I grew up with a beautiful, sexy, hardworking and possibly OCD housekeeper, whose Christianised name translates to Virginia, who feared the lord and saw her duty to her employers as not just to maintain ergonomic order but also provide parental surrogacy, as my mother was still searching for something amid the Macanese urban jungles. I’d shared many stimulating nights of conversation with her in my Masters of the Universe ™ toy tent, and realised how awesome she was one day when the cousins were over.
It was fit for two, I had a lot of male cousins, and I didn’t really want to share it with the dudes. So it was with real sense of duty I suppose that she would slip through the plastic entrance in her modest, familiar uniform, and uncap the .75 liter container of Similac, which I knew I had outgrown.
As I peered through Orko’s ™ cut-out eyes to observe the world beyond the opaque plastic exterior, my cousins were running around with some of the He-Man ™ plastic swords I had left in the magazine racks. If I recall, accurately, the visiting guest ettiquette of the time, I believe my cousin asked his mother if she could ask my grandmother if it was okay to swing the power of Grayskull. She told him he should just ask me directly. I’d overheard and said it was cool with me, I just wanted to be alone with Virginia. I thought we could chill, surrounded by the faded, reversed iconography of He-Man ™, She-Ra ™, Man-at-Arms ™ warding evil away. I never saw it coming. My cousin brought down the non-toxic blade onto the cheap toy plastic I had so tragically believed could shelter a sense of intimacy. Fortunately, his form was sloppy, and he had missed Virginia even as I deflected Grayskull’s power with my Similac bottle.
From that moment on, this individual would be known to us as the Naughty Cousin. It was many years later we all realised how unjust a term it was, as his record of offenses in our household started and stopped that same day. As I held back the tears (at such a young age, no less) and stared down the Naughty Cousin, as his mother snatched the power of Grayskull, scolded him and demanded he apologize not only to me but Virginia, I saw shame and guilt crowd his features. He realised what he’d done was naughty. I said it was okay and that I was fine. I believed he was truly sorry, because just before the sword split the cheap dot-matrix print of He-Man’s ™ rippling, belt-guard and torso I saw, something, in his eyes, the thrill of violence. It was a moment of pure psychotic (childhood) mania. Were he older it might’ve been criminal insanity, but he just having fun, and that I could understand. He said he’d realised he had exploited my permission and in some strange associative moment decided to abuse the power of Grayskull against the Masters of the Universe ™, no less with it’s own merchandise. With the cousins and his parents as witnesses, I silently accepted his apology. He surrended the power of Grayskull and I went away with Virginia, far far away.
