Be Kind, Rewind
January to June, 1999

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Wednesday · June 30, 1999

Act two is done.

Page 81. It's ten after three in the morning. The father finally does something. He goes out to the carport in the rain, with the power out, and fixes his son's bike in the dark by feel, and doesn't say a word about it, just leaves it leaning by the kitchen door. I don't know where it came from. Yes I do. I took it from Ray, with a little bit of Dad stuck on the front.

Arizona doesn't do daylight saving time, so all summer it's the same time here as it is in Seattle. Roz says it's the only thing the two places have in common. I'm not calling her at three in the morning, not even for this. I'll mail her the page instead, in an envelope, so she has it in her hand.

Six months ago I had forty pages of a man walking around a house. Roz said one page a day, I don't care if it's bad. A lot of days it was very bad. Most of those pages I threw away. The ones I kept are good.

Act three. Here I go.

Sunday · June 13, 1999

Roz left this morning.

Her dad flew down from Duluth to drive the rental truck up with her. He's six-four, says "you bet" to everything, and shook my hand like he was testing a rope. We loaded the truck last night after close, me and Mateo and Chuy and her dad: I don't know how many boxes of books, one futon, one cactus she's taking to Seattle out of spite. Ray lent us his dolly and came to supervise, which mostly meant telling her dad about the Air Force while we carried things. Mom sent a foil pan of tamales for the road and a St. Christopher medal for the dashboard.

They left at five this morning to beat the heat. It was already in the eighties. We stood in the lot outside her apartment and I don't have anything clever to report. I said, "Call me from the road." She said, "Call me from Tucson." That doesn't make sense, but it did at the time.

We're going to try long distance. People do it. We've got phone cards and the mail and e-mail, and a plan for her to fly down in October for the wedding. Fifteen hundred miles, give or take. She worked it out on a napkin: that's about thirteen million videotapes laid end to end. Somehow that helped.

I went in at nine and rewound tapes by myself until noon. Chuy didn't talk to me all morning, which was the kindest thing anybody's done for me in a while.

Thursday · May 20, 1999

Episode I.

Mateo and I got in line outside the theater at six o'clock Tuesday night for the 12:01 show. We were not the first. The first people had been there, they told us, since the weekend, with lawn chairs and a cooler and a little TV. There were kids in bathrobes with toy light sabers. There was a man dressed as a Jawa, hood up the entire time, in the heat. I respect that man more than I respect most people.

Mom let Mateo go on a school night. She said, "Your father would have." Then she said, "Don't tell anybody at school where you were," which makes her the coolest school secretary in the state of Arizona.

Here's what I'll say about the movie, since everybody at the counter asks. The pod race is worth the whole line. The sword fight at the end, with the red-and-black guy and the double light saber, is the best fight in any of them. Some of the rest I'm going to need to see again to decide how I feel. Mateo, who is fifteen, has already decided. It's the greatest movie ever made and I'm old.

It was past two-thirty when we got out. Walking to the truck he said, "This is the first one that's mine. The other ones were yours and Dad's." I didn't say anything. I gave him the rest of the popcorn. He held it between his knees all the way home.

Sunday · April 25, 1999

I turned twenty-six yesterday.

It was a hard week to have a birthday in. Tuesday was Columbine. It was on the TV in the break room, on the TV at the Chinese place, in every conversation at the counter. Mom works in a school office. She came home Tuesday and held on to Mateo in the kitchen for a long time, and he let her, which tells you how scared he was. I don't have anything smart to say about it. I just want it written down that it happened and we were sad.

So yesterday was quiet, and quiet was right. Mom made tres leches. Mateo gave me a tape he made off the radio, TLC and Lauryn Hill and "Livin' la Vida Loca" twice, on purpose, to annoy me, with the DJ talking over the start of every song. Ray gave me a good pocketknife and said, "A man should have one that's his." Roz gave me a ream of typing paper with a note on top: FOR ACT THREE. SO GET THERE.

Page 64. Getting there.

ASK ME WHAT TO RENT: Sullivan's Travels (1941). A Hollywood director who makes comedies decides he has to make a serious picture about suffering, so he goes out on the road as a hobo to find out what suffering is, and he finds out. The last few minutes, a room full of men laughing at a cartoon, is the best argument I know for working in a video store. I rent it to myself about once a year. This seemed like the week.

Saturday · April 17, 1999

I have seen The Matrix three times.

Once on opening night, a Wednesday, with Chuy, who stood up when the lights came on and said "I know kung fu" to the whole theater, which got a laugh because it's a line in the movie. Once last Saturday with Roz, who decided it's a movie about finding out the card catalog is lying to you, and made a pretty good case for it all the way home. Once last night with Mateo, who now does the slow lean-back thing, where the bullets go past, every time he walks through a doorway.

Here's what it did to me. I came out the first night so wound up I couldn't sleep, and I sat down at two in the morning and wrote four pages of Monsoon, and three of them were good. It's nothing like my script. Mine's about a family and a rainstorm. But you can feel that somebody made exactly the movie they wanted, every single frame, and nobody talked them out of it. That's what I wanted to be when I went to L.A.

Customers are already asking when it comes out on tape. It just came out. I tell them what I always tell them: not for a while, so go see it again on a big screen while you can.

Monday · April 5, 1999

Ray asked Mom to marry him yesterday. Easter Sunday, at the dinner table, in front of everybody, with a ring he'd been carrying around in his shirt pocket since Ash Wednesday, according to Mateo, who knew. Everybody knew but me. This is becoming a pattern in my family.

She said yes before he finished asking. The wedding is the second Saturday in October, October 9, at church. She wants it small. Ray wants it small. The choir ladies want it big, so it will be big.

I shook his hand. I'll be honest, since that's the rule on this page: I meant it about sixty percent. But that's up from Thanksgiving, when I meant zero, and it's up from last week, and I think I can see a hundred from here, even if I can't walk there yet.

Here's what did it. Later, when everybody was in the kitchen, Ray came and found me on the back step and said, "I'm not trying to take anybody's place, Wendell. I just want to be in the picture." Which is a pretty good line for a guy who fixed airplanes. I told him so. He said he got it from a movie. I asked him which one and he couldn't remember. That is the most Ray thing that has ever happened.

Sunday · March 21, 1999

Roz got the job.

She flew up to Seattle two weeks ago to interview at a library there, a branch with a big reading room and a children's corner and windows that look out on a hill she says is green all year. They called Friday. She said yes this morning. She finishes her degree in May and starts at the end of June. A real librarian, with a real desk.

We watched the Oscars at her apartment tonight with a pizza. When Shakespeare in Love won Best Picture she yelled so loud the neighbor knocked on the wall. Her name is Rosalind. Her mother taught high school English. She takes that kind of thing personally.

I'm proud of her. I want that on the record first. She's worked two years for this and she's going to be great at it.

Then the other part. Seattle is fifteen hundred miles from here, and I've got a mother, a fifteen-year-old brother, and a key to a video store. Neither of us has said the words "long distance" yet. We watched the rest of the Oscars like two people who are going to say it later.

It was raining in Seattle the whole time she was there, she says. She loved it. Of course she loved it.

Saturday · January 16, 1999

New year, new look. I found this film strip in the clip art library over New Year's weekend and redid the whole thing. Roz says it looks like the carpet in a movie theater lobby. That was the idea. The old years are still up, links at the top and bottom.

Two years of this journal now. Thank you to everybody who writes. Somebody asked me last month why a video store clerk keeps a journal. I don't know. Why does a video store clerk do anything? Because it's two in the morning and the tapes are all rewound.

Roz's New Year's challenge, written on an index card and taped to the bottom of my monitor: ONE PAGE A DAY. I DON'T CARE IF IT'S BAD. That was January 1. I've done sixteen pages in sixteen days. Thirteen of them are bad. Three of them are the first new pages of Monsoon since last April.

At the store yesterday a man asked me whether his VCR will still work after New Year's 2000. He looked so worried that I told him the tapes don't know what year it is. That seemed to help him. I'm not sure it's true.