My mother keeps all of the family photos in a gigantic plastic tub, and in those confines, they're not much good to anyone. As of late, she's been batching up packets of photos for my siblings and I, hoping we will use them for more than closet filler. I'm the youngest of seven, and there aren't too many Matt-centric photos compared to my brothers and sisters. I guess anyone would get bored after photographing six kids blowing out birthday candles, riding bicycles and opening Christmas presents. My parents didn't break out the Polaroid camera for me unless I was like, on fire, or at least juggling things that were on fire.
But it's cool, because my big manilla envelope (with the word "MATT" helpfully scribbled on in permanent marker, thanks Maw) was also stuffed with a cornucopia of homemade cards, school assignments and random objets d'art created by yours truly through the years. A really broad timeframe was represented in these works -- I had everything from second grade Valentine's Day cards to poorly drawn recreations of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" done at age 17. I don't know how she ended up with the newer stuff, but considering the amount of gore and perversions found on the more recent doodles, I didn't feel like bringing it up to find out.
One of the last papers pulled from the envelope was a total jackpot...
Apparently, at some point, I drew a collage featuring every last bit of goodness from my summer vacation in 1992. This clearly wasn't a school assignment, as I distinctly remember using that wicked unlined three-holed paper for everything from making lists of my toy collection to drawing full-blown Infinity Gauntlet ripoffs wherein my lead villain looked and acted exactly like "Thanos" but was named "Monsterick."
My summers were rarely notable, but if I was going to base a collage around one of them, 1992 was as close to a banner year as I was going to get. I thought it'd be interesting, probably more for me than for you, to revisit each doodle on this page and figure out why it was worth doodling.
As to be expected from those who know me, I started the collage with crude representations of Atlantic City and Wildwood, then and still today my favorite places in the whole wide world.
I joke about how my parents let empty hotel rooms babysit me so they could go gamble, but the truth is, I loved going to Atlantic City. In fact, I loved it more when I couldn't gamble. Now it's just an excuse to get tanked and blow money, but back then, I was free to explore the safer parts of the boardwalk with twenty bucks worth of hush money in my pocket, to be spent without care within the many 99 cent stores across the sandy planks.
I haven't been to the Trump Taj Mahal in years, but it was still pretty new in 1992, and it was the only hotel we stayed at. My parents were something in the realm of high rollers, not because they had oodles of money, but because they were addicted to gambling. As such, we got everything from the rooms to our meals comped, and I can say with all sincerity that being a thirteen-year-old with permission to order as much room service and as many pay-per-view movies as he wanted was not such a bad thing.
And Wildwood? Sheesh, I've written enough about Wildwood. This shore community and boardwalk town at the ass end of Jersey is as mythical to me as it is trashy to you, and as an added bonus, I believe 1992 was the first year that I was allowed to bring friends along. I loved Wildwood under any and all circumstances, but to be able to wander the boardwalk with my friends without a parent in sight made me feel like the genesis of the next great teen movie.
Perhaps the doodle will make more sense when I tell you that the Bristol Plaza Motor Inn was where we usually stayed. It wasn't the flashiest or most Doo Woppy of the Wildwood hotels, but its pool had southern exposure and its game room had Kid Niki: Radical Ninja. What more could I need?
Sheerly out of loyalty for inanimate objects, I had to make sure Wildwood was the most prominent part of my summer collage. So, I added two of its best rides -- the giant Ferris wheel, and the "Sea Serpent" roller coaster. It would take me a few more years to muster enough courage to ride the Serpent, but what else was I supposed to draw? A tilt-a-whirl? How do you even draw a tilt-a-whirl? As someone who had to cheat his way through a Ferris wheel doodle with a bunch of backward L's, I wasn't about to find out.
I was introduced to the sport of fishing in 1992, which worked out well since I lived about a minute away from a body of water where people had been fishing for decades. The neighbor kids picked up the habit first, and it was up to them to teach me how to use the flimsy, twenty dollar rod I made my parents buy me.
It's sad that I don't know what body of water I lived by -- I guess it was a bay? Whatever it was, the amount and the diversity of fish found within it could make even a thirteen-year-old feel like a champion fisherman. Some of the stranger highlights included giant flounder and blowfish. Blowfish, from the shores of Staten Fucking Island. I still can't get over that.
My friends would bring their catches back home for family suppers, but I didn't eat fish. Even if I did, I didn't see much point in eating fish caught in such a filthy body of water. After all, this was the same "beach" where we were just as likely to find a broken syringe needle as a hermit crab.
I was a total pussy. Whenever we wanted to go fishing, we first stopped by the only local tackle shop to stock up on weights and bobbers. I always picked up useless lures just because they looked cool. Live sandworms were our primary bait, and I was so afraid of those fuckers that I absolutely refused to bait my own line. My friends had to do that for me. And if I caught anything? Yeah, they had to get it off the hook.
I'd say I only fished to fit in, but that's only partly true. I was also in it for the tackle box. I loved my tackle box, what with its contents of many simulated bugs made out of colorful rubber, and neat little red and white floaty things that now strike me as very Pokeball-esque.
1992 was the first year I went fishing, and now that I think about it, it was also the last year.
Either before I was born or right when I started living, my brother received Confirmation. That's a Catholic thing, you sinners. On that day, his godfather (my uncle) presented him with the holy grail of awesome gifts: A motorbike. He used it for some time, lost interest, and left it in our shed for over a decade until I decided that it had to be mine.
It was called The Cat, and it was powered by a small gasoline tank not unlike the ones lawnmowers have. It was big, bulky, ugly and green. Sharing another trait with lawnmowers, The Cat could only be turned on by yanking on a really old and out of shape pull cord. It always took one of my stronger friends to make the thing sputter, but unbelievably, after all those dormant years, The Cat could still go.
I do not exaggerate when I say that I was the coolest motherfucker on the planet during my tenure as a motorbike owner. Think about how much of your personal stock was weighed by the bicycle you had. No bicycle could compete with a motorbike. I wasn't allowed to travel very far with it, but no bother -- the thing was so noisy, I'm sure my friends over in Egypt heard enough to get jealous.
Truth is, I probably wasn't meant to wield such a powerful tool of social status. I mean, the other kids in the neighborhood were jealous, but how jealous could you be of a person who cried and ran home whenever someone suggested a baseball game? The Cat knew that I was unworthy, so after a few weeks of glory, it conked out for good.
We still kept it in the shed for a while, but by then, my only Cat-derived enjoyment was pulling off the fuel cap and taking a whiff of sweet, sweet gasoline. Mmmm.
A few years before 1992, my family started a new tradition. Each year, we'd rent a house out in Long Beach Island (small but really nice beach town in Jersey), invite the whole horde of us down, and spend a week as lazily as possible.
In 1992, we had a lot of people and a really great house. Most of my brothers and sisters were married with children by then, so we required a three-floor beach house with like, 340 bedrooms. Place was full of strange nautical decorations and at least one painting that I swear was used in the Halloran phone call scene from The Shining.
Our vacation was going off without a hitch, until one night midway through the week. We noticed a suspicious and maddening amount of flying bugs all over the house. There were dozens of them on the walls and ceiling, and everyone had to pitch in to smack them to death with old school fly swatters. We couldn't go around the house spraying Raid, because there were too many babies crawling on the floor looking for Baby Bop dolls. Eventually, we got most of them and relinquished the mission for a good night's sleep.
The next morning, it happened. Turns out that the bugs were flying termites, and that the world's largest-ever nest of flying termites had imploded somewhere in the wall near the front of the house. That was enough to get us past our misgivings regarding bug spray, so we Raid'ed the shit out of the tiny little crack that they seemed to be coming out of.
And that...was a huge mistake. By emptying three cans of Raid into the wall, we left the groggy, half-dead termites with no other choice but to flee their nest and fall out onto our living room floor. Take a look at your dining room table, and picture it two feet off the ground. That was the size of our pile of dying termites, and I am not exaggerating in the slightest.
A quick visit from the exterminator confirmed that the worst was yet to come, so we had to cut our vacation short and head home. Everyone was pretty upset about it, but when you're a kid, you want to come home from vacation with a story. We weren't back for more than five minutes before I zipped across the street to tell my friends that millions of termites had caused our rented beach house to collapse.
That was an exaggeration, but my friends bought it, because thirteen-year-olds are dumb.
Oh God, this is just precious. I can't believe this was important enough to me to doodle. I can't remember if it started in 1992 or earlier, but every damn day for years, I called Coach Kurt's pro-wrestling hotline to get all of the inside scoops from Hulk Hogan's dressing room.
Coach Kurt ran a 976 hotline which was pretty cheap to call, explaining how I was able to slip under the radar and dial in at least once a day for years without getting my balls cut off. In the pre-Internet days, how else was I going to find out that the late Davey Boy Smith was busted for steroids?
Kurt also ran a newsletter, and would sporadically give away free subscriptions by way of trivia questions on the hotline. As I remember, you had to call, get the question, and then dial Kurt's home answering machine to leave your answer. If you were the first correct idiot, you won a subscription. I won twice.
Later, Kurt used the convoluted answering machine component of his business to allow listeners to voice their own opinions on the hotline. He'd pick the best "spoken opinion pieces" and run them on the hotline during light news days. Oh, the unbridled joy experienced when I called in and heard my puberty-peaking voice spout off about how the WWF needed to get behind Bret Hart instead of Lex Luger. I was such a celebrity!
I was calling well into 1996, when Coach Kurt finally lost the battle to the much more easily accessible (and free) pro-wrestling websites. His once-daily reports grew more and more intermittent, until finally, I called the 976 number one day and was surprised with an invitation to dive face-first into Lucky Lucy's sexy crotch. I still miss you, Coach Kurt.
My family had a giant Panasonic video camera that they spent way too much money on to use so infrequently. I think they used it six or seven times, tops. Eventually, I adopted the camera and used it to satiate my latest passion du jour: I wanted to be a filmmaker, and I wanted my films to run on the local public access channel.
That never happened, but it wasn't because I didn't try. The cast of my movies rotated between various easily-persuaded kids from around the neighborhood, but the plot was always the same: "Ron Tracy Versus the Gargoyles."
Ron Tracy was a combination of Ron, the kid who lived across the street, and Dick Tracy, who I'm afraid to say was quite good at impressing me in Warren Beatty's 1990 movie. Ron was the hero of the films, always dressed in a yellow Dick Tracy Halloween trenchcoat.
I played Ron's archenemy, the evil Emperor Guillotine. While I stole the name from the infamous villain of the Johnny Sokko Japanese TV series, my version of Emperor Guillotine wore a Beetlejuice mask and a dark trenchcoat, and spoke like Vito Corleone.
Every Ron Tracy movie was the same. They'd start off with me getting wind of Tracy's return to my turf, and I'd respond by sending out various goons (my other friends, dressed in random Halloween costumes or even just ski masks) to kill him. One by one, Ron would take them down, and the movies would always end with him killing me.
The best parts were the epilogues. At the end of each film, we'd record a lit smoke bomb as I put on my best Robert Stack voice and talked about how Ron had conquered the Gargoyles and brought peace and prosperity to the galaxy once more.
We had no method of editing or doing retakes, so if we fucked up, it had to stay in. If we accidentally recorded a wall for three minutes, that had to stay in. The movies were like, half content, half outtakes, but all mixed together until it got to the point where I had to say "PAY ATTENTION TO THIS" and "DON'T PAY ATTENTION TO THIS" to my audience of thirteen-year-olds whenever we popped the tapes into my VCR.
I don't know what happened to the recordings, but they're gone. It's probably for the best. If I remember correctly, I looked something akin to a horse covered with shit at age 13.
Wow, I was busy in 1992. I went with my parents and grandfather to Las Vegas, where we stayed at the still-standing but now less-revered Excalibur hotel and casino. Vegas has built up quite a bit since then, but at the time, this was as specialized as a hotel could get.
Excalibur was never exactly an adults' paradise, but my parents chose it as a form of compensation for taking me on yet another vacation that they'd spend gambling. The hotel was patterned after a medieval castle, filled with costumed princesses and dragons. Even the restaurants fit the theme -- one of them was a total Medieval Times knockoff, complete with the tiny chicken and no forks.
In the lower level was a very large arcade/carnival, and obviously, this is where I spent most of the trip. I can only remember two things about it...
One: Every time somebody lost at one of the many sideshow-style games, they'd loudly play an instrumental version of Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" over every available speaker. People were losing games constantly, and that song is now forever etched into my poor brain.
Two: My mother made up for her casino losses by winning one of those impossible "flip a quarter onto the tiny red star on this gigantic bumpy table" games. Only one out of every bazillion players ever win games like that, so they have huge prizes. We took home a purple dragon doll that was taller than I was, and I'll never forget the adrenaline caused by seeing that thing debut on the Newark Airport baggage conveyor when we got home. It's a miracle that nobody stole it, but then, I guess not everyone has a use for a humongous generic dragon doll that constantly spilled tiny styrofoam balls from its anus.
We didn't do much else in Vegas, actually. I remember going to the Liberace Museum and being forced to spend three hours there, finally breaking down into a tearful tantrum when my mother tried to make a big deal out of the "world's largest cubic zirconium." After that, we kind of just hung around the Excalibur until it was time to go home.
A pool once stood in my family's old backyard, and 1992 was one of its last years before my parents ripped it down and transformed the area into what I'd call a pretty piss poor garden. With six kids gone and me not being a frequent swimmer, the upkeep just didn't make sense.
But I loved that pool, and I loved swimming. The problem was that I could never swim alone, because I was so deathly afraid of sharks that I'd be totally convinced that Jaws was behind me every time I put my head underwater. You don't have to tell me how absurd that is; I already know.
See, the issue was that I had two best friends. We were a trio, and by trio, I mean that me and Person B constantly competed for Person C's affections. (I get to be Person A, because I'm writing this.) A trio isn't fun unless there's an odd man out. Person C didn't have a pool. Person B did, and his was much cooler than mine.
Person B's pool was circular. Mine was oval and not as wide. His had a slide. Mine was under a tree and thus constantly thwarted by shade and falling leaves. His mother kept iced tea and towels in constant supply. Mine probably would have, but I never asked her to because you don't mix family and friends god dammit. Whenever we all swam together, it was usually at Person B's pool.
I hated him for it. I constantly tried to invent problems with Person B's pool in the hopes of convincing Person C that mine was the place to be. "My God, the chlorine in this pool...it's so overpowering!" "Ugh, his stupid little sister is probably going to want to swim with us if we go there." Shit like that. It never worked. A pool covered in shade and dead bugs could not compete with a water slide.
The legality of fireworks ranges from state to state, but here, it's been like this: Every year, there are less fireworks. I wouldn't dare venture into public with a Roman candle now, but in 1992, we totally got away with it. The fireworks were still illegal, but you had to be driving a flatbed truck full of M-80s to get in trouble over them.
Person C of the pool saga lived across the street from me, and I'd always bring over my bag of fireworks to join in his family's front porch Fourth of July fun. While we could get away with setting off fireworks, that didn't mean that we had an unlimited supply. Around here, you could mostly just buy sparklers, bees and a couple of paper tanks that drove two inches before smoking out.
I probably stopped doing this by 1992, but in the years prior, I loved going around the neighborhood on the morning of July 5th to collect all of the cool looking used fireworks from the streets. I didn't have much use for them, but they were always colorful and interesting enough to pass as toys.
I believe the firework seen in the sketch above is my very exaggerated approximation of a bottle rocket.
When my brother moved back out after returning home from college, he left behind many key items that a thirteen-year-old had no choice but to claim. Namely, a small refrigerator, which was perfectly sized for both a dorm room and my bedroom.
I was so excited to have my own fridge. Hell, I even started buying magnets. The best part was stocking it. I'd ride on down to a little deli a few blocks away, and fill the crate attached to my bike's handlebars with all manner of chips, cakes, knockoff Slim Jims and the errant box of Boku. It was fantastic.
Eventually, I left a couple of perishable items in there for a few months. A few months with the refrigerator unplugged, mind you. When the mood finally struck to put my fridge back in order, the stink of rotting food had permeated the plastic refrigerator walls to the point where it was impossible to continue using it.
Into the garbage it went, but not before I collected my "alligator" and "California" magnets. No idea why I had a "California" magnet.
By 1992, I was well into my action figure collecting phase. "Phase" roughly equating to "lifelong obsession that does nothing to help me bang hot chicks." I even had my own stupid toy company.
Basically, what would happen is this: I'd find some geek-related magazine and scour the classifieds for a new trading partner. Me and my new trading partner would then spend several months mailing each other Batman and Lieutenant Worf figures. Eventually, I'd forget to send something and move on to a new trading partner.
I adored getting mail even as a small child, but I don't think I made this doodle out of any random ambient love for the postal service. There was probably a rare Sears "Blue Snaggletooth" in that box, neatly wrapped next to that DC Comics Superman figure that came with the life-sized Kryptonite ring. Hell yes.
In 1992, the local cemetery sought to expand. They bought a large chunk of formerly naturrific land and began gutting it. Building a sort of dirt river to drain out a small pond, my friends and I were simultaneously delighted and horrified to find this four-inch body of water absolutely overflowing with large, gasping catfish.
It was an unbelievable sight. We never knew that this particular pond had a single fish, and yet, there were thousands of catfish. Thousands. And they were HUGE. There was nowhere for them to go and not enough water to go around, and with the ratio of dead-to-living catfish leaning more towards the macabre side, we took it upon ourselves to save the fish!
We didn't save all of them. In fact, we didn't even save a hundred of them. But we filled seven large buckets with catfish and got our mothers to drive us to a large pond/lake/thing across town, where we dumped them in and hoped for the best. Who knows if the rescued catfish survived, but they definitely had a better shot because of us.
That was probably the most summery thing I've ever done. I can't picture myself rescuing those catfish without envisioning a long piece of wheat hanging from my mouth, because there totally should've been one.
Now that I think about it, 1992 was my first summer spent as a teenager. Looks like I spent it as a six-year-old. By the following summer, all youthful graces would be replaced with trying to fit in with the older townies who smoked and played handball and did nothing but those two things. They laughed at me for my serves and ridiculed my obvious non-inhales.
1993's summer was nowhere near as cool as 1992's.
That's probably why I can't find any drawings of it.
