Long before I had my first video rental card, I had something almost as good. I had the video store next door.

One of my friends lived next door to us, and her dad, Ron, had what seemed to me at the time like an absolutely massive movie collection. This was back when having two VCRs was basically a superpower. Ron had two VHS players hooked up so he could play a movie in one and record it onto a blank tape in the other. And record movies he did.

He had probably twenty of those big VHS storage drawers, the kind that pulled out and held several rows of tapes. I cannot remember exactly how many tapes fit into each one, but there were a lot. To a movie-obsessed kid, opening those drawers felt like opening a treasure chest. Even better, most of the tapes had three movies recorded on them using SLP mode. Ron did not just have hundreds of VHS tapes. He had hundreds and hundreds of movies.

Photo by Bruno Guerrero on Unsplash

Basically, Ron had built his own private video store before I was old enough to have a rental card of my own.

And wonderfully for me, he let me use it.

I would go next door and ask if I could borrow movies, sometimes taking the same tape over and over again because I had fallen in love with something on it. I was a trustworthy little movie renter. I always brought the tapes back, I never damaged them, and I knew better than to record over anything. That last part was probably the most important qualification for maintaining borrowing privileges in the VHS era.

Ron did make an attempt at gatekeeping. I remember asking him about one specific movie once, though I have absolutely no memory of what the title actually was. Whatever I pointed to must have been particularly questionable, because Ron looked at me and said, “There’s no way your mother’s letting you watch that.”

He was right, of course.

Ron understood that lending me his collection came with at least some responsibility to respect my mother’s boundaries. The problem was that those boundaries were remarkably easy to bypass when three movies shared a single cassette.

I could borrow a tape because the first title was perfectly acceptable for a kid to watch. It was just a happy coincidence that somewhere after the end credits of a PG comedy lived Body Double or Fast Times at Ridgemont High, or some other movie I knew perfectly well I was not supposed to be watching.

What was I supposed to do? The movie was already there.

A lot of my earliest forbidden movie watching happened that way. There was no streaming history for my parents to check and certainly no algorithm announcing, “Because you watched Body Double…” the next time the family sat down together.

Even parental controls were more of a temporary inconvenience than an actual barrier.

I remember an old Time Warner cable box we had that allowed my parents to lock certain channels with a code. In theory, this meant they could decide what we were allowed to watch and simply make everything else inaccessible.

In theory.

One night my parents went out for dinner and a movie, leaving my older sister babysitting my brother and me. My brother and I apparently looked at that locked cable box less as a parental boundary and more as a technical challenge. By the time my parents got home, we had cracked the code.

MTV was out of jail.

VHS was even easier. You waited until nobody was paying attention, popped in the cassette, fast-forwarded through the tracking lines until you found the movie you wanted, and prayed nobody walked into the living room at exactly the wrong moment.

Other people’s houses offered similar opportunities. Babysitting was particularly useful. Once the kids were asleep, I had access to whatever VHS collection happened to be sitting beside the television. My first viewing of Ghost, for example, happened because one of the women I regularly babysat for owned it on VHS.

There was something thrilling about discovering movies that way. You were not choosing from an endless digital catalog carefully organized around everything you had watched before. You were exploring whatever happened to be available in somebody else’s living room.

That randomness mattered.

There was no algorithm deciding that because I liked one movie, I should be shown twenty more just like it. Sometimes you watched something simply because somebody owned it. Sometimes you picked a tape because you recognized one title and discovered something completely different recorded after it. Sometimes you watched a movie because it was the only interesting thing sitting beside the television.

My choices were technically much smaller than they are today, but somehow the possibilities felt enormous.

Looking back now, I cannot help wondering how annoying I must have been.

There I was again, knocking on Ron’s door because I wanted to borrow another movie. Or worse, probably the exact same tape I had borrowed three times already. I am sure there were days when he saw me coming and knew exactly why I was there.

But he never made me feel like I was bothering him.

I think Ron understood something about me before I really understood it myself. I did not just like movies. I loved them. I wanted to see everything. Old movies, new movies, movies meant for kids, movies definitely not meant for kids, movies I had already watched ten times. It did not matter. If there was a story sitting inside one of those black plastic rectangles, I wanted to see it.

And because I always brought his tapes back and treated his collection carefully, Ron apparently decided there was not much harm in letting the movie obsessed kid next door raid his VHS drawers.

Ron died last year.

I don’t know if he ever realized how clearly I remembered those afternoons at his house or how important those drawers full of movies became to the kid next door. To him, letting me borrow a VHS tape was probably a very small thing.

It wasn’t small to me.

Years later, I would spend countless hours wandering the aisles of actual video stores. Eventually, I would even work behind the counter of a few of them. Movies became something much bigger in my life than entertainment. They became jobs, friendships, memories, arguments, comfort, and eventually something I would sit down and write about.

But before any of that, there was Ron’s house next door, those drawers full of handwritten VHS tapes, three movies squeezed onto a single cassette, and a neighbor who never seemed to mind when a kid showed up at his door looking for something to watch.

Ron probably thought he was just lending me movies.

For me, he was running my first video store.