Together We Kill

Toys for the Man-Child

I was beginning to think that I was the only grown-up who likes to play with toys. Not the sophisticated power-driven goodies and stuff... but just plain old toys that could Walter Mitty you into a happy fantasy land where adventure runs wild and nobody really gets hurt at all.

Then the other day I was prowling through this four-storied hobby shop trying to look like I didn’t belong there, ostensibly on a search to “bring home something for the kid,” but knowing right where I was going, and picking up two kits of a new plastic glider job with fantastic aerodynamic capabilities. The other one was, of course, in case the first one got broken, despite the manufacturer’s claims of nearly total indestructibility.

Hell, that other one was for me. I wasn’t about to let a six-year-old kid have all the fun, especially when I saw the ad first. I don’t think the salesman bought my line. He had probably been through it before and just played it cool, but the well-dressed guy next to me who had been flying the miniature chopper, hand-operated through an egg-beater drive and flexible cable, gave me a silly grin because he had a pair of them and the same explanation that I had.

And there we were, trapped. Two grown men who should have known better. He finally said, “You too?” I nodded. He gave me a silly grin. “I have a sailboat too — I keep it in the pool.”

“So have I. My wife bought it for me.”

“How’d it go?”

“Great... now. When I got the thing it had plastic sails that didn’t work so I got hold of some fabric and a grommet punch and fitted it out right.”

“The kid like it?” he asked suspiciously.

“Hell, I don’t let him near it. He can watch, but don’t touch.”

And so began a very profitable business acquaintanceship nurtured on a quiet pond or an open field and sometimes on the top of the playroom bar that makes a great racetrack and a handy place to talk over new modifications and results.

Like the wives say, it’s cheaper than golf, less wearing on the heart and it keeps them at home. But why the heck can’t they put their junk away when they’re done? And who made these scratches on the table?

So when I happened to be at the Murrell’s Inlett Art and Crafts Festival and stumbled into the handmade toy area, I knew I didn’t have to feel like a loner anymore. It was like something right out of the good old days with Dancing Darts, climbing monkeys, whip tops, tongue-depressor and Popsickle stick fliers, rubber-band guns and all the props we thought we had invented as kids, but had really been handed down through the generations... until this one.

What was really funny... the kids couldn’t work them, but the old men sure knew how to do it and for the first time there was that light of total amazement in a boy’s face when big daddy-o made those gadgets go.

Oh, a few things have changed and you can see why the kids were done out of some of the fun we had because of modern technology. The old snappy rubber inner tubes we used to cut up to make those great guns that could sting the parts of a girl’s legs that showed under her bloomers had been replaced by butyl with no snap at all. But the same technology came up with surgical rubber that really put a zing in them. Now you can pick a fly off the wall at 30 feet and make your sister yelp like a loon right through her mini-skirt.

Seems like the women don’t sew much anymore, so you don’t collect a box full of empty thread spools to notch up and rubber-band power into mock tanks on rainy days anymore. Unless you uncover a forgotten button box with those big, ivory two-holers, you have to invent a replacement friction clutch, and between Zippo and Ronson, wooden stick matches are obsolete, so the rigged shaft drive of the “tank” becomes a plastic substitute. But they don’t quite work as well as the old ones did... and to listen to that older generation explain the relative merits of the kind they had was something else again.

The guy who had spent a winter collecting the obsolete essentials and tooling them up for his nostalgic display of the before-battery era had a run on his supplies he couldn’t believe. Unlike his kid, the old man knew those tongue-depressor propellers you whipped out between your palms always seemed to get hung up in the front yard tree, so he didn’t buy just one... he bought a bagful and screw the tree. The wind always got them down later and why risk a broken leg for just one? And it took more than one tank to fight a battle, so another bagful. Somebody was always breaking the Dancing Dan board, so you got spares, and just so there could be a duet, another Dancing Dan went into the sack too. On top, throw a couple of climbing monkeys, a whip top, two rubber guns because retaliation is always necessary if you want a happy home...

Now, the guy who did all this thought he had run the gamut of “what the kids used to play with,” but he didn’t know the half of it. The next day a bunch of his customers showed up with their own pet versions of rubber-band-motored, mothball-powered shingle boats, four-shot, rapid-fire inner-tube rifles and my contribution of a Crisco-can cannon that fired when a mixture of spit and carbide crystals generated enough gas to touch off at a nail hole with a wooden match. Frankly, that one was the hit of the show even if it did scare hell out of the mothers and it might even set off a new run on shortening tins. The only trouble is, those new plastic lids don’t last very long. Nothing like the good old tin tops back in the pre-plastic days.

All the way across the country I had a good top pal and I couldn’t let him be forgotten — I picked up two of each of the ready-made from the crafts man, packaged a bag of carbide crystals into an empty Crisco can with four extra covers and (nail hole installed), typed out the instructions with a Band-Aid stapled to the top to indicate caution and headed for the post office with my package. He could use his own spit.

The other day his wife told me he’s had her on a pie baking spree and I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was one way to get Crisco cans without looking silly. Besides, she’s a little worried about him. Seems like he’s always poking into her sewing kit and she’s finding balled up handfuls of discarded thread around and he’s got a new lock on a closet behind the playroom bar.

One other thing. We just signed a new contract without any negotiations at all. We had to get on with the game.