A Trip to the Old Video Store

 

Choice paralysis before Netflix: "It's okay, honey, I've got a few here we can look through."

Remember video stores? Occasionally, while telling or writing this story, I have to stop and remind people—including myself, sometimes—that things were different when all this began. No personal computers, no smartphones, no internet, no streaming. If you needed to find or confirm a fact, you had to look it up, either in one of your own books or in a library. If you wanted to see a film, it was either the local cinema or the neighbourhood video store. If you went to the Cineplex, you might have 4 or 5 movies to choose from. At the video store, though, there were hundreds, maybe thousands, and you were well advised to have your ducks in a row before you walked in the door.

21 December 1987—a date I saw emblazoned on a web page last week while confirming a book publication date on an editing project. Also the date I flew back home to PEI that year for Christmas, just hours after mailing a quixotic letter of friendship to that chic, exotic-looking artist Lisa Bryce, who was leaving Carswell that week. No chance to say goodbye, so I expressed the wish that we wouldn't lose touch. An old-fashioned gesture then—positively archaic in today's terms—that I hoped she would find charming and not merely a gratuitous act based on a misbegotten faith in bygone mores.

That got me ruminating on that splendid Maritime trip, day by day, as much as I could recall, all the way forward to my return to Calgary on 3 January 1988, with a sinus head cold that sent me straight to bed for three days. Starting the year off right: the airline had also lost my luggage, and it would be weeks before I finally got it back.

Lying on the couch the next day, unable to sleep, running a slight fever, breathing and thinking through a fog, I decided to walk—or more precisely, stumble and lurch like the living dead—to the video store a few blocks away. An independent store, tiny by later Blockbuster standards but still holding enough choice to paralyze me if I didn't pounce quickly. With a temp of 99.8, I had no appetite for lolling about in unending ditherance. I spotted two crime dramas side by side. I'd heard of them, and they looked plausible, so I grabbed them.

Now, 31 years later, I found myself wondering last week: Did either of those films I watched that day—innocent and unsuspecting as I was—offer any retrospective clues about what lay in store for me that year? Retrospective foreshadowing—how's that for an oxymoron?

Film the First: Jagged Edge (1985), featuring a typically random pairing of then-current bankables, in this case Jeff Bridges, a rich guy accused of murdering his socialite wife, and Glenn Close, the high-powered lawyer hired to defend him. Onscreen chemistry: asymptotic of zero. Offscreen also, I suspect Jeff and Glenn NOT Close (sorry). Fortunately, fairly clever script, great supporting performances from Robert Loggia and Peter Coyote, and taut soundtrack from John Barry (of James Bond fame). And here we have pay dirt: the plot hinges on a defective typewriter key that causes the letter "t" to be truncated and raised above the line, like so:

Sometimes one letter can transform the whole story.

So, "one letter's difference," essentially—an expression that would soon enough become iconic for me. And in a context blessedly far from anyone's wife being murdered. And, for that matter, blessedly far away from Glenn Close (sorry again).

The biggest "one letter" in the whole Story might be the A in "I'm A Man," which, of course, you can read about here. And then there's the N right after it, which becomes part of N-Man, Cosmo's earthly emanation (or emissary). The other one letter's difference I would encounter that March would be between Relf and Self, the photo doppelgangers, which brings to mind:

Film the Second: Body Double (1984), an uneven, self-consciously quirky Brian De Palma entry that took so long to get going that it cured my sleeplessness that day in 1988, at least temporarily. Only now, having watched it in full 31 years later, do I really understand what the hell was going on. Melanie Griffith plays a porn star hired to impersonate someone's wife. A rich wife who, as seems inevitable in these films, is later murdered by her husband. Embedded rather gratuitously somewhere in there is a four-minute video of "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Yes, music videos, a big thing back then, as inescapable in bars and pubs as televised poker is now. Now confined to YouTube. I kinda miss them.

Although the eerie doubles in my Story were faces, not bodies, the link seems obvious enough, and of course you can revisit some of those doubles here.

Well, I did get better and return to work that week. I was a bit nonplussed that Lisa hadn't yet answered my letter (she never did), but little did I suspect that the following Thursday, the 14th, I would lock eyes with a young woman applying for an editing job at Carswell and say to myself, "Uh oh. Here we go again." Yes, it was Monica Carter, and again, as with Clapperton in 1985, it was the Thursday of the second full work week of the year. I don't know how, but I knew at that moment that the same dynamic was in motion again.

This time I was determined to be more cautious. Just how that turned out you can read about here, provided I ever finish the maddening thing. Any day now, I swear.

 

POSTSCRIPT: While whittling away at that multilayered Stairway to Heaven page last month, I ran across a memoir on the university bookstore sale shelf, so I bought it for a friend I thought might like it. When I later looked up some reviews of Love, and All That Jazz, near the top was one by a professional reviewer named, you guessed it, Monica Carter. Not the same one, of course. But this one, around the time of that review, was apparently working on a novel called Eating the Apple. I kid you not. Don't worry, once you get through climbing the Stairway, you'll get the joke.