As I began to examine the movies I took a good look around. The store was virtually deserted. Aside from the store clerk sitting at the cash register there were one or two men examining the merchandise.
That’s when I notice the price-tags on most of these movies were around fifty bucks. I guess when my husband was buying these videos I was sheltered from the money part.
I grabbed two movies that looked good based on the pictures on the box and went over to the clerk at the cash register. He looked to be of Middle Eastern descent.
“Fifty dollars for a movie is pretty steep, especially in today’s economy, don’t you think?” I said to him.
“That’s the price. You picked out movies that are of high quality. We have cheaper movies, but they won’t be as…entertaining.” He answered with a sly grin.
“But I don’t even know if these are going to be good. Can I return a movie if I don’t like it?”
He told me that there was no returning an open video. Then he suggested that if I wanted to preview part of the movie he could arrange for me to watch a portion of it in the video booths in the rear of the store. For a dollar I could buy a token that would allow me to watch about ten minutes of the movie in a private booth.
Thinking that this was acceptable I agreed and he brought me to the back of the store. Behind another door was a private area in which a long narrow hallway was lined on each side with these booths. I noticed some of the booths had a red light above it that indicated the booth was “in use.”
I had never seen, nor heard of this before, but was intrigued at the prospect of what was going on behind these closed doors. The store clerk led me to a booth near the center of the area which was the only one not currently occupied. He told me to go inside and put the token in the slot and he would put one of my movies on the TV for me.
I entered the booth. All the booths had a red door to enter through. I closed this door, but left it slightly ajar as if to indicate that I was not a serious viewer; I didn’t need absolute privacy. I was merely shopping and would be leaving the booth shortly. I assumed that people who locked the doors were doing private things inside. That was not what I was doing here.
The interior of the booth was small and was lit by a single light on the ceiling. There was a chair to sit on and a TV screen directly in front of it. Once I put the token in the machine, the light inside the booth turned off automatically, and I assumed that the red light outside the booth went on.
I heard some clicking sounds from outside as the channel was being selected for me by the store clerk. Then my movie came on.
Other than the movie popping on the TV, the first thing I noticed once the light went out was that there were windows on both the left and right side of the walls of my viewing booth. These windows gave the occupant a view as to what was going on inside their neighbors booths on both sides.
Afraid to look through the windows, I focused my eyes upon the TV in front of me. Shortly thereafter, I heard and saw movement by the window to my left. A hand was at the bottom of the window and the fingers pushed the window upwards a couple of inches.
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