The Characters (So Far), Part III

The Characters (So Far), Part III

So, for those of you keeping score and ticking off the days until I’m finally done with the roll call, I still have nine well established characters still to cover. After that, I think I have something like a half dozen, maybe more, toys that we still haven’t named. Yeah, the kid has that many stuffed animals. Sort of ridiculous. I think that my goal after covering the established players will be to spend some time with Gabe up in his room naming the others. What I’m saying is, you probably have a good three more entries of characters before we get started on the stories themselves. Lucky you!

Creepy Baby

Creepy Baby is so named for reasons that should be apparent from the picture. This life-sized baby doll was Libby’s when she was growing up, and it is creepy for several reasons. First, its glass eyes don’t really function properly anymore. One of them isn’t even in its socket properly, so it has a disturbing, sunken quality to it. Neither eye works like it’s supposed to anymore—they open and close randomly, sometimes when the doll isn’t even being moved around. Tell me that’s not creepy! Oh, it is. It’s also probably not true. I don’t pay enough attention to the thing to see if it’s opening and closing its eyes randomly, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It has that aura about it. Second, its limbs are all wazzle woozle. Its arms and legs are twisted in all sorts of unnatural and painful looking postures, and they can’t be corrected. They were never meant to be twistable or articulated, but somehow they’ve managed to be exactly that—or were just long enough for them to get misdirected. And, finally, it is just too big to be where it obviously is developmentally. It’s like some sort of freakish troglodyte child that must have weighed fifteen pounds when born (no offense to anyone who weighed that much when born—I’m sure you’re just a garden variety troll, and not a troglodyte). And it actually weighs quite a lot. Not as much as its size suggests it should, but still enough for it to seem just a little too baby-esque. Should kids really be taught that it’s alright to lug around a clearly too large child and then just toss it wherever when they’re done with it? I blame toys like this for . . . well, I don’t know what I can rationally blame it for, but I’ll go ahead and blame it for everything that is wrong with the world, just in case it sticks.

As for Creepy Baby’s roll in the room’s drama, there isn’t much to say. It’s a baby, after all, and it’s far too creepy for any of the self-respecting members of the bedroom society to associate with except on a casual social basis. If they saw it at a party, they would say "hi" and stand near it, drink in hand, for a few minutes then dismiss themselves before things got too awkward. And that would be it.

It is, strangely enough, the first toy that Gabe was able to readily identify (and the first thing he ever hugged). I could say, “Hey, Gabe. Where’s Creepy Baby?” and he would walk right over to it. Then I would say, “Can you give Creepy Baby a hug?” and Gabe would lean into the doll and go, “Ahhh.” That’s what he does when he hugs, he leans and goes, “Ahhh.” So, even though I find Creepy Baby disturbing, it’s a part of Gabe’s life now because it has a sort of sentimental attachment.

Did I mention that this toy reminds me of the only part of an episode of “Fantasy Island” that I can remember from growing up? That’s a trick question—I know I didn’t mention it, but I’m going to explain now anyway. There was an episode, I have no idea what it was about or what the person’s “fantasy” was—I was probably too young to actually understand anything about the show—but there was a part with a bunch of dolls in a room. Suddenly, all of the dolls started to come to life and look around the room and do other unsettling things. From that point on, I had nightmares about the clown nightlight my grandma made for me in a porcelain class. I dreamed it would come to life in the middle of the night and do terrible things to me and everyone else. I imagined its first movements upon coming to life—it would climb off the light that was inserted up its wazoo, climb down the electrical cord plugged into its stand so it could reach the floor, and then move faster than my eyes could follow over to my bed where it would climb up the bedspread from underneath and attack me under the covers. I hated that clown. And now I think I hate Creepy Baby because I associate it with the “Fantasy Island” and my clown nightlight.

Wow, that was strangely cathartic. Thank you internet for being my therapist! I still hate the nightlight and, by association, Creepy Baby, though.

Stanley “Tarnations” Jenkins

Stanley is a curly little teddy bear with a lovable little heart on his chest. He’s very soft, but his hair puts me in mind of very thick chest hair. Though, obviously, much softer. I can’t imagine many kids would want to snuggle up to something made of chest hair. The only thing I can think of that would be less appealing was an idea my friend Cameron had once—I think he worked it into a short story during college—of a girl who collected cigarette butts, pulled off all the paper, and used the filters to stuff teddy bears. That would be the least desirable stuffed animal ever. But one covered in chest hair would have to be a close second. I can’t remember who gave us Stanley. I think he might have been a baby shower gift, but we received so many of them at once that I can’t remember who gave us what toy (except Sam, since he had a story).

Stanley Jenkins, as his nickname suggests, is a prospector from the Gold Rush era. Though he enjoyed moderate success with his gold panning operation (I never established where, exactly, he was prospecting for gold, so let’s just say Deadwood, because I like the idea of him running into the HBO version of Calamity Jane and having her repeatedly berate him by calling him a “cock sucker.” He does, after all, look like he’s covered in chest hair, so he might even deserve a little verbal abuse. Nothing against any of my hirsute brethren out there—though you really should consider at least trimming that nastiness, you hairy freaks), unfortunately, there just wasn’t anywhere I could go in my toyroom drama with a lone character standing by a river for twelve hours of daylight. So, instead of being allowed to enjoy his moderate success, Stanley was accidentally caught up in the slipstream of a passing time traveler (let’s say Dr. Who—but the one played by Tom Baker because he had the best scarves) and dropped unceremoniously into the 20^th century. Once there, he brought joy to many children with his colorful vocabulary, haggard, leathery appearance, and tales of hardship and near death experiences living on the frontier while working as a birthday party entertainer. At least, that’s what he was doing until he met his future wife.

Akiko Gogli

Akiko is a little tiger doll and, again, I’m afraid I can’t remember who gave it to us. I blame my memory. Akiko was the first toy that Gabe named himself—and by “named himself” I mean I named him based on what I interpreted his words to be. My interpretation method, however, was very scientific. It utilized all of my powers of basic maths and my intricate knowledge of the phonics classes I had in early elementary school. Keep in mind that all of this happened while I was following him around the upstairs rooms, holding the tiger doll in front of him and repeating, “What do you want to name it? What do you want to name it?” over and over again. Using my mad skills, for the first name I created an equation based on his “talking” (this was when he was about 15 months old, so he really hadn’t mastered many words or phrases except “up” and “your mom” yet) and rounded them up to something that I could pass off as a name. The equation went like this: “ah, ah, ah” + grunt – grunt (this was a pooping noise, so it didn’t count) + “kuh! kuh!” (probably meaning he wanted a cracker or something, I’ll address this later) + “go!” (which he’s had down for quite some time, though I don’t know if it was a request to go somewhere else or an order to leave him alone—I prefer to think it was the former) = Akiko. Yes, I know, it should have been “Akigo,” but I just didn’t like the sound of that followed by another “go” syllable in the last name. Sue me.

The second name was a little trickier since he was clearly not interested in playing my game at that point. Though I could have used my equation method of name creation, I found that I, too, was getting bored with the game, so, instead, I just rounded this name up from a single “guh” he uttered. In my defense, “gogli” was a word that he said pretty frequently at the time, so I just assumed that “guh” was greater than or equal to “gogli.” Thus his tiger was named.

Akiko had a very interesting past, prior to her induction into the ranks of the bedroom animals. Born to a ninja mother and a Cossack father (how that happened I simply cannot say), Akiko found herself torn between her two native cultures, and this conflict was exacerbated by the fact that her mother had deep ties to the Yakusa and her father was an undercover agent for the KGB. It was while Dad was infiltrating the Yakusa that Akiko’s mother and father met, and, needless to say, when Ma Gogli found out that Pa was working for the KGB, the sparks started to fly.

Akiko was never entirely sure which side she was on. She began her adult life working for the KGB, was assigned an undercover job with the Yakusa, and then was recruited by her mother to work as an undercover agent for the Yakusa in the Italian Mafia in the United States. It's all very confusing and convoluted and, for some reason, completely failed to keep Gabe's attention. It was during that time that she was sent on a mission to assassinate a thorn in the Don’s side named Stanley “Tarnations” Jenkins. As it happened, Stanley had accidentally dinged the left front bumper of the Don’s brand new car. Since I’m not very interested in cars and really wouldn’t know what a mafia boss would drive, let’s just say it was a Geo Metro. I do know they weren’t particularly nice cars, but maybe he was concerned more with fuel economy than style. And maybe he was so powerful that he could make a Metro seem stylish.

Anyway, Stanley was unceremoniously lifted from his river bed to the latter half of the twentieth century and dumped about a foot and a half from the Don’s Geo Metro. Disoriented by the trip, Stanley momentarily lost his balance and stumbled. Oddly, even though he was panning for gold, Stanley was carrying a stereotypically top heavy pickaxe on his shoulder, and it was this pickaxe that tipped him over and smacked into the Don’s bumper—though Stanley did an excellent job, considering the circumstances, of spinning away from the car and keeping the pickaxe from doing too much damage. Nonetheless, the Don declared a vendetta on Stanley and assigned Akiko to carry it out. Then, somewhere in there, Akiko and Stanley fell in love (I’m not much for building on the mushy stuff, I guess, I just designated this plot point as “official” and left it at that), got married, and started running from the Mafia, the Yakusa, and the KGB.