd with a million dollars and a mountain climber’s body—and she would marry him, and they would have sex, and she would never ever ever come to Waring again and say, “I need your help.”
He closed his eyes.
Immediately he is on the airplane again, on that last flight from New York over ten years ago. He sees the chubby guy sitting next to him, that orthodontist or veterinarian, and Waring begs the guy to drink with him, buys them little plastic bottles of liquor, tells the guy about his wife leaving. “Can you imagine that?” Waring says. “You come home, and all her things are gone? Can you believe that actually happens? That she could actually leave a note? On the day you lose your job, a job that you hated more than life itself, but still, it sucks to lose it, and you come home that same day to find a little folded note taped to the wall? Hey buddy, hey friend, can you believe that actually happens to people?”
Then he is in a hotel room. A week later. Lying in bed. Surrounded by bottles and darkness. In North Carolina, in Charlotte. Earlier that day, he bombed an interview for a job that would have paid him a third of what he made in New York, a job he probably would have hated even more than his last, so he has no idea why he even applied. He’s been in the hotel for days now—in fact the interview was days ago. He’s drunk, he’s hungry, he hasn’t eaten since yesterday, and he’s trying to muster the energy to walk down to the lobby restaurant . . .
When the phone rings.
He looks at the phone, hears its piercing squeal, and he answers—
“Bullshit,” he hissed at himself, waking up, back in Star Video.
He opened one of his desk drawers. There he found a stack of account ledgers. All of them were blank. Looking at them, he remembered—in his first few years of owning Star Video, he had maintained rigid, daily accounts. The computer could do all of that for him, of course, but he had wanted a physical record. To feel his fingers running over the numbers. To have proof of the new life he’d built.
The Last Days of Video Page 10
