November 07, 2004

Time Travel Attempt #1

Neal Pollack is the author of The Neal Pollack Anthology Of American Literature and Never Mind The Pollacks. He recently wrote in with some praise for Poof!, along with a question for Chris:

"For some reason, more and more young writers are producing dystopian novels. Chris Genoa rides the quest of this wave with weird humor, great characters, and descriptions of time travel so accurate that you'd think he's actually traveled through time. Well? Have you, Chris?"

The answer is no, Neal. Chris hasn’t traveled through time yet. But that’s certainly not because the guy hasn’t tried.

His first attempt came at the age of eleven, when Chris spent the entire summer trying to build a time machine out of junkyard parts and a Commodore 64 computer.

The junkyard parts consisted mostly of an old rotting Tilt-A-Whirl car which he found hidden underneath a pile of car doors. Having seen the classic 1985 film Explorers about two-thousand times, Chris decided to harness the success of the young Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix in that movie and use their Tilt-A-Whirl based spaceship prototype as the foundation for his time machine. Using his younger brother’s red wagon, Chris hauled the Tilt-A-Whirl car to his backyard where he stowed it behind his dad’s tool shed.

The next step was to install his Commodore 64, which would act as the time machine’s maaster control panel. With the help of several extension cords and a lot of duct tape, the computer was easily installed. With that crucial step completed, Chris spent the next several weeks using the C64 to play Lode Runner.

When he finally tired of making the little white dude run around on the bricks, Chris painted a bitchin’ lightening bolt on the side of the Tilt-a-Whirl, pushed the machine to the top of a big hill, got in, got his brother to shove the thing down the hill, flipped end over end about six times, was thrown from the machine, broke his arm, and cried until his dad came to get him, swearing to beat the crap out of Ethan Hawke and company should they ever cross paths.

Chris’s next attempt at time travel wouldn’t come for another ten years...but that is another story.

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