The Blockbuster Chronicles - Chapter 11: No Training Manual

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I woke up early to help my father take his car to a mechanic before school. I followed him to the shop in my pickup, waited while he handed over the keys, and drove him home.

When he climbed into my truck, he mentioned that the mechanics had been watching television in the lobby. Something had happened at the World Trade Center. He thought there might have been an explosion.

I remembered hearing about the bombing there in 1993. I had been eleven years old, and although it had been a major news story, it had barely penetrated my childhood. At seventeen, I still did not pay much attention to events that happened far beyond my immediate world. Something terrible happening in New York sounded frightening, but distant.

My father and I talked briefly about it on the drive home. Then I went upstairs to finish getting ready for school.

A few minutes later, I heard him call for me.

He had turned on the television while preparing for work and realized this was not an ordinary news story.

I never went to school that day.

Like millions of other people, we spent the next several hours sitting in front of the television trying to comprehend images that seemed impossible no matter how many times we watched them. Every new report made things worse. There was no point where the story seemed finished. There was only another update, another rumor, another piece of footage and another reason to keep watching.

By late afternoon, I could not take any more of it. I wanted to move. I wanted to go somewhere familiar and do something ordinary.

Fortunately, I was scheduled to work at five.

Robert was already at Blockbuster when I arrived. The store was empty. Not a soul to be seen. During the seven hours we remained open that night, we rented two movies.

Someone brought a small television out of the office and placed it on the counter so we could continue watching the news. For a while, we stood there doing exactly what everyone else in the country seemed to be doing, watching the same footage and waiting for someone to explain what was happening.

Eventually, Robert and I had enough. We turned off the television and spent the next few hours talking in the nearly silent store.

One of our two customers arrived around nine. He came through the doors looking exhausted.

“I can’t take any more of that,” he said. “Please give me something to watch.”

We pointed him toward the New Releases wall. When he reached the counter less than thirty seconds later, he explained that he had spent more than twelve hours watching television coverage. He was frightened, angry and mentally exhausted. He needed something, anything, that could occupy his mind for a couple of hours.

I don’t think the movie mattered. That night, entertainment was not about having fun. Sometimes you just need permission to look away.

Eventually midnight arrived and we closed the store.

Robert lived on the naval base a few miles away and usually rode a bicycle to work. Whenever the weather was bad or we worked late, I gave him a ride. His bike fit easily into the bed of my pickup, and because I had a military ID card, I could drive through the gate and take him directly to his barracks.

That night, everything was different.

Robert warned me that security had changed dramatically after the attacks, but I did not fully understand what he meant until we reached the entrance. The familiar road had been transformed into a maze of concrete barriers. More than a dozen military police officers surrounded the checkpoint.

We handed our identification to an officer at the gate. He pointed ahead and told us to pull over for a vehicle inspection.

I followed the direction of his finger and began steering around the first barrier.

Suddenly, people started screaming.

“Stop!”

“Freeze!”

Within seconds, four military police officers surrounded my pickup with M16 rifles pointed in my direction.

I slammed on the brakes and threw my hands into the air.

The officer at the gate angrily directed me toward a small inspection area where more military police and several dogs were waiting. The problem was that the inspection area was almost ninety degrees away from where he had originally pointed.

Once we stopped, Robert and I were ordered out of the truck. One officer kept his weapon trained on us while the others searched the vehicle. German shepherds circled my pickup twice, while officers used mirrors to look under the truck for explosives.

I tried to explain that I had gone exactly where the first officer had directed me.

Eventually, he seemed to realize what had happened. His finger had pointed one direction while he had intended me to drive another.

Nobody apologized, but the rifles were eventually lowered.

After several minutes, we were cleared to leave. I climbed back into the truck, navigated the remaining barriers and drove Robert to his barracks.

The entire trip was probably only a few minutes longer than usual, but it felt much longer.

I was angry at first. I had not done anything wrong. I had followed the officer’s instructions and somehow ended up surrounded by armed men.

Over time, though, I began to see the situation differently.

Nobody at that checkpoint had expected to be doing that job under those circumstances. The base had previously been relatively open. Suddenly, the country had been attacked and the people responsible for protecting a military installation were trying to create new security procedures in a matter of hours.

They were frightened too.

That realization stayed with me. As a teenager, I tended to assume adults knew what they were doing. Teachers knew what they were doing. Managers knew what they were doing. Police officers and military personnel definitely knew what they were doing. There was always a procedure somewhere, and somebody older than me understood it.

September 11 was one of the first times I realized that sometimes everyone is figuring things out at the same time.

Blockbuster would reinforce that lesson in considerably less historic ways.

My least favorite management responsibility was taking the store’s deposit to the bank. I only made the trip four or five times, but I hated it. The bank was about ten minutes away, and the deposit had to be placed inside an exterior night box. Company policy required two employees to make the trip so one could serve as a witness.

Because our store was open from ten in the morning until midnight, finding a convenient time to make the deposit was surprisingly difficult. Fortunately, Monica usually handled it.

One Monday, I arrived for a middle shift and found her waiting for me with the expression of someone who had spent the entire morning dealing with a problem.

The bank deposit key had broken inside the night drop.

The bank had given her a temporary replacement, but there was a catch. A permanent replacement key would cost Blockbuster eight hundred dollars.

Monica had another idea.

She wanted the temporary key duplicated before she returned it.

There was only one problem. Both sides of the key were stamped with the words DO NOT DUPLICATE.

Monica spent the morning calling hardware stores and locksmiths around Millington. Everyone refused to make a copy. Eventually, someone gave her the number of a locksmith who operated out of a van parked at his house somewhere in the country.

He said he would do it.

So shortly after arriving at work, I found myself standing in Blockbuster while Monica handed me a restricted bank key, three hundred dollars in petty cash and a set of directions that sounded as if they had been passed down orally through several generations.

I knew the surrounding area pretty well. I enjoyed driving country roads and had explored much of the region around Millington.

I had absolutely no idea where she was sending me.

According to Monica, the locksmith lived about thirty-five minutes away. The route involved several roads that alternated between asphalt and dirt, along with the usual rural directions involving landmarks rather than actual street names.

After forty-five minutes, I stopped and called the store.

This was 2001. There was no smartphone sitting beside me with a blue dot politely explaining that I had missed my turn fifteen miles ago. Consumer GPS systems existed, but they were certainly not something I had sitting in my battered pickup. All I had were directions the locksmith had given Monica, which Monica had then given me.

I had no idea whether I was lost.

Monica repeated the directions and gave me one final landmark.

“Keep going until you see the only house with a chain-link fence around the yard.”

That seemed specific enough.

I drove another half hour before finally seeing a small ranch house surrounded by chain-link fencing. I passed the driveway, slammed on the brakes and backed up.

It was the first fenced house I had seen. This had to be it.

The driveway was blocked by a gate. Beyond it sat a slightly neglected house, a gravel driveway and the sort of yard that suggested nobody was particularly concerned about neighborhood beautification awards.

Just as I climbed out of the truck and started toward the gate, the front door burst open.

A woman with wild hair and a ZZ Top tank top charged into the yard waving her arms.

“You ain’t welcome here!” she screamed. “Get out!”

I froze.

Clearly, this was the wrong house.

We were far enough into rural Tennessee that I figured nobody would find my body until hunting season. I began apologizing while slowly backing toward my truck.

The woman kept coming.

“You aren’t welcome here! We don’t like your kind!”

I had absolutely no idea what kind she meant.

I was a seventeen-year-old white kid wearing khaki pants and a Blockbuster polo. I drove a beat-up pickup truck with Tennessee plates. If anything, I seemed aggressively local.

Just as I reached the driver’s door, she doubled over laughing.

I stood there with one hand on the truck, still considering whether escape might be the safest option.

Finally, she looked up and grinned.

“Tony Stewart fans aren’t ever welcome in our yard.”

It took my brain several seconds to catch up.

I looked toward the front of my truck, where a Tony Stewart plate was mounted to the bumper.

Then I looked toward the house.

A large Jeff Gordon flag hung near the door.

This woman had scared ten years off my life over NASCAR.

She opened the gate, still laughing, and wrapped an arm around me. She told me I looked like I had seen the devil and led me toward the house.

An older man came outside wearing a T-shirt stretched across his stomach, athletic shorts and bedroom slippers. He was her father and, thankfully, the locksmith I had spent the last hour and a half trying to find.

He apologized for his daughter’s performance and explained that they were dedicated Jeff Gordon fans. Apparently, seeing a Tony Stewart supporter arrive at their house had been too good an opportunity for her to waste.

I laughed, although my heart had not entirely received the message that I was no longer in danger.

Then I noticed a large white van parked beside the house.

The locksmith introduced himself and began maneuvering the van around several trash cans, an abandoned bass boat and a large willow tree until he had it parked near my truck. He opened the back and motioned for me to join him.

I explained what had happened at the bank and handed him the temporary deposit key.

“You know it says ‘DO NOT DUPLICATE,’ right?” he asked.

I stood there for a second, thinking I had just wasted all this time trying to find someone who actually wasn’t going to help me.

Then he laughed.

“I don’t give a shit. How many do you want?”

It was simultaneously the most reassuring and least reassuring answer he could have given me.

He started his key machine and sat in the back of the van while he worked. Over the next hour, he told me about being a locksmith and how little most people understood about security. According to him, someone properly trained could enter almost any house in less than thirty seconds.

He told stories about being called into Memphis late at night to rescue drunk young men who had locked their keys inside expensive sports cars. He admitted, with absolutely no shame, that he charged them extra for making him get out of bed.

The man loved his job. That was what I remember most.

He answered every question I asked and seemed genuinely excited to explain how locks worked. When he noticed that a key had broken inside the passenger door of my truck, he even offered to remove it for free.

After nearly an hour of conversation, he handed me two copies of the bank key.

The bill was eight dollars.

Monica had sent me with three hundred.

Before I left, he gave me his business card and told me to call if I ever needed a locksmith. He also promised me a fifty percent discount if I abandoned Tony Stewart and became a Jeff Gordon fan.

Then he unleashed another booming laugh, slapped me on the arm hard enough to nearly knock me sideways and closed the doors of his van.

His daughter waved from the porch as I pulled away.

What had initially looked like Deliverance had somehow turned into Mayberry.

By the time I returned to Blockbuster, I had been gone nearly three hours. Monica was so relieved to see the duplicated keys that she did not even ask what had taken me so long. She just wanted to return the temporary key to the bank and avoid the eight-hundred-dollar replacement charge.

I had left the store expecting a boring errand. Instead, I got lost in the Tennessee countryside, believed I was about to be murdered by a NASCAR fan and spent an hour learning about locks from a man working out of a van.

There was no Blockbuster training video for any of that.

In fact, the longer I worked there, the more I began to realize how little of life came with instructions.

At seventeen, I thought becoming an adult meant eventually reaching some point where you knew what you were doing. The people around me seemed to understand the systems I was only beginning to encounter. Managers understood how businesses operated. Bank employees understood money. Military police understood security. Somewhere, I assumed, there was always a grown-up who knew the answer.

I was beginning to discover that there wasn’t.

Sometimes a military checkpoint was being redesigned by frightened people only hours after the country had been attacked. Sometimes a manager solved an eight-hundred-dollar problem by sending a teenager into the countryside with three hundred dollars and a key stamped DO NOT DUPLICATE. Sometimes the person who could solve your problem was an old man in bedroom slippers operating a key machine out of the back of a van.

Competence, I slowly learned, did not mean always knowing what to do.

A lot of the time, it simply meant staying calm long enough to figure out what came next.

And maybe that was one of the best lessons Blockbuster taught me about becoming an adult.