This Father's Day, I received a wonderful gift from my wife and kids. A radio controlled tank.
This gift was no doubt prompted by one of my childhood tales of how awful my father was. Maybe I've told the story too much, but I think it perfectly illustrates how a father should not behave.
One of my most favorite toys as a kid was a little Radio Control M60 Patton tank my dad had gotten me from Radio Shack. I had wanted the Sherman WWII tank that had a traversing turret, but he went cheap on me and got me the Patton which could go forward, backward, turn left and right, but had no motorization of the turret. Both tanks were to scale with those little, green, plastic Army men kids played with.
At first, I was bummed out, because the Patton was a Vietnam-era tank. I wanted something that matched my WWII Army men. But I soon got over the temporal disgust, because I was having too much fun crashing through the ranks of the green army, toppling their Lincoln Log barriers, and otherwise wreaking R/C havoc in my room.
I can’t recall how old I was when I got the tank- maybe 10 or so. But I continued to play with it for years. I even had a shoe box with the tank, controller, and a slew of victims, er- soldiers, to play with. One day, I went to my shelves to get the box down and unleash some R/C scale carnage, and it was gone. I was baffled. I didn’t have many toys at this point, but I did still have my R/C tank and it had a specific place of honor on the shelves. Perplexed, and unable to find the box o’ carnage anywhere else in my room, I asked my dad.
“I gave that box away…” he confessed.
See, we lived in an apartment at that time, and at the other end of the building there was this single mom, estranged (not divorced) from her husband, with a 5 year old son. My single dad was always slobbering over her, and had tried to get her to go out on a few dates with him. In what he imagined was some kind of slick move to win her favor, he had come into my room, taken what he thought was just a box of Army Men, and given it to her little bastard.
With my R/C tank still inside.
I was crushed and furious. “Dear old dad” wouldn’t get it back either. Nor did he ever get me another tank, despite the fact he was heavy into radio controlled air planes at the time and dropped hundreds if not thousands of dollars on them. Planes, I might mention, he didn’t know how to fly.
This is one of many angry stories I have about my dad, and one that, at the age of 42 still bothers me.
Apparently, the wife got tired of hearing to it too. So, this Father's Day, she and the kids presented me with a bucket of Toy Story III army men and a 1/24 scale Tank- complete with traversing, elevating turret AND the ability to fire soft air pellets.
Mwuhahahahahaha! The kids and I have been having a blast all weekend with the tank, building wood block fortresses and formations of the Toy Story Army and smashing through them with the tank.
Good times.
Maybe next year, the girls will get me an HO train set. That's another painful story centered around my selfish dad.
Isn’t this a kick in the mother-f*cking testicles- I got the tank yesterday, played with it and the kids for a few hours and put it away. Get it out today, and it breaks. More specifically, the gearbox failed, as it wasn’t properly assembled to begin with. One tiny brass retaining ring falls off a pin and the gearbox fails. Can’t be put together as some parts were glued in damned place.
The curse of my asshole father? Apparently. Let’s see if Thinkgeek makes this right- although short of delivering a repair part/whole new tank in a Mr. Fusion-powered Delorean, I’m never going to get this Father’s Day back.
Once again, tanks a lot, dad, you big @!#$head. Almost got that memory erased with one of fun, now I have a double-dad-tank-disaster memory.