B008J4PNHE EBOK (38 page)

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.

His father seemed even less like an actual physical being than usual. Sam was accustomed to Booth being way out there, in the deep background—undoubtedly conductive but invisible, like a satellite. To attempt to conceive of his dying was like imagining that gravity could die. “You want me to just—
rent another father
?” a voice in Sam’s head asked.

But he was dying; Mina had said it was stomach cancer, an untreatable mass in his guts.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Relations between Sam and his father had, over the last eight years, not so much broken off as petered away.

Months had elapsed before Booth returned Sam’s phone call of that rainy September night in 2003.

When contact was reestablished, his father explained, “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to call you back. I’ve had phone troubles. These cell-phone companies are merciless in their demands for payment. But how did the picture turn out? What happened? Please tell me that you let a little bit of light into the room!”

At the time, Sam was sunk too deep in his own sorrow to say what he really felt, which was “You had your chance. Your last chance. Now: die.” He would have liked to, but he couldn’t make the effort to execute his relationship with his father. Instead, he told Booth, “It didn’t turn out. End of subject. Don’t ask again.”

And Booth said, “Oh,” and Sam said, “Really. I mean it. Don’t ask me again,” and somehow, miraculously, his father listened, and didn’t.

A couple of years after that, once the cult of the film penetrated the mainstream media outlets—right around the same time, as it happened, Sam left Video Store to pursue a stimulating career in weddingography—Booth sent Tom Ritts as an envoy. “Your father wants to talk to you about what happened to your movie, buddy.” Tom was so ill at ease about raising the matter that he avoided Sam’s eyes.

“He shouldn’t try to do that,” Sam warned, and his godfather nodded and said no more. The message must have been conveyed, because his father never did mention
Who We Are,
not once, not to this day.

Booth had recently relinquished the Manhattan apartment that was his base of operations since the mid-nineties, and moved in with Tom, taking official possession of the guest room that his factotum had maintained for him for years. The money Booth made from voice-over work—such as the monster-truck rally pitch, for example—was apparently not bad. By all reports, he hadn’t been late on a child-support payment since Mina was in elementary school.

Still, his sister’s conception of Booth as some sort of rock struck Sam as either confounding or ludicrous, depending on the day. He never let himself get too curious, though. He couldn’t see how, at this late date, it could benefit anyone.

If the old man had undergone some sort of Awakening, he at least had been decent enough not to proselytize about it.

The only concrete sign of his reform was a card that had arrived in Sam’s mailbox in 2007. A late-seventies photograph of Orson Welles adorned the front of the card, the aging genius dwarfing a chaise longue and brooding over a backgammon board. Nothing was written inside, but it contained a money order for the amount of $587.34.

Hours elapsed before Sam registered that it was recompense for John Jacob Bregman’s prosthetic nose. Initially, he felt chastened by the payback, but after that, he was irritated, more with himself than Booth. Because it wasn’t as though his father had made Sam a great gift. All he had done was square a debt years after the fact. Sam went ahead and deposited the money, barely prevailing against the urge to use his cell phone calculator to figure what he’d been cheated of in interest.

Booth sent his son the occasional e-mail (from [email protected]), usually
forwards of YouTube videos. (It had to be said, the old man had excellent taste in forwards; among other wonders, he sent Sam a video of a ragged black cat prowling around in a cage and, through the magic of CGI, reciting a portion of a Willy Loman monologue from
Death of a Salesman,
and it had been as moving as it was surreal.) Occasionally, a short “Just thinking of you” or a “Too long since we got together” missive found its way to Sam’s in-box. Usually, Sam didn’t respond. Why should he? He wasn’t thinking of Booth; he didn’t think it had been too long since their last get-together.

Their last face-to-face meeting had been Thanksgiving at Tom’s house, the previous year. Booth eulogized the turkey—“Let us remember him
as the turkey he was,
not the turkey he became . . . a turkey in full . . .”—which was pretty funny, and he also spoke of his thanks that all the people he loved were present. Sam shook his father’s hand, each attested that it was good to see the other, and the younger Dolan was back on the road before the second half of the Lions game.