Tag: 1990s

The Boy in a Box and Other Traumatic Memories from TV.

D. Michl LoweLeave a comment

For several years now, I have been slowly writing down every memory I have. I have been trying to make a complete timeline of my life up to the point where I am now. Its not been easy. I find memories continue to float back into my thoughts. Here recently, I have been getting nostalgic about movies, TV shows, and videogames I remember experiencing and trying to find them. Some of them are fun memories, but others were… odd.

Some of those are easier to find than others. For example, Condor Man, a classic Disney movie from 1981 that stared Michael Crawford was always a movie I went back to as a kid.

Condorman Trailer linked below.

Condor Man Trailer

However, there were other experiences that were harder to nail down. My dad picked up a family on the side of the road that were broken down with two little boys my age. They stayed at our house for the night and the two boys brought a NES game with them.

We played for an hour or so before bed and by the morning they were gone. All I remembered when looking back was that you were a ninja who could transform into animals. It took some googling to discover the name of the game was Ninja Crusaders on the original Nintendo Entertainment System.

Link to a review of Ninja Crusaders linked below.

Ninja Crusaders Gameplay

Now to the reason Im writing this article. When I was young, we had one tv in the house. It was down stairs in the basement and it got four channels, 3,8,11, and 13. There’s a possibility that we got more, but those are just what I remember. The movie I remember was apparently shown on PBS in WV during the early 1980s, but from what I have read, PBS was on channel 33 in Charleston during that time. So, in reality, I’m not sure what channel this movie was on, but I remember it clearly. What I rememeber, was a little old woman who receives a mysterious crate in the mail. Upon opening it, there was a little boy inside who wasn’t quite human. I remembered him as being a bit like a robot.

The movie was called Konrad. It was a made for tv movie feom 1985. It stared Huckleberry Fox as Konrad (the strange little boy) and Polly Holiday as Berti (the kind old lady). As a child, I rememember the opening minutes of the film and was deeply disturbed. I recently showed it to my own kids (13 and 16) and they agreed, it was really weird and creepy. Feel free to watch the full movie if you like below, but honestly the first 10 minutes is enough to see what I mean.

Full movie linked below:

Konrad (1985) Full Movie

The 2nd movie that really messed with me as a child was The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eighth Dimention. What I remember watching was a scene from the very beginibg of the movie. Buckaroo is driving a rocket car reminiscent of the car from Back to the Future. He gets teliported to the Eighth Dimention and when he returns there is a goopy alien ball stuck to the bottom of his car. I dont remember anything else from the movie back then.

Now, that mught be the end of what I rememeber, but that is certainly not the end of that movie. I recently watched the whole thing and it is both absolutely terrible, beyond weird, and not worth your time to actually watch. I would also like to mention that it took me years to discover what this movie even was. Chat GPT had a really hard time helping me discover both this one and the Konrad movie.

This is something that has really bothered me for years, but has been fun discovering these lost memories from my past. Even though these memories don’t hold anything really that special, remembering them from a child’s point of view is interesting. Like seeing a ghost when you were a kid and remembering how scared you were, but thesebare ghosts you can rediscover and reveal them for the smoke and mirrors they really are.

Link to the trailer for Buckaroo Bonzai linked below:

Trailer for Buckaroo Bonzai!

Experiences as a child are like that at times, mythic and large. You remember the path through the woods that seemed to go on forever with the huge cave at the end of it. When you return as an adult, the path is just a little over fifty meters and the “huge cave” is just a small overhanging rock. This is why I like writing down my memories. It preserves the mythic perspective. I wrote a story down once about a snake that lived over our swimming hole when I was a kid.

I always swore this snake was at least twelve feet long and as thick as my arm. I wrote it down as such. Besides, I was like ten years old when I last saw this creature. In speaking to my cousin who was about fourteen at the time, he informed me it was more like six feet. I like my version of the story. The memory of a twelve foot black snake throat protected our swimming hole is a lot more fun to tell. Sitting alone on the carpet in front of our large wood paneled Magnavox CRT.

My memory of a strange robot boy being delivered in a crate and a man finding an alien blob ball under his car is a lot more fun than the movies themselves. That’s how childhood is; bigger than life. Full of new and amazing experiences. Even time spent on front of the TV that only had three or four channels at the time could live on in my memories. I often wonder how many of these kind of memories lie dormant in other people’s memories. They might remember them from time to time, but never share them with anyone else. Welcome to the back room of my mind; it’s a really messed up place, and I love it.

D. Michl Lowe

Chrono Trigger and the Death of My Friend

D. Michl Lowe3 Comments

I’m starting to understand what Anne Rice harped on so often in her Vampire Chronicles so much. Eternal life here on Earth would not be as great as some might believe it would be. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think I could make it work, but it wouldn’t be all unicorns and rainbows like you might first believe. In the Vampire Chronicles, the vampire Lestat, the most famous vampire after Dracula I would argue, often laments being “alive” for so long. Vampires often have to go into decades-long hibernation just to be able to deal with living so long.

The loss and pain of losing others tend to catch up to these creatures and cause massive amounts of pain and depression. I have lost more people in my life than I thought I would by this point in my life. Currently, I am 41 years old, and I can think of many friends that I have already lost to death and many more family members. I would like to talk about one of these that has been on my mind here recently and why I miss him. For the sake of anyone who might know these folks and be sad with me, I am going to use a fake name.

When I was a kid, I had a good friend. I know, shocking that I had a friend, but I did. And this friend was a great guy. I will call him Charles. When I was around eight years old, Charles and I’s entire relationship consisted of playing Nintendo and using the Game Genie to try to find ways to make Mario invincible so we could actually beat Super Mario 3. We were terrible at it. He would come to my house and spend the night and we would stay up to all hours of the night playing games together, going on adventures, and discovering new worlds through my little 13-inch TV.  Later on, I got a new 25-inch TV and we thought we had died and gone to gaming heaven, it was so big!

When I was around 14 years old, we had upgraded our gaming to the Super Nintendo and one weekend Charles brought over a game on a Friday night that he had borrowed from a friend for the weekend. We started playing Chrono Trigger, a Japanese RPG, at around 6:00 p.m. We saw the credits roll at around 8:00 a.m. the next morning. It was the first time I had ever stayed up all night. It also helped that Chrono Trigger is one of the greatest games of all time. The story sucked us in. Time travel, revenge, and alien invaders who are trying to literally eat the Earth kept us glued to the TV set.

Charles and I grew apart after High School. The next time I heard about him, my mother was telling me that he had died. We never heard what had killed him, he was still really young. I was at the end of my time in college at MVNU and I remember Dad asking if I wanted to go to the funeral. I said yes. We went and I remember seeing his family there, but I don’t think they recognized me. I’m sure they were in shock. It was so sudden after all. It was one of the first times I had lost a childhood friend. To this day, I drive past his old house and always… always think about my friend.

Every year, I play through Chrono Trigger at least once. I play through the adventure I had with my friend and think about the first time I went on this journey. How childhood felt like it had been forgotten, we were adults; staying up late and doing what we wanted. We could save the world from the comfort of my bedroom. We could be heroes and leave the confines of a little holler in Sissonville to roam a new and magical world, if only for a little while. Just one night. For just one night we were more than just little boys, trying to understand the world and our place in it. Charles was a good friend. He was my friend and I will always remember him.

I guess, I just miss my friend.

D. Michl Lowe

Side Project: My Forgotten Youth

D. Michl LoweLeave a comment

So I took a break from writing the fantasy book that I have been working on and wrote something different. I woke up last night at 3:00 a.m. and had a book idea ramming itself into my consciousness. The idea wouldn’t go away. I had to write down the general idea. Below, I have written out the rough introduction to the book. I don’t plan on stopping work on the fantasy book, but I just needed a break. In my mind, this will be a very short book, less than 200 pages for sure. A middle-grade book, I think. We will see. In my head, this book is dealing with some heavy issues kids are dealing with even today. My current working title is My Forgotten Youth. Enjoy.

Introduction: The Abnormal Life

You don’t really question the things that happened to you as a kid. To you, it was just how life was and that was normal. It’s not until years later that you start to understand that your childhood might not have been completely regular. Example: My mom once told me that my father was a famous magician. I asked her why I didn’t have a dad and she said that he was busy working in Vegas and that the entertainment company that employed him wouldn’t let him take time off.

It made sense to me at the time, that my dad was a magician; too important to come and visit me. I told all my friends at school, and when they got old enough to realize it was a lie, they let me know, harshly, over and over. It was 1990 and I was eight years old. My mom would often disappear for weeks at a time, that was normal. My grandma and I would always order pizza when she knew mom wasn’t coming home. I got to the place where I hated the very smell of the stuff. Mom continually traveled up to Detroit with her boyfriends; sometimes just for the weekend, and others, for a month at a time.

We lived with my Grandma Susan. She had a little trailer that my grandpa had left her when he died. That was years before I was even born though. We all lived in Sissonville, West Virginia and my mom and Grandma had their own rooms, but I had the hall closet. It was big enough that my twin mattress could fit, but that was about it. 

One morning, I woke up before I should have. Not sure why, but something seemed wrong. Sometimes you wake up because of a noise, but you think you just woke up naturally. It was one of those times when you feel like you slept for a long time. I was wide awake. There was the sound of clinking dishes in the kitchen and I walked in, the footed pajamas I wore had a hole for the big toe on each one, but they still made a soft shiff shiff as they slid across the linoleum floor. 

The sound of my feet caused my mother to drop her little plastic purse on the side of the sink. When she did, amber pill bottles came plopping out on the counter and the floor. She was startled.

“Hey darlin’, what are you doin up?” She asked, smoothing her blond hair back from her face and licking lips that were too dry. 

“I heard something, and woke up,” I said. 

She was fully dressed in a short skirt and some of those fishnet stockings that girls loved to wear in the 80s, but that she was obviously too old to be wearing. Mom was fashionable; MTV was always on when she was home. Her bangs were the poofiest bangs in the whole town. While I always thought mom was pretty, in a “my mom” sort of way, I hated poofy bangs. She quickly picked up the pill bottles and began stuffing them back into the hot pink purse. One of them had rolled across the floor and my bare big toe twiddled it. I reached down and picked it up. It had my grandma’s name on the label.

“Oh,” I said. “This one is grandmas.”

A slight panic flashed across her eyes. “Yes, well I am taking it to get it refilled,” she said.

“Are all of those grandmas?”

She backed away from me and I was confused. “No, these ones are mine,” she said glancing towards the door. “Why don’t you mind your own business, huh? You think you know what’s best do ya? You aren’t the parent here! I am!” She screamed the last part, but immediately hushed herself, glancing towards the hall that led to grandma’s room.

“Mom, are you okay,” I asked, brushing off the harshness of her words. I learned long ago, not to take her harshness with any sincerity.

“I’m fine,” she hastily said, zipping up the little purse. It looked stupid, hot pink and almost rubbery. I thought it was like something a little kid would have, not a grown woman. She brushed tears out of her eyes. When had she started crying? Coming over, she kissed the top of my head. She smelled; sour, like ammonia. Like when our cat’s litter box hadn’t been cleaned in several weeks. Her arms were too thin, I could see the bones in her wrists. She had bruises up and down both of her arms, little scabbed dots all over.

“You be good okay. Listen to your grandma. I’m gonna be gone for a couple weeks, alright. I have a job up in Detroit I have to do. Robert says we can get some real good work this time.”

Robert was the current guy she called her boyfriend.

“Okay,” I said.

What else could I say? She looked back once, then walked out the front door.

I never saw my mom again.

Our Trip To Florida And How I Nearly Died

D. Michl LoweLeave a comment

When I was around seven years old my family decided that it was time for us to take a trip down to Florida and go to Disney and then head over to Daytona Beach. We decided I needed a buddy to take with me, and so Cousin Randy went with us. Because we wanted to save money where we could, we decided to drive down there. On the way down, when you are coming out of Georgia and heading into the northern part of Florida, you are driving on a large highway that is very straight in one section. I remember looking up from my Gameboy and seeing that our side of the highway was empty, with no cars at all. However, on the other side of the highway, it was bumper-to-bumper traffic.

I mentioned this to dad and he thought this was odd as well. So turning on the radio, we discovered that Florida was being evacuated because Hurricane Andrew was going to be hitting Florida very soon. Now I don’t know about your dad, but my dad’s reaction to this news was to comment that he would be able to get some really cool video with his camcorder while we were down there. And so we continued our trek down into the sunshine state. Our first stop was at Disney and our first park was supposed to be The Magic Kingdom. Now, I have been to Disney several times since this first trip and have never had the same experience as we did the first time we went.

Upon entering the park, there is a large boulevard running down the middle of the park with Cinderella’s Castle at the end of the road. The road is lined with shops, restaurants, and little boutiques. Every other time I have been to this park, there have been so many people crowding this area, that you can barely see five feet in front of you and are shoulder to shoulder the entire time. It is always packed. However, this first time we went, there were maybe twenty people on that boulevard. No one was in the part hardly at all.

You might think I am exaggerating, but I am not. Normally, each ride has a good hour-long wait to get on it. We walked directly on every ride we wanted to. No, wait at all. In fact, we rode a couple of the rides twice. By lunchtime, we had ridden every ride we wanted to ride in the Magic Kingdom. We went back to the hotel to eat, then decided to go over to the Animal Kingdom to check it out. By dinner, the time we had experienced everything we wanted to at the Animal Kingdom as well. When I tell you it was the best Disney Vacation we have ever had, it’s not an exaggeration. It only rained once, for about twenty minutes.

After our time at Disney, we went over to Daytona Beach. This is where things get a little more interesting. The storm had begun to really become fierce. There were days we were stuck in the hotel room because of torrential rain. Dad was having a ball filming it all and mom kept asking if we needed to get to the first floor of the hotel since she believed we would be blown away. Dad informed her that if we were lower, we were much more likely to be flooded so it was better to stay on the higher floors. I don’t think that made her feel better.

So on Randy and I’s first trip down to the sand, we decided that playing in the surf was the best idea. However, that idea was quickly dashed when we realized that about every twenty minutes or so, a ten-foot-high wave would come along and crash so hard on us that we thought it would rattle our teeth loose. So we moved a little further out into the water so that it was about up to our waste. For some reason, the waves were not nearly as bad at that depth, but it presented a new problem for us; jellyfish.

Apparently, the storm had blown in a very large school of quarter-sized jellyfish. Their tentacles weren’t but three to four inches long, but they could still sting, and sting they did, a lot! The problem was, it wasn’t a bad sting. Let me explain. With a normal jellyfish sting, it hurts bad enough that a little kid might be done swimming for the day. But these little jellies weren’t terrible, and that was the issue. It wasn’t a bad enough sting to make you get out of the water. I would compare the sting to the bite of a horsefly. So you would yelp, and swat at the water, but then keep on going, with only a little red line to show where they had got you.

At the end of the first day, we came up out of the water and it looked like we had red spider webs all over our legs. That’s how many sting lines we had down our legs. Not that we minded really though, we played that entire day in the ocean. So it wasn’t that bad, but by the next day, we were ready to see if there was another way to have fun. Other than swatting at jellyfish.

The deeper out into the ocean we went, the fewer jellies there seemed to be. So we moved out deeper and deeper, which, thinking about it now was very foolish; considering rip tides and what I am about to tell you about. Either way though, we moved further and further out into the ocean until we were around a football fields length out in the water. It was around ten feet deep at this point. We were diving for shells. Both of us were expert swimmers even at such a young age and had no trouble diving to the bottom to search in the dark for the shells.

We had been out in the water for around ten minutes or so and were treading water. We were facing each other talking, I was facing towards the shore, and Randy facing out to sea. Suddenly, as I was swimming there, a large fin rose up out of the water, just behind Randy. It passed by him and silently slipped back down into the water. I was almost speechless, but managed to sputter out,

“R-R-Randy… th-th-theres a shark!”

His eyes went wide, “Where?”

“Just behind you.”

“Well we gotta get outa here then!” he said.

We started swimming as fast as we could back towards the shore, but we only made it about halfway back, before three more fins rose from the water just in front of us. We stopped dead in our tracks. But should take a moment and explain something to you. In the ocean, there are two main types of fins that you should know about. One of them, is a large triangle, like the one I saw just behind Randy. It was nearly a foot long with crisp edges. The other type of fin though is more like the crest of a wave, where the tip of it curls back. This second type of fin was the type we were seeing now, the three of them begin to circle us.

As you may have guessed, this second type of fin is not a shark fin, but a dolphin fin. The three dolphins were about eight feet from where we now trod water and slowly circled us. We were scared, of course. Dolphins are big animals and these weren’t the trained ones you see in Sea World, but wild dolphins of the Atlantic. However, as we continued to swim towards shore, they kept up with us, circling us the whole way into the breaks where we could stand.

Now, I don’t know how you would have taken that situation, but from that day forward, I have believed that the dolphins were protecting Randy and me from the shark. So that’s the story of how Randy and I went to Florida during Hurricane Andrew and nearly got eaten by a shark, only to be saved by dolphins. True story.

D. Michl Lowe