Ashback # 5 – I Pity the Fall!

Hey all,

Pictured above is the old 1983 Mr. T action figure, and no not a doll, an action figure. The difference is the kung-fu grip. Anyway, I was and still am I guess, a huge fan of the A-Team. I watched religiously every week as Four Vietnam vets, framed for a crime they didn’t commit, help the innocent while on the run from the military* Mr. T played B.A. Baracus, said doll. Damn it! I mean action figure.

It’s all choppy now, but one day, I was out adventuring around the neighbourhood and thought that it was a good idea to start randomly climbing stuff. Just down from my house, in a place, locals would call “over the bank”, were a bunch of steel-enforced retaining walls. Growing up, I used to climb them a lot. Yeah, had to be creative back in the day, just being a kid really. They weren’t hard to climb at all, that’s because they had these huge rivets in the middle of each section which made it very easy to grab hold.  Well, until one day. One day I got a little too cocky I suppose and reached for my last rivet and because I had that stupid doll in my hand. Damn it! I mean action figure. Because I was holding Mr. Jibba Jabba himself, I missed the last one and fell off. Falling close to ten feet square on my back. The fall knocked the wind clean out of me. I laid there hurting, slow leaking air out of my crushed lungs and my extremely crushed pride felt like it was leaving my body like a soul leaving a corpse. That was stupid, Ash.

For what seemed like a lifetime, I lay staring straight up, stars fluttering about in my eyeballs and tears welling up. It might have been a retaining wall, but for a second there, I couldn’t remember a thing. (eesh!) So, I shook off the cobwebs while still focusing upward. That’s when I noticed something at the top. Mr. T’s tiny body hanging halfway off the top portion of the wall. Boy, whatever bad words I knew up to that point my life, I used to curse Mr. T. for two whole minutes. As if it was all this toys fault like it went all toy story and Cliffhanger Sylvester Stallone’d me off a suspension bridge. Why Mr. T, why?

Indeed, ten-year-old Ash had been humbled. Since I was still alive, I had no other choice but to slowly ply myself up from the cold, unforgiving ground. When I got to my feet I quickly realized how lucky I was and more importantly, I thought my grandmother wasn’t going to find out what I did and freak. Though, I quickly realized that sometimes lessons come hard. Because, when I looked up one last time, “CRACK!!” Something had hit me Rrright in the face, Mr. T had busted open my bottom lip. However way it happened, the…ah, action figure had finally fallen off too and in doing so, gave me a nice scar that will forever be a reminder of how stupid I was that day or how nan ending up putting, how “stunned” I was.

*The A-Team – IMDB