39. Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley
The small, 1980s-era suburb we lived in when I was a kid had, at the front of its mid-sized shopping centre, one video store – Video Ezy.
We quickly became regular customers, mixing new releases with weekly bundles, and eventually video games as well as DVDs.
It was always a pretty cool place to visit and wander up and down the aisles, looking for something to stave off that most frightening of childhood issues – boredom.
Which made getting a job there even more rewarding than my first job.
Video stores, for those too young to remember because clearly I’m now ancient, were places where you could go and hire videos to take home and watch in your Video Cassette Recorder (VCR).
They were big business in the days before fast internet and illegal downloading.
Rows of shelves weighed down with the bulky plastic packaging of now-bewilderingly large video cassettes, they offered a decent set of entertainment options.
For those so inclined, you could head to the Action section and see how many copies of Schwarzenegger’s or Stallone’s latest had made it over to the Weekly section.
Or if one was more interested in the more serious stories, there was the Drama section – headed, always, by a copy of Beaches on the top shelf.
Over time, you could also come to learn the distinction between the Children’s section – animated shows, mostly – and the Family section – where movies like the Mighty Ducks and Milo & Otis lived.
The Thriller section wasn’t of much interest when you were a kid, except for containing the kinds of scenes that make for the sheer awkwardness of seeing an unexpectedly lavish ‘adult’ scene in a movie you were watching with your parents.
(Desperado was one such surprise packet. I can still remember my father awkwardly muttering about the impressive guitar work during one of the racier scenes in that otherwise-simply-violent movie).
Then, behind the curtain down the back was the Adult section. Off-limits for kids and adults worried about striding out from behind the curtain, tucking the illicit title into the pile of disguise movies, only to bump into their neighbours, in-laws or work mates.
The New Release wall, though, was the main attraction.
Where all of the, naturally, New Releases were displayed, you’d walk up and down, checking the titles and picking up the ones that looked interesting.
You’d read the blurb, check the rating, and put it down to come back to.
Because the real interest was in perfecting the unique permutations offered by the Deals Sign hanging above the counter.
5 weekly’s for $12, plus 2 New Releases (overnight hire only) for $9.95 could get you through a week of school holidays.
Maybe.
But is that better value than the 12 weekly’s for $19?
Or are you better to get 4, 3-night hires for $12.95, with 3 more weekly’s for $7?
And is it worth chancing your arm and trying for the coloured popcorn deal – 10 weekly’s and a bag of not-yet-stale coloured popcorn for $13?
Maybe a bottle of coke to go with the pizza you’d just ordered next door as well?
Standing at the back of the line, laden down with video cases, weighing up the 116,000 different potential combinations and permutations, trying to balance the needs of all involved, required a level of parental equanimity I can confess is well beyond me.
And so it was with a great deal of familiarity with this store that I applied for the job advertised in the window. I was still working at Hungry Jacks at the time and must have been in year eleven at the time.
But it was a job at a video store!
Alongside the bounteous pay ($10 an hour, thank you very much) sat the two greatest perks I could have imagined:
1) Free hire of anything in the store, except for the newest-of-the-New-Releases;
2) Access to the corner cabinet of Preview Tapes.
These tapes, provided by the distributors, had the new movies coming out soon. All for us to watch, in advance and for free!
For a growing movie nerd, this was an incredibly exciting benefit.
And for a nervous 16-year-old kid, squatting down to rifle through the cabinet at the end of each shift was a thrill for far too long in my time there.
I was fortunate enough to get the job – I found out later that the owner well-remembered my family and I, which when combined with my ability to look people in the eye when talking, helped me secure the gig – and got into it right away.
I learnt the IT system – say what you will, but MS-DOS is reliably robust, if ugly – and the late fee schedule and how to print out the overdue list to call each night and how to balance the till and how to drop the cash into the lockbox on the busy nights and remembering to put the returns into the high-speed rewinder and how to find the details of members who’d forgotten their cards and how to add notes to the system and how to play it cool when someone reeking of cigarettes and missed showers furtively passes over their 5 weekly’s, all of which are clearly from behind the curtain.
Saturday nights had the added benefit of a $10 meal allowance, most of which found it’s way into the tills of the neighbouring Chinese or pizza outlets.
It was a really good crew of people there.
I’ll avoid names, but the owner of the place was a great Australian bloke, with all of the good elements that come with that – and definitely none of the negative bits.
His manager was a good guy too, patient and steady with this work. And…enthusiastic in his work on the local nightclub circuit. I was still a kid, but he remains the one guy I’ve ever met that could share a dirty story without seeming sleazy.
A few of the owners’ daughters worked there too, which triggers thoughts of nepotism and favouritism. Except they were damned hard workers, reliable and great with the customers.
There was another manager, a few years older than me, who was great fun. He split up with his long-term girlfriend mid-way in my time there and went off the rails a little. But he quickly put it all back together and last I heard, had started a family.
Another employee started a little while after me, another uni student, who was also great with customers, worked hard and was always happy to swap shifts around.
It wasn’t the same level of friendship as the ones from Hungry Jacks, but it was a great crew to work with and blowing off steam together was eye-opening too.
This was the group that showed me what hospitality nights were all about, why hydration is important, especially if you’re working the next day, and what a blessed relief a 10am start was, compared to a 6am arrival.
The timeline’s a bit fuzzy, but I remember driving home after late shifts, so I must have been there through the end of year twelve and well into my university years.
But before I turned eighteen, I’d walk the 20-minute uphill route to work each shift, then back home afterwards.
My purchase of a Razor scooter made that return trip far quicker. Heart-bracingly fast, actually, thanks to the racy gradient of those hills back to my house.
Well, it was a lot faster, until I burnt out the back wheel while trying to bring my return speed back to something remotely safe.
It’s a time I remember really fondly.
It included the early days of uni, so I wasn’t entirely disillusioned yet.
I was getting paid (a lot) better than I had been, to hang out with mates, with free access to all the videos, games and – soon on in my time there – DVDs I could consume.
And there’s a lot I’ve left out here, from:
- Testing just how high you could get the return stack you were carrying before losing control during the re-shelving run;
- The enormous late fines wracked up by customers over titles that were, frankly, ridiculous;
- The routine of picking up our pay in little yellow envelopes each week;
- The volume of merchandise that would go through a video store that we could pick from – I had an outrageous number of posters and cut-outs at home;
- How much videos and DVDs actually cost a video store to buy (I saw some valued at $130 on some of the delivery dockets);
- Shouldering the heavy vacuum cleaner to keep the well-worn carpet clean;
- The poky little cave of a ‘staff area’ down the back where we could eat our meals and read a textbook – but not at the same time;
- The many, many silly games, jokes and routines you develop when working in retail with a close team of people your own age;
- The hours and hours my TGNW and I have spent perusing video stores shelves over the years;
- The satisfaction that came from finding a lost video out on the shelves.
Or of the envy I have now of those quiet times where we’d just stand around the counter and shoot the breeze.
One of us at one end, with a foot leaning against the cabinet, arms crossed. The other, leaning against the pole near the entrance to the circular cabinet, ready to answer the phone that rang a lot more often back in those pre-mobile days.
And you’d talk.
About the job, about school, about customers, friends, nights out – past or planned, and always, always, about movies.
If it was real quiet, you’d break out of the corporate-mandated cycle of movies you were allowed to play on the big television on the side wall and watch an old favourite.
Oddly enough, Shrek was one that got a lot of play. Maybe because the jokes were still relatively fresh, maybe because you wouldn’t have to rush to turn it off when a lone customer strolled in.
Either way, there were plenty of times where me and the other manager – the one who temporarily went off the rails – would stand there and watch that little animated movie.
He’d stand there, tossing this nearly-empty plastic bottle in the air. I’d be leaning against the desk, bored then, but jealous now.
And there’s a scene in Shrek where a cover of Leonard Cohen’s classic rhyming exercise – Hallelujah – comes on.
A scene that would tip us into debating the ‘best’ version of this oft-covered song.
My argument was always, and will always be, for the Jeff Buckley version I’d discovered the year before.
His argument, well, argument is too strong a term because he agreed with the gentle magic of that angelic voice Buckley brought to it, was that the KD Lang version had the edge.
It was a gentle discussion between two young guys working things out, finding their different paths, about a gentle song playing during a gentle movie.
Which is why this song, this meaningless rhyming exercise performed by so many wonderful artists, always reminds me of that worn black counter, those laminate shelves, those high-speed rewinders, barcode guns, dot-matrix overdue lists, preview tapes, DVD-disk drawers, name badges, black shirt uniforms, yellow pay packets, coloured rosters, MS-DOS terminals and conversations I had while working in a truly enjoyable job.
PS: The owner must have seen the writing on the wall and sold before the video rental market collapsed on itself.
I stayed on for a while with the new owners, but soon left to take on an Assistant Manager role at the Blockbuster Video store up the road. It wasn’t as fun, but I’m yet to find a job that was.
But it did teach me the impact of having a boss tell you off for showing initiative, so I try to avoid that to this day.
The space the Blockbuster store occupied is now split between a 24/7 gym and a medical clinic, I think.
The old Video Ezy space is a bank now, depressingly.
And the only trace of Video Ezy I can find are those green DVD vending machines in some shopping centres.
