I thanked him for his time and when my parents picked me up again, I explained the situation to them: I could buy the new edition online with their credit card.

“I’m good for the money, you know that!” I said in my best imitation of a pathetic gangster whose walls were closing in. “I just don’t have a credit card! You’d have to buy it for me and I’d pay you back.”

It wasn’t a question of money, they explained. It was just that this whole “Internet” thing was new and strange and they didn’t feel comfortable using their credit card on a website they didn’t know, didn’t trust, and where they potentially risked having their financial information stolen.

At this point I realized that I had exhausted all options available to me and I gave up.

Days, maybe even weeks, went by. I was at school, eating lunch with my friends, when I saw Darrell, a good friend of mine, wearing glasses and balancing on the tip of his nose, reading the inside of a Sprite can.

“Hmm,” Darrell wondered aloud. “I wonder how much that’s worth?”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“So, Sprite does this. Each lid is worth a certain amount of money. See that code?” He showed me a code printed on the inside of the lid that looked something like 8JUV9X123. “You enter it at Sprite.com and it’s worth between five cents and a quarter. Sometimes you get lucky and it’s worth about a dollar.”

“What can you buy with it? More Sprite?”

“Sure, they have merchandise. But you can exchange it and buy it on Amazon.”

“Wait, Amazon? Did you say Amazon?”

“Yes,” he said. “So what?”

“I want to buy something on Amazon. Do you use this cap?”

“Nope, try harder.”

He tossed it to me like a big shot tosses a quarter to a kid. I took the coin, put it in my pocket, and headed straight for the school library. The computers might be slow and terrible, but by God, they had Internet! I went to Sprite’s website, set up a login account, and put in my very first coin. The login account home page told me I had a whole five cents.

I went back to my friends’ table: Darrell, Lane and Cedric were still sitting there. I asked them if any of them had any Sprite caps left. No, they shook their heads, they were all drinking Coke. I saw other kids drinking Sprite: “Hey, I’m collecting Sprite caps. If you don’t need them when you’re done, can you bring them over to me?”

They looked confused, but they agreed. And sure enough, sometime after lunch, on the way to another lecture, someone came up to me with a cap or two, and I packed them in my backpack to enter on the school computer at lunch in the library. I kept up this cycle every lunch break. Only a few assholes said no, not because they were using them, but because they just didn’t want me to have them, because, screw me. Okay.

My search for bottle caps, however, took on a life of its own. Soon I didn’t have to ask; people just found me. One time, someone came up to me with a plastic bag full of bottle caps. “We hear you’re the Sprite guy,” he said. “So here you go, Sprite guy.” I remember that bag alone was worth nearly $5, because I got a lucky bottle cap worth a whopping $1.

It took forever raise the money to buy Blood Simple. Forever. First, movies back then? They were cheaper than they were in the 80s – before the cost of owning home video was subsidized by Diet Coke ads – but they still cost a shocking amount, especially for a specialty title like Blood simply. Back in 2001, a brand new movie cost about $25–not terrible, but I had to scrape together the money. Aaaand I had to pay for shipping. Prime with its free shipping perk was still decades away. And to top it all off, there was some service fee nonsense that took a certain amount off the total to redeem my Sprite points on Amazon. Basically, I had to scrape together $50 to buy the damn movie.

Finally, the big day arrived and I had enough money to pay for the arbitrary Spite-Amazon exchange rate and transfer fee, the movie itself, and the damn shipping. I sat at the school computer, hats on my lap, and a crowd of people behind me. Darrell was right behind me, Lane was on the left, Cedric was on the right, and a whole bunch of other kids who had donated a large number of hats to me. They all wanted to be part of this historic moment. I logged in, entered the codes, and made my purchase.

An error occurred on the screen: UNFORTUNATELY, AN ERROR HAS OCCURRED.

“What the hell?” I gasped.

“What happened?” asked Lane.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t fucking know.”

“Press refresh!” Darrell shouted.

“No, don’t press refresh, hit back! Hit back!” Cedric shouted.

A dissatisfied murmur broke out from the crowd behind me. “What’s wrong?” “Is it broken?”

Eventually, I got my home screen back and the entire purchase amount was deducted. After all of that, I had a remaining balance of $0.011. However, when I went to the purchase history, it was empty. The order was never accepted! I panicked. Okay, okay, okay. Everything was fine. I just had to contact Sprite customer service and explain the whole thing to them. They would understand. Right? RIGHT?!

But no one was there to hear my ramblings. They were long gone and I desperately wrote a message to Sprite customer service.

The next day, Sprite responded to me and told me I had to contact Amazon because I had exchanged my points. Now it was Amazon’s problem. Amazon, predictably, said something like, “I don’t know what Sprite is talking about, the order came from their website, you’ll have to work it out with them.”

I tried to think back and forth, but to no avail. Nobody wanted to refund my points, complete the order or Blood Simple.

After that, I officially gave up. Occasionally, one of my friends would ask me: “So, what’s going on, have you Blood Simple or what?” And I just shook my head seriously.

Sometimes someone would come up to me with two hands full of Sprite caps and I would wave them off. “I’m not doing that anymore,” I would say. “My cap days are over.”

I have finally come to terms with the fact that some people Blood Simple, and some people don’t. I was one of those who wouldn’t. Hell, maybe he never really existed at all, I tried to convince myself. It was just a glitch in the Matrix that didn’t allow me to see the movie.

It was months later and I was out running errands with my dad. We went shopping early in the day, picked up the mail at the post office, bought chicken feed and all that stuff because I had a football game that afternoon. Yes, I played a terrible season of football and was bad at it, but then I could say, “I played football for a year” and I never had to do it again. When you grow up in the country, you have to play for at least a year. That’s an unwritten rule.

When we got to the post office, my dad gave me the keys to the post office box and sent me inside. I always liked the post office. I liked the smell of it. I liked how quiet it was inside, but how loudly my footsteps echoed inside. I opened the metal box and inside was the usual stuff: bills, letters, but there was also a little red key. Whenever you were given a little red key, it was for opening a post office box. another PO box because there was a package that was too big for your regular PO box.

“What is the package?” my father asked.

“I don’t know, I thought it was for you and mom.”

“Why don’t you open it and see what it is?”

I tore off a corner of the large paper envelope and ripped it open. I reached inside and felt something smooth, sleek and square. When I pulled it out of the envelope, it was a copy of Blood Simple on VHS. It was the brand new reissue that I was dying to get my hands on. The cover was black, but the figure of M. Emmet Walsh smoking a cigarette was lit up in red neon. I blinked and my eyes got hot. I felt tears welling up in my eyes.

“We bought you the damn movie,” my dad said.

“For God’s sake. Thanks, Dad.”

When we got home, I rushed to unload everything. I grabbed the chicken feed and ran to the chicken coop to refill the feeders and put the rest away. I ran in with the groceries to put everything away, spinning around like a tornado – imagine Taz the Tasmanian Devil putting his groceries away.

“What’s wrong?” my mother asked. “Why are you acting so crazy?”

“I have Blood, simple! I got the movie you bought for me! I’m clearing everything away so I can watch it!”

“Whoaaaaa, whoa, stop,” my father said, raising his hands to signal me to hold back. “You have a football game in just a few hours. A movie like Blood SimpleI think you have to be in the right mood and not get distracted. Just wait until the game is over to watch it. I think then you’ll appreciate it more.”

“Look,” I said, pointing like a madman. I was pointing at it, at the sky, at invisible sprite caps that had been haunting my dreams for over a month. “I went through hell to see this damn movie! I’m watching it now! And if I don’t appreciate it enough, I’ll just watch it. again! After the stupid game! But I’m going to watch it, come what may.”

My parents both backed away from me, the way one might back away from a coiled rattlesnake ready to bite.

When I closed my bedroom door and drew the curtains, it was pitch black. Right in front of my bed was a television with a VCR on it. On the shelf above my bed were some of my favorite bedtime movies, movies I watched when I couldn’t sleep. Bedtime movies didn’t have to be sleep-inducing, pleasant movies in the traditional sense, but just pleasant for me. Movies that I could recite from beginning to end, that I had seen a million times, and that could wash over me with a warm wave of nostalgia when I fell asleep.

I looked further Blood Simple from beginning to end and this film also belonged on this shelf of cozy, sleepy films. I have watched the tape so often that I can still remember the upcoming attractions before the main film: Universal had the reissue for Blood SimpleThere was a trailer for the DVD release of An American werewolf in London, the direct-to-video release of Tremors 3, and a trailer for a horror slasher anthology, a best-of-kills compilation called Boogeymen.