In the late '80s, I had a teenage driver on the insurance policy, so I got a second job at the latest rage, a video store. Video stores back then were like Starbucks or nail salons today. They were everywhere.
The work was easy, but I learned people smell bad. There was always a stink of fast food, cooking grease and farts in the air when the store was crowded, especially in the evening. We had our regulars, guys who rented a movie or two every single day. How lonely and bored were they? When snow was forecast, we'd rent out 80 percent of our stock, sometimes more! We were open seven days a week, 13 hours a day, no matter what the weather, so when the snow was too deep for people to go to work, they still managed to get to the video store.
One memorable night after a snowstorm, the 80 percent of our stock that had gone out all came back during one evening shift. (This was back in the one-day rental days.) We could not file them back on the shelves fast enough, so when the store closed for the night, we had literal five-foot high piles of videos on the floor. Everyone pitched in to get them back on the shelves, singing, laughing, and gossiping about the stinky customers. Our store, Erol's, filed library-style, spines facing out, separated by genre and then alphabetized. Then you had to balance the shelves so one didn't have 10 videos and the next 25, so the store had an orderly look. I truly enjoyed returning the store to pristine order every night and starting fresh each new day.
Except for the supervisors, my co-workers were high school and college students. The college boys were particularly dedicated and responsible. They had gone to J. Sargeant Reynolds for most of their undergraduate courses, then transferred to the University of Richmond for the last years so ultimately their degree would be branded the more prestigious UofR. The high school kids were less serious about working.
One of them was short, thin, pimply, and always excessively happy and excited. Sometimes he came to work wearing a Frank Sinatra-style fedora hat. His puppy dog enthusiasm was annoying. Just be quiet and work! The supervisors were patient with him and tried to keep him focused. The college boys were dismissive. The high school girls paid no attention to him, no matter how charmingly he tried to chat them up.
He had a flair for performance. One night at closing, he was assigned to vacuum the store. Instead of vacuuming, with a tip of his fedora hat, he danced with the vacuum cleaner. Instead of being charmed, we were all just annoyed because no one could leave until all the closing chores were done.
He seemed happy at the store, but I don't know what was going on at school or at home. I had my own teenager and didn't need to talk to another one about life, especially one that was always jabbering about his big future plans involving unrealistic fame and fortune.
One morning I was on first shift and the shift supervisor met me at the door with the news. The boy in the fedora hat had gone out to a shed in his backyard, put a rifle in his mouth and blown his head off. As the word spread from shift to shift that day, the high school and college kids were shockingly nonchalant about it. What a dork! What a dorky thing to do! But the adults were numb with shock. For days afterward we kept talking about it, comparing notes, trying to figure out if there had been a clue, some warning, that we had missed. But the truth was, none of us had ever really talked to him much because...well...he was so irrationally happy and annoying, like the Tigger character in Winnie-the-Pooh.
That was 20 years ago. The boy in the fedora hat would be in his late 30's now. Surely whatever was so unbearable when he was 16 would have long since been resolved and he'd be living his life now, rolling along with the rest of us. Instead, we left him behind in the '80's, always and forever 16 years old, never knowing anything more about life than teenage confusion.
He has been my touchstone ever since. No matter how bad things are, they are never so bad that you should kill yourself because...things change. Things will change. Things will change!
Life gets better. Or maybe life gets worse, but in a different way. Inevitably, life always has the potential to get better, or at least get different. Maybe still bad, but tolerable. You always have to take a chance on the change. Always.
The boy in the fedora hat drifts through my memories at odd times. I see today's teenagers and think, they own the future, a future the boy in the fedora hat will never see. He doesn't know that VHS won out over Beta, that our Erol's store was bought out by Blockbuster, that Blockbuster is now on the ropes to Netflix. No one rents VHS tapes anymore. Things changed. They changed for me, and they would have changed for him. In big and little ways. Surely one of those changes would have made life more hopeful.
I was just one of the adults at the store when he was there, no one significant in his life, but he turned out to be someone very significant for me. He'd probably be surprised to know how much of an impression he made on me, how often I still think about him, how he helped me push through my own difficult times, and sad to say, how I can't remember his name.
Being a writer is a curse because when something happens, you have to write about it. It torments you until you do. And if it's a sad story, you get to relive it through every draft and rewrite. You let it break your heart over and over so you can recreate the pain and put words to it.
