The Video Store Minicomics Collection

• Chapter 1 Rewind or Die: November 1994
• Chapter 2 Subtitles Don't Bite
• Chapter 3 The Tape Head Cleaner Blues
• Chapter 4 Godard on a Tuesday Night
• Chapter 5 Late Fees and Lost Causes
• Chapter 6 Bergman in the Bargain Bin
• Chapter 7 Shift Change at Midnight
• Chapter 8 Truffaut Behind the Counter
• Chapter 9 Misplaced in the Action Aisle
• Chapter 10 The Tracking Button Static
• Chapter 11 Seven Samurai and a Broken Case
• Chapter 12 Return Drop Confessions
• Chapter 13 New Wave, Old Grudges: Winter 1995
• Chapter 14 The Customer is Always Wrong
• Chapter 15 Herzog in the Cult Corner
• Chapter 16 Chewed Magnetic Tape
• Chapter 17 Inventory Night Fever
• Chapter 18 Black-and-White Skeptics
• Chapter 19 Fellini for the Indifferent
• Chapter 20 Overdue Notices and Out-of-Print Dreams
• Chapter 21 The Auteur Next Door
• Chapter 22 Splicing Tape and Broken Hearts
• Chapter 23 Cinema Paradiso on VHS
• Chapter 24 Closing Time at Blockbuster's Rival
• Chapter 25 The Clutter of Clamshell Cases
• Chapter 26 Be Kind, Please Rewind: Summer 1997

The fluorescent tube directly above the register had a loose starter that buzzed in the key of B-flat whenever the weather turned damp. It was the second Tuesday of November, and the pavement outside Cinema 7 was slick with the kind of greasy, soot-flecked rain that only fell in industrial strip malls within spitting distance of an interstate off-ramp.

My name is Arthur, though the blue polyester vest with the frayed yellow piping identified me only as "CLERK." I was twenty-two years old, lived on stale saltines and tap water, and spent forty-four hours a week defending a meager four-foot section labeled World Cinema against people who genuinely believed that Lethal Weapon 3 was a documentary. Cinema 7 wasn't part of a chain, which was both our salvation and our curse. Mr. Henderson, the owner, spent nine months of the year in Scottsdale trying to cure his gout, leaving the day-to-day operations to a rotation of community college dropouts and me. He gave us one ironclad rule: keep the front display stocked with whatever had just arrived in the cardboard shippers from Baker & Taylor, and make sure people rewound their tapes.

The sign taped to the glass counter was printed on canary-yellow cardstock using a dot-matrix printer that dropped every third descender: BE KIND, REWIND. UNREWOUND TAPES SUBJECT TO A $1.00 PENALTY FEE. NO EXCEPTIONS.

Naturally, every single person who brought a tape back treated that dollar like a personal insult delivered by the United Nations.

At 4:15 PM, the glass double doors shuddered open, setting off the tinny brass bell mounted to the frame. The damp draft brought in the smell of fried onions from the gyro stand three doors down, followed by an overweight man in a sodden windbreaker who carried a white plastic bag like it contained biohazardous waste. He dropped it onto the counter with a heavy plastic thud.

Inside was a copy of Speed. It was the rental of the season, our six copies never staying on the shelf long enough for the magnetic tape to cool down.

I took the black plastic case, popped open the side latch, and pulled the cassette out. Through the clear plastic window, the tape was piled entirely on the right spool. The left side was empty, bare plastic hub exposed.

"That'll be a dollar rewind fee, sir," I said, keeping my tone as flat as an abandoned highway.

The man stared at me. He had a pencil tucked behind his left ear and the red-rimmed eyes of someone who hadn't slept since the Carter administration. "You gotta be kidding me. I watched the movie. You're charging me a buck to push a button?"

"The store policy is posted on the counter, on the receipt, and on the back of the cassette shell," I pointed out, tapping the yellow sticker that Mr. Henderson had bought five thousand of in 1989. "If we have to run it through the rewinder, it ties up the machine. Other customers have to wait."

"It's a plastic box," he snarled. "You stick it in the machine, it goes whirr, it stops. You don't do any work."

"The electricity isn't free, sir."

"You kid," he muttered, digging into the pocket of his jeans with an expression of sheer disgust. He fished out four greasy quarters and slammed them down one by one against the glass, right over an advertisement for a boxed set of Twin Peaks. "You're a real comedian. I hope this place goes under when that big corporate barn opens up over on Route 4."

"Have a pleasant evening," I said.

He left, leaving a pair of wet shoe prints on the gray industrial carpet.

As soon as the brass bell jingled shut behind him, I picked up his four quarters, dropped them into the metal cash drawer without ringing them up—Mr. Henderson reconciled the rewind jar by weight at the end of the month anyway—and took Speed over to the K-Tek tape rewinder shaped like a red sports car. I dropped the cassette into the Corvette's plastic hood, slammed it down, and listened to the high-pitched motor scream as it spun the spool back to the beginning.

While the red Corvette screamed its mechanical agony, I pulled a fresh sheet of folded legal paper from beneath the register drawer, along with my trusty 0.3mm Pilot G-2 pen.

This was how Tapehead Comics began. It wasn't born out of an artistic manifesto or a burning desire to communicate with the world. It was born out of sheer, unadulterated boredom and the quiet rage that festers in your chest when you have to explain to three different grown adults that La Femme Nikita is not an exercise video.

The format was simple: eight pages, made from a single sheet of paper folded into quarters, slit down the middle with an X-Acto knife, and creased with the edge of an empty clamshell case. Page one was always the cover. For Issue #1, I drew the red plastic sports-car rewinder with sharp teeth, chewing through a black ribbon of tape, under the bold heading: REWIND OR DIE: NOTES FROM THE LOWER SHELVES.

Page two was an instructional diagram titled: The Anatomy of an Asshole. It featured a cross-section of a tape case containing crushed popcorn, an unidentified sticky amber fluid, and a cassette whose supply reel had been turned backward by hand until the tape had creased like an accordion.

The back page, as always, was reserved for the recommendation list. It was my private act of guerrilla warfare. Mr. Henderson insisted on devoting seventy percent of the floor space to direct-to-video erotic thrillers starring Shannon Tweed and martial arts sequels numbered four through seven. In the back corner, squeezed between a row of instructional golf tapes and an out-of-order public payphone, sat my pride and joy: two wire racks containing fifty-eight foreign and independent titles.

I had ordered them myself through a distributor in New Jersey who specialized in European art cinema and didn't mind that our store credit was permanently on the verge of revocation. We had Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, and a battered, black-and-white copy of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless with French audio and yellow subtitles that bled into the white shirts of the actors until they became completely illegible.

Nobody rented them. Occasionally a high school French teacher would check out The 400 Blows over a holiday weekend, or an art student from the local branch campus would spend forty-five minutes turning a copy of Aguirre, the Wrath of God over in his hands before ultimately renting Die Hard 2 instead. But mostly, they just sat there, accumulating a thin, fine layer of carpet lint.

At 5:30 PM, the lunch-rush crowd had long vanished, and the evening commuter rush hadn't yet begun. The silence in the store was heavy, broken only by the hum of the overhead tubes and the soft murmuring from the promotional monitor suspended by chains above the front desk. The distributor loop for November was playing: twenty minutes of trailers on continuous repeat.

I knew the dialogue by heart. First came the gravel-voiced narrator for True Lies, promising "an explosion of adrenaline," followed by the synth-heavy trailer for Clear and Present Danger, and finally a bizarre thirty-second public service announcement featuring a cartoon cassette named "Tapey" who reminded children not to insert peanut butter sandwiches into their parents' VCRs.

The bell rang.

It was Mrs. Gable. She came in every Tuesday at precisely five-thirty, wearing the same yellow raincoat and carrying an enormous vinyl handbag. Mrs. Gable was seventy-four, drove an ancient Buick Skylark that backfired whenever she shifted into reverse, and held very specific opinions about the American film industry.

"Young man," she said, resting both hands on the edge of the high counter.

"Good evening, Mrs. Gable. How was the Shirley Temple double feature?"

"The audio was fuzzy," she declared without hesitation. "In Wee Willie Winkie, during the bagpipe scene, there was a terrible buzzing sound. It sounded like someone was running an electric lawnmower in the next room."

"That's the bagpipes, Mrs. Gable."

"Nonsense. My third husband was Scottish. He played the bagpipes at the Elks Lodge. They sounded like a dying calf, not an electric appliance. The tape is worn out. You should throw it in the trash and order a new one from the television."

"I'll inspect the tape path with some isopropyl alcohol tonight," I said, taking the cardboard slipcase from her hands. "Did you want something similar for this week? We have Heidi on the shelf, or there's that Judy Garland picture you haven't seen yet."

She frowned, her eyebrows knitting together like caterpillars. She peered over my shoulder toward the dark, narrow aisles that stretched toward the back of the store. "What's that one with the girl and the umbrella? The one you were scribbling about on that piece of paper last week?"

My hand stopped over the keyboard. "You mean The Umbrellas of Cherbourg?"

"That's the one. The foreign one. Does it have singing?"

"Every word," I said. "From beginning to end. Even when they're checking the oil in a car, they sing it."

She looked deeply suspicious. "Are there dirty parts?"

"It's a romance, Mrs. Gable. It's about a girl who works in an umbrella shop and a mechanic who gets drafted into the Algerian War."

"I don't like wars. My brother was in Okinawa. Nothing to sing about in a war."

"It's very colorful," I added, perhaps slightly too eagerly. "Every frame looks like a pastry shop. The French director, Jacques Demy, painted the walls of the entire town of Cherbourg in pastel colors just to make the film look more vibrant."

She considered this for an agonizing thirty seconds, her pale blue eyes drifting past my head to the cardboard standee of Jean-Claude Van Damme kicking through a plate of glass to promote Timecop.

"Bring it to me," she said finally. "If it's filthy, I'm bringing it right back tonight, and I won't pay the dollar either."

I almost sprinted to the back of the store.

The World Cinema section was organized alphabetically by country, then by director. It was a system that baffled my coworker Derek, who believed movies should only be organized by two criteria: "Explosions" and "T&A." I found the Demy tape right where it belonged, tucked between a documentary on the German painter Joseph Beuys and a clamshell box containing Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

The tape was housed in a heavy white plastic case manufactured by a defunct company out of Chicago. The cover was an insert of Catherine Deneuve standing under a bright pink umbrella in the rain, looking impossibly young and melancholic. I took it down, checked the cassette inside to ensure it was properly rewound—it was, because I had personally rewound it four months ago after testing the tape—and brought it to the front.

"Two dollars and fifty cents for two nights," I told her, running the barcode under the heavy wand scanner. The red laser beeped once, a clean, high note.

Mrs. Gable extracted two singles and two quarters from a leather coin purse that smelled faintly of peppermint oil and mothballs. "If there are subtitles, my glasses had better be strong enough," she warned.

"They're bright yellow," I lied. They were actually slightly off-white with black outlines, which tended to jump around whenever the camera panned, but I wasn't about to lose the only customer who had willingly touched that shelf in three weeks. "You'll be fine."

She took the plastic bag, gave me another long, hard look, and shuffled out into the cold rain.

I returned to my minicomic.

The Pilot pen was bleeding slightly into the cheap paper, creating tiny spiderwebs of ink at the corner of every letter. On page three, I began sketching the layout of the store as an aerial tactical map.

I labeled the front door: Point of Incursion.

The New Releases wall, which took up forty feet of prime real estate along the northern wall, was labeled: The Zone of Infinite Regression. Underneath it, I wrote: Where people spend forty-five minutes looking for something they already saw in theaters six months ago, only to complain that the picture has black bars on the top and bottom.

The black bars were our primary source of customer conflict, second only to the rewind fee. The mid-nineties were a terrible time for home video aspect ratios. Studios were just beginning to experiment with widescreen letterboxing on standard VHS tapes for high-profile releases, and the average customer viewed those black bars as a personal theft of their television screen.

"I paid sixty dollars for a twenty-seven-inch Magnavox," an irate father of three had screamed at me the previous Friday, holding a copy of The Fugitive like an unexploded grenade. "Why is there nothing on the top four inches of my screen? You gave me the widescreen version! I want the whole picture!"

I had tried, with all the patience of a medieval monk, to explain that the letterbox version actually showed more of the movie—that Tommy Lee Jones had not, in fact, been amputated at the shoulder by a pan-and-scan operator sitting in a basement in Culver City.

He hadn't cared. "I want the whole screen filled with movie," he had insisted. "If I wanted black bars, I'd stare at a radiator."

I added a panel to the comic: a small, miserable clerk holding up two fingers, explaining Euclidean geometry to a gorilla holding a plastic bucket of buttered popcorn. The gorilla was saying: MAKE TV FULL.

Around 6:45 PM, the front door rattled open again, and Derek strolled in for the evening shift.

Derek was nineteen, wore a flannel shirt over an oversized Soundgarden T-shirt, and walked with a slouch that suggested his spine was made of boiled pasta. He carried a half-eaten sleeve of cinnamon donuts from the gas station across the street and dropped his leather jacket directly onto the counter, right over my drawing.

"Henderson call?" he asked, not looking at me as he picked up the wand scanner and aimed the red laser beam at his own palm.

"Not today," I said, pulling the paper out from under his jacket before the ink could smudge. "The rewinder in the back is making that grinding noise again. Don't use the green one. Only use the red Corvette."

"The red one eats the leader," Derek said, chewing loudly. "Chewed up that rental copy of The Crow on Saturday. Tape pulled right out of the spool like a bad tooth. Had to splice it with Scotch tape and a razor blade from Henderson's desk."

"You used regular tape?" I looked up, horrified. "Derek, regular cellophane tape has acrylic adhesive. It melts when it hits the video heads. It's going to coat the drum in gummy residue and destroy the next three VCRs that play it."

He looked at me with an expression of profound, unmovable apathy. "Arthur, it's Brandon Lee. The whole movie's dark anyway. Nobody's gonna notice a little static during the guitar solo."

He reached behind the register and pulled out the logbook, flipping through the carbon-paper receipts with greasy fingers. "Hey, you rent anything good today?"

"Someone took The Umbrellas of Cherbourg."

Derek paused, his thumb hovering over the page. He squinted at me. "The French musical? The one with the girls singing about gas stations?"

"Mrs. Gable took it."

He burst out laughing, spitting a crumb of cinnamon sugar onto the glass. "You gave that to the old lady who complains about the swear words in Driving Miss Daisy? Man, she's gonna crucify you. You know that film is about a pregnant teenager whose boyfriend gets drafted, right? She's gonna think it's filth. She's gonna call Henderson's house in Arizona."

"It's a masterpiece of modern European cinema," I said defensively, capping my pen. "It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1964. It has a score by Michel Legrand."

"She doesn't care about Cannes, Arthur. She cares about whether or not people get married before they hold hands. You're dead."

The bell rang again, cutting off my response.

A teenager in an oversized army surplus jacket wandered in, his sneakers squeaking wetly against the floor. He hovered near the horror section for a few minutes, his fingers tracing the lurid spines of the Nightmare on Elm Street tapes, before drifting toward the counter with a sheepish look on his face.

"Excuse me," he mumbled, looking down at his boots.

"Yeah?" Derek said, leaning against the register with his elbows.

"Do you guys have... do you have that movie where the guy cuts off his own hand, but it's like, a comedy?"

"Evil Dead II," Derek and I said in unison.

"Aisle four, bottom shelf, between Dawn of the Dead and Friday the 13th Part VI," I added. "Big red box. The eye is looking at you."

"Cool," the kid said, shuffling away.

"See?" Derek muttered under his breath. "That's cinema. A chainsaw for an arm. That's what the people want. You give 'em guys singing in pastel raincoats, and you're just begging to get your throat cut by Henderson's quarterly audit."

I didn't answer. I took my minicomic, folded it carefully into eighths, and tucked it into the pocket of my blue vest.

The evening settled into its familiar, numb groove. The trailer tape looped three more times. We rented out four copies of The Mask, two copies of Natural Born Killers (which required checking IDs and arguing with seventeen-year-olds who insisted their mustaches proved they were twenty-one), and a stack of low-budget martial arts flicks to a guy who smelled like damp weed and motor oil.

By 9:30 PM, the strip mall was quiet. The gyro shop had turned off its neon sign, leaving only the blue-and-yellow glow of our window sign cutting through the rain.

Derek was in the back room eating a microwaved burrito, his feet propped up on a crate of unopened promotional posters. I stood at the counter with an old bottle of head cleaner and a bag of foam swabs, systematically cleaning the brass rollers of the return inspection deck.

The front bell clattered.

It wasn't Mrs. Gable. It was a man in his late twenties, soaked to the skin, wearing a torn denim jacket and carrying a heavy canvas messenger bag that dripped water onto the mat. He didn't look like our usual clientele. He didn't look at the New Releases wall, and he didn't head for the horror aisle. He walked straight to the back corner, directly to the World Cinema wire racks.

I stopped what I was doing and watched him through the security mirror mounted in the corner of the ceiling.

His eyes scanned the shelves with an intensity that was almost alarming. His fingers moved quickly, skipping past the standard Criterion laserdisc ports and the worn copies of Kurosawa films that had been rented twice since the store opened in 1988. He stopped at the French shelf.

He pulled down Breathless. Then he pulled down Alphaville. He stood there for several minutes, holding both tapes under the yellow light, comparing the backs of the boxes like he was deciphering ancient scrolls.

Finally, he brought Breathless to the counter.

Up close, he smelled of stale tobacco and wet wool. His hair was cut short and uneven, like he had done it himself in a bathroom mirror with safety scissors. He had dark circles under his eyes, but his gaze was sharp, darting around the counter before landing on the stack of blank paper near the cash register.

"Is this the copy with the original theatrical subtitles?" he asked. His voice was raspy, the product of too many cigarettes and too little sleep.

"It's the 1987 New Yorker Films release," I said, turning the cassette over to check the distributor label. "It's got the white text with the thin black outline. It's not the restored version, but it's the full frame."

He nodded slowly, his fingers tapping a rhythmic pattern on the counter. "The one with the cut during the hotel scene? Where she's holding the towel?"

"Yeah. The jump cut is still intact. Henderson tried to throw it out two years ago because he thought the tape was broken. I had to hide it under the register for three weeks until he forgot about it."

A faint, tired smile touched the corners of his mouth. "Smart. Henderson's an idiot. My name is Julian."

"Arthur."

"You work here every night?"

"Tuesday through Saturday. Four to midnight."

Julian reached into his messenger bag, pulled out an orange membership card that looked like it had been through a washing machine, and pushed it across the counter along with three crumpled dollar bills. "I'm starting a film group at the collective down on 4th Street. We meet on Thursdays. We're doing Godard this month, then we're moving on to the early Italians. Antonioni. Rossellini. The stuff nobody around here gives a shit about."

"Nobody around here gives a shit about anything made before 1991 unless it has Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover," I said.

"That's because they've been fed corn syrup their whole lives," Julian said flatly. "They don't know what bread tastes like."

He noticed the corner of my minicomic sticking out from the register ledger. Without asking, he reached out and slid it toward himself, turning it with two fingers.

I moved to grab it, then stopped.

He didn't laugh. He unfolded the tiny, eight-page booklet, holding it close to his face under the flickering fluorescent bulb. He read the panels in silence, his eyes darting across my terrible, scratchy caricatures of the red Corvette rewinder, the angry customer with the pencil behind his ear, and the diagram of the magnetic tape being mangled by an uncalibrated roller.

When he reached the back page—the recommendation list with Wings of Desire and The 400 Blows—he let out a short, sharp snort through his nose.

"Your crosshatching is shit," he said.

"I know."

"And your lettering looks like a sixth-grader wrote it on the back of a school bus."

"It was a bad pen."

He folded the comic back up, creased the edge with his thumbnail, and handed it back to me. "How many of these do you make?"

"Just that one," I said, feeling my ears turn hot. "I draw them while I'm waiting for people to bring back their copies of Ace Ventura."

"Make fifty," Julian said, taking his plastic-wrapped copy of Breathless and dropping it into his canvas bag. "Run them off on the photocopier at the library down the street. It's five cents a page if you use the machine behind the microfiche readers. The lady who works the desk doesn't check the counter."

"Why would I make fifty of these?"

"Because there are about six people in this town who are losing their minds for the same reason you are," he said, turning toward the door. "Leave a stack of them on the counter at the coffee shop next to the record store. Sell them for a quarter. Or give them away. Just don't let Henderson catch you using his paper."

He pushed the door open, the bell gave its pathetic little ring, and he was gone, vanishing into the dark, wet street before I could even ask him if he wanted his receipt.

I stood there for a long time, the silence of the store closing back in over me like cold water.

From the back room, Derek called out, "Hey, Arthur! Did you finish those return slips? My shift's almost over and I'm not staying one minute past midnight for Henderson's minimum-wage bullshit!"

"Almost done," I yelled back.

I picked up the Pilot pen. I pulled another legal sheet from beneath the register, laid it flat against the smooth glass, and carefully measured out the margins with the edge of an empty tape case.

On the cover, in bold, slightly uneven block letters, I wrote:

THE VIDEO STORE MINICOMICS COLLECTION ISSUE #1: NOVEMBER 1994 PRICE: 25 CENTS (OR ONE CLEAN CASSETTE REWIND)

Beneath the title, I drew the front counter of Cinema 7. I drew the buzzing fluorescent tube, the yellow BE KIND, REWIND sign, and the stack of black plastic boxes waiting to be checked back into the system. And behind the counter, half-hidden in the shadows between the New Releases and the World Cinema racks, I drew myself: eyes wide, pen in hand, waiting for the bell to ring again.

By Thursday afternoon, the rain had turned into a slushy drizzle that plastered sodden maple leaves across the plate-glass window. The library photocopier had lived up to Julian’s description: hidden behind four banks of green metal microfiche cabinets, smelling of burnt ozone and cheap toner, it clunked along like a threshing machine. I had fed fifty nickels into its coin slide, pocketed fifty warm, double-sided copies of Issue #1, and spent my two-hour break sitting on a bench by the public fountain with an X-Acto knife and an aluminum ruler.

My knuckles were scored with shallow paper cuts, but I had twenty-five completed minicomics stacked inside a shoebox under the counter. The other twenty-five I had dropped off at Java Orbit, the coffee place next to the used record shop, where a girl with purple hair and an eyebrow ring had shrugged, dumped them into a wire basket next to the wooden stir-sticks, and gone back to wiping down the espresso machine.

Cinema 7 was dead at 3:00 PM. The only sound in the front room was the dry clacking of my keys as I inventoried the returns from Wednesday night. The computer system ran on an amber-screen terminal that looked like military surplus from the Korean War. Every keystroke produced a hollow mechanical chime from the chassis, followed by a wheeze from the five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drive as it searched for customer records.

The brass bell over the door chimed, accompanied by the violent slam of an umbrella being shaken out against the doormat.

Mrs. Gable marched up to the counter. She did not take off her yellow vinyl hood. Her jaw was set in the rigid line of a state trooper about to administer a field sobriety test. On the glass between us, she placed the clamshell case of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

"It was in French," she said.

I looked at the cover. Catherine Deneuve was still under the pink umbrella. "Yes, ma'am. We discussed that on Tuesday. It’s set in France."

"You did not say I would have to read my television set like a telephone book."

"They sing the words, Mrs. Gable. It's an opera. The subtitles are just there to help you follow the plot."

She planted both palms on the laminate counter and leaned forward until I could smell the peppermint lozenge dissolving in her cheek. "If I wanted to read, Arthur, I would go to the public library. When I turn on my television set, I want to rest my eyes, not strain them trying to make out white letters bouncing across a woman’s beige blouse. Do you know what happens when someone in that movie walks past a white wall? The words disappear. Completely vanish. They could have been plotting to overthrow the government or talking about cabbage soup, and I wouldn’t know the difference."

"The New Yorker Films transfer does have some contrast issues," I admitted, reaching for the plastic case. "In Europe, the theatrical prints used yellow titling with black borders, but when they converted it for domestic NTSC home video, they cut corners on the optical printing."

"I don't care about your opticals," she snapped. "I care that my neck hurts from craning forward to see what the gas station boy was whining about. And he didn't even marry her! She married the jeweler with the spectacles! What kind of an ending is that for a musical? Where was the tap dancing?"

"It’s realistic, Mrs. Gable. It reflects the disillusionment of postwar French youth."

"If I wanted postwar disillusionment, I’d talk to my cousin Harold in Gary, Indiana. He lost his pension when the mill closed. He doesn't sing about it in a pastel suit." She reached into her handbag and produced her coin purse. "Take the dollar for the rewind. I didn't rewind it. I turned it off right when the baby was born."

I opened the case. The cassette was indeed sitting at mid-movie, the black tape fully exposed on the left reel. "I'll waive the dollar this time, Mrs. Gable."

"Don't do me any favors," she said, slapping four quarters onto the glass anyway. "I pay my debts. But you are going to walk back to that shelf and get me something in plain English where the people have the decency to speak with their mouths instead of printing their thoughts on the bottom of the rug."

"How about Driving Miss Daisy? We have a copy back from cleaning."

"Seen it. Four times. Jessica Tandy reminds me of my sister Blanche, but without the mustache." She narrowed her eyes at me. "Give me that picture with the fellow who talks to the ghost in the pottery shop."

"Ghost is in aisle three. Under Drama."

"Get it for me. My knees aren't what they were before the cold snap."

I walked over to Drama, retrieved our third copy of Ghost—the one with the cracked spine and the sticker reading COPY 3 - DO NOT REMOVE FROM STORE WITHOUT SLEEVE—and brought it to the register. I scanned it, took her two dollars and fifty cents, and handed her the bag.

She took it, but she didn't leave immediately. Her gaze had drifted down to the shoebox resting on the shelf behind the register. Sticking up from the cardboard was the front cover of Issue #1, featuring my drawing of the sharp-toothed Corvette rewinder.

"What's that nonsense?" she asked, pointing a gloved finger.

"Just some drawings. A newsletter."

"Are you selling them?"

"Twenty-five cents."

She snorted, a dry, papery sound. "You're charging twenty-five cents for eight pages of scratch-paper, but you try to charge a dollar because a machine turned a wheel for three minutes. You have a very peculiar sense of economics, young man."

She turned and bustled out, the brass bell ringing twice as the heavy door swung shut against the wind.

I picked up her copy of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and walked it back to the wire racks. As I slid it into its slot between The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and a documentary about Leni Riefenstahl that Henderson had ordered by accident thinking it was an instructional ski tape, I noticed the blank spaces on the shelves.

Breathless was still out with Julian. Seven Samurai had been missing since August, presumed stolen by an art-history adjunct who had skipped town without paying his utility bills. That left fifty-six tapes. Fifty-six little black plastic bricks containing the collective postwar anxieties of France, Italy, Germany, and Japan, trapped in an eight-by-eight corner next to forty-two copies of Pulp Fiction.

I took out my Pilot pen and a scrap of cardboard from a disassembled display for The Flintstones movie. On the back, in thick, black ink, I drew a large speech bubble coming out of a cartoon drawing of an eyeball:

SUBTITLES DON'T BITE. Foreign films aren't homework. They just have better dialogue and fewer car chases. (Ask Arthur at the counter for recommendations that won't make your head hurt).

I taped the sign directly to the header card of the World Cinema rack with two strips of yellowing Scotch tape. It looked pathetic, like a lost-dog flyer pinned to a telephone pole, but it was better than letting the shelf sit there like a tombstone.

At 4:30 PM, the door bell rang again. It wasn't a customer; it was Todd, the assistant manager who worked the Friday-Saturday night shifts and spent his weekdays driving a delivery van for an auto-parts warehouse. Todd was twenty-six, wore a permanent five o'clock shadow, and considered himself an authority on cinema because he had once attended a two-day screenwriting seminar at an airport hotel in Cleveland.

"Henderson called from Phoenix," Todd said without greeting me, tossing a grease-stained clipboard onto the counter. "He wants to know why our rental numbers on The Specialist are down twelve percent compared to the store in Westlake."

"Because Westlake has three high schools within two miles and we have a concrete mixing plant and a retirement community," I said, without looking up from the amber screen.

"He doesn't care about the concrete plant. He cares about Sylvester Stallone. He says if we don't move the action floor-displays closer to the front door, he's going to cut our promo allowance." Todd leaned over the counter, his eyes falling on the shoebox of minicomics. He picked one up, turned it over, and squinted at the cover. "What is this? Is this Henderson's paper?"

"It’s my paper. I bought it at OfficeMax."

"You're using the store pens."

"I bought the pen, Todd. It's a Pilot G-2. Henderson doesn't buy pens that cost more than eleven cents a dozen."

Todd flipped through the folded pages with his thumb, his mouth twisting into a smirk. "The Anatomy of an Asshole? Arthur, if Henderson sees this, he'll fire you before you can say 'jump cut.' You've got customers drawn as pigs wearing baseball caps."

"That's not a customer. That's a composite archetype."

"Whatever. It looks like Mr. Giamatti from the dry cleaners. And what's this on the back? Wings of Desire? You're still pushing that German angel movie? Nobody wants to watch two hours of guys in trench coats listening to people think in German. People want explosions. They want Sharon Stone uncrossing her legs. That’s what keeps the lights on."

"Sharon Stone was two years ago, Todd. Now they want Keanu Reeves on a bus."

"Same difference. Speed, impact, resolution. Aristotelian three-act structure. That's what they taught us at the seminar. European movies don't have structure. They just have moods. You can't sell a mood to a guy who just worked ten hours on an asphalt crew."

He tossed the comic back into the shoebox, picked up his clipboard, and headed toward the back office to count the petty cash. "Make sure the drop box is cleared before six. And take down that hand-drawn sign on the wire rack. It looks amateurish. Henderson wants professional signage only."

"Henderson has an inflatable gorilla taped to the roof," I muttered.

"The gorilla has high brand recognition," Todd shouted from the office hallway. "Take the sign down."

I didn't take the sign down. Instead, I pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and began sketching page one of Issue #2.

The title came easily: SUBTITLES DON'T BITE: A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR THE MONOLINGUAL.

The first panel showed an ordinary American living room. A man sat on a brown plaid sofa, clutching a bowl of chips, staring in sheer terror at a television set from which two small, innocent words emerged: "Bonjour, monsieur." The man’s hair was standing on end, his eyes bulging like fried eggs. The caption below read: The Terror of the Bottom Third.

On page two, I drew a technical breakdown of the average customer's reading speed versus the average running time of a Jean-Luc Godard dialogue scene. If a character in an American movie wanted to say "I love you," they said it while hanging from a helicopter skid, using approximately 1.2 seconds of screen time. If a character in an Eric Rohmer film wanted to say "I think I might possibly be falling in love with you, although the moral implications of my affection trouble me deeply," it required three paragraphs of dense, single-spaced yellow text that scrolled past while two people in wool sweaters walked very slowly around a muddy pond in suburban Paris.

I was halfway through inking a diagram of a viewer's eyes violently jerking between an actor's mouth and the bottom edge of the glass when the front bell chimed.

A young woman stood in the entrance, shaking water from a dark green corduroy jacket. She had short, dark hair tucked behind her ears, wore round tortoiseshell glasses with thick wire rims, and carried a damp cardboard box under one arm. She looked around the store with an expression of faint amusement, her eyes lingering on the life-sized cutout of Steven Seagal holding an automatic shotgun before she walked toward the counter.

She set the cardboard box down. Inside were about thirty video cassettes, all in standard white library cases with hand-typed spine labels.

"Are you the clerk who knows about the New Yorker catalog?" she asked.

I capped my pen. "I'm Arthur. That depends on what you mean by 'knows about.'"

"Julian told me you were here," she said, pulling a damp strand of hair from her forehead. "I'm Claire. I run the media desk at the college library across town. We’re clearing out our legacy VHS collection to make room for the new computer workstations they're installing next semester. The department head told me to toss them in the dumpster behind the boiler room."

I looked into the box. My pulse did a strange, irregular hop.

On top was a copy of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, its spine slightly faded by the sun but the case entirely intact. Beneath it was Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating, a two-tape set in a double-width clamshell that was almost impossible to find outside of specialty rental shops in Manhattan or Chicago. Further down, I caught glimpses of Fassbinder, Ozu, and a battered copy of Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad with the original French audio track.

"You're throwing these away?" I asked, my voice dropping an octave.

"The dean thinks everything is going to be on CD-ROM by 1996," Claire said, leaning her hip against the counter. "He thinks students shouldn't be watching movies on tape when they could be searching encyclopedias on a screen. Julian said you had some space on your racks."

"Henderson will never buy these," I said honestly. "He thinks the foreign section is a tax write-off. He won't authorize a purchase order for anything that doesn't have an Orion or Columbia TriStar logo on the spine."

"I'm not asking for a purchase order," she said. "I'm giving them to you. Or rather, I'm abandoning them here. If they're in my apartment, my roommate will throw them out to make room for her aerobics tapes. If they're here, at least somebody might accidentally rent them."

"Nobody accidentally rents Jacques Rivette, Claire. It's three hours and twelve minutes long. People bring it back after twenty minutes and tell me the tape is skipping because the women are eating hard-boiled eggs in a library."

"Then you'll have to educate them," she said simply.

Her eyes dropped to the counter, catching sight of the half-finished drawing for Issue #2. She reached out, turned the paper with one slender, ink-stained finger, and looked at the diagram of the man on the plaid sofa.

A small, sharp smile appeared on her face. "Is this why Julian was raving about some comic he found in a strip mall?"

"He didn't rave," I said. "He told me my crosshatching was shit."

"That is raving, for Julian. Usually he just tells people their bourgeois aesthetics are reinforcing the capitalist hegemony and walks away." She tapped the panel showing the subtitles disappearing into the white wall. "This happened to me when I showed La Notte to the freshman film survey last month. Half the class complained that they couldn't read Marcello Mastroianni's shirt."

"White shirts are the enemy of foreign distribution," I said. "Every subtitle lab in California should be forced to use 100 percent drop shadows by federal law."

"You should put that in the comic," she said. She picked up one of the completed Issue #1s from the shoebox, slid a quarter from her coat pocket, and laid the coin squarely on the glass. "One copy, please."

"You don't have to pay for that."

"I support local print culture," she said, slipping the tiny eight-page booklet into her jacket pocket. "Besides, you're harboring my fugitives." She tapped the cardboard box of library tapes. "Take good care of Marienbad. The tape path on that particular cassette has a slight tracking flutter at the forty-minute mark, but if you adjust the manual tracking knob about two millimeters to the left, it clears right up."

"I know how to track a tape," I said.

"Good. I'll be back next week to see if anyone was brave enough to take Rivette home."

She turned and walked toward the glass double doors, her heavy boots clicking cleanly against the thin carpet. The brass bell chimed, the damp wind swept in for a fraction of a second, and then she was gone, disappearing past the neon sign of the gyro shop into the gray afternoon.

I stood behind the counter for several minutes without moving.

The box of tapes sat before me like an alien artifact dropped into the middle of Cinema 7. In this store, movies were commodities—plastic bricks wrapped in colorful cardboard meant to be consumed between six o'clock and midnight, accompanied by two liters of Mountain Dew and a bag of microwave popcorn that left an oily film on the cardboard cases. But these thirty tapes were different. They had the white catalog stickers of a university library, complete with call numbers hand-typed on an old Smith Corona, and the clear vinyl wrappers were worn smooth by the thumbs of people who had actually wanted to see them.

I picked up Celine and Julie Go Boating. The case was heavy, solid, satisfying.

From the back office, the sharp snap of an adding machine broke the silence. Todd walked out, holding a strip of paper tape covered in red and black numbers.

"Henderson’s short sixty bucks on the weekly deposit," Todd said, chewing on the end of a plastic pen. "He wants to know if we had any walkouts on the new Van Damme."

"Nobody walked out," I said, sliding the box of library tapes behind the counter with my foot, safely out of his direct line of sight. "People don't walk out on Van Damme. They know what they're getting. Ninety minutes of roundhouse kicks and a slow-motion shot of a helicopter exploding."

"Damn right," Todd said, looking at the promotional monitor above our heads. The trailer for The Specialist had just started again—James Woods looking greasy, Sylvester Stallone staring blankly into the middle distance, and an explosion that rattled the small speaker inside the television cabinet. "That's entertainment. It’s concise. You don't need a dictionary to know what's happening."

"You don't need a dictionary for foreign films either," I said. "You just need to be able to read at a fifth-grade level."

"Nobody wants to read at home, Arthur. That’s what school was for. When you come home from work, your brain is like a wet sponge. You just want to sit there and let the images wash over you."

"A sponge absorbs things, Todd. It doesn't just sit there."

Todd gave me the look he usually reserved for people who tried to pay their late fees with expired coupons from the local supermarket. "You're too smart for your own good, kid. That's why you're making four-eighty-five an hour in a polyester vest while your friends are out getting real jobs."

He tossed the adding-machine tape into the trash can and picked up his jacket from the hook behind the door. "I'm going to Arby's. If the Westlake store calls about that extra copy of True Lies, tell them we don't have it. Henderson wants to keep it here through Sunday."

"Got it."

He left, the door slamming harder than usual behind him.

The store fell into that dead, static-charged quiet that always preceded the five-o'clock commuter rush. The hum of the fluorescent starter above the counter shifted from B-flat down to an irregular, fluttering A-natural, clicking twice every few seconds as if it were trying to decide whether to die completely or keep buzzing until the end of the century.

I reached down, pulled Celine and Julie Go Boating from the box, and set it on the counter beside my legal pad.

On page three of Issue #2, I drew a three-panel sequence titled: The Mechanics of Reading While Watching.

Panel one: A close-up of a French actress looking deeply melancholic while standing on the Pont Neuf. Her eyes were filled with the ancient, unspeakable sorrow of the European continent. At the bottom of the frame, the subtitle read: “The soup is cold.”

Panel two: The viewer's eyes, drawn as two independent ping-pong balls with red veins, violently oscillating between the actress's face and the bottom edge of the screen, creating little motion lines that looked like lightning bolts.

Panel three: The viewer’s head exploding in a shower of popcorn and shredded magnetic tape. The caption: Casualty of the French New Wave.

On page four, I drew a map of the World Cinema section, but this time I drew it as a small, fortified bunker surrounded by barbed wire. On the perimeter, I drew Derek and Todd armed with barcode scanners, guarding the perimeter against any movie that didn't feature a car chase, while inside the bunker, a small group of figures—Godard, Truffaut, Catherine Deneuve, and a miserable clerk with a Pilot pen—huddled around a kerosene heater, trying to keep a reel of 16mm film from freezing.

By 5:15 PM, the front door began to rattle with regular frequency.

The evening crowd arrived in waves, their coats wet with the gray November slush. They were tired, irritable, and in a hurry. They wanted Speed. They wanted The Lion King. They wanted Four Weddings and a Funeral. They brought back tapes that were sticky, tapes that had missing slipcases, tapes that had been left on the dashboard of a car until the plastic shells had warped into black plastic pringles.

"Is this the one where the dog dies?" a woman with three small children asked, holding up a copy of Homeward Bound.

"The dog makes it home, ma'am," I said, running the barcode under the red wand. "It's Disney."

"If the dog dies, I'm bringing it back," she said, her voice entirely flat. "I don't need my eight-year-old crying all weekend. We have enough problems."

"The dog is fine. The cat gets wet, but it survives."

"Good." She paid with exact change and dragged her children out into the damp dark.

At 7:00 PM, a man in a brown work jacket with his name—VERN—embroidered over the left pocket came up to the counter. He had a pencil behind his ear, though unlike the man from Tuesday, his expression was more perplexed than angry. He set down an unmarked black case.

"Hey," he said, scratching the stubble on his chin. "My wife rented this last night. Said it was supposed to be a romance. We put it in after the kids went to bed."

I checked the label: The Passion of Joan of Arc. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928.

"Did you like it?" I asked cautiously.

Vern stared at me like I had asked him if he enjoyed eating gravel. "Arthur, it doesn't have any sound. The whole movie. We turned the volume on the Zenith up to eighty-five. Nothing. Just a little hum from the speakers. We thought the cable had gone bad, so I climbed behind the entertainment center with a flashlight and checked the RCA jacks. The jacks were fine. It’s just people staring at each other with their eyes wide open, and then a piece of cardboard comes up with some words on it, and then they stare at each other some more."

"It's a silent film, Vern. It was made in 1928."

"Well, why didn't the box say that?" he asked, turning the case around. "It says 'Masterpiece of World Cinema.' It says 'A Triumph of the Human Spirit.' It doesn't say 'Shut your ears off because nobody's gonna talk.'"

"In 1928, they didn't have synchronized sound on film," I explained, trying to keep my voice light. "Dreyer used extreme close-ups of Falconetti's face to convey the emotional weight of her trial. You're supposed to read the intertitles and listen to the silence."

Vern looked at the box, then looked at me, his eyes deadened by forty years of common sense. "Arthur, I work fifty hours a week at the brake plant. If I want silence, I can sit in my garage with the door down. When I pay three dollars for a movie, I expect some noise. I expect somebody to say something. My wife fell asleep ten minutes in, and I spent an hour watching an old French priest sweat through his collar."

"I can give you a store credit for a dollar-fifty," I offered.

"Keep the credit," Vern sighed, shaking his head. "Just give me that new one with the guy who travels through time to punch people."

"Timecop?"

"Yeah. That one. Does he talk in it?"

"Constantly," I said. "And he does the splits on a kitchen counter."

"Now that's what I'm talking about," Vern said, his face brightening slightly. "That’s value for money."

I processed the transaction, swapped the tapes, and watched him leave with his plastic bag.

I picked up Dreyer's masterpiece. The plastic shell was cold. I opened the case, checked the spools, and placed it gently in the return bin behind me.

On the back page of Issue #2, in the lower left corner, I drew Falconetti’s face from the trial scene—the immense, luminous eyes staring upward toward heaven with an expression of divine agony—and beneath it, in tiny, precise block letters, I wrote:

Falconetti didn't die at the stake just so you could watch Jean-Claude Van Damme jump over a refrigerator.

At 8:30 PM, the bell rang once more.

It was Julian. He was wearing the same damp denim jacket, but tonight he had a cardboard coffee cup from Java Orbit in one hand and a thin black notebook in the other. He didn't go to the shelves; he walked straight to the register and dropped the coffee cup onto the counter with a hollow thump.

"Your little pamphlets are gone," he said.

I looked up from my Pilot pen. "What?"

"The ones you left by the stir-sticks at Java Orbit. Some kids from the community college art department took four of them, and an old guy who used to teach German at the high school took three to show his wife. The rest were gone by seven o'clock."

"You're joking."

"I don't joke about paper," Julian said flatly. He reached into his pocket and pulled out five crumpled dollar bills, dropping them on the glass next to the coffee cup. "The girl behind the counter said two people actually dropped quarters in the tip jar for them. Here's your cut."

I stared at the wrinkled bills. They were limp, smelling faintly of espresso grounds and stale tobacco. "That's five dollars."

"Twenty copies at twenty-five cents is five bucks, Arthur. That’s basic math. You covered your library copier costs and you made enough to buy a pack of cigarettes and a bad sandwich." He looked at the shoebox behind me. "You got more?"

"I've got twenty-five here," I said, my voice barely above a whisper. "And I'm working on Issue #2."

"Good." Julian reached across the counter, took five of the Issue #1s from the box, and shoved them into his messenger bag. "I'm going to Columbus on Saturday to look for some 16mm prints at an estate sale. There's an indie bookstore on High Street that has a zine rack near the door. I'll drop these off there. They take forty percent consignment, but they move volume."

"It's just a comic about unrewound tapes, Julian. It's not a zine. It's not an underground movement."

Julian leaned forward, his dark eyes fixing me with that terrifying, unblinking intensity that made me wonder if he ever actually slept or just stood in dark rooms waiting for Godard retrospectives to begin.

"Everything is an underground movement if the people above ground are stupid enough," he said. He tapped the cardboard box of library tapes sitting on the floor behind my ankles. "Where did you get these?"

"Claire brought them by."

Julian’s face didn't change, but his eyebrows lifted slightly. "Claire from the library? She gave you the Rivette?"

"She abandoned them here. To keep them out of the boiler room."

He stood there for a long moment, looking down at the white cases with their typed spine labels. He reached out, his thumb running over the plastic edge of Sans Soleil, touching it with a reverence he had never shown to anything in Cinema 7.

"The world is ending, Arthur," he said softly, almost to himself. "Every year they tear down another independent house to build a multiplex with twelve screens and digital sound that blows your eardrums out while you watch giant lizards step on buildings. Every year another library throws out its collection to make room for computers that do nothing but show you the same three paragraphs of text on a green screen. In five years, nobody’s going to remember who Chris Marker was. They’re just going to remember the bus that couldn't slow down."

"The bus was pretty exciting, Julian," I said, unable to help myself.

He glared at me, the spell broken, but there was a faint twitch at the corner of his mouth that might have been a smile if he hadn't spent the last five years suppressing all bourgeois impulses.

"Finish Issue #2," he said, turning toward the door. "Make sixty copies this time. The library copier has a jam in the second paper tray, so use tray three. It has better rollers."

"Wait," I called out. "What about Breathless? You're two days late on the return."

Julian paused at the door, the brass bell shivering above his head. He looked back over his shoulder, his face half-shadowed by the blue neon of the front window.

"Charge it to my account," he said. "Or better yet, charge it to Henderson's soul."

The door clicked shut. The cold draft swept across the floor, rustling the stack of return slips beneath the amber terminal.

I picked up the Pilot G-2. The ink was flowing smoothly now, the ball rolling across the cheap legal paper with a soft, steady scratch that sounded like an insect burrowing into dry wood.

Above me, the fluorescent starter clicked twice, then settled into a low, steady drone, humming in the key of B-flat as the November rain turned entirely to ice against the glass. I drew the final panel of Issue #2: an empty clamshell case, lying open on a gray carpet, its clear plastic sleeve reflecting the faint, yellow light of an unrewound screen, waiting for someone who knew how to read between the frames.