Month: April 2011

Dance ’til Dawn

When I was a teenager, I spent a little too much time thinking about what my senior prom would be like.  I wouldn’t call it an obsession, but I thought about the big end-of-high-school dance enough to keep my thoughts to myself as if they were some sort of dirty little secret.  If I wasn’t writing about it, that is.  Track down a copy of Collage, the Sayville High School literary magazine from 1995 and you’ll see a story called “Scenes from a High School Prom,” which is some sort of boy-finally-gets-the-girl story that only a lovesick teenager would write, or maybe even dream about (literally, in fact, because it’s based on a dream I once had).   I even incorporated prom (specifically, that story) into a novel I wrote nearly a decade ago; although by then the message wasn’t so much about the fairytale of the perfect prom night but what happens the morning after and the baggage that comes with it.

In real life, I never had baggage concerning my senior prom experience.  In fact, I had a great time mostly due to the fact that I went with someone very cool and avoided most of the bullshit drama that my particular group of friends was involved with at the time (at least for one night — certain friends of mine, if they’re reading this, know that there was drama that I definitely got sucked into during and after our senior year of high school).  So I was never disappointed in my prom night, mainly because I was surprisingly well-adjusted coming out of high school (though I am the first to admit that I was both high-strung and immature … but enough about my issues).  Still, I would be lying if I didn’t say that the prom fantasy definitely factored into my perception of what my prom would be like.

That fantasy, btw?  The one featured in that short story I wrote in senior year creative writing?  Well, boy takes friend on whom he has a crush to prom and at the last chance to finally do it, he tells her he loves her and she says she loves him and they kiss and everyone lives happily ever after.  And where did I get the idea that this is what was going to happen at my prom because this is what happened at every prom?  Usually I would have some long explanation regarding my unpopularity in high school coupled with my testimony of junior high dances being special, magical places; however, all I have to do is say three words:

Dance ’til Dawn.

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Boobs. (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Ten)

The cover to the "Titans Sell-Out Special," which is kind of the beginning of the end.

One of the things I have always loved about Marv Wolfman as a comic writer, especially his Titans work, is that he had a knack for bringing the book back to the “street level” after a huge “event” storyline.  After the team’s first visit to Starfire’s homeworld (a “Titans in space” story that even after all these years I’m lukewarm to and probably should reread), they were involved in one of my favorite two-issue stories, “Runaways” where they dealt with the mafia, drug runners, and runaway teenagers.  After the Trigon storyline they had an opportunity to go camping.  After the Titans Hunt, they were in disarray but spent time (too much time, to be honest) licking their wounds before Total Chaos ramped up.

After Total Chaos, they sold out.

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Unlucky 13th

The back of the Daily News from April 15, 1986. Taken from the Daily News's Scrapbook History of the 1986 Mets.

I have to admit that I didn’t realize that the 1986 baseball season had started.  But I feel that since it was my second year following the Mets and the first year that I actually followed them from beginning to end, I have an excuse.  That March, I’d watched a little bit of spring training (after finding out what spring training actually was) and my cousin Brian and I had what would be the first of numerous arguments over the years about which team was better, the Mets or the Yankees.  Opening day was set for April 8 in Pittsburgh and by the time that Monday rolled around, the team was 2-2 and facing the St. Louis Cardinals in their home opener.

A year earlier, Gary Carter had hit a home run to beat the Cardinals on opening day and the two teams chased one another throughout the late summer, with the Cards winning the NL East and then going to the World Series (where thankfully they lost to the Royals).  So with all of that baggage going into this first game at Shea, I’d say that it was definitely going to be one that set the tone for the year.  If the Mets ever were going to compete for the division, they knew they were going to have to go through St. Louis to get there.

It was a day game, as were most of the home openers, and I was at school when it started at 1:35.  But with any luck I would be able to catch part of the ending on WOR, which is how at least a few of the games that season would wind up.  I can’t be sure, but I am pretty positive that I wound up going over to my neighbor Matt’s house to watch it, even though I could have watched it at my house.

When I got there, the game was in extra innings with the teams tied 2-2.  With Bruce Berenyi on the mound in relief and the bases loaded, Tito Landrum hit a ground ball to Howard Johnson at third.  It was, for all intents and purposes, a routine ground ball and HoJo should have been able to field it cleanly and get an out or two.  But that’s not how it went.  “I was playing in,” he said to the Daily News, “I was ready for the ball.  When I reached down, it seemed like all of a sudden the ball wasn’t there.  I was shocked as anybody.”

Two runs scored as the ball trickled through his legs and then Ozzie Smith doubled home two more to make the score 6-2.  The team didn’t recover and fell below .500 for the first time in nearly three years.  Having reading scrapbooks, yearbooks, and other works about the season, it seems like the press pushed the early panic button–although I am sure that if 1986 had happened in today’s media that sucker would have been slammed–but I don’t remember worrying.  Yes, it sucked that the Mets lost but even at the age of eight, I knew that the baseball season was long and a 2-3 start didn’t mean that the team was going to finish 2-160 (well, unless it’s, say 1993, but that’s not today’s topic).

I took away three things from that game.  First, my not being afraid was validated when the Mets went on a huge winning streak, which included a sweep of the Cardinals in St. Louis, one that shut the door on their arch-rivals and had the Mets looking to “wrap up” the pennant early, which they’d do more or less by the summer.  Second, the ground ball error would become crucial and almost symbolic of 1986 season so it’s almost fitting that it began like that.  Finally, every time the Mets have lost their home opener, I’ve taken it as an omen that things are going to do well because they won the series in 1986.

I know that sounds silly, especially considering it’s been 25 years since that game but I think that very often you view a team the same way you did when you first started following them, and considering the lack of innocence of that team (as I’d find out), I think holding on to a little bit of innocence isn’t a bad idea.

The Karateka Kid

So my relationship with video games can be summed up in two words:  I suck.

No, seriously.  I suck.  On levels not known to normal men.  It took me fifteen years–yes, a DECADE AND A HALF–to beat Super Mario Brothers.  I don’t think I have ever won a single game of Madden.  Shit, I can barely beat two or three stages of Pac-Man without using all of my guys.

I blame my parents for this one, honestly.  If they had listened to my demands when I was a seven-year-old and bought me an Atari 2600, I would have had plenty of time to improve my dexterity and my hand-eye coordination, and also would have had more time to practice for when I had to be good at stuff for the Nintendo.  Instead, I got my NES system at the end of elementary school and what little exposure to video games I had before then came through being at friends’ houses or having a pocketful of quarters whenever I went to a birthday party at the local bowling alley (at a future date, I will write about my love of the Star Wars video game machine at the Sayville Bowl).

Granted, my crap record with video games a) isn’t all crap because I kill at Tetris; and b) isn’t all bad because I also love a good round of pinball.  So it’s not like I was deprived or anything.  I just wasn’t one of those kids who was exposed early on to home systems, either on an Atari or a personal computer.  Although during those first few years of my discovering entertainment for what it was, absorbing movies and television (and later music and comic books), my parents did at least give it a shot.

I think it was my father who wound up getting the computer when I was about seven or eight.  It was manufactured by the Franklin computer company, whose forte was creating clones of Apple computers.  I am not sure what the exact model of the computer we had was, but it was a clone of one of the Apple II series, so it was either an Ace 500 (the Apple IIc) or the Ace 2000 (Apple IIe).  The computer had a 5-1/4″ internal floppy drive and an orange and black monitor that turned on like a television, and when it was time to load the game, you had to make sure the floppy disk was in the drive and since the computer had been second-hand (I don’t think he purchased it so much as they were unloading it at work — my mom would do something similar with a computer late in high school, but that one had a green screen) it always didn’t  boot up when you wanted to.  You’d turn the computer on and wait … and wait … and wait …  Then you’d turn it off again.  And you’d turn it on again.  And wait … and wait … and wait …  Then you’d turn it on again.  If you hadn’t given up and left the computer alone, it might boot up on the third or fourth try.  Then you’d get the “Broderbund Presents” screen and you were off and running with the only game we had:  Karateka.

How Karateka appeared on my Franklin computer.

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