Legos

            by Avi Samelson

 

Legos made up about eighty five percent of my childhood.  From the ages of four to twelve I was absolutely in love with my Legos.  Legos were the main focus of my world.  Every holiday I would go through the Lego Magazine telling everyone in my family which Legos I wanted.  Often, my friend Nate and I would sit for hours on end, building Legos. 

The Lego Magazine and Lego Club Magazine were my favorite pieces of literature other than the instruction booklets to my Lego sets.  The Lego Club Magazine was a magazine with hints about building Legos, pictures of other peoples’ Legos that they built, and new sets of instructions for old sets that could be used to build something different.  It was often short, but I read it over and over anyway.  However, it was nothing compared to the Lego Magazine.

The Lego Magazine is a mail-order catalogue with every single set that Lego makes.  Often I would go through the magazine and put every set that I wanted on the enclosed order form.  I would add up all the prices, put down for “express” shipping (2-3 days versus the normal 1-2 weeks for regular shipping) and try whole heartedly to get my mom to spend the 1200 dollars on every single Lego set I wanted that was in that magazine.  When I did order something from the Lego Magazine, I would get more distraught everyday I saw that there was not a big box waiting for me in the mail.  I had more anxiety than any high school senior applying early decision to Yale would ever have. 

The first object of my desire from the Lego Magazine was a Lego train.  Lego trains were always powered by a front car with electric rims around the wheels, followed by two or three other train cars that did not have any electrical part to them.  The tracks that the train ran on were gray, the lead car would pull electricity from a shiny conductive surface on the top of the tracks.  I saw the first one of these in the back of the Lego magazine.  The train I wanted was a freight train, with a red front car, a blue open car that transported barrels, and one other freight car, for carrying automobiles.  I pleaded and pleaded to get one of these trains and one year I got it for my birthday.  I had to pay all my birthday money and my parents picked up the rest of the sticker.  Once I opened it, the birthday celebrations were over. I didn’t want any cake or ice cream and I didn’t want any of my extended family at my house. I wanted to build the train. 

“Don’t start building it now, you won’t get it done tonight!” my Dad yelled at me as I bounded up the stairs to my room with the huge box in my anticipatory hands.

I built the train that night anyway.  As I began to set up the track, my Dad came up to my room and told me to go to bed.  Severely disappointed, I moaned and whined for at least twenty minutes.  Getting that train was the most exciting moment in my life up until then (my sister was born at least two years before I got the train).

My obsession with Legos continues further than just being more excited about a Lego train than the birth of my sister.  Not only am I still angry at my mom for getting pulled over by the cops the day when I got my first Lego set, but I remember the event in perfect detail.  I was so vexed by the fact that I was delayed another 15 minutes from getting to open my Legos that the event was imprinted on my mind forever. 

My mom was driving me home from pre-school, and I was excited to finally open the box of bricks.  My mom would not let me open the box in the car, and I was frustrated.  Adding to my apprehension, my mother had to go grocery shopping.  I berated my mother to let me open my Legos as I stood on the side of the cart while she pushed me around.  I could hold off eating for another few days, we did not need to go grocery shopping.  Once we bought all our groceries, we hopped into the car and left the parking lot.   

“Mah-om, hurry UP.  I want to open my Legos!” I said, filled with excitement over the prospect of finally getting home so I could build spaceships, cars, boats and houses with my Legos.

“Avi, we’ll be home in 5 minutes.  We’re six blocks away from home”

As everyone knows, 5 minutes is four lifetimes to a 4 year old.

“MOM!  Why are you going soooo slow?”

“I’m driving the speed limit, I can’t go any faster.”

After my attempt to convince my mom to drive 85 miles per hour failed, I shut up and inspected the box of Legos in my lap for the fifty-fourth time that day.  The base of the bin was square, with rounded corners.  The sides of the bin rose up to the top which was had the classic four dots on it, representing the tops of a Lego.  It was a replica of a massive two by two piece (four indents on the top).  Each side of the bin had a sticker on it.  I read them over and over in my mind.  Each sticker had pictures of each brick, with numbers like “x2” or “x5” next to each brick.  There were two Lego doors, five red two by four bricks, five blue two by four bricks, five yellow two by four bricks and five black two by four bricks.  I imagined what I was going to build: a house, with a man to live inside it.  It was going to be the best Lego house ever. 

As we turned onto Marin, a large four lane road, I heard police sirens.  My mother, good citizen as she is, pulled over, saying “I hope they weren’t after me.”  So did I, if there was another delay I would run all the way home.  Unfortunately, the police car pulled up in front of our car, sirens blaring, and the policeman got out.

I could not believe it.  This event had to have been more painful than childbirth.  I turned as red as the picture of the bricks on the box of Legos I was carrying.   As the policeman approached I felt an insatiable urge to cut off his legs and shove them in his mouth.  I started crying.  My mom calmed me down as the policeman walked up to her window.  As she received her two hour lecture from the policeman I tried to keep calm, lightly sobbing in the passenger seat of the car.  Finally, my mom got her ticket, for running a do not enter sign, and started to drive off.  When we got home, I was so blissfully happy that I ripped open the box of Legos and actually sat still for a good two or three hours (that is no small feat for a four year old).  

The anxiety I felt during this event is almost too great to explain.  My obsession with Legos stemmed from this experience.  I began to request only Legos for holidays and my birthday.  As I compiled a great collection of different Lego sets, for my birthday or other holidays, two different people often gave me the same set, which also happened to be a set that I already had.  I would have favorite sets, but these ebbed and flowed, and those sets would eventually be destroyed and the pieces put in my drawers for me to construct something else with later.

Legos would often reflect my emotions.  If I was angry or frustrated, the sounds of Legos being smashed against the walls or floor were heard from my room.  I built Legos just a little more often than I destroyed them.  I ran trains into walls, making them shatter into the 2000 individual pieces that they were made from.  To my Legos, I was god, creator and destroyer.  Often, I was vengeful.  I would destroy a set that I had been saving up for that I had finally received.  On one occasion, I took a Lego train station through the Destruct-O-Matic, throwing it out the 2^nd story window of my room.  The instructions had not made sense, and I was left with a part of the station that did not work out.  After building the station for 45 minutes, I was frustrated with the confusing instructions, and my parents’ futile attempts to help me just made me more frustrated.  What did they know about Legos anyhow?   I cried as I picked up the pieces strewn below my window in the backyard.  I brought the pieces back up to my room and put them in my white Lego drawers.  I had a cabinet with three white drawers, each filled to the brim with Legos.  I had well over 100,000 pieces.  Next to the drawers were a set of shelves, on which stood “The Creations of Nate and Avi.” 

I built all sorts of different buildings and vehicles, setting up different scenarios and challenges for whatever one-armed-pirate (dressed in armor with a police hat on, in a fire truck) I had.  Whatever I built was usually somewhat disorganized. I constructed houses and headquarters that looked as if someone was testing out all 40 colors they wanted to paint on their house.  The house had different colors mixed and matched all over.  I did not really care that much about how the house looked.  I didn’t have enough pieces to be able to care about that.  However, when I started really building Legos, Nate forced me to have matching colors, and to make sure that there were no one-armed pirates among our protagonist’s crew.  Nate and I built many, many Legos.  What started as a simple limousine spawned a huge amount of Lego building, and created an enormous profit for Lego, Inc.  One day, we made a limo-bus.  It was all black, except for the top row of blocks, which were white.  We made our protagonist, who would last for years, “The Rich Guy”, and two drivers to go with the limo-bus. 

“Don’t let your cleaner destroy this.”  Nate told me as he left my house.

“Of course not.”  I would try to put it somewhere where the cleaner would not pick it up and crush it into some drawer or shelf in my room.  I knew that I would not destroy it because I was too proud to ever take my anger out on it. 

The next time Nate and I built Legos, we made 4 police motorcycles and a police car that had a working siren and blinking lights to go with it.  Eventually, we built a huge mansion for “The Rich Guy”.  I bought a Lego police station, we incorporated that into The Rich Guy’s estate.  Eventually, The Rich Guy was the proud owner of a jet (complete with 8 engines), a hovercraft (that had 5 rooms, including a bar), a dock with a working elevator, twelve police motorcycles (all matching), six police tricycles (all matching), four personal body guards that had their own small transport truck, four police speed boats (two matching pairs), a transport boat for the police car that had lights and sirens, a train (which I destroyed for more pieces), thirty-five video cameras stationed around his estate, six personal chefs, four bath tubs, four guards always guarding the front -and back- of his house, a separate house for his four mechanics, a bomb-threat squad, a fire engine, a search and rescue helicopter, four janitors, countless police officers, a garden, a massive fountain, two palm trees, and an enemy, named Hyja, with two heads and a cape that drove around in a dump truck that had a street sweeping brush on the front (which we aptly named “The Dumb Truck”).  If The Rich Guy’s employees were all finely dressed, and mostly matching, then Hyja’s followers were the exact opposite.  Once I had run out of useable pieces- yes it was possible and did take a good 3 or 4 years- Nate and I took the random heads, spears, legs, shields, antennae, alien outfits, bricks that were more than 2 stubs wide and monkeys, and put them together to form Hyja’s followers.  This society resembled what would happen if an atomic war broke out and aliens landed at the same time.  Hyja had followers with everyday objects as limbs, names that were made of disturbing 10 year old gibberish, and a head of security with two legs and three wheels. 

Every time Nate would come to my house, we would look through the Lego magazine, telling each other what sets we needed to continue to expand The Rich Guy‘s (and Lego Inc.’s) wealth.  We would look at the sets that other kids had made, took pictures of, and sent into the magazine, always telling each other that ours was so much more massive and intricate that we would definitely be in the magazine if we sent our picture in (we never did).  We would then express the feud between Hyja and The Rich Guy, always ending up with something of Hyja’s smashed and the pieces put in one of the white drawers. 

Soon enough, my political awareness seeped into my Lego building.  As Nate and I began to run out of pieces, our focus strayed from building things for the rich guy to building more enemies for him.  We built a series of rafts that George W. Bush was living on.  Each one had a special function, and they were all tied together.  There was George Bush’s oil drilling raft, with all sorts of parts on it to make what was a very accurate oil drill.  There was a raft for Bush and his wife to live and another where Cheney and his servant lived.  Dick Cheney was wearing a grey suit, from the “Western” sets, with a grey cowboy hat.  His servant was also semi-normal looking.  However, George and Laura Bush, to put it mildly, were somewhat different.  Laura Bush had on the body and pants of a person from the islanders set.  She wore a skirt of leaves and a necklace made of those same leaves.  She had a one-eyed bearded pirate face with a red-hair piece snapped on.  George Bush was the opposite, his body and pants were those of a normal Lego woman, and he had on a woman’s face and a cowboy hat.

  Nate and I also made a set of about 40 medieval Viking nomads.  Under their leader, who wore a helmet with bat wings coming out the side, and a red and black cape with gold around the edges, they came to settle on the The Rich Guy’s property many a time, only to be thrown out by the massive onslaught of The Rich Guy’s security forces.  Often George W. and Hyja would form an alliance (a very shaky one) and attempt to overtake The Rich Guy’s property.  We tried to film some of these adventures using fishing wire and my video camera, but they never worked all that well.

As I became older, Nate and I took out The Rich Guy’s house less and less frequently, and it would collect so much dust that every once in a while we would have to clean it.  This was a lengthy process.  First, we would take all of the Legos into my bathroom.  Then we would fill up one of my sinks with water and put every single Lego “guy” into that sink.  We let these soak.  Then we would take out every electrical piece that was in our collection and set it aside.  This step involved some skill.  The electrical pieces in our working elevator and police car were often hard to remove with destroying it.  Eventually, we would wash all of the Rich Guy’s stuff, in the bath tub, and set it out to dry on towels in my bathroom.  Then we would take out all the Lego guys that were in the sink and replace them with motorcycles, tricycles, small speed boats, or any other small vehicle that we had.  Of course, we had to wash Hyja’s estate and followers separately, fearing that they would try to wage war during their purification.        

Eventually Nate and I ceased to even clean The Rich Guy’s property.  As I became older, I moved some of my Legos into my closet, and destroyed George Bush’s rafts and some of Hyja’s followers and vehicles.  My Legos continued to stay on my white shelves and in my white drawers for a couple years.  One day my mom came home with two huge Rubbermaid bins.  Each bin was two foot wide, three feet long and two feet tall.  She told me to put all my loose pieces in one bin, and all of my structures and vehicles in the other.  I dumped the contents of all three drawers into one of the Rubbermaid containers.  The bin filled up to the top with loose pieces.  As the pieces fell into the container my last connection to my childhood fell with them.  Reluctant to pack up the remainders of my childhood, even though I did not play with them anymore, I proceeded, as carefully as I could, to put all of Hyja’s men in the bin.  Then I took all of The Rich Guy’s possessions and put them into the bin.  I carried the bins downstairs to my garage where they still sit.  The white drawers were moved to my sister’s room.  However, I still have The Rich Guy’s house, and his hovercraft sitting in my room on a small set of shelves opposite my bed.