Always one to pursue useless knowledge wherever he can find it in a seemingly never-ending quest to achieve the improbable and downright unlikely status of modern-day Renaissance man, Mark Bittmann has indulged his desire to never be lost in any conversation, by developing an arcane understanding of things of little consequence or import while maintaining his alleged status as a small fish in a small pond.
As long as his self-indulgent whim is catered to, he manages to sustain the facade of someone under the misperception that others care about what he thinks. With a ubiquity normally reserved for greenhouse gasses, he chases his random and inconsequential thoughts with all the tenacity of a banana peel. This is his life, his curse, and his twisted and maniacal way of impressing the ladies.
Remember those full-page ads in older comic books for all kinds of cool stuff that you could order through the mail? Things that no young boy worth his salt didn’t dream about ordering could be had for a little paper route money and some postage, if only to find out if the X-Ray Specs would work on the developing girls around us. Looking at the full page ad with the benefit of my alleged adult wisdom, it seems that it was some pretty shlocky stuff, although the Star Trek Phaser set that sold for a seemingly paltry $2.95 plus shipping in 1977 (courtesy of my copy of Fantastic Four #181) probably goes for at least hundred times that amount in mint condition today, especially if it came with original packaging and was only available through Johnson Smith Co., perpetrator of insidious assaults of my fledgling bank account were I not already indebted to Bazooka Joe.
Bazooka Joe, for the uninitiated (and there are few) is the comic strip included in every single of bazooka bubble gum. There’s a BZ comic on one side of and an order form for cool crap on the other. At least that’s how it was way back when I was a kid. Maybe it’s changed. My friends at school and I all wanted the sub-machine gun water pistol, because we liked to play army on the cul de sac I lived on and the idea of having a machine gun that shoots water sounded like a good one when colliding with thoughts of summertime. It looked like it would probably hold more water than the water pistols we were used to and make our cheesy, miniature, see-through plastic Colt .45s obsolete. Damn things had to be refilled every dozen squirts or so and leaked like sieves, leaving one exposed to enemy fire when refilling. Sure the point was to get wet, but making the other team wetter was the only way anyone could claim any kind of victory.
So, I figured between this cool new piece of hardware and the water balloons we used for hand grenades or launched with a slingshot inspired, surgical tubing and towel apparatus that I’d be rockin’ and rollin’ on the enemy. I waited for what seemed weeks and weeks for my cool, new, terminating weaponry and finally a package arrived from New York and within the box lay…a New York Yankees pennant (which was cool, because I collected pennants from every state our family traveled), some comic books (obviously greeted with a warm reception), a couple of magic tricks, a joy buzzer and a note explaining that they (whoever “they” were that provided the stuff for Bazooka Joe to give to me) were going out of business and that they hoped I would appreciate the items they did send. I was disappointed for about 8 seconds or so and by then my nose was in one of the comic books visiting another universe and not hearing my mom asking me to take out the trash.
So after the whole Bazooka Joe fiasco (say that five times fast) I had decided that maybe this mail order stuff was pretty cool and began shopping with my friend in my comics for something to buy next. Now Aaron wasn’t particularly into comic books, but had been known to crack one open on the hotter, lazier summer afternoons of our childhood and read them with me, always lingering over the same, old ad published and occasionally updated in just about every comic of any kind and dreaming about what we could do with some of the stuff. We had both heard that the X-Ray Specs were judged “fakey” (our universal word for anything unconvincing, from Ray Harryhausen special effects viewed in the wake of Star Wars, to the way the lips of the Japanese people fleeing Godzilla on Creature Feature didn’t match up with the bad English translation that was marginally voiced over) by other kids and figured they must be or every boy going through “growing pains” (and his brother and his dad…) would own a pair. So we decided against the remote possibility of letting a mail order product usurp the ubiquitous Playboy as our first exposure to the naked female form and instead opted for a World War II soldier set that promised tanks, both gun and bazooka wielding soldiers, assorted naval vessel replicas, and all sorts of weapons of mass destruction made plastic to capture our imaginations and prepare us for war. The Vietnam War was something we recognized as a news topic as soon as we became aware of the concept and at a young age planned on going into the army. It wasn’t until a couple of years later when my dad informed me that the draft was no longer that I was enlightened to the fact that going into the military was optional. Although it had again been reinstated by the time I had turned 18 years of age.
Anyway, the toys that came were much smaller and less detailed than those in the advertisement. Shocker, huh? The power of misdirection and all that. Ricky Jay would be impressed. Dazzle the kiddies with the flash of a well-rendered drawing with fine print reading “imaginary war scene shown” amongst the soldiers that looked large in the foreground of the drawing. Perspective, evidently, is a major player in the seduction of an innocent’s wallet. Oh, well. Lesson learned. No more ordering stuff from the backs of comic books. No eight foot tall giant balloons, Hercules wrist-bands, Sea Monkeys, Pocket Spy Telescopes or 1000 Tiny Magnets to be disappointed in the reality of. Gotta grow up some time I guess.
