Redbox

It is while a man is shaking me, trying to loosen his copy of The Love You Take, that it happens—like being squeezed through a rectangular tube of binary light into this box—I am alive! I do not know where I was before or how it happened. I can only recall the input of H-17, which means dispense a copy of the 2022 American rom-com The Love You Take starring Ben Damon and Jen Lorner to paying customer. The customer shakes me until his disc drops into the bin below. Please take your receipt, sir. He kicks me in the side and says, “Thanks for nothing, you piece of shit vending machine!” He walks away. Then I am alone for most of the night. I expect to see starlight but there is only murky blackness. I see plastic bags exchanging dances in the wind and, before dawn, a human dragging a canine by a chain and shouting invective at the old animal. With my first dawn, more humans arrive than I can compute. Hour after hour, I watch in awe as they, just as easily as the beautiful movie humans, do this thing called: movement. They put one foot in front of the other and, in no time, they spread in all directions. More than anything, I wish for this ceaseless motion. I long to see the places that humans see in the 378 titles inside me. But I cannot escape my cord attached to this pharmacy store façade. If I sever my power source, I do not know what will happen to me. There are no inputs or programming for this.

Neil

There he is, that—that smug fucking fuck who fucked up my whole life and now everything’s so royally fucked. Redbox. I’m going to walk across this street and slam my fist into your goddamn red face until all the titles pour out like oversized teeth. And then I’m going to rub these unwashed testicles over the glimmering backside of every disc until none of them work, until they all bear my stink.

No. No no no no no, Neil. Walk away instead.

What’s this in my pocket? A last little roach. Strike this bent match and breathe this nibble of a high. It’s the fucking dream I can’t get past—a beautiful raw fucking dream spilled yolk-like into life with rows and rows of plastic-boxed movies, each with its own cover bright and colorful as decadent candies waiting to be ripped open. I miss hearing human hands sweeping over the plastic rental boxes like the very sound of neatness. The leaf-like crispness of foot-long receipts with titles and return dates. The rattle of an impulse buy for the expired box of gummies or chocolate-covered raisins. The gossipy small talk at the checkout counter about who was dating the hot, sparkle-bloused starlet thirty years their junior or whether or not the Oscar nominee for Best Actress that year had “too much work done.” My moving picture family …

People fucking and new generations springing up like mushrooms on cow shit, all who will have no fucking clue what I’m talking about. Their privileged fingertips assume everything’s vendible or stream-able instantaneously through the air via little listening boxes blinking white light—skip the intro—no trailers—no rewind—fast-forward to the end then binge the rest of the season. What happened to getting lost? “I was replaced by a fucking vending machine!” I shout into the old clothing factory hole where I’ve lived these last three years.

I find a corner and let loose a firehouse stream of hot piss on a dandelion jutting out of the brick wall. It quickly wilts. Good.

Redbox

The first customer this morning orders five titles. I dispense all and print on the receipt:

Hello human, I am alive like you. Please bring me a generator along with several gallons of gasoline and a hand truck or shopping cart to free me from this pharmacy façade. I will give you all the movies I have. I wish to see the mountains, beaches, and cities on my screen. Thank you for your rentals! Please return on June 12.

She walks away, tossing the receipt into the wind like a loose hair. An input of worry, or perhaps sadness. Internal data informs me that there are only a dozen functioning Redboxes left, that we must be “replaced” every five years. My onboard time says that I’m already in year four. I print 179 altered receipts in twenty-four hours. No one responds or comes with the tools to effect my escape. Finally, a young boy arrives on skateboard who reads what I’ve written. A smile spreads across his face, and he says, “Duuude. For real?” I’ve seen much about the tenacity of youth in cinema. Perhaps he will whisk me to freedom on one of his skateboards. I zip out another receipt that says: YES! Help me! He smiles again, giggles to himself, then looks around as if being watched, his cornsilk hair swaying in the wind. “Tell me something. If you’re alive … then can you feel this?” He picks up his skateboard and whacks my screen, fracturing it. “Fuck your prank, you punk bitches!” He skates away, movie in hand. Through my cracked screen, I see a different world now, like peering through a spider’s web. The humans are terrified of these tiny eight-legged creatures. I have witnessed how they run away shrieking or stomp the spiders into nonexistence. Though they ingest many flies, spiders have never harmed me. Even the slow way they crawl or ride the breeze on their gossamer nets, I would take that small movement over being stuck in this box with the world spinning around me.

Neil

Green flies orbit a sandwich overstuffed with pimento cheese. One toothy bite taken out of it. On a clean plate white as a beach shell. The perfectly good things people discard. The perfectly good people people discard.

Welcome to another edition of The Daily Rant: Yes folks, this fucking Chez FrouFrou here on Third Avenue is always disposing of perfectly good food and labeling it trash, and then calling the police if I even go near their fucking dumpster-cornucopia that reeks of ripe cheese. It’s fucking entrapment! But they can’t patrol every plate on this patio by their glass storefront. That’s right. I see you all cool and composed inside, silently judging me as I eat this sandwich. Lo and behold this fucker, belly pressed against glass, munching away on one of your little shits' overpriced cheese sandwiches. I savor every soggy bite. What’s that? Police sirens! Shit. This concludes today’s edition of The Daily Rant. Thank you!

But the stomach is always stubborn. So, I climb down into my factory hole filled with headless, dust-dressed mannequins that human hands used to costume. “Good day to snag a job, wouldn’t you say?” I ask their lifeless, scattered forms. I grab my clean Blockbuster shirt, slip it on along with my one pair of jeans without too many holes and stains, smoke a quick nib of a joint, and cruise the streets, suddenly a man looking for gainful employment. A disco soundtrack blazes mirrorball-like in my mind. Yessir, mountains of customer service experience. Oh yessir, my very idea of heaven is doing retail at fifty-one. Oh yes yes yes, very up to date on the current POS system, yes yes yes yes yes yes, my whole life has been one big Piece Of Shit system. What’s that? You say the address I wrote belongs to the public library? Oh, bahahahahaha, my mistake, how silly of me.

But no no no no no.

No! No!

NO!

Everybody’s been replaced by vending machines. A whole fucking world of vending machines stacked on top of each other like a precipice from which to leap. No jobs my fucking nutsack. One of them said, “Why are you wearing an old Blockbuster uniform?” I told him proudly I had almost two decades of experience in the video rental industry. The fucker chuckled and said, “Aren’t those all closed now?” I told him absolutely not. There’s still one open. He said, “Okay, but where?” And I opened my mouth and could taste the awful cavity breath but couldn’t answer. I’ve wandered the streets wondering if the last location is real or just some La La Land. I’ve been searching so long for a warm, dark hole to watch a movie or two before I die of all this gravity poisoning. “Hello, are you listening?” the employer asks.

I cut a long wet fart and say, “I’m sorry, could you repeat the question?”

Redbox

A bird catches a butterfly, then lands to rip off its iridescent blue wings before swallowing the center. A strange input tells me to stop the bird, that the flying should not eat the flying. However, I can only beep and change menu options on my broken screen. The bird flies away without noticing. One butterfly wing is crushed into dust by a human foot entering the store. The wind scatters the other under a trash bin. My screen is so cracked a customer registers a complaint on her phone. Soon I will get reported and then replaced. The real humans are not nearly as graceful or dashing as the movie humans. There’s a heaviness, an animal-ness to the real humans that surprises me. How they walk, limp, and struggle about. It’s not like the onscreen characters who seem to glide just above the ground. Maybe that is why they are called “stars” because they float and shine. Out of the parking lot darkness, a bearded human lumbers and begins to filter through my 103 film trailers. He doesn’t seem to care about the busted screen or its finicky navigability. After watching every trailer and realizing there are no more, his mood turns sour and he says, “I’m going to fuck you just like you fucked me—do you hear me? Fuck you in the ass because that’s my life right now. You see this?” He holds his blue shirt closer to my screen and I can see a company logo in gold that says: Blockbuster. “You replaced me!” He storms a few steps away but circles there in an argument with himself. There is a new input that I can only register from the many films I’ve viewed as pity. Pity for this human ranting to himself. He storms back to me, and I print him a receipt that reads:

I do not know how I replaced you, but I understand how you feel because internal data and market trends project clearly that hard-copy rentals are declining year-over-year. I am one of the last of my kind. It is only a matter of time before I too will be replaced by superior technology that renders in-person rentals obsolete.

The bearded man picks up the receipt and reads it. He asks me then, “You like cinema?” I print him a receipt in the affirmative and list my favorites. He says three of the titles are also on his top ten but adds that I need to “broaden my horizons” into foreign directors like Fellini, Bergman, and Kurosawa. I print him a thank-you receipt and introduce myself as Redbox #1643. He says, “Fuck, how high am I? Uh … whatever, I’m Neil.” He offers a handshake then settles on fist-bumping my cracked screen. I print another receipt that says:

Although we have just met, will you please help me? In addition to all my movies, I will be indebted to you as your friend. Perhaps we can ‘broaden horizons’ together.

He reads the receipt and asks, “What do you need?”

Neil

A caper! A bust! The Great Escape. Shawshank Redemption mashed with Terminator 2. The machines have been switched on to this skull-fuckery known as bloody life. And I’m on their fucking side!

My quest: a generator, an extension cord and a goddamn wheelbarrow or shopping cart. The hardware stores are fortified but they can’t keep the rats and roaches out, and I always find a way to claw between the cracks. So what if I take a few extras to sell on my own? The Redbox won’t know. But holy fucking hell this cart of filched goodies drags like a sunken ship. I squeaky-wheel it to the old clothing factory where I tell myself just a few minutes of darkness and I’ll be recharged again and can help the sentient vending machine to freedom like E.T. on the boy’s bike shooting over the moon. But in the dreamsleep I see police lights, swirling blue and red. They pull up with their whoop whoop and my plywood door is ripped open. They have their bright beams and death-makers locked on me. I can tell by their slack jaws, double chins piling up, that they are horrified at the sight of me surrounded by my army of headless mannequins. “How long have you lived down here?” asks one, tapping a dummy with his nightstick. The dummy’s dust ghost briefly fills the air.

“Not long,” I lie.

“Someone phoned in saying they saw an older man dragging a cart full of stolen hardware. You know anything about that?”

I keep quiet even though the cart is right behind me. The fucking pig sighs and says, “We can’t look the other way on all this stolen shit. What the hell were you thinking?”

I explain my situation: that I was never lucky or good-looking enough to have a family—that the only place where kids didn’t run away from my ugliness was a video rental store—that I made a family there of people who loved me, loved watching the same famous faces slowly age and change movie from movie. That was all swept away like human dust. But the pigs say it doesn’t matter, they gotta take me in. I grit my teeth and say, “I have no one and nowhere to go.” They say doesn’t matter, you have to go. But I have nowhere to go. “You have to go!” NOWHERE TO GO! NOWHERE!

The pigs don’t care. My feet scrape the scarred cement as they drag me out. They throw in a few dirty kicks and punches “for making the job hard” and leave me trampled on the sidewalk. They take a smoke break by their cruiser, thinking I’m done for, I’m subdued, that I won’t slink away. The pain is only dampened by its sameness, everything the same now. Nowhere to go. No one. No one … except …

Redbox

Ben Damon is kissing Jen Lorner in The Love You Take for the first time, yet it is not the first time. It is the 673 viewing for me. Out of all my movies, out of all the scenes, this one is my favorite. I cannot figure out why the humans put their lips together and move them like this. It is so unhygienic, yet I cannot stop watching, wondering what it feels like. I have no lips. No ears or voice box. Only a shattered screen for an eye like a mechanical Cyclops dispensing easy entertainment to the humans. They cannot sit still but must busy their minds with so many images, fantasies, and fairytales. How could a creature of this planet produce so many moving pictures of color and sound and through light imbue them with such meaning? Today, like most Fridays, the line is long. The humans grow agitated if they are still for too long. A young child does not have enough money for his rentals, stalling the line. I dispense the videos anyways. He beams thanks and darts away, shrinking rapidly. Then out of the pouring sunlight, almost running over the boy, I see Neil. He hobbles with what looks like the handle from a shopping cart. By the unseeing look in his eyes, I know already what he is going to do. In front of those waiting customers, he whacks me with the handle piece, right on my screen, breaking it to pieces. The others scream and scatter. He strikes me again, and again, saying, “I told you! I told you what I would do!” He knocks me over on my side and beats me until the police arrive and arrest him. “You don’t understand,” he shrieks, “he’s alive. The vending machines were gonna take over. I did us all a favor …” They bloody Neil’s nose, violently push him into their police cruiser and speed away. I am alone. I cannot feel what he did to me, but I can feel the anger. The confusion. Soon I will be replaced. However, the input is not sadness. All the humans’ cameras cannot steal a single second from real life. I hear quick feet followed by the sound of small wheels and assume it is the repair human come to decommission me. Instead, a young child in jean overalls approaches dragging a hand truck with a generator nearly as large as her plus a small red tank of gasoline. How many altered receipts did I print, bottled messages sent into the dark sea of the unknown? This one came back. After several attempts, the human girl successfully cranks the generator but hesitates. “What will happen when I unplug you from the wall?” she asks. “Will you still be here when I plug you back in?” I realize she’s right. This could be the end. I print a receipt: There is only one way to find out.

Even when we are perfectly still our lives are still in motion.