First Time

My first time was a magical and unforgettable experience that I will always cherish. It changed everything I thought I knew before, and nothing since was ever the same. I was young, perhaps nine or ten years old, and was visiting a duplex that had just been built at the end of our block. I don't remember the name of the new friend I made that day, but I remember what he showed me when his parents weren't home. I wasn't too impressed with it at first. I had one of my own, but soon learned that this one was different.

It was a large toy, a gray fighter jet. It was impressive, but singularly boring. I had toy cars and planes myself, and a set of construction vehicles to rival the jet's size. I used to play for hours on a hill in my backyard that my parents had gradually added sand from the beach to. I'd delight to the revving truck noises my dad would make as I would embark on the grand architectural endeavors of my imagination. I was starting to outgrow toys and had lost interest in my sand-hill, save for the occasional bored sadism of smashing ants with a large, polished rock into the sand they had adopted for a colony. What is it about human nature that makes us automatically prey on that which is smaller to feel superior? I was always picked on, being the smallest in my class, and was generally regarded as the “nice” kid by anyone who didn't regard me as the town nerd. Yet alone in my backyard in a place where I literally had engaged in more constructive activities, I committed mass murder. I grew up to be the kind of person who, upon finding an ant or a spider in the house, finds a container or some sort, usually a plastic Easter egg, to catch and subsequently release them into the yard. I still look back on how I treated insects as a child, and cannot understand why I was like that.

Speaking of segues into unrelated tangents, it was a large toy, a gray fighter jet. Apart from its size, there was nothing impressive about it, until this kid started folding and shifting parts, and revealed a robot. I was in utter awe of the concept then and, twenty years later, I still am. Eventually I got my own Transformer, the Decepticon seeker jet Thundercracker. Soon I had over thirty figures and constantly would follow my parents around asking them to watch as I turned a car into a robot, and vice versa, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. I collected all 80 issues of the comic book and recently acquired the entire series on DVD, as well as the more recent CGI Beast Wars which is quite possibly the best and most complete series from beginning to end. It takes place well after the time the original series was set and, in a brilliant twist, millions of years prior.

And what of my first exposure to Transformers? That was actually a Gobot, an impressive early Japanese model that my friend's father had brought home for him after a business trip. That version of Leader-1 would not be available in the United States until 1985, after Transformers had surpassed Gobots in popularity, but by some cosmic stroke of fortune I was exposed to it sooner. For better or worse, my life has never been the same.