LEGO (6 page)

“Nobody ever actually sees how a bridge is made. But when the project manager of a bridge is giving a tour, they say that it went together like a bunch of LEGO bricks. People use that analogy all the time,” says Duane as he stoops every few feet to collect a brick from the carpet.

“Everybody can snap together a piece of LEGO,” I reply.

“Right, but some of us just can’t stop,” says Duane.

I smile, but that sentence runs over and over in my head on the plane ride back to Kansas City.

The first MOC (my own creation) I built, a delivery truck half the size of a stapler. It can only get better from here.

After returning from Brick Bash, I discover that a new stash of LEGO bricks is only another closet away. This closet happens to belong to my youngest brother-in-law, Sam, who is twenty-four. The closet in his childhood bedroom looks just like anyone’s who has gone to college and not returned. In other words, it’s an unorganized mess. My mother-in-law, Ann, helps me find the oversize blue storage tub, the kind typically reserved for sweater storage.

A musty scent burps up from the container as I pry loose the lid. It’s not unpleasant—sort of a cousin to the dry skin odor that creeps into your grandparents’ home. I figure that the tub hasn’t been opened in at least a decade, so I’m curious to find out what’s inside. There are thousands of LEGO bricks in every color, along with artifacts of the nineties: New Kids on the Block stickers, clear plastic Game Boy game cases, and Matchbox cars that change color.

A few days later, as my wife and I sift through the tub in our own living room, we discover interlopers among the bricks—plastic pieces that resemble LEGO, but are of inferior quality.

“You could always tell which ones were fake,” says Kate. “They never snapped together right and they would never come loose from a real brick.”

We also find disembodied minifigure parts—heads, torsos, limbs, and their minifig accessories. We start playing like children.

“Aah!”
screams Kate in mock horror as she holds up a disembodied head from a LEGO minifigure.

“Aah!”
I cringe as she waves the severed head.

“Here. I’ll just put him on a body. Give him a helmet for protection.”

“Right.” I look at the torso to which she’s attaching the yellow head. “But he still doesn’t have any arms.”

I dig down into the tub, but instead of arms, I find a large dried brown stain lurking on the bottom. I’m silently glad that LEGO bricks can be put in the dishwasher. I close the top and decide to ask my brother-in-law Sam if he has any idea about the origin of the stain. I e-mail him to ask if I have his permission to play with his LEGOs, and I’m surprised by his answer.

“No,” he says, and I wonder if I was wrong to take them.

“What I mean to say is that I can’t give you permission. The bricks belong to Ben. They shouldn’t have been in my closet,” admits Sam.

I have stolen from a thief. I reach my other brother-in-law, Ben, who seems surprised that their mom kept the bricks. He gives me his blessing, and I promise that he can have them back anytime. I make the promise only because I know he’ll never ask for them back.

Now that I have loose bricks in the house, I feel compelled to build. I pull a few LEGO wheels from the tub and settle on attempting a delivery truck. I figure the boxy right angles will be easy, since most bricks are rectangular.

The wheels quickly snap together, connected by square 2 × 2 bricks. After that, I’m a bit lost. My dog, Charlie, sleeps fitfully on the couch next to me as I mutter continuously under my breath. I’m not even aware that I am talking until she gives a brief howl and sneezes before turning over to show me her belly.

Ben’s bricks are close to two decades old, and they stick together. My fingernails aren’t long enough to split apart pieces when I change my mind, and it’s embarrassing that I don’t possess the necessary finger strength to separate two plates, the flat LEGO pieces. I’ve resorted to using my teeth—a method that appears to have been tried by one of my brothers-in-law, based on the tooth marks at the corner of several bricks. I officially possess as much ingenuity as an eight-year-old.

Even though the truck is only four inches long, I continually tear it apart to try to make it stronger and simpler; hence, the muttering. I opt for an open-air door, reminiscent of a UPS truck, and apparently my LEGO driver will have to settle for some sort of telepathic method of steering and braking. The truck looks awful—and that’s an improvement after three hours of construction.

I prepare to take a few pictures of my first creation. As my left hand reaches for the digital camera, my right hand inadvertently slaps the truck from my desk onto the floor below. The three-foot fall shatters the truck into an impressive number of pieces. It’s small, so thankfully rebuilding only takes about twenty minutes. But I learn a lesson: Always photograph something before you move it.

 

 

In an effort to further build my collection, I head over to the local Target. I’m a lone, unshaven man in the toy section, and I attract a lot of attention. Mothers look at me questioningly, and several of the sales staff hover close by—to answer questions, whether I have them or not. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been standing in the middle of the aisle for the past fifteen minutes, my mouth hanging slightly open as I try to mentally process how many choices LEGO is offering to the customers of Kansas City.

I happen to have been born in an important year for LEGO. In 1978, the company introduced a number of different sets based on two play themes: space and castle. The concept was to produce sets that, if purchased together, allowed the user to construct an entire world out of LEGO. Each box was part of a story—for example, a castle keep that could be set up next to soldiers attacking with a catapult. And within those themes, the minifigure (the iconic yellow LEGO man) appeared for the first time. But as a seven-year-old playing with LEGO bricks, I was unaware that the space police were an innovative concept less than a decade old. I just liked that they had translucent shields on their helmets.

This store has four shelves, fifteen feet in length, filled with LEGO Star Wars ships, SpongeBob SquarePants rockets, and the familiar blue buckets of assorted parts. I lift boxes and read the parts included, as focused as any child making his Christmas wish list. But I walk away without a set because I have no better idea of what I want to build than when I entered the aisle. I also experience a bit of sticker shock. The cheapest kit at Target is $4.99, but most fall somewhere between $39.99 and $149.99.

That might explain why LEGO pieces and sets don’t often end up in garage sales. Sunk costs and sentimentality make pack rats of us all. So I don’t have high expectations when I agree to accompany my wife to tag sales in our neighborhood the following weekend, despite her claims that “they might have LEGO.”

Five garage sales later, and the closest thing I have seen to a toy is a jigsaw puzzle depicting Big Ben. The final stop doesn’t look any more promising, with rusted-out lawn furniture being picked over by the latecomers to an estate sale just three blocks from our house. We first enter the garage, where a portly man in an ill-fitting cowboy hat is testing a handheld chainsaw. We don’t linger. When my wife hesitantly asks, “Do you want to go in the house?” I say yes.

Inside we encounter close to twenty people milling around, picking carelessly through a lifetime’s worth of collections. TWA prints and model cars are stacked haphazardly on folding tables. The stale air and pink carpet leave me feeling claustrophobic, but like someone bewildered in a blazing home, I wander away from the front door and head further inside the house. Clothes and price tags hang from furniture bunched together to leave narrow aisles that lead into the two bedrooms on the first floor.

“Plenty more upstairs!” declares the marker-stained sheet of paper taped onto the yellowing wallpaper. The temperature rises as we climb up to a wood-slatted top floor with a finished bedroom. My wife and I thread our way to the back of the attic, where another couple is testing the integrity of caned wooden chairs by repeatedly banging them into the floor.

I’m ready to pack it in, as I feel the first small bead of sweat form at the base of my neck. But then my wife says a magic word.

“Look honey, LEGOs.”

Pluralizing the word “LEGO” is one of the most common mistakes made by the average mom buying a set or the dad talking about his kids. It is also one of the largest pet peeves of adult fans. AFOL Eric Harshbarger, a renowned LEGO mosaic builder who constructed a LEGO portrait of the actor Dean Cain atop a billboard on Sunset Boulevard for Ripley’s Believe It or Not in 2003, explains the proper usage of the term on his Web site.

“The word ‘LEGO,’ when used as a noun, should only refer to the company that makes the product. Otherwise ‘LEGO’ is supposed to be used as an adjective. Thus, when referring to the pieces, neither ‘lego’ nor ‘legos’ is correct... rather one should say: ‘LEGO bricks’ or ‘LEGO pieces.’”

I ignore that Kate has inappropriately pluralized the toy as I bend down to see a briefcase-size box containing four different LEGO sets: pull-back racers (the kind that are propelled by a buildup of tension), two Star Wars boxes, and an oversize container for Mars Mission—which features a series of interconnected tubes and LEGO aliens. The box promises over seven hundred pieces altogether, and has a $15 price tag on it. I immediately back away and pretend to be uninterested. The couple continues to smash the chairs into the attic floor.
Bang.
I squat down for a closer look at the LEGO box while telling my wife I probably am not going to buy it.
Bang.
This is what I do when I really want something. It’s as if I’m negotiating with an invisible vendor.
Bang
. But in truth, my mind is whirring as I consider what will happen when I take it home.

I snatch up the oversize box and my heart races. Three minutes later we walk out into the cloudy afternoon $16 poorer—$15 for the LEGO sets, and $1 for a glass pitcher adorned with dinosaurs. My return to childhood is complete.

When rain starts to fall, we pack it in and head home, where I set about examining my haul on the ottoman in the living room, divvying up the pieces like Halloween candy. I now own two Ewok minifigs and a Chewbacca. In celebration, I utter Chewbacca’s throaty animal cry of emotion, which makes our dog, Charlie, come running. I next pull out a light gray brick the size of my remote with two red buttons and what appears to be a USB port. I am stumped as to what it is.

I e-mail Duane a photograph of it, and he responds immediately with a series of links that describe the Technic nine-volt motor. Technic debuted in 1977 as the Expert Builder series (the name changed in 1984). As one might guess, it was designed for advanced builders, with lights and movable parts in working machines that had gears and motors. I click through the links and thereby discover the online marketplace of BrickLink, where millions of new and used LEGO bricks are bought and sold.

The “unofficial LEGO marketplace,” according to the site’s slogan,
BrickLink.com
is eBay for the AFOL community, and I am visitor 28,733,814. This is where the collectors and builders have come to shop since it opened its virtual doors in 2000 as Brickbay.

BrinkLink actually made national headlines in 2005, when William Swanberg, a Nevada resident and online seller, was charged with fencing stolen LEGO sets on the auction site. He allegedly used a barcode switch scheme in toy stores across the Pacific Northwest, tagging more expensive sets like the Millennium Falcon with cheaper bar codes, and then reselling the sets online at close to the true retail price. In just three years, he sold approximately $600,000 worth of LEGO bricks.

When I mention Swanberg’s story to Duane, he says Swanberg was a big seller on BrickLink, even volunteering as an inventory administrator, cataloging the parts in sets.

“Sure, I bought some parts from him,” says Duane.

“Really? What was he like?” I ask.

“Just another seller. He sent me what I ordered.”

I’m not sure I believe him until I look at the feedback records for Swanberg and see Duane’s account pop up three times in 2005. “Great deal. Thanks, I’ll be back!” Duane wrote in April. Swanberg was arrested seven months later, pleading guilty to three counts of felony theft and receiving thirteen months in prison. U.S postal inspector agents had to rent a twenty-foot moving truck to haul away the evidence.

While reading about Swanberg on my desktop, I’m absentmindedly snapping together white and black bricks. I’m using primarily 2 × 2 bricks (two studs wide by two studs long) to build what ends up looking like a two-humped camel. It’s four studs wide with a slope for a head and yellow feet. It rests on my desk, and when my wife gets home she compliments me on what I’ve built. I smile, but don’t reveal my secret. I, like balloon animal hacks everywhere, can only make one animal so far. It is a LEGO version of the Island of Dr. Moreau, wherein I have brick-engineered a pig-camel, a dog-camel, and a camel with wheels. These monstrosities are quickly torn apart, and I wonder if I have some unresolved camel issues.