So I went to the kitchen and I made myself a sandwich, and I cut it up into manageable pieces so I could eat with a fork. And then I drove down to Cinema Video. I can hardly believe Cinema Video’s still in business, and I really can’t believe how many videotapes they still have in there, gathering dust against the east wall. But look down toward your feet and they’re all right there, neatly piled up in hopeful stacks on the floor. There’s a little sign taped to the wall at about knee level, green marker on canary-colored copier paper: Used Tapes $5.00.
Stacks of dusty VHS tapes automatically register to the eye as trash now, and I’d be surprised if anybody ever took much note of the sign or the hoard it pointed toward. But I got out a twenty and I brought home four: Future-Kill, Krull, Red Sonja, and Gor. It was a little bracing to carry Gor up to the counter, because when I was a kid I used to think about Gor the way some kids thought about making the football squad. It was an object of almost religious contemplation. I would scrutinize John Norman paperbacks in the Thrifty book rack like a code cracker working against the clock.
There were so many Gor books. No end to them. Marauders of Gor. Slave Girl of Gor. Priest Kings of Gor. They stared out from the same shelf as Doc Savage at the Book Exchange, but Doc Savage books were different, because you could tell the publishers wanted you to like them. Afternoons had been spent in meetings and at drawing boards coming up with the right combinations of images and cover copy, and by the time the books reached the racks, they were rich with code: images for the curious, images for the devout, all threaded together. They faced the world with action scenes promising adventure and intrigue, and the promise of triumph over fantastic adversity or final glory at its hands. Who doesn’t want to rise above the obstacles in his pathway? Who wouldn’t want to go down in flames? And for those of us who can’t or won’t rise above, who doesn’t at least want to hear stories about how it might be possible for some triumph to eventually happen, given enough luck?
The Gor books, by contrast, were shameful and garish. The pictures on their covers were pornographic, but in an almost dishonest way: near-nude mutants leering out into the fluorescent air of the drugstore aisle. Willingly or not, they seemed to suggest that maybe you shouldn’t actually be reading these books. And so I never did. I would stare at their covers, and maybe thumb through them a little, picking out phrases and images like a secret shoplifter. But that would be enough for me, and sometimes more than enough. I didn’t need to hear the stories the books were trying to sell me: their skins haunted and troubled me enough. But I would assemble my own stories, based on the information I had from the covers; and in my stories, there’d be winners, victors, spoils to divide, satisfying conclusions to things. Happy endings sometimes. I felt sure that the books themselves would be less kind to their characters, that whatever was actually going on inside was dark and mirthless. There was this odd, flat sort of desolation in those covers. Steam or smoke rising from a distant city, seen from a boat out on the water: grimy, vivid. It always made me feel uneasy.
I set the stack of movies down in front of the TV when I got back, and I pulled the VCR out of the closet and wired everything together. I thought about Gor, but it still had some sort of prohibitive power over me, so I turned out the lights and sat in my recliner watching Krull. It took me back. The screen throbbed in its familiar way and the darkness around it spread out to the farthest corners of the room. When the movie was over I just sat there in my chair for a while. The sun was going down outside. I nodded off and caught one of those ten-minute naps that always feel like they last longer than they really do.
I dreamed of a ghost in a hallway; the ghost was holding his own head in his hands. I know where this image came from, and I knew in the dream, too, though that didn’t make it less real or frightening. The ghost holding his own head in his hands, coming down a hallway, was a neither-common-nor-rare card in the Monsters of the World series. These were bubble gum cards with a stiff stale powdery pink slab of gum included in every pack; I used to buy them at Rexall. Kids would joke about buying the cards and throwing the gum away, but nobody actually threw the gum away, because they had paid for it. It crunched when you chewed it.
Some people dream whole stories, but I get only fleeting images. A ghost in a hallway, an open hallway facing out onto some trees. Maybe an office building in California. Maybe an apartment complex. The ghost is holding his head in his hands, making a ghost sound. I’m not even sure how I know it’s a ghost; his flesh is solid. The face is held close against the ghost’s body, so from where I’m standing, I can see only the back of his head.
Sometimes I try to make my dreams mean something: to connect them to the accident, which seems like an obvious fit here, or to connect them to things going on in my life. But there’s so little to them, so little to pick apart in my dreams. A thing that’s a ghost because something tells me that’s what it is, coming toward me in a hallway of some building. No real details. Ghost, hallway, building. When I woke up, I thought about Kansas, cold Kansas where the hallways of the buildings would be tightly sealed against the weather, so unlike the open, exposed buildings of Southern California, which are the only buildings I can actually tell you anything about, because they’re the only ones I’ve ever seen with my own eyes.
Krull is a movie about a man on a quest, and it plays like something made by guileless people. Who knows the secrets of anybody’s heart, I guess: for all I know everyone involved with Krull has bodies under the floorboards and babies in the oven. But the evidence on the screen strongly suggests that these were people trying to make something fun for others to enjoy, something largely innocent, not trying to open up any windows on the abyss. For me, though, it was a hallway full of doors leading to dark places. The hearing at the courthouse had propped several of these doors ajar: bagged bits of evidence standing in for bigger questions that couldn’t be answered, timelines of meaningless afternoons that ended somewhere big and terrible. But whether they’d seen it coming or not, the abyss had eventually gotten around to claiming most of the people who made the movie, or starred in it, or underwrote its considerable budget. The abyss was general. Which I couldn’t help thinking, the whole time: I was twelve when I first saw ads for this movie running in the L.A. Times. How old does that make some of those young people on my screen now? Who’s left?
The plotline was fairly clear. This was given to me to know: that many worlds have been enslaved by the beast and his army the slayers. It aimed high; I could feel the old excited hopes, destined for disappointment but still game, rising up inside me. Everything came together: the potential letdown of the saccharine wedding at the outset suddenly ripped into vivid pieces by the electric-blue flashing doors and the slayers scaling the walls. Swords that gave off lightning when they clashed, full-screen flaring X’s in battles whose backstories hadn’t been filled in sufficiently yet, so that the central remaining image for me — then as now — was the crystal-clean desolation of the aftermath: Confusion. Sudden loss. Evaporating bodies in an emptied stone cathedral. One guy looked like somebody I used to hang out with, I thought, watching his face turn to steam. Was it JJ? Maybe. I couldn’t even get a clear picture of JJ in my mind anymore. It had been too long.