The Blockbuster Chronicles: Chapter 10 - Brady

Brady is my oldest friend. We still keep in touch today, although if you had told me twenty-five years ago that the nerdy, sheltered homeschool kid I had just met would still be exchanging texts with me about movies and video games when we were both in our forties, I probably would have laughed. At that age, twenty-five years was too large a stretch of time to comprehend. I could barely imagine making it through the next week.

I returned with a newfound appreciation for life behind the counter. Blockbuster might not have been glamorous, but it was climate-controlled, surrounded me with movies, and rarely required me to perform maintenance outdoors. More importantly, coming back gave me the opportunity to spend more time with Brady. Our friendship developed quickly.

Brady made the job fun. He was willing to go along with almost anything, which was dangerous because I was usually willing to suggest almost anything. Although I tried to maintain a reasonably professional appearance when customers were around, we got into plenty of trouble after hours or whenever the store was empty. 

In the past, I freely shared some of those stories. Looking back now, I’ve decided that certain incidents are probably best left buried. This is not necessarily because they were terrible, but because age provides the wisdom to recognize when a story might be better without written documentation.

I can offer one censored example.

On a day off, I was walking through Walmart when I found a can of foam spray designed for writing messages on car windows. It cost only a dollar, which placed it well within my prank budget. Brady’s truck happened to be parked outside Blockbuster, facing the busiest highway running through Millington. There was probably nowhere in town with better visibility.

I won’t repeat what I wrote on his window. I’ll only say that it wasn’t kind, it was definitely embarrassing, and I found the results much funnier than Brady did.

I’m not sure who called him, but someone reported that his truck had been vandalized. I laughed until I could barely breathe. Brady eventually got his revenge, and somehow both of us ended up with foam spray all over our Blockbuster shirts. That was how we found ourselves at a car wash around one in the morning, attempting to pressure-wash our shirts by hanging them on the clips that hold your floor mats and spraying them with high-pressured.

Fortunately, I had access to the store’s supply of uniform shirts, so I replaced the damaged ones and quietly moved on with my life. As far as criminal cover-ups go, it was less Italian Job and more two idiots with access to a stockroom.

The story Brady and I still talk about most, however, began with Blockbuster’s pens.

The company purchased enormous boxes filled with cheap blue pens. There must have been a thousand in each box, although only about twelve of them worked at any given time. I don’t remember who threw the first one, but I was probably responsible. Since I was the manager on duty, I had access to the box, and authority had already begun corrupting me.

At the end of each night, one employee was usually sent onto the sales floor to straighten the shelves and put away the final returns so the morning crew wouldn’t arrive to find a disaster. When Brady and I closed together, that job usually fell to him. I stayed behind the counter to count the registers, prepare the deposit, and change the security tape.

One night, I must have walked out from behind the counter and thrown a pen at him. Brady came to the front, grabbed a few of his own, and returned fire. From then on, our closing routine included an unofficial game of Who Is Going to Lose an Eye First?

What began with one or two pens gradually evolved into full-scale warfare. We ran between shelves, dove behind counters, and used DVD cases as shields. Pens flew through the store from every direction. Because we were young and stupid, the fact that nobody had been injured only encouraged us to become younger and stupider.

Other employees eventually joined the nightly pen wars, but one particular battle has remained in my memory ever since. Brady, Josh, and I were closing together, and A Walk to Remember had recently arrived on video.

The night began like all the others. The doors were locked, the customers were gone, and someone threw a pen across the store. Another came sailing back. Within minutes, I had gathered an entire handful, and the great pen war was underway.

Technically, we should have already gone home. It was around one in the morning, and all our work was finished. Once the pens began flying, however, we lost track of time. We ran through the aisles, ducked behind displays, and threw anything remotely shaped like a writing instrument. Pens gave way to highlighters and markers. We were sweating and diving onto the floor as if something more important than our dignity were at stake.

The battle continued for nearly an hour. It was the pen war to end all pen wars, and like most wars, it ended because someone introduced a weapon that should never have been involved.

We kept a silver paint pen behind the front counter. I have no idea why Blockbuster needed a paint pen, but we had one, and during the chaos it entered circulation. It had already been thrown several times when Brady crouched near the large front windows facing the highway. Josh picked up the paint pen and hurled it with all his strength.

It missed Brady and struck the glass.

The sound was enough to make all three of us stop. Any lingering doubt that things had gotten out of hand disappeared when the pen exploded, splattering silver paint across the window and all over the freshly shrink-wrapped display copies of A Walk to Remember.

For a moment, nobody moved. We stared at the damage and understood that the war was over. 

Then we started laughing.

Once we regained control of ourselves, we surveyed the battlefield. Silver paint covered a large section of the front window. Somewhere between fifty and seventy VHS and DVD display boxes had been splattered and would need to be unwrapped and shrink-wrapped again. Paint had also reached the wall behind the display. 

I ran into the back room, grabbed a ladder, and put Josh to work on the window. Unfortunately, every time he wiped the glass, the silver paint spread into a larger smear. Brady and I began stripping the damaged plastic from the movie boxes, and he stationed himself at the shrink-wrap machine, working with the speed and concentration of a man trying to dismantle a bomb.

I attempted to wipe the paint from the wall but only made it worse. Since I was contributing nothing useful, I moved on to collecting the hundreds of pens scattered throughout the store. By that point, most of the interior lights had been switched off. The store had been closed for hours, yet Josh was standing on a ladder in front of the window while Brady frantically operated machinery in the back and I crawled around the floor looking guilty. 

Naturally, this attracted the attention of local law enforcement.

A police cruiser slowly entered the parking lot and aimed its searchlight toward the store. The beam passed across the darkened windows and illuminated Josh, still wearing his Blockbuster uniform, standing on a ladder and smearing silver paint across the glass. Behind him, I was attempting to clean paint from a wall with the unmistakable posture of someone who knew he was going to have difficulty explaining the situation.

For one terrible moment, all three of us panicked. From outside, it must have looked as though the world’s least competent burglars had broken into a Blockbuster and decided to redecorate.

Once the officers saw our uniforms and determined that nobody was robbing the place, the crisis passed. We returned to cleaning, laughing harder than before. What should have been a routine closing shift had turned into an overnight restoration project because three grown men couldn’t resist throwing defective pens at one another.

Before we finally left, I did what I usually did whenever we behaved like idiots: I rewound the security tape. 

The store’s surveillance system was recorded onto VHS tapes. There was a tape for each day of the month, and we rotated them so that the store retained roughly two months of footage. The video was black-and-white and recorded at a severely reduced frame rate, making everyone on-screen move like a character in a silent film, but slower.

Whenever we did something particularly stupid, I stopped the recording, rewound the tape to a point before the stupidity began, and pressed Record again. Fortunately, nothing serious ever happened during one of those missing stretches. Still, there were quite a few security tapes in that store with unexplained gaps, and I’m grateful nobody ever had a reason to investigate them.

We were young people left in charge of an entire store, and we made the best of it. There were pranks, insults, practical jokes, and more than a few incidents that would have ended differently if smartphones and social media had existed. Yet we were also good employees. We never behaved that way in front of customers. The store was clean, the shelves were organized, and we took pride in providing good service. Then the doors locked, the lights went down, and whatever maturity we possessed clocked out for the night.

I’m grateful there are no videos of those years floating around online. All that remains of our immaturity are the stories Brady and I still share with each other, and, apparently, the ones I share with strangers.

The pens are long gone. The Blockbuster is gone too. Brady, somehow, is still here. Who would have guessed?