B008J4PNHE EBOK

by Owen King

  “I’ll be fine, kiddo,” Allie had said when he asked whether she’d be okay if he went to dinner at the Goolsbys’. “I’ve got wine.” He could see her at the table by the window, looking out, imagining a taxi pulling up the driveway.

  They were still waiting, the little family, looking at Sam, smiling, wanting to hear something good; they weren’t waiting for empty houses or mothers drinking wine by windows.

  As well as he could remember, he repeated an interesting thing that Booth had told him:

  “Do you know what they call this?” Sam used his fork to gesture at the sky, at the smeary haze of orange and amber and raw red that spilled golden traces across the treetops and the lawn. “They call it the magic hour. It’s the last light of the day, and it’s the best time to shoot a movie. The reason they call it the magic hour is because the light is so warm and so rich, so no one ever looks more beautiful than they do at the magic hour. But the thing is, you have to work fast, because it doesn’t last long.”

  7.

  The appointed Thursday passed, and Friday, and the weekend, and when Booth finally did call two weeks later, it was from a movie set in Vancouver. After that, he called every day for a week. Although Sam could not always make out what was being said from behind closed doors, he was able to absorb Allie’s tenor, and it was strikingly, almost eerily, modulated. His mother sounded like she was ordering a pizza, striving to be clear about the toppings.

  One day Booth called, and her voice ticked briefly upward, became soothing, and her distinct words drifted out to where Sam lurked in the hall. “Shh,” said Allie. “I told you, Booth, I told you what would happen. I never asked for a promise, but you made it—shh, darling, shh. Please. It’s pointless crying over it now.”

  Self-preservation, and Sam’s own vibrating sense of guilt, carried him outside, down the street, to the graveyard. He insisted to himself that he was excused, that Allie knew enough. The dead Huguenots never argued otherwise, but their silence was suggestive, and he was aware of their bones and skulls beneath his shoes.

  They were silent still when he was thirteen, when he sent his father a tape of The Unhappy Future of Mankind, the stop-motion movie he had spent months making, and Booth made no response; when he was fourteen, after the divorce was completed, the graves did not stir; not long after his fifteenth birthday, after he’d read an interview wherein his father casually mentioned the many love affairs he had enjoyed during his career, Sam went to the graveyard and laid flat on his face, lips to the dirt, and asked, “Why do I care? Why?” He found an affirmation in the silence of the dead. He did care about Booth and Booth’s betrayals, but the hard ground and the unreadable stones and the mournerless burial ground encouraged him to keep trying not to.

  One night when Sam was sixteen, ashamed to have wept—even alone—over a television screening of a ridiculous movie about a saintly turnip-shaped animatronic alien and the children who help him escape home, ran to the graveyard and kicked over a stone. The release felt like a cold drink.

  He regaled the Huguenots about his newborn sister, and he confessed to them, in the twilight of his high school graduation day, how his feelings of bitterness—as expected, Booth had missed his plane—had given way to relief.

  ■ ■ ■

  Where there had been a house, a charred square of concrete foundation and a yard of trampled grass were all that remained.

  “Yup,” said Allie, “they burned it.”

  Booth was ten days late then. Sam didn’t have to say anything; Allie knew he wasn’t coming back.

  Sam poked around in the ash with a stick. Allie wandered down to the gravel turnaround where the firemen had dumped the house’s contents: the chairs and table, the green couch, an upright piano, all of the pieces junky and broken-looking. The boxes had been torn open and looted by trash pickers.

  There was nothing in the debris, and Sam pitched his stick.

  At the turnaround, his mother had drawn a milk crate up to the piano and begun to run a few scales. Hands in his pockets, Sam shuffled over.

  “Hey,” he said, “I didn’t know you played the piano.”

  “I don’t, really,” Allie said. “Not well, anyway.” The notes were thin and out of tune, but the rising and falling sequences were lovely. The wind of a passing car whipped his mother’s hair and pulled at Sam’s clothes.

  Allie stopped playing. She closed her eyes and let her hands rest on the keyboard. “I think I’m getting a headache,” she said.

  “I think you’re great.” Sam touched his fingers to her cheek. “Keep going, Mom.”

  ■ ■ ■

  Tom Ritts gave him a VHS camcorder for his twelfth birthday. “From your dad,” Tom said, the sole instance that Sam could recall of his godfather having told him a lie.

  PART 3

  THE LONG WEEKEND

  (2011)

  Later Friday

  1.

  The Park Slope independent video store where Sam had toiled in the years after Who We Are and before making the move to weddingography, was called, with intentional irony, Video Store. The rarified perspective of the concern was exemplified by the way it was divided into two sections: Commercial Fare and Auteurs. The long aisle of Commercial Fare contained a vaguely alphabetical selection of blockbusters, lowbrow comedies, lame horror stuff, and Barney-type crap. In the Auteurs aisle, the films were carefully categorized into subsections by the last names of famed directors (Cassavetes, Fassbinder, Hawks, Mizoguchi, etc.), and beneath each director’s section was a tag listing major accomplishments, awards, and what were, by the lights of the Video Store employees, their virtues. (Listed among Scorcese’s finest qualities, for instance, were “revolutionized the use of pop music in film,” “directed the only Jerry Lewis movie that doesn’t suck shit,” and “made eyebrows funny again.”)

  Video Store’s staff was equally composed of adrift young BOA-holding cinephiles and middle-aged, burnt-out, quasi-intellectual fat guys. There was a pervasive mood of despondency among this all-male cohort, which made Sam, at this time in his life, an apparent fit. Because of this, and despite the foreboding categorization and the aggressive labels, the vibe was quite different from that of its late cousin, the infamously bitchy independent record store of High Fidelity and the pre-MP3 era. The stuck-up record store employees of yore had been, first and foremost, fans, transformed by overexposure to their passion—i.e., music—into red-assed critics. Still, they were enthusiastic, and their pursuit was, early on at least, one they had gravitated toward willingly.

  The adrift young BOA-holding cinephiles, meanwhile, were of the type that had not only dabbled in filmmaking classes but also served on the board for their college’s film program and, in carrying a print of Umberto D. across campus in a gleaming, hexagonal steel case, caught a whiff of the same imperative air as the Secret Service agent who totes the president’s red phone; they had brushed up against the industry only to discover, post-graduation, that they lacked either the connections or the extroversion to score the sort of internship that led to a career in production. Video Store was, for them, a stunning reverse. The middle-aged, burnt-out, quasi-intellectual fat guys, meanwhile, were the very despots who had ruled the independent record stores and been downgraded by the obliteration of the retail music industry to the movie rental arena. For these aging tastemakers, Video Store was exile, not just from their chosen field but also from their youth.

  The result was that the commerce of the Video Store was transacted drearily. Although the opinions of the staff ran as thick and oppressive as those at an Ivy League faculty meeting, the discriminating borrowers of the latest Wong Kar-wai film received the same grunting service and treatment as the rank and file who took out Hollywood romcoms and action movies. Only the appearance of a young art school female in an ass-length skirt could reliably rouse the members of the staff from their usual semi-conscious condition.

  And yet there also ran beneath the thin brown carpet of Video Store, an underground river of the
most acid petulance that Sam had ever encountered. One of his coworkers, Denny, a puffy fiftyish former owner of a long-shuttered East Village record store called Opiates, was constantly mumbling something under his breath. After listening closely for a time, Sam deduced that Denny was repeating, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” the way another person might reflexively whistle a favorite melody. Another coworker, a recent Wesleyan grad who never took off his sunglasses and was always sniffling, was fired when it was discovered that he had been meticulously scratching random DVDs in order to render the last five minutes unwatchable. The prematurely bald Zach, who back in his salad days at Brown had conducted a lively Q&A with Francis Ford Coppola before an audience of two hundred, disposed of hours by dribbling spit onto dollar bills from the cash register, then using a pen to trace the spit flecks and, when they were dry, restoring the currency to the till. With no affect or preamble whatsoever, and while nonchalantly filling in every answer in the Friday New York Times crossword puzzle from left to right without stopping, Zach once remarked to Sam, “I think George Romero is a fucking philistine, but I like the idea of a zombie virus, because then I’d have absolute impunity to waste all the kumquats who come into this place.” Having dispatched the puzzle, the Brown alum rolled up the paper and dropped it in the trash. “And then go and comfort their witless girlfriends with my cock.” It was, Sam decided with a little reflection, perhaps the most frightening thing he had ever heard someone say.

  As something of a tweener—a young cinephile but in complete retreat from any desire to involve himself in the making of film; and inarguably burnt out, but nothing like as fat as the middle-aged quasi-intellectual fat guys who used to work at record stores—Sam eschewed convention completely. For the three-plus years he worked at Video Store, he smiled as much as his face could bear, politely rented people their movies, and to avoid fraternizing with the other inmates, grabbed as many solo shifts as possible.

  He was present, though, when an indistinctly damaged kid, seventeen or eighteen years old, a regular by the name of Aldo, inadvertently disturbed the dragon that brooded inside the heart of Video Store.

  Aldo had glasses like goggles, a big tapered head like Frankenstein, and a foot-dragging walk that suggested a history of wearing leg irons. He came into the store at irregular times and betrayed no hint that he attended school or held a job. Sam surmised maybe Aldo had suffered a stroke or fallen off a roof or otherwise experienced a serious but not physically debilitating brain trauma, although he was totally animated and spoke clearly enough.

  Aldo’s mistake was to profess one fateful afternoon that he, Aldo, “liked all of those silent movies without the talking.” His error was compounded when, in reply to Zach’s shallow sigh, Aldo laughed like a drunken hillbilly, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted, “Hey, man, you awake?”

  The question echoed around the store. A woman looked up, disapproving, from the remote end of the Commercial Fare section. Zach blinked at Aldo.

  Sam, who had been filling out an invoice, stepped forward. “Are you looking for something in particular?” he asked Aldo.

  Zach snapped straight up on his stool. “I’m awake. I got this guy.” He gestured for Sam to back away.

  “He’s awake!” Aldo shook a triumphant fist.

  “Silent movies, huh?” Zach’s thin, pale eyebrows arched slightly. “Without the talking.”

  “Yeah!” Aldo was oblivious. “What should I get?”

  “The uncut Greed,” said Zach. “You haven’t lived until you’ve seen the uncut Greed.”

  And that casually, poor Aldo was hooked by the most pointlessly mean-spirited long con of all time. Zach went on to regale the kid with the story of Erich von Stroheim’s legendary original ten-hour cut of Greed. In this cut the director had attempted to realize the full power of cinema by adapting Frank Norris’s McTeague, a novel of dentistry, the West, insanity, and yes, greed, down to the minutest detail.

  Wouldn’t Aldo like to rent it?

  “Oh, man! Yeah, yeah! I gotta see that!”

  Oops! Oh, sugar, Aldo. Wouldn’t you know. It’s out.

  By dastardly coincidence, the ten-hour uncut version of Greed invariably happened to have “just gone out” mere moments before Aldo arrived. While a quick search of the Internet could have revealed that the Greed reels had long ago been destroyed, the kid’s interest in silent film was apparently unattached to any kind of research or education. Aldo simply liked the silent movies without the talking, and wanted to see what was the best.

  Except for Sam, who refused to take any part, the rest of the Video Store gang happily played along with Zach’s scenario.

  Von Stroheim’s uncut Greed was the object of Aldo’s unrelenting desire. “Is Greed in? Is Greed in?” he’d ask.

  If Zach was the one on duty, he would become uncharacteristically excited and slap his head in a show of transparently over-the-top frustration. “Gosh darn it, Aldo! Wouldn’t you know, a fat-ass in a red suit and a red hat just came in and rented it. You must have passed him on the sidewalk. He was carrying a big sack over his shoulder? I’m so sorry. I can’t believe you haven’t seen it yet. It’s the most bestest, most superest movie ever made.”

  About this uncanny run of bad luck, Aldo was heartbreakingly good-natured. “Oh, shoot!” he’d say, and the next day he’d be back to see if the fat-ass in the red suit had returned the non-existent movie.

  Meanwhile, Zach and the others insisted that Aldo not rent anything else. You have to be patient for Greed! they said. It’s such a special movie that we only rent it to people on the special list, and if you want to be on the special list, you can’t take out anything else. You just have to wait for Greed.

  This went on for over a year. Flowers grew and flowers died. Snow fell and snow melted. Denny, the fuck you mumbling former owner of Opiates, suffered a fatal brain aneurysm on the 7 train and was replaced by nearly interchangeable sadsack named Danny, who in the pre-digital era had been the proprietor of an Upper Eastside record store called Musee de Grouvre. Through the months and the seasons, Aldo came in—every day. Greed was not in.

  “Man,” said Aldo frequently, shaking his block head, “I just wish I could rent something, you know? I’m, like, bored.”

  Zach would shrug. “By all means, Aldo. Rent whatever you like. But remember, if you do, you lose your place on the special list, and it might be quite a while before we can squeeze you back on.” Zach might pause here, clicking his tongue or petting one of his pale eyebrows, before pressing home the final point. “If that happened, who knows—you might never get to see the uncut Greed.”

  Though Sam did not collaborate, he passively abided this cruelty. Was it possible that some coincidental elements relating to the matter—such as the famed loss of the reels and the not-quite-right-in-the-head film enthusiast—made him instinctively shy away? It was possible.

  Sam did once summon the nerve to say to Zach, “This Aldo thing . . .” He winced to show his discomfort.

  “I know, I know. I feel the same way,” said Zach. “I keep thinking how laughable it would be if shithead died without ever finding out how stupid he was.”

  ■ ■ ■

  One February day, Sam was the only employee able to make it through a snowstorm for the midday shift. Video Store was empty the entire afternoon; the phone didn’t ring a single time; the only thing visible through the frosted surface of the plate-glass front window was, faintly, the rotating emergency lights of passing snowplows.

  And then Aldo burst inside, glasses steamed and speckled with flakes, and cried, “Greed! Greed! Is it finally in?”

  Sam jumped at his position by the register. “Jesus, Aldo! You scared me.”

  Aldo slammed himself against the counter. He was breathless, seeming to sense that the treasure was at last within his grasp. “I’m on the special list! You can give it to me!”

  “Calm down,” said Sam. “You know, that movie is bullshit. Zach and those guys are just pulling your chain.
”

  A snowflake slid down a steamed glasses lens, leaving a smear of water. Aldo gasped some air. “What did you say?”

  Sam repeated himself. “It’s a joke, Aldo. A stupid joke. There is no DVD of the uncut Greed. The film was destroyed decades ago.”

  “What?” Aldo asked, and Sam told him a third time, and Aldo asked, “What?” and Sam told him yet again, and it went like that for a while, until finally, Aldo got it.

  “Oh, man! Man!” The kid slapped the hips of his jeans several times. He staggered around in a little circle in front of the counter, dripping snowmelt on the carpet and bobbing his anvil-shaped head, as if trying not only to accept the idea that the ten-hour cut did not exist, but to swallow the idea, too. Aldo clutched his temple. “Well, what the heck am I supposed to do now?”

  “Rent another movie?” proposed Sam, who wished with all his heart that he had not said anything.

  “Rent another movie?” Aldo gaped. A plow growled by outside, blade screeching, and the ceiling banks of fluorescent light flickered. “You want me to just—rent another movie?”

  The indistinctly damaged kid continued to come in after that, though when the other employees of Video Store asked if he was interested in renting Greed, he’d shrug and pick a Three Stooges compilation, pay, and wordlessly shuffle out. Aldo never fingered him for having broken the spell, and soon after, Sam quit to pursue weddingography full-time.

  “Poor guy,” Zach commented on the change in Aldo. “He must have realized that we were all bastards and life is a machine that skins guys like him alive.”

  ■ ■ ■

  The feeling he had on the Friday-morning drive north to Hasbrouck to see his dying father put Sam in mind of Aldo for the first time in years. A forbidden door inside Sam, padlocked and drawn with chains and nailed over with plywood and braced by a jumble of furniture, had without warning come crashing open, and now he was gazing out beyond its step into the ultimate nothing of freezing, sucking space. He supposed this was how it was for Aldo when he learned that the uncut Greed didn’t exist: as if his entire belief system had been called into question, making everything dizzy and inconceivable, and his brain couldn’t seem to catch up. It was also like that time when Sam was a kid and Booth’s mistress gave Sam her underwear, and Booth spun everything around somehow, and after the wheel stopped, it was Sam who was the culprit. His chest ached to remember it. The trees that hugged the shoulders of the Taconic Parkway smeared green beyond the windows, Sam’s foot was a brick on the accelerator, his sister had beaten the hell out of everyone, and Booth was dying.