Listen to Dan Musgrave read this excerpt.

There are three screws in the body of a G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero figure, but the only one that matters is the one in the middle of their back. You stab them there to take them apart.

My little brother, Rye, and I stumbled on to this fact in the year of our parents’ divorce. The same year the toy line was canceled, in fact. Throughout the fissuring of our household and its aftermath, we huddled, heads nearly touching, over the makeshift operating table of our bedroom floor. There, we tore down our most treasured possessions and rebuilt them into something new, repeating the act over and over, like an incantation. Like a plea.

We hadn’t expected our parents to split up. Hadn’t even suspected such a thing was possible. It didn’t make sense that something so cataclysmic could occur without any clues that it was transpiring. Dad, the veteran, had nearly died fighting for what he believed in and then came home to become a protester and public speaker. Meanwhile, Mom, the artist, painted and sculpted and drew in order to put pieces of herself on the walls of galleries for anyone to see. But with this, there was nothing on display. We never saw them fight, never heard them argue. Whatever happened between them was a purely covert operation.

Decades later, Dad would say his war had come between them. “All this shit I’d thought I’d put away for good was coming up again,” he said. “I was so consumed with it that I wasn’t a good partner.”

The end came when Mom met someone new. When I found out, I couldn’t understand why our dad wasn’t fighting to stop it. I imagined us gathering intel together, spying on her, finding some way to halt what was in motion. When I asked Dad why he wasn’t doing anything, he said he loved our Mom so much he would do anything for her, even if that meant letting her choose to be happy with someone else.

He said you can’t make someone love you.

I wasn’t old enough to understand. All I could grasp at the time was that Mom had betrayed and abandoned Dad. And Dad had given up and accepted defeat.

It was after our home morphed into “Dad’s house” that we went to work on our G.I. Joes as a near daily ritual. Once you extract the one screw where his backpack goes, you can turn the Real American Hero over and pull his chest off. For all the gear he wears, the bandoliers of ammo, the knives and grenades, the pistol on his belt, the weapons piled beside him, inside he is empty. There’s nothing to be done
about that. No amount of swapped parts will fill that void.

All we needed for this operation was a #0 Phillips head. There was only a single screwdriver in our house small enough to fit in the divot in the Joe’s back, and I pilfered it from my father’s old rusty toolbox and kept it upstairs in our room. For whatever reason, probably because we were poor, I didn’t think we would be able to replace it and so we treated it with extreme care.

G.I. Joes, once impaled and opened up, come apart into seven pieces: two arms, a head, back, chest, waist/crotch, and a pair of legs attached to a small metal bar with a hook sprouting from the middle, like a clothes hanger. This hook holds a rubber O-ring that keeps the bottom and top halves together. Before we found this somewhat surgical method of disassembly, we used more brutal options for turning the figure into components. A cinderblock, for instance, dropped from a few inches. A hammer. Put a figure under the car tire and wait for an errand to be run. Most often, we would just twist the Joe’s legs one direction and their torsos the other and wind them until the O-ring snapped. Before the screwdriver, the parts of these unfortunate individuals were just battle fodder, littering the play area. They could not be remade, so they became victims of bombs or mines or artillery or even, when the narrative demanded a real blockbuster moment, masterful sword strikes. These casualties could be revived after we discovered the screwdriver. We sometimes had to put rubber bands inside them if there were no donor O-rings available. The rubber bands were not suited to the task and eventually dried out and snapped, but we made it work in a pinch. The Joe could be made serviceable for a quick, one-night deployment.

Throughout my childhood, Dad was injured so frequently it almost felt routine. He crashed his motorcycle, fell from the rigging of the power plant where he worked, crash landed while skydiving. He was always in one or another braces, casts, bandages, and/or wheelchairs. Spicy foods would leave him moaning in the bathroom, and eating fish would puff him up like a balloon. I carry in my memory
a ledger of the injuries he incurred during my youth.

We were so used to our father being injured that when my mother picked my brother and me up from school and said, “Let’s take a drive to the lake,” my immediate fears—the first words out of my mouth—were for my father. “Is Dad hurt?” I asked, throat constricted, eyes already threatening tears. She said no in a sad, small way. Before we could get to the lake, she told us about the divorce. Turned out her answer to my question wasn’t entirely true. He was hurt—they both were—just not in the way we were used to noticing.

The divorce seemed to deconstruct not just our home but also our father’s resilience. It seemed like before the divorce, he could heal from his wounds, and after he could not.

Shortly after the split, Dad flew from our home in Kansas down to Atlanta to see some kind of specialist for pain in his leg. According to Dad, he’d been limping since coming back from Vietnam, and decades of this lopsided gait had left him at the point that he was in constant pain from the nerve damage. When I heard that, it was news to me. As injury-prone as he was, I never thought of him as handicapped, just serially unlucky. He was like an eight-foot-tall statue that could show flaws but never topple.

The surgery was supposed to keep Dad in Atlanta for a few days, then he would fly back to recuperate. Something went wrong, though, so he was in that hospital for a week. Blood clots had formed in the leg. Despite the seriousness of these complications, the hospital sent him out once his insurance would no longer cover the stay. My mother said he had complications because he was going through intense cocaine and whatever else withdrawal, which was another surprise to me. No matter the actual reason, my father was wheelchaired out the door and my grandfather had to speed down to retrieve him.

“I couldn’t walk out because every time I stood up, I passed out, which they knew wasn’t good, but they put me out on the curb anyway,” Dad said when I asked him about it as an adult. “Grandpa drove me back and went right to my doctor, who told Grandpa to go straight to the ER. Doc knew I looked bad and I
knew when he said that, it must be pretty serious. They took me right to the ICU.”

By the time we got to visit him in the hospital, the clots showed no sign of receding. The opposite, in fact, as they’d moved into his one remaining lung. The other had been torn apart by machine gun fire in an ambush in Vietnam. Before this surgery, the scars of that event were the biggest indication I had that some things never healed. The clots made him need a respirator to breathe. Before we got there, though, he made the nurses switch him to the smaller, far less effective, nasal cannula because he wanted everything to be less scary for us. It made it harder to breathe but easier to speak, and that was a trade he was willing to make for my brother and me.

“I would pretend to be asleep so I could hear how they talked about me. When you’re awake they don’t always give you the straight scoop. They didn’t think I was going to make it through the next night. I think that’s why they finally let you boys visit me. I’d been asking for it, but it wasn’t until then that they decided to do it. I remember laying there and thinking, here I go again. I knew what dying felt like, and it was like this. And the irony of it. The first time it was my chest and here it was my chest again, only this time it was the right side, not the left. And I had kind of accepted it, but I kept telling God to just let me see my boys again.”

I remember his ICU room was dark, everything in shadow, though we’d arrived in the middle of the afternoon. All the light seemed to be coming either from Dad or the machines plugged into him. He was bathed in this dull yellowish glow, a flashlight on the last bit of its batteries. He tried to explain to us what was going on in an upbeat way, his voice raspy and weak, mindful enough through the fog, probably, of the concern on our faces.

I don’t remember being conscious of feeling anything at that time. If I try to put myself back in that room, I remember the gloom and the beeping and the hose in Dad’s nostrils and Grandpa hovering behind us. I remember feeling stiffness. Standing almost at attention. Like my body was wooden. Looking back, I know that I was scared. I just can’t put that feeling into the ten-year-old standing there, listening to his dad’s breathless voice trying to explain it all . . .

To read the rest of this essay, order your copy of NER 45.4.

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