The Basement: My Fortress Of Solitude (A GI Joe Memory)

One of my best memories from way back when, was the epic GI Joe battles that took place in my Grandparent’s basement.  At first, I was afraid to go down there.  It was dark with wood paneling and thick red carpet, remnants from when my Uncle made it his bedroom.  As I got older, I found it a great place to let loose with my Joes and not have to worry about making a mess in the more heavily occupied parts of the house.  I could open up the shutters to the window wells and let in more light from the outside.  

My Grandparent’s house was an old farmhouse built in 1909.  As some of you know, a house that old is rare in Arizona.  When my family bought the land in the 1940s, they expanded the farmhouse, adding extra bedrooms and the infamous basement.  My Grandpa grew up there, my Mom and Aunt and Uncle all lived there as well.  I spent lots of summers, weekends, birthdays, and holidays in that yellow farmhouse.  

Anyway, back to the GI Joe aspect of it.  The stairs leading into the basement were a frequent site of many bloody battles.  I used to pretend it was a steep hillside, where each side would fight and die to capture an inch of territory.  The Condor would fly over and bomb GI Joe positions (I would have to be careful not to lose the red bombs in the deep red carpet).  The Joes would be teamed up with A.J. Moon and his Battlecopter (from Bronze Bombers).  Up in the “sky”, the Night Boomer would be dogfighting the Condor, while the Dragonfly would unload its armaments on the Mamba.  I could spend hours doing this, until Grandma called me to lunch and a rerun of the Andy Griffith Show.

Courtesy:  Yojoe.com.  Bronze Bombers were a GI Joe-like line aimed at African-American kids.  I was probably the only white kid who had this.  A.J. Moon was a great addition to the GI Joe team, and bailed out his fellow soldiers many times.  He disappeared some time after the Basement Battles.  If only I knew back then how much these were selling for on eBay now!

The biggest and most fantastic battles took place in the main room of the basement.  One day, in the midst of intense combat, I had a great idea.  I took inspiration from Tomax and Xamot’s zip line handle accessory and decided to make a network of zip lines all across the basement.  Grandma’s sewing notions were pressed into action and before you knew it, cables were strung everywhere.  I fashioned gondolas from boxes used to store player piano rolls and binder clips I “borrowed” from the farm office.  The piano roll boxes could hold quite a few figures.  So years before Jon Chu thought to put a high-wire battle into the Retaliation movie, I had my Joes dangling from thread in the basement.  The gondolas would slide down the thread and the Joes and Cobras would be shooting at each other.  Every so often, a Cobra Trooper would fall to his doom (great falls were one of my favorite ways of killing off Cobras).  Meanwhile, the Locust and the FANG would be playing a game of cat and mouse, desperately trying to avoid tangling themselves in the “cables.”  Air superiority operations were launched from the green felt of the antique pool table that no one played on.  I played this scenario out many times, luckily my Grandma didn’t care how much of her black thread I used and no one seemed to miss the binder clips from the farm office.

I don’t remember when exactly the Basement Battles ceased.  Possibly when my Grandparents built a new house on the property and moved into there.  I had a few battles there, mostly the Joes versus Megatron in the spare bedroom.  It wasn’t the same.  Gone was the privacy of the basement, my fortress of solitude.  The new spare bedroom was not the best battleground.  It was filled with too many porcelain dolls and every surface was covered by a nick-nack of some sort.  Plus, I was growing older and the battles were fewer and fewer.  

As a father to a 5-year-old girl, I love to watch her play.  Her Barbie Dreamhouse is a constant “dolly party” as she calls it, where Bratz party with the Equestria Girls and Doc McStuffins.  I see in her the imagination that I had and I hope she looks back on her “dolly parties” just as fondly as I remember the Basement Battles.