The robot traveled through space at near light speed for tens of thousands of years until, quite by chance, he collided with the earth, twenty miles off the coast of Brazil. A local shrimp boat captain recovered the robot in a net one day, accidentally reactivating it from the dormant mode in which it had spent the last 200 millennia. Upon awakening, the robot, who my father named Super Champ, promptly tore the captain into pieces, set his boat aflame, and proceeded to ravage the coastline for 50 miles, killing thousands, until, without provocation, Super Champ decided to become a patron of the people, and fight the oppressive governments of South and Central America. In doing so, this wayward visitor from the heavens subsequently stumbled into a Las Vegas singing career, where he became addicted to pain killers and married Debbie Reynolds.
The winter of that year harkened record snowfall and during those dismal days under the unrelenting white blanket, we saw the emergence of a new member to our tragic family. My father, whose enterprise dwindled during a season bereft of backyard birthdays, focused his erratic energies from the business of clowning to that of cartooning. His creations revolved around the day to day activities of a robot from a distant solar system whose sun had collapsed into a neutron star and pulled all seven planets in the system into its surface, unleashing a cataclysmic shockwave which also laid waste to another nearby solar system.
According to my father, the trials and tribulations of Super Champ paralleled his own evolution from propulsion scientist to private clown. Nightly, around the dinner table, he would expose the latest details of Super Champ's fast-paced lifestyle. My mother, his rock, would merely smile and nod as the stories unfolded, as if unaware of the degree of his psychosis. It soon became clear that he no longer comprehended that Super Champ was a fictitious figment of his own disjointed imagination, but rather fancied the robot a close personal friend, whom he contacted via telepathy.
