The Blockbuster Chronicles - Chapter 2: Two Girls, a Guy, and a Video Store

When I think back on my time at Blockbuster, I sometimes think of The Sandlot. Not because we spent our shifts playing baseball, although we probably would have if there had been room between the New Releases wall and the candy display, but because it was a period of innocence, confusion, growing up, and making the kind of stupid mistakes that seem funny only after enough time has passed.

If Blockbuster was my Sandlot, then Megan was my Wendy Peffercorn: beautiful, older, and so far beyond my reach that merely speaking to her felt like an achievement.

Megan was the kind of person you noticed as soon as she entered a room. She was tall, slim, athletic, and had long blond hair. She looked like the pretty girl in a teenage movie, the one the awkward kid spent ninety minutes trying to impress before learning an important lesson about being himself. I had not yet learned that lesson. When Megan walked into the store during my second weekend on the job, I mostly stood there and stared.

She had worked at our Blockbuster for three years before leaving to attend college. After one semester on campus, she decided she would rather live at home and asked for her old job back. Deloris, our store manager, welcomed her immediately. Megan had been one of the store's best employees and had left as a third key, which meant she was trusted to open and close the store, supervise shifts, and perform most of a manager's responsibilities without receiving the full glory of a manager's paycheck.

I was excited about working with her, although working with her was probably an ambitious description of what happened during our first shift together. She stayed near the counter with the employees she already knew, while I was assigned to the floor to return tapes and straighten shelves. As one of the newest people in the store, that was where I lived most of the time. Every returned movie had to be matched with its display case and put back in exactly the right place, while every shelf had to look as though customers had not spent the afternoon pulling boxes out, changing their minds, and shoving them back wherever gravity allowed.

On a busy night, the veteran employees suddenly discovered a deep passion for shelving. On a slow Sunday afternoon, however, the register became the most desirable place in the building. You could lean against the counter, talk to your friends, and occasionally interrupt the conversation to rent somebody a movie. That afternoon, Megan and the others stayed up front while I drifted through the store alphabetizing VHS tapes and DVDs, pretending I wasn't listening to them laugh.

I knew where I stood in the social order. I did not seriously expect Megan to walk into Blockbuster, discover the shy high-school kid organizing the Horror section, and decide she had found the man with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life. I mean, I imagined it. I just didn't expect it.

After my lunch break, two employees were sent home because business was slow. I’m pretty sure since I was the new guy, I was voluntold that I would be staying while the others go to enjoy their Saturday afternoon. That left Megan and me alone in the store. She told me we would work together on the floor but that the register was our main responsibility, then motioned for me to come behind the counter and relax.

At last, I had an opportunity to talk to her. I gathered my courage, walked behind the counter, and began aggressively alphabetizing the returned tapes so I would have something to stare at besides her.

Fortunately for me, Megan was never at a loss for words. She asked how I liked working there and told me stories about how bored she had been during her first few weeks. That was comforting. Until then, I had wondered whether my boredom meant I was doing the job wrong. More importantly, a beautiful college girl was showing sympathy toward me. At seventeen, I interpreted this perfectly ordinary kindness as compelling evidence that she might already be in love with me.

I was crushing hard, but my self-esteem was low enough to prevent me from doing anything dangerous with that information. Still, having a normal conversation with a girl, especially a college girl, gave this loser a little confidence. I had expected her to be the head-cheerleader villain from every high-school movie I had ever seen. Instead, she was friendly, funny, and easy to talk to. It was one of my first clues that attractive people were not a separate species sent to Earth exclusively to judge me.

Megan and I began working together regularly, often with just the two of us in the store. We became friends. She told me about her boyfriend, who attended college in another state and did not particularly enjoy hearing about her nights out dancing at the club. Their long-distance relationship was already strained, and my existence would eventually add to that strain, though I was much less threatening than either of them seemed to realize.

As I got to know her, the prom-queen image I had invented disappeared. Megan was laid-back, intelligent, and not remotely the stereotype I had assigned her. Some of my generalized resentment toward the jocks and cheerleaders of the world began to fade. It is harder to despise an entire category of people once one of them starts sharing breakfast with you.

We eventually began hanging out away from work. It was nothing romantic. We would grab breakfast before a shift or get a late dinner afterward. I still had a crush on her, but even I understood where I stood. Besides, before long, another girl arrived and redirected every bit of my teenage attention.

Dina was a military brat like me whose family had recently transferred into the area. She was cute without seeming overly concerned about being cute, and she was a complete nerd at a time when I had never encountered a girl who openly liked the same things I did. She loved Evil Dead 2 and eighties music. She had seen Clerks and liked Mallrats. She had a dark sense of humor, which I considered one of my greatest areas of expertise, and she could not park worth a damn, which gave us one more thing in common.

Within a single shift, Dina had checked nearly every box on my imaginary dream-girl list. Did I mention she had seen Evil Dead 2? I had assumed those qualities did not exist together in an actual person, let alone a female, and especially one who might willingly speak to me.

My friendship with Megan had raised my confidence just enough for me to imagine making a move. Dina was funny, attractive, and somehow seemed to enjoy talking to me. I told Megan about my crush, and she found the whole thing adorable in the way an older, more experienced person finds a puppy adorable when it tries to climb a flight of stairs.

Megan had not worked much with Dina, so when the next schedule came out, we rearranged a few shifts until all three of us were working together. We spent a slow Saturday afternoon talking, and Megan and Dina hit it off as quickly as Megan and I had. Soon the three of us were getting breakfast before work, meeting for lunch on our days off, and treating each new schedule as a puzzle that could be solved through enough shift swaps. Eventually Deloris seemed to give up and began scheduling us together, saving everyone the paperwork.

For a while, I felt incredible. At school, I thought of myself as a loser. Outside school, I was hanging out with two college girls who were far cooler than I believed myself to be. Blockbuster showed me the possibility of an adult world where the high-school hierarchy did not matter. I had spent a lot of time depressed and isolated during those years, and this strange little friendship felt like a way out. I finally had a place where I belonged.

I do not remember precisely when I learned that Dina had a boyfriend, but eventually it became clear that nothing romantic was going to happen between us. Oddly enough, I was fine with that. I valued what the three of us had. I also redirected my attention toward a girl who worked at McDonald's with my best friend, Anthony.

Megan had gone to school with this girl and knew her brother, so she decided to help me acquire my first girlfriend since fourth grade. This plan mostly involved accompanying me to McDonald's, sitting in the dining room with Dina, and encouraging me to go to the counter and say something charming.

The confidence I had developed with Megan and Dina did not transfer to unfamiliar women. I could talk to them because work had forced us into the same place until we became comfortable with one another. Walking up to a girl I barely knew and expressing interest was entirely different. No matter how much encouragement I received from the table, I would approach the counter, panic, order food, and stare like a creeper.

Then I would return to the table, and Dina would put her arm around me in an attempt to make the McDonald's girl jealous. Whether this inspired jealousy or merely convinced her that I already had a girlfriend who really enjoyed Chicken McNuggets, I cannot say.

My pursuit consisted mostly of eating at McDonald's so often that the managers apparently assumed I was in love with Anthony. I showed up nearly every day, talked to him, failed to talk to the girl, collected free food from the staff, and gained weight. It may have been the least efficient courtship in human history.

While I devoted myself to this doomed strategy, Megan and Dina began spending more time together without me. Most of those outings happened while I was working, but that did not stop me from becoming jealous. I had been so happy to bring the three of us together that I began to treat the friendship as something I owned. When they hung out without me, I felt rejected and replaced. It was childish, because I was a child.

Megan's boyfriend may also have contributed to the tension. She talked about me enough that he became suspicious, and she found herself having to defend a friendship with a seventeen-year-old Blockbuster employee whose romantic strategy involved repeatedly buying value meals. I can understand why that put her in an uncomfortable position. At the time, my response was essentially, "Screw that guy. You're a free woman." It felt very principled when I said it in my head. In reality, it was pure high-school melodrama. Fuck, I was turning into Dawson.

I don’t remember exactly what caused the break between us. I probably said or did something stupid, which does not narrow it down much. Whatever happened, I suddenly found myself excluded from the friendship. Worse, the tension followed us into work.

Megan used her authority as third key to keep me on the floor while she and Dina sat on the front counter talking. I would finish shelving the returns and straightening the cases, walk toward the register, and immediately be sent back to find something else to do. It was petty and demoralizing, and that slow shift became one of the longest I had worked.

I did not want to get Mega in trouble, but I could not continue working that way. I approached Deloris and asked to be scheduled separately from her. Deloris reasonably wanted to know why. I refused to explain, and she told me she could not rearrange the schedule without a reason. Fair enough.

With management unable to solve a problem I would not describe, I went home and emailed Megan and Dina. I apologized for whatever I had said or done. Almost immediately after I clicked Send, Dina called me. She apologized for how she had acted and admitted that she missed hanging out. I spoke with Megan later, and she expressed much the same thing. Just like that, the crisis ended. We were friends again.

For approximately one week.

The following Saturday, Megan, Dina, another coworker named Joe, and I decided to spend the evening together. We had dinner at On the Border, where Megan unsuccessfully tried to convince our waiter that it was my birthday so the staff would sing to me. Afterward, we played miniature golf, wandered through the arcade, and finished with a game of laser tag.

The laser-tag match was boys against girls. Joe and I abandoned any serious attempt to win and agreed to spend the game hunting Megan and Dina. For a while, we seemed to be doing well. Then, in the black-lit confusion, I lost track of Joe.

When the game ended, he was nowhere to be found. The scoreboard showed that he had finished last, with far fewer hits than the rest of us. We circled the arcade a few times before I decided to check the men's room.

A few people were inside, but I did not see Joe. One stall door was closed at the far end of the row. I walked over and knocked gently.

“Joe?” I asked, keeping my voice low in case the stall contained a stranger.

“Brandon?”

“Yeah. Are you okay?”

There was a pause.

“Oh, Brandon, thank God it's you. I shit my pants.”

His voice carried a level of embarrassment I had never heard from another human being.

“Okay,” I said. “I'm sorry, man. I'll get the girls and see if we can find you a towel or something.”

“Thanks,” he whimpered.

I found Megan and Dina and explained the situation. Megan immediately started laughing, then tried desperately to stop when I reminded her that Joe was trapped in the restroom and needed our help. I found him a towel, and the four of us made a slow, silent walk to Megan's car.

I have experienced many awkward silences since then, but few have matched the twenty-minute drive to Walmart, with all the windows down, with Joe sitting among us in disgrace. To his credit, he eventually emerged from the store wearing an exceptionally ugly pair of shorts. Once he made a joke about them, everyone else had permission to laugh, and the tension finally broke.

Our original plans no longer seemed appealing, so we decided to rent a movie and go to Megan's house. We stopped at Blockbuster and entered with the confidence of off-duty employees who believed the building still belonged to them. While Joe explained his new wardrobe to the people working, Megan and Dina chose Sugar & Spice, a comedy about cheerleaders who rob banks.

There was one problem. New releases had to be available for two weeks before employees could rent them for free. The rule protected the newest movies for paying customers while still giving employees a generous rental benefit once the initial rush passed. Sugar & Spice had come out the previous week.

Megan and Dina did not want to pay four dollars to rent it. Their solution was to remove the Sugar & Spice tape from its case and exchange it with the tape inside a copy of Cast Away, which was old enough to qualify as a free employee rental. They hid the Sugar & Spice case behind an unpopular horror movie, then checked out Cast Away at no charge.

I watched all of this with the rigid discomfort of a lifelong goody-two-shoes. It was the first time I had seen coworkers deliberately exploit the job, and although the deception was small, it felt enormous to me. I decided not to join them at Megan's house. I said I was tired, had to work in the morning, and wanted to go home. I left with my principles technically intact, although knowing about the switch made me feel complicit.

Over the preceding weeks, I had developed a casual friendship with Tim, one of the assistant managers. Tim was in his early thirties, married, and had a child, but he also loved video games and drove a battered Ford Bronco with a sound system worth twice as much as the vehicle. He had a slightly unusual demeanor, but he was friendly and easier for me to talk to than most of the older employees.

Tim and I opened the store together the following morning. As we vacuumed and prepared for the day, he asked about dinner and miniature golf. I told him most of the story, carefully leaving out Joe's emergency. I said that circumstances had cut the evening short, so we stopped by the store, rented a movie, and they went to Megan's house.

“What movie?” he asked.

At that moment, I realized I had wandered into dangerous territory with a manager.

I could have lied and said Cast Away. Instead, because I had always been intensely opposed to lying, I decided honesty was the safest option. I also assumed Tim and I were friendly enough that he would understand. Perhaps, I thought, swapping tapes was one of those unofficial practices longtime employees knew about and management quietly ignored.

“Sugar & Spice,” I said.

Tim stopped vacuuming.

“Didn't that come out last week?”

I gave him a nervous laugh. “Yeah, but they switched it with Cast Away and hid the box.”

He stared at me. “Let me get this straight. Megan, our third key, put a new release in an older movie's case so she could rent it for free?”

I knew immediately that I had made a terrible mistake. I tried to make the situation sound harmless. There were still several copies on the shelf, I explained, and nobody was watching that crap anyway. No customer had been deprived of anything.

Tim's expression did not change.

“Brandon, Deloris needs to know about this.”

I immediately began defending Megan and Dina. It was a stupid, harmless choice, I said, and I would make sure they never did it again. There was no reason to involve Deloris. No customer had complained. No movie was missing. If we could simply forget the conversation, the problem would cease to exist.

Tim listened to my entire argument and then said, “Either you tell her, or I do.”

My stomach dropped. I had accidentally informed on my only friends at work. Other than Anthony, they were practically my only friends anywhere. I felt the blood drain from my face, but I agreed to tell Deloris myself. I hoped that if the explanation came from me, I could persuade her to treat it as a minor violation. Everyone loved Megan. She had worked there longer than almost anyone. Surely nobody would lose a job over a four-dollar rental.

Deloris was no more flexible than Tim. She told me she would have to address the situation. I knew then that the friendship was probably over. I asked again if she could schedule me away from Megan and Dina, but she refused to rearrange the entire staff. We would have to behave professionally and get along, she said, or go our separate ways.

I dreaded our next shift together. I was embarrassed, angry with myself, and terrified of what they would say. Looking back, I probably should have warned them. At seventeen, it never occurred to me until it was too late.

The shift I feared never happened. By the next day, neither Megan nor Dina worked at Blockbuster anymore.

Because the tape switch involved loss prevention, Deloris had to consult the district manager. He instructed her to question them separately by phone. If they denied switching the tape, they were to be suspended while the matter was investigated. If they admitted it, they were to be terminated. Dina denied it. Megan admitted it. In the end, both of them were fired.

I had destroyed my tiny social world by answering one question honestly.

I wish I could say I believed they deserved what happened, but I didn't. The punishment felt wildly disproportionate to the offense, and I blamed myself for setting it in motion. I called both of them and sent emails trying to explain what had happened. Understandably, neither wanted to hear from me.

The rest of the staff loved Megan, which made me public enemy number one. By the time I returned to work on Thursday, the story had spread. I was a rat, a traitor, and the reason the golden girl had been fired. Coworkers looked at me as if I had personally summoned the district manager and demanded blood. I stood silently behind the counter and seriously considered quitting.

Deloris had called a staff meeting to explain what had happened and put an end to the rumors. Employees trickled into the store over fifteen minutes and gathered behind the registers, talking among themselves while I stood alone. Then I glanced through the front windows and saw Megan crossing the parking lot with her uniform shirt in her hand.

She was pissed.

Megan shoved the entrance door hard enough that it swung back toward her, then began cursing me before she had fully crossed the threshold. She walked the length of the counter, yelling the entire way, threw her uniform shirt onto the floor, and stormed out through the exit. I stood frozen while everyone else stared after her. The entire confrontation lasted maybe thirty seconds, but it dramatically altered the mood in the room.

No one had ever seen Megan behave that way. Until then, many of my coworkers had assumed that the sweet, dependable employee they knew could not possibly have done anything wrong and that I must have betrayed her out of spite. Her entrance did not prove that I had handled everything perfectly, but it complicated the version of the story they had been telling one another.

One of the older women looked at me and said, “I'm so sorry. I never knew she was like that.”

With that single sentence, I was allowed back onto the team.

Management commended me for telling the truth and warned everyone that abusing the employee-rental policy would not be tolerated. Robert, another manager whose default mood seemed to be anger, stood nearby nodding at me with a satisfied half-smile. Somehow, losing my two closest friends had earned me the approval of management. It was a strange victory, especially because it did not feel like one.

I had gone from being the nervous new kid on the sales floor to someone the managers trusted. I had also learned that the adult world beyond high school was not free of cliques, jealousy, gossip, or sudden reversals. The people involved were older, but the social aspects were familiar.

The friendships I thought would define my time at Blockbuster were over almost as soon as they began. The store remained, and so did I. Before long, I would find myself surrounded by a different group of coworkers, people older than me who, for reasons I did not yet understand, began treating me as one of their own.