by Rainn Wilson
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Dwight: I never found Mr. Ignatowski funny because I genuinely believe his teachings and philosophies as a reverend are quite profound. Frankly, I never understood why the studio audience was laughing at this insightful thinker. Does anyone know if his parish is still in operation?
LES NESSMAN, WKRP IN CINCINNATI
The beleaguered news director of the radio station, Les Nessman, he of the bow tie, horn-rims, and plastic pocket protector, may have been the first “geek” on television. He’s a Dwight prototype, often butting heads in his search for respect from the others in the office. His running gag of having tape on the floor, demarcating where his office walls should be and insisting that everyone knock on his imaginary door and mime opening and closing it, brought my nerdy heart tremendous joy on a weekly basis.
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Dwight: I’m proud to be compared with the venerable Mr. Nessman. Arthur Carlson, the “manager” of the station, was a complete bumbling oaf and Mr. Nessman should have been given a chance in that position. I find the extent to which he was disrespected absolutely disgraceful. Furthermore, I wish I had thought of that whole “tape off the walls of your office” idea when I was a mere salesman at Dunder Mifflin. Would have saved me a lot of nonsense and high jinks.
DETECTIVE ARTHUR DIETRICH, BARNEY MILLER
I loved the unflappable, intellectual know-it-all played effortlessly by Steve Landesberg. This existential philosopher was always on a quest for knowledge, and his deadpan wit was unlike anything else on the TV. He was the drily cool philosopher I aspired to be one day.
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Dwight: As a fellow unflappable intellectual with deadpan wit who works in law enforcement, I endorse Detective Dietrich. However, I did not watch Barney Miller often, because the fact that nearly every cast member had massive bags under their eyes disturbed me.
ARNOLD HORSHACK, WELCOME BACK, KOTTER
Sheer, broad, idiotic buffoonery sometimes trumps all other subtler choices. A loud laugh and ridiculous hair help tremendously. This “character,” played by Ron Palillo, was staggeringly huge and shocked all of America, preparing the way for Kramer and Urkel.
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Dwight: I have no comment on Arnold Horshack, but I did enjoy the opening scene of Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, wherein actor Ron Palillo had his heart ripped out as he vomited blood.
TED BAXTER, THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW
This pompous clown, utterly lacking in self-knowledge, was perfectly rendered by Ted Knight. The anchorman’s epic vanity was matched only by his stupidity. Like so many newsmen, he’s completely style without a whiff of substance. Like Ron Burgundy and Geraldo Rivera. And I’m sorry, sometimes people are just wired funny, and Ted is that. He just simply makes you laugh.
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Dwight: “Simply makes you laugh” unless journalistic standards actually mean something to you. A poor reporter who, I believe, was responsible for the Symbionese Liberation Army’s kidnapping of Patricia Hearst. I don’t have the space here, but I’d like to expound further in a book of my own.
THE FONZ, HAPPY DAYS
Ayyyyyyyyyy! The Fonz was an icon. During the opening credits we see the Fonz go to the mirror to comb his hair; he stops, decides it’s perfect, and does his signature “Ayyyyy” move in his leather jacket. Apparently this was the choice that Henry Winkler made when auditioning that made all the producers laugh and got him the part. All the other actors actually combed their hair in various Fonz-like ways, but it was the daringness of Mr. Winkler that set him apart and above. And the essence of that acting choice was what defined the Fonz and set his character in an entirely different paradigm from the typical fifties cool guy. He was a magical unicorn of a man who had infinite confidence and could snap his fingers to have beautiful women drape themselves on his shoulders, and yet we felt for Arthur Fonzarelli. He was lonely inside, and for all his “cool” there was a lost child in there that we wanted to get to know.
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Dwight: A man with godlike powers to make machinery spring to life at the touch of his hand. A supernatural ability to induce sexual hypnosis in any woman—which he would then compulsively act upon. Happy Days is the terrifying tale of a town enslaved by the whims of this inhuman monster, “the Fonz.”
Chapter 4
THE NERD OF GOD
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In the midseventies we moved to a northern suburb of Seattle called Lake Forest Park. We lived in a different but exactly-the-same tiny concrete-block, two-bedroom rental house between a Pizza Hut and a 7-Eleven just off of Ballinger Way on a leafy, green, solidly middle-class cul-de-sac. My dad was now working at Erickson Brothers Sewer Repair of Seattle (later to be known as Jim Dandy Sewer and Plumbing) as the office manager. It was a tiny plumbing and sewer construction shop that had been launched in 1908 by some craggy Swedish relatives of Kristin’s. In his spare time from sending out invoices and dispatching sewer trucks to the plugged drains and clogged sewer lines of rainy Seattle, Robert Wilson would be furiously typing chapters of his science-fiction and fantasy books on a green Smith Corona. The rough-hewn, poo-encrusted men of Erickson Brothers looked at my dad as if he had just arrived from the planet Voltron.
Robert Wilson was still an artist at heart: a suburban dad, providing for his oddball family at a sewer construction company, whose bohemian dream still bubbled around inside. He literally typed out six or seven novels in that musty, mossy basement office. His second novel, Tentacles of Dawn, was the only one published.
You see, there’s this man who wakes up in an egg in a cave in a dark world. He fights giant bats and mutant tribes and “the Wild Wagon Women” on his quest to find “the Watcher at the End of the World,” where he realizes that he is actually an android sent to bring light to Earth. It’s really that simple.
Here’s a compendium of some of the other books he wrote, now long lost to the world (note: I’m not making any of this up):
The Ghosts of Ea: A spaceship of human explorers, captained by one John Draco, returns to Earth one hundred thousand years after the planet has been abandoned, only to be held captive. They discover Earth is now a prison colony for violent aliens whom they must partner with to overthrow their evil overlords who are based on the moon.
The Curse of Gitan Mu: The diminutive monk Hikphat wanders the continent Panea, which is breaking apart, in search of a tattoo that will make him immortal. The holy order he belongs to worships a set of ankle bones and he must discover whom they originally belonged to as he travels a world peopled with slavers, monsters, and pirates.
The Chromium Kid: A semiautobiographical account of an awkward young teen growing up in a Chicago suburb while escaping into a fantasy adventure novel that serves as a guide to surviving in the “real world.”
The Subways of Ur: A Roman soldier is misplaced in time and takes a subway back and forth from the frozen future of Earth to the ancient city of Ur, which was settled by ruthless extraterrestrials who are worshipped as gods.
Clarissa of Toom: A beautiful woman was created by a magician, Algoram, out of ashes, a log, a spiderweb, and some moss. She’s sent out into the world to investigate if anyone else is alive after a devastating war between wizards. Clarissa travels the countryside, guided by a dial on her ring that points toward magic. She visits the Seven Cities of Stone and learns that she must ultimately return and slay Algoram, who was the one who started the war in the first place.
Arizona Hospital: In the future, after a terrible plague apocalypse, all humans live in cities built inside enormous hospitals and eat a special food called “nutrient” that protects them from mutant gene production. Special police forces, under the command of our hero, Romeo Sierra, hunt and kill mutants that are being led by a maniacal general and scientist named Doctor Corruptus. The mutants are rampant, evil carnivores . . . or ARE they?!
The Lords of AfterEarth: Manuel escapes his narrow-minded village and rides
a giant spider left over from a long-gone civilization, stumbles upon a cult in a desert that grows people in underground vats, discovers a sunken city that rises to the surface of the ocean for one day each year, and eventually ends up at an abandoned spaceport, his final escape to the stars.
I waited with bated breath for my dad to finish whatever novel he had been fabricating so I could read it immediately. I was always his first audience, and I was instantly transported by his strange, imaginative tales, bundled in a giant pile of double-spaced typewritten pages. I was in awe of this man who could pound away on a typewriter or slosh paint on a stretched piece of canvas and actually create something that hadn’t been there before. I wanted that. I wanted to be able to do that, and it was my father who lit the fire of my passion to be an artist of some kind.
After slugging out pulpy books and cleaning sewers during the day, he became Jackson Pollock at night. Our converted garage was my father’s art studio. Upon arriving home from work, promptly at five thirty, he would put on some paint-soaked Levi’s and a work shirt and head into his studio with a V8 juice (to which he added a splash of Worcestershire sauce) and a paintbrush. After cranking the Wagner, he would start to paint his enormous abstract oil paintings. I remember there was one particular phase of his work where he was painting large Picasso-esque women with their enormous breastesses fully revealed. This was terribly embarrassing to me as a young lad. Big abstract women-ladies with their boobages flying in the abstract breeze. I remember leaving him a note on his desk asking him to “please stop painting nakid women’s brests” or something to that effect.
His “studio” was also stacked to the ceiling with other science-fiction and fantasy books. Their outlandish, pulpy covers sparked my imagination and drew me in. By the time I was twelve years old, and had been tiptoeing into the genre via Mr. Ray Bradbury, I was hooked.
I devoured the robots of Asimov and Andre Norton and the aliens of Arthur C. Clarke and Poul Anderson. I carried swords and cast spells alongside Conan; the Gray Mouser; Corwin, Prince of Amber; and Elric of Melniboné. I submerged myself in the dystopian futures of Le Guin and Huxley and Wells and the grandmaster of them all, amphetamine prophet Philip K. Dick. And, my personal favorite, an author largely forgotten, Jack Vance, whose hyperverbose, comic science-fantasy adventures I read and reread and reread.
I left my comic books behind for actual novels without cartoons in them. Words upon words upon words. Bloated, alternative-reality webs of pure speculative imagination. One great rule my parents had was that however many books I wanted they would buy for me, as long as I read them all. No questions asked. We didn’t have a lot of money, but every month they’d purchase me an enormous stack of science fiction from our family’s favorite hangout, the University Book Store on “the Ave” in Seattle.
This was the beginning of the long, inevitable descent into total and irredeemable nerddom.
I was bone-numbingly nerdy before there was even a modicum of cool attached to that now overappropriated, worn-out word. In the early eighties being a nerd meant you were reviled and got the crap literally beaten out of your gangly body on a regular basis. You were shunned, derided, and laughed at pretty much daily. There were no nerd CEOs or TV hosts or rock stars or actors or billionaires. There was no Nerdist podcast or Big Bang Theory or emo girls with “I Love Geeks” T-shirts. There were only the unwashed, cerebral misfits who slipped quietly into the side doors of the school and skirted along the lockers, trying to avoid any sudden move or eye contact that would result in a beatdown from a jock, stoner, or popular kid. It was like literally living inside a John Hughes movie.
I was repeatedly mocked, derided, shoved, punched, and laughed at by a good majority of the people I was in school with in Seattle. Certainly having the name Rainn didn’t help much. I would sometimes dream longingly of being named Gary or Doug or Carl, strong, simple names that didn’t draw much attention. I heard “Rain, rain, go away” chants most of the way through elementary school. Hysterical rain puns “rained” down on me incessantly.
I remember a band trip where tiny bully Terry Kostas and a bunch of his minions somehow decided they were going to kick the crap out of me and my dork posse at some future point in time. I was terrified beyond measure and escaped with nothing worse than being socked in the stomach with a monkey wrench by his version of Crabbe or Goyle in metal shop one day.
Another thing about the seventies and early eighties was that bullying was just accepted. Think of the great bullies in classic old movies: Johnny Lawrence from The Karate Kid, Ace (Kiefer Sutherland) from Stand by Me, the Socs from The Outsiders, Scut Farkus from A Christmas Story, Biff from Back to the Future, the entire senior class from Dazed and Confused, and, of course, the Heathers. The idea that there would someday be an anti-bullying campaign of some kind would have been thought of as ludicrous back then. Being bullied was good for you, according to cultural beliefs. It toughened you up and thickened your skin. It was the natural order of things. Darwinian. So geek- and nerddom* had a very high cost to it with zero perks. Only bruises on your self-esteem. And your body.
My obsession with all things fantasy and sci-fi dovetailed into real life with the advent of the second-greatest game ever invented (next to chess, of course), Dungeons & Dragons. For the twelve of you who don’t know, D&D is a role-playing game where you pretend to be a wizard or thief or warrior and you endlessly battle fictional monsters in treasure-laden dungeons while eating Cheetos.
My friends and I would leave school on a Friday afternoon to dive into a weekend-long Dungeons & Dragons marathon extravaganza. Myself, John Valadez, Steve Wilmart, Mike Wentzel, Chris Cole, George Evans, and Shawn and Tim Higgins (our malevolent dungeon master, who spookily resembled Art Garfunkel) would live in a different world from Friday night at four p.m. until around Sunday at six p.m.
This world was filled with orcs and morning stars, dexterity points, labyrinths, twenty-sided dice, healing potions, action miniature figurines, and intricate maps, painstakingly etched onto graph paper. It was fueled by Fritos and Dr Pepper and the desire to “level-up” our characters until they were invincible. This was the world of the imagination. Scrawny, self-hating wimps transformed into fierce barbarians and dazzling wizards all across the basements of America.
I would most often play Ragnar the Radical, my eleventh-level fighter who was adept with both bow and sword and, because his moral alignment was “chaotic neutral,” could do whatever he damn well pleased. Which was tremendous fun. I would spend my days in class not paying attention to the teacher but sketching Ragnar over and over again. Ragnar fighting an ogre. Ragnar shooting arrows into the shield of a Frost Giant. Ragnar looking majestic in his cape on top of a snowy mountain at sunrise, gazing off at the horizon, knowing that there was more evil to fight with his “Reaping Strike.”™
ARTIST: Rainn Wilson, circa 1980
I also played Queekag the monk, who was a martial arts expert but, because he couldn’t wear any armor, was a sitting duck if we got attacked by a bunch of goblins with crossbows, let me tell you. I admire Queekag to this day. His resolve, his discipline, his mystery, his bo staff. More of a man than I’ll ever be. I suppose in some ways, Queekag was the male role model I never had. The man I still to this day strive to be. Itinerant, wise, self-sufficient, spiritual but an ass kicker at the same time. Influenced, obviously, by Kwai Chang Caine, the Shaolin monk from the seventies TV show Kung Fu, so deftly played by David Carradine. And by the Buddha.
Schedule of D&D Marathon Extravaganza
Friday
4:00–9:00 p.m.: Play Dungeons & Dragons, usually at Shawn Higgins’s house.
9:00–9:30 p.m.: Order pizzas and run around outside with broomstick swords and garbage-can-lid shields until the pizza guy got there.
9:30 p.m.: Chug Dr Pepper from the two-liter bottle and make fun of Shawn’s Adam’s apple (which was like a second head, it was so huge. It was like the little alie
n baby in Alien had gotten stuck in his pale, freckly esophagus and lay there, threatening to burst out of his rubbery neck. Hi, Shawn!).
9:45 p.m.–1:45 a.m.: Fight monsters and get treasure.
2:00 a.m.: Go spend the night at John Valadez’s house, watch wrestling, and eat rocky road ice cream.
Saturday
9:30–10:00 a.m.: Count Chocula.
10:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m.: Play D&D.
2:00–3:00 p.m.: Run around in the woods with Chris Cole’s bow and arrow and shoot it at a bunch of old tires.
3:00–9:30 p.m.: Strive to finish clearing out the dungeons of Aktar, making sure to find Hosgurd’s key (which we would need to get the treasure from Klur the Copper Dragon, of course).
9:30–10:00 p.m.: Snack on fruit from the giant boxes of free produce the Higginses had stacked in their garage from their divorced, absent father who ran a food distribution company and supposedly sent bananas and apples over by the pallet in lieu of making child support payments.
10:00 p.m.–2:00 a.m.: Attempt to finish level nine of the dungeon and slay Klur the Copper Dragon in order to obtain entrance into the Castle of Garadrel.
Sunday
10:00–11:00 a.m.: Eat runny scrambled eggs with parents (eye-roll a lot, classical music plunking away in the background).
11:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.: Finish the Castle of Garadrel. Celebrate with Twizzlers and Slurpees and some furtive, adrenalized glimpses at a stack of Cheri porno mags that Tim had found at the bottom of some old boxes in the corner of their basement. (This was the late seventies. Porn wasn’t as ubiquitous and “one click away” as it is now. We had to work for our porn back then!)