Collect All 21! Memoirs of a Star Wars Geek - Expanded Edition

by John Booth

  Finding Star Wars merchandise was like unearthing a rare prize on an archaeological dig, but I still opened them up and threw away the packaging, which makes me wince a little now, but then I think that because I did open those toys, it means I still saw them at least partially through the eyes of that 7-year-old I had been when Star Wars first came out. They were still toys to me, and not collectibles, and that’s something I’ve tried to keep hold of.

  I took all these things home and set them in my closet with the rest of my Kenner leftovers. The miniature-scale Death Star may have gotten a publicly-visible spot on one of my bookshelves, out of fondness for its long-deceased big brother. None of them is really a cool Star Wars toy: There’s a reason they were on clearance and still gathering dust in Children’s Palace several years after Jedi’s theatrical release. But I still have most of them, because they remind me of a time when Star Wars had left the public eye and was kind of a secret treasure.

  Toys “R” Us later moved in right across the street and pretty quickly drive Children’s Palace out of business.

  I would be a college student at Bowling Green State University before interest in the original trilogy began its resurgence in bookstores and comic shops. “Star Wars is back,” people started to whisper.

  Some of us just brought our toys back out of the closet and smiled, knowing it had never left.

  Proof of Purchase

  In seventh grade Algebra, my friend Dave and I were fake-fighting over a pencil before class started, tugging at it from both ends.

  “Mine!” I squawked in Yoda’s voice. “Or I will help you not!”

  Dark Times

  When I was a freshman at Bowling Green State University, I went to my first Big Lots store. High on a shelf I found a whole stack of Star Wars record totes, sized to hold vinyl 45s. This was the fall of 1989, mind you, so grabbing one of these for 50 cents was a treat and a trip and many, many times since, I’ve realized that I should have gone back with a five-spot and bought a pile of them. I used it to collect my pens and pencils and desk clutter and that’s what it’s still for almost two decades later.

  It was a good farewell to the ’80s and a great way to start the ’90s, stretching myself out in the flatlands of northwest Ohio. Between the old and new friendships, regular fights and tears and ridiculous joy, I can’t think of another time in my life where everything in every moment seemed to matter so much. It still feels very close and very real.

  And yet within a few years, I’d made some stupid relationship decisions, alienated most of my friends and family, and moved a thousand miles away from everyone who mattered to me while my Dad was dying of cancer.

  At the same time, there’s a thread of Star Wars running through the whole period, particularly during the years I call (only half-jokingly) the “Dark Times.”

  The last good summer, 1991, my friend Ivan and I lived in a crappy, boxy apartment in BG to take summer classes and enjoy a little independence away from home. We had original Star Wars trilogy posters above the little black-and-white television set in the living room were we watched a lot of “Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

  That summer, my buddy Aaron came up for a day or two and told me about this book he’d started reading called “Heir to the Empire.” Aaron had never been a big reader, so I knew this had to be something special. I was hooked immediately, and I remember lying on an overstuffed, worn blue couch underneath the sole window in the living room reading while the hot breath that passed for a summer breeze wafted faintly through the apartment. Ivan scarfed the book down as quickly as I did – I think we may have even read the same copy simultaneously, passing it back and forth as we came in and out of the house from classes, summer jobs and WBGU radio duties.

  I had a brown and tan bathrobe that had been Dad’s when I was growing up and which I’d used as an Obi-Wan getup on a trip to Ohio University for Halloween a few years before. (Back before the days of the 501st and online costuming groups, a white bedsheet toga, a brown turtleneck and brown beach towel hood plus that robe and a flashlight made for a perfectly passable Jedi outfit.)

  Every so often, post-shower or in the morning, or whenever, I’d be wearing this robe around the apartment, and if Ivan passed through the room, I’d throw out a random Obi-Wan quote: “The Jundland Wastes are not to be traveled lightly.”

  “…and no questions asked.”

  “Many of the truths we cling to…”

  Walking from the bathroom across the hall to my room once, I caught a glimpse of Ivan sitting in the living room and, without stopping, said, “Run, Luke, run!”

  Ivan objected, insisting that this was Obi-Wan’s spirit voice, and not eligible for inclusion in the Robe Dialogues. I responded that since I hadn’t spoken before passing out of Ivan’s line of sight that the quote was valid.

  Man, I wish I still had things that important to discuss on a summer morning.

  I had never stopped being a Star Wars fan, but in the post-Jedi years, I explored different (though still largely nerdy) paths: I discovered Ray Bradbury in the BGSU library stacks and read every collection and novel I could get my hands on. I’d played games like Archon and Infocom’s text adventures incessantly on our Commodore 64 in high school, and I’d toyed with role-playing Dungeons & Dragons and later Shadowrun. I did college radio comedy and got my FCC permit to host. They Might Be Giants and REM and New Order and the Pet Shop Boys and Mannheim Steamroller (well before they built their Christmas-schmaltz empire) were my soundtrack.

  On a spring break trip to Florida my sophomore year, I rode Star Tours for the first time. My friend Adam, whom I’d known since fourth grade, worked at one of the Disney resorts and got me and our friend Mike in for five days straight on passes. It rocked, seeing the ride and the giant AT-AT and the fake Ewok village and the prop sand skiff and snowspeeder at what was then called the Disney-MGM Studios.

  While I was there, I bought an Imperial Walker T-shirt that was my favorite ever.

  So when Aaron brought me that Timothy Zahn book, long after our sequel-writing and Star Wars RPG-collecting days had faded, I was psyched like I hadn’t been in a long time. A long time.

  Like I said, I’d never stopped being a Star Wars fan, but that book, that summer, was like hooking the jumper cables to the Landspeeder up on blocks in the back yard.

  By the time that summer came to a close, I was dating the girl who’d wind up helping me make an emotional wreck of myself over the next few years, though the real shitty times were a little ways off yet. On the bright side, though, I had Star Wars actively back on the brain.

  When summer 1992 rolled around, my life was very different. During the previous school year, That Girl had moved into my room in the new apartment Ivan and I were sharing. This pissed off my parents and widened the gap between me and my closest friends because That Girl found extreme fault with most of them and was a bitch anytime someone I cared about came near. Blind, I was. And stupid. And stubborn.

  Ivan moved away after the first semester, subletting his room to a guy I didn’t know.

  Dad’s cancer came back. He’d had a kidney removed during my senior year of high school, but we hadn’t seen signs of the illness since. It was hitting his lymph nodes now. He and Mom asked me to come home for the summer. That Girl begged me to stay in Bowling Green.

  I decided to compromise and go back and forth every two or three weeks, but was a spineless asshole and spent most of that summer in BG, back in the boxy, cramped apartment that had been such a cool and fun place just a year before.

  Bit by bit, the pieces of my life moved from the house where I grew up into that apartment: my books, my posters, my pictures. My stuff.

  My Star Wars guys.

  Once, my wife Jenn asked me about the good times I’d had with That Girl. I know they were there, and I may have even come up with one, but they feel fake and only justified afterwards, even though at the time they felt genuine.

  The gradual comeback of Sta
r Wars is now pretty much the only good stuff I remember coming out of my two years on the Dark Side, from late 1991 until November or so of 1993.

  Living with each other, That Girl and I fought a lot. She latched onto my love for Star Wars and fueled it, which you’d think would be cool, but turned out to be just another way to manipulate me.

  Still, this was the time when neat stuff was happening: Zahn’s book had re-stoked the Star Wars fires, and I was itching for his sequel.

  Then Steve Sansweet’s “Star Wars: From Concept to Screen to Collectible” book came out. This thing came at me out of nowhere one afternoon in a mall bookstore, and I absolutely devoured it: page after page of the toys I’d had, the toys I’d craved, and sweet God, the toys I’d never even known existed but now wanted to see. And for just the second time in my life, my eyes fell upon the image of a Blue Snaggletooth. This single picture and one-paragraph explanation of the figure’s existence, maybe more than anything else in that book, put the scent of Star Wars collecting back in my nostrils. “Collecting” even seems too antiseptic and grown-up. This nostalgia was like being little again and feeling that bone-deep desire to Collect All 21!

  There was only one comic shop in Bowling Green, but I figured they might have some of the old Marvel books I remembered, so I paid a visit.

  And I got another smack upside the head: The Star Wars comics from my childhood were there in the longboxes, of course, but … there were also new Star Wars comics on the racks!!!

  That’s how I stumbled onto Dark Horse’s “Dark Empire” and “Classic Star Wars” comics.

  Suddenly I had new Zahn books and new comics to wait for, and I had old stuff to hunt for.

  I started seeking out comic shops and old toy dealers up in Toledo just to see what vintage Star Wars things they might have around. Because this was pre-Internet, you could still discover things in the real world because everybody and their mom didn’t think a chewed-up Vader from the sandbox was worth a box of gold.

  I loved these places. I loved seeing Star Wars figures still on their cards and ships still in their boxes. I loved seeing things I hadn’t as a kid, like the Desert Skiff and the electronic Laser Battle and Battle Command games. I remember seeing my first vintage fan-custom figure: a Slave Leia (shock!) sitting near the cash register in one of these places.

  My favorite stop was a comic store in a strip mall in Toledo run by a guy who was the closest I could imagine to a real-life version of Doc Brown from Back to the Future. He wore a long trenchcoat all the time and was kind of wild-eyed and messy-haired and flapped around the store excitedly looking for stuff among the piles of seemingly disorganized boxes. He’d point me to a crate or a corner and I’d start rummaging. This is where I got stuff like my original Star Wars movie theater program and the January 1978 “Mad” magazine with Alfred E. Neuman as Vader on the cover and old fanzines and weird publications with titles like “Enterprise” and “Star Quest Comix.”

  I replaced the original six-issue Marvel Star Wars comic books I’d long since read into dust, then the six issues or so that followed, and then I added more when I could.

  I found all four Burger King Return of the Jedi glasses at a local flea market one Saturday morning and picked up the lot for two bucks.

  I brought all my original Star Wars guys to the apartment and set them up on a drawing board in the corner of the living room, and if there’d been room for the ships, they’d have been there, too.

  At a card show in a Toledo mall, I bought the entire set of red-bordered Topps Return of the Jedi cards I had as a kid. Here, I also discovered the blue-bordered Jedi set I had never even known existed, and the gold-bordered set of The Empire Strikes Back cards.

  On a trip home to North Canton, I found some still-packaged “giant” Topps Empire cards at the Hartville Flea Market, yet something else I’d never seen.

  It was kind of a second Golden Age for me, Star Wars-wise, and it was gorgeous and sustaining in its own way, because the rest of my life pretty much sucked hard.

  Remember that plan to spend alternating two-week-periods at home with my family and my sick Dad? Yeah, That Girl made that impossible with her guilt trips and needy emotional manipulation.

  The one visit I remember making back to North Canton, That Girl and Ivan showed up. (Ivan was either back in Bowling Green for a visit or was planning his return to school there in the fall. I honestly don’t remember.) They’d brought Ivan’s car since That Girl was dependent on mine, and I’m pretty sure she also dragged him in to serve as kind of a buffer for the friction between her and my family. The one thing that stays in my mind is that the two of them had gone out and bought me a present: the new Timothy Zahn Star Wars book, “Dark Force Rising.”

  Fall 1992 was my last semester of college, and the sickening roller coaster ride continued.

  Dad’s cancer got worse. My closest friends and I grew more distant, since That Girl got along with none of them. I hardly spoke with my mom and my brothers. Life with That Girl was a series of fights and make-ups.

  We bought and painstakingly assembled a Star Wars Millennium Falcon model together.

  She shattered it against the wall one day during an argument.

  She ripped my original trilogy posters down and shredded them in her hands.

  This was how things went.

  That Girl, in fact, said many horrible things and behaved terribly in many big and important ways, but maybe the thing that sums her up is this seemingly small act of pettiness: She would go out of her way to wear my Imperial Walker shirt by digging it out of my dresser or even the laundry and putting it on when I wasn’t around. This way, see, I’d look like the selfish jerk if I took offense.

  I didn’t participate in my college graduation because she ridiculed the notion (having stopped taking classes herself). The day I should have been receiving my degree in front of my parents, I was working in the McDonald’s where I’d met her, standing on an overturned plastic hamburger bun rack at the counter because the goddamn soda machine had exploded and there was an inch of pop on the floor.

  In the spring of 1993, we moved to Orlando. I had my degree and wanted to do nothing more than find a job writing anything. That Girl wanted to live where it was warm, so we got jobs at McDonald’s in Florida, working at different stores.

  I said goodbye to my family and packed up most of my stuff on a quick overnight trip back home. Dad wasn’t getting better. He and I both cried. I left anyway.

  That Girl and I moved into another crappy apartment and ate a lot of cheap, bad food and scraped to pay our bills.

  I displayed all my Star Wars figures and toys up on shelves in a closet and started looking for new shops to visit.

  Mom and Dad and my brothers made their annual spring break trip to Madeira Beach on the Gulf Coast within a month or two of the move. They flew into Orlando, and I picked them up at the airport. Dad was wearing a chemo pump and looked frail and sallow. He slept in the apartment – That Girl was at work, thank God – while my mom and brothers and I walked around the neighborhood a little. They rented a car and drove over to Madeira for their vacation. Later that week, we went and visited them for a day, but of course, That Girl insisted on the two of us going out for lunch alone, even though we’d driven two hours to see my family.

  At least I still had Star Wars to distract me.

  Topps released its first set of “Star Wars Galaxy” trading cards, which I bought by the box until I completed a set. (Yes, we were still largely broke. I scrimped and tucked away dollars here and there so I could try to buy solace in Star Wars stuff.) I called about a half-dozen comic and card shops regularly in the lead-up to the release, asking when they’d be in.

  A cool thing happened on my first visit to one of those shops in Orlando. I was talking with the owner about Star Wars, even though his was a more Trek-centric store called Enterprise 1701, and he ducked into a back room with a “hold on a sec” tossed over his shoulder. He came out with an old leftover admission t
icket/flyer to an advance promotional screening of The Empire Strikes Back.

  “Wow, that’s pretty cool,” I said, looking at it and then handing it back.

  “Keep it,” he said. “I have a whole stack of them.”

  It’s still framed on my wall.

  Even those ridiculous rubbery Galoob “Bend ’Ems” Star Wars figures were something to be had. Being in a store and seeing Stormtroopers and Vaders and Lukes hanging carded on the pegs was a rush, even if they were more like cruddy oversized erasers than “action figures.”

  I called my Dad on his birthday in early May. He sounded horrible. Not being able to afford a plane ticket, I boarded a Greyhound bus the next day and took a miserable 30-hour ride back to Ohio.

  How miserable? Well, for reading material, I had “The Grapes of Wrath,” and my entire travel provisions consisted of a box of sour-cream-and-onion snack chips, an Oscar Mayer packet of cheese, crackers and chicken slices, a Three Musketeers bar, a pudding cup, a package of M&Ms and a $1.19 in change. (Even this broke, I still plugged a quarter into a Star Wars arcade game at five in the morning at a stop in Louisville and blew up three Death Stars. Sometimes you just gotta let loose with the laser cannons.)

  Dad was in really bad shape. When he spoke, it was weak and simple. Mom brought him a dish of his favorite ice cream, and he and I sat there in our living room while he ate it, and he looked up from a bite and said in this small, childlike voice, “I got spumoni.”

  One afternoon, he and I were sitting side-by-side on the couch looking out at the backyard. It was that golden time of day, the sun just starting to deepen with that light that made the green on the grass and the trees so rich. Bits of milkweed fluff drifted slowly and glinted over the fields and the yards. We weren’t saying anything.