The Video Store Chronicles (non-fic)
Four Poems:
When Winter's Dying
Head-Lamps
Smoke Break
>The Row
The Video Store Chronicles, Part 1 (July 20, 2009. Issue 7.)
This series of stories are not in actual chronological order. The events found within did really occur, they are true, but certain liberties have been taken. This is not supposed to be a memoir, but a sharing of strange and outrageous stories. The names of the people and the video rental store have been changed in order to protect all individuals involved from possible legal action. Blah, blah, fuckity, blah.
I work at a video store in the art district of one of the more run down metropolises in America. Some call us a “cult”. Other’s a “Cinephile’s Mecca”. We work both ways. The black rune on my arm makes me agree more with the “cult” statement.
The store’s located in the gutted interior of a depression era house. The building’s changed more hands than a Russian bride. It was once a residence and a bridal shop and a Native American/new wave store and a recording studio and a bunch of other flawed and failed business ventures. Now for around the last decade it’s been “Dark Corner Videos”. Near twenty-thousand films ranging all eras and genres and directors. We love movies. We really fucking love movies. That and killing your family. Am I joking?
The store’s three floors and a basement. Collages from cut-up posters and movie covers and magazine pages taped and pasted along all the open walls and shelving units. The shelves are filled to bursting with DVD and VHS cases. Divided by genre and/or director. Goddard in the Foreign Film Directors. Cronenberg in the Cult Directors. And on and on it goes.
You step through the blood red side-door. Chips in the paint and poorly removed graffiti. The first thing glaring you in the face is the porn and erotica. To the left is The Desk. A three-hundred pound corner-slab of faux-wood and molded steel. Mounted with a barely-living computer desktop and various single DVD case displays and a plushie Facehugger from Ridley Scott’s Alien. To the right is the display window rimmed with Asian silk curtains. Two curbside easy chairs and a sagging sofa stare out into the street. A TV in right-hand the corner hooked in to a stack of various electronics. Silver DVD player. A well-maintained VHS. A surround sound hub. There’s an art piece across from the TV that we like to call the “Pain Amplifier”. It’s a monstrous cabinet attached to a sixties era defibrillator, electrode globe, and manikin. The next two rooms wind into a maze of wall shelves, simple iron-bar racks, closets and more films than any person could ever list.
The back opens up behind a sliding fold-door plastered with more images and random quotes. There’s the backlog shelves that hold the library of VHS and jewel cases. The shelves back there are defaced with quotes and statements and illustrations all scribbled in fat black sharpie. When you step into the back the smell of shit and dead cigarettes and upper-class weed shoots up your nostrils. It beats your sense of smell with a sledgehammer and spits on its crumpled body. There’s a kitchen along the left wall. Stained sink. Old microwave. Beat-to-hell mini-fridge. The bathroom is wall-to-wall VHS shelves. Over four thou shoved in. Almost no room for the shower tucked in the back corner and the rebuilt toilet. There’s a small vanity with no mirror. Instead Jeff Goldblum’s face taken out of Cronenberg’s “The Fly”. A simple line printed under the photo. “Jeff Goldblum is watching you poop!”
If you head straight into the back you’ll hit the door to the basement. The place is worn down and humid and disease-ridden. Concrete support making up the floor and the retaining walls. Dirt all along the sides of the carved out room. Someone could bury bodies down there. It was mainly used for storage.
A narrow hallway in the backroom navigates out to a tiny alcove that separates the upstairs from the hand-job hut in the back. Yeah, a forty-something masseuse that winds the cranks of a short list of clients. From what I’m told she has a walk-in shower and hot-tub. The upstairs is led by a ribbon of deep-sea colored carpeting punched with cigarette holes and warped by spilled drinks. You trail up and find the recording studio. It’s now a venue for traveling underground bands and misfits. The acoustics make most clubs look like boonie bars. Stumble around a sharp corner and there’s another kitchen set. Slightly nicer than the one downstairs, but with the same amenities. There’s another bathroom, only room enough for a shitter and stacks of jerk-off mags and weird tales compilations. Across the toilet closet is the door to the production room turned library. It’s filled with the usual great literary works and in-depth movie critiques and illegal technical manuals and blacked-out government dossiers.
Above that is the loft. That’s where someone in the circle is usually living from one time to another. It doesn’t matter unless I say it does.
I’ve been working there for a couple years now. Been brought into the fold. The underbelly. Because any place this dark and disturbed. Any fuckin’ group of people that worship the sick and depraved and diabolical can’t just run everything legit. It just ain’t in the cards. I’m not saying federal offense. And I won’t go into detail, yet. But there have been assaults, drug dealing, mind warping, thievery, and a list of other less than legal activities.
That’s not to say that we won’t smile and talk nice and open your film horizons. That’s not to say that we aren’t good people somewhere deep down in our guts. It’s just not good for the business to seem all bunny rabbits and sunshine. We are supposed to be the abyss. The hole in the earth for all the wayward scum and thugs.
We’re service with a wink and a nod and a little chill up your spine and a knife under the register.
But enough of the set up.
***
It was the pit of autumn. Halloween around the corner. Trees flaking coppery leaves like burning bodies shedding ash-skin. It was going to be my boss Eliot and me for the second shift. Six to midnight. “The erection shift”. Think for a minute, you’ll get the joke. The night ran steady. I shelved returns in the back. Cramming jewel cases and sleeved VHS in the backlog. Tagging movie covers “Out on Rental”. Removing tags on returned titles. Putting cases back in the sections they belonged to. Their homes.
A few “Bobby Fishers” came in. That’s what we like to call the men, mainly older ex-military types, who spend hours scanning the porn section for the perfect masturbation piece. This usually ends with them grabbing something that has “Daddy” or “Barely 18” in the title.
The “Shock-Chasers” passed through like clockwork. Those kids usually college age looking for “The most fucked up movie we have”. We usually recommend “Salo: 120 Days of Sodom” or “Funny Games” or something of that gut-wrenching “I now fucking hate humanity” sort. These kids scare me. They’re so fucking desensitized that they’re looking for something to invoke a human emotion. Something to bring them back to reality. Away from their fake invulnerability.
The hours went by fast when we were slammed. Lines of people waiting to get their visual fix. The hours trickled by when we were empty. Eliot kept his ass planted in the desk chair. Leaning back and smiling like Moriarty. Crooked, sinister teeth. Balding head. Eyes that saw into you. Catalogued your being. A mind like a devil’s trap. Ready to snap and let you die slow and maimed and turn you into something easy to control.
We’d fake kill each other to pass the time. Invisible gun battles and over-drawn death sequences. Pantomime representations of entry and exit wounds. Unseen grenades and knives and flamethrowers and blow-torches and baseball bats and hatchets and garrotes. Anything sick to laugh at. Plus the customer reactions were priceless.
We’d try to say the most horrible things about each other. Bringing to surface how normal people really acted. What they thought. What they really meant with every subtle and slitting exchange.
“So…I’m going to beat you until your brain leaks out your mouth. You fucking freak.” Said Eliot.
“Eh, I still opened your mom’s ass with a ditch-digger and dropped roaches down the gaping shaft. So, do what you will ass-clown.”
“I am so going to fry your nipples off with a car battery.”
“Eh, I’ll just run your scrotum through a garbage-disposal while shaving chunks off your back with a salted cheese grater. You don’t got the fucking spine to step up to me.”
“Your mom loved it when I plungered her cunt with my fist. It made such a pretty sucking sound, like someone forcing ground-beef through an exhaust pipe.”
“You still owe me a bill for that. Your fantasies don’t come cheap. Like your dad.”
We laughed. Eventually the night ran to its close. The clock winding up to midnight. Digital digits ticking up to lift off. To the party hour of chaos and depravity. To the time when sobriety ran into the streets screaming “Rape!”
The lights turned off. Blinds and curtains dropped. The steel DVD racks in the sub-rooms were moved to make space. The entrance deadbolt was locked for a total of ten minutes. Then the lock was flicked back open. The people that didn’t live up top flowed in. Around a dozen. Some I knew. Others, I didn’t give a fuck. The pieces were brought out of pockets and bags and drawers. One-hitters and bubblers and steamrollers and bongs. Vials and bags of weed followed the pipes. Containers filled with grams of fat-finger sized buds. Frosty white and running with patches of red and purple and blue. It was a mass congregation of burning. Burning bowls and cigarettes and cigars.
A cluster of people migrated to the bathroom. Poured out powder on the vanity. Sniffing in rail after rail. Talking fast and breathless. Eliot and I emptied the bowl in his hand-made orange crystal bong. When it went dead he slid out his vial from the bottom drawer of the desk. Acid. LSD. Pure. Clear. Amazing. He pulled out the dropper and dripped a few doses onto his tongue. There was barely any light aside from embers and lighters. He offered me the vial and I took half what he dropped. The rush came pretty fucking fast.
Jimmy came up beside me. Casual in street clothes. Jeans and T. Thin glasses and shaved head and slick grin.
“Hear about [insert horror movie remake or nerd wet-dream flick here].”
“Can’t say I have. Haven’t been checking the sites too much lately.” His head started to shrink and grow. It pulsed like a human heart. A heart wearing glasses and talking to me.
“Well, it looks pretty good. You should check out the trailer.”
“Will try to do that. Sounds interesting.” I wasn’t able to understand half of his words. They sounded like someone talking into a high-speed fan.
I stood up and had a bit of trouble. The body high was kicking in. An engine turning over and kicking into gear. Eliot gave his high, hacking laugh as I got my trip legs. I tried maintaining the conversation with Jimmy. It was hard to focus. Really hard.
I stepped into the back. Shoes clapping on the linoleum. I lit a Camel with my clover Zippo. Looked around. The only people near were the dusters in the bathroom. Could barely make them out in the dark. They looked like goblins or gargoyles or some shit. Creatures gnarled and hunched in the darkness making growling and snorting noises. I moved to the corner where the kitchen counter meets the video shelving. Squatted down and smoked. Took the trip as it climbed. The coke crowd ghosted across the linoleum. Entered through the side door into the Horror room.
“What’s going on back there?” Eliot yelled from up front.
“Don’t know. A bunch of somethings flocked into the next room.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t really know. You go check for yourself.”
Eliot walked into the back and then towards the horror room. He turned the handle and opened the door. Then stood there. He looked like he was trembling. I could hear wet noise. Sucking and licking and I didn’t want to really know. Eliot made a groan and fled into the basement. I stumbled to where he was. Curiosity was ready to slit my throat.
And it did.
There in the middle of the horror room. On the brown-patched dishwater blue carpet. There in front of me was the most fucking scarring orgy. A mad orgy. Unattractive and carnal and nauseating. Two girls and two guys. Bare ass naked. The women naked and jiggling as the fucked and sucked. The guys not in the best shape. Mad eyed and sounding like sick dogs. There was a black chick with suffocating tits. Pointy, dark-shaded nipples. Folds around her belly. A thin white guy with a pudgy beer gut pumping away into her. Her tongue riding an even bigger white girl with a potato face and a belly-button the size of my fist. The white girl was gargling a pair of chocolate colored balls.
I couldn’t make out any of the guys faces. The girls didn’t seem familiar.
Flashes started. Another guy entered the room with a Polaroid and started taking shots. Instant pictures spitting out onto the floor. Some landing and sticking to the sweaty bodies. The photographer wouldn’t stop talking about the beauty of sex. I wanted to empty my stomach. Shoot bleach into my eyes and scrub my brain with battery acid.
The orgy turned into the “shunting” scene from “Society”. Flesh absorbing flesh. A monster forming from multiple bodies. Physical features sliding and settling into places they didn’t belong. Faces on asses. Arms on faces. Legs on tits. Bones twisting and contorting and skin moving and yields and morphing.
I followed Eliot into the basement. Fuck it. I ran to the basement like the Mongols were after me. Like hell was smiling at me from that room. Like a scared bitch.
The stairs into the basement were nailed and sanded down pieces of lumber. Nothing fancy. Mainly cut two-by-fours. Dirt and dust were on everything. There was even less light down there. I was spelunking under a breaking down house. While on about twenty hits of acid. The blackness would change every step into something new. A forest. An urban alleyway. A train station. A perfect view of the galaxy. Full of spinning and twirling clusters of stars and planets and strings of asteroids.
“Oi, Eliot?” I said to the flashing dark.
I didn’t get a reply. I slid my feet against the concrete floor to avoid tripping and confirm I was still on solid ground. Still on earth. I made it to the open area of the basement. About the size of a prison cell. The Heating unit took up a good chunk of the room. I flicked my Zippo and I was in a prehistoric cave filled with familiar objects. A broken bike. Scattered shreds of paper. A dried up paint set on a makeshift table fashioned out of two sawhorses and a plank of wood.
I didn’t see him so I turned to head back. And then Pupils shot. Pupils like black holes were looking straight into mine. Eliot was standing there in the narrow basement walkway. Belt tied around his head like Rambo. Shirt off and letting his furry gut spill over his shorts.
“The battles happening.”
“What battle?” I was still stuck in some out of time cave.
“The Battle of Los Angeles. Are you going to stand up for your people?”
“What people?”
“The free. The strong. The savage.”
“…Ok.”
“Look. Do you see the carnage?” He pointed at a spread of plastic army men. Some green. Others blue. They were placed along the retaining wall on the dirt. Mounted over a miniature rocky terrain. Small plastic guns and mortars and rocket launchers.
Radio chatter kicked in. I couldn’t make out any real words or sentences. It was just static and clicking and mumbling. I could hear the guns going off. The battlefield coming to life. The plastic rifles flashing back and forth.
“It’s the last stand. The only chance to reclaim this country. The last chance to end the lies.”
“Fuck it. Give me an order.”
“You give it.”
I stared hard at the figurines. Stared and focused. Tried to look like a young and destructive Patton.
“You kill and you take what we are deserved. You fucking make their dead relatives shit in their graves. Their families quake from the wounds. You make them know. We. Are. Not. To. Be. Fucked. With.”
Eliot closed his hand over the lighter and closed it. The light went out. The battle became more real. Like I was standing from a general’s outpost while these plastic men fought and screamed obscenities and shot and bayoneted. I was gone. Eliot was gone.
All that was left were blue freedom fighters and green army men. All that was left was some kind of war.
The lights came on. Time and space reconfigured. I was back in the basement. I was still standing and staring at the plastic army men. The staged and motionless battle. Eliot was still standing next to me. Belt around his head and his gut hanging out.
Four Poems (April 24, 2009. New Moon. Issue 4)
When Winter's Dying
I walk the sidewalks a lot,
In March, when the trees start
To become perpetually drowned
In wet and cold and gray.
The low-air slinks by,
Tugging at my hair and
Whispering about old memories
From past winters.
I recall your rainbow eyes,
And warm smile. Images
That would become
Venomous and sharp.
I just want you to know,
That the streets still
Chant the dirge of grinding
Tires and barking dogs.
And that the sky, hasn’t
Been as pretty as when
You were under it, staring
Up at God’s indifferent face.
I stop every few blocks to
Take a mental picture, of a
City, like a land-locked Atlantis,
That built something beautiful
And tore it back down.
Head-Lamps
Night sky is raining down like
Black tar being burned away by
White-hot head-lamps.
Balding rubber’s holding
The ground with a newborn’s grip.
The roads are lonely,
Soldier’s footpaths through hiding-trees,
Appearing in front of my caffeinated eyes
In split-seconds before dodging
Back into the thick dark.
Streaks of obsidian water rolling
Down, to the invisible earth,
Inching to the radio - tempo of Riot-folk
Ballads; croaking of foreign kids tripping through
the night, warmed by fire-wells and twisted steel.
I breathe through a cigarette, exhale
Out of my nose like dragons and inner-city
Dreamers, sipping coffee in the midnight chill.
The sprinting storm drags out the scents,
Of dogwood flowers and amputated grass.
I’ll drive fast and long and far,
Until the engine seizes and rattles
Like a metal epileptic.
Nothing in the sky but dim guiding stars,
The moon’s left his home vacant.
I look into the cracked rear-view,
The world is gone behind me
With no proof there was anything, but
Darkness.
Smoke Break
Forty-fourth cigarette of the day,
And the bench in Battery Park is damp.
I can see a lost named building
Across from me,
Decrepit and empty.
A squatter home down to the flooding
And faulty stolen electricity.
Some have called it a tombstone.
A monolith of “once was”.
The concrete walls are chewed out -
Rats, stray gang bullet, car wrecks.
People stay there
Among the dying road trees
And shards of glass
They stand and sleep
In the wake of a weak breeze
A constant low chill.
A nipping memory filled with fire.
Watery eyes haunt that place,
Locked in missed chances
Failed good-byes.
The dust lays thick
People die in places like that all the time
They don’t get medals or accolades,
Just a place to bloat and rot.
They die for their own reasons
Like everyone should.
The Row
Sing so loud that the echoes form into friends.
I’m rocking like a three-year-old,
counting back seconds like they matter.
The cinderblocks have moved in
Ash-colored and dancing in a 6x4 rectangle.
Books, read a million times and stacked
For exercise and a better pillow.
We all have to look good on our death day.
The librarian walks the rounds,
A black man with a rocky face.
Wiry glasses and a thick Georgian drawl.
He smiles the way I wish I could.
They always say that you
Think about why they locked you up,
Why they gave you a steel-rod door and a slit-window
That only a midget chink could slide through.
My eyes feel like they weigh more than my crimes.
I killed a few men, I admit it.
Like I admitted when they cuffed me and
Set me in front of harsh lamp-light.
A filthy-cop with knuck’s
And the stamina of a linebacker.
Less than an hour until they strap me down
And pump me full of a chem-cocktail.
I still don’t feel guilt, just anxiety
She’ll be watching when the first plunger
Drives down and fills my veins.
She’ll be there, behind bullet-proof glass.
The second plunger will drop
And I’ll start to pass out, heart slows down.
My eyes’ll be locked on her sapphires.
All I’ll think about is the cordite.
The stream of smoke rising from
My dad’s old gun, .38 revolver.
The four deputies that took her out back
Behind the diner, and did sick things.
How their chests and heads
Opened up to a flood of blood and chipped bones.
The bodies were made for more reason
Than to make an undertaker happy.
My cell-neighbor told me last night that
Eighty-percent of murders are committed because of women.
God, I hope she smiles.