The Death of Golobulus

The teenage years are a rough time for any male; a tsunamic flood of hormonal and physical metamorphosis that renders the majority of us into confused drooling monstrosities. It was much the same for me, finding myself overwhelmed by the thirst for carnage and blood that ravages the minds of the demented. For my part, my pubescent transformation resulted in the ultimate obliteration of many an unfortunate toy.

There were only two "races" of action figure spared from my genocidal tendencies: Star Wars and Transformers. These both ranked as sacrosanct, outside the bounds of even my most homicidal urges. Sometimes they'd even be brought along for the sheer joy of the kill, to laugh alongside me as their plastic brethren departed the earth.

Without question the most frequent targets for my destructive actions were the good men and women of the GI Joe unit. Wankers, the lot of them. I had no qualms whatsoever in proposing and carrying out creative methods of execution, all for my twisted amusement.

For every termination there were two important parts; the determination of method and the reading of the last rites. Every toy sentenced to death would have their charges read out before them. Occassionally I would allow them to argue for clemency, though I'm afraid that the majority found that justice's ears are firmly plugged.

The methods varied. Duke found himself bound a pair of bottle rockets, launched into the stratosphere only to suffer a violent explosive episode before plummeting back towards the Earth at terminal velocity. Gung Ho found himself strapped to the outside of a helicopter on its way to a head-on collision with a tree. He found the pilot of said vehicle to be a terrifying master, indeed, as his splintering crash had to be repeated seven or eight times until the headsman was satisfied.

Another Mengelian experiment in which I took joy was the grafting of the limbs from one victim to the ample torso of another. To facilitate these actions would require a blowtorch and a great deal of creativity, heating the limbs on victim number one until soft enough to be pulled from the torso, only to attach the limb to his compatriate and let the bubbling plastic cool. Many a mutant was created in such a fashion.

Ahh...the mutants. Herein lies my finest hour.

Golobulus was the mutant leader of Cobra-La, the original incarnation of Cobra, the primary nemesis of the GI Joe universe. Good old Golobby was a serpentine mutant, half man, half snake. He came into my life not as a single figure, but as part of a three pack of Christmas joy, accompanied by Nemesis Enforcer and Royal Guard.

To his credit, Golobulus was a pretty cool figure, what with his segmented mutant body and accompanying baddies. All in all I was rather fond of the lot of them.

But fancy can be a fickle thing, and the following summer I found a death sentence handed down from the high courts, boldly stamped with Golobulus' name, his two henchmen named as accomplices.

I'd love to say that I argued eloquently on their behalf, acting as an informal Clarence Darrow with the hopes of swaying the opinion of the judiciary. I'd love to, but it would be a bold faced lie. In truth, I relished the idea of their forthcoming execution and quickly set to work with determining the means and timing of my justice.

And so it was that one fine Spring morning, Golobulus and his crew found themselves wrested from slumber and carted off to the nearby baseball field. I dragged them off to a little used nook and laid them on the ground before digging them a shallow grave with a garden trowel. A grave, I might add, that they WATCHED me dig. I made no reassurances that they would not occupy this earthen stronghold posthaste.

At the appointed hour I read the charges against them and informed them that they had been sentenced to death. A sentence to be carried out immediately. They were stood before their future grave and the ceremony communed.

Their death was to be in two stages.

Stage 1: Artillery fire. A BB gun provided the small birdshot pellets that would tear their tender flesh to shreds, or at the very least dent their tough plastic casing. This stage would cease when the final accused dropped into the plot behind him.

Stage 2: Chemical bath and immolation. Once the accused had been fired upon and laid to rest in their shallow grave, they were to be bathed in WD-40 and set alight, to smoulder and boil into a formless blob of plasticized chemicals.

When the acrid black smoke finally cleared I offered the cermonial "Ashes to ashes" speech and then covered their remains with the dirt used to construct their grave.

Years went by, and I relished the memories on countless occassions. I would even make constitutionals over to the ball field to revisit their eternal resting place. But as time wore on and my memory dimmed, I found myself unable to pinpoint the exact area of execution.

The knowledge of their forgotten grave began to eat at me, my brain shifting at odd moments to the spectral monsters that no doubt lurked the field in the evening. I wouldn't have been surprised to see the Mystery Machine pull up to investigate the scene.

And so, one August afternoon in 2003 (that coincidentally turned out to be the day of the great blackout) I took my stepchildren and brother-in-law over to the field with a metal detector in hopes of finding my forgotten prey.

We spent the better part of three hours combing the land, hoping that the BB's or metal pins in their joints would set off the detector, allowing me to glimpse with pride once more at the destruction wreaked upon those hapless victims oh so many years ago.

I regaled the children with tales of what we were searching for, pointing out the sites of various misdeeds of my youth. (Which included the area where Terry and I hid for another misdaventure.) We fervently struck at the soil at various points hoping to blindly stumble across the victims while I did my best to reconstruct the scene in my head.

But it was to no avail. The final resting place of the Cobra-La squad remains lost to the ages. I fear that Golobulus will never see daylight again.