Frozen in Time

It’s 1987. I’m thinking of what my ideal bedroom might look like, so I start drawing where everything should be.

I use elements from my current room setup. This isn’t some far-off fantasy future room, but instead the way I want my room to look in the somewhat near future—maybe 1989, when I start high school.

Among the things from my actual room are a Soundesign stereo system. You can see two Beatles posters on either side of the stereo system, framing the magical place where their music comes to life every night. Here’s that finished drawing, which I’m pretty happy about since I used a felt-tip pen from start to finish. Not bad for a 12-year-old who just wants to doodle.

That Soundesign system cost me $119 (according to my malleable memory). This was a princely sum for me, but I was able to save up for it by mowing lawns, having a yard sale, raking leaves, picking up aluminum cans, and saving up my $5 a week allowance for a while.

This was before I won a major award (a $100 bill) from delivering newspapers, so having a massive sum like this was highly unusual. In fact, it may have been the most money I had ever been able to save up until that point.

It was well worth it to be able to immerse myself in the sounds I wanted to hear while drawing comic book covers (or planning my future room setup).

You might notice that there’s a cot with a pillow down below, while everything else rests on some kind of platform. That’s supposed to represent a loft, where I could climb up there and just play Nintendo or listen to music. Lofts seemed like such a cool idea—you could effectively double your floor space as long as you didn’t mind sort of crouching down up there, and I had zero issues with that sort of discomfort. If anything, this would represent an adventure for me.

There’s an NES up there, too. The Nintendo Entertainment System provided at least a solid hour of amusement and entertainment per day once it had been introduced, but video games really never dominated our lives. D&D, playing sports, going to the comic book store, bowling—these were priorities, not things to do if you couldn’t get to a video game.

Still, it’s clear that I wanted access to a lot of electronics. It was important for me to be able to see and hear the things I wanted to—to curate my own experience, so to speak. There’s a VCR and a jam box (single portable cassette player that blasts sound out into the world) up there too.

Of course, a laptop or smartphone does everything that cluster of electronics did back then, and a whole lot more to boot.

I thought it might be kind of fun to peer back at this drawing, to see if I could step back into my own mind for a while, and describe that to you. If you’re in the mood to stay put in 1987, you might enjoy one of these next: