It was late on into winter but still the sun went down early. Earlier on, the day had been clear, and the sky blue and majestic, but the clouds had come in the afternoon and turned everything the color of old chalk as the sun sank low-spirited in the sky and then was gone. I was waiting outside in the dissipation of the light for the car to come. We had wanted to leave straight from school but it was agreed by the parental collective that we would have to come home and “rest up” and eat a meal before we could go. We had all rushed home and done this as tokenly as we could and now I was waiting out in front of my house in the growing dark and they were coming for me last because I lived nearest the highway.
Waiting on the shoveled walk, I felt the strange sensation of seeing a usual thing at an unusual hour. The dull, unchanging array of streets and mailboxes and houses seemed to shift its form under the descending veil of darkness, growing foreboding and unfamiliar in the still, waiting dusk. The harmless facade of suburbia shimmered and faded, and in the coming of the shadow-hour was revealed a faceless labyrinth filled with secrets both sordid and sorrowful. In an upper room of a far-off house, a shade was suddenly pulled, darkening a swath of snow-strewn lawn. Here and there silhouetted figures moved behind curtains, upon secret business. Lights came furtively on in some of the houses, while others remained dark, concealing, I imagined, the pinched faces of husbands who watched at windows, lying in wait for their unsuspecting wives. All of this went on almost unnoticed, marked by no one save myself, and perhaps the young widow at the end of the cul-de-sac, who it is said sits, even in darkness, in her splintered rocking-chair, and sings sad, lilting arias in the settling silence.
A certain potency seemed to rise up into the air and I breathed it deeply and for a moment felt inhabited by that certain sensation, a commingling of thrill and fear, that gives you the idea that you are either about to die or about to truly live for the first time. Then I heard a car turn and come up the block. It was them. As soon as I opened the car door, Crow’s voice shot a dozen meaningless things into the pristine air. As we pulled away, I looked back at the disappearing neighborhood and was disappointed to find that my reverie had already been broken; the place already transformed back into its old self, the interminable bored congregation of houses containing ruined, meaningless lives and streets leading from nowhere to nowhere.
“In the end, it’s got to be the double-barreled shotgun. It’s the best at close range, and if you’re any good you can always get to close range.”
“Plus it’s got the most class.”
“Right, it’s got the most class, too.”
“I dunno, can it really stand up to the rocket launcher?” I put in. “Sure, you’ve got a chance of hurting yourself, but in a crowded room that’s what’s going to do you the most good.”
“Alright, that’s a viable point if we’re talking multiple victims at once,” Crow conceded briskly. “If you’ve got a lot of targets to put down at once, you might have to swallow your pride and pull out the really heavy stuff.”
“Also for long range,” Servo added.
“Right. But the fact remains: the most common situation you’re going to come across is going to be the single target at close range, and the double-barrel is the ideal weapon for that scenario.”
“He’s got a point, Gyp,” said Servo. “Next to the chainsaw, the double-barrel is my favorite. It’s the style and the substance.”
“Hey, I love it too, don’t get me wrong. It just seems to me that if I’ve got the double-barrel and I’m up against, say, the rocket launcher or the plasma gun, I’m likely to lose, even at close range.”
“That’s because you still suck at the game, Gypsy. The double-barrel takes a lot more skill to use than either of those. You’ve got to be able to put ‘em down with your first shot otherwise it’s not the weapon for you. The plasma is probably still the one for you: you can always hurt somebody with the plasma even if you don’t have any skill. That’s why people think it’s cheap.”
“Bah, the plasma gun. It is cheap. You never get any style points with that thing. Even the BFG you can get style points with.” Servo was always concerned with his style points. He had a certain Doom aesthetic.
“So, you’re telling me that if someone equally as good as you had the plasma gun and you had the double-barrel, and you were at close range, you would consistently beat them?” I asked Crow.
“First of all nobody’s as good as me. Second of all, yes. Not by much, maybe, but yes. The double-barrel, while by all appearances the underdog’s weapon, really is the weapon of champions.” Crow was always keenly aware of his Deathmatch prowess, and of the fact that it gave him the power of ultimate judgement over all things Doom. You couldn’t argue with him unless you could beat him, and you could never beat him, so there it was. Outside the car the last light was slipping under the earth. The car full of would-be massacrers rolled on westward under the night.
We were headed to Best Brains Studios, which was – according to our best sources – to be found somewhere amidst the maze of nondescript industrial parks that comprises most of the Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prarie. Best Brains was the creator of the venerable cable comedy Mystery Science Theatre 3000. For eleven years they had put out, to a small but fanatical cult following, the oddest and funniest show in all of what I know of television history, documenting the life and times of a lonely human shot into space on the orbiting Satellite of Love by a mad scientist, and forced to watch bad movies until driven insane. Due to this admittedly thin premise, our hero was forced to lampoon stupefying cinematic trash on a regular basis in the name of his own good sanity. Helping him out were his homemade robot friends: the dutiful ship’s pilot Gypsy, the documentarian Cambot – a cheerful plot device who enabled cable-watching Earthlings to see what went on – and the wise-cracking and movie theater-going duo of Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo. The show was a sort of low-budget salvation, and we were all wholly in love with it.
But now it had died. One shrouded day a few months back The Sci-Fi Channel had announced that they wouldn’t order any more episodes. Never overwhelmingly popular, MST3K had been dropped for the second and final time. You know that quote that goes: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has?” That’s a bunch of trash. Even a small group committed enough to send Margaret Mead into throes of ecstasy would be no match for the undersized but tenaciously zealous cult of MSTies, and their uproar was met with a deafening and impenetrable silence. In a thrilling validation of the impotence of the common man, their cries went unheeded and the show went on dying. The week before our trek, the last episode had been wrapped up. The Satellite of Love had crashed violently to earth, and the only thing we could think to do was to go find the place where it lay and pay our respects there, and maybe get a piece of the wreckage for nostalgia’s sake. So we sped forth, towards the condemned studio, where there was to be an auction of set-pieces, props, and robots early the next morning.
Senior year of high school I wrote an English paper (in response to one of those open topics that are given by teachers who are creative and wish hopelessly that their students were the same) that began like this:
“It is a private theory of mine that the Midwest has, beneath its teeming majority that adhere to all the codes of blandness and small-mindedness that pass as traditional heartland values, a creative underground the merits of which rival either of our country’s more famous coasts. In proof of this theory I need only point to the immortal newspaper The Onion. Every wise person I know depends upon it for their comedy, and a good many for their political conscience. It is another private theory of mine that most Midwestern genius is destined to fail, should it come upon a nationwide stage, because anyone innately Midwestern is, as Scott Fitzgerald once said, ‘subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.’ I do not think we fare any better in the West. In proof of the theory that Midwestern genius fails and withers away before the eyes of the country, I need only point to Mystery Science Theater 3000.”
You will perhaps find it doubtful that I wrote with such affected pretension at such a young age. I must assure you that I did.
Even if I were still able to nutshell the world with my old high school ease, I would be hard pressed to explain the exact reason for MST3K’s failure. Like all failed “genius,” it may have been a little too original for its own good. Here there does not seem to be any illusion about an original thing having widespread popularity. Perhaps because of this, our basement creators never seem to bother pandering, and there is something about their freedom of idiosyncrasy that seems to doom their later ventures into the outside world.
I remember a conversation I once had on the board with Tom Servo. He was telling me about his latest idea for a show – Tom professes to be a aspiring puppeteer, though I don’t think he’s ever done a show for an audience, and certainly would never have let us see him do one – and I said something to the effect of “That’s clever, but most people won’t get it.”
“Most people won’t be watching,” he replied.
So it was, and is, in my Midwest. I feel I should try to give some little idea of my relation to the place, for though it bears Servo and Crow and the rest of us unwillingly, we are still a part of it, and it of us, inextricably. Though we scorn it at every chance, it lives in us, an extended family with whom we have, or like to believe we have, not a single thing in common…
When I took the chance to go to London for two weeks last winter break – an advantage of Eastern universities is the prevalence of old-money wastrels who are somehow allowed to take whole gangs of their poorer friends to Europe – I found myself desperately tracking down an American sports bar so I could watch the Packers-Vikings game. At the time I thought, “Well, so much for rebellion,” but in retrospect I feel that it was. What the Midwest has taught me, above all else, is perpetual dissidence. No matter where I am, I know I will at times do the opposite of what is most popularly done there: while in England, I must at times watch football; while in Wisconsin, I must occasionally sit around drinking tea and reciting Oscar Wilde. Even my tea, though, is had in such a way that would not pass in a place like New York: it, too, is steeped in the dark, musky-filled waters and swirled by the wood-smoke winds of this land. Ah, this land, where under a sky of endless, cirrus-veined blue, we sit in our sweat pants, watching Packers Extra.
“The sky is so black that it’s blue. Or is it so blue that it’s black?” Servo stood on the gravel, his gawky head craned heavenward. We had stopped at an old abandoned gas station to use the bathroom, which had been left invitingly propped open by a crumbling cinderblock.
“The air is so cold that it’s hot. No, wait, it’s so cold that it’s fucking cold. Let’s go.” Crow got back into the car and slammed the door.
Servo and I lingered a moment, under the blue-black sky, in a quiet broken only by Crow’s muffled rustlings. Off in the distance was the light of a solitary ice-fishing shanty.
“Shooting star,” Tom said.
I looked up, but there was only his frail arm, thick with hair like wire, pointing at the old, unmoving stars.
“Satellite of Love?” I asked.
He chuckled and shook his head.
Crow opened the car door, and slammed it shut, four times.
“Damnit Servo, you’re wearing a t-shirt for Chrissakes! Get in the car you crazy dildos.”
Servo brought his arm downward.
I pulled out in a swirl of gravel and clay. Crow pawed restlessly through a backpack of his CD’s next to me. A stack of cases toppled and broke in a wave around my foot. I picked one up.
“What’s this?”
Crow took it from me and examined it a moment in the light of the dash that reflected dimly off the plastic case.
“Guided By Voices.”
“Sounds like a Baptist choir,” I ventured. Crow blinked many, many times and turned to Servo with an appalled mouth hanging wide. He seemed to want some confirmation that such a stupidity as mine was possible. Servo was evidently not disgusted with me to a satisfactory degree, so Crow slammed the power button on the radio and thrust the CD inside.
“This is Alien Lanes. It’s not a fucking bowling alley.” He put it in and picked a track and something loud came out. Our car had crashed into a wall of sound made of fuzzed-out guitars. I think the song was what is affectionately called lo-fi. Which means the guys who made it don’t have any money. Guys who don’t have any money have a distinctive sound. It’s the sound of bad recording equipment.
“When do we get to hear Guided By Voices?” This was Servo. Crow snapped a glare at him and I saw that his “I mean business here” face was on. He’d gotten sick of us mistaking his music, as an immigrant is sick of Midwesterners mispronouncing his children’s names. Amal does not rhyme with enamel and The Eels are not The Frogs. I tightened up on the wheel as Crow opened his mouth, but before he could launch anything from his great maw, Servo leaned forward and let the dim light play upon his little mischief grin. He was only taunting Crow a little. He knew all about Crow’s music, about how Alien Lanes was the title of a Guided By Voices album. That’s a mistake that our fathers make. Confusing the title and the band name. You have to point it out when you make a Christmas list, or they’ll get it wrong. I felt a little ashamed.
“Dickweed.”
“Say, look at that,” Tom Servo said, his reedy voice rising over the music.
We stared blindly out through the glass.
“It’s dark out,” Crow observed.
“Yea, I know it’s dark out. But we just passed a trooper just sitting there on the side of the road.”
“And…”
“And it looked just like in Manos.”
“Whoa. Was there a couple makin’ out, too?”
“No, they haven’t gotten to that part yet.”
“Are we the Sunday driving family, then?” I put in. I didn’t know the show as well as they did, but everyone knew the Manos episode.
“Oh, ya. ‘Look, there’s a field! And another field. And…another field.’
‘Shot on location in Spooner, Wisconsin!’
‘The movie just lapped itself!’” Servo could go on like this all night, quoting his Tupperware doppelganger.
We all stared out as though cinematic magic was rising in waves from the illuminated roadside gravel.
“‘Do something!’” Crow riffed. In Manos: The Hands of Fate – yes, that really does translate into Hands: The Hands of Fate – there is a stupidly long scene where a family spends an afternoon aimlessly driving around a seedy, run-down desert. It’s as though the director had the bright idea of simulating the passage of time by actually filming time passing. Manos was the first MST3K episode the three of us watched together. The basic plot of the movie, if you can call it that, is that this family somehow gets lost within the outskirts of a small desert town and winds up staying at this house run by a mush-mouthed servant named Torgo, who oddly resembles Joe Cocker and stumbles through his duties on a pair of big prosthetic knees – ostensibly because he’s a satyr – “taking care of the place while The Master is away.” The Master, you may be interested to know, is an occasionally flaming-handed, always ultra-polygamous worshipper of the little-known demon god Manos. The movie was made by, I swear, a fertilizer salesman, and also involves a lot of women in nightgowns being tied to poles and wrestling with one another for The Master’s favor. And it’s a lot worse than it sounds, believe me. If you can imagine watching all of this go on in complete seriousness on the movie screen, while at the same time watching it torn apart by the witty repartee of silhouetted bubblegum machine-headed and pin-beaked robots, you might begin to understand our fanatical devotion. Crow and Tom Servo recited on from Manos with the familiarity that only cult programming inspires, and we sped imperceptibly towards Minnesota and left Spooner, Wisconsin lying in the eastward darkness among a host of other bleak and inherently comical towns.
In Eden Prairie, in the summer of 1989, somewhere in an anonymous building in a district of anonymous buildings, amidst the dull industrial geometry of sheet-metal cubes and concrete lines and circles, here and there broken by an asymmetrical scrap heap, rests two puppet robots. They hang side-by-side on hooks, or perhaps slouch on tables. Around them lies an assortment of amputated toys and mismatched plastics. One is colored an unburnished gold, and appears to be made mostly of Tupperware and sporting goods. The other resembles a red and white gumball machine with a skirt on. Now sounds are heard. Now men enter. The golden puppet is lifted; an arm goes into him. His bowling-pin beak swings to and fro, testing the air. It flaps angrily. The gumball machine now too comes to life. It peers around, its white hands bouncing uselessly. It shifts its gaze to the gold robot.
“Hello, Crow,” it says.
“Dickweed,” the gold robot replies, as it would so often reply. Its beak opens and shuts again, as it would so often open and shut, as the maw of Crow T. Robot, the short-fused wisecracker, ever flapping against the ridiculous world that had the gall to make films like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, and many, many Gamera movies.
But the gumball machine is not offended. He is too well mannered for that. He’s a dapper gent, this Tom Servo. Elegantly mannered, copiously witty, he is never one to miss a black tie affair. He wields an impeccable aesthetic, with which he will scythe through generations of shabby derivatives.
Now they are carried across the room, seated in front of a television. A third seat lies empty between them for a moment, then is filled by a sleepy-eyed man. The television turns on, begins to play a movie. Practice begins. They have only a few months in which to tape 13 shows. If they aren’t a hit, they will be cancelled, as they were nearly cancelled by KTMA, the lowest-rated TV station in Minneapolis, months earlier. The robots turn their eyes intently to the television. A movie called “The Crawling Eye” begins to play.
“I wonder if we can work Richard Baseheart into this,” says Tom Servo. What this means, you will probably never know.
We crawled onwards through the blue darkness. Servo and I had been keeping to ourselves and Crow had been playing DJ in lieu of talking. For the past four hours we had listened to an unceasing parade of music that sounded as though it had been recorded on equipment loaned from Fischer Price. Perhaps I would have liked it if they hadn’t chosen to record inside of a seashell, but I couldn’t tell. I ventured aloud a hope that I might choose the next cd.
“Next is Low,” Crow said, not stopping to think. “They’re great night music.”
I shouldn’t have bothered: he had been using his shotgun privileges past the point of abuse all day. Low, my mind went, almost automatically. REM, from Out of Time, and Cracker, from Kerosene Hat. A quirk of mine is that I happen to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every song played on modern rock or alternative radio between 1991 and its death. This is not something I would mention, but around Tom and Crow I had to marshal my quirks.
Much of my friendship with Crow and Tom Servo was a hopeless attempt to make up for too much time lost in the mainstream. When I met those two, I was frighteningly normal in my tastes, and to some extent still am so. I’m not so normal as to like the popular drivel: I’m never going to own any Kenny G records, or read John Grisham, and the phrases “heart-warming” and “stand up and cheer” are enough to chill my bones and make me want to fall to my knees and mutter wordless vulgarities, but in my own way I am predictable. Granted, my own way is perhaps an odd one: rare, I suppose, are those whose formative influences include sys_ops and wisecracking Tupperware robots, nevertheless I like most of the things other people like me like. A true expert might be able to pigeonhole me, given enough wood: I’m probably a Post-Post-Modernist Neoclassicist Romantic Midwestern Red-Throated Goopher or something. The day I meet that expert, though, will be the day I kill either her or myself, because I’m deathly afraid of being definable. I speculate about my own definition so that others won’t try. I don’t know my limits, and I never want to. I want what I’m capable of to stretch out like space-time.
But that’s enough about me. There’s just one more thing worth knowing, really, perhaps the fundamental difference between Crow and Tom Servo and I: I’m one of those people who’s always going to come out alright in the end.
Crow and Tom Servo were not in any way mainstream, their idiosyncrasy was felt all the way to their deep-space core. I joined them on many strange ventures of body and mind, but somehow I was always the last to get picked up, sitting in the uncomfortable third seat. If one is named Crow, the other must be named Tom Servo, because those are the two chief ‘bots. But what is the third to be named? Joel? Pedestrian at best. Cambot? Despite he and I sharing out Outsider Syndromes and our love of documenting, he was just too minor a player in the show to be the third wheel. Gypsy? As a character, usually either boring or ditsy: not a flattering choice. I wouldn’t have ever chosen it, given a choice, but it was my screen-name before I knew anything of the Satellite of Love, and it is somehow fitting that I came to know MST3K through the bulletin board.
I discovered the bulletin board CyberQuest during the fall of my sophomore year of high school. A friend of mind knew about it, and we called it up one day as part of our bloodthirsty effort to play Doom II against one another on-line. CyberQuest was a BBS in Milwaukee that you could dial up to and play games with other people over the modem. The two of us signed up for our free trial periods. He stayed five days; I stayed almost three years.
The bulletin board is a thing that the world has by now trampled over and passed by. It was innately local and entirely text, and, because of this, has passed into obsoleteness. It is true that some boards are still operational, trying to eke out a meager existence through telnet, but most of what is left of the BBS age are bits of CyberQuest and others of its kind that float through cyberspace like so many exploded planets, an antiquated wastage of broken telnet links and lost file fragments.
I was one of the last children of these doomed, homely outposts. This could conceivably be seen by some as being one of the last of a venerable, dying breed, but is probably more likely equated with being one of the last people to invest wholeheartedly in the 8-track. Still, being a BBS guy fits snugly into my love of old things: I now know at least one language that will soon be dead to the world. I’m sure I can’t be alone in my passion for arcane technology: I don’t doubt that somewhere out there in the pale blue world there are whole communities of people who get teary-eyed about the dying days of DOS, regretfully living on in a world that shall forever favor all things that may be pointed at and clicked upon. In some small, dear, dorky way, these are my people, for there are few nostalgias that stir me like my nostalgia for plain text.
The choosing of a screen name is a ritual similar to the naming of a baby, only much more self-involved. When I came onto CyberQuest, I chose Gypsy as mine, attempting to brand myself as one of a rare race of romantic free-spirits, continually driven on from one exotic, beautiful, and endlessly adventuresome land to another by the ache of an incurable wanderlust. They mistook me for a robot, though, and that was the first I ever heard of MST3K. That was, I think, the one time I got something worthwhile out of proclaiming the endless romanticism of my heart. It was also the first time I was introduced to the characters Crow and Tom Servo. They made much ecstasy when I first logged on. They thought they had found a brother. When I confessed my ignorance, a little sad that I didn’t really belong to their secret society, they were unwilling to abandon the idea, and so they adopted me. I spent most all my free time on the board those first few weeks, allowing them ample opportunity to convert me, and sure enough, one Friday afternoon I found myself renting Videoland’s lone copy of MST3K: The Movie, and entering forever into that subterranean world.
Years later we would look back on that day, laughing at my ignorance and replaying the chat that played out in the strange language of the BBS global chat program:
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): What’s MST3K?
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): WHAAAAAAAT?
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo is sighing wistfully.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): WHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAT?
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo shakes his head sadly.
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo pats you on the head softly.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): What did I do?
>>> Chan #0 (424) Crow is shaking you up and down!
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): You know that show where they watch bad movies and make fun of them?
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): oh
>>> Chan #0 (424) Crow is screaming his head off at Gypsy!
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): and you can see their silhouettes sitting in the theater?
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): Yes.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): that’s it
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): ignoramus
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): sure. Never seen it, though.
>>> Chan #0 (424) Crow wonders if we should shoot him or learn him.
>>> Chan #0 (424) Crow would not object to the shooting.
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo appears to be in deep thought.
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo learns Gypsy.
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo whips out a gun and shoots Crow!
>>> Chan #0 (424) Crow is bleeding all over the place!
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): ow
After this we proceeded to blow the hell out of each other. Crow and Servo had also originally come to the board to play Doom II. And play we did. It became a ritual: we ventured out and sniped, liquefied, mowed down, cut up, pulverized and in a hundred other ways fragged each other to our desensitized hearts’ content, and afterwards we went back to the board and talked our way into a dear friendship. By the time I realized that I had come into something dear – which was some time – I was at least halfway competent at the game, but when I first came on I was god-awful. I used this sticky old joystick that made my soldier appear not only slow-witted but arthritic. Like a man facing his execution over and over again in a dream, I was continually turning and facing the wall while someone came up behind me and blew my brains out with infinite leisure. Eventually I evolved into mouse-only control, which was also a fairly stupid way of doing things, but at least by that time I had learned to face in the right direction while I was being leisurely blown apart.
It was Crow who reduced me to entrails the most often. Servo was pretty good as well, but ultimately I would be able to beat him. Really, he was more interested in doing queer, improbable things inside the game than he was in winning. Anyway, his preferred game was HeXeN, a fantasy-themed and slightly more cerebral spin-off of Doom, at which he was utterly peerless. But Crow had worked his way to the top in Doom, and was now the best at Doom II, and in the future would retain his crown on into the Quake series. He had a few rivals, but like any good action hero, he always got them in the end. Eventually he was the one who deigned to teach me the art of using the keyboard and the mouse together, which was the best way to play. Though I never beat him and never came close, his teachings are what allow me to now humiliate legions of my fellow Freshmen at college. Every time I win a game, I recall him standing over my corpse and shouting “Eat Crow!” Going to CyberQuest was a little like going to military school, in a light-hearted sort of way.
And so we met on the killing fields. Though the color of our soldiers was different from game to game, I always knew who was who by their well-worn methods of killing me. Crow was the one who would get me by making rockets explode in my face whenever I stepped around any corner, not because he had met me there face-to-face and out-drawn me, but because he had calculated to the quarter-second when in my headlong dash towards death I would appear there, and had shot a rocket two or three seconds earlier that would meet me just as I turned the corner. This was not guessing, this was a simple matter of – having killed me in the first place – hearing the sound of my re-spawn, knowing by ear where on the map that meant I was coming from, and deducing, by knowing my playing style better than I myself did, how long it would take me to get from that spot to the fatal corner. Crow was magic, Crow was money. Servo was the one who would lurk in dark corners and kill me with the chainsaw, not because that was the most efficient way but because it was the most hilarious. To this day I still love Doom II, and the euphoria I get from beating other people at it is near the top of my list of dear and dorky pleasures, but it is a love born out of many nightmarish evenings, lost and confused, caught between certain death and humiliating death.
It had gotten to the point when it was neither late nor early and from there things stopped having any significance at all. We had wandered aimless and lorn through the lamp-lit corners and endless corridors of the suburban labyrinth for what we were sure must have been all night. Dawn lay hidden, an indeterminate distance away, indistinguishable amid the city’s aura. It was anybody’s guess as to whether it would ever come up again. The clock on Servo’s creaky old Buick has inexplicably gone out. We drove until all faith in our directions had gone, and then we drove some more. Eventually we had managed to lose all sense of direction and almost all of our gas, nearly stranding ourselves in some especially clean and unmarked part of the clean, unmarked wasteland. Through our only stroke of luck, we had happened upon a 24-hour gas station. Behind the counter were two long-haired creatures: an extremely thin man of extraordinary suspicion and another, flabbier man with a Twins baseball cap and a colossal indifference who looked like he had not stood erect in a very long time and perhaps even lacked the ability to do so.
Surely a city of industrial parks must be laid out on some sort of ordered grid. Surely it is difficult to become lost upon a grid. I had been reasoning out loud for such a long time that Crow had pulled out the inevitable, tired, “Don’t call me Shirley.” It was a sad moment for us all, but we had kept on. Things we knew: our directions had been wrong, we did not know where we were, and we did not know where we were going. There was probably a sign somewhere amid the deceptively vast, unremarkable city that said Best Brains, but it was probably not very large. We had all reached that point where you become so dogged that you actually prefer doggedness to other, superior ways of getting things done, that point where your only desire is to “just keep going.” It is mindless but you no longer care.
And so we just kept going. We had gone down 17th Street, which was indistinguishable from Kent Hrbeck Blvd., which was indistinguishable from Cocoa Beach Court. Arapaho Way and Red Rock Road and Crane Dance Trail dissolved into one flat stretch of mildly illuminated concrete that evoked no sense of Indian heritage. If the ghosts of the Brave and the Squaw yet haunted this plowed-over land, they had been enticed to Bingo in the Legion hall.
We cruised the vacant industrial parks like machinists out for a good time. Again and again we criss-crossed the city, beneath the lights of solemn street-lamps and the shadows of great, snow-laden branches. Lost in the lull of ghostly lights shining upon empty parking lots, the world became again unreal to me and it seemed as though the fields of concrete stretched smoothly on forever, in perfect harmony with all space and earth, with here and there a benevolent, useful factory waiting to welcome us into a world full of perfect order where small, happy humans held small, happy jobs beneath the sovereign eye of local regent Joe P. Schmidt, Prince of Corrugated Roofing, Asst. Supervisor of the Midwestern Branch of WorldCo, Inc.
The time came when we could go on no more. We were stiff and frustrated and far too tired. We decided to quit for the night and rest until six or so, when more people would be around to give us directions than just those two longhaired guys at the Kwik Trip. Servo pulled the car into an empty parking lot next to some small corporate pond and we all curled up beneath our coats, under that inescapable, somehow malevolent streetlight glow.
I awoke to the sound of music. Dawn had begun to rise, pale over the feeble yellow of the city. I looked out into the wan light and saw, before a pond glazed thinly with new ice, a scene that made it seem that I had not wakened at all, that I was still passing through some strange fever-dream.
A man in a cape stood at the end of the lot, his arms raised rigid to the sky, presiding over two raised, open caskets, a half-moon of about twenty seated onlookers, and a four-piece brass band. The band was blatting out something perversely noble and solemn. After a moment I identified it as the MST3K Love Theme.
I reached forward and shook Servo.
“I know,” he said.
“God damn,” Crow whispered thinly.
Presently, the band stopped and the cape-shrouded man began to speak. He stood flanked by the two coffins, his head bowed in what would have been a mockery of tragedy except that tears were streaming freely down his face. He spoke in a deep, passionate, unintelligible voice, and his audience sat at complete attention, stiff-backed and rapt. It was like a scene from a bad movie. We sat there, watching, Tom Servo on the left, and Crow on the right, and me leaning forward in the center.
Servo eased his window open. The speaker’s words drifted in upon the morning air:
“-can it not then be said that for them, downward is heavenward?
Let us not too long mourn these dead. Take this final, grief-strewn hour; hold it softly in the arms of well-worn love, but with its passing let it pass. In life they were among the stars, and now they must return. After we have lingered here this while, let them float home, in soft jettison to eternal release, in the circle of ashes to ashes, dust to dust, void to void.
And so we leave you, Crow T. Robot. And so we leave you, Tom Servo. Float home. Rest now, with the lost satellites, in a peace beyond all human orbit. You have earned it, and we leave it you, though our eyes yet stray heavenward; though the day of our forgetting never pass.”
The man was silent and nothing was heard but the chill air passing softly across the land. The weird cult was still for a long moment. Then the man went and quietly closed the caskets. The sound of a motor was heard, and a shining hearse drove slowly across the lot to the caskets. The man loaded them up himself, got in, and was driven away. The onlookers and the brass band remained motionless, their stillness broken only by the odd whipping of a coat-sleeve. At one minute they turned suddenly, almost as one, and filed out of the lot in a dragging yet formal procession, fading lingeringly into the clean, concrete labyrinth, the scattered brass shining in the new day sun.
We sat in a trance until the last of the horns had receded, and then we started shouting things, half to ourselves, with enormous appetite. Crow wanted to know what the hell just, and who they were to think they could, and what kind of loonies do that sort of, and whether this was still, and he also wanted to say “fuck” a lot. And so he did. I wasn’t much better. My fundamental okay-ness got put on its heels for a second or two there, I admit.
Servo did not look particularly taken aback, except for the fact that he was blinking incessantly and cocking his head to and fro. Suddenly he said, very calmly and clearly, “Well, will you look at that. We’re at Best Brains.”
We both turned to him. He pointed out his window.
“Look.”
Sure enough, there across the lucky lot, glinting in the sun, was a small sign that said “Best Brains Studios.”
“What time is it?”
Servo turned on the car. The clock worked again. It was six thirty-two.
Staring out at the vacant erstwhile cemetery, Crow said, in an odd voice, “The Master got them at last.”
We never learned who they were, or if they were, or where they came from or went, or even whether there were actual ‘bots in the caskets. I thought there probably were. Any group with enough of whatever it was you needed to have in order to perform a parking-lot funeral probably had enough of it to get real robots, too. I could imagine the ‘bots in the caskets, shining gold and glinting plastic in the sun. Though I hadn’t seen it, I imagined that Crow’s beak would protrude a little out of an open coffin. Servo’s useless arms were too short to be crossed and so they would hang limp and bounce a little at every movement, disrupting his solemnity and making it seem as though he were still feebly struggling for life. The ‘bots were actually puppets, and so were rarely shown below the waist, and it would be unsettling to see their lack of legs so obviously, as though they had both lost limbs when the Satellite of Love had crashed finally to earth.
At a quarter to eight we came back to Best Brains. Strangely, it was as deserted as when we’d left it. Uneasily, we approached the building and tried the main entrance. It was locked. We banged on the glass. No one answered. Inside the reception area was dark. Crow looked at Tom Servo.
“Eight?”
“That’s right.”
“And where’d you get this info at, again?”
“On Usenet. It’s confirmed.”
We went around to the back of the building, where a warehouse rose out of the front offices. We banged exhaustingly on the huge metal doors on each side of the building. After waiting four or five minutes at the final door, we were about to go back to the front when it was suddenly wrenched open. A plain-looking, dark-haired man with a moustache stood casually in the doorway. “Can I help you?”
“We’re here to buy some ‘bots,” Crow proclaimed.
“What?”
“The auction,” said Servo. “We’re here for the auction.”
After a pause, the mustachioed man said: “There isn’t any auction here.”
There was a silence.
“What do you mean?” Servo said hollowly. “They said it…on Usenet…a reliable source…it’s confirmed…today…eight o’clock…confirmed”
“Oh.” The man smiled a little out of sympathy or pity. “Stupid newsgroups. No, that’s an old rumor. It’s happening on eBay. Sorry.”
We all stood there dumbly, looking at the man. He didn’t know quite what to say. He gave another of his odd smiles, apologized again, and quietly closed the door.
We all stood there dumbly, looking at the door.
It wasn’t until much later, during the drive home, that we realized there was something strange about that man. His voice was identical to that of the robot Tom Servo.
Our return was a somber, almost funereal affair. The silence that came from Servo was so deep that even Crow was powerless against it. He resigned himself to laying down a soundtrack for the ride. Given our state, it was a delicate matter.
He began going through all of his albums, giving us the best of an odd bunch of tinny anthems, queer dirges, and fuzz-marred sweetness. I don’t know that Servo heard a thing.
Most of what Crow played had that same lo-fi sound, which lent a strange air of sadness to even the occasional upbeat songs. It was as though you could picture the musicians pouring out their hearts into second-rate equipment. Somewhere off in musty basements, while the Celine Dions of the world slept off their days of spreading sickly goo onto immaculate canvas, certain daytime drudgers of this world spent their allotments of freedom and sleep birthing tiny pieces of true Grade-A inspiration and given them in good faith unto outdated, fitful machines. What came out was smudged inalterably. I imagine for Crow the smudge eventually became part of the charm: not only because of its particular air, but because it made them more than bands, it made them causes. Through the indifference of a bland and tasteless world, certain creations sank on the weight of their own merits and were reduced to middling, minor key existences from which, without our help, they would never be freed. I like to think Crow is this sort of freedom fighter. Though there were times when I wanted to throw a Buick at him for his smug dismissal of everything I’d ever heard of, I’d like to think that deep down inside of him there is something sweeter than a smirk and earnester than a shrug; that in his future there’s something more than a soapbox at some independent record store. Crow, wherever you are, may you fail mightily.
I never said anything of this to him, of course. If you think high-school boys talk to one another about things that matter on any sort of regular basis, you must not be from around here. In absences as palpable as the one that filled that Buick, I am reminded that Midwestern kids are often only-children, capable of meaningful communication only with themselves.
I was sitting at home in the den, listening to some Hum. Crow had lent me a couple of their cds, because “They’re major labels, so you might actually be able to appreciate them. It’s all good except for “Stars,” which they had to ruin by putting it on the radio.” I thought I’d had a golden opportunity to make fun of Crow for liking someone popular, but apparently their latest record – a masterpiece, he said – flopped, and they were going to get dumped from their label any day now. They had an ethereal sound: dense clusters of spacey guitars through which an almost monotone voice softly sang lines that were like fragments of sad love songs penned by an astronaut. One of their songs was lifting off into feedback swirls when the phone rang.
“Hello?” My mother’s voice said.
“Who?”
“We don’t have a son Gypsy.”
“It’s for me,” I shouted, and went to fetch the phone from the hall.
“Hello?”
“Hey Gypsy, it’s Tom.”
Tom’s given name was Scott, but he was Tom just the same. Even on the BBS, where you could key in ;i to get personal information on users, Tom Servo’s name was Tom Servo.
“Hi Tom. What’s up?”
“Come on the board and play some HeXeN.”
He tried to say it breezily, as if this were a common thing he did. Still, he might as well have showed up at my door with the same question. He’d never called me up to play before – it was always Crow – so I was listening closely for some little quaver in his voice, and I caught it.
“Alright,” I said.
“Good.”
It wasn’t going to be any use, I thought, but how could I really know? I felt I had to try.
“Everything alright, Tom?” I asked, before he could hang up. In the background, the feedback crescendoed.
After the briefest pause, so brief I might have only willed it there, he said: “Sure, why?”
And so we land,
“Just wondering…”
Only to find
“Okey, well…it is. So…”
That we never left the ground
“…bye, then. See you on the board.”
“Bye.”
I sighed and put the phone down. As the song ended, I turned over the cd case and looked for the name of that last track. Songs of Farewell and Departure.
I logged on and joined them in the Game Connection. We were the only three there: the board was empty except for us and the usual half-dozen unresponsive people playing the MUD. Hardly anyone really played Doom II anymore on the board except us. Most of the old players had left CyberQuest, partly because of a shift that brought an influx of users to play on the new MUD, and partly because new technology was passing the BBS by. New games like Quake required too much bandwidth to be played over the board, so it was slowly becoming a haunt for those addicted to text-based role-playing games or the nostalgia of the classics rather than one for those hungry for the newest and best-looking pixilated slaughter fest. Still, we played on, because it was only the beginning of the end and we did not yet feel pathetic for staying. It was understood that the board would shut down eventually, but no date had been set and so though it was the twilight there was still plenty of light left by which to play.
I watched him jump off the building. Halfway down, the green light took him and he was spread out along all the length of the street. The red soldier danced away behind a pillar. I warmed up my BFG and jumped off the building to the right of where Servo had jumped, behind the red soldier. A rocket slapped upside my head just as I hit the ground and I spread out and slapped against the building and along the street next to Servo. The red soldier did a little shuffle down the length of my scattered remains and disappeared around the corner.
I saw Servo respawn right next to where my body lay, and the red soldier shuffled back into view and brusquely killed him again.
I respawned in the rocket room, and took the lift up to snatch it. In the distance I heard the regular pop of a pistol and a few gasps of pain and then the release of a rocket and a squish and then silence again. I ran out into the street and circled the block. Then I heard more or less the same sequence of sounds repeat itself, this time from inside the building, again ending with the squish. I turned to run inside the building and Servo respawned right in front of me. He just looked at me. He fired his pistol into me once and then stopped and looked at me some more. I felt a sudden, absurd moral obligation to let him alone. I put away my rocket launcher and walked so I was right in front of him and drew my pistol and fired it into him once and was still. We stood there and looked at one another, like a couple of thugs placed in an emotional situation, not sure what to do or say. Then Crow came around the corner and killed us both. Along the street, our awkward corpses lay quiet, watching each other.
` Good game.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): Good game
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): yep, not bad
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): you were an iota or two more challenging than usual
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): servo, on the other hand, just sucked it up tonight
>>> Chan #0 Frequency 424 – Tom Servo appears.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): Yeah, he was awful.
>>> Chan #0 Frequency 424 – Tom Servo just went [BUSY].
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): hey dickweed, you might want to get back into the habit of going for the good guns. it’s no fun mopping you like that
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): er..
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): where’d he go?
>>> Chan #0 (424) Gypsy is shrugging his shoulders.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): he’s probably still recovering from his funeral today.
>>> Chan #0 (424) Crow is smirking wryly.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): hey, i’m okay. i survived my out-of-body-into-robot experience, didn’t I?
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): He didn’t say a thing on the ride home...
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): well, neither did you
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): neither of you knows what to do without a keyboard in front of you
>>> Chan #0 (424) Gypsy is laughing his fool head off!
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): It’s true...
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): Servo really wanted those ‘bots though, didn’t he?
>>> Chan #0 (424) Crow is nodding his head affirmatively.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): Did you check on eBay?
>>> Chan #0 (424) Crow is nodding his head affirmatively.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): bidding is already crazy high
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): How much?
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): more than Servo ever saw in his life
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): oh
>>> Chan #0 (424) Gypsy is frowning darkly.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): it’s alright. more cd’s for me!
>>> Chan #0 Frequency 424 – Tom Servo appears.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): There he is.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): I hate that level. No chainsaw.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): oh, so you were holding a non-violent protest? is that what that was?
>>> Chan #0 Tom Servo is hissing at Crow!
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): i suppose you’d go on a hunger strike when your friends used to play the wrong version of Hungry Hungry Hippo, too?
>>> Chan #0 Tom Servo wonks Crow over the head!
>>> Chan #0 Crow is smirking at Tom Servo wryly!
>>> Chan #0 Gypsy is laughing his fool head off!
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): welp
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): ima go play some guitar for awhile
>>> Chan #0 (424) Gypsy is playing air guitar!
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo is playing air guitar!
>>> Chan #0 (424) Crow is hissing at Tom Servo!
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Crow): be back in awhile
>>> Chan #0 Frequency 424 – Crow just went [BUSY].
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): sorry we couldn’t play Hexen
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): It’s HeXeN.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): sorry
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): Yeah. Crow always conveniently uninstalls it when I want to play.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): well, he hates it because you can beat him.
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo is nodding his head affirmatively.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): Was that guy today the real Tom Servo?
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo is nodding his head affirmatively.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): The guy with the moustache?
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo is nodding his head affirmatively.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): I remember his picture from the net.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): It was him, alright.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): wow
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): I just got thrown by hearing that voice on a real person, so it took me awhile to realize.
>>> Chan #0 (424) Gypsy is nodding his head affirmatively.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): man...we should have gone back.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): what for?
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): umm...to meet Tom Servo?
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): We wouldn’t have met Tom
Servo.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): We would have met Kevin Murphy.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): You want to meet Tom Servo?
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo is shaking Gypsy’s hand.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): Nice to meet you, son.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): There.
>>> Chan #0 (424) Gypsy is chuckling wryly.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): Man, how many Servos can a guy have in his life?
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): You can never have too many Servos.
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo is always good to have plenty of.
>>> Chan #0 (424) Gypsy is nodding affirmatively.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): a good Servo is hard to find.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): especially on eBay
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo is frowning darkly.
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo commands a high price, it seems.
>>> Chan #0 (424) You pat Tom Servo on the head softly.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): Couldn’t you buy a replica?
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): No.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): They don’t have controls.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): oh
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): Well, it would be something, at least.
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo is shaking his head sadly.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): No.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): well...there’s probably lots of old Servos, right? Like parts of him wore out and they had to replace him? They might show up someday.
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo is shaking his head sadly.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo) It’s not likely.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo) I think they only had two or three. They probably had a mold, and made new parts as needed, and then just scrapped the old.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): Hmmm...
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): um...build some?
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): I did.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): you did???
>>> Chan #0 (424) Tom Servo is nodding his head affirmatively.
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo): It’s not the same.
>>> Chan #0 Frequency 424 -- Crow leaves.
==> Crow logs -OFF- : Parallel lines on a slow decline, tractor rape chain...
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): er
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Tom Servo):
>>> Chan #0 Frequency 424 – Tom Servo just went [BUSY].
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): I’m sorry?
>>> Chan #0 (424) (from Gypsy): ...
>>> Chan #0 Frequency 424 – Gypsy just went [BUSY].
As I recovered myself from the board I became aware of being very cold. You get to being very cold when it is past one and the heat has gone off long ago when the parents went to bed but you do not think to go and turn it up because you are not really there except for your body. Eventually you begin to shake a little but you do not notice and are not roused by the cold or by anything until some lull in the board releases you and then you are free to remember yourself and wonder how the pasty tip of your nose must look in the green glow and whether or not an instant coffee might do for that shaking in your hands. Ten, eleven, midnight, one, and eventually the hands go blue and you want a coffee and you get one and wonder again how pasty your nose must look, in the nuclear waves, as the mug spins calmly on the tray. Then you drink your coffee down and it is not good, but warm, yes, and that is something. And then, perhaps, if you are the type, you begin to wander around your dark quiet midnight house. It is the same sensation of the usual thing in the unusual hour. You wander around without turning on any lights and sometimes you trip over things and spill your coffee all over the carpet, but sometimes you don’t. No matter what you don’t do or how quiet you are, though, if you have any pets they will stir sleepily if you draw near to them, and look at you like “What the hell are you doing at this forsaken hour?” And if you see the look of the cat questioning your hours you realize what a weird, weird thing it is that you’re doing. But you would not be where you are had you not already come to some terms with your weirdness, and so you go on wandering the house that is lonely with the feel of a place emptied and waiting for life to come back to it. Outside, too, it looks to be lonely with that same waiting. Outdoors, even in the remotest suburbs, there is always life if you can hear it, with the sound of trains upon distant trestles and semis fading away and the delicate crunch of night creatures breaking the husk of new snow with their footfalls. From inside glass, though, there is no sound; there is only the vacancy in the illuminated areas and the darkness under the near trees and the glow in the distance that hints of life going on elsewhere. And so, if you are lucky, you become lost in that distant glow and you sleep, and dream of blatting lo-fi symphonies and resplendent Tupperware heroes and do not think of the puppets lying abandoned in the basement that you built to replicate other puppets that have already themselves passed into ruin and taken you with them before you could ever begin.
Unlike most of his brethren, the failed leading man Tom Servo does not live on. Like a ruined revolutionary, his fair limbs are scattered to strange corners of the earth. He has been sold on eBay; he has been sold for scrap. And so we leave him, amidst the heaps of discarded toys that begin to grow dust in neglected basements, in the lost file fragments that release into the wires as the BBS disconnects, in the peace of the lost satellites.
