The Happiest Days of Our Lives Read online

  The Happiest Days of Our Lives Copyright © 2009

  by Wil Wheaton. All rights reserved.

  Dust jacket Copyright © 2009 by ?????

  Interior design Copyright © 2009

  by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.

  First Subterranean Press Edition

  ISBN 978-1-59606-244-3

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  www.subterraneanpress.com

  contents

  introduction to the subterranean press edition

  original author’s note

  what a long strange trip it’s been

  the butterfly tree

  beyond the rim of the starlight

  see a little light

  blue light special

  exactly what i wanted

  close your eyes and then it’s past

  my mind is filled with silvery star

  when you dressed up sharp and you felt all right

  i am the modren man

  suddenly it’s tomorrow

  a portrait of the artist as a young geek

  in which time is well spent…

  the big goodbye

  let go—a requiem for felix the bear

  green grass and high tides forever (and ever and

  who’s gonna drive you home tonight?

  lying in odessa

  acknowledgments

  about the author

  photo pages

  introduction to the subterranean press edition

  My first book, Dancing Barefoot, was a collection of five short but true essays about my life as a husband, stepfather, and former Star Trek actor. My second book, Just A Geek, was considerably longer, and recounted my journey from actor to writer and back again. My third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives, was a collection of stories about how I became a geek, as well as a celebration of the geek culture that’s meant so much to me for most of my life.

  When I chose which stories to include in The Happiest Days of Our Lives, I had this idea that I couldn’t include any that were too similar to each other. This was a silly idea because all of the stories are similar to a certain extent—I figure prominently in each of them, and the common theme of geek nostalgia runs through the whole book. It was also a very bad idea, because I ended up cutting several stories that I absolutely love. The Happiest Days of Our Lives, as published by Monolith Press, is still a nice little book, and it was very well received, but I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that it could have been so much nicer if I had just gotten out of the way.

  This expanded edition restores those stories to their proper place, where I wish they’d been all along. I am especially grateful that Subterranean Press gave me the opportunity to cast Raise Dead on them, and let me include a few other stories that were written after The Happiest Days of Our Lives was originally published. This volume can safely be called The Author’s Preferred Edition That Is Totally Awesome And Has All The Stuff He Shouldn’t Have Cut In The First Place. Or, I guess, you could just call it the expanded edition, which doesn’t sound nearly as impressive, but is easier to write on a single grain of rice at the county fair.

  original author’s note

  Over the last six years, I’ve written thousands of posts for my blog, talking about every subject imaginable. Nothing generates as much email and as many comments as stories like the ones in this book. It’s not surprising, really, because these stories are the most fun to write and are the closest to my heart: stories that celebrate geek culture, passing my geeky hobbies and values along to my own children, and vividly painting what it meant to grow up in the ’70s and come of age in the ’80s as part of the video game/D&D/BBS/ Star Wars figures generation. There are also a couple of stories about an obscure science fiction show I was a part of for a few years, but I don’t think anyone really watched that.

  Everything in this book originally appeared online in some form or another. Each time one of them was published, at least one reader told me, “Hey, you should put this into a book some day.” I never said it, but that was sort of the idea all along.

  I had a wonderful time revisiting the happiest days of my life while I worked on this book. Thanks for letting me share them with you.

  Namaste.

  Wil Wheaton

  June 2007

  what a long strange trip it’s been

  Ryan and Nolan are my wife Anne’s sons from a previous marriage. They were 6 and 4 when I entered their lives, and I’ve raised them as my own ever since. I’ve always called them my stepsons out of respect for their relationship with their biological father, but I’ve never made an emotional distinction; they are my sons in every way that matters.

  I adore them, and as their primary father figure, I’ve worked very hard to pass along my core values of honesty, integrity, hard work and compassion to them. Over the years, I’ve also shared (intentionally and not) the things that make me a geek, like my love of science, comic books, science fiction, and math. This is just one example of an all-too frequent occurrence in our house.

  I asked my stepson Ryan what the formula was to find the circumference of a circle if you know its diameter.

  “It’s C = π × D,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I can’t believe I forgot that.”

  I grabbed my calculator and entered 3.14 × 186,000,000.

  “Why didn’t you remember that formula?” he asked.

  “Because that part of my brain doesn’t get used as frequently as it once did, and even when it got used almost every day, I had a…difficult…relationship with it.”

  584,040,000 came up on my display.

  “Why did you want to know what it was?” he asked.

  “I just had this idea, and I wanted to know something…”

  I typed in 584,040,000 × 34 and got back 19,857,360,000.

  I looked up at him, unable to contain the huge smile that spread across my face.

  “I’ve been riding this planet for almost twenty billion miles,” I said.

  “Whoa,” he said. “That’s cool.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It really is.”

  the butterfly tree

  My mother says that I got some details wrong in this story. I believe, however, that it’s as true as anyone’s memories of being six years old can be. The details may not be right, but the heart of the story still beats in my chest, 30 years later.

  While on my daily walk through the neighborhood, I passed a set of twins who live up the block from me. They’re girls, in first or second grade. They’re painfully adorable little kids who call me “Mr. Wheaton” and always smile and wave when they drive by with their parents. Their names aren’t important, but H loves my dogs, Ferris and Riley, and A always wants to know where “the grills” are (as my wife calls them) when Anne and I walk without the dogs.

  They were sitting on their driveway, drawing with sidewalk chalk and talking.

  “Hi, girls,” I said as I passed.

  “Hi, Mister Wheaton!” they cooed in adorable unison.

  “How are you today?” I asked.

  “Good,” A said.

  H wiped chalk off her fingers and said, “Guess what, Mr. Wheaton! Today? In school? Melissa C. got her name on the board!”

  “It’s not good to get your name on the board,” I said.

  “I never get my name on the board!” H said.

  “I don’t ever get my name on the board either!” A said.

  “That’s awesome,” I said. “Bye, girls.”

  “Bye, Mr. Wheaton!”

  I took a few steps away, and a long-forgotten first-grade memory of my own rose up and crashed over me in a
powerful wave, washing the smile from my face and the joy from my heart. The memory was so clear, I could close my eyes and see everything in detail that astonished me. It’s almost like I cracked open a time capsule that my mind sealed in 1978.

  I lived in a rural area of Los Angeles called Sunland. I can only see it through the eyes of a 6-year-old, so the whole place is forever the late ’70s, bathed in the golden red sunset of a summer afternoon: tract houses, wide sidewalks, and lots of trees. It was a great place to grow up, but the schools had a really terrible reputation, so my parents put me into a private Christian school that was a few miles from our house.

  I really liked school. Learning was fun, and my parents always seemed interested in every new fact or skill I picked up each day. I liked going to the chapel to sing songs with everyone, and the playground had swings that went so high, you could jump out of them and fly through the air for a whole minute…or five seconds; my memory on that is a little hazy and distorted by time. We didn’t have uniforms, but we had to wear corduroy pants and collared polo shirts. I didn’t mind, because it was fun to get dressed up for school, and I really liked flipping the collar up and down on the drive there every morning.

  I also loved my teacher, Mrs. Gleason. She was about the same age as my parents, had really long blonde hair, always smiled, and wore blue dresses. She was a lot nicer than Mrs. Krocka, a severe woman who was much older, wore her black hair pulled back into a tight bun, and always wore pantsuits. Mrs. Krocka was from Czechoslovakia and spoke with a thick and intimidating accent. As an adult, I wonder now if she was a Soviet Union expatriate, or if maybe her parents fled Europe during or after World War II, but at the time, she was just a mean old lady to me.

  Because she taught the second graders, I only had to see Mrs. Krocka once a day, at recess, except for once a month when she taught our music class (which actually wasn’t that bad, because we learned how to sing the songs from chapel in Slovak. I didn’t understand what I was saying, but it sounded cool…sort of like when they had us do the flag pledges).

  I left that school after first grade and forgot both of my teachers until H and A told me about Melissa C. You see, I was a really good kid in first grade. I only got the equivalent of my name on the board once. Unfortunately, it was in front of my entire family. Oh, and everyone else’s family, too. It happened during Back to School night. Mrs. Krocka took over for Mrs. Gleason, who was called away at the last minute for some sort of family emergency.

  Back to School night was different then from how it was for my kids: Back then, parents brought their kids to school and sat at the back of the class while the teacher took the kids through a truncated version of an average school day for a half an hour or so. When the whole thing was over, the kids got to play on the playground while the parents talked with the teachers, signed up for PTA, and did other mysterious adult things.

  I was really excited about Back to School night. I put on my green corduroy pants and wore my favorite blue polo with the skinny orange and brown stripes across the top. I let my mom comb my hair and use Suave hairspray to hold it in place.

  In 1978, my brother was almost three years old and my sister was about five months old. For whatever reason, my parents couldn’t or wouldn’t or just didn’t get a sitter, so they brought both of my siblings along to Back to School night. I thought it would be cool for them to see me in my class. I was the big brother, after all.

  We arrived a few minutes early (a rarity with my parents, who would show up an hour late for the end of the world) and I was one of the first kids to slide into my desk, right next to my friend Matthew. I thought he was cool because he had a Bible name.

  After the rest of the parents and students filled the room, Mrs. Krocka explained that Mrs. Gleason wouldn’t be there, but she’d show the parents what their children did on a usual day.

  We started with our pledges to the American and Christian flags, did our daily prayer, and opened our math books. I thought it was really weird that we were doing this stuff at night, and I wondered if the double prayers were such a good idea, but I kept those thoughts to myself. My parents and my little brother were watching, and I wanted to make them all proud of me.

  Before we finished the shortened version of the math lesson, I heard my little brother’s voice from the back of the room.

  “Mommy! I can’t see Willow!”

  All the parents laughed. Mrs. Krocka spun around from the chalkboard and shot a withering look toward the back of the room.

  I concentrated on my smelly math ditto. It was two columns of four problems each, printed in purple ink on paper that dissolved if you erased it too much. I held my oversized pencil tightly in my now-sweating hand and held my breath.

  I heard my mom say, softly, “He’s right there, Jer Bear.”

  “Hi Willow!” he called out, louder. “I see you in school!”

  The parents all giggled again. To my horror, a giggle escaped from me, too.

  Mrs. Krocka looked directly at me. Through colorless, tightly drawn lips, she said, “I do not tolerate outbursts like this in my classroom.”

  In the front of the class, next to the chalkboard, there was a cork board. Posted on the cork board were the classroom rules and a laminated picture of a tree. Attached to that tree were laminated butterflies, each with a student’s name on it. If a student got into any sort of trouble during the day, Mrs. Gleason would take that student’s butterfly off the tree and pin it to a different area of the board.

  Mrs. Krocka walked to the front of the classroom and was taking my butterfly off the tree before I even realized what was happening. As hard as it had been not to giggle, it now became even more difficult not to cry.

  It was so unfair! It wasn’t my fault that my stupid parents brought my stupid brother with them! All the adults were laughing, too! Why weren’t they in trouble?

  Mrs. Krocka returned to Mrs. Gleason’s desk and moved on to the next lesson. The remainder of the time in the classroom is lost to my memory, obscured by an overwhelming sense of humiliation and sadness.

  When we were done, I met my parents in the hallway outside the class.

  “Why did you bring him?!” I asked through tears.

  I don’t remember what they said, but my baby sister started to cry with me. For some reason, this embarrassed me even more than my own crying, and I started to cry harder.

  I can only imagine the scene we were making. The next thing I knew, we were walking to my dad’s green Volkswagen bus.

  I tried to speak through halting sobs on the way. “It…wah-huh-huh…wasn’t my fa-fuh-fuh-fault! Jeremy muh-muh-made me l-l-laugh!”

  “I know, Willow,” my dad said.

  “Wuh-wuh-will you go t-tell her that it wasn’t muh-my fault?” I said. “And to puh-put my bu-bu-bu-butter—” I couldn’t even get the word out of my mouth. All I could see was my butterfly, with the happy yellow face and pink wings and “Wil” written in black marker, sitting all by itself.

  Alone.

  Off the tree.

  My parents looked at each other. “We have to get home and get Amy into bed,” my mom said.

  “WHAT?!” I hollered. “That’s so un-fuh-fuh-fair!”

  I don’t remember what they said. I don’t remember the drive home. I don’t remember what Mrs. Gleason said when she put my butterfly back on the tree the following morning. All I remember is how hurt and angry I was that my parents didn’t stand up for me to Mrs. Krocka, who humiliated and embarrassed me in front of my entire class and all their parents. In fact, while I walked through my neighborhood and relived this memory, I felt like I was going to cry all over again.

  My parents did the best they could with all of us, and I don’t know why they didn’t stand up for me. Maybe there’s more to the story than I remember, or maybe they were just as intimidated by that hideous bitch as I was. But it hurt me that they didn’t. A lot.

  It’s always been important to me to stand up for people who can’t stand up for themselves
. Honor, integrity, fairness, and justice are the most important principles in the entire world to me, and I never knew exactly why I felt so passionately about that…until now.

  I think it started in a butterfly tree, in 1978.

  beyond the rim of the starlight

  Shortly after we began production on Next Generation, people who had been associated with the series for a long time—actors, creative department heads, producers and writers, mostly—asked us if we’d been approached about going to conventions to promote the show.

  The rest of the cast didn’t know what a Star Trek convention was, but I did, because I’d been attending comic book and horror conventions since I was in the sixth grade and my parents gave me permission to go to the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors convention at the Ambassador Hotel.

  “Conventions are awesome!” I said at the end of a table read when the subject came up. “There’s all these people, and you can watch movies and buy cool stuff, and I bet you they’d let us in for free!”

  I was a naïve 14-year-old, and it didn’t occur to me that if the adults in the cast spent one of their days off promoting the show, they would expect compensation that was a bit more substantial than free admission.

  If you’re unfamiliar with Star Trek conventions, this primer from my book Just A Geek may be helpful:

  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, 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 more singing. In Klingon. Seriously.