Just a Geek

by Wil Wheaton

  Congratulations, sir. I’m glad that your empty, pathetic existence is made whole by shitting on a person you’ve never even met.

  You know, I promised myself that I wouldn’t get into this. I promised myself that I wouldn’t get sucked in to the mire with the lowest common denominators. Well, guess what, guys? I don’t care if you’re “The Guy From TV” or if you’re “the kid from math class.” Being personally attacked hurts. It sucks. I wonder, do you spend a fifth of the time you spend dumping on me doing something constructive with your life? I certainly hope so. You people are just like the people in high school who never took the time to get to know me, who judged me before I even showed up.

  Aren’t we mostly geeks here, online? Didn’t we all, at one time or another, get bullied by “the cool kids”? Don’t any of you remember what that felt like?

  My mom said to me that she was amazed at how honestly I revealed my feelings.

  She said that I’ve always reacted in anger when I am hurt and she didn’t think I was angry. Well, I wasn’t, but I am now.

  So here’s the deal, people: you can read this or not, and you can see the stuff at my site or not. But if you are going to judge me—me, the person, Wil, who gets up in the middle of the night when his kids are sick and worries about making the bills this month and tries to find time in the day to spend with his wife and works his ass off for auditions that are going to go to the flavor of the month, anyway, well, you can fuck all the way off. Zip up your spacesuit and hurry to the comic shop. Your weekly supply of Magic cards has just come in.

  I will never understand why the Internet seems to take away the basic humanity of most people, and allows—no, enables—them to say things that they’d never say to another person face to face. I couldn’t believe that after I bared myself naked before them, people could still be so cruel and inhuman. In retrospect, my reactions were very extreme, almost as if they came from the defensive teenager I once was. I had been away from Star Trek for almost 15 years, but when I read those websites, I saw the same people say the same things that they had when I was a teenager. Clearly there were unresolved feelings left over from that time, and they all came violently back to the surface.

  I felt a little bit better because I stood up for myself, but I regretted the emotional and manic way that I’d done it.

  “Way to go, Wil. You played right into their hands,” The Voice of Self Doubt said.

  “See what happens when you let people into your life like that? They cock-punch you,” said Prove To Everyone.

  “You should write some more jokes,” The Voice of Self Doubt said.

  “Maybe I’ll talk about Anne,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s nice. Things get rough and you bring out your wife to silence the critics,” said The Voice of Self Doubt. "What are you, some kind of politician?”

  “Shut up, you guys. I’m writing about her and Ferris. Maybe when they hear that I have a cool wife, they’ll see that I’m just a geek.”

  27 AUGUST, 2002

  Save Ferris

  My wife is the coolest, ever. You know that stupid corny Hallmark-card thing about someone making you want to be a better person? Well, sorry, I like to be anti and all Emo and shit, but it’s true. I love my wife more than anything and she really does make me want to be a better person. I could gush about her for pages here, but I’m not gonna. I am going to exercise restraint.

  Oh, fuck that. I knew from the moment that I saw Anne that I would marry her. Isn’t that weird? Has that ever happened to someone who wasn’t in some godawful Nora Ephron movie? And the way we met . . . it was all timing. My best girlfriend, Stephanie, worked with Anne for YEARS, but she never introduced us . . . I mean, she even baby-sat Anne’s kids, at MY PARENT’S HOUSE, when we were younger and she never introduced me to Anne . . . because, when we look back at stuff, the timing was just all wrong. We weren’t ready to meet each other. But when we did, it was bootylicious.

  Anne is beautiful. I mean, she is fucking hella rad.

  Hella.

  Hella.

  Hella.

  I always joke that when we are out, people look at us and complain that there’s another hot babe with a geek. I say that I am Bob Goldthwait to her Nikki Cox, David Copperfield to her Claudia Schiffer, Siegfried to her Roy . . . I truly adore my wife.

  One of the things I adore about her is how she has what Soul Coughing called “Boundless Love.” Anne works every day, takes her kids to school, picks them up, deals with their dad and still has time to make me feel like I’m important in her life.

  We have this fake dog poop that someone gave us a long time ago and we have the game that we play where we try to put the poop in each other’s stuff. Recently, I stuck it in the toe of her shoe, which was in her suitcase. She found it when she put her shoe on in Vegas. She put it in the exact middle of my bed, under the sheets and it scared the hell out of me when I jumped into bed around 2:30 or something last week. My point is, my wife is cool, okay?

  Yesterday, when I was sobbing like a little bitch in our bedroom, she came in, sat next to me, put her arm around me and just sat there, loving me. I could feel it. Then she gave me Kleenex and told me that she’d leave me alone until I felt better.

  You need to know that to understand the story of Ferris.

  Anne is a sucker for hard-luck cases, especially animals. One time a few years ago, she almost got hit on the freeway, because she saw a kitten running in the slow lane . . . so she stopped her car right there and got out to save the kitten, but it got hit by a car just before Anne could get to it and Anne sat on the freeway, holding the kitten while it died in her hands.

  She was fucked up about it for months.

  So about 18 months ago, she and I were on our patio and we heard this meowing coming from our garage. We both thought it was one of my cats, Biko or Sketch (who are both inside cats, but occasionally get out), so we went to look . . . and out came this skinny black cat with no tail. Anne immediately fell in love with him and took him to the vet, to get him healthy again, while I made the “Found Cat” posters. (Long story short: we thought he was going to die, the vet said he was just dehydrated, we got him shots and Anne named him “Felix.” He has lived with us ever since and he is one of the coolest cats, ever.)

  Cut to Memorial Day this year. We have no dog. Anne took the kids to Home Depot, so they can buy the materials to make a grind rail. (They’re all about the short boards. I’m all about the long boards. It makes for an interesting dynamic when we skate.)

  Funny aside: Ryan (12) and Nolan (10) were talking about how excited they were to get a grind rail, which they kept calling a “pole.” Nolan says to Ryan, “We TOTALLY have to get some grinding wax, Ryan!” Ryan replies, “Yeah, so we can wax our pole!”

  Okay, so they’re leaving the Home Depot. Instead of going to the left, to get back to the freeway like we always do, Anne went right and passed this bus stop, where this tiny little dog was chewing on a T-shirt. Anne says that she felt compelled to stop and save her . . . so she did. As soon as Anne got out of the car, the dog ran into some oleander bushes and Anne spent close to 30 minutes getting her out. Then Anne took her to an emergency vet for some shots and to get the ticks out of her ears.

  So Anne brought home this skinny, 27-pound, depressed little dog and, I must be totally honest, I was pissed. I was so mad that she had made this huge decision, to take on the responsibility of a dog, without consulting me. I mean, we have enough responsibilities already, you know? We really had it out. There was much gnashing of teeth and Sir Robin soiled his armor. We finally agreed to keep her for a few days and see how she was and if she wasn’t any better, we’d take her to a shelter where they don’t euthanize the animals.

  Well, the dog was terrified of me. She had CLEARLY been abused by a man and she was terrified of men. “Great,” I thought, “I’m going to be responsible for a dog who never lets me pet her. Terrific.”

  For the first 12 hours, she sat by the side door: never moving, n
ever eating, just looking depressed. But somehow, my amazing wife loved this dog enough and totally turned her around. Within just 12 hours she was wagging her entire body, eating, chasing a tennis ball and generally acting like a dog. And she let me pet her and started following me everywhere around our house.

  So we decided to keep her. But she needed a name . . . and that was very important. I wanted to give her a name from Mythology . . . “Athena” or “Psyche” or something. I know, lame. Deal. The kids wanted to name her “Haley,” which didn’t work for me at ALL, because in high school I had the most painful crush on a girl named Haley . . . so we decided that we’d try different names for a few days and the right one would reveal itself to us.

  Anne came home from work the next day, walked in the door, looked at me and said, “Ferris.”

  “Bueller?”

  “Sort of. Save Ferris!”

  There is this band that we LOVE from OC called Save Ferris. They play with our friends fairview (another band) a lot. They rule.

  Anne says, “Get it? Save Ferris. I totally saved Ferris!”

  I looked at the dog, looked at her sweet, marble eyes and soft little puppy-fuzzy-head and it was perfect. Not surprising, considering that it came from my wife.

  So her name is “Ferris.”

  Isn’t that a cool story?

  Anyone?

  Anyone?

  Bueller?

  Bueller?

  Our friends joke that my wife and I have had an eight-year honeymoon. It was very easy to write about the love I feel for her, because I didn’t have to put on a brave face or risk revealing how frustrated and tormented I was in my career.

  Chapter 3. SpongeBobvega$ Pants

  I SPENT THE FIRST WEEK of September 2001 in Las Vegas, at a Star Trek convention which celebrated the 35th anniversary of the original series.

  In addition to the things we Star Trek people usually do at conventions (signing autographs, posing for pictures, answering questions, and saying “Engage!”), I took a group of people from the ACME Comedy Theatre with me to perform a sketch comedy show. The entire convention experience is chronicled in “The Saga of SpongeBob Vegas Pants,” which is the centerpiece of my first collection of essays, Dancing Barefoot.

  Here’s a primer for readers who aren’t familiar with Star Trek conventions: conventions (or “cons,” as they are known among people who are too busy to say “conventions”) are part trade show, part collectible show, and part geek fest. It all adds up to a celebration of everything related to Star Trek, and the atmosphere is always festive and excited.

  Promoters hire actors, writers, producers and others from the show to give lectures, answer questions, and sign autographs for the fans. There are also people who sell collectibles and bootlegs and other sci-fi- and fantasy-oriented merchandise. The organizers usually run episodes of Star Trek on a big screen, and there are always costume contests. Oh, the costume contests. Think Rocky Horror Picture Show, with less drag, but strangely, more singing. In Klingon. Seriously.

  When I was invited to participate in this show, Prove To Everyone That Quitting Star Trek Wasn’t a Mistake grabbed the phone out of my hand and said, “I’d love to come to the convention, but I’m in this sketch comedy group that performs at the ACME Comedy Theatre in Hollywood, and I’d like to bring some of it to Vegas, and prove—I mean, show the fans that I can do something different and unexpected.”

  The promoter thought it was a great idea, so I approached some of the funniest and smartest ACME writers and performers about doing a sci-fi-oriented comedy show for some sci-fi fans. The ones who didn’t ask me for money or run away screaming came with me to Vegas.

  The Q&A Talk that I gave to the fans was a complete failure, but my sketch comedy show was a resounding success.

  Prove To Everyone and I were very proud of ourselves, and The Voice of Self Doubt was temporarily silenced . . . but that was nothing compared to the experience I had at the Las Vegas Hilton’s Star Trek: The Experience.

  The following excerpts are from “The Saga Of SpongeBob Vegas Pants or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Star Trek,” which was first published in Dancing Barefoot.[4]

  OCCASIONALLY GLANCING UP THROUGH THE RAIN

  I check my watch: 4:55 p.m. I’m supposed to go on at 5 p.m. and talk for about 50 minutes. I usually talk for 90 minutes, which gives me time to let the audience warm up to me, tell some involved stories, take lots of questions, and make some jokes. With just 50 minutes, I can’t waste any time: I have to go out there and nail ‘em with a good joke right away, so the audience is on my side.

  Well, I’ve got three things working against me before I even walk into the room:

  I’m the last speaker of the day. The fans are tired and a little burned out.

  I’m following Michael Dorn and Marina Sirtis. They do conventions together all the time, have a set routine that never fails, and the fans adore them.

  I was Wesley Crusher.

  Performing well at a convention is extremely important to me. I care about what the fans think. I don’t write them off or take them for granted. I know that they’ve spent a large portion of their disposable income on this show, and I want to make sure they get their money’s worth.

  I remember how I felt when WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER dismissed me on the set of Star Trek V. That feeling of humiliation and disenchantment is easy for me to recall, and I do everything I can to ensure that I don’t inflict it on another person.

  When I am on stage, the only real difference between me and the people I’m talking to is that I got paid to wear the spacesuit. I’m a huge science fiction geek. I’ve been attending conventions since I was in the fifth grade, and I know what it’s like when a guest is only there to take the fans’ money.

  I pace backstage, checking my watch every 40 seconds. Michael and Marina are really working this crowd, and the fans don’t want to let them get off stage. At 5:15, they finish.

  My mouth and throat get dry. My hands sweat and tremble. I’ve got the Mind Meld cast, my parents, and my wife in the audience. The last thing I want is to have a whole room of Trekkies hate me in front of them.

  Michael and Marina come off stage, and smile at me. Marina gives me a warm hug and kisses my cheek.

  “You look great, Teen Idol.” She turns to Michael. “Doesn’t he look great?”

  “If you say so,” Michael teases me.

  I love these two. I’m terrified about going on stage, but a smile that starts in my feet spreads across my face.

  “The fans loved you guys,” I say. “I have a lot to live up to.”

  “You’re going to be great, Wil.” It’s the promoter, Dave Scott. “Are you ready?”

  I take a deep breath. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

  Michael and Marina wish me luck and leave. I wonder if any of us have ever stayed around to watch each other on stage. I’ve watched Patrick a few times, hoping that he’ll break into some spontaneous Shakespeare, but nobody’s ever watched me, as far as I know.

  Dave pats my shoulder and takes the stage.

  “Oh, ladies and gentlemen! Our next speaker is going to really surprise you!” The crowd begins to applaud.

  That was nice. Surprising people is cool.

  “He did a show for me in Waterbury, Connecticut, and he was the funniest, most entertaining, and charming guest I’ve ever had!” The applause is joined by some whistling.

  Woah, Dave! Let’s not build me up too much.

  “You are going to have the time of your life in the next 50 minutes!”

  I can hear some screams of “WESLEY!” join the cacophony.

  Oh Christ. “The time of your life?!” Stop now, please.

  “Please welcome to the stage, all the way from Los Angeles, the man, the myth, the legend, Wesley Crusher himself, WIL WHEATON!”

  The crowd explodes. They cheer. They stomp their feet. They whistle. The stage is littered with panties.

  Well, maybe not the panties part, but everything else i
s true. I swear. I take a deep breath, and walk through the curtain.

  I burst out onto the stage, and they jump to their feet. In this moment, I understand the appeal of living a rock-and-roll lifestyle.

  I walk around the stage, waving, throwing the goat, and enjoying the positive response.

  When the crowd settles down, I hit them with my funny.

  It’s hot in Vegas. Tenth Circle of Hell hot. Fortunately, TNN has shown up and, in a humanitarian and self-promotional effort, have handed out bottles of “Altair Water.” It’s plain old bottled water, but it’s in a nifty green bottle with some Star Trek graphics on it and a friendly reminder to “Watch TNG on The New TNN!” They were handing them out by the hundreds, because those spacesuits really make you sweat, if I remember correctly.

  So I hold up the bottle of water and I say, “I’ve been drinking this `Altair Water’ all morning . . . and you know what I’m thinking? This isn’t actually from the planet Altair. It’s just regular water! So if you paid for it, I think you got ripped off.”

  Oh yeah, baby. It’s comedy gold.

  The applause and cheering of moments before is replaced by the hum of fluorescent lights, as the first surly heckler shouts, (with the appropriate mix of condescension and contempt), “It’s free, Wil!”

  Self Preservation speaks up. “Get off the stage, Wil. You had your chance and you blew it.”

  He’s right. I’ve been on stage for 15 seconds, and they already hate me.

  I try to shake it off, and move right into the Q&A. “Okay . . . uh, I only have 50 minutes here and I want to maximize our time together today, so here’s the deal: I have some stories that I like to tell, but I also like to take questions from the audience, so you can direct the discussion. Since we only have a short time today, I’ll answer the most frequently asked questions first: No, yes, umbrellas, I can’t remember, and they were real.”