Dolls and the nerds who love them.

I found myself outside of the fucking Times Square Toys ‘R’ Us at 9:45 am today, waiting for the doors to open. I surveyed the other people waiting; a family of Southern tourists, an Asian couple, and a couple handfuls of random male nerds. When the doors opened, no one ran inside, as I’d expected; we all sort of briskly walked.

I went to the action figure section and pawed through the rows of
Batman dolls.

“Don’t tell me,” a nerd said from behind me, “you’re looking for the Joker?” I shook my head.

“Nah. I need the chase figure. You know, the maskless Batman,” I said. Another nerd came up to us.

“The chase ain’t here.” He held three dolls in his hands. The other nerd studied his finds and gasped. “Yeah, I got a joker,” the second nerd said triumphantly. He stared at me. “Now,” he said, “If they were to reintroduce Poison Ivy, don’t you think she would be ideal? I mean, between her and Uma Thurman…she’s so much better!”

The other nerd disagreed. “But I’m old school,” he said. He pointed to an action figure on the rack. “For example, where’s the red and blue?! I went to college for animation. I have a bachelor’s degree in this shit!” The nerds started discussing live-action Batman short films and sort of forgot I was there.

For as long as I can remember, comic book geeks in my social universe have goaded me to be one of several comic book heroines/villains for Halloween every year. “Be Wonder Woman! That’d be so hot!”

(I actually have issues with most female comic book characters…look at Catwoman. “Just when I started to like him, he pushed me off a building!” Pathetic. Forever arrested by their feminine weakness/cocklust/intellectual inferiority. Then again, the industry is fueled by men who are unable to get laid, so it makes sense.)

I wish I could say this was my first Batman doll attempt…last weekend I drove from Miami to the Toys ‘R’ Us in Pembroke Pines. I flirted a kid into digging through a new shipment in the back room for thirty minutes to find the dolls…I carried them to the checkout line…and they shut me the fuck down when the cashier scanned them and discovered they weren’t supposed to be out yet.

I also made an ultimately fruitless trip to the Bronx Toys ‘R’ Us two nights ago. A male employee told me that sadly, they did not have the Batman dolls yet. I asked him if a lot of collectors visited the only TRU in the Bronx.

“Yo, we got motherfuckers know more about what we got in the back than we do! I be like, ‘yo, how you get those numbers, son?’. And you know, most of em be bus drivas. You know, school bus drivas. They drop the kids off at 8:30 then you see the lot full of yellow buses. They hit the Target, us, the K-Mart…they crazy! Sometimes we find them in the backroom when no one let them back there. Then they tresspassin’. I think everybody want the joker. You know, cause he dead; that’s money. It’s kinda messed up.”

Fuck you, Batman. And fuck all this elusive advertising.

Tags: 40 year-old virgins, action figures, batman, chase figures, christian bale, dark knight, dolls, dorks, geeks, heath ledger, nerds