Part 6 (2/2)
”Jeez ...” Brendan shuddered. ”I forgot about that.”
”Yeah. Maybe we better not. Here, listen to this one.”
Tony clicked on <fontsize=-1ogden orff.=”” a=”” faint=”” voice=”” echoed=”” from=”” the=”” speaker,=”” declaiming=””></fontsize=-1ogden>< p=””>
”That's my boy-Ogden Orff!”
”Let me!” Brendan poked Tony's arm. ”C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, To-neee-”
Tony laughed. ”Be my guest.”
Brendan looked at the pictures, black-and-white publicity stills of Chip Crockett as his most notorious character: the weirdly Edwardian Ogden Orff, a man dressed as a boy in black jacket and trousers, with a long floppy tie and his hair slicked down. Ogden never spoke; only listened as Chip Crockett's sonorous off-screen voice offered him advice and the inevitable admonition-”No, Ogden, noooo!”
-but always ending with the same triumphant announcement- ”That's my boy-Ogden Orff!”
There were other characters, too. Ratnik, the beady-eyed beatnik puppet who carried around a copy of No Exit and ended each of his scenes by failing to find his way off the set. There was Captain Dingbat, navigating the Sloop John B through New York Harbor and calling the Statue of Liberty a Hotsy-Totsy. There was the Old Professor, quoting Groucho Marx instead of Karl; and Mister Knickerbocker lip-synching ”Mr. Ba.s.sman.” And last of all there was Chip Crockett himself again, sitting with a copy of Millions of Cats on his knees and reading to a studio audience of a dozen entranced children.
Only of course these were only pictures. No voiceovers, no soundtrack, no living color, except in Brendan's head. Just pictures. And there were only nine of them.
”That's it?” Brendan tried to keep his voice from breaking. ”What about, you said something about some video clips?”
”Yeah. Well, sort of. There's nothing from the actual show, just a couple of outtakes. But they're not very long. Everything was lost.” Tony sighed. ”Just-lost. I mean, can you believe it? They just taped over all of it. That's like taping over the moon landing, or Nixon's resignation or something.”
”Not really,” said Brendan, and he grabbed back the mouse.
The videoclips were about the size of Brendan's thumbprint, framed within a little grey TV screen. <fontsize=-1cocoa marsh=”” commercial.=”” funorama=”” blooper.=”” chip's=””></fontsize=-1cocoa>< p=””>
”Wow,” said Brendan. A timer underneath the little screen indicated how long each clip was.
Sixteen seconds. Twenty-seven seconds. Thirty-two seconds. ”There's not a lot of him left, is there?”
”Nope. But you know, I was thinking-like, maybe there could be like a hologram or something, you know? Like cloning someone. You have a tiny piece of their DNA and you can make a whole person. So, like, you'd only need a tiny piece of Chip Crockett, and you could bring back a whole episode.”
”Tony.” Brendan stopped himself before giving his automatic answer of thirty-odd years: Tony, you're an idiot. ”Tony, you're the Steve Wozniak of Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue. Do I just click on this?”
Tony nodded. Brendan clicked. A swirl of black-and-white-and-grey dots filled the tiny screen, danced around jerkily while a hollow voice intoned something Brendan could barely understand, though the words ”Cocoa Marsh” seemed prominent. It took nearly sixteen seconds for Brendan's eyes to force the pixels into an image that resembled a man's face and a puppet. By then the clip was over.”That's it?”
”That's it.”
Brendan played it again. This time he could make out the image more easily, a closeup of Chip Crockett and Ooga Booga, the puppet holding a gla.s.s and trying to drink from it while Chip encouraged him.
”That's right, Ooga Booga! Drink your Cocoa Marsh-”
Bam: the image froze, the screen went blank. Brendan ran it six more times, trying to fix it in his mind's eye, see if it stirred any memory at all of the original commercial. It didn't; but just that tiny clip was enough to bring rus.h.i.+ng back the wonderful sound of Chip's voice, the deep and deeply humorous tones that were the echo of some great benign Everydad. You could imagine him telling knock-knock jokes over the barbecue grill of your dreams, holding Ooga Booga as he tucked you into bed at night, taking sips from a can of Rheingold between verses of ”They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha!” You could imagine all of this, you could live all of this, and sometimes it seemed that you had.
”Check these out, man!”
He started, as Tony ran the other clips. They resembled the first: fuzzy black-and-white pointillist figures, tinny voices beamed from a million light years away; cheap sets. The last few notes of Chip's theme song faded and the screen cut to Ooga Booga nestled against Chip's face, his little longyears clapping spasmodically and Chip's lips moving, seemingly by remote control.
”... now Ooga Booga, tell all the boys and girls what you just told me-”
The image froze. It was over. No matter how many times you played it back, you'd never hear Ooga Booga's secret.
”Man, this really bites,” said Brendan. He replayed the blooper clip, Chip b.u.mping into a boom mike and pretending to wrestle it. ”There's really nothing else?”
”Nope.” Tony pulled his hair back, making a ponytail with his fingers. ”But if you read through all the letters people have sent, there's, like, all these rumors of other stuff. Like a couple of people say they've heard about some bootleg tapes that were shown on Italian TV in the '70s, tapes of actual shows that somehow got s.h.i.+pped over there or something. So there's this entire Chip Crockett Mafia trying to track them down, a bunch of fans and this retired video cameraman from New York. If they find them, they can broadcast them over the Net. They could probably broadcast them on TV, one of those stations that plays old stuff all the time.”
”I doubt they could do that, Tony. Even if they found the tapes. Which they won't.”
Tony swept the curtain of hair from his face and gave Brendan a hurt look. ”Hey, don't believe me. Here, look-”
Another click, and there were the e-mails from devoted fans: kids grown to doctors, lawyers, teachers, garbage men, rock stars, TV weathermen, editors.I'm 45 years old and boy, was I amazed to find an entire Web site devoted to Chip Crockett....
They were all pretty much like that, though surprisingly well-written and grammatically correct for e-mail. Brendan imagined an entire invisible electronic universe seething with this obsessive stuff, billions of people crowding the ether with their own variations on Chip Crockett -- obscure baseball players, writers, musicians, cars, books, dogs. He scanned the Chip Crockett messages, all variations on the themes of Boy, was I amazed and Gee, I remember when and Oh if only, a long lamentation for videos perdus.
If only they'd saved them!
If only WNEW knew what they were losing when they erased those tapes!
If only the technicians had done something!
If only I'd been there!
Brendan sighed and ran a longyear across his face. ”You know, this stuff is sort of depressing me. I think I'm gonna get the coffee going.”
Tony nodded without looking away from the screen. Reflexively, Brendan glanced back, saw a brief message that seemed to be the very last one.
Happy T'giving, everyone! Has anyone else heard about a bootleg of ”Silent Her” that's supposed to air on Christmas Eve? I'd like time/station info so I can tape it.
”You know about that, Tony?”
”Uh-uh.” Tony frowned, leaning forward until his nose almost touched the screen. ”That's kind of weird. Where would you hear about something like that? I mean, apart from this site?”
”Probably there's a thousand other sites like this. You know, weird TV, collectors' stuff. Christ, Tony, move back, you're gonna go blind.”
He put his longyears on Tony's shoulders and gently pulled him away from the screen. ”Come on.
Time for breakfast. Time for Cocoa Marsh.”
”Yeah. Yeah, I'm coming.” Tony stood, reluctantly, and yawned. ”Christmas. Wow. How could I forget it was Christmas?”
”It's not Christmas. It's the day after Thanksgiving,” said Brendan, seeing the first faint flickers of that other movie starting to burn around the edges of his head. Very deliberately he blinked, snowflakes melting into slush, a forest of evergreens flaming into ash and smoke, a black boot disappearing up a chimney that crumbled into rubble. ”You have a whole month to remember Christmas.” But Christmas was what Brendan was already trying to forget.
The truth was, over the last few years Brendan had become an expert at forgetting about Christmas. A few days after the start of the Official Holiday Shopping Season, the ubiquitous background soundtrack of ”Silver Bells” and ”Silent Night” and ”Christmas at K-Mart” haddiminished to nothing more than a very faint whining echo in his ears, choir boys and rampaging reindeer and Bing Crosby relegated to that same mental dungeon where he banned homeless people on the Metro, magazine ads for starving children, stray cats, and junkies nodding out at Dupont Circle. It didn't snow, so a whole gauntlet of joyfully shrieking kids on sleds or s...o...b..ards or big pieces of cardboard could be avoided. But it was cold, that frigid dank D.C.
cold that seeped into your pores and filled the newcasts with reports of homeless people freezing in alleys and cars stalling on the Beltway on their daily exodus to the sprawl.
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