LEGO (20 page)

The last time I was in Ohio, Kate and I were halfway through a cross-country drive from Brooklyn to Kansas City in March 2007. The twenty-two-hour drive was going by slowly, as I struggled to adjust to Kate’s blue Volkswagen Beetle.

It was only the second time I’d driven a stick shift, a fact that didn’t escape my fellow drivers on the road. But I’d avoided drawing their anger until we came to a toll near West Virginia with a line snaking a dozen cars long. I managed to coast toward the toll window, and I thought we’d be fine until the driver in front of us took an inordinate amount of time to pay the toll.

In stopping suddenly, I failed to engage the clutch, and the car came to a shuddering, groaning halt. And then the horns began. A horn blared, flat and loud, as I fumbled to shift the stick and restart the car.

“It’s my fault,” I told Kate.

The horn sounded again. I started the car, but released the gas too quickly and we stalled again.

“It’s not your fault, they’re being jerks. God, why can’t people just learn to wait, like, a minute,” replied Kate.

I stalled another three times as I began to feel the cars lining up behind us. The air conditioning cycled on and off and it started to get hot in the car.

“It’s my fault,” I repeated over the sound of the horn.

We rolled past the booth, alternating between coasting and a jerky, uncoordinated tapping of the clutch, brake, and gas. I threw the coins in the basket and skipped a gear in my rush to get moving. The car caught for a second and then bucked forward.

“Honey, it’s not your fault. You’re doing the best you can,” said Kate as we mercifully sped away from the tollbooth.

“No ... it was my fault. I was leaning on the horn with my arm each time I had to restart the ignition. I was the one honking at myself to go,” I explained.

Kate was still giggling when we pulled over less than an hour later in Zanesville, Ohio, to stop for the night. A Fairfield Inn promised free Internet and had the same name as my hometown. It won the road-trip game of motel roulette. When we went to bed that night, we had no way of knowing that hundreds of LEGO models were less than ten minutes away.

 

 

The LEGO bricks are calling eighteen months later. Dan’s phone call wakes me, and I roll over in the Zanesville Super 8 motel, opening my eyes to see the glowing clock numbers: 8 a.m. It’s Friday morning, the day before the convention. I get myself up and awake and head over to the museum, saying a silent prayer of thanks that my rental car is an automatic.

No one is around outside the building except the motionless carousel cows, but the front door is unlocked. I go inside and wander into the Space Room. Breann Sledge looks up tiredly, busy weaving thin rigid tubing through the holes of elements, making a quick repair on something that looks like a cross between
Alien
and a Komodo dragon. The “Baerwyrm” is a twisting mass of gray and black plastic as large as Breann’s torso, extending slightly longer than her straight black hair parted in the middle. She’s spent the last five days building the articulated tail and bony midsection of this intimidating monster from LEGO and Bionicle parts.

“I’ve always been a collector of action figures. If you want to build your own action figures out of Bionicle, all you have to do is measure the toys and then turn that into bricks,” says Breann when I ask her about a collection of smaller figures that seem poised for combat. She picks two up and stages a mock fight, making explosion sounds and noises that mimic robot commands.

Breann is well known in the AFOL community as one of the preeminent Bionicle builders—as much for the fact that there are not many adults who build large-scale constructions with Bionicle as for her creativity and skill. At a time when most were building robots or warriors, she was building a fridge out of Bionicle, intertwining the bioorganism’s body parts to create a kitchen appliance. Online, she’s been called everything from “Breanicle” to “Bioniclina” to a “nerd-babe.”

“It’s always been boys, so I guess I never really noticed,” says Breann when I ask if it’s hard to be a female builder in a world dominated by guys. She lifts up the Baerwyrm, getting ready to move her MOC out to the hallway. I don’t offer to help, having learned my lesson that you never move anybody else’s creation unless you’re ready to rebuild it. I haven’t even seen half the parts that Breann has used, let alone know where they would go.

I’ve got the morning to myself in the museum, and I decide to explore some of the rooms that I didn’t see the day before. The History Room is first on my list; it’s Dan’s tribute to LEGO. A six-foot yellow LEGO man in a NASA suit stands in front of the chalkboard, where a signed wooden mosaic of Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen rests on the rail. I recognize it from Brickworld as the work of brick engraver Tommy Armstrong, a silver-haired adult fan from North Carolina whom I have never seen sans suspenders. It’s as if Dan has assembled artifacts from my trip into the AFOL world. I can’t decide if this means that I’m more connected than I think or simply that Dan has accumulated a truly massive collection.

I glimpse the museum’s former life as a school from the teacher’s pose of the NASA man and from the two students facing him, hunched over actual school desks that have individual bricks glued to their wooden surfaces. In the back of the room, wooden cars and ducks as well as plastic bricks from the 1950s and 1960s sit inside square glass cases. The condition of what’s in this room matters; these are some of the only models in the museum that the public can’t touch. The tone of this room is different as well; it feels the closest to a traditional museum.

The collection of dozens of pieces is impressive, because LEGO wasn’t introduced in the United States until 1961, which means that most of these toys originated in Denmark or other parts of Europe. Interestingly, Dan often approaches the LEGO company with his finds to confirm that what he has purchased—for example, an oversize white plastic cross imprinted with the LEGO logo—is genuine.

“I guess there just needs to be a happy medium,” Dan said when we talked about it the day before. “You’re dealing with Americans, and the company is coming from a culture in Denmark that is more reserved.”

A common respect for the company’s history seems to be that “happy medium” where Dan’s aggressiveness in acquiring models is recognized by LEGO because he unearths pieces that likely wouldn’t be found otherwise.

Immediately down the hall from the History Room is the Western Room. Here I see Dan’s sense of humor on display. LEGO Bart Simpson and Milhouse wait outside a saloon door next to a table of poker players, all scaled-up minifigures originally built at LEGOLAND California. Inside an old mailroom window is a LEGO clown—a slightly creepy, but funny, surprise.

Dan pops his head into the room; he’s gathering everyone together to talk about getting ready for the convention. A crowd of a dozen volunteers and vendors gathers in the first floor hallway in front of the LEGO Darth Vader. Dan clears his throat, wipes his hands on his jeans, and addresses his convention staff.

“I want it [the convention] to deal with something that no one has done before. At BrickFair and everywhere else, it’s—okay, here is the crowd, let’s charge them ten bucks and cover the cost of what we’re doing. I’m charging two dollars. It just basically pays the general employees’ cost of being here,” says Dan.

AFOL convention organizers often see public display days as a kind of necessary evil, since in essence, the families that come are helping to subsidize the cost of the event. Many convention organizers are basically volunteers, donating their time and in some cases money to rent a meeting room or event space.

“If AFOL events end up putting their organizers in debt, then there won’t be any AFOL events,” wrote Duane Collicott on LUGNET in October 2007, in a discussion over the money raised during conventions.

Some fans also see public days as a part of giving back, show-casing the talents of adult builders and helping to promote LEGO. There is also pride in knowing that thousands of people are coming to admire and take pictures of what you have built. But the visitors who pony up the admission fee are only temporary attendees of the convention; they’re not there to make friends or attend classes to discuss building techniques. They are only connecting with the LEGO. And they never see what’s behind the scenes at the carnival.

For Dan, it’s different. The attendees of Brick Show are likely to come back to the museum, which is in essence a permanent public display. The convention might last only a weekend, but the museum is still open fifty-one otherweekends a year. So he looks at his convention from a customer service experience perspective, trying to offer kids and parents a reason to return. And that approach extends to adult fans, whom Dan is trying to sell on augmenting or helping to build the museum’s collection.

“Erickson Bricks is making custom bricks for [name badges]. We’re doing a trade. It’s not like you have to make me five hundred dollars’ worth of stuff, it’s whatever you feel is appropriate,” says Dan. It’s a pay-what-you-want approach to an AFOL convention—which is decidedly unconventional. Vendors usually have to pay per table, such as the $25 fee charged by BrickFair held in Washington, D.C., the previous week.

Dan’s anti-establishment ethos seems to attract adult fans who share his worldview—fans like Tom Erickson.

“I’m a LEGO rock star, living on beer and Funions,” jokes Tom. “But I also need gas money,” he says over lunch at a nearby Pizza Hut that day.

If you saw him get out of his Toyota EFI microbus, you might think he was a member of Phish. With a dirty-blond goatee, red LEGO T-shirt with a yellow brick graphic on the front, and leather choker on his right wrist, Tom, thirty-two, has perfected the style-conscious look of someone who just doesn’t care how he looks. Yet the whirling mind of an economist and opportunist is what drives Tom around the convention circuit.

“Buy low and sell dear,” he says, paraphrasing one of the early axioms of Wall Street.

It was Civil War reenactors who initially got Tom back into LEGO. In 2006, a close friend passed away, and he took over the friend’s small toy soldier shop in Moline, Illinois. It was a time-intensive business—each toy soldier had to be hand-painted. “The customers demanded perfection, and it helped me realize that I want my toys to be durable,” says Tom.

To help defray the costs of running such an expensive enterprise, he put in a few LEGO displays and opened a BrickLink store. Over time, the focus of the store began to shift from toy soldiers to LEGO. Tom’s online BrickLink store was paying the rent of the brick-and-mortar shop. When his friend’s son decided to take over the toy soldier business in March 2008, Tom switched to selling LEGO full-time. By then, he was already known in the AFOL community as the “other brick engraver,” after creating custom brick badges for BrickFair.

“Tommy [Armstrong] is the original brick engraver. But I can make this work; it’s two years before any new business takes off,” says Tom.

It’s strange to think of anyone as an upstart in the adult fan community, but Tom Erickson is the new kid on the block in comparison to Tommy Armstrong, who debuted engraved bricks at BrickFest in 2004. Custom magnetic name badges made of bricks with names and hometowns burned into the side have since become the standard at conventions. And while Tom sees two brick engravers as a case of competition in a free market, some feel that he has just taken Tommy’s idea. And of course, LEGO purists shudder at either of them searing or altering a brick to make a key chain.

When we return from lunch, Tom gets back to his engraving setup, laying out the design for Brick Show bricks on a computer. Dan grabs me when I walk in and asks if I want to help out during the convention. He tells me to pick out a white T-shirt from the gift shop and leaves to make sure the A-frame signs have begun going up around Bellaire directing people to the convention tomorrow. In under a minute, I’ve gone from attendee to convention staff.

Later that night, in the middle of building the Yellow Castle wall, I take a break to act as a judge in the fourth-grade coloring contest—the entries are being taped to the wall for visitors to admire. My status rises the longer I stay at the Toy and Plastic Brick Museum. I go back to stacking bricks, absentmindedly holding them in my mouth like nails. I do the same thing at home while cooking raw chicken, licking grease or sauce off my fingers. Neither tastes particularly good or is a smart idea.

 

 

The next morning I walk in the front door of the museum, sporting my official staff T-shirt with its graphic of gold LEGO bricks and the words “Bellaire Ohio Toy Museum: Solid Gold!” Dan places me in charge of the building room on the second floor, where kids and parents are going to be constructing battle scenes for the interior of the Yellow Castle build. I get a staff brick badge from Tom. Dan has prebuilt white, blue, and red “houses” out of LEGO to provide some consistency to what everybody builds. Each builder—adult or child—gets an 8 × 10 stud “house” after picking a color and an oversize gray baseplate, forty-eight studs wide by forty-eight studs long (fifteen inches by fifteen inches).

By the door, I notice four cases of unopened baseplates that retail for $14.99 per baseplate at LEGO’s shop. And scattered all around the room are loose bricks and LEGO elements, including various plastic tubs filled with the knight minifigs that Carol was sorting the other night.

“Dan, there are thousands of dollars of bricks in this room,” I tell him, holding up a few unopened boxes of NBA minifigs.

“Sure, but I never want to get to the point where I say this is a two-dollar part and you can’t use it. It’s LEGO, you’re supposed to play with it,” says Dan.

And so he opens up his collection. It’s a generous streak that I think few adult fans would share. But I understand what Dan means when I meet his twelve-year-old son, Conrad. He’s helping me to organize the room and make sure kids have the parts they need to build. I watch him move around from group to group, offering them different pieces, and I see flashes of Dan the salesman.