The first time I entered the video store there was sperm on the TV. Chattering white tadpoles swarmed through a glowing pink tunnel, “I Get Around” by The Beach Boys blasting. A single sperm with the voice of Bruce Willis wiggled its way through the outer layer of an egg. I had no idea what I was getting into.
My parents set me loose to comb the kids’ section. I couldn’t watch the same three movies they’d taped—Spaceballs, Superman II, and Claymation Christmas—over and over again anymore. I’d already memorized every static-filled commercial break.
If a video store in the 90s was a scratch-and-sniff it’d smell like a kid in a candy shop.
I chose The Last Unicorn and that became my go-to. I’d rent it every week and pop it in the VHS player, sitting rapt like the experience was brand new. If it was rented out before we got there, I’d get jealous of the person who’d deprived me of my ritual, wonder who were they and how dare they.
As I grew, the video store grew with me, and together we crested the peak era of home entertainment. The store changed ownership and moved to a new location, a second floor up a flight of carpeted stairs. For ease, the clerks left a wicker basket on a rope inside the door for video return, and they’d pulley it up to the counter above, like maidens in a tower. I needed to be one of these maidens. I stopped wanting to drive a taxi for a living and started wanting to work in a video store. I was 9. It’s still all I want to do.
Ten years later, my dream came true. I returned home to Charlottesville from my freshman year of film school in New York and applied. The video store was looking to hire more clerks to help with the transition from VHS to DVD. The owner snapped me up. He was a bighearted no-bullshitter from Queens with a close-cropped Shi-tzu and a house plastered floor-to-ceiling in Broadway posters. His magnificence spilled out into the store and we employees helped make it all to his liking. We painted stars and film reels and yellow brick roads on the floor. We tacked up cardboard standees and lobby cards. Old movie paraphernalia dripped from every wall, a rainforest of obsolescence.
We trafficked in the tangible. We touched every new release that came through the door, cracking their cases like oysters and giving them new shells, plastic on plastic on plastic. We blessed each with a circular sticker, color-coded for the geographic section where they belonged: blue for America, red for Europe, pink for Asia and Oceania. We slid the newly stickered DVDs alongside their flabby VHS doppelgängers, peopling the documentary section, the television section, the gay & lesbian section, the theater section and the independent section, which were also the gay & lesbian sections.
I came in early every morning to open up. I savored the thud of tapes falling through the after-hours return slot and onto the floor, stickers like confetti. I rented porn to my former teachers, picked out TV shows for a dying friend to binge. A local rock musician in her third trimester dressed me down for a bad recommendation. My shrink made small talk and tried to lie to her son about how she knew me. There was a deep intimacy between us all, because I held their rental history at my fingertips. Every title they’d taken home was logged in our computer system, and I could call it up with a simple click. Surveillance masquerading as care. I reminded our elderly customers which murder mysteries they’d already checked out, sitting regal at my desk, enforcing the late fees which paid my salary. It was the best and only job. I shed all ambition, because I could.
I got my education after closing, using my free rentals to stockpile films and tear through them on my laptop in my childhood bedroom. I learned more in a sleepless evening than in four years of film school—learned Jarman and Fassbinder and Priscilla Queen of the Desert; learned Charles Burnett and Double D Nurses in Love and The Czech is in the Male; learned Araki and Ozu and Paris is Burning; learned Lizzie Borden. A barely-audible bootleg VHS of Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story—his tragic biopic told with barbie dolls—became The Last Unicorn of my adulthood.
The first time I entered what would become my New York video store, I noticed a clipping from The Onion taped up behind the counter: “Film-School Graduate Goes Straight to Video Store Job.” I was there to open an account; the next disc of a show was taking too long to arrive in the mail from Netflix. I had just graduated with a degree in film and TV production. I asked the clerk for an application.
If a video store in the 2000s was a scratch-and-sniff it’d smell like a collapsing star.
The next week, they hired me and handed me a gun. The gun was full of stickers—it printed numbers on them so I could fire prices onto our retail DVDs. I placed them on high shelves to either side of the store, using a grabber to reach—the same familiar grabber Mom had at home. The New York video store was spartan, functional: one large room with troughs where our card catalog was filed with paper advertisements for the tapes and DVDs, and the actual inventory kept in the back, on rows of steel library stacks. Beyond the stacks the building went deeper, to the office where our boss hung out, and stairs down to what we called the murder basement, where lord knows what was stored.
It was different being a clerk in New York. We worked among the stars. We could have 30-minute conversations about Czech cinema with the Bond villain who crushes men to death with her thighs, or get a private serenade from Björk and her daughter. In my hometown store there was no upward mobility, but in New York some of us would ascend. One day I’d watch the lowkey couch-surfer sing on a jumbotron as his band headlined the Hollywood Bowl. I’d watch the hyperactive high schooler win the Golden Globe for best actress in a motion picture comedy or musical. I didn’t have their momentum. I was already where I had hoped to be.
My paradise was shaken by a confrontation with a shoplifter. I saw him slyly knock down some shrink-wrapped DVDs and tuck them in his jacket, and I rushed to the door to call him out. The day manager—a masterclass in unpleasantness—didn’t have my back. She sat at the desk ignoring the situation. The shoplifter denied everything, spat at me and rushed away. I retreated to the cramped bathroom and had a panic attack. I sat on the toilet and realized I was still holding my pricing gun. I used it to sticker the front of my shirt, shooting one after another onto my chest, marking myself down. If my phone at the time could have taken video, I would have recorded it.
When my shift ended and I left, still shaking, I noticed a man loitering on the bench out front, smoking a long cigarette, as if in wait. He was old but dressed young, in a weathered flat-cap and a baggy button-up. I crossed the street, stopped and turned around, saw him shuffle inside the store, watched through the bright window as he stepped behind the counter, opened the cash register, removed a few twenties, and walked back outside.
The following day, he was behind the counter when I showed up. We were introduced. This was Paul. He’d worked at the store since before I was born. He smelled like wet newspapers and seemed to melt into the walls. I heard more about him when he wasn’t present.
In younger days, he was a hugely influential music critic. He introduced Dylan to folk music via his magazine and his record collection, was briefly Bowie’s publicist, and had saved Warren Zevon’s life by getting him to sober up while writing a profile for Rolling Stone. His celebrity-scraping career was in the past. “I don’t really want a job anymore where you have to think,” he’d said to an interviewer in 2000. Amen. Paul was the inverse of my co-workers who were on a path to stardom. He’d come back down to earth. The fridge of his apartment on the Upper East Side was stocked only with Cokes and Reese’s peanut butter cups. A few times a week he would trek down to the store and simply hang around, not working, just being. A fading dream of an employee, a projection of my possible future, the ultimate clerk.
He would sneak money from the register or from the cashbox in the office when he thought no one was watching. I don’t know why I was always watching, but I assumed this was his back-pay, compensation for being a human talisman, sustained and protected from death by the video store, another entity on its way out. When I casually mentioned Paul’s skimming to the boss, he acted surprised. From then on there was a code to open the register, and the cashbox was hidden. I watched Paul fumble with the locks, search the office in vain. I was working longer and longer hours, pulling full day-to-night double shifts, trying to become a permanent fixture. The boss took pity on me, asked if I was okay, opened the register and gave me hundreds of dollars. He thought I must have been catastrophically hard up for cash. In actuality I had just been introduced to the extent of my generational wealth. A check had arrived—dividends from a family partnership—that covered my entire year’s rent. I was given control of six-figure stock holdings. My work frenzy was avoidance—an attempt to do nothing different, to accelerate the sameness. I gave Paul my unearned cash bonus and decided to quit.
On my final shift, at closing time, two irregular customers dawdled too long. To give them the hint, I turned up my music so loud it shook the window glass. The customers approached and said, “Can you turn it down?” And I said, “We’re closed,” and they said, “Can you turn it down?” and I turned it up and they stormed out and I was God.
Paul died a month later. His body went undiscovered for weeks.
In the summer of 2007, the same month that the New York video store closed—sold off and refurbished into a boutique, the murder basement converted into a glitzy lower floor—I walked the property of my aunt and uncle’s new vineyard in Sonoma. They showed me the plot of land where they were going to build a house. My uncle was on the Netflix Board of Directors. He told me that the company was starting to produce original content. The aggregator tracking every subscriber’s streaming activity had shown Netflix that people mostly viewed British TV dramas, movies directed by David Fincher, and movies starring Kevin Spacey. In response, they’d acquired the rights to remake a British TV drama, hired David Fincher to direct, and hired Kevin Spacey to star. A perfect formula. We stared down into the valley that would soon be a septic system.
The Charlottesville video store of my youth clung to life for seven more years. I popped in to catch up whenever I was in town to holiday or teach, checking out stacks of titles to screen for my class, supporting their survival campaign, a David to the Goliath of streaming giants. The Last Video Store.
If the Last Video Store was a scratch-and-sniff it’d smell like an aging wolf that’s left its pack to go and lie down and rot alone.
The fate of the store’s collection was the final sticking point, and when the UVA library struck a deal to acquire around 10,000 titles, the man from Queens held a sell-off of redundant inventory. I darted straight to the bootleg of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, couldn’t believe my luck that it was still on the shelf. I brought it home, left the sticker on. I didn’t even own a VHS player anymore. I found a high-definition version on YouTube, and held the physical version in my arms as I watched. I missed stickering until my fingers ached, missed standing around eating jars of dry-roasted peanuts and talking about movies all fucking day. I missed being a dying breed, an aorta of Charlottesville culture. Our function clogged, slowed and stopped, and with us passed the era. Too late and too soon.