The Soul-Crushing Agony of a Lost Toy Part

Over the years I’ve spent an absurd amount of effort trying not to lose parts or accessories to my toys. With as many as I’ve accumulated over these past hundred years or so of collecting, I’ve been very very fortunate that the vast majority of my collection is still around. Between sandwich bags, collector cases, and plastic storage boxes, the key has been to know where my toys are, where they’re going, and where they’ll be when I want them again. That is a lot of guns, missiles, and various whatnot to keep track of. Especially the whatnot. You gotta keep a close eye on that stuff.

Hey, who are you calling anal-retentive!

Despite all of this diligence, there are still a handful of cases where I’ve . . . GASP . . . lost some accessories. I know, I know. It happens. But since it happens so rarely, those few exceptions really stick their finger in all the wrong orifices.

The first item I remember losing was the vintage Bespin Luke’s lightsaber. I mean . . . why did it have to be his lightsaber? The blasters were more or less all interchangeable, but his yellow lightsaber was unique to him.

Yeah, remember when his toy had a yellow lightsaber? And we were all like “huh?” because it was supposed to be blue. Stupid Kenner. Your attempts to confound our tiny little minds was nonstop.

But back to his lightsaber. I had my figures on the family sofa, and I was having a furious battle between good and evil. It was late in the afternoon. My parents had decided that we should all go out to get dinner. By “going out to dinner” I mean we went to Hardee’s to pick up some cheeseburgers because my parents were young and broke. That didn’t matter to me; try telling a three-year-old that cheeseburgers in a wrapper weren’t fine cuisine.

I always removed the pickles back then. Stupid green infiltrators of my pristine cheeseburger, I stab at thee!

Anyway, when we got back home with our steaming bag of fast food, the first thing I wanted to do was continue the epic battle I had going on over on the sofa. At the time the sofa was the coolest place to play because you could have some characters hiding between the cushions and then pop out for an ambush and . . . well, you know.

Luke’s lightsaber was gone.

Gone.

As in “not there.”

Now, of course my first thought was that some burglar had broken in and pilfered my lightsaber. They would have left behind the television and taken the lightsaber because son of a bitch! But then, why didn’t they take Luke also . . .

Yeah, the logic on that line of thought quickly broke down.

Let me tell you, friends and neighbors: I crawled so far into that sofa looking for Luke’s miscolored lightsaber that I’m pretty sure I discovered an alternate universe in the cushions. I chucked the cushions on the floor and ransacked the now-nude sofa. I looked everywhere. I checked behind the sofa. I checked under it. I checked everywhere on the floor. I retraced my steps from the sofa to the front door, and then from the front door to the truck. I turned my shoes over and dumped them, thinking I had somehow kept a stowaway lightsaber there. If I could, I probably would have walked to Hardee’s, head down, looking for a thin slice of yellow plastic.

But it was gone.

Luke’s little yellow lightsaber was gone, and Luke would be lightsaber-free until I eventually got Jedi Luke. Jedi Luke, as many of you know, initially came with a blue lightsaber, when his lightsaber was supposed to be green.

Just couldn’t get it right, could you, Kenner?

To this day I don’t know what happened to Luke’s lightsaber. I want to say aliens. I mean, aliens makes the most sense, right?

But at least that wasn’t entirely my fault. That was a cruel and unusual sofa with unusual appetites and a bit of bizarre magic realism.

Zartan though . . . that was my fault.

I hadn’t had Zartan long. We were still in that honeymoon phase where I carried him around with me so I could play with him at odd moments. I still hadn’t gotten tired of the fact that he changed color in sunlight.

Again, my family and I were going somewhere. This time it was to my grandparents’. This was a long drive, a two hour drive, so I needed something to occupy myself while sitting in the middle of my parents as we toddled the truck down the road, listening to ’80s pop songs.

This is the same truck that we took to Hardee’s to grab fast food, by the way. The same truck that carted us away from Luke and a lightsaber I would never see again. It was a puke-colored ’70s Datsun.

This particular truck had a strange little quirk: there was a hole right at the bottom of the gearstick. You could look down from your middle seat and watch the road spin away underneath you as you drove along.

You can probably guess what happened.

It wasn’t Zartan that went down that hole. No, I was spared that cataclysm. It was just his removable chest plate. Somehow it popped off, and fell down, where the air currents tugged it through the hole into the waiting arms of the asphalt below. What was worse was that I could see it slide into the hole and disappear forever, to be crunched and munched by the wheels of the car behind us. I watched as it was sucked free of the truck, but I was way too slow to stop it.

Zartan was now without his fabled chest plate and color-changing sticker. A single road trip turned him into a bare-chested savage.

It didn’t help that once we reached our destination — the grandparents’ — I also lost one of his leg plates.

That was not a good trip for Zartan. And while my mom was able to make a construction paper chest plate for Zartan, he was never quite the same.

That would be the last time I took a toy with me on a long trip.

Flash forward a couple dozen years, and we come to the last entry on this catalog of incomplete toys.

You all remember Low-Light, right? Specifically that awesome version from 2011 that came with that tiny, itty-bitty, little 50 caliber bullet for his sniper rifle? Yeah, if you have that figure, it’s impossible to forget such a thing. It’s just . . . so tiny. It’s almost as if it were manufactured to be lost. Planned obsolescence in the purest form.

I had the package open for all of two minutes before I dropped it.

See, the bitch about this was that I was prepared for that bullet. Horror stories had already flooded the Internet of people losing that single, tiny bullet. I was determined not to be that guy. I was determined to keep my bullet.

So I had a plastic bag waiting. I was very careful. I opened the package over a table, so if anything dropped, it would be caught by the tabletop. I did it all so slowly.

When I finally plucked the bullet from its housing, I immediately grabbed the plastic baggie to drop the bullet inside.

But as with all things, a small miscalculation had interrupted my perfect planning.

You see, with all the plans I had in place, with all the caution I had put into opening that figure . . . I had forgotten to open the baggie. I had forgotten to break that vacuum seal.

Instead of dropping the bullet INTO the bag, I dropped the bullet ONTO the bag. Where it bounced. It bounced out. And rolled. And before I could stop it, it rolled down onto the carpet.

Carpet . . .

I froze. I didn’t move a single atom. I glared down at the carpet and fixed my eyes where I believed it had fallen. Slower than I have ever moved, I crept off of my seat and down onto the carpet.

A carpet only a handful of shades darker than the very bullet I was now intent on finding.

I knew it was there. I knew that it had not gone to that place that Luke’s lightsaber had traveled. This was here. It was right down there, in the tangled, fibrous miasma of carpet.

It was the size of a damned sperm cell, but it was there.

I muttered curse words under my breath and began searching through the fibers of my carpet for this bullet. I refused to allowed this microscopic thing that was crafted in the lower levels of hell itself to be a victim to fate’s cruel game of hide and seek.

I spent a half hour on my hands and knees sifting through the carpeting in a five by five area directly under where it had to have fallen. It is, by far, the most ridiculous thing I think I have ever done. Rationality screamed at me that it was a plastic shaving in the shape of a bullet. It was ridiculous to spend so much effort trying to find it.

Sure, rationality says that, but once you’re fifteen minutes into the hunt, then time stops meaning anything. Minutes, hours, days . . . what does it matter now? All that mattered was finding that bullet.

I expended my field of focus to a slightly larger area. It couldn’t have bounced this far. Did tiny plastic bullets bounce? This was nuts. I had to have missed it somewhere between some fibers I had already searched.

This was hopeless.

Nearing the forty minute mark, I was about to stop looking. My knees hurt. My back hurt. My eyes were tired of looking at carpet. It is very possible that I was half insane at this point.

There it was.

The bullet.

I don’t know how it got so far away from the point where it should have fallen, but there it was.

I picked it up. I held it tightly between index finger and thumb. I grabbed the opened bag, and dropped it inside, sealing it tight. I stuck that bag in a larger bag. I stuck the larger bag in the smallest of a series of Russian nesting dolls, which I then proceeded to re-nest into the largest doll. I shoved the doll in a trunk. I shoved the trunk into a floor safe. I loaded the floor safe onto a dolly and wheeled it to a storage locker, where it now resides. I may have been lying about a lot of that, except for the part where I put the bag inside a larger bag.

But I didn’t lose that bullet. I know exactly where it is.

Luke’s lightsaber, though . . . that’s a mystery.