MOUNT GREENWOOD, Ill. – Under a sustained assault from online streaming services like Netflix, omnipresent Red Box kiosks and on-demand movie options offered by major cable and satellite TV providers, small video-rental stores that somehow managed to survive the Blockbuster era seem destined for the endangered species list.
Considering the state of the market and the seemingly obsolete services brick-and-mortar video stores offer, one might reasonably wonder what has kept them afloat for so long.
The answer, evidently, is an unusual pairing: The compassionate grace of God and the sociocultural scourge of pornography.
Anna Mae Henry of Popcorn Video, a store that opened more than 30 years ago, put it succinctly: “Thank God for porn.”
According to Henry, more than 80 percent of Popcorn’s revenue comes from the rental and sale of pornographic videos — but even porn’s intervention might not have been enough to save Popcorn Video had it not been for some timely intervention from The Man Upstairs.
As recently as a few weeks ago, Henry contemplated closing up shop, ending the long run of the corner video store originally known as Home Show Video. Then, out of the blue, she got a call from a woman asking if Henry would be interested in purchasing some of the nearly 2,000 videos left behind as part of her recently deceased brother-in-law’s estate.
“She said, ‘Unfortunately, they’re all adult titles,’” Henry said. “I said, ‘Oh yeah, real unfortunate.’”
And so it came to pass: “One woman gathered what a dead man spilled,” as the Grateful Dead eventually might have sung — if one of them hadn’t keeled over from severe cocaine abuse and sustained overeating before getting the chance to approve a modification to the lyric in question.
Was the unidentified porn hoarder’s death merely a fortuitous coincidence, or was it something more, coming as it did just in the nick of time to forestall the sweeping of Henry’s business into the dustbin of history?
Undeclared Republican presidential candidate Milton Whittaker Buckley said he definitely sees the invisible, capitalistic hand of God behind the Popcorn Video miracle.
“What you have here is a perfect example of what small businesses need and what helps them thrive,” Buckley said. “What they need isn’t a handout from our increasingly socialist government. All they need is faith in God, an ample supply of elbow grease and the occasional untimely death of a third-party who happens to have hoarded the very product they sell.”
Others aren’t so certain saving corner video stores is one of the mysterious ways in which God works, particularly given the smutty nature of Popcorn Video’s recovery.
“Put simply, there’s no evidence in the Bible or anywhere else in the Christian liturgical tradition suggesting the Lord intervenes on behalf of businesses which traffic in flesh,” said Rev. Ludwig von Kirk of Gracepoint Heritage Baptist Church in Naperville. “Sure, every once in a while God will agree to help people in exchange for them killing something, like a lamb, goat or firstborn child, but I’ve never heard of God striking down a total stranger in order to keep the lights on at a video store, especially one that stocks a bunch of porn — not to mention two copies of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.”
Despite the skepticism, the owner of another struggling Chicago-area video store says he’s going to “give this beseeching the Lord thing a shot.”
“I figure what the hell, why not see if God would be willing to whack old Jimmie D’Antoni who lives up the street,” said Sal Giancana, owner of Sal’s Video Shack on South Halsted. “Nothing against Jimmie, really, but I know he has about a zillion classic pornos on DVD and VHS packed away in his attic and he’s been smoking a couple packs a day since the late ’60s, so he’s gotta be just about ready to kick anyway, right?”
Rev. von Kirk called Giancana’s idea “monstrous” and a “sickening perversion of the purpose, meaning and spiritual significance of prayer.”
“In our prayers, we are supposed to praise God, express our devotion to Him and request His mercy and salvation,” von Kirk said, “not ask Him to hasten the demise of an elderly chain-smoker so we can seize upon his porn collection.”
Buckley disagreed, noting in the current economy businesses “do what they have to survive and it isn’t always pretty.”
“I understand people thinking it’s a bit unseemly to petition the Lord to allow them to benefit from the misfortunes of others, but at the same time, that’s precisely what made America great,” Buckley said. “This is a long-held tradition in American business, one many historians believe originated with the time God answered John D. Rockefeller’s prayers for Charles Pratt to suffer a bout of severe intestinal distress during the Standard Oil/Pratt & Company consolidation negotiations.”
