Eleven days I would like to return to via time travel

This list is Quantum Leap defined, meaning, I could only travel to one point or another in my lifetime. Still, no shortage of visits I’d like to make to the past.

1) Sept. 10, 2001
Could I stop it? Maybe, maybe not. Isn’t this the conundrum everyone from Steven Hawking to theoretical physicists to Gene Roddenbury has with time travel, changing the past? My thought? Fuck it. If I could go back to the day before the September 11 terrorist attacks, I’d do everything possible to alert the authorities, and spare the U.S. and those killed. Be nice if the hijackers still wound up dead, though, in some freakish series of simultaneous incidents post-arrest. To Hell with what the Council on Islamic-American relations would’ve said…

2) Second Wednesday in April, 1984
I’m pretty sure this was the day. Given a calendar, I could probably figure it out. But the exact date isn’t important. It’s not like a historical event (see No. 1) occurred that day. But I did cut school, met up with my girlfriend (who had also cut school, delinquints such as we were), and spent the day fooling around. Some pretty serious fooling around, at that. Won’t go into details, but as you can imagine, for a 16 year old? It was a pretty memorable day. Well worth skipping class. Not that any reason wasn’t a good one to skip class, but still…

3) Friday, April 16, 2010
Think I pegged it right, if my (often lousy) math is correct. Only a brief jaunt to the past, so as to breeze into a service station and pick up a Powerball ticket. Trust me, the clerk who won the $254 million bucks? Wouldn’t have bitched about winning $127 mil if he didn’t know any better.

4) November somethingorother, 1992
The date in question? The night my hockey team played the heavily-favored Devils for the league championship. We’d gotten blown out in game one, 12-2 I believe. Then, we pulled out a win in Game 2, forcing the deciding rubber game. We were down 2-0 late in the second, when I took a puck out from the corner, got up to about the red line, and just teed off, with time running out. I caught a break, the shot dribbled in, and we went to the third trailing by one. Midway through? I caught a great pass (think Brian Mackie fed me on it) and snapped a low wrister into the twine to tie it up. And, the reason going back would be so fun? With about two minutes left in the game and near the end of a long shift, Mike Richford has a guy freaking draped on his back, moving behind the net, trying to get free. Whilst taking a beating in the slot from a sonofabitch named Biggs who’d absolutely planted me early in the first, I got Mike’s attention and a bouncing pass which I one-timed low glove side. I can remember the shot like it happened yesterday. Kings win, 3-2. I probably oughta credit an ex who delivered a bit of motivation prior to the game but…well, won’t get into details on that part, either.

5) First Saturday in December, 1991
Another date I could probably figure out, because I think I still have the ribbon from that tournament. Only, it wasn’t hockey, but Fordham debate. I had a pretty good weekend, but the real reason for the return to the past would be to change what went down. Or, didn’t, as it were. See, this is one of those mistakes I would correct having the benefit of hindsight. I had a shot to make a move on my debate partner, after a relatively ugly incident earlier in the evening had me and two other guys ready to go crack some heads. Our hosts (three guys from Rhode Island College) were kind of crossing the line with the girl in question, and all four of them had probably had one too many. Back then? I carried (discreetly) one of those bad-ass Crocodile Dundee knives. Thing was freaking enormous. And I had it out, talking with Dave and Sloane about putting it to use in getting a couple of drunken bozos to back off my debate partner. Luckily, it never came to it. But she and I wound up staying up real, real, real late, and the opportunity was there. I’m not talking about anything serious, not sleeping together or anything like that, but at least to make the move. I didn’t act on it. I should have.

6) September 6, 2005
A couple of weeks after wrapping principal photography on my first feature film, The Bunker, I sent off the master tapes to Hart Fisher, who was supposed to do the rough cut. The editor I’d hired to cut the flick, who had a killer reel, wound up having to move to Jersey, where he or his wife (I forget which) had gotten a sweet offer with a TV station up there. Hart was never supposed to be the editor on The Bunker, but he volunteered to do the rough cut, so I sent him the tapes. I had all sorts of other hassles—hurricanes were waiting in the wings to screw things up on several scenes, for starters–but if I could go back, he’d never have even touched the footage. Incompetence, huge delays, an inability to do a decent film look, and three years later he still hadn’t cut the stuff he was originally supposed to. I wound up hiring somebody else, much better, right out of film school, and she put together a cut that got screened at the Halloween Horror Picture Show film festival; Jani Con; showings at two Florida SuperCons, and which garnered two offers from distribution companies (one being Galloping Films) to release the movie. If I didn’t have to reshoot a scene to trim the last vestiges of HDF involvement from the film, the thing would have been out back in 2007 when it was supposed to be, before the economy tanked and cash deals for indie flicks dried up like a salted slug. There’s not a lot of mistakes I would want to go back and correct that badly, but this is at the top of the list.

7) May 21, 1981
I’m sitting at home, waiting excitedly for 8 o’clock to arrive, because the Islanders are home for Game 5 of the Stanley Cup playoffs, and I have no doubt that they are going to roll over the Minnesota North Stars to win their second straight Cup. The phone rings. It’s my Dad. He tells me to get dressed, we’re going out. I tell him, we can’t go out! The Islanders are playing for the Stanley Cup. His reply? “I know. I just got tickets.” So, we wind up sitting about five rows off the ice, and the Isles deliver, knocking off Minnesota 4 games to 1. It takes us approximately two hours just to get out of the Nassau Coliseum parking lot, and the traffic didn’t bother us at all. Fans were dancing on the rooves of their cars, the chants of “Let’s Go Islanders” could be heard with accompanying car-horn beeps…it was everything you imagine winning a major championship in pro sports is like, and being there live to see it. I went to a shitload of Islanders games over the years, but I’ll go to my grave remembering that night, and the great time we had. Perhaps second to the game in terms of memorable? The look on my Dad’s face upon our foray into the Men’s room after the second period, to find it so overcrowded that two guys were simultaneously pissing in a sink. Unpleasant? Sure. But the look on my Dad’s face was utterly priceless. He probably remembers that as much as the game itself, and we still laugh about it to this day, almost 30 years later.

8) April again, 1995 this time
I can probably look it up online, because I believe it was Easter weekend. I went to the Dallas Fantasy Fair, unattached and ready to spend a couple of days out of town, hanging out with friends Keith and Shannon, at promoter Larry Langford’s huge comic con. That weekend, I kept bumping into a girl named Jen, finding it odd that we kept winding up in the same places and in the guest suite at the same times. Could be it was entirely chance, although I wound up staying with Keith and Shannon for several days after the show, where I discovered I should have been paying more attention. Yep, big damn finger snap after missing that opp. Oh well, things worked out all right the next time I had a chance to hook up with a girl from Texas, but still… Yeah, that hindsight thing again. If only you could bottle that shit and have it around whenever you needed some.

9) May 17th, 1999
I’ve just moved to Florida, and my freaking car decides to give up the ghost. Been in town a week, don’t hardly know anybody, the move cost me a bundle, and I towed the fucking thing 1,600 miles only to have it die in rush hour traffic, leaving me stranded. My Dad helped me out with a down payment on an Isuzu Hombre (which Pam and I still have and which runs *great*), but right after I bought the truck, I had a shot to buy a motorcycle, cheap, from a guy in the complex where I was living. Later on, I would get another cycle (I had one briefly in NY), but I should have grabbed the bike, and got in some more riding time before the lights went out on me. I miss a lot of things I did when I was sighted, but playing ice hockey and riding a motorcycle are probably at the top of the list, 1-2. (Working for a porno company? A very, very close 3rd.)

10) September, 1992
Little fuzzy on the timetable, but this is close enough. I’m driving through New Jersey with Annie, my girlfriend at the time, and we come around a turn, heading to some restaurant we wanted to check out. (Well, more likely she wanted to check it out and I was going along for the ride, as it was a health food place). Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a FOR SALE sign in the windshield of a vehicle parked on the corner of a gas station. About fifteen seconds pass, then Annie and I look at one another and at the same time we each say, “Did you see that?” Yep, we had. And so I turned my Ford Taurus around, and we went back to inquire about the spiffy vehicle on the lot. A 1972 Cadillac Hearse. I’m talking old-school. Fender skirts, curtains, huge and black and about the length of a small yacht. We talk to the owner, and he shows off the inside. In the back? Two huge cabinet speakers on their sides provide a killer sound system. Thing runs like a charm. The guy wants a grand for it. I know what I have in my pocket, and what I can yank out on my ATM card. I offer him $900 in cash and tell him I can be back in ten minutes. We shake on it, and fifteen minutes later, Annie is driving my car back to her place and I am rolling through Lake Hopatcong in this monstrous old horror-movie vehicle. Loved that thing. Both of us did. We even used it to go camping at the NY Renaissance fair the following spring. What a trip *that* was. I wound up putting a futon mattress in the back, which turned the thing into a rolling camper. I once drove half the hockey team to a game in it. We looked quite the sight piling out of the deathmobile, that’s for sure. When I drove into the Village and there was no parking? I simply pulled up in front of a church in a red zone and left it. Nobody ever said Boo about it. On the highway with the lights on? People automatically changed lanes. Didn’t get much to the gallon, but boy, the extra bucks I spent on gas were well worth it.

11) March 1, 1984
Here’s a mistake I would go back and correct. In January, I’d sent in my entry form to take part in the Golden Gloves, the premiere amateur boxing competition in the country. They have Golden Gloves all over, but New York is considered the top of the line. In February, I got my confirmation in the mail, and the date for me to go into Brooklyn and get my physical. No sweat, right? Well, by March my Mom’s back was in really bad shape, and she went into traction for a couple of weeks. I decided not to go take the physical, thinking if I missed it, I’d just go back the following year. You know the rest. One thing happens, then another, then I’m in college, then I have a real job, and so on. I should’ve gone, and kept it a secret. Fought once, and if I won, quit undefeated, just to say I did it. Now if I want to box (and trust me, I do), I’ll have to find somebody equally crazy to get in the ring, because I don’t want to fight another blind guy. I’ve figured out a way to make fighting a sighted guy feasible. Maybe when we get the next film rolling and I’m up visiting my producer Joe in New York, we can set it up on Opie & Anthony. Hey, if I can sword fight with a martial arts expert, I can throw leather for three, six, or nine minutes, right?