Robert

I can’t believe, after all I’ve been through, that the best I can fetch is a miserable five bucks. It makes me crazy just thinking about it. Why, the puffy shirt alone has to be worth a ten spot for chrissakes.###
Well, at least, when all is said and done, I should find a loving home out of all this commotion, and be in the care of someone who, at least, had the courage to write my story—one that started day one on the factory shop floor. ###
It was a dismal birth, even by manufacturing standards. Before I knew it, I was cruelly separated from my identical twins and shipped out in a cramped little box. I say twins because I had plenty, probably a couple of thousand. I’m not kidding. ###
If the truth be told, you might say we were born on the wrong side of the assembly line. I mean, look at me. There’s no Barbie or Ken in my gene pool. A pathetic lot we were for sure. And from what I’ve been able to piece together over the past few years, most all my sibs were either recalled or destroyed, which you’d think might have made me a little more prized in collectable circles. ###
But no! Five dollars! Man that gets under my rubber skin! It really does! ###
Anyway, I was the property of this kid, who, let’s just say, had some issues. I have a feeling he had a rough go of it on the old school bus—most likely bullied, the sort of thing that could dement a lost soul. And who do you think became the target of his misplaced anger? That’s right. Me! That’s who. ###
Oh, let me count the ways. ###
I’ve been decapitated precisely a hundred and forty seven times. Been boiled like a baby bottle fourteen. For a while there, he liked to poke at my left eye with his Boy Scout knife. That’s when he got the bright idea of this puffy shirt and a patch over my mutilated orbital socket. ###
Ah yes, the pirate phase. He called me “Matey” and always wanted to “shiver me timbers”, whatever the hell that meant, which I’d find out soon enough. ###
I suppose the “shiver” part was when he undressed me, like he usually did before a good boiling. But the “timbers” began when he pulled my arms and legs from their sockets and cut the rubber bands—in doll physiology, our musculature—essentially paralyzing me. Appendages rendered useless, he dressed me up, and threw me in the corner, where I lay for months like a sack of you-know-what, pardon my French, until the family dog snatched me up from my most lowly of states like a rotted ham bone. ###
Soon I was resting peacefully in a shallow grave hidden in the back yard garden, albeit a bit gnawed. God it was quiet. Even the grubs left me alone. If my calculations are right, I lay there a good thirty years, as far as I could tell. What happened after that is sketchy at best. I remember a pitchfork, a kind soul, and a gentle act of God. ###
Before I knew it, I was in the operating room of some doll doctor, who surgically attached new rubber bands and fitted me with little, plastic, beady eye. He even cleaned me up and gave me this new puffy shirt for all my troubles. Things were certainly looking up, so to speak. The operation was a great success, and the makeover gave me an edginess not often carried by my species. Sort of like a doll that had been around the block a few times. ###
Having said all that, I could do without the gay pride suspenders though. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a hundred percent down with the whole cause. Some of my best doll friends are gay. Good folks by any measure. But it’s just … well … it’s just that the suspenders put a damper on that “most interesting doll in the world” image I’ve been shooting for. ###
Eh, who cares really? It’s all small potatoes in the scheme of things. The point is that, finally, things were going my way. Or so I thought. ###
Then, the final straw. ###
The operation, the bath, the new clothes, all of it was simply an effort to jack up the price I’d be asked to fetch. I was up for goddam sale! I mean come on! I was like sixty years old for crying out loud. I was supposed to be entering my sunset years. You know, a glass-encased, what-not cabinet, life style. And now I was up for sale? God, was there no end to the heavy weight I carried? ###
For a measly five dollars no less! Bastards! All of them! ###
So I sat there like a slug on the discount shelf in the back, stuffed between a one-armed Betty Boop and legless G.I. Joe for five freakin’ years. That is, until I was recently rescued by the kind folks at NPR. ###
And the best part is, finally, my story will be told. ###
I look forward to meeting my new owner. I hope he’s the sort of fella a doll, such as myself, will be able to sit with, while he tells me ribald stories of adventures past over pints of Dos Equis—the only beer I’d drink, if my mouth could only open. ###
Yeah, that is gonna be so sweet, which is why I’m able to smile, as crooked as it is, and say, thank you, NPR. Thank you from the bottom of my heartless innards. ###