That grumpy guy is Waring Wax, and he’s usually too drunk to worry about his declining business at Star Video, let alone his quickly evolving extinction in popular culture. But everything changes in his small college town when a bright and shiny Blockbuster Video opens nearby: Clearly, this means war. So, Waring enlists the help of his two reluctant employees, charismatic but conflicted Alaura and desperate virgin Jeff, to hatch a series of wild schemes to save their little store. Together, these three misfits try to save Star Video while confronting, among other things, Waring’s self-destructive tendencies, a life training cult, corporate bicycle gangs, and a Hollywood director who constantly sees the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock.
The Last Days of Video is a hilarious elegy for a bygone era, a quirky and charming story of redemption for a group of loveable cinema freaks, and a love letter to the art of the movies.
That grumpy guy is Waring Wax, and he’s usually too drunk to worry about his declining business at Star Video, let alone his quickly evolving extinction in popular culture. But everything changes in his small college town when a bright and shiny Blockbuster Video opens nearby: Clearly, this means war. So, Waring enlists the help of his two reluctant employees, charismatic but conflicted Alaura and desperate virgin Jeff, to hatch a series of wild schemes to save their little store. Together, these three misfits try to save Star Video while confronting, among other things, Waring’s self-destructive tendencies, a life training cult, corporate bicycle gangs, and a Hollywood director who constantly sees the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock.
The Last Days of Video is a hilarious elegy for a bygone era, a quirky and charming story of redemption for a group of loveable cinema freaks, and a love letter to the art of the movies.
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Overview
That grumpy guy is Waring Wax, and he’s usually too drunk to worry about his declining business at Star Video, let alone his quickly evolving extinction in popular culture. But everything changes in his small college town when a bright and shiny Blockbuster Video opens nearby: Clearly, this means war. So, Waring enlists the help of his two reluctant employees, charismatic but conflicted Alaura and desperate virgin Jeff, to hatch a series of wild schemes to save their little store. Together, these three misfits try to save Star Video while confronting, among other things, Waring’s self-destructive tendencies, a life training cult, corporate bicycle gangs, and a Hollywood director who constantly sees the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock.
The Last Days of Video is a hilarious elegy for a bygone era, a quirky and charming story of redemption for a group of loveable cinema freaks, and a love letter to the art of the movies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619025189 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
STAR VIDEO
HOW TO TRY IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY SUCCEEDING
The blue and yellow thing leaned over the road, a glossy robot poised to attack. It was tall, top-heavy, terribly real — a pristine anachronism on this otherwise dusty stretch of West Appleton — and it had materialized overnight, fifty yards from Waring Wax's shop.
The blue and yellow thing was a sign.
The sign read, "Blockbuster."
Waring's eyes burned. Tears. He pressed his brow into the crook of his elbow. He had not wept sober in over a decade.
A Blockbuster opening on College Street? It would kill him.
Waring turned away from the sign, and facing West Appleton's small business district — the snooty organic grocery store, two trendy thrift shops, three cafés, three deep-fried sandwich shops, seven taprooms, and no fewer than five yoga/naturopath healing studios — he spat out a minute-long fusillade of profanity. During this barrage, several pedestrians edged to the other side of College Street to avoid him. He couldn't blame them. He knew what they saw. They saw a short, sweating, babbling crazy person who was assembled of Hollywood's most disagreeable features: Humphrey Bogart's overbite, Fred Astaire's trapezoidal forehead, Leslie Neilson's bowlegs supporting Jack Black's potbelly, and Chaplin's dark, frizzy hair, now gone Clooney half-gray. And, of course, Tom Cruise's lamentable height.
Arthur-era Dudley Moore, plus twenty extra pounds around the gut, might have been the ideal choice to portray Waring Wax in 2007.
Yes, Waring understood why the pedestrians circumvented him. But he didn't care, so he sneered at them anyway, and this sneering finally helped quell his ridiculous tears. He stopped cursing. He heaved for breath. He lit a cigarette and began sucking it down.
It was ten a.m. and already over eighty degrees. The August sun scalded Waring's sallow skin, a pain that he appreciated. Fresh sweat trickled down his already soaked back. Then a city bus swept by, kicking a gritty gust against his face and whipping his cigarette out of his mouth.
"Could have done without that," Waring muttered.
He listened as the offending behemoth receded behind him. If one were aboard this bus, carrying a cattle load of chirping undergrads, one would enjoy a six-minute air-conditioned trek between the disparate worlds of West Appleton and Appleton (combined pop.: 34,867; w/ students: 45,572). The bus route started here, in West Appleton's quaint-if-somewhat-low-rent business district, then coursed over the blue-green trickle of Nile Creek that demarcated the border between the two towns, then passed the picturesque and preposterous mansions of the Historic District, through Appleton's not-at-all-low-rent and more-than-somewhat-commercialized business district — where a new Blockbuster made a hell of lot more sense than here, Waring thought — and finally to Appleton University, that small, old, and consistently average institution that is the crown jewel of Ehle County, North Carolina.
Finally, after successfully consuming a full cigarette, and without looking again at the Blockbuster sign, Waring stomped across his empty parking lot and entered Star Video, his beloved grungy palace. He switched on the neon OPEN sign. Then he took up his station upon his director's chair behind the long black counter, at the register labeled "Cashier du Cinéma," and he started a John Ford Western. One of his part-time employees, Rose, had called in sick that morning, so he'd have to pull an all-day shift. But it didn't matter. It's not like his social calendar would be thrown into turmoil.
And anyway, business was slow. Over the next few hours, only the regular morning porn renters filtered in, wearing their abashed but resilient expressions, wordlessly swapping out their shame. Then at noon arrived the normal vanload of old biddies from Covenant Woods, the nearby retirement tank, for whom Waring reluctantly submitted to playing tour guide, as he was forced to almost every week whenever he couldn't pawn the job off on someone else. "No, don't worry, we won't sell our VHS tapes," he told them in annoyance as he showed them for the hundredth time to the British TV Mystery section. "Yes, I'm totally devastated that Bob Barker retired," he lied as he guided another old biddy to March of the Penguins, the same videocassette she rented every week.
But the old biddies were oblivious to Waring's harsher-than-average disdain. Or perhaps they weren't oblivious. Perhaps they just didn't care, because they'd grown accustomed to him, and because they needed his help navigating his imposing store, with its twenty-feet-high warehouse ceilings, its labyrinthine metal shelving, its thousands of titles, its sections and subsections and sub-subsections (Martial Arts, Bruce Lee, Bruceploitation), its plague of dust bunnies swarming like Tribbles, and its rickety loft/employee break room looming over the front counter, seemingly ready to collapse at any moment. And the Porn Room, into which these old biddies, on more than one occasion, had accidentally wandered.
Yes, the old biddies needed his help. But that didn't mean he had to be nice about it. Especially not today.
So Waring rolled his eyes at them. He sneered at the porn renters. He scoffed in one way or another at every single customer, no matter how innocuous his or her offenses. But of course, as West Appleton's famously cantankerous drunk, Waring's mood went unnoticed.
Then, at four p.m., Alaura Eden — the longtime manager of Star Video — arrived for her evening shift, and Waring was relieved that she didn't immediately mention the Blockbuster sign. He hoped Alaura hadn't learned of the corporate villain's encampment. Would never learn of it at all.
"Hot day out there, huh?" Alaura said, tossing her jangly purse under the counter.
"I'm having a drink in my office," Waring replied, and he walked away.
Star Video closed at midnight, as usual. Shop lights down. Run Lola Run on the store TV, for the grinding music. Waring was back on the floor, mildly tipsy, sitting in his director's chair and totaling that day's paltry receipts at the counter. Alaura, who was shelving movies nearby in the New Releases section, chattered about how great an employee Jeff was going to be (apparently Waring's objections to Jeff, the tall Richie Cunninghamish undergrad suck-up Alaura had recently and unaccountably hired, were meaningless) and, as usual, about her sweet boyfriend du jour, Paul or Pierce or Peckerdick, though, lest we forget, Peckerdick had threatened to punch Waring in the very recent past for a drunken offense Waring thought best left forgotten. But at least Alaura hadn't mentioned ...
"So is Blockbuster a big deal?"
Waring laughed bitterly. Then he muttered something about being tired/headachey/gassy, and leaving that night's paperwork unfinished, he retreated again toward the rear of the store, through the Porn Room, into his small windowless office.
In his MicroFridge he found a six-pack of Budweiser — lukewarm because the fridge hadn't worked in months — and he pounded two in a row. He collapsed into his creaky office chair. Then he looked up and saw Alaura standing over him. Today her dark brunette hair — long on top, clipped short on the sides and back — was slicked back into a rather amazing pompadour, a sexy punk rendering of Travolta in Grease. Her arms were crossed, displaying the immaculate sleeved tattoo on her right arm: a giant squid slithering its purple tentacles from shoulder to wrist. She wore a black Misfits tank top and tight black jeans, and Waring's eyes lasered in on the chubby Buddha tattoo on her neck, beaming his contented smile. Conversely, Alaura's face was irate and beautiful.
"Waring, are you having money problems?" Because, you see, Waring and Alaura had a longstanding deal — We take care of each other. He had paid for her lawyer, for example, in the early 2000s for several absurd pot charges. Covered her rent when she'd roadtripped with that hairy guru pervert. Forgiven her for her other impromptu spiritual escapades (vanishing for a week or two to study Hinduism, Shamanism, Insane Clown Posse-ism). And once he'd even paid down her student loans when they'd gone to collections — she'd materialized on his doorstep, weeping, pleading for help, and cursing at herself in the most heartbreakingly sincere display of self-loathing he'd ever witnessed. He'd helped her. Gladly. Of course that was all years ago — she had repaid him for all of it. She'd pulled her life together, or seemed to, she hadn't wept on his doorstep for years, and thank Christ she'd given up those absurd religious quests, but still ...
Still there was the silent bargain — We take care of each other.
Though Waring knew Alaura paid the greater price for their friendship. Appeased the customers he trampled upon. Hired new employees whenever old ones finally gave up. Fed him. Stuffed spearmint gum into his mouth to mask the smell of alcohol. Shoved him in a cab when he was too drunk. Instructed him when to buy new clothes. Everything.
In the end, he gave her nothing but money.
"No," he said. "I'm not having money problems. We're fine."
"But our bank account is getting really low."
"You know I have money, Alaura."
"And Blockbuster is obviously a big deal," she persisted. "Is that why Clarissa Wheat from Guiding Glow Distribution has been leaving messages?"
He looked again at Alaura — her pouty lips and pert Jean Seberg nose and angry eyes overlaid by concerned brow. Her heart-shaped face framed by the office door.
"Every single day, she calls."
But Waring didn't want to think about it. About Blockbuster, about money, about the downturn in business, about Clarissa Wheat from Guiding Glow Distribution. (And why was Clarissa Wheat calling? That was more bad news. Waring needed his feeble distribution deal and its measly wholesale discount, not to mention that Guiding Glow was currently allowing him to operate at a considerable debt. But Clarissa Wheat: a hideous Christian prude whom he had grudgingly screwed a year ago, though in truth he couldn't remember the particulars of her visit, such as conversations or copulation, because he'd been tanked. Perhaps nothing sexual had happened, which was possible, he supposed, given her Skeletor-like countenance and her obnoxious biblical proclamations, and especially given that his member hadn't functioned reliably since the early 1990s. But the point: Clarissa Wheat could cancel his distribution contract with a wave of her bony hand, effectively shattering the narrow margin upon which Star Video currently skated. And that, as they say, would be that.) No, he wanted to drink, so he chugged another beer, and he mumbled, "Don't worry, Alaura, everything is fine," and very, very soon, yes, he started to feel the booze, and he wasn't hearing Alaura. He was talking to her but not participating in the interface. Alaura, the only person he gave a crap about, the quirky country girl from Sprinks, North Carolina, turned hipster West Appleton power goddess ... but now he didn't have the energy. This wasn't one of those times when Waring Wax acts for a moment like a human being to gain sympathy, this was instead when Waring drinks, which he did.
Alaura finally left the office.
He guzzled another beer.
Finally the warmth of the booze was pulsing again through his face, so when he thought about Blockbuster, he felt only a painful twinge that became easier and easier to ignore — because fuck it, he owned the ancient, rundown strip mall that housed both Star Video and Pizza My Heart, as well as the half acre on College Street where the building stood, and he owned his own house. Yes, they were shitty properties, but he owned them, so he'd never end up destitute. And when he thought of his family, all he saw of his father was a mound of wet clay, and of his brother a false, toothy smile, and of his mother a swath of gray and white — that cloudy headshot from her unsuccessful acting career that had adorned the mantle of his childhood home, a proud memento of her failure. And of his ex-wife, Waring saw nothing of her physical form — only the never-good-enough apartment in New York. And the bars he had frequented. And his office. And that last flight from the city, when he had decided, once and for all, that he actually didn't care about money, or working in an office, or owning things, or being married, or impressing people at dinner parties — especially dinner parties. He really didn't care, all he'd ever wanted to do was own and operate a video store, that had been all he'd ever dreamed about, and he had wept on that plane, and cursed, and told whoever would listen that his wife had left him for another man, that he'd been fired from his job by that same man, that he was leaving New York forever, and that life as he knew it, thankfully, was over.
An empty beer can slipped from his fingers and pinged loudly against the concrete floor — Waring jolted awake, surprised to find himself in his office at Star Video. It was two a.m.
He unearthed a half bottle of cheap bourbon in the bottom desk drawer, under the credit card bills (unpaid). He kept drinking, and later, on his couch at home, he passed out during the first long tracking shot of Touch of Evil.
The next morning, after a shower and a change of clothes (in his head he heard Alaura reprimanding him for his odor), Waring stumbled down College Street through the harsh whiteness of day. He needed a drink. But coffee first.
Waiting in line at the Open Eye Café — a large, trendy study spot for Appleton University students — Waring realized that he was surrounded, once again, by a hoard of people all transfixed by tiny glowing terminals. The laptops: rectangular screens blooming blue-white light, like a field of illuminated gravestones, brighter than the sun streaming through the windows. And all the damn cell phones. At one table he saw three emaciated college girls, each wearing a pink tee shirt and plaid pajama pants, each gaping like zombies at their one-inch screens, tapping away with their thumbs, lost in an ether of idiocy.
And ... good God ... was one guy actually watching an episode of that god-awful Two and a Half Men on his laptop? Wearing headphones, plugged in like an android?
Then, as if to intensify this horror show, Waring spotted Alaura's boyfriend, Peckerdick, in all his graduate-art-student glory. The kid wore paint-splattered pants and a black hemp shirt that fit a little too well, his gym-sculpted muscles somehow belying his commitment to the painter's craft. What was Alaura doing with this guy? After Peckerdick had threatened to punch Waring that drunken night not long ago, Alaura had defended her boyfriend, arguing that deep down, Peckerdick was kind and complex. Waring knew what that meant. It meant that Peckerdick performed oral sex and listened to Yo-Yo Ma while he painted. He listened to This American Life. He probably wept in joy during Peter Greenaway movies and worshiped the collective works of Terrence Malick without discussion. Peckerdick was, according to Alaura, "wise beyond his years." But Waring didn't buy it. The guy was clearly a rich kid pretending to be evolved. And he was only twenty-three years old. Way too young for her.
Then Waring saw — Peckerdick was sharing a fruit pastry with a blonde girl in a powder-blue tee shirt. Some high-breasted sorority chick. Peckerdick forked a hunk of pastry toward the girl's shimmering lips, and as the airship reached its dock, he made eye contact with Waring.
Peckerdick leaned back in his chair, frowned.
Waring pointed a finger gun at him. "I knew it," he mouthed.
Smiling at his discovery and resolving to lock it into memory so as to tell Alaura posthaste, Waring ordered a red eye. He paid the purple-tattooed twit who always sneered at him, and he thought, Life sucks, but not as much as people, and he wanted to say, "I know a girl with tattoos who knows a thing or two." But he didn't say it. He was tired, and anyway, being rude in the Open Eye might get him kicked out, again, and this was one of the few places where he tried to behave. He was spoiled on espresso. And wasn't that the best sort of business to be in? To sell a truly addictive product to your customers?
Two nights later, from the safety of Star Video's loft — referred to by those in the know as The African Queen — Waring listened to a staff meeting that Alaura had hastily arranged. He had spent the entire day in The African Queen drinking and smoking and reading a fascinating biography of D.W. Griffith (Waring supposed someone had to invent the establishing shot, but unfortunately it was a crazy racist) and just for fun watching Thin Man movie after Thin Man movie, and he had no intention of participating in the pointless meeting. The African Queen itself was tiny, only seven feet by seven feet, nothing more than a rectangular wooden crate supported by the shelves behind the front counter where all the DVDs and VHS tapes were stored, and further secured by several rusty cables. The vessel's name was etched upon its berth in black stenciled letters, and the walls of the loft rose high enough that, when seated on its dusty yellow couch, one was hidden from the large store below.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Last Days of Video"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Jeremy Hawkins.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
STAR VIDEO,
HOW TO TRY IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY SUCCEEDING,
A NIGHTMARE ON WARING'S STREET,
JEFF, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE,
WHY FIDELITY,
THE DISCREET CHARM OF CLARISSA WHEAT,
THE ONE WHERE THEY PERPETRATE A COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS SCHEME THAT COMES,
TO BE KNOWN SIMPLY AS "THE CORPORATE VISIT",
THE REALITY CENTER,
Articles,
HOW ALAURA GOT HER GROOVE BACK,
JEFF AND WARING'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE,
THE WRATH OF THOM,
IT'S A MISERABLE LIFE,
IT'S NOT EASY BEING GREEN,
REALITY BITES,
THE BURIED MIRROR,
A NEW HOPE?,
EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT MATCH ANDERSON* (*BUT WERE,
AFRAID TO ASK),
BEING MATCH ANDERSON,
Y TU TABITHA TAMBIÉN,
SH** HAPPENED ONE NIGHT,
MATCH POINT,
INTO GREAT SILENTS,
THE LAST DAY OF STAR VIDEO,
Acknowledgements,