The Last Days of Video (36 page)

Cookies, he thought. Maybe intermission cookies can be our calling card. Every showing, bring them warm chocolate chip cookies.

He approached the projection room's lone exterior window, which opened vertically, swinging out and up. He sat in his director's chair, positioned by the window. He lit a cigarette, exhaled into the cold night. Smoking in the projection booth while a movie played was impossible; it interfered with the projector and cast ghostly waves onto the screen. But this was fine; he could smoke out the window. The fresh air was good for him, though he might catch his death up here when winter really hit. Whatever. He cranked up the plug-in radiator to “High” and looked northward out the window, in the direction of College Street.

West Appleton. He had loved it here since the moment he arrived, years ago, on the day after the nightmare in the Charlotte hotel room, when his wife had called to tell him she was starting a family with another man. The next morning, still drunk from the night before, Waring had driven a rental car through North Carolina. Four hours later, he had pulled into Ehle County and up to Star Video. As he would later tell Jeff, Waring had simply found the place via an advertisement in the back of
Video Store Magazine
, and he'd finally worked up the courage, just a few days before, to call the owner, who had given away all his bargaining leverage by confessing to Waring that no one else had inquired about buying his shop. Stepping out of his
rental car that day, Waring looked around West Appleton, and his first thought was that he had no idea who
wouldn't
jump at the opportunity to own a store
here.
West Appleton was a young town, a college town, an imperfect town. There were restaurants, and pretty girls, and bars. And people were smiling. This was light-years away from New York, and he remembered thinking,
There are a lot of places worse than this.
So he walked into Star Video, which was tiny, and which had a laughably bland selection, and an hour later, over beer, he made the crumpled old geezer in the blue cardigan an offer on his store, and the guy had immediately accepted.

Now, looking at West Appleton from the projection room window, Waring was already forgetting what Star Video had looked like with all the movies on the shelves, all the posters on the walls. The movies were gone. His life was gone. He'd discovered what he'd always wanted to do with his life, and he'd made it happen, and then, after little more than a decade, it had all fallen apart. Maybe he should have seen it coming. But the winds of Fortune, he thought philosophically, are usually only felt after the storm. Or some such nonsense. Still, the second he'd seen a Redbox in a grocery store, he should have known. The second he'd seen a smartphone playing some Ashton Kutcher afterbirth, he should have known. But he'd never been one for foresight. He should have seen that Helena was going to leave him, but he'd been taken completely by surprise by that as well.

Helena would hate Star Theater, he thought. She'd absolutely fucking hate it.

He smiled.

Because his mother, he knew, would have loved it.

He gripped the bottle of stout beer in his hand. It had come from a thirteen-dollar six-pack, and it tasted like heaven. Or at least what he wished heaven might taste like—round, bitter in a soft way, with enough alcohol to singe nose hairs and remind you that you are alive.

“Damn it,” he whispered.

He hurled the bottle from the window. It arced across the sky like a satellite, traveling on infinitely, over the cars lined on the far side of Watts Street, streetlight glinting off the bottle's surface, brown liquid twisting out in a spiral that dispersed into mist. Away the bottle went, venturing high in the direction where in two years the new towers of the Green Plaza/ArtsCenter would stand, where Star Video once was, before finally the bottle descended into the leafy branches of an ancient oak that occupied the vacant lot across the street. The bottle skipped and knocked through the branches, then plodded harmlessly, unbroken, upon the soft soil below.

Acknowledgements

Mom and Dad—despite the many creative ways I tried to discourage you over the years, you've always been ceaselessly loving and supportive. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. I hope it will give you some measure of relief, if not a smile on your face, to know that publishing this book—even if it flops and no one attends my readings and James Wood pans it in the
New Yorker
(James Wood is a golden god, by the way, and very handsome, and a very good drummer)—publishing this book, no matter what,
has made me happy.
I wouldn't have done it without you guys. I love you.

To my fellow employees at VisArt Video, where I worked for nine glorious years, thank you for being fun and weird and brilliant. This book is for you.

To Dan Smetanka, my amazing editor. A word of advice to all upcoming writers: Dan Smetanka is always right.

Thanks to my agent, Craig Kayser, one of the most uniquely intelligent and entertaining people I've ever met. Thank you, sir, for coming into the camping shop where I worked and buying maps, or else I'm certain I'd still be lost in the woods.

Special thanks to Clyde Edgerton, an amazing writer and teacher and chicken wrangler and friend. Thank you for believing in my book and saving it from disaster on many, many occasions. Remember that serial killer subplot? Ugh.

Thanks to everyone else at UNC Wilmington: the mighty Philip Gerard (who presided over the germs of many a novel in my favorite writing class ever), Rebecca Lee, Wendy Brenner, Robert Anthony Siegel, Todd Berliner, Karen Bender, everyone in the creative writing program, everyone in the graduate school, everyone at Randall Library. And thanks to all my fellow students, especially Ariana Nash, Peter Baker, Ben Hoffman, Mitch McInnis, Kyle Simmons, Rod Maclean, Nick Miller, Nick Roberts, Carmen Rodrigues, and, most importantly, Johannes Lichtman . . . I'm humming ABBA's “Take A Chance On Me” and thinking of how much I miss you, you Swedish bastard.

Many books on film and video-store history were essential to the production of this novel, notably
From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video
by Joshua M. Greenberg,
The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies
by David Thomson, and the books of David Bordwell.

I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the tremendous debt this novel owes to
Black Books
, the amazing British sitcom created by the genius Irishmen Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan, two of my comedic heroes. I stole liberally, but I hope lovingly and respectfully, from
Black Books
—as I'm sure will be obvious to anyone who's watched the show, which, if you haven't watched it, you definitely should.

Thank you to Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for fighting the good fight for independent bookstores, for providing me gainful employment, and for being unlike video stores in that most important of ways, i.e., consistently making a solid profit.

Thank you to the Weymouth Center in Southern Pines, North Carolina, for providing me a beautiful and inspirational (if apparently
ghost-haunted) space to work. And thanks to That's Entertainment Video, also in Southern Pines, for answering my many annoying questions and for renting me DVDs
(Grand Budapest Hotel, Scanners
, and
Dawn of the Dead)
in 2014.

Special thanks to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Thanks to Amanda Bushman, for the inspiration of your art, for your support of my writing, and for watching all those movies with me.

Thank you to my many amazing friends, Corwin Eversley, Mark Harrell, Huru Price, Kim and Eric Riley, Tom Raynor, Dylan Robinson, and everyone else I don't have enough space to name here . . . you are all in my heart.

To Shaw and Kinsey, I love you guys. And just because there's underage drinking in this book doesn't mean you're allowed to do it yourself. Just kidding. I know you guys drink. But as always, don't do anything racist.

Lastly, and most importantly, thank you to Hillary, my beautiful love. You're the bomb, boo. I love you so very much. Oh, and I tried to work in a reference to
Somewhere in Time
but couldn't figure out a way. Next book, okay?