Be Kind, Rewind
an online journal from behind the counter of a video store in Tucson, Arizona

HELLO   my name is

Wendell   ask me what to rent

I'm Wendell Fry. I'm twenty-six. I work at the Blockbuster Video on the east side of Tucson, usually behind the counter in the blue shirt, usually rewinding something. In 1996 I was in film school in L.A. when my dad died, and I came home to help my mom and my little brother, and I stayed. I've been writing a screenplay called Monsoon the whole time. This journal started in January 1997. Newest entries are on top.

Older years:   1999, January to June  |  1998  |  1997
This page:   September  |  August  |  July

Sunday · September 26, 1999

FADE OUT.

I typed it at ten after four this afternoon, at the kitchen table, on the old Packard Bell. Page 118. Then I sat there. I didn't feel what I thought I'd feel. I thought it would be like the end of a movie, with music. It was more like the end of a shift. You count the drawer, it comes out right, and you stand there a second before you turn off the lights.

Three and a half years. I started it in a classroom in L.A. in January of '96, with a father in it who walks out to the carport when the rain comes and says "Smell that." I finished it at my mother's table while my stepfather-to-be yelled at golf in the living room all afternoon, which I didn't know a person could do.

Printing it took an hour. The printer jammed twice. Then I did what I decided back in June I'd do: I gave it to Mom first. Not Roz, not Hollis, not a contest. Mom.

She put on her reading glasses and read the first page and said, "Ay, Wendell. The carport." And then she didn't say anything else. She just kept going. Ray came in and saw her and made her a cup of coffee without asking and took Mateo out to the garage to "look at something," so we'd have the kitchen.

I called Roz on the last minutes of a phone card. She said she's going to frame the title page. I said it's just a title page. She said, "It's the title page."

It's nine-thirty now. Mom's on page 71. I can hear her turning them. Every so often she stops for a long time, and I don't know if it's a good stop or a bad stop, and I am not going in there to ask. I'm going to go sit in the carport. It's not going to rain. It's the end of September. I'm going to sit out there anyway.

Tuesday · September 21, 1999

The Matrix came out on video today, and it was the biggest day at the store since Titanic.

I opened. People were waiting in the parking lot again, a different crowd than Titanic: college guys, a man in a long black coat in ninety-five degrees, a grandmother whose grandson told her she had to. The new-release wall was one movie from end to end, a whole wall of people in sunglasses. Even the DVD shelf, which is three shelves now, had a crowd.

And every regular came in. It was a perfect day.

The Barrister returned a tape. On time. A day early, actually. He set it on the counter and looked me in the eye and said, "Don't make it a thing, Wendell." I did not make it a thing. I am making it a thing here.

Mermaid Dad came in without the Mermaid. His daughter is six now. She picked out Babe by herself and carried it to the counter by herself and paid out of her own little wallet, and he stood behind her looking completely lost. I wanted to tell him she'll remember the walking around.

And Mrs. V. rented The Matrix. Mrs. V., the Merchant Ivory lady, who has rented A Room with a View more times than I've rented anything. "To see what the fuss is," she said. I cannot wait for her to bring it back.

Chuy stood by the wall all day saying "Whoa" in a Keanu voice to anybody who picked one up. Sharon let him. It was that kind of day.

Friday · September 17, 1999

Page 103. Fifteen to go, I think. The ending has been in my head since June and now it's just typing, which is the scariest part, because typing is where you find out it doesn't work.

Roz called tonight. Her turn; we alternate who buys the card. First real fall rain up there. She held the phone out the window so I could hear it. It sounds different from ours. Softer. Like it isn't sure it should.

Monday · September 13, 1999

Mateo wants to quit school.

He's fifteen, a sophomore. He told Mom at dinner last night that he wants to leave and go work at the body shop where his friend's uncle is. He's been hanging around there on Saturdays all summer, sweeping and handing people wrenches, and he says he learns more in one Saturday than in a week of school. He's Dad's kid. He can hear what's wrong with an engine the way I can hear a tape that's been chewed. He's also fifteen, and I doubt anybody could hire him full time anyway.

Mom said no in English and then in Spanish, so it was a real no. Mateo went out and sat in Dad's truck, which is where the men in this family go to be dramatic.

I went out and sat with him. I'm the one person in the house who's quit school, so I'm either the best one to talk to or the worst.

I told him the truth. That I left for a reason and I'd do it again, but leaving isn't a door, it's a hallway, and you can be in it a long time. That I've been rewinding other people's movies for three years. That the day I got my key I was proud and also felt like I'd signed something. He didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, "At least you know how to do something." Which is the nicest thing he's said to me all year.

Then Ray, who'd come by for Mom and seen the dome light on, leaned in the truck window. He said if Mateo stays in school, Ray will give him every Saturday in his garage, and they'll rebuild the engine in the old Chevy that's been up on blocks behind his house since 1994, and when it runs it's Mateo's.

Saturdays. Of course it's Saturdays.

Mateo said he'd think about it. That's all. I'm writing it down so I remember the night when we didn't know yet.

Tuesday · September 7, 1999

Labor Day. Ray did the grill in our backyard, which I have decided to allow, and the choir ladies came with more food than a funeral, which I'm allowed to say.

Late in the afternoon it was just me and Ray at the grill, turning the corn. The sun was going down behind the carport and the whole yard was orange. And he said, without looking up, "I'd like you to be my best man, Wendell."

I said, "Don't you have friends?"

He laughed. He said he has friends. He has a brother in San Antonio and a man he worked on airplanes with for twenty years. "But I'm marrying into this family," he said, "and you're the one who's been holding it up. I'd like to be standing next to that."

I didn't answer right away. I turned all the corn. Then I said yes.

I went to my room after and sat on the bed for a while and I did cry, which I'll admit to you people and no one else. It wasn't the old kind. I don't know what kind it was. A new kind.

The wedding is five Saturdays from now. I have to rent a tux. I work in a rental business. How hard can it be. He wants me to give a toast, too. I've started it. It's harder than the screenplay.

Thursday · August 26, 1999

About phone cards, since three of you have asked how we do long distance on a video store paycheck.

I buy them at the gas station on Speedway, next to the beef jerky. You scratch off the number, dial about forty digits, and a recorded lady tells you how many minutes you have left, in the voice of a flight attendant who's disappointed in you. We take turns buying. We talk Sundays and Thursdays, and every call ends the same way: the lady says "You have one minute remaining" and we both start talking faster and faster, trying to get the important thing in, and never getting it in.

Tonight was the full moon. I took the cordless out to the back step and she took hers out on her fire escape and we both looked at it. Mine came up big and orange over the Rincons. Hers came up through clouds, of course. She said, "Mine's better. Mine has weather."

We've been apart ten weeks. It's hard. I'm not going to pretend it isn't; that's the deal on this page. Some nights I hang up and sit on the step a long time. But she's flying down for the wedding, the ticket's bought, and she mailed me the itinerary like it was a love letter. Forty-four days.

"One minute remaining," the lady said. We didn't get it in. We never do. We say it at the start of the next call.

Sunday · August 15, 1999

The Sixth Sense. I've seen it twice now and I am not saying one word about it, because if you've seen it you know why, and if you haven't, go, before somebody at your work ruins it. Chuy almost did, in the back room, and I threw a box of empty cases at him.

The question at the counter all week: "When is The Sixth Sense coming out on tape?" Every day. Ten times a day. It's been in theaters nine days. I tell them go see it in a theater, in the dark, with strangers. That's the only way to see anything the first time.

Ray brought Shane back today (see below). He put it on the counter and didn't leave, line or no line. He wanted to talk about the ending, the boy yelling after him. He said he saw it at a drive-in in Texas when he was twelve and didn't get it, and now he's fifty-eight and he does. He said, "He knows he can't stay. That's what makes him a good man. He knows what he is."

I said my dad used to say that. Almost word for word.

Ray said, "Well. Your dad was right." Then he took the next tape I handed him, which was Breaking Away, and went home. He has homework now.

Thursday · August 5, 1999

Ray came into the store tonight. By himself. He's never been in without Mom.

He walked the whole store the way new customers do, like it's a museum, and then came up to the counter and said, "Your mother says you're the one to ask. What should I watch?"

I could have handed him anything. Something long and boring. Something in French. I thought about it, honestly, for about a second.

Then I went to the Westerns and got Shane and put it in his hands.

He looked at the box a long time. He said, "I haven't seen this since I was a kid." I didn't tell him why I picked it. He'll figure it out or he won't, and either way it's a good movie.

Saturday · July 31, 1999

The Blair Witch Project went wide yesterday, and Chuy and I caught a show after work. Half the audience believed it was real. I know because the girl behind us kept whispering "Is this real?" to her boyfriend, and he kept saying "I don't know," and he sounded like he meant it.

It's three kids lost in the woods with a video camera and a film camera, and that's all it is, and I have never been so scared of a little pile of rocks in my life. Chuy slept with the light on. He admitted it.

The film school part of me walked out shaking for a different reason. They made it with almost nothing. No stars. No sets. Woods. You can feel the whole time that it's just some people who decided to make a movie and made it. Nobody gave them permission. I lay awake half the night on that.

At the counter today three people asked me when it's coming out on tape. It came out yesterday. In theaters. I'm going to have this conversation every summer until I die.

Mateo and his friends borrowed Ray's camcorder and are making their own witch movie in the wash behind the house. So far it's forty minutes of them screaming at a saguaro.

ASK ME WHAT TO RENT: Raising Arizona (1987). An ex-con and his wife, who used to be the cop who took his mug shots, can't have a baby, so they steal one of a furniture king's quintuplets, figuring he has more than he can handle. People who aren't from here think it's a cartoon. People from here know it's a documentary.

Sunday · July 11, 1999

New page for the second half of the year. January to June is here now, with the older years behind it.

A hundred and eight today, and the monsoon's still teasing. Every afternoon the clouds pile up over the Catalinas and the whole town looks up like it's waiting for a bus, and then nothing, and the clouds go home.

Roz has been in Seattle four weeks. She says she's cold. It's July. She wore a sweater to the fireworks. I mailed her a thermometer from the swap meet shaped like a saguaro so she can see what she's missing.

Yesterday the U.S. women won the World Cup on penalty kicks against China, and I watched it with Ray. That's the news. I didn't plan to. It was my day off. I came out for cereal, and he and Mateo were on the couch yelling at the TV and Mom was in the kitchen pretending not to watch, and I sat on the arm of the couch and didn't get up for an hour. When the last kick went in Ray jumped up so fast he hit the ceiling fan. It was off. He's fine. I laughed until I cried, and so did he.

Page 86 of Monsoon. Act three is where the rain comes.

Older years:   1999, January to June  |  1998  |  1997

Write me at [email protected]. If you want a note when I update, say so; there are about forty of you on the list now, and I read every letter on my break. To the reader in Ohio who sent me a list of Westerns I'd never heard of: I've rented four so far. You were right about all of them.

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since January 1997. Be kind. Rewind.

Last updated Sunday, September 26, 1999
© 1999 Wendell Fry