The Last Days of Video (34 page)

The shelves were nearly
bare, and Star Video, or what remained of it, now seemed twice as large as it ever had. Over half the shelves had already been dismantled, their remaining DVD and VHS show boxes shifted toward the front of the store. The remnants of the shelving now lay in a gigantic metal heap, over eight feet high, near the entrance to the Porn Room.
The African Queen
had also made its final voyage. Its wooden hull was now a splintered shipwreck covered with a large blue tarp. The result of all this was a new, strange, wide-open space that made Star Video look more like a business at its earliest stages than at its end. The room now echoed. Fully half the floor space was bare, a gaping hole where one could now do cartwheels, run sprints, lie down and take a nap on the cool linoleum. In this rear section of the store, at least, the battle against the dust bunnies had been won.

Today was Star Video's last day of business.

But where the hell is everyone? Alaura thought. Where are all the regulars?

Alaura had informed them (those twenty or so most faithful cinephiles) that Star Video would be closing early tonight, and for
good. That they could all bid adieu by having the last grab at the remaining DVDs and VHS tapes. One dollar per title. Fifty cents. Free. Who cared.

But none of them had come.

Only the dregs of cinematic history remained, of course. DVD collections of
The Real World
and
Road Rules
and
Big Brother
and
The Bachelor
—because no one cared about watching reality shows several years after that reality had transpired. And there was
Garfield: The Movie, Crash
(not the 2004 movie by that title, which had inexplicably won Best Picture, but the 1996
Crash
, by Cronenberg, which alone should have gotten it sold), Spielberg's
1941, Mac and Me, Junebug.
And
Gigli
—they'd tried for years, literally, to sell their last DVD copy of
Gigli
, but it had all been for naught. Every disc remained of
Wire in the Blood
, a British mystery series that Alaura had actually quite liked but that no one else seemed to know about, even the nice old ladies from Covenant Woods. Hundreds of old comedies remained, and hundreds of old dramas, and a somewhat higher percentage of indie films, like
The Trouble with Perpetual Déjà-Vu, The Mystery of Trinidad
, and
Death and the Compass
, movies with promising titles that had turned out to be mind-numbingly awful—even though Alaura had always touted the merits of independent cinema, there was no denying that quite a lot of those titles had been simply unwatchable.

And it had not escaped Alaura's notice, and it made her throat clench to see:
Changeless
, Match Anderson's failed sci-fi epic, was her lone remaining title on the Employee Picks shelf.

For five weeks—since the production of
The Buried Mirror
had closed up and left town—every movie at Star Video had been on sale. Liquidation. Classics and new releases (everything from
King Kong
to
Casino Royale)
had been gobbled up first, and as she and Waring had aggressively reduced prices, more and more of the store's impressive back stock had evaporated. Porn, of course, had gone like cocaine pancakes (Waring's term). Then those television series popular with
the Ape U intelligentsia:
The Sopranos, The Wire, Homicide: Life on the Street, Deadwood, Black Adder, Black Books, Fawlty Towers, Firefly, Arrested Development
, all the others. Then the Criterion collection. Then everything else. Several customers had spent over a thousand dollars each, toting away laundry baskets filled with DVDs. And the fanatical collectors: anime hounds, horror snobs, Peter Sellers junkies. One customer, a fat African-American man with a C. Everett Koop beard, had purchased every film in the Korean Horror section, as well as every Takashi Miike movie still in stock, insanely claiming that Miike would one day go down as Japan's greatest director since Ozu. Another customer, a hale and hearty Swedish guy with sand-blond hair who spoke less English than a tree stump, had expressed and then acted on his rather awkward penchant for black-on-white gay porn.

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.