The Last Days of Video

by Jeremy Hawkins

  The air smelled, immaculately, of popcorn.

  “This place, Star Theater,” he went on, “will be a home for good movies. Or if not good movies, then at least interesting ones. And if not interesting, then at least weird. What I’m saying is, we’ll show old films and new films, we’ll host film festivals and other gimmicky things like that, and in general, we’ll try to deal in honest films that contribute to the scope of film history. I know that sounds pretentious. But that’s what we’re going to do. That’s our humble mission, et cetera.”

  Then he saw Farley, whom he’d known would be there that night, just as he’d been at Star Video earlier—Farley was filming Waring, as always, while Rose dutifully pointed a long-tubed microphone in Waring’s direction, a finger set to one ear of her huge headphones.

  Waring, unable to resist, began to flip Farley the bird—

  “And the documentary!” Farley yelled, as if to forestall Waring’s rising middle finger.

  “Oh, right,” Waring said, turning his attention again to the audience. “As my former employee has so politely interjected, two weeks from tonight, at eight p.m., Star Theater will screen a new documentary by Farley . . .” and Waring glanced at the camera and its vigilant operator. “Farley . . . Farley . . . who I’m sure has a last name, though I’m not recalling it just now. But anyway, Star Theater will screen his new documentary, which he promises will be ready and screenable by then, because apparently he’s been working on it for months and is rushing to get it ready for festivals or something, though I’m a bit skeptical of his timeline, as it appears he’s still engaged in principal photography right now. But whatever. The documentary is about my old . . . I’m sorry, our old video store, Star Video—”

  A sudden round of applause, mingled with a healthy dose of doleful “awwwws” from the audience.

  “Yes, yes,” Waring said. He clenched his jaw, trying to drive away the surge of absurd sadness now expanding in his chest: “It’s tragic. It’s heartbreaking. We’re all devastated. And Farley has captured all that tragedy on camera, which is just absolutely great. The documentary is titled . . . what’s it titled again?”

  “The Last Days of Video!” Alaura’s voice rang happily through the theater.

  “Right,” Waring said, nodding. “The Last Days of Video. Come check it out. There’ll be a reception or whatever, with drinks and chips and things like that.” Waring belched behind a fist. “Oh, and some time early in January, date to be announced, we’re hoping to have Alex Walden, yes, the Alex Walden, who is an old friend of mine, we go way back, he’ll be visiting Star Theater for a discussion and a screening of some of his father’s films. Alex, the old lug, has agreed to come, and we’re just hammering out the details. Impressive, huh?” The audience agreed resoundingly with a round of clapping, during which Waring sucked down another gulp of beer. “Anyway, I wanted to thank you for coming, and for watching tonight’s movie and drinking and eating with us. And for forgiving us for the state of the place, which will improve with time. As a treat for our first night of business, we’ll stop the movie halfway through and bring fresh chocolate chip cookies to whoever wants one.” A few giggly murmurs from the audience. “Really, I just wanted to thank you,” he said again. “So . . . well, thank you.”

  Waring stepped away from the screen.

  Sixty seconds later, up in the projection room, Waring turned down the houselights and the Christmas lights, and he hit play on the digital projector—he had paid for the projector, as well as for all the seating and the concession implements and the first and last month’s rent for this ancient building on Watts Street, just around the corner from his old shop, with money garnered from selling his house, and from selling the property that housed Star Video and Pizza My Heart to Ehle County. He had paid off all his debts, and, depending on how business went (People still go to movie theaters, right?), he suspected he would have enough money to keep the place running for at least a few years.

  The movie began, and he watched the first minute of it through the projector room window. But he had already watched the damned thing earlier that day—and you couldn’t watch the same movie twenty times in a row, could you? He knew he would have to lug a television and DVD player up here, so he could watch other movies while Star Theater’s films played on the big screen. The small projection room was big enough for the flat panel. It was big enough for his bed and his books and for the twenty boxes of junk he had deemed un-throw-awayable from his house. And it was just barely big enough for the crusty couch from The African Queen.

  Downstairs he heard Alaura clunking around in the small kitchen, a remnant from this building’s ancient history as a general store. Maybe he should go down and help her. But no. He was exhausted, and Alaura had said she could handle the cookies herself. At intermission, he would help her carry them out. Shit, he thought, how can I replace her? He couldn’t afford to pay her what she deserved, of course, and he had been honest about that. Finally he’d been honest. Now she had a new job at that damn grocery store. He had visited her there that morning, had watched her from behind a display of organic corn chips and all-natural jellies, and to his surprise, she had seemed happy. Smiling, charming customers, fixing problems. She’d be running that store in a year. And that was a good job for her, wasn’t it? They probably contributed to a 401(k), which Waring had never gotten around to setting up. That store would be around forever. People would always need food.

  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 s
een 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?