Even though being inside our garage was at least 10 degrees cooler than the blazing Florida heat in the driveway, it was still muggy and hot enough that I was sweating bullets. Because there were no windows in the garage, the only light that filtered in was from the half-open, roll-up door that I still had trouble lifting by myself. It was the fall of 1984, deep into November, and it still felt like the height of summer on this midday afternoon. I’m not sure if I can remember what was making me perspire more, the swamp-like heat of central Florida, or the anxious stress as I could still hear my father’s booming voice tearing apart my sister inside the house and two rooms away.
I never was never really on the receiving end of my dad’s ire, which was almost wholly reserved for my sister who was a good 8 years older than me and not his biological, only adopted daughter. But I hated their screaming matches and there was a tone my father achieved when he was really angry that put the fear of God into me on my sister’s behalf. A fear she never seemed to express herself. When it got bad, I’d skitter away from the house to the safety of the garage and my mother’s new car, her prized bronze Mazda 626. She never locked the car’s doors, so whenever I was scared or needed to exit the house I’d crawl into the back seat and using a nifty latch on the passenger side by the headrest, lower the back of the seat so that I could shimmy my way into the trunk. There was a faux leather pull handle sewn into the back of the seat on the trunk side, so I could hide in there and pull the seat back almost all the way back up, leaving just enough of a crack to let in a bit of light. It was a sanctuary, my secret hideout that I was pretty sure no one knew I was using.
Our house in Tampa with my mother’s Mazda in the garage.
My mom was always extremely fastidious with the care of her cars, and she managed to keep that new car smell in her vehicles long after purchasing them. Even though both my parents were heavy, 3-pack-a-day smokers, she never smoked in the car and forbade my father from doing it either, so it was also a place I could go to get away from the nicotine funk that made me constantly retch throughout my entire childhood. The trunk wasn’t the most comfortable place to hang out. I couldn’t bring a blanket or pillows in case I needed to make a hasty getaway if my folks were calling for me to come home (and they assumed I was out somewhere in the neighborhood.) The stiff, utilitarian tan carpeting was rough on my hands and knees, and having started hitting growth spurts at age seven, I couldn’t really stretch out much to get comfortable. But the insulated trunk lid and the thick seatbacks were the perfect sound dampeners for my father’s yelling, which made it feel like the safest place in the house.
My sister washing my mom’s prized Mazda 626 with Tim’s house behind her. I spent a lot of time in that trunk.
On this sweltering November day, while escaping the strife going on in the house in the relative comfort of my mother’s car trunk, I stumbled upon something that would shock my worldview. Hidden in the cramped compartment along with myself was a crinkly large shopping bag overflowing with toys. To be more specific, there was a whole pile of Masters of the Universe action figures. Even in this semi-darkness, I could tell what I stumbled upon after my tennis shoe got tangled in the bag while I was trying to back into the trunk space. As I pulled the bag off my shoe one of the carded figures slid out and I could make out the evil navy-blue face of Webstor, one of Skeletor’s minions I’d just seen for the first time on the pegs at my local Service Merchandise.
The weekend before I’d accompanied my mother to the store while she was picking up some small appliance she’d ordered from the catalog and while we were waiting, I made my way over to their couple of toy aisles to drool over all of the coveted plastic wonders on display. I was hip-deep in my Masters of the Universe fandom, tuning in to my local UHF station every weekday at 3:00 pm for new syndicated episodes of the cartoon while amassing a fairly impressive collection of the action figures. Daydreaming about becoming He-Man or Stratos was my jam at age 7, and when I saw that there was a whole new batch of characters that I’d never seen before on the peg board I was floored. I don’t remember the specific conversation with my mother. Still, I’m pretty certain it involved myself contracting some horrible disease if I didn’t go home with at least one of these new action figures that very minute, and l am positive she countered with her rote-memorized speech about asking Santa and waiting until Christmas. Though my folks were very generous around birthdays and Christmas mornings, the rest of the year they were fairly frugal about buying me new toys and the like. There was also an open wallet for Slurpees or the odd trading cards, but toys were saved for the two big kid holidays, and mine just happened to be perfectly balanced between July and December. So, there was very little wiggle room for negotiations.
On that Service Merchandise trip, the character that stood out to me the most was Webstor. I was typically drawn to the villains, and his clashing blue and orange color scheme really spoke to me and stuck with me. So, when I stumbled on him in the trunk of my mother’s car, I was kind of in shock. For a couple of reasons. You see, in those days my mother was in full charge of my letters to Santa, keeping the list of things I desperately wanted and then sending it off with her monthly bills towards the end of November. I made it very clear that week that it was imperative that Webstor was on the list, and she assured me that he was.
At the same time, I was on the precipice of discovering the truth behind the cryptozoological myth of Santa Claus. Old St. Nick had come up a few weeks before in a fight with my next-door neighbor Tim, a contentious little bastard who delighted in tormenting me. Tim was an instigator, an alpha who lived to rule as some conquering warrior king in the small domain of his five or six house radius in our neighborhood in suburban Tampa Florida. I think part of this was that in our relatively small neighborhood of ranch-style, one level houses, his folks had one of the few two-story places built at either end of the oval development. It was as though his residence was the castle that the rest of the houses surrounded. He was also a year older than me and the four other kids that lived under the eye of his domain, and if you didn’t pledge fealty you’d be ostracized or worse, he’d bully you until you relented. The thing about Tim was that he also had a silver tongue, he could talk kids into almost anything, including myself. I’m ashamed to admit it, but there was one day when he convinced me that cats could not only swim, that they loved it and he he urged me to prove it by tossing my family’s Russian Blue, Smokey, into his pool. And wholly convinced, I did it. Luckily I dropped Smokey in the shallow end near enough to the pool stairs that he almost immediately got out, but it seemed like it was weeks before Smokey trusted me to pet him again.
I felt horrible after I did that and thus began a rivalry between Tim and I that ended in my front yard with the two of us throwing wild, exaggerated haymakers at each other. Tim ended up connecting with one, knocking me on the ground where, like a beetle or turtle flipped on its back, I started kicking madly trying to distance him and defend myself. It was at this point that Tim pulled out one of the most shocking things an eight year-old can say to a 7 year-old as he blurted out, “You’re just a baby who believes that still Santa Claus is real!” For a moment I couldn’t quite focus and as my dad came running out of the house to push Tim away and pull me away all I could think of to say was “When Santa finds out what you just said he’s going to take back all your E.T. stuff!” The year before Tim had received practically every piece of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial merchandise that Toys R Us and Lionel Playworld stocked, from pleather plush dolls to board games, wind up toys to multiple sets of Colorforms. He flaunted it all around the neighborhood and I coveted every single piece of it.
Me on my beloved hand-me-down bike and Tim the Tyrant in the foreground.
Later that night, when I crawled under my sheets for bed, I asked my mom if it was true that there was no such thing as Santa Claus. She did her best to reassure me that of course there was, but the damage had been done. There was a crack in the foundation of my belief and at age seven Santa was the Lord and Savior as far as I was concerned. I drifted off to sleep uneasy that night, and for weeks afterwards the idea kept nagging me from the back of my mind.
As I lay in the trunk of my mother’s car on that sweltering day, in the semi darkness gripping the Webstor figure floating in perfect hibernation in under the plastic bubble, everything fell into place. This toy that was just waiting for me to rip it open a month later on Christmas morning, should not be in the trunk of my mother’s car. It’s not like Santa made early deliveries to ease his burden on Christmas Eve night. The only thing that made sense was that Tim was right. He was still a raging asshole, but he was right. There was no such being as Santa Claus.
With my father still screaming in the house, and with my existential crisis ongoing in my mother’s car trunk I did what any rational child would do. I opened up the Webstor figure, pulled the figure and accessories (an orange blaster and his grappling hook/zipline armor), and exited the vehicle. I hopped on my yellow banana-seat bike (a hand-me-down from my sister, complete with lowered “girl’s” crossbar) and I pedaled my way to my friend Michael’s house on the other end of the neighborhood to show off my brand new toy. Looking back, I’m both shocked and proud of my brazen move to effectively confiscate the toy from my mother. My motive is hazy all these years later, but I have to assume that I felt like taking to toy was some sort of prize for figuring out that Santa was just a ruse (even if I got a little help from Tim the tyrant.) I know that at some point during my bike ride over to Michael’s house I was already hatching a plan to sneak the action figure back into the packaging. I distinctly remember weighing Elmer’s glue versus Scotch tape as a means of resealing the bubble. But for however devious, yet vindicated I was feeling, my planning was also equally and measurably useless as upon leaving and heading back home, I left the toy lying on the kitchen counter of Michael’s house..
Me and a shining example of the trash bags that were always at the curb.
Between leaving his house and arriving home, Michael’s mother had phoned my mom to let her know I’ve left my new toy, and my mother was waiting in the driveway with the Service Merchandise bag in her hands and a look of utter fury on her face. My mom was not the disciplinarian of the household, if that hasn’t already been made clear, but she took her best shot at making an impact on my stupid behavior that day. She didn’t ask me if I took the toy, or why, she just gritted her teeth and told me that she was never going to buy me another He-Man figure ever again and that everything in the bag she was holding was going straight in the trash. She then made a show of stomping over to the curb where we perpetually had large black trash bags piled and she shoved the bag of toys inside one of them. Luckily for me, my mother never said a word about the incident to my father, who I’m sure would have spanked me silly had he found out. She also never brought up the toys in the trash or that incident ever again.
Sadly not my original Webstor figure, but the one I cherish to this day.
I was never sure what other Masters of the Universe figures were in that bag in her trunk and eventually in the trash, but come Christmas morning that year there was one toy under the tree that I never expected to see ever again, the very Webstor that I left at Michael’s house. He was leaning up against an unwrapped box of Space Lego and surrounded by a handful of other toys that I’ve forgotten over time. The main detail that stood out to me is that nothing was wrapped that Christmas, and pretty much for the remainder of my life when it came to gifts from my folks. I think my figuring out that there was no Santa Claus took a lot of the fun out of the holiday for my mother. In fact, by the time I turned ten it was pretty much routine to make a trip out to the toy store to pick out most of the stuff I’d get for Christmas and definitely for my birthdays. There was a surprise here and there, but it was never the same as it was before I found out the truth about Old Saint Nick.
