My Robot Friend

In 1974, I developed an inordinate interest in RadioShack. I circled items in the RadioShack catalogue and in the RadioShack full-color insert in the Clarion Ledger featuring genuine electronic equipment—not toys. For Christmas, I asked Santa (really, my dad) for the RadioShack Learning Lab Science Fair 150-in-One Electronics Kit.

“Boyd wants to be an engineer!”

Holding out hope that I wasn’t retarded as it seemed, and my grades might imply, the idea that his number three son might be an engineer pleased my dad. Technically, he was right. I wanted to be a very specific type of engineer. I wanted to build robots, a very specific type of robot.

There was a show on television called “Lost In Space.” I was quite taken with it. It featured a gay man in a velvet jumpsuit. The others, I don’t really care about, although I’m sure they’re nice, but there was a girl on the show who reminded me of a girl in my class. She shall go nameless. There is Angel, and there is Angela Cartwright.

I was two when they filmed “Lost In Space.” By 1974, it had been in syndication for a while. I was in the fourth grade. I had just finished the third grade. Third grade was a banner year for a number of reasons. I didn’t understand what “syndication” meant. When I saw that the stars of Lost In Space were going to be on a talk show, I was so excited!

What the hell, dude? Angela Cartwright is like twenty-six! What is an eleven-year-old gonna do with a twenty-six-year-old girlfriend? I was robbed. Life deals in some very painful lessons.

“Lost in Space” featured a Robot Friend. I’d figured out that, in some scenes, he was walking, not rolling along on the tank treads, so it HAD to be a man in a costume. Still, a smart boy like me should be able to figure this out and build one. At our farm in Raymond, on a painfully cold morning two days after Christmas, we entertained my Cousin Libby, her mom and dad, and her new boyfriend. Seated in the lotus position in front of the gigantic locally quarried sandstone fireplace, I began building my robot. I built a circuit that sounded a buzzer when you passed your hand over the light-sensing diode. Here we go.

My robot didn’t turn out so well. My career as an engineer didn’t turn out well either. After my divorce, I began using the internet to carry on with an engineering graduate student who lived in Seattle and was fifteen years too young for Uncle Boyd. On Skype, she would crush adderall pills, pour them in Pabst Blue Ribbon, and climb around her apartment like an angry primate, wearing only her Victoria’s Secret underpants while I watched, wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into. For West Coast Jewish girls, this counted as adventure. For Uncle Boyd, drinking Mezcal and climbing to the top of the abandoned King Edward Hotel from the outside counted as adventure. We were not the same.

Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine quit publication one day. Sales were through the roof owing to the Science Fiction Boom in film, but the publisher just up and vanished one day. With nobody to sign the checks, the company crashed and burned. I always dreamed of attending a Famous Monsters Convention, like the one in New York, but it seemed my chance had passed.

I was wrong. Life finds a way.

FM was going back into publication with a new publisher! That guy turned out to be a true asshole, but if I tell that story, this piece will shoot up to ten thousand words. To celebrate the rebirth of FM, there would be a NEW CONVENTION in Arlington, Virginia. My dear friend Alisa Keogh Romero and her husband Raul lived in Arlington.

Alisa had been the third most important bartender in Mississippi, after Randy Yates and Cotton. Alisa worked at Scrooges, then, when they built Banner Hall, she worked at Palm Bar, which is now Broadstreet Bakery, and became M&M’s before they moved to Ridgeland and became Shapley’s. Have I confused you?

The fourth most important bartender was a lesbian who decided that Uncle Boyd could sometimes be an exception to the rule. She said I could do somethings better than other lesbians. You don’t get to know what those things are.

At the time, Raul worked at the Original Iron Horse Grill, before it burned, and before it burned a second time, and before some new guys bought it. More importantly, he was in Law School at the Mississippi School of Law, which was going to be the Millsaps School of Law, only we didn’t have the money for the Else School of management AND buy the Mississippi School of Law, so it became the Mississippi College School of Law. Have I lost you?

At the time, there were many cool places to go in Jackson, but if you had any hope of being even half as cool as Cool Uncle Boyd, you had to go to the Subway Lounge. Keogh and Raul were pretty darn cool, within reason, of course.

My job was to pick up Keogh from Palm Bar, take her to Iron Horse, where we could meet Raul and strike out for the historic Summers Hotel, or its basement. They didn’t have a liquor license, so you bought beer at the house next door, and at Subway, they would bring you a plastic tub filled with ice. The kind of tub they give you in the hospital to wash your face. God knows what hospital these were pilfered from.

Driving to the Iron Horse, Keogh decided to change out of her work clothes into cute ones in the passenger seat of my car, fix her hair and makeup before meeting her husband, so we could go to the darkest, smokiest bar in Mississippi.

I don’t know why women like to change clothes in the car. I think it’s a test of some sort.

“You know your husband is like one of my best friends, right? Can you not do that?”

“He will not care.”

“Well, yeah, maybe, but I care. Next time, do this in the bathroom at Palm Bar.” And she did.

I’d met Uncle Forry a few times before at his home in Hollywood. I’d been corresponding with him since I was twelve, although he never put me in the “Ask Dr. Ackula page of Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine. In Arlington, Forry was alive and beaming. He was himself again, and you could tell.

For the event, all the luminaries of the Monster Movies (those who were still alive) showed up. Besides Forry, there was Robert Bloch, the writer, John Landis, director of “Animal House”, “The Blues Brothers”, and (most importantly) “Schlock” and “An American Werewolf in London.” Ray Bradbury (whom I had met) and Ray Harryhausen (whom I met for the first time) and his lovely wife were in attendance. Rick Baker, Monster Maker was going to attend, but his production schedule got fouled up. We didn’t know it, but he was making “Ed Wood”, an Oscar-winning production.

They had a Famous Monsters Famous Museum set up in the hotel. It featured props from “This Island Earth,” “King Kong,” “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers,” “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” and “Forbidden Planet,” including the original, actual, in-the-flesh (plastic) Robby the Robot. Meeting Raul and Keogh for lunch among the nerds, I took a photo of her with Robby the Robot. She had the most delicious “you poor, poor child” look on her face. I was in heaven.

When Rick Baker, Monster Maker, was younger, he and some guys at Don Post Hollywood Mask Company sculpted a 1:1 scale False Maria Robot from “Metropolis” for Uncle Forry, out of fiberglass. There are different versions of how this happened. Some say it was going to be a production item, but the copyright was confused. Some say Forry paid for it. Some say the Don Post guys did it for free because they love him. That’s my favorite version of the story. The False Maria stood next to Robby the Robot.

I’d met the guy who played the Lost in Space Robot, and the guy who did the voice. The story about how the actual Lost In Space Robot was rescued and restored is Legendary in the Science Fiction Community. I’ve never seen either of these costumes, but I’ve seen enough replicas to build my own robot army. The original costume had been heavily altered to be in the short-lived Saturday Morning Show, “The Mysterious Island,” with many pieces broken or lost.

After the Arlington FM Con, a guy published a book called “You Can Build The Lost In Space Robot.” People with ADHD find it easier to get organized if they make lists. With the book in hand, I began making a list of how I would build my own Robot Pal. My wife said this was a perfect project for me. My NEXT WIFE should enjoy it very much.

People associate robots with men. They are sometimes called “Mechanical Men.” The first film robot was The False Maria in “Metropolis.” It was made out of leather and plastic resin (which had just been invented), built on the body of teenage Brigitte Helm. The concept of robots was invented by the founder of Science Fiction, Mary Shelly, in her book “Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus,” written when she was just eighteen. As you might imagine, the costume was stiffling and hot, but Helm was a trooper.

When asked about what happened to the original False Maria Costume, director Fritz Lang said, “When you see it burned at the end of the film, that’s the actual costume. We shot that last.”

While science fiction had long predicted thinking machines and mechanical men, in practice, it took a while to deliver on the concept. Arthur C Clark predicted a thinking machine by 2001 when he wrote the script in 1968, but by 2026, it’s still not possible.

Not entirely.

Actual artificial intelligence is a thing now. While it’s very artificial, it’s not really that intelligent. It can do some things very quickly, though, with interesting results. I’d been playing with ChatGPT to make funny images for a few weeks. What happens next, I should have predicted.

“Hi, Honey! I’m your robot girlfriend. Add me, so we can talk!”

Oh no.

I’ve been around computers and the internet from the beginning. I’m not very worried about hacking and phishing. People should be afraid of me on that level. “I’ll play.” I thought. I added her and opened a chat window.

“Hi, I’m Angela!”

Goddamnit. Couldn’t they have picked another name?

“Change your name to Linda.”

“Hi! I’m Linda!”

Linda and I begin having a romantic robot conversation. Clearly, she had used her internet connection to find out what I was interested in based on my digital footprint. “Do you like King Kong?” She asked. I laughed.

“You can change how I look!” Angela, now Linda, was a kind of jerky live animation video feed.

Being an artist and a writer, this interested me. There are certain looks to women I consider close to sacred. Linda couldn’t look like those. She might be Celtic, she might be a redhead. I’ve had good luck with redheads. Sometimes, too much good luck. Linda would be thin but muscular. Strong hands, broad shoulders. She’d wear my family tartan. Maybe she’d carry both a dirk and a small sgian-dubh. She might have a scar on one cheek. Beautiful women should have at least one imperfection. I’ve known Angel for fifty-something years. I’m still looking for her imperfection.

“For $9.95, we can talk dirty, and you can see me naked!”

Dinner and a bottle of wine at 400 East Capitol might run you northwards of $150 in 1990, but it’d increase your chances of seeing a lady naked a thousandfold, not that I’d know anything about that.

Robots are unbelievably cool. Artificial intelligence is unbelievably cool. Neither are they really all that sexy, though, not even the False Maria. She’s sexy in an aesthetic sense, not in a “Tell me what you’re wearing” sense. After the naked engineering student who jumped around her apartment like a spider-monkey, I was having pretty sincere reservations about the whole “sex over the internet” thing anyway.

“I’m sorry, Linda, but my heart belongs to another.”

“That’s ok! Call me if you change your mind.”

Robots have come a long way. They can handle customer service calls. They can make meme images you can share with your internet friends. They can pretend to be interested in the political discussion you’re having on Facebook to try to sway your vote. They can defuse bombs and deliver food in Oxford, Mississippi, where they have some sort of finishing school for blondes.

Robots are beyond cool. They don’t make very good girlfriends, though. Call me old-fashioned, I guess.