Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017

The 911 recording was scratchy, distorted: At first, it made Deena think of the tricks the projectionists had shown her the summer she’d sold concessions at the little five-screen movie theater downtown.

The lobby hadn’t been air-conditioned and it was a constant struggle not to drip sweat down into the popcorn butter or onto the jumbo-sized boxes of Dots or Junior Mints. Once the last showing had started, she had always slipped into the projection booths, little boxes of cold air, and bribed Stu-the-projectionist with soda and nachos to let her sit out the duration. He was thirty-seven, bearded, pudgy, and more interested in the flickering images below them than he was in her, but in the downtimes, he taught her what he called the tricks of the trade with the assumption that she was as interested in it all as he was, that she would “put in her time” with the licorice whips outside and then move up to usher, then to projectionist herself, maybe — in a pipe dream — manager. Deena had just wanted to stay cool.

But some of it she absorbed, especially when Stu talked about the sex scenes back in the days of real film — “the outlaw era” — and how they would get snipped out, still by still, by hopeful, sweaty-palmed projectionists from one coast to the other. Which, he said, she might have heard about from Fight Club. She hadn’t seen Fight Club? She had to see Fight Club, like, now.

Deena had tilted her head against the chugging, Freon-scented box of an AC unit and nodded. Fight Club, sure.

He took that for a solid commitment and breezed on. “It’s like VHS tapes.” All of this was delivered in a kind of monotone hush, the better to not be overheard by the audience. “You probably don’t remember tapes, do you?”

Deena had the premature nostalgia of her generation: For the first time, she tilted herself away from the rush of air. “We had all the Christmas specials on those, Rudolph and Frosty, and home movies, and—” She laughed, her hand cupped over her mouth in deference to Stu’s obsessive need for quiet. “I used to wake up at two in the morning to tape episodes of Buffy. I’d buy these eight-hour tapes at the dollar store and they’d never hold more than six episodes, eight hours my ass, but I had all of season five. We only got the right station at two in the morning, for some reason, I never figured out why.”

Stu was looking at her with a curious near-tenderness that Deena would only be able to dissect years later, when she taught high-school students with a near-complete ignorance of MTV.

“Okay,” Stu said. “VHS tapes. You’re definitely too young for this, unless you have, like, really shitty parents, but it used to be that if you rented anything really steamy from Blockbuster — which was so hard to do anyway, because they wouldn’t stock anything good, uptight corporate assholes — or wherever, you hit a sex scene, you’d see it wobble.”

“Like...” Deena glanced down at her breasts and willed him to follow her gaze without, somehow, being creepy about it: She had recently discovered in herself the inability to allude to her own femaleness, which didn’t serve her well in getting tips.

Stu snickered. “No. No jiggle. We’re talking your basic distortion. See, someone before you, your ordinary American pervert in those dark preInternet days, would have been watching that scene and rewinding it, watching and rewinding, and again, and again, until it wore the tape. So your audio would get all messed up and your picture would get trashed. VHS, that was really bad technology. Don’t let anybody ever convince you it was like the vinyl of your almost-generation.”