So many cracked personalities. At times, there had been a line of twenty or thirty at the Cashier du Cinéma. Like the old days, Alaura had thought. Financially, these had been the best five weeks in Star Video’s history.
But at this final moment, this last day of business, where were all the regulars? The friends of Star Video? The former employees? The annoying barflies? The regulars who came in and hung out and talked about movies? Where was the swell of local remorse?
Were they all at home? Watching cable? Streaming movies on Netflix? Did they all have better things to do than wave farewell to their beloved shithole video store?
(And at the very least the local progressive Appleton newsrag might have assigned a reporter, seeing as Alaura had sent them repeated e-mails about this important community development. She’d even suggested running an obituary for Star Video, a clever conceit that, in her opinion, had been discourteously ignored.)
“Bring your final selections to the front!” Waring barked from behind the counter, standing where his director’s chair had once stood. “Lights out in five!”
Alaura surveyed the ravaged floor. She could see through the remaining grated shelves all the way to the rear wall. Dead, she thought. Over. For years, this industry had flourished. It had begun in the early 1980s, when she was a little girl, when VCRs had first become affordable to everyday citizens, because everyone wanted to watch movies at home. At first the VCR had been about time-shifting, about recording the shows you couldn’t be home to watch. But then, shortly thereafter, video stores had come along, and quickly VCRs were only used to play rented movies, bringing the movie theater to the home. It had been that simple: that was the entire story of their industry. She had started working at Star Video in 1997, when there were still those long lines on Friday nights, that sense of frantic scramble for the newest releases, and that giddy tingle to discover a movie one remembered from one’s youth (“They have The Dark Crystal? No way!”). Watching movies had never been like this. Before the 1980s, people only watched films in theaters, or they were hostage to whatever aired on television. If you wanted to see Rashomon, you had to wait for a Kurosawa retrospective at your local university, like that ever happened, like people even cared. If you wanted to watch every episode of Hill Street Blues, you had to be home to catch it, every week, on time, for years.
Video stores had changed everything. And now they were dying.
Alaura sold an obese man with a handlebar mustache thirty dollars’ worth of third-rate VHS nature documentaries. She thanked him, bagged his movies, and realized that he might be the last paying customer Star Video ever had.
Only four customers remained. She vaguely recognized their faces. But they weren’t regulars. They just wandered the remaining aisles. Bored.
Didn’t they understand today’s significance?
Farley understood, and he’d been driving customers nuts all day. He’d interviewed nearly every person who had entered the shop. It was sweet watching him navigate the store (with Rose, who was apparently his new girlfriend, as well as his sound crew, devotedly at his side holding the boom mic) and accost customers with questions about what Star Video had meant to them, what Star Video’s closing might mean for West Appleton, etc. Dorian had submitted happily to being interviewed—he had arrived with his new boyfriend (a flannelled musician wearing tighter jeans than Alaura’s), hugged everyone (even a reluctant Waring), and after his interview departed the shop while donning, as always, his contented-Buddha smile.
“That’s it,” Waring called to her. “Time to lock up.”
She nodded.
Six p.m.—the earliest, she was certain, that Star Video had ever closed.
Alaura moved to the front door. Her legs felt weak. She reached up and carefully yanked the cord on the neon OPEN sign. The light went out.
Jeff, simultaneously, hit the circuit breakers in the Porn Room, killing over half of the store’s fluorescent bulbs.
The final customers began shuffling toward the exit.
Alaura was close to tears. Her stomach ached. She didn’t want anyone to see her, but she couldn’t help it. For fuck’s sake. When had she become a girly crier? Maybe it was just because she was exhausted. That morning she had awoken early and worked her first shift at Weaver Street Market, the West Appleton grocery co-op Waring always made fun of. She had always half-mocked the place, too, though the food was tasty. People seemed too happy there. So enlightened, so fucking evolved. Aging hippies shopping with purple fabric bags. Taut middle-aged joggers meeting at sunrise for group runs, and cyclists, and speed walkers, and Nordic walkers (elderly women dragging weird graphite poles behind them). Bluegrass and jazz and puppet shows on its shady front lawn. Hula-hoopers. The interpretive dancer who might or might not be a lunatic.
The co-op was a community center, but Alaura had always considered it too mainstream-West-Appleton-progressive for her outsider spirit. Then, on a recent sortie for a quick lunch, only a week ago, Alaura had actually taken a moment to reconsider the place for the first time in years. The light from the large windows rushed into her eyes with the painful shock of cold water, and she had realized that she recognized many of the customers shopping around her. Of course she did. She knew everyone in West Appleton. And she knew the reason she normally walked through Weaver Street Market (and everywhere else, for that matter) like a robot, with blinders, was because she would recognize people but would not remember their names. It was bad enough in bars, or on the street, when Star Video customers would approach her and ask how she was doing, and she could never remember their names. Outside the confines of Star Video, she was helpless.
But that day, when she made eye contact with them, she remembered most of their names instantly, and they nodded and smiled, and a few even stopped to ask how she was doing, stammered for some sympathetic offering about the closing of Star Video. It dawned on her that she made them nervous. They thought she was cool. The hip girl with tattoos. Not as pretty as she used to be, no longer one of the sexiest girls in West Appleton, but cool nonetheless. That day she walked out of the co-op feeling light and popular, and after eating her lunch of tempeh and couscous and mushroom salad at a picnic table out front, she marched back into the place and applied for a job. Her interview the next day was for customer service manager. Living wage, benefits, 401(k). And they didn’t care about her tattoos. Those hippy entrepreneurs have a few things right, she’d thought.
And even before finding out that she’d been hired, she’d had visions of herself—the happy, tattooed grocery-store lady, who greets customers and organizes important community events. Wearing a red bandana, like Willy Nelson, as well as a sleeveless, low-cut shirt—Rosie the Riveter with tattoos and cleavage. Assisting elderly women with their dried goods. Helping an autistic employee learn to bag fruit. The glass doors of Weaver Street Market sliding open for her husband pushing a baby carriage. Eating a vegetarian lunch with her small family in the shade of the oak trees out front. An old old woman with tattoos and kinky gray hair, a vegetable patch in her backyard, walking streets covered in yellow leaves from grocery store to home, a small funky house in West Appleton, a fireplace purring at her arrival.
Alaura noticed that Farley, half-hidden in the New Releases section, was filming her, and she found herself performing a teary-eyed, smiling shrug for his camera. Then she saw Jeff, who had emerged from the back room and now stood near the decimated Employee Picks section—she didn’t know what else to do, so she gave the poor kid a little wave.
Oh, Jeff. I wish I’d handled you differently.
Waring appeared beside her.
“We’ll need to get going soon,” he said. “Don’t want to be late.”
She nodded.
Their final four customers, none of whom had purchased anything, left the store—they weren’t regulars, they didn’t understand the importance of this moment, and they exited with oblivious, cordial nods to Alaura, who held open the door for them.
She wished them
all good night.
Waring, Jeff, and Alaura—bundled in various coats and scarves against the November chill—stood together, silent, on the weedy sidewalk in front of Star Video. Jeff was speechless. Waring and Alaura looked morose, bereft, bloodless. Jeff understood, of course. He felt it, too. But he’d only worked at Star Video for a few months, and he knew he didn’t have any right to their level of sadness. Not after all the mistakes he’d made.
Still, in an oddly noble gesture, Waring had ordered Jeff to close money that night (which the young man had done under the watchful eye of Farley’s camera), and for years he would be somberly proud that the paperwork for Star Video’s final day of business would forever be adorned by his handwriting and calculations and signature.
Farley and Rose had just walked away—Farley was pleased with the footage he’d gathered, pleased at least that Waring had submitted, without much rancor, to his filming it. And Rose had seemed happy, too. Jeff might enjoy running into them sometime—former coworkers shaking hands on the street and reminiscing.
“Sure you won’t come tonight?” Alaura said to Jeff, breaking the silence.
“No, sorry. I’ve got some catching up to do. Studying.”
Alaura nodded, not looking at him, not insisting that he change his mind. But her coldness didn’t really hurt him anymore. For weeks after the Match Anderson debacle, she’d either completely ignored him or snapped at him rudely for any mistakes he made in the store, and Jeff had come to understand the difference between real anger and the type of perpetual crankiness Waring exhibited, and how much more the former hurt than the latter, especially when it came from a woman you adored. Jeff longed for the Alaura of two months ago, in her apartment, wearing her long tee shirt and little shorts. But that was over, forever, and he’d grown used to it, moved on.
Then, a week ago, there had been yet another mysterious shift in her behavior—though she never actually announced forgiveness for his stupid mistake, she seemed to have made a conscious decision to be more polite. Or at least not to snap at him. She didn’t hate him. She might even be his friend again, eventually.
“Waring?” Jeff said. “Good luck with everything.”
Waring nodded, flicked a cigarette stub onto the sidewalk, and gazed at his shoes. “Well,” Waring said, “you know, Jeff . . . for these last few weeks, working so hard during the final sale, you’ve been . . . I appreciate it.”
“You were paying me.”
“I’m saying thank you,” Waring said, a bit annoyed.
“I know you are.”
They shook hands.
Waring continued looking at his dusty shoes, and Jeff was tempted to hug the strange little man—but he suspected Waring might throw something at him.
Jeff turned to Alaura.
“Well . . .” he said.
“Oh, shut up,” she said, her tone breezy and familiar. “We’ll see you soon.” Then she reached out and hugged him.
And though he tried to resist, he could not help holding her tight. Squeezing her even after she had started to pull away. He knew she would understand. She wouldn’t mind the long hug. She knew he’d had a crush on her, maybe even loved her. But he didn’t want to push it. Who knows, years down the line. Still, he held on. He did not let go. He smelled her hair, felt the wool of her lime-green toboggan fizzing against his face.
“Bye,” he whispered, and he turned and walked away.
Moments later he glanced back, trying to imbue tragedy in the motion, but Waring and Alaura were already walking in the other direction, not looking his way.
So that was it.
Five minutes later, Jeff passed Tanglewood Baptist church—where he’d not gone in over a month, and he hadn’t told Momma, and he didn’t care—and after giving the tall steepled building a sidelong glance, he turned and entered a pub, a place he’d had the good fortune to be served beer several times recently. It was a dingy place named Pravda, the centerpiece of which was a huge red-on-black painting of Lenin on an exposed cinderblock wall. At 6:35 p.m., when Jeff arrived, there were only three other patrons, men in their twenties or thirties, drinking quietly and watching college football. Indie rock with an off-key singer buzzed over the jukebox. Jeff ordered a twenty-four-ounce Pabst. He took the beer to a corner table and began studying a textbook on film criticism. Earlier that week, he had observed a film class, and he had all but decided to switch majors, from business to film, at his next opportunity. The class had been exciting—though much of the discussion was over his head. But they were talking about movies, his favorite thing in the world, and he’d learned that he might even be able to focus his studies on sci-fi and anime, genres that he now guiltlessly admitted were his true loves. Some people actually made a living studying exactly those genres! The only thing he had not understood during the class was that no one ever said that a particular movie was good or bad; they only talked about shots and sequences, used cryptic French terms he had scribbled in his notebook to investigate later.
So he had checked out this book, a large brick of paper, the contents of which, he now realized, were also over his head. Every few sentences he had to consult his mini dictionary, and some of the terms weren’t even in there.
Then a group of three girls and two boys, preppy college kids, walked into Pravda, blaring voices, laughing stupidly at the kitschy decor of the place. They ordered fruity red drinks and took a table next to Jeff’s, though there were ten other tables they could have chosen. He heard the girls babbling about Gossip Girl—of all the shows on television, that new piece-of-crap Gossip Girl. And the gaggle of them looked so much like what Jeff assumed fans of Gossip Girl would look like that he couldn’t stop listening to them with anthropological fascination. Jeff caught a glare from the bartender—the bearded man shrugged. Jeff nodded in disgusted agreement. Then, after another explosion of shrill laughter, Jeff leaned over to them, cleared his throat, and said, “If you’re going to be obnoxious, could you move over there?” One of the boys, the bigger of the two, started to say something. But Jeff beat him to it: “Don’t talk to me, Chester. You’re in my bar.” (Why Chester? Jeff didn’t know. And why had he said “my bar”? Because he had shared a glance with the bartender, he decided.) The guy stepped down, and the group moved to the far table, finished their drinks quickly, humorlessly, and left. The bartender then waved Jeff over, shook his hand, and gave him a free beer. Jeff returned to his book. Over the next hour, he got a bit drunk, and for the first time since—well, maybe since first getting hired at Star Video—he felt hopeful about his future.
At seven thirty p.m., cigarette and beer in hand, Waring Wax stepped from the shadows wearing a rumpled black suit that, to all those watching him, seemed a natural extension of his body. The large room opened up in front of him. Christmas lights were strung along the eighteen-foot-high ceiling, a firmament of near-linear constellations. Waring was standing upon a small stage and looking down at his audience. Forty Applets stared back at him. They were sitting on mismatched couches, or in Burger King booths, or at Formica-topped diner tables, or on the short bank of twelve theater seats that Waring had procured cheap from Memorial Hall on Ape U’s campus (recently remodeled). He saw a young couple sitting in the front half of a Volkswagen Beetle that he had purchased for forty dollars in scrap, and that Jeff had painted with two cans of Rust-Oleum spray paint (Harbor Blue). He saw several of the old biddies from Covenant Woods, his morning regulars, who were holding hands cutely, looking up at him with dazed smiles. A few other people milled near the walls of the wide-open space, and in the dim creamy light, Waring saw them studying the dense collection of classic movie posters—there was the Tom Laughlin autographed Billy Jack poster that Jeff had marveled at, and several of Alaura’s indie posters from her apartment, and all of the random wrinkly posters that had adorned Star Video for so many years. And looking to the back of the room, Waring saw Alaura behind the new glimmering concession stand. She was handing two bottles of beer and a leafy sandwich to a chubby lesbian
he recognized from the store. Alaura smiled radiantly, leaned forward onto the counter, her head bobbing in some theatrical jest, locked in pleasant conversation. Waring smiled, took a drag of his cigarette.
“Welcome to Star Theater,” he called out to the audience.
He announced the title of that night’s film, the newest from an up-and-coming independent director, and he called out loudly, “I’ll be honest with you, I watched the movie today, and it isn’t fantastic. I’ve seen better. But when you go to a movie theater, you don’t necessarily expect the greatest thing you’ve ever seen, right? You just want to be entertained. And I was entertained when I watched this earlier today. And the director, I think we’d all agree, he’s earned the right to make a movie that isn’t exactly amazing. He’s made other, better films, and he dated that woman, you know, from that British pop group, the one everyone really liked, or so they tell me. And well, I guess . . .” and Waring took a sip of beer, only his third sip of the evening.
The Last Days of Video Page 24