LEGO (11 page)

Toward the end of the opening ceremonies, the crowd of several hundred is getting restless. The adult fans have been promised access to scratch and dent boxes and a special convention discount at the LEGO store in the Northbrook Court Mall.

Visiting a mall after all of the stores have closed is like walking into a zombie movie or a Kevin Smith flick. You never know if the undead or Ben Affleck is waiting around the corner. As I step on the escalator at the Northbrook Court Mall, the first thing I hear is a crackling, like a fire getting started. When the escalator steps reach the second floor, I see the beginning of the line into the LEGO retail store. The store is opening after hours for the attendees of Brickworld 2008, and the employees seem a bit overwhelmed by the crowd.

The group I’m with walks to the back of the line, which stretches for several hundred people and is growing at an alarming rate. The crackling noise is the buzz of conversation as adult fans of LEGO discuss potential set purchases—Green Grocer and Indiana Jones being popular choices.

The line begins to move briskly until the store reaches capacity, with a hundred fans grabbing and clawing through bricks. The LEGO employee at the door, wearing a bright yellow apron, operates like a club bouncer. One in, one out, under the watchful eyes of two of Northbrook’s finest on hand for crowd control. I watch the frenzy as people grab discounted sets and fill boxes from the Pick A Brick tubs (loose pieces that you can grab and buy in bulk). And I want to get inside and join them.

I’m staring at a LEGO store employee who looks a lot like Dustin Diamond, better known as Screech from
Saved by the Bell.
While I’m trying to figure out what Screech is doing in a suburban Chicago mall, the employee at the door waves me inside even though nobody has yet exited.

I walk in, and I stop five steps later. The store is packed with LEGO fans carrying armloads of kits and cramming brick pieces into empty white cardboard boxes that they can fill up for $150 a pop. A forty-something mechanical engineer wearing a yellow LEGO T-shirt struggles to pick up six set boxes at once.

“It’s like a shopping spree you always dreamed of as a kid,” I say to him, stepping aside as a pair of teenage boys walk past, excitedly pointing to the Indiana Jones sets.

“Except you’ve got to pay for it when you get the bill next month,” he responds, laughing, and he walks toward the back of the store, where a LEGO employee has just emerged with an armful of Green Grocer sets in an attempt to restock. The employee won’t even reach the shelves in the front before he is empty-handed again.

I’m experiencing stimulus overload, so I mostly stand in the middle of the store like a child hoping he isn’t really lost. I’m struck that, despite a lack of personal space, I don’t see one angry face or hear a terse word. This is what bliss feels like.

Dave Sterling walks up to me, a big grin on his face.

“I thought you might forget these.” He hands over two green brick separators. “You should have at least two.”

“You weren’t making it up,” I say with a smile as he disappears into the crowd.

I eventually settle on buying a Pick A Brick cup, an oversize clear cup you can fill for $15 with whatever loose bricks and pieces are available. A savvy LEGO collector can stock up on parts well below retail or aftermarket cost. I am not savvy, but I pretend. I marvel over bright orange 1 × 4s and translucent blue 2 × 2s. I load up on white plates, window frames, and 1 × 1 headlight bricks. To paraphrase Mr. Barnum, I’m the sucker born right this minute.

An hour later, I’ve reached the front of the line. I place my Pick A Brick cup and two LEGO separators on the counter.

“What do we have here?” says the guy working the counter.

“That’s everything,” I shrug. The register reads $19.61.

“This is kind of anticlimactic,” he says, gesturing to the two gargantuan sales bags that the person in front of me is still struggling to carry from the store.

“I know,” I admit. “But we can pretend that I just helped you reach your sales goal for the quarter.”

He half-laughs. “Shouldn’t be a problem. Okay. Have fun at the convention.” And he’s on to the next customer.

On the ride home, I tell Dave a bit sheepishly that I wish I had bought more LEGO, I just wasn’t sure what I wanted. He tells me about how his mom used to put LEGO bricks in his Easter eggs instead of candy.

“She thought it would be healthier than candy. She didn’t want me to have so many sweets. Little did she know.” He laughs before continuing: “But you have to careful. It’s like gambling once you start, because you just keep buying. You think about a LEGO piece and it’s just five cents. So you tell yourself, I’ll just buy a hundred and that’s only five dollars. But then you do that twenty times, and you’ve suddenly spent a hundred dollars.”

I kind of want the rush that comes from spending a hundred dollars. I want my regret to be over credit card statements and embarrassing confessions to Kate. Because right now, I only regret that I haven’t bought more.

My effort in the Belville challenge, highlighted by the skeletal fairy godmother.

It’s the second day of the convention, and the volume is beginning to rise in the Elm Room at the Westin Chicago North Shore. A LEGO conspiracy—I didn’t think such a thing existed. But I’m riveted as adult fans discuss the possibility that LEGO is leaking information about new sets. I turn my head to the back of the room to see who is talking, and I see the oversize figure of Bryan Bonahoom. With a mop of curly brown hair and a laugh like Chris Farley, he often can be heard before he is seen. But on this occasion, he just points to me and mouths one word: “Belville.”

I nod my head and pack up my bag as my heart slowly begins to thud in my chest. I’ve been selected for one of the alternate build contests, the Belville challenge. The twenty other people in the room don’t know I’m nervous. They are too busy debating the merits of seeing a Star Wars set early. Cold sweat forms, and I realize that I’m terrified. I briefly consider remaining in my seat, but Bryan is waiting at the back of the room and shuffling his feet impatiently. I walk slowly out of the room and try to control my breathing, but the ensuing moment of embarrassment is dominating my thoughts.

Building contests are featured at most LEGO conventions. When you get a few hundred men in a room for a few days, competition is inevitable. The two most popular types are alternate building and speed building. In the alternate build, everyone is given the same bag of parts or pieces and told to work in a particular motif or vignette. In the speed build, each of the competitors is trying to build the same set and whoever finishes first is the victor.

Earlier in the day, I dropped my name on a small slip of paper into two of the six challenges being offered at the convention. The first was a LEGO Chess tournament, and I believed that even if I had been picked, it would have been mercifully short. I am not a crack chess player. It also had the advantage of being the only challenge to not feature competitive building of any kind. The chess pieces were already laid out and constructed. That seemed right up my alley.

The Belville challenge sounded interesting to me. I doubted there would be many entrants, and ideally the other competitors would be as clueless as I am, because Belville is the line of LEGO products specifically aimed at little girls. It features predominantly pink and purple sets with fairy princess and horse riding themes.

Belville has “sunshine homes” and the “Blossom Fairy”—the antithesis of what interests the average thirty-year-old male. So when I dropped my name in the bucket, I was figuring that guys who love Star Wars and architectural structures would be just as mystified as I by a LEGO kitten or a pink tower piece. I severely underestimated the creativity of my fellow convention attendees.

The five competitors are brought to two folding tables in the hallway adjacent to the lobby. My anxiety level rises as I realize that we will be building in front of not only other AFOLs, but also any member of the public who happens to walk by. One of my fellow competitors is a dad, Chris McDonnell, a Kentucky native who has accompanied his son Noah to the convention. I feel slightly better about my chances to finish fourth until I learn that he and his son often build together.

The organizer, Esther Walner, lays out the rules of the challenge simply. We have three small sets to use for parts: a Belville Blossom Fairy set, an Aqua Raiders set (think underwater James Bond), and a Castle set. Since this is the Belville challenge, we must use a majority of Belville parts to build a vignette—a scene with a backstory that we will explain after we’re done building. Although it’s not a timed build, we still have to be finished by 3:45 p.m. I put my cell phone down on the table and see that I have fifty-seven minutes. I wipe my hand on my jeans. I haven’t sweated this much since the moments before slow dances at Fairfield Woods Middle School.

“Go ahead,” Esther encourages us as two men in dark gray suits pass behind her. I catch the eye of the older man and he cocks his head slightly—a dog hearing a sound he can’t quite place. I wish I could keep walking.

“Do you have any idea what you’re going to build?” I ask Abner Finley at the end of the table. We had lunch together the previous day, and it’s nice to see a friendly face. I immediately wonder if I’ve just violated the cardinal rule of an alternate build: don’t ask your fellow builders what they’re going to construct.

“No idea. I guess I’ll figure something out,” says Abner, turning his attention to the three clear plastic bags from the sets he has just opened.

Linda, the only female contestant, is having trouble opening her cardboard boxes on the right. I’ve already managed that feat, so I move to offer her my open box in a bit of chivalry.

“Oh sorry, there’s no sharing of pieces,” says Esther quickly, seeing me push a pile of parts in front of Linda.

“I wasn’t... uh ... I was just trying to trade boxes,” I say weakly. In the three seconds of that conversation, Linda has opened her set, and I begin to slide pieces back in front of me. I leave behind my white LEGO kitten, until Linda and Esther point out that I have missed it.

I pretend to look as if I know what I’m doing as I sort pieces from the three sets. The Belville set has large pink castle pieces, white cones, sparkling pink gems, daisylike flowers, and fairy wings. Aqua Raiders features a treasure chest, water snakes, and the bricks to make a giant yellow submarine. Skeletons battle knights with a catapult in the Castle set.

A pile of just over two hundred parts sits on the white tablecloth. I move them around like a kid trying to stall as his parents wait for him to finish his vegetables. Only seven minutes have elapsed, but everyone else has started building. I can hear the click of bricks snapping together. Since talking to Abner, I haven’t looked at or talked to the other builders. I’m afraid that I’ll see what they’re building and be unable to come up with something original.

I immediately rule out using the large pink tower pieces sitting in front of me. I (correctly) guess that the others will use them in their structures, and I hope that if I can’t win through technical strength, at least I can be more creative. But so far, I’ve failed to show traces of either imagination or design skills.

A teenage attendee of the convention wanders over in a khaki fisherman’s vest, the lens of his Nikon pointed directly at me.

“What is this?” he asks.

“Belville,” I grunt, pretending to be authoritative in using a word I learned the day before.

“I’m going to check out the Mecha challenge,” he says, before wandering over to the adjacent table, where five more AFOLs are busy assembling robotic figures constructed of LEGO—emblematic of the Mecha style of building. The final product will look like Japanese anime superheroes or something out of
The Matrix.
I can see why he doesn’t stay very long to watch what I do with my Blossom Fairy set.

My first instinct is to build sea monkeys. As I’m mentally cycling through conversations I’ve had over the past day in an attempt to find some inspiration, I remember a moment with Joe Meno. Early Friday morning, I found him hovering over a collaborative Belville display, where convention participants were encouraged to bring rooms of a hypothetical castle in predominantly pink and purple. Joe had his hands in a small plastic container and was affixing green tentacle-like plants to a baseplate. I watched him work for a minute, until his hands found a scattered collection of alien minifigs waiting to be posed.

“Joe, those are
Life on Mars
aliens. I have no idea what to do with those,” I told him, excited to recognize a piece from my garage sale set. (Which, of course, is called Mars Mission, rather than the title of the canceled ABC drama.)

“Nobody knows what to do with them,” he replied. When I gave him a questioning look, he explained.