The Last Days of Video (14 page)

So Jeff did what he could. He shelved DVDs and VHSs. He took cash next door to Pizza My Heart and pleaded for change. He swept the floors, changed the whiteboard, took out the trash. He scoured the file cabinets and found the phone number of their concessions distributor, and he ordered more Jiffy Pop, because how could a video store function without popcorn? And, on Tuesday, he used the dingy laptop he'd inherited from one of his redneck cousins to create a poor approximation of Alaura's New Releases handout, which he then printed and photocopied on Ape U's campus, at his own expense, using his student account.

Later that day, Jeff worked with Waring, and he found himself, as usual, the only one standing to help the few customers who entered. Waring never budged from his director's chair, and he hadn't bothered to thank Jeff for any of his extra work. Instead, Waring kept his gaze dispassionately on the television screen, today playing
High Sierra
, and he only occasionally emerged from his trance to belt out the title of a movie that a customer might be asking about.

“
Night of the Living Dead,
” Waring grunted to one unsuspecting customer who'd approached Jeff with a question. “That's Romero's first zombie movie.
Dawn of the Dead
is better. They're both great. I was just reading that Romero says that the racial commentary in
Night
wasn't on purpose . . .”

Waring's voice trailed off, and Jeff led the confused customer to the Horror section.

Over the next few hours, as Jeff continued shelving and cleaning and assisting customers, he occasionally stole glances at the ragged little man, who seemed even more weird and distant, and possibly more drunk, than normal.

And slowly Jeff realized what must be going on in Waring's mind—he was worried about Alaura. He missed her. He might even be in love with her. It had been easy for Jeff to think of Waring and Alaura as an old married couple. As bickering, griping, sexless entities. But the truth, Jeff decided, was much more complicated.

“It's been years!” Waring said suddenly, some time later, when they were alone. “I thought she was over all that religious crap.”

“Where is she?” Jeff asked in confusion. “What is the Reality Center?”

“I think it's some Werner Erhard knock-off.”

“The director?”

Waring sighed, shook his head. “No, Jeff. That's Werner
Herzog.
Werner
Erhard
ran these life-training seminars in the seventies. I had no idea they were still around. The kind of thing where they berate you for hours, then empower you with mumbo-jumbo, then convince you to sign up all your friends. A pyramid scheme.”

Jeff wanted to respond, but at that moment, a beeper went off on his hip. He scrambled to silence the device.

“What's that?” Waring said.

Jeff wrote something in a small notebook.

“Hey. You. Hick.”

“I'm not a hick,” Jeff said, but not as forcefully as he would have liked.

“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.