Suck it, world! We’re still here!! (Shelli Trumbull photos)
Does Morgan Payne (20) even know what a VHS tape is?
Wendy (Frost) Mikos: “Clock in on time? Surely you jest, good sir!!”
Videoville will never die.
Oh, the actual store is long gone, replaced by an oriental food store. Yes, I know we moved two doors down for a bit, into the a-frame where the doggie food store now sits, and that version had a run under several different owners, each who brought their own unique twist to the business, but for me, there really is only one store.
And that is the version where Miriam’s Espresso and Videoville shared a space from 1995-2006.
But, of course, there was the little house that used to sit in what is the parking lot for the oriental food store now, the tightly-packed hut where I spent my first year renting movies and screaming like a banshee when the frickin’ popcorn machine spit its insanely hot, insanely yellow “butter” down my arms.
The hut where a squirrel ran in the door one day and was never seen again, until the day the building was torn down and a skeleton was found in the wall. No, not the customer skeleton — we knew that one was there — the squirrel skeleton, mouth still open, look of “Oh crap!!” on its preserved face.
The hut where my arch-nemesis, Mr. Drooly, a righteous bastard of a little kid, used to stand in front of the counter, stuffing gobs o’ greasy popcorn into his gaping mouth, rivers of water cascading down his chin as he stared at me. I stared into the abyss and … man, it was vacant in there.
The hut where a customer tripped and knocked down the entire new release section on top of a little girl, then ran away.
The hut where a couple, now married parents whose names shall remain zipped behind these lips (unless you got $5…), stumbled in from the Tyee one night.
She reached for a movie, missed and landed face-down on the floor. Laughing hysterically, he reached to pick her up, missed and planted himself face-first into the carpet as well. And there they lay for the next 27 minutes, laughing hysterically in between “I love you baby!” and “I love you too, but I think I peed myself.”
The hut where the guy told me about losing part of his brain (for real), the hut where the school bus driver turned too sharply, got her bus caught under the eave of the building, then revved the engine, lurched forward and tore off a chunk of the roof, the hut where we broke the front window by playing “Jurassic Park” at full-blast on the newfangled Laserdisc machine that rested against said window.
Of course, once we moved into the “true” Videoville, added espresso and a ton more workers, the stories just got … different.
My sister, who I worked with for eight years, threw a phone off my face at close range (to the delight of the customers).
A video clerk got nailed in the back parking lot (by a car!) when he pissed off a former girlfriend.
A 450-pound customer exploded an espresso chair … with her butt.
A barista signaled his departure by taking EVERY SINGLE CUP in the store out of their plastic sleeves and piling all 46,912 up to the ceiling.
Another barista locked her keys in the car three days in a row, then got arrested on the third day after having a drunken argument with the responding cop.
We staged a daring daylight commando raid on a rival video store, with one employee sticking a two-liter bottle of pop up his sleeve and letting it drain all over the other store’s carpet. This employee later burned off all his leg hairs by attempting to transport hot, foil-wrapped burgers into a movie theater by sticking them down his pants, so…
And that’s the tip of the iceberg, as we haven’t even discussed the midget/gorilla/butter porn, the customer we gave a stroke, the “baby” in the ice machine, the time Jacob Henderson (now a highly-respected doctor!!) licked coffee grounds out of a garbage can and then ate a peach, even though he was deathly allergic to peaches and the whole “Wendy Frost trying to beat the time clock shenanigans” era.
But what is the point of all of this, you ask?
There are three living tributes to us, the people that were Videoville.
One is the store sign, which grows moss out behind my duplex, a reminder of the best job I could have ever frittered away 13 years of my life doing.
The second is the chair used at Coupeville High School basketball and volleyball games that Miriam Meyer sponsored many years ago. Kids too young to know what a VHS tape was, or why it would hurt to have a customer whip one in its sharp-cornered hard plastic protective case off your head (Leo Mikkelsen, and he did it from a moving car, which was impressive once I got back up) now plant themselves on a piece of rapidly-fading history.
And the third living tribute?
Our memories of those years. There are some things you just can’t scrub away. Therapy doesn’t fix everything!
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