Fran Ross - Oreo

She had not reached the summit of achievement to which she aspired, however, Scott confided. No, that day was still many vandalized vases, squashed tomatoes (a mechuleh medley), and lightly fantastic trippings away. That day would be reached only when his mother had perfected her art to such a point that she would be able to make breathing and blinking totally voluntary actions. Then and only then would she be ready to star in a play she had written for them both, Clumsy Claudette at the UN , in which she played the title role of warmongering bulbenik and he played the world’s greatest pacifist translator. The marquee would read: SCOTT SCOTT AND SCOTT SCOTT IN SCOTT SCOTT’S CLUMSY CLAUDETTE AT THE UN. They had agreed that although she would give up the stage after the run of the play, she would continue to share in any fame that accrued to his Scott Scott as though it were her own. It was to him equal, since he was convinced that the play, a marvelous melding of their unique talents, would probably run for their lifetime or until one of them was eighty-five, whichever was later.

As his mother exploded from the kitchen with the tray of hors d’oeuvres, Scott rushed over to her. “Permit me. The outside of works— me , I them will carry.” He took the tray from her. “Rest you on that chair-long there.”

Mrs. Scott must have been tired. She tripped only twice on her way to the couch. Scott brought the tray over — a farrago of spills and misses, which Oreo tasted only out of an experimental sense of politeness.

“You said you might have some information about my father?” said Oreo, picking up a plain cracker whose spread was a blob on the underside of the tray.

“Ah, yes, one moment, if it you pleases.” Scott tore a sheet of paper from his three-ringed looseleaf notebook and wrote something with a flourish. “There is!” he said, handing it to Oreo. He explained that she might be able to find her father at either of two sound studios uptown, one on the East Side, the other in Harlem.

Oreo thanked the Scotts for their hospitality and got up to leave.

“So long. It was nice meeting you,” said Mrs. Scott. She waved good-bye, knocking over a stool, which set up a vibration, which made a cup fall off a hook on the kitchen wall and crash to the floor, where she could trip over the shards later.

“To the to see again,” said Scott. He opened the door for Oreo.

“To God,” said Oreo, swinging her walking stick in salute.

Oreo on Second Avenue in the seventies

No one at the In-the-Groove Sound Studios had seen Samuel Schwartz for several weeks. As Oreo walked up the street, she saw a pig run squealing out of a doorway, a bacon’s dozen of pursuers pork-barreling after it. Oreo started running too. As she neared the building from which the pig had made its exit, she saw that it was a pork butcher’s. In its attempt at escape, the pig had made a shambles of the shambles. Oreo continued in the pig pursuit. The porker darted across the street. Oreo flung her walking stick at its legs. The cane did a double whirl, tripping up the pig. A taxi turning into Second Avenue screeched on its brakes, but not in time. The cab sideswiped the pig, which tottered a few feet, then fell dead in front of Temple Shaaray Tefila, directly across from the pork store.

Unwittingly, Oreo was the indirect cause of the pig’s death, but as she reflected on its porcine demise, she realized that she could take out her list again. That hashed rasher of bacon defiling the temple sidewalk — that surely was “Sow.” Yes, that must be so.

Oreo and Mr. Soundman

Mr. Soundman, Inc., was in a renovated brownstone on Lenox Avenue. Oreo could hear the strange permutations of words speeded up and slowed down, rushed backward and whisked forward, the barbaric yawp of words cut off in mid-syllable (the choked consonants, the disavowed vowels), burdened with excessive volume, affecting elusive portent. Words were all over the floor. Words and time. What word was that there in the corner, curled up like a fetus? And this umbilicus of sound, what caesarean intervention had ripped it untimely from its mother root? Sound boomed off the walls, rocketing around the hallways as it charged out of an open door marked Control Room B.

Reep-warf-shuh, reep-warf-shuh, reep-warf-shuh , repeated some backward sounds as Oreo stuck her head in the door. An engineer in a desk chair wheeled among three machines — two tape decks and a master-control console — his ropy arms whipping about like licorice twists. Two pencils stuck out at forty-five-degree angles from his hedgelike natural, pruned to topiary perfection and so bulbous that, along with his dark, chitinous skin and his sunglasses with huge brown convex lenses, he had the look of an undersized mock-up of a movie monster — the grasshopper that spritzed on Las Vegas.

The soundman noticed Oreo on one of his whirls and motioned her into a chair. He stopped the two tape machines. Then he deftly unreeled a three-foot length of tape from one end of a reel, pulled it back and forth between the sound heads ( Raugh-vooff-skunge, raugh-vooff-skunge , it went as it sawed between the heads), found the spot he wanted, and made a quick slice with a razor. The piece fell to the floor amidst the curly riot of words previously dispatched. How many reep-warf-shuhs and raugh-vooff-skunges that piece represented, Oreo couldn’t guess. The engineer then laid a loose end of the tape still on the reel in a groove at the front of his machine, stripped in a piece of white leader from another reel with Scotch tape and a razor, whirled the gray reels of his tape deck a few times, then stopped. He walked out of the control room, motioning Oreo to follow him.

They walked down the hall to a small office. So far neither of them had said a word. The engineer pointed to a chair next to a desk piled with a stack of oddly shaped cardboards. Oreo sat down. Since the man didn’t say anything but merely looked at her expectantly — or, rather, his glasses were turned toward her — she said, “I’m Christine Clark. Is Slim Jackson around?”

The man pointed to himself, then shuffled through the pile of cardboards next to him on the desk. He held one up. It was shaped like a cartoon balloon, and the message read: YOU’RE LOOKING AT HIM.

“Can’t you talk?” Oreo asked. He shook his head. After establishing that Slim was neither antisocial nor laryngitic but mute, Oreo asked permission to look through his balloons so that she would know the range of answers he was prepared to give. She found the usual:

FORGET IT, CLYDE

RUN IT DOWN FOR ME

RIGHT ON

YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING

LATER FOR THAT

GROOVY

TOUGH TITTY

I CAN DIG IT

WATCH YOUR MOUTH

DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS

She saw that he had translated the typical cartoon asterisk-spiral-star-exclamation point-scribble as a straightforward FUCK YOU, YOU MUTHA. He had a pile of blank balloons and a stack of balloons with drawings: a cocktail glass with an olive followed by a question mark; a Star of David followed by a question mark; an egg-shaped cartoon character with a surprised look on its face (the “That’s funny — you don’t look Jewish” follow-up to the Star of David? Oreo wondered); an inverted pyramid of three dots and an upcurving line; the three dots again with a downcurving line; a clenched fist with the middle finger raised in the “up yours” position. These last Oreo thought redundant, since Slim could easily pantomime them or use an available word balloon. True, the drawings gave him shades of translation that might be lost in the original gesture. Besides, his blank cards indicated that he was not unaware of the limitations of form balloons. Oreo conceded her argument with herself to herself. Yes, both the words and the drawings had a place.