The Blockbuster Chronicles - Chapter 6: The Folks Behind the Counter

Working at Blockbuster brought me into contact with personalities I never would have encountered in my sheltered life. Some of my coworkers were kind. Some were reckless. A few were complete disasters. Every one of them taught me something about the adult world, even when the lesson was simply that age and maturity were not the same thing.

Those people made Blockbuster memorable. The movies provided the setting, but the cast changed constantly.

Every so often, Coca Cola ran a promotion with Blockbuster. We loved promotional periods because they allowed us to wear T shirts instead of the standard blue polo with the gold collar. Occasionally, there were prizes too.

The first contest involved selling twenty-ounce Coke products with movie rentals. None of us wanted to annoy every customer by delivering a sales pitch, so we made almost no effort. Somehow, either through naturally high sales or a clerical mistake, our store won. The prize was a paid trip to a Memphis Redbirds baseball game.

Since Blockbuster could not close for baseball, the staff attended two separate games. One group contained the younger employees and most of the people we considered fun. The other included Deloris and everyone unfortunate enough to be scheduled with her. I was in the first group, along with Mandy.

Mandy was a recent hire and the younger sister of a longtime employee named Sarah. When we heard Sarah's sister was joining the staff, none of us knew what to expect. Then Mandy walked in looking like she had stepped out of an eighties teenage comedy, with blond hair, a deep tan, a halter top, and a huge smile. Every young man in the store immediately forgot how to perform basic tasks.

She was in her early twenties, sweet, beautiful, and not always blessed with common sense. None of that mattered to the guys. Mandy also worked at Hooters, which definitely mattered to the guys.

Once we learned she would be attending the game with us, the actual baseball became secondary. Mandy arrived dressed for the attention and became increasingly flirtatious after a couple of beers. We enjoyed the game, but the real entertainment was watching our normally dull collection of Blockbuster employees attempt to act sophisticated around her.

Afterward, she invited everyone to her house. We stayed until early morning, telling stories and laughing. Despite the elaborate fantasies of nearly every guy there, nobody stayed the night with Mandy. As far as I know, no Blockbuster employee ever managed to even get a date with her. She left the store not long afterward, probably because Hooters paid better. Later, I heard that she found a wealthy boyfriend and eventually began dancing professionally.

My memories of that night are less about Mandy now and more about the terrifying drive home.

Kenny owned a battered car from the late eighties that appeared to be held together with duct tape and band-aids. He believed offensive driving was safer than defensive driving, which meant curves were challenges and speed limits were suggestions. Reaching Mandy’s house required us to travel through the dark, winding roads of Shelby Forest. The car slid sideways more than once, and several trees came much closer to meeting us than nature intended.

I was convinced I was going to die. I have since been involved in three accidents, including one that totaled my car and that still remains the worst car ride of my life.

Kenny's car provided another memorable moment in the McDonald's drive-through. I was on break, sitting in my truck and waiting to order, when something slammed into my rear bumper. My truck had already been damaged in an earlier accident, so I was less concerned about the vehicle than I was furious that someone had managed to hit me at drive-thru.

I looked in the mirror and saw Kenny laughing behind me.

I pulled forward, and he tapped my bumper again. This time, the front of his car became wedged beneath the rear of my truck. When I moved, I dragged him with me. He tried reversing, but his dying car was no match for my Chevy S-10. Eventually, he had to climb out in front of everyone and jump repeatedly on his hood until the vehicles separated. While I tried not to pee in my pants.

There are few experiences more satisfying than watching a man lose a fight with his own joke.

Not long after the baseball game, Lori and Kelly both left for new careers. For several weeks, a manager from another Blockbuster helped cover our store. He was a large Black man with an enormous laugh and one of the calmest personalities I had ever encountered. I loved working with him.

He was also the first serious Star Trek fan I ever met. Enterprise had not premiered yet, and he talked constantly about how excited he was to see it. Growing up in the South, I had developed a narrow idea of what a science fiction fan looked like. He did not match it, and that was good for me. One of the quiet lessons Blockbuster kept teaching me was that people rarely fit the categories I had built for them.

We spent hours talking while we worked. Before returning to his store, he offered me a job there. The location was in a rougher part of town and would have added thirty minutes to my commute, so I declined. Still, knowing that someone respected my work enough to recruit me meant a great deal. We kept in touch for a while, and I wish I could remember his name today.

One of our replacement managers was Candice. She was rough around the edges and smoked marijuana behind the dumpster with several employees. I disapproved, although I became considerably less vocal after she saved my job.

Retail managers regularly remove excess cash from registers and secure it in the office. Most businesses use zippered money bags or pneumatic tubes. Our Blockbuster used pockets. A manager would take several hundred dollars from a drawer, put it in a pocket, walk through the store, and deposit it in the safe. Somehow, this system rarely caused problems.

Then I took home a thousand dollars.

After one exhausting shift, I returned home, untucked my shirt, hung up my keys, and emptied my pockets onto the top of my television. For younger readers, televisions were once enormous pieces of furniture with enough room on top for a VCR, a collection of tapes, and apparently a large portion of Blockbuster's nightly revenue.

My wallet landed in its usual dish. So did a thousand dollars in cash.

I froze. I had created and recorded the cash drop at work, but I had never actually placed the money in the safe. Returning to the store and explaining this to Deloris seemed likely to end my brief management career. Honesty may have been the best policy, but panic was the policy I chose.

I called Candice, who was working with Deloris, and quietly explained what had happened. She helped me smuggle the money back into the building and place it in the safe. We made the exchange behind the dumpster, which was apparently the center of all unofficial Blockbuster business.

Candice was not the kind of manager corporate headquarters would have celebrated, but she protected a terrified teenager who had made an honest mistake. People were complicated like that.

The rest of the staff offered their own education.

Rhonda was around fifty, worked at Walmart, and seemed to have spent her life finding men who treated her badly. She had a generous heart and a talent for surviving circumstances I could barely understand. During our shifts together, she told me about poverty, abuse, and the exhausting work of rebuilding a life after someone else had damaged it.

Richard was in his late twenties and engaged to a sweet woman who competed in barrel racing. She was beautiful, devoted, and clearly loved him. Richard responded by collecting phone numbers from nearly every woman who entered the store. Age, appearance, and relationship status seemed irrelevant to him. If someone showed interest, he was interested too.

Richard was not especially handsome, but he was confident and knew how to talk to people. Watching him taught me that attraction was not only about appearance. The way a person carried himself mattered, sometimes far more than it should.

He also had a terrible temper. His father had been killed by a drunk driver and left him a house and enough financial security to get by. I suspect that loss damaged him in ways none of us understood. I hope he eventually found help, although at the time I mostly saw the anger and the way he treated his fiancée.

We were friends outside work for a while. He accompanied me when I bought my first PlayStation 2 on the day Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was released. We listened to “Broken Wings” on the way to EB Games and discovered a shared love of eighties music, an interest few people our age admitted to having. When the same song played during the game's opening sequence, it felt like the universe had arranged a private joke for us.

After I began dating someone, I grew more judgmental about Richard’s infidelity. I had objected before, but now I confronted him directly. He believed I had no right to interfere, and he was probably correct about that. I simply could not stop thinking that his fiancée deserved better. We parted ways after that conversation and never spoke again.

Nate offered a different lesson in confidence. Every day, he asked three women for their phone numbers. His reasoning was mathematical. Rejection was inevitable, but if he kept asking, someone would eventually say yes. I admired the strategy while having absolutely no desire to experience that much rejection.

Another coworker was a soldier whose legs had been crushed when one Humvee backed into the vehicle on which he was sitting. He was waiting for disability payments and needed temporary work. Among the many things he taught me was that if a fight becomes unavoidable, breaking someone's smallest finger can quickly change the balance of power. I have never tested this advice, but I have remembered it for more than twenty years.

Josh was a troubled young man who left his Marine father's house to live in a deteriorating trailer with a friend. He wanted freedom badly enough to accept almost any conditions. We became close, and once again I loaned money to someone who never repaid it. The last time I saw Josh, he was speeding through a trailer park while I chased him, fully intending to beat the money out of him. I had been watching far too much The Sopranos at the time.

Josh also created one of the worst customer complaints I ever handled. While wearing his Blockbuster uniform, he stepped in front of a woman waiting in line and pretended not to notice her. She repeatedly tried to get his attention while he ignored her. When she finally became furious, he laughed and revealed the joke.

She did not find it funny.

She demanded a manager, which meant I had to step forward. Since I looked no older than Josh, she assumed I was his friend pretending to have authority. I pointed to the word “Manager” embroidered on my shirt, but she required confirmation from three other employees before believing me. Being promoted while still in high school came with certain disadvantages.

Then there was the other Brandon. He arrived as an irresponsible kid but gradually became one of our best employees. His mother once came into the store and thanked me for setting a good example for him. I have received more impressive compliments since then, but few have meant as much.

Tracy challenged another set of assumptions. She spoke openly about sex in a way no woman I had known ever had. She had a fiancé serving in Afghanistan but regularly described encounters with other men. At seventeen, I was equal parts fascinated, shocked, and thoroughly unprepared for the level of detail she shared. She made me realize that women could have the same appetites and contradictions I had previously associated only with men. She also became a first of mine, something that I guess I’ll never forget.

The coworker who changed my perspective most was Juan.

Juan was in his forties and managed a jewelry department at a Walmart in Mississippi. He dressed impeccably, spoke softly, and clearly considered Blockbuster beneath him. Still, he needed the additional money and did solid work while he was there.

One night, Lori pulled me into the office and asked whether I thought Juan was gay. The question confused me. I had never knowingly met a gay person, and at that point homosexuality still felt like something discussed in church, on television, or in movies rather than part of ordinary life. Lori told me her mother was gay and that she had mentioned this to Juan, hoping his response might reveal something.

I had no interest in analyzing him. I smiled, nodded through the gossip, and returned to work.

A couple of weeks later, Juan called during a slow Wednesday night. I assumed he wanted to quit because he disliked Deloris and already had a better job. Instead, he asked whether anyone at the store had been talking about him. More specifically, he wanted to know whether anyone had questioned his sexuality.

I told him about my conversation with Lori. Then he asked what I thought. I said it was none of my business.

Juan responded with a story. He had been drinking alone in a hotel bar when a married man slid a note across the counter inviting him upstairs. Juan stopped the story there and asked what I made of it.

I was baffled by the entire conversation. Finally, I told him that if he had accepted an invitation to another man's hotel room after meeting him in a bar, I would probably assume he was gay.

Juan laughed and confirmed that he was.

I assumed the mystery was solved and the conversation was over. Instead, it lasted another forty minutes.

He asked whether I had ever known a gay person. I admitted that I had not. I had grown up in a conservative Christian family with all the prejudices that environment could encourage, although watching Six Feet Under had already begun dismantling some of them. Juan told me about growing up in New York City, spending time at Studio 54, and serving on the board of a Memphis film festival for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender stories.

What began as an uncomfortable conversation became fascinating. Juan described what it was like to be a gay Hispanic man living in the Bible Belt. He was honest about his life and patient with my ignorance. Talking by phone made the exchange stranger than it might have been in person, but it also gave me enough distance to ask questions I might otherwise have been too embarrassed to voice.

Eventually, the subject turned toward me. In a roundabout way, Juan asked whether I was gay.

I told him I was not, although the question made me wonder what I had done to inspire it. I also repeated an idea from Chasing Amy that had stayed with me. Was it reasonable to dismiss half the human race automatically when searching for love? I was not presenting a fully developed philosophy. I was a teenager repeating something from a Kevin Smith movie that had made me think.

Juan found the question interesting. He said my love of eighties music and the arts did not fit the masculine expectations of our small Southern town. We laughed about that. Then he commented on having noticed the shape of my body through my pants, and the conversation ended shortly afterward. So, yeah… maybe that went a little too far.

The next time we worked together, Juan asked whether he had made me uncomfortable. He apologized and continued telling me stories about his life in New York. He welcomed questions and seemed to enjoy challenging my assumptions. That same night, he said he was giving notice but hoped we would remain friends. We exchanged telephone numbers.

Over the following months, we spoke regularly. Juan gradually became a mentor. His experiences, interests, and worldview differed from nearly everyone I knew. He forced me to reconsider ideas I had inherited without examining, which is something every teenager needs.

Then one afternoon, Juan saw me driving through a mall parking lot and called my cell phone. The phone was turned off, and I did not hear his message until I returned home. I called back, reached his voicemail, and explained what had happened.

The next day, he left me an angry message saying he would not tolerate phone games. I was stunned. I had never experienced that level of fury over one missed call, so I deleted his number and stopped answering when he tried again. Perhaps he was having a terrible day. Perhaps our friendship meant something different to him than it did to me. I never learned the reason.

About a month later, Juan called to say he was returning to New York. He was exhausted by the bigotry and hypocrisy he encountered in the South. He apologized for lashing out and told me I was one of the good ones. I had not deserved his anger, he said, and he wished me well.

That was the last time we spoke.

Meeting Juan did not instantly transform me into a worldly or enlightened person. It did something more believable. It made one unfamiliar life familiar. Years later, when my brother came out, the news did not frighten or unsettle me. By then, I understood that a person's sexuality was only one part of a much larger human story.

I have Juan to thank for helping me learn that.

Blockbuster was my first sustained encounter with people whose backgrounds, beliefs, desires, and mistakes differed from my own. They complicated the simple categories I had inherited. A manager who smoked marijuana saved my job. An abrasive military man recommended me for a promotion. A gay coworker expanded my understanding of the world. People who behaved terribly could still show kindness, and people I admired could disappoint me.

The shelves taught me about movies. The people taught me nearly everything else.