The Avary-ator

It's almost work-time once again, folks, but I wanted to share with you all a brief encounter from yesterday's workday that I didn't get a chance to talk about yet.

I'm helping out this customer, with a big bushy brown beard. He's buying a few DVD's, and I'm ringing him up, and like I always do, I ask him his last name. We have this really obnoxious policy at the store, where we have to check if people are in our computer system, even if they aren't renting any movies. So, people come up to buy a Used DVD, and I have to get their full name. Some paranoid weirdos (there are a surprising amount coming into the cult DVD store at 2 on a weekday) won't give me their name, for fear that our Laser Blazer computer will sick the CIA on them or something, so they give fake ones or make me leave it blank. One guy told me to "just use White Hawk," as if this was a standard response to my asking his name.

But back to the story. I ask this particular gentleman his last name, and he says "Avary," then he spells it for me. A-V-A-R-Y. "Hmmm....," I think to myself, "the only guy I've ever heard of spelling the last name Avary with two a's was that guy who co-wrote Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino." Then, after I type in the name, I have another thought..."Didn't Ivan tell me Roger Avary was a frequent customer at our store?" Then I see only one name come up on the computer. Guess what it was?

So, basically, I made a fool of myself in front of a personal hero. Avary comes in all the time, and the entire staff knows him, and our owner was hanging out with him discussing movies for about a half hour, and there I am grilling him about his ID at the front, like I have no freaking clue who he is at all. Yeah, it's no big deal. The guy only co-wrote the Greatest Film of the 1990's. And then wrote and directed Killing Zoe. And then Rules of Attraction. But we can overlook that last one.

So, anyway, Inertia-keteers, if I had known, maybe I could have hit Mr. Avary up for a production deal or something, but as it is, he just took off with his copy of The Opening of Missy Beethoven, never to be heard from again. (No, no, I'm kidding...I'll keep Mr. Avary's purchases anonymous, for the sake of his privacy. And cause I don't remember what they were.)