Blockbuster Video

I moved out of my parents home for the second time without stable employment. I worked occasionally as a video tech, but not enough to pay the bills.

For some reason I moved in with Christian again. We found a funky one bedroom apartment with a nice big front room, a good size kitchen and millions of cockroaches.

Rent was cheap, and when we moved our friend Sean in it got even cheaper. The landlord was and old Romanian woman named Pava who owned a restaraunt, "Pavas" next door. She lived with her husband in the apartement above the restaraunt and she was convinced and dismayed that she'd been fooled into renting to a bunch of gypsies.
We enjoyed not working and could pay our bills by hustling up money in various ways. We'd recycle, getting up early and hitting dumpster and alleys to pile up cans and bottles. We'd panhandle. We got a gig through Sean allowing us to get paid for decorating a dance club, including hanging our own paintings and building a giant tv using rolls of black plastic and a rear projection screen and projector, playing original footage I'd shot and edited. The bartender at the club even bought one of my paintings.

This kept us in food and booze and I worked just enough for Mike filming weddings and school kids, to pay my share of the rent. Christian, Sean and I were damn near always drunk, until I started to get bored with the drunk thing. The romantic ideal was to be the crazy drunk artist, but the truth was, we did very little art. Who had time with so much time spent scraping up money for booze.
I scaled back my drinking to one or two nights a week and went on a job search. I hit Blockbuster video almost immediately. I was a huge movie nut and free movies sounded like a hell of a deal.
I walked into our local Blockbuster, and deja-vu, there was Chance, from KFC, now wearing a Blockbuster assistant manager's uniform. I asked for an application and Chance must have forgotten or forgiven what a terrible employee I'd been at KFC because he helped me land the job.

The Blockbuster downtown was famous amongst Blockbuster employee's throughout the area as being freak central. Not only were the majority of the employees gay (still shocking to Sacramento suburbanites at the time) but the head manager, Scott was better known around town as Large Marge, Sacramento's most infamous drag queen.
Scott was an absolute sweetheart. He was grumpy and always tired, but he really cared about us all and treated us great. I loved working for him. He'd often show up with traces of the night before on his face, and we all got in the habit of checking him over and warning him when a little eyeliner or lipstick still showed.

I was great at helping customer's find movies, since I knew my films inside and out. And I was getting to know them even better as I was allowed to have seven movies out at a time. I watched all the great art films, indy flicks, foreign films and b-movies that I'd always meant to see. Suspiria, Liquid Sky, The Forbidden Zone, Turkish Delight. This was one great benefit.

I'd matured considerably since my days at KFC and much to my surprise and I did very little to piss off management. The only thing I had to be reprimanded for was talking too long to customers about movies.

The district manager came to visit and I was assigned the task of showing him around the store. He was a nice enough fella but he kept calling me "big guy." "Alright big guy, show me how this place is put together." "Hand me that tape there would ya big guy?" Finally I had enough. "So, big guy, do you rent a-lot of this foreign crap?"
"Yes, little man, we most certainly do." I said it, and I kept walking, facing away from the little man.
He didn't say a word to me. I'm sure Scott got an earfull, but all Scott shared with me was a tired expression.

Life at home would be changing. Sean enlisted in alcoholic's anonymous and Christian went the opposite route, his drinking getting worse each day. Christian and Sean didn't get along anymore, and Christian felt judged by me. He took my not drinking and my ability to get along with Sean personally. One night, when he was good and tossed he decided to kick my ass. Christian was a tough guy, and I think sober he could've taken me. As it was I couldn't pull punches if I was going to come out of this the winner. I ended up putting him in a choke hold and holding it until I knew he wasn't coming after me again. He only stayed out for a few minutes. Then he was right back on my case, fists up and ready. I grabbed my coat and split. I'd already choked him out, I wasn't willing to do more.

The next day I found out that Christian's girlfriend Anne had taken him to the emergency room. The whites of his eyes were solid red. The hospital staff notified the police but when they called the next day I answered. They asked if I knew Christian and I said yes. Then they asked me if Christian planned to press charges against a Mr. Jensen. I told them he did not want to press charges. They instructed me to have Christian call them if he changed his mind. I was amazed to have just successfully dropped charges against myself. Christian moved out soon after.

I didn't like Sean much more than Christian had. He was a slob for one, and he always brought stupid party people by the house. He brought two girls by, a blonde and a red head and I was sure I wanted nothing to do with them. One, the blonde, made a comment about financial success having a bad effect on an artist's work.

"How can you say something so fucking stupid." Those will forever be remembered as the first words I spoke to Bryna, the love of my life. We started arguing and she turned out to be quite intelligent and very passionate. We became fast friends. I would eventually ask her to marry me, but at the time I started dating her best friend, Emily, the red head.
It was around this time that the NC-17 rating for movies was created and the first movies to get this rating were some damn good flicks including The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover and Henry and June. Blockbuster had these flicks for a bit and then they wimped out and pulled them. I felt like such a heel walking around with a milk crate pulling all the best flicks we had off the new release shelf to send back to corporate.

I was growing tired of Sean spitting loogies in the sink spreading his dirty laundry throughout our pad. I gave notice on the apartment, fixed all the broken windows, lost my cleaning deposit and moved onto a friend's couch. I had many friends willing to let me stay with them because hey, I got seven free movie rentals a week!

Christmas was approaching and the season's big video release was Disney's The Little Mermaid, which played nonstop on the TVs spread throughout Blockbuster. We were on holiday hours and so I was doing 40 hours a week of Little Mermaid. I'd gotten this job because I loved film, and the film lover in me was now being tortured by this incessant new-Disney crap. They gave the Little Mermaid a happy ending? What the hell? The Little Mermaid, the Hans Christian Anderson classic, can not have a happy ending, nor should it have caribean sing-a-longs.

I was finally making friends downtown, thanks in large part to Sean, an obsessed social butterfly. This meant I actually had things to do on Saturday Nights, and when I didn't, hanging out at home with Emily, who had recently robbed me of my cherished virginity, beat the hell out of enduring more Little Mermaid. I began calling in sick on Saturday nights. I was written up several times.

Calling in sick can be addictive. There are few things as enjoyable as a night that was meant to be spent working spread out in front of you with no obligations. Having a scheduled night off is great, but you know it was coming, and you'll probably just squander it. When you'd spent the day trying to muster up some energy and enthusiasm for a job you don't want to go to, and then you decide to free yourself, to make that call, that is a special night indeed. It was on these nights that I'd take long walks by the river or get a bunch of friends together for drink and movies. Hell even calling in sick when you are sick is enjoyable. I have much nostalgia for days propped up on pillows watching Get Smart or I Dream of Jeanie and drinking tea.

It is a special skill, calling in sick. Not only coming with and delivering a good excuse each time, but developing a plot line between call-ins, each one setting up the next while playing off the last.

Finally on New Year's Eve I was too hung over from the night before and I called in yet again, this time really dying. I was 'crawl from bed to the bathroom, throew up in my pants while sitting on the toilet, wish I was dead' sick. As sincerely sick as I was, I did feel better once I'd called in and by 10pm that night I was at a party. But I stuck to sipping Seven Up. New Year's Eve is the biggest day of the year for home video and Scott had no choice. He would have to fire me.

Scott called me and asked me to come in and speak to him. We went into his office and he was so adorably nervous. He handed me my final check and began apologizing. I thought he was gonna cry so I helped him out. "Don't worry scott. You had no choice. I pretty much quit by not showing up on New Years. I know that. It's fine really. I should have just quit. I'll still come by and say hi, and I think you've been a great boss." Scott smiled and thanked me.
Then I asked him what kind of reference I'd get. Scott apparently wasn't allowed to give a reference and would refer any potential employers to corporate who would see me classified as "Not for re-hire." Shit!


Epilogue: The way I hear it, Blockbuster bragged that they were giving all of their full time employees benefits and then instructed the store managers to cut everyone back to part time who wasn't a store manager and thefore didn't already recieve benefits. Scott refused and was fired. He's, or actually she is doing well as the bartender and grand dame at Sacramento's Faces dance club, the hottest gay night club in town.

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