  by Teresa K. Morrison "Let's go!" I shout back, because I have become
an acolyte and I'm ready to drop almost anything to hop in the car
and drive to far-flung places in pursuit of rare and elusive
toys.
Mind you, neither of us is actually going to
walk out of a scheduled shift in the middle of a dinner rush to go
toy shopping, largely because we would lose our jobs, decidedly
disenabling any hobby that requires a fair amount of disposable
income. It's just a nice fantasy when you've got eight plates of hot
food up, two tables that need their orders taken, and one very nice
lady for whom you cannot, despite your past four attempts, get the
soup hot enough.
Why Wal-Mart? Wal-Marting is just a convenient
term we use for trips to out-of-the-way toy haunts, Wal-Marts
themselves always seeming to crop up in decreased rent, suburban
locations. We usually have to drive to the outer fringes of the Los
Angeles area and beyond, where the concentration of toy collectors is
less dense, to get the really great toys. So trips to the Toys-R-Us
in Montebello, the Target in Valencia, and, yes, the Wal-Mart itself
in Glendora, are all called Wal-Marting.
It seems like a childhood dream realized--having
both the desire for, and the disposable income with which to obtain
all the toys your apartment can hold. But there's an insidious twist
to toy collecting in the nineties, and the days when we performed a
month of chores only to have to beg for a ride to Zody's to acquire
our cherished item du jour, well that all just seems simpler in
hindsight.
Action figures, by far the most collectible and
popular genre of toy for the past several years, come packed in cases
with a predetermined mix of characters, with some figures
intentionally "short-packed" by the toy company (A short-packed
figure would be one that occurs, say, only once in a case of sixteen,
while the other fifteen figures are commons, say three each of five
different figures). Some collectors have perversely turned the hobby
into a hunt for the rarest figures rather than collecting the
characters they like.
All this being said, John only collects
characters he likes, but some of the figures he genuinely likes and
wants are short-packed, and the hobby has gotten so nutso that he can
spend a month of Wednesdays (shipping day!) and four tanks of gas
hitting every toy and department store from here to the state line
and still not find the figure(s) he's after.
"Have you seen these?" he asked excitedly one
night as he approached me at work and thrust a plastic item no larger
than a bug into my hand. It was the prince guy from The Little
Mermaid, and it's remarkable that I can tell you that because it
really was only several centimeters tall, but the details were
there.
He went on to tell me that it came from a (now
defunct) Nestle Magic Egg, that there are twenty-four different
Disney possibilities, and that he needed them all.
He had considerable trouble finding them, even
calling Nestle at the zenith of his search to ask if he
might buy them direct--the answer was no. Once he found them, he
bought every egg he could lay his hand on, thirteen cases, one
hundred and fifty-six eggs. He didn't eat the chocolate.
We drove out to the La Puente area, hitting two
TRUs (that's insider talk for Toys-R-Us), two Wal-Marts, one K-Mart,
two malls, one Target, one Ninety-Eight cent store, one strip-mall
mom-and-pop (an independent store that sells some combination of
toys, comic books, and collectibles) and the glorious factory site
Mattel outlet that is the Holy Grail to such Disney and Barbie
collectors as John and Robert.
John spent his formative years in a tract home in
Torrance. It is significant in that it was the last house he would
live in with his nuclear family, the sale of which would date his
parents' seperation and his mentally retarded brother's need for
committed residential nursing care.
There weren't many kids in the neighborhood who
were John's age, and his father was selective about the toys he would
buy for his sons. Of primary consideration was that boys didn't play
with dolls, regardless of any earnest and hopeful attempts to qualify
them as "action figures."
In fact, John cites his first "action figure" as
the winged angel from his parents Nativity set. She was just a few
inches high and held a banner reading, "in excelsis Deo."
John's family moved out of the Torrance house
shortly thereafter, and the Nativity set made the move without its
angel. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph et al. now reside in John's West LA
apartment and are faithfully displayed every Christmas. But what of
the angel?
"I think about her all the time. I can't even
tell you how many times I've driven past that house, wondering if she
could still be on that ledge after all this time. I want to go to
the door and tell the owners I used to live there and ask them if I
could just take a look. But they'd think I was crazy, or the whole
wall would be gone. Still, I know she's there somewhere," he drifts
off. This is about as vulnerable as I've ever seen John and at this
moment I want to drive him to Torrance myself.
"You should go find her," I say
matter-of-factly, at the same time wondering how I would respond as
an adult if someone like John came to my door with a similar request.
But that's just it--being an adult, frankly, sometimes sucks. "You
should definitely go find her."
For more information on collectors and collecting, see our review of the
Raving Toy Maniacs site or the book Magnificent Obsessions
(available in our bookstore).
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"Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart," John shouts
jubilantly over the din of the dinner rush at the West Hollywood
restaurant where we both wait tables.
John Sala is a thirty-five year old native
Angeleno, the adoptive child of an Italian father and a Japanese
mother, whose character is in part shaped by, and in part consumed
by, his zeal for toys.
What does he collect? Primarily Disney, lots of
premiums from fast-food joints and mail-in offers, select items from
Star Wars, and whatever else interests him at this very moment. But
it isn't really the specificity of his collection that's facinating;
it's the zeal with which he collects.
I can actually date my own emergence as a toy collector to
one fateful day with John and his friend, Robert, a fellow
thirty-something who collects Barbie (and just in case you're
beginning to imagine mincing steps and lispy exchanges, don't. They
are both extremely capable and unfailingly chivalrous men whom I feel
safe with at the seediest of Wal-Marts in the darkest of nights).
They took me on a toy run of epic proportions, though considered mild
by their own standards.
It took ten hours, with one meal break at an
in-mall Marie Callender's. At the end of day they both buzzed with
content over their purchases even though neither of them had what one
might call a bounty of goods. The hunt often proves greater than the
spoils and the stories that emerge are not unlike fisherman's
tales--the toys they landed and the toys that got away.
"I used to fly her all over the house," John
enthuses. "She was sort of a super hero. The last time I remember
playing with her, I set her up high on a ledge, on one of those walls
with rocks that stuck out like irregular shelves."