Playing with "Guys"

The magic of the toys of our youth

I’ll get my confession out of the way early. As a child, I loved toys in an off-the-charts way. The contours of my upbringing illustrate this better. My parents were academics, one a detached mathematician and one from a foreign country. They were not rich. I was not allowed to do various things, chief among them, watching television. Sugar was also off the menu, unless it came via a banana or Fig Newton.

These privations took ordinary longings and morphed them into something like insanity. Bugs Bunny, candy necklaces and crunchy sweets shaped like bones and sold in a plastic coffin - these were the objects of my desire. So strong was my desire and the alienation that accompanied it, that I developed an entire universe of aesthetic desire. In the crosshairs of my desire were toys.

What is a toy? A toy is a “physical object used primarily for open-ended play, creativity, and imagination”. It is not a game, but some games are also toys.

I didn’t see too many other kids until I was 4 and we moved to Princeton. I have vague memories of driving miniature London cabs on the sidewalk in front of our Montreal apartment. I remember my mother bought me a plastic Roman suit of armor with a sword. I was not deprived and mainly stayed amused being read to and pretending.

This blew up when we hit Princeton. First, we had a television set of our own. The guidelines were clear (don’t watch and if you do, no cartoons or anything good). I would sneak downstairs, turned it on and watch the colored bars of the test pattern that preceded the shows. She caught me eventually and in a rage, shattered the screen. I remember seeing it waiting for the trash men to pick it up like a battle-wounded comrade.

Luckily, across the street was the Cooper family, 3 boys and their professor father and a mother devoted to creating fun. They had just returned from a year in Japan. When I saw their toys (this was 1975) my world collapsed. They had 18 inch tall, transforming robots with mechanical appendages that fired spring-loaded missiles. These demented things lit up, moved and could be pinned against each other in battle.

I wasn’t enough to visit and play. I wanted them, coveted really. I remember a series of envious, lustful dreams in which I awoke, looked past the end of my bed and realized that all the Coopers’ Japanese toys were now mine. Then I woke up.

In summer of ‘75, we moved to our own house on Deerpath. Jason Plaks, another Jewish kid down the block became my best friend. He was magnificent, smart, artistic and athletic but he had the same crummy toys I did. Balls, a record player and tons of books.

The forbidden fruit lived next door to him. The El-Shakhs family were Egyptian and unforgettable if only because of their possessions. The father, Salah, was an urban planner and collected mid-century modern toys of the design variety. Tamer, the eldest, was a model maker and a master painter of lead figurines from Tolkien and beyond. Hisham, 3 years older than me, was the target of my affections and his toys were beyond belief. They eventually came alive in early games of Dungeons and Dragons but in the beginning, they were what we called “Guys”.

Guys were action figures. The original action figure had been GI Joe in the mid-60’s but that wasn’t what we were into. Broadly speaking, there were 2 kinds of guys. The first were made by Fischer Price - they were iconic and modular and about 4 inches high. Dressing and battling them consumed us. The second kind were about 10 inches high and were dominated by Star Trek, Planet of the Apes characters and a few more benign variations. The Planet of the Apes ones still haunt me for their coolness - men with outfits and apes, all riding horses and armed to the teeth. The piece de resistance was a working catapult that fired plastic boulders at the forts we built.

As I mentioned, by 1977 or so, Dungeons and Dragons swept through our imaginations and rendered the toys somewhat silly - who needed to stroke a puppet when the Dungeon Master described scenes of greater brilliance. I now realize how tender this moment has been for me and how fragile the love of toys was.

Fisher Price coined the word “Action Figure” largely to remove the stigma of boys playing with dolls. And what happens to someone, boy or girl, when playing with a doll is a magical process of transference, using the object to transform yourself into a character. I can remember my daughter being given dozens of used Barbies and a second hand Dreamliner. Each day, she’d come home from school, go straight to her room and shut the door and work out her frustrations and ideas through the dolls. Sometimes it would be an hour before she demanded strawberries and salami for a snack.

Growing out of toys makes me sad. Many men my age simply refuse to do so and get fancy cars, guns, second homes and second wives. Others pour themselves into video games, becoming the character and 60 frames per second. Still more take up sports. None of these interest me the way toys once did.

I suppose what I play with now is creativity - thinking of new companies, adventures and ways of being. I am not bored but just for a day I’d love to get on my hands and knees and become the doll in my hand.