Manhattan Is My Beat

he can probably get a VCR for fifty bucks.”
    “Beta only, I’ll bet.” Frankie sneered.
    “No, they’ve got VHS. And he leaves and I think that’s the last I’ll see of him. But the next day he’s back when the store opens and he says he found a player. And he joins and rents this movie he’s so interested in. Turns out he’s a real sweetheart, we bullshit some, talk movies….”
    “Yeah, your date,” Frankie observed. “I remember him.”
    “And he’s not flirting or anything. He’s just talking. Takes the film home. Eddie picks it up the next day. Okay, couple days later, he calls a delivery in. Rents something I don’t know what it is and what else?
Manhattan Is My Beat
again. This goes on for weeks.”
    Frankie nodded, his shaggy hair bobbing.
    “Christ,” Rune told him, “I feel so sorry for the guy— I picture him spending all his Social Security check on this stupid movie. I told him just to buy it. But you know Tony. How he marks up? He was charging almost two hundred. What a rip-off. So I tell Mr. Kelly I’m going to copy it for him.”
    “Man, Tony’d be super pissed, he finds out,” Frankie said, lowering his voice as if the store were bugged.
    “Yeah, whatever,” Rune said. She pictured Mr. Kelly again. “You should’ve seen his eyes. I thought he was going to cry, he was so happy. Anyway, it was, like, noon or something and he asked if he could take me to lunch, you know, to thank me.”
    “So did you make the dupe for him?”
    Rune’s face fell. After a moment she said, “I did, yeah. But it was just a couple days ago. I never got the chance to give it to him. I wish I had. I wish he’d seen it once at least—the tape
I’d
made, I mean. He said he didn’t have anything much to give me now but when he got rich, he’d remember me.”
    “Yeah, right, I’ve heard that before.”
    “I don’t know. He said it in a funny way. Like,
when
his ship came in. It was like … Hey, you know fairy stories?”
    “Uhm … I don’t know. You mean, like, Jack and the cornstalk?”
    She rolled her eyes. “I was thinking about this one from Japan. About the fisherman Urashima.”
    “Like, who?” Frankie Greek’s eyes were close together too. Like the detective in Mr. Kelly’s apartment. Manelli.
    “Urashima saved a turtle from some children who were stoning it. He helped it back to the ocean. Only it turned out to be a magic turtle and took him to the sea lord’s palace under the ocean.”
    “How could he breathe underwater?”
    “He just could.”
    “But—”
    “Don’t worry about it. He could breathe, okay? Anyway, the lord’s daughter gave him money and pearls and jewels. Maybe everlasting youth too, I don’t remember.”
    “Man, not too shabby,” Frankie said. “Happily ever after.”
    Rune didn’t say anything for a moment. “Not exactly. He blew it.”
    “What happened?” Frankie seemed marginally interested.
    “One of the things the daughter gave him was a box he wasn’t supposed to open.”
    “Why not?”
    “Doesn’t matter. But he
did
open it and, bang, got turned into an old man in about five seconds flat. See, fairy tales have rules too. You have to play by them. He didn’t. You’ve gotta listen to magic turtles and wizards. So, that’s what I was thinking of when Mr. Kelly said something about getting rich. That I did a good deed and he was going to give me a reward.”
    Frankie added, “Just don’t open any magic boxes.”
    Rune looked up. “So, that’s my story about Mr. Kelly. Is it totally bizarre, or what?”
    “You ever ask him about it, why he rented it so often?”
    “Sure. And you want to hear a sad answer? He said, ‘That movie? It’s the high-point of my life.’ He wouldn’t say anything else. I’ll bet his wife and him saw it on their honeymoon. Or maybe he had a wild affair with some vampy woman the night it was released and they were in a hotel in Times Square with the premiere right outside their window.”
    “Like, what’d the cops say about him getting whacked? They have any idea why?”
    “They don’t know anything. They don’t care.”
    Frankie flicked through the pages in a rock music magazine, undid one of his earrings, looked at it, put it into a third hole in his other ear. He said, “So, you’ve seen it, you think it’s worth being the high-point of someone’s life?”
    “Depends on how low your life has been.”
    “Like, what’s it about?” the young man asked. “This