The Toys your Parents Never bought You

In the immersive, wrap-around staging of the play Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, a truncated War and Peace sings all around you, while at the middle, in a little alcove, a middle-aged Tolstoy sits and watches and scribbles in a notebook.

He’s the writer, at the center of life, an omniscient perspective, old enough to fear death and decline, but young enough to remember passion and primary colors.

Not one thing or the other; barely in the story, there for a moment to witness, understand, forgive, pity and envy the characters swirling around him.

So you’re the writer; you have at best as many conscious years ahead as behind, and the milestones ahead are greasy with despair. With the occasional hopeful beacon. A grandchild? Some professional accomplishment, perhaps? 

Time to get writing, friend.

So you grow up and grow older and one day you find yourself wanting to buy all the toys your parents never bought you. Read the books and do the things and visit the places and eat the food and drink the drinks that were passed over, discouraged, forbidden or forgotten. 

Sexual  maturity is one of the first of these toys you take for yourself (God, if you’re lucky) and eventually autonomy of every kind. To eat and drink and drug and work and sleep the way you see fit.

But the toys you were never given, you can never get… those toys were needed by a version of you that isn’t any more. Buying them now doesn’t work. If anything it excites that nameless ache. The sense of something missing which is perhaps the essence of life.

Still. People do it. They can’t help it. They seek these things out. They threw them out, or their mother did, with or without permission or they never had them but a neighbor did, a friend did, a person they secretly loved had the entire set, you had one, too, for a week but then your brother broke it.

And it was never replaced.

I grew up in the age of Television, Movies, Radio and print. And print was full of these mosaics of tiny ads, mostly horrific frauds of one sort or another (x-ray specs; one dollar submarines.) But some were just things that hadn’t shown up in your toy store, or they were old toys that had been discontinued. 

Famous Monsters issues hung around for decades in pleasantly moldering stacks in the bargain basements of bookstores, sometimes with covers half torn off, and they were filled with tiny grids packed with strange objects of desire.

I did own the Forgotten Prisoner…

Lost in Space was poorly syndicated in central New York in the sixties and seventies, and my unmet desire to see the show manifested in daydreaming about the these three models; the saucer shaped Jupter 2, Television’s knock off of Robbie the Robot from Forbidden planet called imaginatively, Robot, and the Chariot, a treaded fishbowl that for some reason excited me tremendously.

I never owned any of these.

But sooner or later, the toys and the TV shows and the movies and the ads lead you down a path to the end of childhood, which, if you were born in the sixties looked something like this:

Vampirella lurked at Childhood’s End clad in an impossible crimson bikini kind of thing, with fangs dripping blood staring into your soul with some impossible to decipher emotion.

Sometimes threatening, sometimes being threatened.

The Warren Publication, including EERIE and CREEPY were big, not sold on the comics racks but with the full-sized magazines, and they had black and white interiors. 

I have no memory of any Vampirella story. But she looms large in that landscape, gazing through that pre-adolescent haze of inchoate lust.

Frank Frazetta’s women were the end of the road. You could still look back, at the candy colored super heroes printed on the giveaway fast food cups, at the legos and action figures and wacky pack sticker encrusted doorway, but… the way ahead beckoned.

Cemetery forts with pony kegs and crimson lipped girls from alien high-schools smoking cigarettes in darkened basements blasting with Led Zeppelin.

Beyond lay the sexist-you’re-soaking-in-it kaliedoscope of Playboy magazine and National Lampoon and late night R-rated soft core and the long hard slog of adolescence. Eventually leaving your toys behind in your parents basement, shedding childhood as if it were some embarassing cocoon as you escaped suburbia and plunged into university or city or apartment or job.

Until finally, like Tolstoy, your own children now fleeing, you remember the acrid tang of annealing plastic, the blackened steel birthing creepy crawlies, the monotone of the Robot, the flashing saucer slicing the sky, the monsters hands and face glowing greenly in the dark, and this crazy hot goth girl that just might eat you alive.

If you lived long enough.

If you could be so lucky.