10182-1 Cafe Corner
In which I reveal which kind of adult LEGO man I am
I started writing this essay in one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been—Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Yesterday morning, my wife and I rode horses through the park and saw what I can only describe as Mars but with plants. My horse’s name was Elbi—rhymes with Shelby. Elbi is a very good boy. Would recommend.
So, of course, when we got back to the hotel, I sank down into the jet tub and started thinking about LEGO.
I started thinking about my build. The one that I’ve been putting through draft after draft. The one that involves little gray aliens and a gift shop and a stylish apartment. The one that has a flying saucer on the roof.
There, soaking in the tub, for a moment, I wished I was back at home so I could make some modifications to my imaginary alien friends’ little LEGO living room in my LEGO design software.
I want to tell you all about it.
I want to tell everyone all about it.
But I should back up.
To 2007.
My mom had died about a year earlier. It was a bizarre time, but, in many ways, it was a very calm time. My mom’s illness and death were protracted. It was hard. It was exhausting. For everyone.
So when the dust had finally begun to settle, I leaned into calming and soothing things. Some healthy. Some unhealthy.
I had moved back into my childhood home to stop bleeding money and to help my brother sort things out while I took stock of my life. My then girlfriend and I had very simple passions. We liked to smoke pot and drink beer and eat spaghetti. We liked to do all three of those things while we watched Planet Earth with the sound off and the stereo up. Let’s say we were listening to Modest Mouse. Let’s say it was The Moon & Antarctica. Sometimes we played Katamari Damacy on my PlayStation 2.
One time, at the mall, we went into the LEGO store. Just because. Why not?
It felt good to be in the LEGO store.
It felt great to be in the LEGO store.
“I should get something,” I said.
“You should,” she said.
“I love that Hotel,” I said.
“That’s so cool,” she said.
“It’s like a real hotel,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “And the roof comes off!”
“And you can see inside!” I said.
“And there’s a cafe on the bottom floor,” she said.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“What?” she said.
“It’s $139.99,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “Fuck.”
“I shouldn’t,” I said.
But I did. I definitely did. And we took it back to my childhood bedroom and smoked pot and drank beer and ate spaghetti and watched Planet Earth and listened to, let’s say, Neutral Milk Hotel’s On Avery Island on the hifi and opened the box to LEGO 10182-1 Cafe Corner and spread out the plastic bags and instructions on the floor.
We stayed up late. We made the first floor. Then the second floor. Then the third floor. Then the roof.
Then I had this LEGO object. This beautiful thing that made me happy. This thing I could take the roof off of and inhabit ifsoever I felt the need to do so.
Montage. Insane editing. Let’s say the next paragraph is all quick cuts set to “What People Are Made Of” by Modest Mouse. Sometimes the footage is in reverse, as it was the style at the time.
Big smile at my 25th birthday dinner, martini in hand. Stealing pills out of an amber bottle in someone’s bathroom whose name I can’t remember. Crying in a parking garage alone in my dead mom’s Chrysler Sebring. Drunk on the London Underground, getting harassed by hooligans for having a big red beard. Squaw Valley, California, shaking hands with an editor from an indie press, promising to send him my manuscript when it’s finished. Crying in the Chrysler again, this time after a breakup. Driving alone in the Midwest. Back in DC, downtown, face first in a bush in the snow in the dead of winter. Not wearing a jacket. My friends are still in the club. Crying in the bush, shivering. A friend finally spots me and puts her hand on my shoulder. “Baby,” she says. AA meeting. Waiting tables and passing out on the restaurant floor when a freak electrical short fills my lungs with the fumes of burning plastic. Moving. Moving again. Moving again. Meeting my now wife. Holding her hand in a haunted house. My first day on the job in an office building. Packing up the last of the things in my childhood bedroom when my brother and I finally put our mom’s house on the market.
“Maybe I should just throw it away,” I say.
Emily observes me as I make a stern Miss Piggy face at LEGO 10182-1 Cafe Corner.
“I get that,” she says.
“I’m just tired of having so much stuff,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says.
“What if I just?” I say. “You know?”
“No, I get it,” she says. “If it feels like something you need to let go of.”
So I made a decision. I threw it in the trash.
Now, as a forty-two-year-old who loves building and collecting LEGO sets with his kid, this hurts my head and my heart to imagine. As a person who will forever be traumatized by years of financial insecurity, this gives me a near panic attack to imagine. As an autistic person whose special interest laser beam array has been sharply refocused on LEGO in the last year or so, this is… well, frankly, unimaginable.
But, when I was in my early thirties, this was exactly what I did. I threw LEGO 10182-1 Cafe Corner in the trash. At the time, I suppose it felt like I needed to. I suppose I did need to. To separate from “childish things” or from the version of me who had lived in his dead mom’s house and who had self medicated for so long.
But lately, as you may know, I’ve been embracing my special interests. My nerd things. My autism things. Whatever they are. The things that I might have masked for one reason or another in my younger years.
And having a five-year-old kid with remarkably good spatial reasoning who loves doing LEGO with his dad, well... It was only a matter of time before I decided I needed to get some adult sets of my own that I could admire on a shelf and not have to worry about sharing with said Destroyer.
And it was obvious to me which kind of adult LEGO man I was going to be. I would not be a Star Wars one or a Harry Potter one. I would not be a pirate one or a castle one. I would not be a train one or a robotics one. Nope, I would be—I mean I have been, have always been, through and through—a modular building LEGO man. Obviously.
I like that you can make an apartment building or a fire station or an arcade that your minifigures can live in and work in and play in. I love that you can stick your buildings together and make a city block. You can make a whole little world as big and as weird as you want.
“So,” I said to myself, “Self, why don’t you look for LEGO 10182-1 Cafe Corner on eBay and buy a used one? That would probably be a good place to start. How much could those be? Probably no one is looking for those, right? It’s not like it’s Hogwarts or whatever.“
Friends, I may or may not be about to blow your minds. The cheapest I could find a used, open-boxed LEGO 10182-1 Cafe Corner on eBay when I first looked for one was $1,500. The cheapest I could find one sealed in a box was nearly $3,000 dollars.
Holy shit! That’s too much!
So I didn’t buy one of those on eBay, duh-doi.
But did I feel dumb about throwing mine in the trash a decade earlier? Yep! Sure did! Did I feel bad about it? Not as such, no. Not really. At the time that I threw it away, I would have paid someone $3,000 if they could have helped me move on with my life.
Fun fact? I recently learned that the designer of LEGO 10182-1 Cafe Corner was none other than now-famous TV Person Jamie Berard! If you’ve ever watched LEGO Masters, you’ll recognize him as the judge who isn’t the tall Scottish woman.
Let’s set this next montage to “Everything is Awesome!!!” By Tegan and Sara because my LEGO vibes are nothing if not sincere.
I learn that LEGO 10182-1 Cafe Corner is pretty special in the history of LEGO. I learn it’s the very first Creator Expert modular building. I learn that a new, official modular building has been released by LEGO every year since 2007 and that there are plenty of really cool ones I can just go buy at the store that don’t cost more by volume than human plasma. Cool! I buy a few of them. I read a bunch of the internet. I learn that MOC means “My Own Creation” and that there are hundreds of designers all over the world who sell instructions to MOC sets they’ve designed themselves. Indie LEGO! Imagine! I learn that LEGO Studio is now the official LEGO design software and that it’s really great and easy to use and free. I create accounts on several LEGO-related websites, including rebrickable.com where I go by “malibu_banshee” (no, really) and I have my first design accepted (it’s a jukebox and you can download the instructions for free!) and it already has more likes in a few weeks than any post I’ve ever published on Substack (lol) and I embrace rebrickable’s social media component.
And I have a vision and it involves little gray aliens and an Earth gift shop and a stylish apartment. And it has a flying saucer on the roof.
And I want to tell you all about it.
I want to tell everyone all about it.
