The Last Days of Video

by Jeremy Hawkins

  “Why?”

  “Video store etiquette. Woody.”

  Jeff nodded. “By the way, Waring, you’re repeating yourself.”

  “What?”

  “That’s like the tenth time you’ve called me Sasquatch, which doesn’t even make sense, by the way, if I’m quote-unquote hairless.”

  “I’ll remember that, teenage Ed Begley Jr.”

  BEING MATCH ANDERSON

  Match Anderson’s immaculate room at the Siena Hotel looked like it had been ransacked by goons searching for top-secret government documents. The mattress of his four-poster king bed sat askew on its box springs. Several dinner trays and takeout cartons were strewn over the floor, along with a carpeting of yellow and white papers, hundreds of them, many with Match’s messy handwriting scrawled over them. It was a wonderful room—mahogany furniture and brass fixtures and a sixty-inch flat-screen television—but the place was a complete disaster, as if Match had been holed up here for months.

  Alaura sat quietly and watched as Match traipsed around, quickly, crazily, in completely random routes amidst the clutter—the Tasmanian Devil who had clearly caused the room’s devastation. Now that she’d spent an hour with him, during which they’d shared a quick meal in the hotel’s restaurant, and during which he’d been constantly accosted by fifty crewmembers asking him a hundred questions, all of which he seemed to answer correctly, but with intense anxiety and annoyance . . . she couldn’t believe the general character of his behavior, nor how he looked, nor how he sounded. His voice was scratchy, like a smoker’s, and he lapsed occasionally into strange phrasing, odd elocution . . . a million parsecs from his sharp boyishness back in high school. And he looked . . . well, he looked awful. Skeletal in the shoulders, haggard and sallow in the face, and more of an unhealthy distribution of flesh around his waist than she had originally noticed. He was sweating profusely, and mostly, it seemed, from his forehead. And his huge, glassy eyes—freaky and detached like Gollum in Lord of the Rings.

  The problem was: how to bring up Star Video. She hadn’t figured out how to do it yet. There hadn’t been a calm moment.

  “So the thing was, I couldn’t get money for the movie,” Match said, after he’d been silent, but walking violently, for quite some time. “For The Buried Mirror. The studio was balking at the eleventh hour, there just wasn’t funding, so I had to say sayonara to my lead actress, who is a great fucking actress, by the way, and she would have played the role perfectly, this obscure Irish chick I bet you’d know. But [name of film studio omitted] said that I had to go for someone with a bigger name, just ten days before initial exteriors in LA, and what the hell am I supposed to do? I don’t have a lead actress. So I float my interest to agents and shit, and then it comes about after a lot of rigmarole that Tabitha Gray is interested. I mean, Tabitha Gray! And though honestly she isn’t right for the part, I agree to meet with her at this restaurant overlooking Central Park, this private club, and she’s read the script, and she’s super interested, which really doesn’t mean anything, because they’re always super interested, but I’m hoping, because I’ve been wanting to make this movie since fucking high school, you know? I mean, I know I’m only thirty years old, but still, that’s a long time.”

  Alaura nodded, smiled. But Match was frightening her. He was tramping around and not looking at her and smoking cigarettes and sweating and holding a clinking glass of bourbon and monologuing.

  “I can’t express how wrong Tabitha was for the part,” he went on. “Is for the part. But I walk in to meet her, at this fancy club, and what do I see standing at the bar? Who do I see? Here it is, Alaura, are you ready? Here it is: I see this amazing fucking Alfred Hitchcock impersonator. I mean, he’s absolutely stupendously perfect. You know how into Hitchcock I was. Am. I’ve watched every second of every movie and all the interview footage and every episode of Hitchcock Presents. I know what the man looks like. He’s one of my heroes. And there’s this impersonator standing there, at the bar, all chubby and shiny like a white seal in a black suit, his teeth jutting forward and craggy, ugly as all sin. Around sixty years old, placing him at the height of his powers, you know, The Trouble with Harry. The Wrong Man. Vertigo. North by Northwest. Psycho. The Birds. Six great films in eight years.” Match sipped his bourbon.

  “So what happened?” Alaura asked timidly.

  “What happened?” Match said. “What happened is I waved to him. And he waved right back. Then he starts mouthing words at me. He’s standing fifteen feet away, from here to that wall right there, but he’s not saying anything, like he can’t make the words come out. Creepy. So I think, must be a drunk impersonator, right? Must be some dude who stands down at Times Square to get pictures taken with tourists. Never mind that this theory doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. Here is this impersonator in an ultra-private uptown club, a club so private that they virtually probed me to let me in to meet Tabitha Gray, because the dude at the front, the maître d’, he didn’t recognize me, and I don’t dress very fancy to boot.” Match took another tiny sip of bourbon, just touching his tongue to the golden liquid. A line of sweat trickled down his left cheek. “Anyway, Tabitha shows up. She sort of explodes silently into the room the way movie stars do, and I click into action. I play the conflicted artist with her. I play the snooty intellectual. I tell her how amazing she is, but then I tell her, to catch her off guard, that I think she’s wrong for the part, that she’s too attractive, too famous, too damned striking. Which is all true, of course, because the part calls for a sort of frumpy housewife type, someone so dull that you’d never expect her to do the things she ends up doing, as I know you remember, Alaura, all the sexual stuff. I say all this to Tabitha, honestly not knowing whether I’m trying to scare her off because she’s so wrong for the part or if I’m playing that frankly honest card hoping to bait her into it.”

  Alaura was struggling to keep up with Match’s frenetic pace, to hold everything in her mind. Not to mention that his room smelled distractingly like an intensified version of him, those musty old bookshelves, but with an unfortunate dash of mildew thrown in.

  Focus on Star Video, Alaura thought to herself. Star Video needs money. Not even a ton of money. Just a little boost. Waring’s finally trying. We can survive. We have to. There’s no way bookstores and record stores and the fucking Postal Service can outlive Star Video . . .

  “And as I’m babbling away at Tabitha,” Match continued, “I keep looking at the fat bastard at the bar, and I notice that the bartender hasn’t said a word to him. And then I know, I just know, pow! I know that I’m looking at Alfred Hitchcock’s ghost. And I know for a fact that he’s here to see me. It’s a shock, obviously. But I keep my focus on Tabitha. And I even notice that she’s flirting with me a little, which is hilarious, given how I look and how she looks and that her last boyfriend was that French soccer player. Anyway, I leave Tabitha in medias res, I walk away, which is as good an approach with a car salesman as it is with an overhyped actress . . . and I plan to poke Hitchcock in the chest just to see how real this ghost fucker is. I reach the bar. But he’s not there. I look back at Tabitha Gray, who’s looking at me with the sad puppy-dog thing, and there’s Hitch sitting across from her. But she doesn’t see him!”

  “Match?” Alaura said softly when he had been silent for a few seconds.

  He turned to her and smiled pleasantly, like he had momentarily forgotten his old friend was in the room.

  “Do you realize that this sounds . . . well . . .”

  “Crazy?” he said. “I know.”

  She nodded, relieved that he had provided the word.

  The question now became, crazy how? Had he sustained a blow to the head? Was he legitimately schizophrenic? Was he strung out on pills and booze? Was he dangerous? Alaura didn’t believe she was in any danger herself, though, unfortunately, the fact that the thought had crossed her mind was more than a little worrisome.

  “Clearly, I’ve gone nuts,” Match said, as if directly addressing her tho
ughts. “I’ve been working too hard. Nonstop for, like, five years. More like ten years. More like always. I’ve never stopped. So it’s mental exhaustion, or something, and now I’m seeing the ghost of a dead director. And of course it has to be insanity, because The Buried Mirror is my Hitchcock thing, that’s how I think of it now, not like Lynch or Cronenberg, but like Hitch. This is my attempt to be both artistic and entertaining, just a straight out-and-out thriller, but done artfully, and with the sex stuff, too. You know, Alaura? You remember, don’t you? You were the first person who ever read The Buried Mirror five thousand drafts ago.”

  “Of course I remember,” she said in a daze.

  “So the first thing I do is call my brother. You remember Finn?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He used to masturbate all the time.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I walked in on him once.”

  “I’ve walked in on him jerking off so many times I could pick his dick out of a lineup.”

  And Alaura knew he was referencing Porky’s, the scene where the angry gym teacher proposes a penis lineup to determine the identity of a flasher.

  Was this a good sign? That he was capable of a joking reference?

  “So I call Finn,” Match said, “and he’s really concerned. He coproduces things with me. Did you know that?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ve kept up with your career.”

  “Finn is concerned,” Match said, not acknowledging her comment. “Concerned for Match’s well-being. But we have to keep it quiet because we’re supposed to start shooting in ten days. So Finn discretely arranges for me to see this neurologist, this Indian or Pakistani guy with a pencil-thin mustache, who does these brain scans, in Brooklyn, and he interviews me, and he can’t really find anything wrong, but he gives me some pills. My brain doesn’t look like a schizophrenic’s brain, he says, and typically visual hallucinations are not as defined and consistent as what I’m experiencing.”

  “And?”

  “And the pills work. I don’t see Hitchcock. But only for a little while. When we start filming, all of a sudden, like a week in, I start seeing him again. Hitch at the food services table. Hitch sitting on the couch in my trailer. Hitch on set, standing behind me, watching me direct. Hitch everywhere, like fifty times a day!”

  “Oh, Match!”—she wanted to reach out to him, embrace him, calm him down. But he was still whirling around the room, bumping into the nightstand, kneeing the antique chestnut coffee table but still moving, not reacting in pain.

  “And I can’t tell anyone,” Match said, his voice grumbling over the final word. He took a sip of his whiskey, a big sip this time, and he sighed in pleasure-pain after swallowing. “That’s the rub. I shouldn’t even have gone to a doctor because if [name of film studio omitted] finds out that I’m seeing a ghost, that I’m crazy, then they could rip me right off the movie. I mean, I don’t own the rights to the script, I sold it to them, I have very limited creative control. And to be honest, the bigwigs don’t care for me. After Changeless, they weren’t too thrilled to bankroll another Match Anderson project.”

  This was the fourth or fifth time Match had referred to himself in the third person, and Alaura was concerned that this sort of linguistic disassociation might be symptomatic of . . . of whatever was going on with him. She rubbed her hands together. She watched him and noticed again that he was scratching himself repeatedly, sort of a Toshiro Mifune nervous habit, though Match’s scratching carried none of Toshiro’s oddly masculine charm. She felt an incredible sadness welling up inside of her, a cold balloon rising through her belly, both for Match, who was clearly suffering, and for Star Video, which she sensed getting lost in the cloud of this madness.

  “Changeless really screwed things up for me in Hollywood,” Match said. “Eighteen months principal photography, twenty million over budget, and it was a damned flop. Like two weeks in the theaters. I’m embarrassed to even think about it. A sci-fi time-travel reincarnation romance? I mean, I think it’s beautiful, but I thought it would be a classic, you know, that sort of movie that no one sees but critics call a classic and in twenty years normal people will call a classic, too. Terrence Malick, that sort of thing. But the critics hated it more than the public. I mean, they fucking hated it. Twenty-six percent on Rotten Tomatoes.” He looked at Alaura and said, “I can tell that you hated it, too.”

  Alaura cringed behind a tight smile.

  Yes, if she was being honest, she’d hated it.

  “I didn’t hate it,” she managed.

  “So I’ve got no wiggle room,” Match went on, his voice cracking again, pained, and he began another circuit around the room, moving off in the direction of the cockeyed poster bed. “Because Doris Day signs on, right there in the restaurant . . . wait, did I say Doris Day? I meant Tabitha Gray. Sorry. Tabitha Gray signs on, she says yes, so we get the money we need. But damn it all, it’s like the project is beyond my grasp now. Thank God there’s only twelve days left of principal photography. Thank fucking God. Because now I’m like a hired hand on my own movie. It’s horrible. If Tabitha doesn’t like something, it gets changed. She’s not playing the part frumpy, she’s playing it sexy from beginning to fucking end. Which makes no sense. She wouldn’t cut her hair. The bitch wouldn’t even consider bangs. And Alex, he’s amazing, he’s a force of nature, but he makes no fucking sense with Tabitha, he’s too old and fat, maybe thirty-five-year-old-Tom-Clancy-movie Alex, but not sitcom Alex, fuck. He arrived on set on day one like fat Brando in Apocalypse Now, when of course I’d asked him to slim down. And I wanted the crew to live out in the woods somewhere, in some shit-hole redneck motel, or even in Sprinks, I actually hoped, because I thought Sprinks might get everyone into the feel of the movie, you know, the feel of the South, even if we’re filming in Appleton. But Tabitha or someone waves their magic wand, and we’re shooting in HD, not in Super 16, and there’s all new hair and makeup people, and she’s not comfortable saying this or that, and Alex is not comfortable saying this or that, so the script gets altered. And we’re staying at the Siena, the ritziest place in Appleton. And I wanted to keep the details of the production secret to create some buzz, but that pissed off the Ehle County authorities, so they’re giving the studio a hard time, which pisses off the studio, so they’re giving me a hard time. And even though our budget has virtually doubled, I’m not allowed to do half the set-ups I had planned, the long tracking shots, the in-camera stuff, et cetera, because time is so fucking important now, and they’d rather clean things up with CGI. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m seeing Hitchcock, and I’m making a shitty summer blockbuster.”

  “Match,” she said softly. “You need to calm—”

  “But there’s only twelve days left of shooting,” he said, then he exhaled loudly. “Twelve days. Then it’s postproduction, thank God, back in LA. Things will slow down. I just have to make it to postproduction. Twelve days.”

  He had completed his latest trip around the room, and he suddenly collapsed next to her on the baroque burgundy quite uncomfortable couch where Alaura sat. Their hips touched. She smelled his musty books. She looked at his disheveled curly hair. She wanted to remove his dirty brown blazer, massage his neck, straighten the mattress, put him to bed.

  “I’m rambling,” he said. “Sorry.”

  She took a breath. “Does he talk to you? Hitchcock?”

  “No. He tries, I think, but I can’t hear him.”

  “Do you see him now?”

  “Not now. Down in the conference room, when you first arrived, I saw him. And he’s always there when Tabitha is near.”

  Alaura nodded, unsure of the implications of this comment.

  “Jesus, Alaura!” Match jerked up on the couch as if his own words had startled him. “I’ve only been talking about myself! If I’d known you were still here in Appleton . . . Alaura, I’ve missed you. I think about you. All the time. I think: Alaura would love LA. You’d love it there. You should come visit me sometime. You know, high sc
hool might have been the last time I was completely happy, watching movies with you. It’s hard to believe that you’re here, that you’re real. Alaura, what’ve you been doing for the last ten years?”

  And despite everything—despite the cyclone of Match Anderson and her resultant bewilderment—Alaura found herself smiling. That Match thought of her, perhaps often, shot her through with an odd surge of pleasure.

  So she gathered herself and confessed, though she was unable to conquer her embarrassment about it, that she hadn’t been doing anything worth discussion with her life. He prodded further, politely but insistently, and she finally admitted that after graduating from Ape U, she had kept working at Star Video, and she had been there ever since. Which all sounded pathetic, she knew, following the exciting, rambling—if technically insane—tale of the past few months of his life. But it felt good to tell him, because . . .

  As she spoke, she noticed the crazy glaze temporarily vanishing from Match’s face. His eyes seemed to focus on her. His forehead stopped sweating. He leaned back in the lumpy couch, relaxed, like the boy she had known so many years ago.

  “And the tattoos?” he asked calmly.

  “Just things I’ve picked up. They’ve each got a story.”

  “They’re beautiful. You’re beautiful.”

  “Um,” she said, and she couldn’t help cringing a little. Thankfully he was now staring off into space and not at her. “You remember we used to talk about getting tattoos?”

  “Beautiful,” he repeated. “That one on your arm is from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Any guys in your life?”

  “Um . . . occasionally? Nothing that stuck.”

  Match looked toward the ceiling. “I think it sounds like a great life. Working in a video store. Ordering movies, watching movies, talking about movies. You get the best part of the movie business: the movies themselves.”