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When I was around 12 years old, my grandmother
gave me a souvenir pencil from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, a place
she occasionally volunteered. There was a grotesque plastic imitation of an
African shrunken head on the end where you'd normally find an eraser. Despite a
baleful expression, the long, loose, cheap doll hair made the head look slightly
comical.
The first time my friend (and future
co-defendant) Al, who was also 12, saw the pencil, he grabbed it and started
dancing it toward me, chanting, "Jigaboo, Jigaboo!" This sounded like
a fine name for the shrunken head, so that's what we started calling it. It
would be a few years before I learned, to my dismay, that this was actually a
racial slur. At the time I just figured it must have been the name of some
jungle cartoon character Al had seen on TV.
One day we tore the head off of a Shazam action figure
Al had (I always cringed when people referred to these toys as
"dolls." Only girls and sissies played with dolls). We replaced Shazam’s
head with Jigaboo. It was one of the most asinine things I've ever seen. Picture
a body clothed in a bright red jumpsuit with a lightning bolt emblazoned on the
chest. Atop this body was a "shrunken" head that's actually about
three sizes too big. We must have felt that such a creature would be inherently
evil, so we expanded its name to Jigaboo Demon.
Jigaboo Demon wasted no time getting included in our
activities. We made him the leader of a ragtag band of 8 or 10 of Al's other
action figures (I was kicking myself for my decision two years earlier to throw
away my toy box, which contained many such men. At the time it seemed like a
mature thing to do, but it would have been cool to have made a personal
contribution to Jigaboo's fledgling army). The first order of business was to
outfit the men with various heavy and/or sharp protruding objects. Using rubber
bands, we strapped rocks to some, knives or forks to others, and some lucky
individuals even had batteries attached to them. One of us would then take these
characters to the top of my laundry chute while the other brought Jigaboo and a
plastic vehicle to the bottom of the chute. The vehicle was generally a cop car
or fire engine that was specially made for action figures but was, of course,
sold separately. Whoever was upstairs would then hurl the men one by one down
the chute in an effort to inflict the most possible damage on the vehicle below
as Jigaboo serenely sat by in judgment. If one of the guys caused minimal
destruction or even, gasp, missed the target altogether, the offending party was
dealt with quickly and harshly. Jigaboo often "instructed" us to lop
off the poor sap's finger with a pair of dog nail clippers we had handy. Another
common punishment involved plunging the man's face into a candle we had burning
nearby until it was sufficiently disfigured.
Jigaboo's House of Fun was created when we (and
presumably Jigaboo) grew tired of this game. Out of variously sized cardboard
boxes we made a miniature chamber of abstract horrors to keep the men on their
toes. Upon entering the structure, a disembodied leg would swing down and kick
the visitor past the crudely lettered "Enter at Your Own Risk" sign.
This would jolt the man into a hallway flanked by the most damaged of Jigaboo's
comrades (by now we'd gone on a small buying spree and had purchased five or six
fresh recruits to experience the House of Fun). A wooden beam arced wildly
across the middle of this hallway, threatening to knock passersby not only
senseless, but also into the arms of Jigaboo's less fortunate disciples. The
next room was bare except for a noose that hung through the ceiling. A sign
instructed the visitor to place the noose around his neck and calmly wait to be
hoisted out of this room and into an adjacent tower. Once in the tower, the next
step was to dive headfirst down the cardboard tube that gave the structure its
altitude onto the "concrete" floor below. This accomplished, the guest
then had to crawl through a small chamber into a wall of fire (really just a red
wash cloth) to get to Jigaboo's office. There he'd find his host seated behind a
cardboard desk, patiently awaiting him. Finally the visitor was allowed to come
in and discuss the news of the day with Jigaboo.
To heighten the effect of this perilous journey,
we recorded a tag-team welcome message on my cheap 1970s tape recorder and
played it while the men made their way through the compound. The greeting was
enhanced by The Doors' "Light My Fire" blasting in the background. My
step-dad happened upon us during one of these rituals and looked at us like we
were criminally insane (which was arguably the case). I imagine if he had delved
even slightly into what we were doing, Jigaboo's House of Fun would have been
instantly dismantled and found its way to the no-man's land of our garage
garbage cans. On an earlier occasion he'd thrown away my prized, yet horribly
tattered, pair of tennis shoes in one of these same cans. I simply took them out
and continued to wear them. The next time they disappeared, I confidently went
to the garage expecting to retrieve them in the same place. Once again they were
right where I thought they'd be - this time sawed in half.
As the saying goes, all good things must come to
an end. Jigaboo's demise came a few weeks after the construction of his. House
of Fun. We placed him in some sort of accessory cop car that actually hadn't
already been smashed by Kamikaze Jigaboo troop members. Then we hurled him off
of Al's roof. The ensuing crash just wasn't satisfying enough, so I crushed
Jigaboo's death car with a brick. When we extracted him from the wreckage he was
a mess. All his limbs had separated from his body and hung loosely inside his
red jumpsuit. We determined that, alas, Jigaboo was dead.
Our course of action was swift. We collected his
remains and placed them in an old red wagon. Gathering some interested friends
from the neighborhood, we hooked the wagon to the back of my moped and embarked
on a small, slow funeral procession down Al's street (Yes, I made sure my
headlight was on). Jigaboo was then buried near the side of Al's house. I'm
proud to say we only exhumed him once. I don't remember why, but after we dug
him up, we engulfed him in flames using an aerosol spray can and a lighter. Then
we reburied him and Jigaboo was able to rest in peace.
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