nude highway driving

Since last weekend, I’ve been undergoing a massive-ass cleaning of the apartment. I’m one of those people who saves everything because it might come in handy (either for practical or nostalgic purposes) one day, so it’s a little crowded in here. Or it was. I finally hit a snapping point, and the chicky mama (aka de vogel), who has cable and watches lots of “Clean Sweep,” was more than willing to come be The Enforcer. Last weekend I gave away six trash bags of clothing and tossed five trash bags of trash. I filled two big-ass boxes with stuff to give away, and finally reformatted and boxed up my old PowerMac (that I replaced three years ago) along with a scanner and gave them to a neighborhood school.

During this process I’m finding shit I haven’t seen in years, such as a GWAR condom, paychecks from every job I’ve had since college, copies of JoMo’s first underground “punk zine” and my old London public transport ID. And with these finds come stories.

I found the above photo of Armand Hans III and the stars of Imagic, makers of video games for my Atari 2600. It sits inside a rejection letter I got on Dec. 17, 1982, from them after I wrote and offered to help design video games. Does anybody remember the Imagic TV commercials? I loved them — this stuffy old English dude (Armand) would be hanging out with intergalactic space hoodlums pimping video games. They were great!

I thought for sure they could use the brainpower of a 12-year-old fan to help create more games. I didn’t know programming or anything, just had ideas for what future games should be about. Why wouldn’t they hire me?

That wasn’t my first letter to a big company. Several years earlier, I was a HUGE fan of Wacky Packages. My dresser was covered in their stickers (sorry Mom). I had started coming up with my own faux products and drawing them, and one of the ideas I was most proud of was “Belch’s Jelly.” It made friends laugh. I knew I was pure genius.

But then my world was shattered when I got a new pack one day and saw … IT. How could Topps have a Belch’s Jelly sticker? That was clearly my idea. Obviously, they stole it. Never mind that I never sent it to them (or, as I now know, that the sticker came out in 1974, way before I started buying them), they somehow ripped me off. So I wrote an angry letter, threatening to sue them. I bet the office assistant loved reading this pissed-off, threatening-legal-action letter clearly written by an 8-year-old (no typewriter for me). They wrote back a very polite letter stating that they were confident their creative team came up with all ideas on their own and didn’t bogart anyone’s intellectual property.

I don’t think Imagic lasted very long … I can’t even find any sort of company history in the Net. Probably their curse for not hiring me. (Topps, of course, fared a little better.) I’ve still got some of their games (yes, I still have an Atari), and I’ll always have the evidence of my big-time game-designing plans. It will survive my massive cull because it was my first rejection letter ever, an ominous foreshadowing of my much-later decision to pick writing as a career goal.