Be Kind, Rewind: 1997

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Be Kind, Rewind
1997

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This was the whole page in 1997: black and plain, because that's what I could do then and what I wanted. I fixed typos and nothing else. It was not a good year. It gets better, but you have to go forward to see it. -- W.

Wednesday 12/31/97

Last shift of 1997. New Year's Eve at a video store is the whole town deciding not to go anywhere, and I respect that more than anything people did this year. I said "Make it a Blockbuster night" about two hundred times, and by the end I think I meant it.

In Arizona the ball drops at ten o'clock. When I got home Mateo was asleep on the couch with Times Square still on TV, and Mom was asleep in Dad's chair with her shoes on. I put the afghan over her.

I've been seeing the counselor Mom found, every other Thursday since August. I haven't said so here before. It helps more than I want to admit.

Resolution: one page of Monsoon. One. I haven't opened the file since July.

Sunday 12/21/97

Mom asked me to take her to Titanic.

That's a big deal. The Saturday movie was Dad's thing, with me and later with Mateo. Mom always said it was for "the Fry men" and she'd rather have two hours of quiet, and she'd have coffee ready when we got home, and Dad would tell her the plot wrong on purpose so I'd correct him. She hasn't been inside a theater since I was in high school.

But the ladies at church are all talking about it, so yesterday we went to the 1:15 at the big theater by the mall, just the two of us.

It's over three hours. Mom brought Kleenex in her purse like a professional. I went in ready to be the film school guy about it and lasted until the ship started going down. There's a moment with an old couple in their bed holding on to each other while the water comes in, and Mom took my hand and didn't let go until the end, and I let her, and I'm twenty-four years old.

In the car she said, "That boy could have fit on the door." Then nothing the whole way home, which is how I knew she loved it.

Today a woman at the store asked me when Titanic comes out on tape. It came out Friday. In theaters.

Sunday 10/12/97

Mom went back to church today.

Mateo told me last week she's been driving to Mass every Sunday since summer, sitting in the parking lot with the engine running, and driving home again. He followed her on his bike. He's thirteen and a better detective than me.

This morning she put on the blue dress and asked if I'd come in with her. I haven't been inside since the funeral. I don't know what I believe anymore. Or I do, and I don't want to write it where she might read it.

We sat where we always sat, left side, halfway back, where Dad could put his bad leg out in the aisle. At the sign of peace half the parish came over to hug her. A lot of old men shook my hand and called me mijo, which means "my son," and all I could think was I'm nobody's son now. Which isn't even true. I'm hers.

I spent the whole Mass angry at a building. The building didn't do anything. I know that.

After, Mom stood on the steps in the sun talking to people, and for the first time in a year and a half she looked like herself. So I'll go back next week. Not for me.

Tuesday 9/9/97

Tuesday is new-release day, which means the wall: a whole row of the same box, sometimes thirty of the same face looking at you. By Friday half are gone. By Sunday there's one left with a cracked case. It's like weather.

The Barrister was in again (see May). Today he swore he put his tape in the drop box Saturday night, which means the drop box I empty every morning is a portal to another dimension where tapes wait two extra days. He said, "Are you calling me a liar, Wendell?" They all read the name tag. I said no sir, I was calling the drop box a liar. Chuy had to go in the back room.

Sharon came up and handled it the way she handles everything, in a voice like a warm bath. He left happy. I was shaking.

It isn't him. I know it isn't him. I want to yell at somebody every single day, and he's the only one who comes in asking for it.

Also a man whispered across the counter for something rated NC-17, and I got to tell him we don't carry them. Only thing all day I enjoyed saying.

Mom got up in the middle of the night Saturday to watch Princess Diana's funeral. I heard the TV and came out and sat with her. Neither of us said why.

Thursday 7/24/97

The monsoon came tonight.

You know it's coming before it comes. All afternoon the clouds stack up over the Catalinas, and then around five the wind turns and the whole east side smells like creosote, which is what the desert smells like when it knows it's going to rain. If you're not from here I can't explain it. Green and sharp and a little like pennies. Every summer of my life Dad walked out into the carport when that smell came and said, "Smell that," like he'd made it himself.

I was on break in the parking lot in my blue shirt when it came, and I stood by the cart corral and couldn't get my breath right. A lady getting out of her car asked if I was okay. Then the sky opened and half the shopping center ran in to rent something before the power went out. Rain so loud on the roof you couldn't hear the register. I spent twenty minutes drying tape boxes from the drop box with paper towels.

My screenplay is called Monsoon. I started it in a class in L.A. in January of last year, homesick. It's about a family in Tucson one summer, and a father who walks out in the carport and says "Smell that." I wrote that scene before. Before, is what I mean.

Mateo is printing pictures of Mars off the NASA page and taping them over his bed. The little rover is the size of a microwave, he says. At least somebody in this house is looking up.

Sunday 6/15/97

Father's Day. I asked for a double and got one.

All day men came in with their kids to pick out a movie for Dad. I rang them up. I said have a good one. A kid about ten was stuck in the Westerns and I handed him Shane and told him it was the best Western ever made, which is what my father believed. The kid put it back and got Twister. That's fine. That's his dad, not mine.

After close I sat in Dad's truck in the driveway for an hour with the engine off. It still smells like him, sawdust and Juicy Fruit. I'm afraid of the day it stops.

Here's the honest part, since nobody reads this. I sleep ten hours on my days off and wake up tired. I don't write. I don't call anybody from school. When I'm not at work I don't know what I'm for. Mom asked if I'd talk to somebody, a counselor, like the one she saw last year. I said I talk to four hundred people a day. She didn't laugh. So I said I'd think about it. I'm writing it here so I have to.

WENDELL RECOMMENDS: Shane (1953). A gunfighter who wants to quit rides up to a homestead in Wyoming, and the little boy there decides he's the greatest man alive. The mountains behind them look painted on. When the boy yells "Shane! Come back!" at the end, that was the first time I ever saw my father cry. I was seven. He said it was dust.

Friday 5/16/97

Friday night. Since I'm at the store more than I'm home, here are my regulars.

Mermaid Dad. Every Friday around ten after six, a big guy in a work shirt with his name stitched on it comes in holding hands with his daughter, who's maybe four. They walk every aisle. Then they end up at The Little Mermaid, and he rents it. Fourteen Fridays in a row, I've counted. He could have bought it by now. I would never say that. I think the walking around is the point. I think in twenty years she'll remember the walking around.

Mrs. V. Retired, white hair in a bun, drives an old Buick very slowly. She rents every Merchant Ivory movie we have, in order, and when she gets to the end she starts over. This week it's The Remains of the Day. She told me her husband fell asleep in every single one and she misses the snoring.

The Barrister. Fifty or so, briefcase, reading glasses on a cord. Chuy named him. He argues every late fee like he's in front of a jury. He loses every time and comes back every week. I almost admire it.

Friday nights the store gets loud and bright, and I'm good at it, which surprises me. I can find any tape in the building in ten seconds. I say "Make it a Blockbuster night" so often that yesterday I said it to my mother when she handed me a plate of eggs. She said, "Ay, Wendell," and laughed, and I hadn't heard her laugh in a while, so I'll take it.

WENDELL RECOMMENDS: The Remains of the Day (1993). A butler in England spends his whole life not saying the one thing. If you've ever not said the thing, rent it. Mrs. V. says it's the saddest movie ever made about good manners.

Saturday 4/5/97

Took Mateo out to see the comet tonight. I see it every night driving home from close, and tonight I finally took him.

We drove east on Tanque Verde until the houses thinned out and sat on the tailgate of Dad's truck. You don't even need binoculars. It just hangs there over the mountains like somebody pinned it up. Mateo explained that it has two tails, a blue one made of gas that points straight away from the sun and a white one made of dust. He knows everything about space this year.

Dad would've made it an event: lawn chairs, a thermos of cocoa, a lecture. We had two sodas. Mateo said, "Dad would've brought the lawn chairs," and I said yeah, and that was all either of us said about it, and it was enough.

It's the first thing all year I've looked at without thinking about something else.

Friday 3/14/97

One year today.

I'm not going to write about it. I worked open to close. Mom made his enchiladas, the red ones, and none of us ate much and none of us said anything about not eating. At midnight Mateo came in my room with his pillow and slept on the floor like he did all last March. He's thirteen now. He'll deny this.

Saturday 2/1/97

The Star Wars Special Edition opened yesterday, and today I took Mateo, because it's Saturday and that's what you do on Saturday in this family.

Dad took me to the first one in 1977 when I was four. I fell asleep before the Death Star and he carried me out to the car, and he told that story every Thanksgiving for twenty years like it was the funniest thing that ever happened.

We went to the old theater on Broadway and sat where Dad always sat: row G, the two seats on the left aisle, so he could stretch out his bad knee. The seats were open. I don't know what I'd have done if they weren't.

They added new computer creatures all over the spaceport and changed the part in the cantina with Greedo, and Mateo and I argued about it the whole way home. He said Dad would have hated the new stuff. I said Dad would have loved it. We're both right. That's the worst part, that now we both get to be right forever.

I held it together until Luke walks out and looks at the two suns. Then I didn't. Mateo pretended not to notice and held the popcorn between his knees the way Dad did. I don't think he knows he does that.

The whole place clapped when the Death Star blew up. I stayed awake for it this time.

Tuesday 1/14/97

My name is Wendell Fry. I work at the Blockbuster Video on the east side of Tucson. Blue shirt, name tag. I've been there since May.

Chuy from work has a page here about kung fu movies, and he said anybody can have one, it's free. So here's mine. I don't know who it's for. The counselor at my little brother's school told my mother that writing things down helps. She told Mateo. Mateo told her to tell me. So.

The short version: I was in my second year of film school in L.A. Last March my father died. Heart attack, at school, between classes. He taught shop. He was fifty-one. I came home to help Mom and Mateo, and I got the job at the store, and here I am.

I just survived my first Christmas there. Picture the whole city returning everything at once. The drop box in the morning is the worst part of my day: full to the top, tapes cold from the night, half of them not rewound. I rewind maybe two hundred a day. Somebody years ago stuck a sticker on the rewinder behind the counter that says BE KIND, REWIND. Nobody is kind. I named this page after it because it's the only advice anybody gives me all day.

I'm supposed to be writing a screenplay. It's called Monsoon. It's on a floppy disk in my desk drawer. I don't open the drawer.

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