Mike Kaye the owner of the world's largest Transformers collection (Guinness Book of World Records)
My father was a complicated man.
My very first memory is of my father’s face. Massive and filling up my field of vision, he was shouting at me. He knew I was too young to understand what he was saying, but he wanted to start early and instill me with his killer instinct. He had to teach me to be ruthless, unflinching, and to follow THE RULE.
My father lived his life with a clear, singular purpose: to collect as many Transformers as humanly possible.
He would recite the rule at any opportunity until it was drilled into me. Until it was the only thing I thought about. “Son, life is a race to see how many Transformers you can collect. The person who dies with the most Transformers, WINS.”
One day at school I lost my Optimus Prime in a game of marbles. When my father heard the news – he shoved me out of a moving car. I laid there in the street, bloody and broken, gazing up into the sky. Was this all there was to life? The relentless acquisition of robots masquerading as vehicles – and sometimes as animals or dinosaurs?
Was the desperate pursuit of Transformers a shallow, pointless undertaking – or was there more than meets the eye?
Life back then was simple. Go to sleep at night with more Transformers than you woke up with. If you came home from school without a new Transformer, you didn’t eat. My relationship with my father was volatile. If I brought home an exciting new Transformer – like Metroplex – he was my best friend. If I showed up with a Starscream; he pretended like I didn’t exist.
Photo of a typical Transformers collection (Reddit User u/TriggerDaTeddy/Reddit)
One day in my twenties; my father got sick.
As it turns out, spending decades inside a room filled with Transformers is bad for you. The hot sun would bake the acrylic paint, and he’d sit there unwittingly inhaling the fumes. The doctor explained that due to the sheer number of Transformers he’d been exposed to, the paint fumes had eroded much of his brain.
After he came home from the hospital, my father was never the same. He lost interest in Transformers and started collecting Cabbage Patch Kids instead. Then he switched to He-Man: Masters of the Universe for a few years. Near the very end he had tragically begun selling off his Transformers collection to buy Pound Puppies.
When my father passed, he did something that up to that point had seemed unthinkable; he died Transformer-less. After a lifetime of harassment and torment, he broke the rule. At his funeral I quietly placed a Bumblebee on his coffin. I didn’t want him to leave this world without owning a single Transformer.
It was later that I realized my father hadn’t been beating, insulting, and humiliating me to mold me into a toy collector. He just wanted me to have a better life than he’d had. To succeed where he’d failed, and to experience joy where he’d only found pain.
Much like a Transformer, his love for me had been hidden in plain sight.
My father was a complicated man.
