THE MAGIC VIDEO STORE

Back in 1980 - 1982 I was living in Jackson Heights, Queens. I was enthralled by the films the likes of Escape From New York, The Warriors ... 1990 The Bronx Warriors, You Got Lucky video on MTV. At 82nd Street and Northern Boulevard was a movie theater where I partook in these mind-blowing visions of the future that never happened. Afterwards I would wander around the streets, my imagination going off on tangents from the story line of the movie that I just seen.

When I wasn't in the movies, there was a video store on the adjacent block running to 83rd Street. I know, just a video store. Who remembers video stores these days? Not the video supermarket, like the Blockbuster Video, and not a chain of stores, like the West Coast Video or Coconuts. This was a mom and pops video store. A tall guy in his fifties wearing those 1970's large lense steel rimmed glasses owned the store and was always there. I didn't know what a VCR was in those days. I asked him what a VHS sign was in his window and he told me about Beta and VHS, and that Beta was a better quality video.

It wouldn't be for another two or three years until we moved out to suburbia and bought our first VCR that played store rented VHS tapes. I used to come to his video store none the less. I would pick up a video cassette box and ask him what the movie was about. He would go on for 15-25 minutes telling me about the movie. I became a regular, stopping by his store on my walks and speaking with him.

How does it tie to the Post-Apocalypse, you might ask. Well, if you hadn't been there, you have to picture Northern Boulevard going west where this video store was. It was slightly downhill and it was running straight into the middle of tghe Manhattan skyline on the horizon. It was close, but not that close as to be in its shadow, and when the sunset hit it, you were in for the fireworks! Both sides of Northern Boulevard in those days were not like malls and stand alone convenience stores, It was 3-5 story residential apartment buildings with ground floors taken up by small stores. Even with traffic flying by, the scene was eerie, like the stage-set in a Michael Jackson Billy Jean video, concrete everyshere, except on the alcove leading into that magic video store.

That video storefront was recessed into the building, so there was about three feet of the second floor serving as your roof to keep out the rain as you eered into the window to see the movie posters. The store entrance was on the same side as the Manhattan Slykine and there was about three to five feet of a brick wall before the store's fromt door. Well, he, or someone else painted a mural on that wall. As you looked on towards Manhattan, you saw the skyline, but when you turned your eyes left towards the mural, you saw a vision of the Manhattan skyline after it was nuked. The skies were gray and Manhattan skyline was a dark silhouette. The Northern Boulevard was empty and pockmarked with craters, some of which were glowing slightly around the edges. Large chunks of pavement were broken and upturned near the craters, adn you could see patches of the dead yellow grass. It matched up to the horizon and your eyes went smoothly from one world to the next.

So, my big question - Has anyone been to that store back in the day, who was the owner, and what became of that shop?

NEXT POST

This is the next post after the eulogy for my father. Time is right for it. Two years and more have passed and a lot happened, including the good things, and then the stage was set for this next post. A few days ago I went to the library to take out a few audiobooks (books recorded on CD). I picked a few, but my library card had expired and I needed a new card. Bringing up the records, I noticed that the last time I used the library was on the eve of my father's death, and the last two audiobooks I returned, were the first two I was looking to take out. That's a weird coincidence if there ever was one. It occurred to me just how profoundly the death of my father had affected me. I stopped listening to recorded books, something I been doing my whole life, and I didn't even notice it. I wasn't particularly devastated by my father's death - I didn't tear my hair or go catatonic or stopped functioning. Never took a day off from work. I was paying to bury my father, my father passed after a long, long illness that never relented, much as I hoped for a remission, and instead of stabilization or even recovery and regeneration, tissue turned cancerous. And yet, when he passed, his death was sudden. When the final crisis hit, at one point it really hit me, the full realization that my father is dying. There was a desperate entry in my journal. Just one. I will always remember where I was - driving along an industrial stretch of the road, post apocalyptic and romantic in its desolateness, and I was sitting in traffic, going to the bank to put some money in my mother's bank account, when it hit me. Then I was back to the usual, and my father passed a few days later.

Life went on. Money was not an issue right away, financial hardship came a bit later, and it wasn't fatal, nor it sank me. It wasn't as bad looking back at it, as it seemed back them. The household in paradise where my father passed away, the tropical blue skies, the white marble and white carpeting, the white silk curtains on the window and the lush greenery outside, that household imploded in a modern day version of the American Gothic and a touch of the House of Usher, but everyone escaped, though deeply scarred. Blinded and bed-ridden, my father was the anchor, but his passing had nothing to do with what happened afterwards. Nothing terrible, the left Florida and resettled elsewhere. leaving the Paradise Years behind.

My life went on as well. I figured a way out of the financial crisis and emerged debt free having buried my father. The year my father passed turned out to be a terrible one for me personally. Work-wise I was no longer on my way up, but on my way out, maybe a few years too early, but otherwise I did okay. Relationship with my g/f grew stronger. After my father's passing I started doing things on my Bucket List, including the New Year's Walk, but more on that later. In the end, that weekend when I drove out to the library to get some audiobooks, was the last and final thing in the process of things going back to the way they used to.

IN PRAISE OF MY FATHER

My father was a great man. Capital G, capital M. He had huge arms from working with a jackhammer in the tight spaces of a small coalmine, aiming it at the veins of coal located above his waist and over his head. He spoke truth to power and took on a sadistic drill instructor when he was in the military. Needless to say, he did not have a military career, but they did offer him an officer’s commission. My father was interested in aviation, but didn’t make it on the account of color blindness. They offered him airborne infantry, and he spent time drinking with the officers, who were testing the new jumps and the new parachutes for the troops. In the end, my father did not stay in the military. He went to school to be a mining engineer, but wound up working as a regular miner, because he could make more money. He took up the issue of the mine safety, and became very unpopular both, with the labor union members and with the management of the coalmine, until a mine explosion proved him right, but by then my father was fired from the job and moved on from the small mining town he lived in at the time. He ended up in grad school, working as a stagehand at the local opera theater and modeling for the art students. He was a low profile activist, and when the police tried to make an informant out of him, he played a fool, (or was it his true nature?) and told his would-be handlers that he will co-operate, so long as he will advise everyone that he talks to, that the content of their conversation will be reported to the authorities. They waived my father off and told him to forget that he ever spoke to them.

My father was a smart jock, who sat in the back of the higher physics classes (math was his strong point), and read Hindu philosophy book. He practiced Yoga, but did it in a different spirit, than in which it is done today: He did it for the sake of walking on coals, laying on beds of nails and being able to let two and half-ton trucks roll over his abdomen. I did not listen to my father and chose weight lifting and gyms over Yoga practice. That was my mistake. I should have listened to him more, when I was young. Had I listened to his advice based on the general notions from another time, I would have been more successful in my endeavors. It was one of those things of the had-I-stuck-with-my-father’s-yoga-and-kept-doing-my-karate-practice-I-did-in-high-school variety. But I hadn’t, and instead I argued with him all through my teen-age years, trashing all of his cherished notions and values in the process. I was a young republican driving a truck during my college years devoid of humor or enlightened self-interest. There were opportunities to talk to girls and a red flag or two, but I missed them. While rejecting most of his views and practices, I managed to internalize a few key ones despite myself. One was Achievement and Self-Development. The others were fascination with Eastern Philosophy and ignorance of and immunity from the peer pressure. My father used alcohol to break down barriers and connect with anyone and everyone, regardless of who they were. I never became a jock, but I am able to do the same with mere conversation. I had horrible fights with my father, which lasted beyond my teen-age years, until I moved out on my own. As with most things back then, I was not aware of the significance of the event, while my father got unexpectedly upset.

The older I got, the closer I grew to my father. The only fights I had with him were about his drinking. I tried to get him to stop, but failed. He respected me more after I moved out, and I learned to recognize and value his common sense advice and commentary on the events in my life. His success was an irony, given his drop out lifestyle, where career was evil and money was bad. The more money he got rid of, including giving it away to friends and charity, the more money fell on his head. His few friends privately thought him a fool, tried to emulate his income or outdo him, failed, and were his friends and buddies no more. He craved fellowship and a commune the way I endure wanderlust and long for solitude. He tried to find a commune, religious and otherwise, but saw through the bullshit of his would-be gurus and self-appointed wise men. In the end, I was able to achieve the same degree of the financial success as my father, but I get it done with 60 hour work weeks, while my father took a 25% reduction in pay to work four days a week, and he came and went from his office as he pleased, whereas I got to punch the proverbial clock. My father started out in a basement apartment, where he lived with his parents, grandparents, and sibs. He ended up living in a nothing short of a mini-mansion on the American Riviera, lined with white carpet, marble, and with a heated pool outside and a country club nearby, all the amenities were lost on him, and he found he place thanks to the diligent efforts of my mom and a brother of mine. My father may eschew the material, but I definitely appreciate the sheer beauty and the sheer spaciousness of it, every time I fly down to see my parents. I have my own bedroom with awesome white curtains against the deep azure of the southern skies. My father died after a long illness on October 8, 2015. His final health crisis came too quickly for me to fly down and see him. I was on-line looking for a flight when I got the news. His illness and death were the direct result of his life-long drinking. I asked my folks about why he drank, to see if the hardships of his life and my conflicts with him had something to do with it, but I was told that he drank socially and recreationally. He drank since he was sixteen, and that in their almost 50 years of marriage my parents had separated and almost divorced three times because of it, but in the end nothing, but terminal illness brought on by alcohol abuse, could stop him from drinking. Going back to Ancient Greeks, every classic hero has a tragic flaw, an Achilles heel that kills them. I always thought this notion contrived and unrealistic, until it occurred to me that the firewater was my father’s tragic flaw.  

 

WINTER HIBERNATING

I have two life-long passions, road trips and Dungeons and Dragons. I used to play Disc Golf a while back, but started hurting my elbow, and I stopped. There is a blog dedicated to my D&D, here: Tales from Midlands. This one is about my journeys and explorations.

 

I love to walk in the woods and drive with music playing, along the back-roads, wherever they happen to be. I got a good union job that works in shifts and rotating days off. I am also a Rail-fan, but not so much into trains and locomotives, though I love to watch freight diesels in action, I am more into walking along the lost highway of the railroad tracks and exploring the surrounding landscape. Rivers, railroad tracks, roads and highways, they all tell a story in terms of the landscape, man-made and natural, that surrounds them. I like to follow those stories. There are four states of tranquility while walking along the trail or following a path: There is the  natural beauty of your surroundings; and the comfort you feel in your gear, from essentials, like a pair of good walking shoes and your trusty old jacket that will keep you dry and warm to those little extras, such as that WW-I cigarette case that you picked up for five bucks at a flea market that has your initials and can only hold unfiltered cigarettes, which makes your walk such an extreme pleasure. As you walk along the path, all sorts of thoughts, feelings and stories will bounce off each other inside that echo chamber that is your mind. landscapes will trigger memories and sometimes nostalgia; and there will always be the mystery of what lays beyond that turn in the path and the mystery of that abandoned building.

 

There are several ways in which to experience a landscape. You can walk it, and you can drive it in the car or ride through it as a passenger, or experience it from a train, a plane or a helicopter. Google Earth is a cheap and mostly adequate substitute for hiring a private plane and making an outing of it. Certain gear is essential for supporting this wanderlust. You need a good roadster. A large car with a big engine that can eat the miles on the highway. Mine is a ’96 Buick Regal two door coupe with a big block GM engine and the streamlined grace, inspired by the Chevy Monte-Carlo of old and the attack angles of the WW2 Tiger tank! I need my music for those long road trips. I been buying vinyl as a ‘tween, then cassette tapes, then Music CD's and finally downloadable MP-3 content (When I have no other choice). A small gym bag full of cassette tapes and CDs used to be a must, accompanying me on all road trips, but now all is digitized onto my I-Pod classic, 160 Gigs worth of music and I still hadn't run out of space, though I hadn't digitized my cassette tapes and records yet. The best part of it is that you can take it on the train with you and listen to mood music as the landscape floats past your window. You need a full size pair of earphones to faithfully reproduce the sound. I don't know why the Beats headphones are popular, since they don't get the perfect fit over the ears. I got a set of high quality Pioneer studio earphones for thirty bucks and they do just fine. Another favored piece of gear is the spill proof thermos coffee cup. It keeps the tea hot in the winter and ice water cold in the summer. I always bring a camera with me. My parents got me a Minolta XG-1 on my 17^th Birthday, and I have been taking photos since. Around 2007, it became too expensive to buy and develop film, and I went for a digital camera. I ended up with a Canon Powershot SX-10 IS, which has an amazing 80x zoom and night vision capabilities. This expanded my photographic range beyond belief, and the final essential piece of gear is my Lowe-Pro Passport Sling camera bag, looks like a stylish male satchel purse, it has a padded camera and lens double compartment, a few pockets, and enough room for the spare batteries, my thermos cup, reading material, snacks and a hat gloves, sunglasses kind of stuff. Essential for trips by the railroad. I heard about this bag, went to a very professional very famous camera shop in Manhattan, they tried to sell me crappier and more expensive bags, and then I found what I was looking for in Wal-Mart!

 

I live on the edge of New York City, and NYC boasts the top commuter rail systems in the US: Long Island Railroad (LIRR) ranked #1 largest in the US; Metro-North Railroad, ranked #4; New Jersey Transit, ranked #2; and Philadelphia’s SEPTA, ranked at #5. New York City is a great place to go exploring by the railroad. One of the immediate pluses of taking the rail to your next hike is that you left your car keys home and you can drink all you want, anywhere you like. I love walking, urban and rural, and I am at my happiest, when I walk from point A to point B, taking picturesque photos as I go.

I am fortunate to be doing the job I love, so I don’t mind going to work, but I still look for my days off. That’s when I go roaming, if the money and weather permit. If, not, then I get to hang around my place. It’s a studio that has two things that I really appreciate – a big, big picture window overlooking some trees, and it’s roomy with a lot of closet space for all my gear. My father taught me to go backpacking train my cardio to improve my distance running. Habit took, and I also developed fondness for going on road trips that went nowhere in my car. I used as an inspiration for writing adventure stories, and music a big part of it, but then I stopped writing, and road trips remained. Like a herd of zombies in the Walking Dead, I kept following the sound of noise I had forgotten a long time ago, charting the same trajectories along the same suburban and semi-rural highways, like Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins charting his favorite walks. Eventually the forest became the sea of green, where I washed away all the stress from work. Career failed. Writing became a dream. My dad became too old for nature walks and day hikes. I was still getting high off the two hour rides set to music and the familiar landscapes, whose photos I had stopped taking having photographed them a million times already. I was an outsider living in a world of suburbanites and haunting commuter rail stations among other things. I was living as a bear in my quiet and comfy den with the loneliness and longing washing over me in waves. Then I met and seduced or did she seduce me, my wifey. She is into Bears (four legged ones, who hibernate in the winter), and I am a Bear, according to her, and nothing else matters. She – my trophy. I am very fortunate, but she won’t share my love for the road with me, not yet.

I am working for the two of us, I hadn’t worked much overtime last years to spend more time with her, and now money is tight, after the winter vacation, so we are hibernating together in the winter. Snow covered tree limbs outside my window. In April-May there is six weeks of beautiful Spring weather in New York, when the sky is blue, the Sun is warm, and you don’t need air conditioning yet. Ergo for the Indian Summer in September. I been dreaming about these and been working overtime. I will hit the road again and go riding the rails. I am dreaming of Spring.