Read The Last Days of Video Online
Authors: Jeremy Hawkins
The Last Days of Video
Copyright © 2015 Jeremy Hawkins
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hawkins, Jeremy, 1978-
The last days of video : a novel / Jeremy Hawkins.
pages cm
1. Video rental servicesâFiction. 2. Motion picture audiencesâFiction.
I. Title.
PS3608.A89335L38 2015
813âº.6âdc23
2014033912
Cover design by Jarrod Taylor
Interior Design by E. J. Strongin, Neuwirth and Associates, Inc.
Soft Skull Press
An Imprint of COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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e-book pdf 978-1-91902-518-9
For Mom and Dad.
And for Clyde.
“Oh, Fortuna, blind, heedless goddess, I am strapped to your wheel,” Ignatius belched. “Do not crush me beneath your spokes. Raise me on high, divinity.”
âJOHN KENNEDY TOOLE,
A Confederacy of Dunces
Contents
HOW TO TRY IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY SUCCEEDING
A NIGHTMARE ON WARING'S STREET
THE DISCREET CHARM OF CLARISSA WHEAT
HOW ALAURA GOT HER GROOVE BACK
JEFF AND WARING'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE
EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT MATCH ANDERSON* (*BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK)
HOW TO TRY IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY SUCCEEDING
The blue and yellow
thing leaned over the road, a glossy robot poised to attack. It was tall, top-heavy, terribly realâa pristine anachronism on this otherwise dusty stretch of West Appletonâand it had materialized overnight, fifty yards from Waring Wax's shop.
The blue and yellow thing was a sign.
The sign read, “Blockbuster.”
Waring's eyes burned. Tears. He pressed his brow into the crook of his elbow. He had not wept sober in over a decade.
A Blockbuster opening on College Street? It would kill him.
Waring turned away from the sign, and facing West Appleton's small business districtâthe snooty organic grocery store, two trendy thrift shops, three cafés, three deep-fried sandwich shops, seven taprooms, and no fewer than five yoga/naturopath healing studiosâhe spat out a minute-long fusillade of profanity. During this barrage, several pedestrians edged to the other side of College Street to avoid him. He couldn't blame them. He knew what they saw. They saw a short, sweating, babbling crazy person who was assembled of Hollywood's most disagreeable features: Humphrey Bogart's overbite, Fred Astaire's trapezoidal forehead, Leslie
Neilson's bowlegs supporting Jack Black's potbelly, and Chaplin's dark, frizzy hair, now gone Clooney half-gray. And, of course, Tom Cruise's lamentable height.
Arthur
-era Dudley Moore, plus twenty extra pounds around the gut, might have been the ideal choice to portray Waring Wax in 2007.
Yes, Waring understood why the pedestrians circumvented him. But he didn't care, so he sneered at them anyway, and this sneering finally helped quell his ridiculous tears. He stopped cursing. He heaved for breath. He lit a cigarette and began sucking it down.
It was ten a.m. and already over eighty degrees. The August sun scalded Waring's sallow skin, a pain that he appreciated. Fresh sweat trickled down his already soaked back. Then a city bus swept by, kicking a gritty gust against his face and whipping his cigarette out of his mouth.
“Could have done without that,” Waring muttered.
He listened as the offending behemoth receded behind him. If one were aboard this bus, carrying a cattle load of chirping undergrads, one would enjoy a six-minute air-conditioned trek between the disparate worlds of West Appleton and Appleton (combined pop.: 34,867; w/ students: 45,572). The bus route started here, in West Appleton's quaint-if-somewhat-low-rent business district, then coursed over the blue-green trickle of Nile Creek that demarcated the border between the two towns, then passed the picturesque and preposterous mansions of the Historic District, through Appleton's not-at-all-low-rent and more-than-somewhat-commercialized business districtâwhere a new Blockbuster made a hell of lot more sense than
here
, Waring thoughtâand finally to Appleton University, that small, old, and consistently average institution that is the crown jewel of Ehle County, North Carolina.
Finally, after successfully consuming a full cigarette, and without looking again at the Blockbuster sign, Waring stomped across his empty parking lot and entered Star Video, his beloved grungy
palace. He switched on the neon OPEN sign. Then he took up his station upon his director's chair behind the long black counter, at the register labeled “Cashier du Cinéma,” and he started a John Ford Western. One of his part-time employees, Rose, had called in sick that morning, so he'd have to pull an all-day shift. But it didn't matter. It's not like his social calendar would be thrown into turmoil.
And anyway, business was slow. Over the next few hours, only the regular morning porn renters filtered in, wearing their abashed but resilient expressions, wordlessly swapping out their shame. Then at noon arrived the normal vanload of old biddies from Covenant Woods, the nearby retirement tank, for whom Waring reluctantly submitted to playing tour guide, as he was forced to almost every week whenever he couldn't pawn the job off on someone else. “No, don't worry, we won't sell our VHS tapes,” he told them in annoyance as he showed them for the hundredth time to the British TV Mystery section. “Yes, I'm totally devastated that Bob Barker retired,” he lied as he guided another old biddy to
March of the Penguins
, the same videocassette she rented every week.
But the old biddies were oblivious to Waring's harsher-than-average disdain. Or perhaps they weren't oblivious. Perhaps they just didn't care, because they'd grown accustomed to him, and because they needed his help navigating his imposing store, with its twenty-feet-high warehouse ceilings, its labyrinthine metal shelving, its thousands of titles, its sections and subsections and sub-subsections (Martial Arts, Bruce Lee, Bruceploitation), its plague of dust bunnies swarming like Tribbles, and its rickety loft/employee break room looming over the front counter, seemingly ready to collapse at any moment. And the Porn Room, into which these old biddies, on more than one occasion, had accidentally wandered.
Yes, the old biddies needed his help. But that didn't mean he had to be nice about it. Especially not today.
So Waring rolled his eyes at them. He sneered at the porn renters.
He scoffed in one way or another at every single customer, no matter how innocuous his or her offenses. But of course, as West Appleton's famously cantankerous drunk, Waring's mood went unnoticed.
Then, at four p.m., Alaura Edenâthe longtime manager of Star Videoâarrived for her evening shift, and Waring was relieved that she didn't immediately mention the Blockbuster sign. He hoped Alaura hadn't learned of the corporate villain's encampment. Would never learn of it at all.
“Hot day out there, huh?” Alaura said, tossing her jangly purse under the counter.
“I'm having a drink in my office,” Waring replied, and he walked away.
Star Video closed at
midnight, as usual. Shop lights down.
Run Lola Run
on the store TV, for the grinding music. Waring was back on the floor, mildly tipsy, sitting in his director's chair and totaling that day's paltry receipts at the counter. Alaura, who was shelving movies nearby in the New Releases section, chattered about how great an employee Jeff was going to be (apparently Waring's objections to Jeff, the tall Richie Cunninghamish undergrad suck-up Alaura had recently and unaccountably hired, were meaningless) and, as usual, about her sweet boyfriend du jour, Paul or Pierce or Peckerdick, though, lest we forget, Peckerdick had threatened to punch Waring in the very recent past for a drunken offense Waring thought best left forgotten. But at least Alaura hadn't mentioned . . .