Still Just a Geek
Dedication
JUST A GEEK is dedicated to Anne,
then and now, the other half of my heartbeat.
STILL JUST A GEEK is dedicated to the memory of
Andrew Hackard and his Red Pen of Doom.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction to Still Just a Geek
Just an Introduction
Note to Reader
Author’s Note
Introduction
Act I
1. Where’s My Burrito?
2. WIL WHEATON dot NET
3. SpongeBob Vega$Pants
Act II
4. Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before
5. Last Place You Look
6. Balance
Act III
7. A Sort of Homecoming
8. April’s Fool
9. Alone Again, Or . . .
10. “You’re Gonna Be a Great Writer Someday, Gordie”
Act IV
11. The Wesley Dialogues
12. All Good Things . . .
Epilogue: Hooters 2: Electric Boogaloo
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: The WWdN FAQ
Appendix B: An Interview
Further Reading
Acknowledgments for Still Just a Geek
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction to
Still Just a Geek
EARLY AUGUST 2004
I am not a morning person, but I am awake at 8:00 a.m., so my dog, Ferris, can get a walk before it’s too hot. This dog means so much to my family and me, we will do anything for her. We do not know that cancer is slowly growing in her belly, and that our time with her, never long enough with any beloved pet, will be cut short in just a few years.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. That’s strange. All my friends know not to call me before ten, and even then they’re probably going to talk to voice mail.
I pull it out of my pocket and look at the tiny, glowing numbers. It’s my manager.
I flip it open, loving, as always, that the motion I’ve made my whole life in my imagination is now a real thing that I do when I answer my phone.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“You’re up early! I was expecting your voice mail.”
“It’s gonna be bullshit degrees today, so I got up early to walk Ferris before it was too hot.”
“Tell Ferris she’s a very good dog.”
“She knows, but I’ll remind her.” I scratch her behind her ears. “Bearris, Chris Black says you’re a very good dog.”
He chuckles and says, “Entertainment Weekly just called! They requested a review copy of your book, and they said they were planning a feature on you!”
“Holy shit! That is amazing!” My book, Just a Geek, has just been published. It’s selling . . . not very well. The indie publisher and I don’t really see eye to eye on the promotion of it. They want to focus hard on the Star Trek audience I believe will already be likely to buy it, and I want to let a wider audience into my world. We both agree the audience I’ve built with my blog and website will absolutely buy it, but this is the only thing we agree on. In retrospect, they were probably right and I was probably wrong, but at this moment, I am frustrated and beginning to feel defeated. Any chance I have to touch mainstream entertainment and its audience is a tremendous opportunity that I will not let go.
“The sooner we get it to them, the better. Do you have any author’s copies at home?”
“I do,” I say. I’m only a block from my house, not even halfway through Ferris’s normal walk, but I’m turning around and heading back to the house.
“Do you think you can drive one down here to me? I’m going to be in their building this afternoon and I can drop it off.”
“I can absolutely do that.” Even then, it was all about the hustle.
I take Ferris home and tell my wife the good news. Then I walk into my living room, where our kids are on the PlayStation, and I tell them the good news.
We are all so excited. This really could be the big break I’ve been waiting for, the big break I’ve been hoping against hope will materialize out of this book.
A quick shower and I grab a book out of my personal supply from the publisher. My face somberly looks back at me from the cover. I wonder if anyone gets the symbolism I was going for when I deliberately put half my face in faint shadow. I wonder if I’ll ever get to talk about that on late-night television. For the first time in a while, I feel like it’s happening for me.
I drop the book with my manager and wait until next week’s EW hits the stands.
“Whiner of the Week” is how they title their review.
It’s accompanied by an illustration of me making a pouty face. Two enormous tears explode from the corners of my eyes.
“In his new book, Just a Geek, Wil Wheaton endlessly laments that he ‘used to be an actor when I was a kid.’”
That’s it. That’s the whole review, if that’s what they want to call it. It’s barely twenty words, an afterthought tucked into the corner of a page that’s filled with fawning mentions of whoever is popular at the moment.
I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach, like all the wind has been knocked out of me.
I look up at Anne, my wife, who is sitting across the small breakfast table from me. I feel so humiliated and embarrassed. Did this person even read my book? I will search my manuscript for the phrase they used and variants of it. It shows up three or four times—hardly “endlessly.”
Worse than the factual error, is that really all they got out of it? Do they know or even care how much this hurts me?
I take everything personally. I am so insecure, so afraid the things my father has told me my whole life about myself—that I’m unworthy, I’m a fraud, I’m unlovable, nobody really likes me—are all true.
“I’m so sorry,” my wife says. “That’s not true, and you know it’s not true.”
I’m not sure I do know it’s not true, though. (Note that, now, I know it’s not true.)
“I’m never talking to Entertainment Weekly again,” I swear. Five or so years later, I will relish telling them to go fuck themselves when they want me to participate in a special Star Trek issue.
They will try to blame the entire thing on an intern who isn’t there anymore. I tell them maybe that doesn’t make things better the way they think it does. I pass. The issue comes out. Fans love it. I’m not in it. I claim the Pyrrhic victory.
I save the magazine with my “review.” I hope that, someday, I will show them. I will show them all!
Years go by and I don’t show anybody anything, but I keep writing and going on auditions that I never book. I begin to accept that, maybe, I’m not going to be an actor. I begin to accept and admit to myself that it wasn’t my dream, as much as it was my mother’s dream, that she sacrificed my childhood, and our relationship, to pursue.
Then, in 2009, Bill Prady calls me and asks if I’ll play a “delightfully evil version” of myself on his show, The Big Bang Theory.
My life changes in an instant, and for the next ten years, I have a recurring role on the most popular sitcom in America, one of the most popular in the world.
And just as important—to me, at least—I keep writing. Eventually, I start a blog post that turns into a novella that turns into a semiautobiographical novel.
When that novel is as close to finished as I’m ever going to get it, I give it to my literary agent, who shops it.
It is universally rejected. Nobody is even a little bit interested in it. I am devastated. My deepest fears of failure begin to spira
l.
But one of the editors is a fan of the book I wrote in 2004, Just a Geek, and he has this idea to revisit and annotate it.
We decide that we’ll call it Still Just a Geek until we can come up with something good . . .
. . . so at this point I’m open to suggestions on a title.
(waits for rimshot or crickets)
In 2020, I opened up Just a Geek for the first time in at least ten years. I was immediately confronted with homophobia and a real gross male gaze, and I was reminded that this voice is mine. It wasn’t a pretty realization, seeing this ugly side of me (and that it was ugliness that I put out into the world, as opposed to the darkness that was inside me, which I kept from the world). To say I was horrified and embarrassed would be an understatement. To say I wasn’t sure I wanted to interact with this side of Past Wil—or, really, most sides of Past Wil—would be a lie. But my editor insisted I needed to show everything and respond to it all.
“I’m going to have a lot of notes,” I warned my editor.
“That’s the idea,” he said.
So I got to work. And . . . it wasn’t great.
Many times during the process, I wanted to quit. I kept coming across material that was embarrassing, poorly written, immature, and worst of all, privileged and myopic. I shared all of this with my editor, my wife, my manager, my literary agent, and anyone else in my orbit who I trusted. “This really ought to be buried and forgotten in that landfill with the E.T. cartridges,” I told them. “Digging it all back up is not going to go well,” I said. They all assured me that confronting and owning that stuff in public, something I’d done privately, was important. I had to confront the parts that still fill me with shame and regret.
Everybody is the hero of their own story, including me. But I am pretty sure that, when the blog posts and website material that inspired Just a Geek were written, I was the villain in someone else’s story, and more than once. I never meant to be, and if I’d been called out, I would have loudly argued that I wasn’t, but that doesn’t excuse it, or make it untrue.
So I stayed with it, and kept working. For a little over a year, I made my way through the thoughts, fears, dreams, insecurities, and pain that defined my life and myself when I was in my twenties. Then I went even further back and revisited the abusive childhood and emotionally neglected adolescence I survived, which helped me understand why I thought homophobia, misogyny, kink-shaming, and the white male privilege underlying all of it was okay.
To be clear: that understanding doesn’t excuse any of it. But before we can change, we have to understand. Still Just a Geek helped me understand that I could be a hurtful person with a lot of anger and hate in his heart. And the thing is, I was completely blind to it. I sincerely believed I was a Good Guy. I was the hero, after all.
I’m going to hold myself accountable later in this text, but right now I’m going to do my best to give the person I was some empathy and compassion. I was doing the best I could do at the time, and it was tough for me to see how “my best” back then wasn’t as good as I thought it was. Annotating Just a Geek made me realize there was a ton of lingering childhood trauma I hadn’t dealt with when I wrote it, trauma that, to this day, still affects me, starting with my mother forcing me to become an actor when I was just seven, effectively ending my childhood; to living and working in a predatory industry with no protection from my parents; to my father emotionally abusing and neglecting me until the day I ended contact with him in 2018.
It was . . . a lot. And it still doesn’t excuse the times I was horrible. But it has helped me understand why. And when I knew why, I could address it, in annotations to the text, as well as in regular sessions with my therapist.
I’m going to be honest: I’m terrified that I didn’t say the right things, take away the right lessons, atone appropriately for the parts of this that are gross. I know that I am not the person I was when I thought it was funny to make a childish, lazy, homophobic, joke. I am not the same person who didn’t even consider that a young woman, doing her job, was worthy of respect and kindness, because she was more useful to my male gaze as a character in a story that isn’t as good as I thought it was. I know I’m not that person, because those things—which are a small but significant part of my origin story—revolted me when I read them for the first time in over a decade. I mean, I physically recoiled from my own book. Those moments, and the privilege and ignorance that fueled them filled me with shame and regret. They still do. But confronting and learning from them allowed me to complete my origin story, as it turns out. It’s another thing I was unaware I needed to do, but, having done it, cannot imagine not doing.
I really hope you get more out of Still Just a Geek than EW got out of its parent volume a long time ago, because I’ve put a lot more into it. That includes the gross parts, which I am learning to accept (without condoning) through the words of the great Bob Ross: “You can’t have light without a little darkness.”
It also includes the parts that I was and am proud of, the parts that I loved revisiting and adding to. Those parts are great. This isn’t all sad, y’all. Some of it is supposed to be funny and maybe even a little inspiring.
If I did it right, we’re going to spend at least a few days together, and our parasocial relationship will be memorialized in song, maybe by Iron Maiden. If I did it wrong . . . no refunds, pal.
Something Something Something to wrap it all up,
Wil Wheaton
Los Angeles, CA
May 23, 2021
Just an
Introduction
Q. Who is Wil Wheaton?
A. Wil Wheaton is an actor. He is also, as you’ll realize once you’ve read this book, a writer. He was famously in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Rob Reiner film Stand by Me, and much less famously in Roger Avary’s wonderfully peculiar Frankenstein film Mr. Stitch.
Q. Who are you and why are you writing this introduction? Do you know Wil? Were you in Star Trek too?
A. I’m Neil Gaiman. I write stuff, comics—most famously a comic called The Sandman—and screenplays and books.
And no, I’ve never met Wil. We were meant to be guests together at a Linux and sci-fi convention called Penguicon in April 2004, but he wound up missing it entirely because he was on call for a part in a movie. He stayed home and waited, and they didn’t need him after all. This phenomenon will seem less surprising to you after you’ve read this book.
As to why I’m writing this introduction, well, Wil asked me (although that doesn’t always work, and that isn’t why I said yes). The nearest I came to being in Star Trek was once writing an episode of Babylon 5, which isn’t really very near. And even though I pointed out that having an introduction by Patrick Stewart would sell more copies, Wil held firm in his belief that he wanted me to introduce his book. This is because Wil is a geek. If you’re a true geek, I’m pretty much as cool as Patrick Stewart.
And I said yes, because . . .
I completely missed Star Trek: The Next Generation. Maybe I wasn’t watching much TV when it was on, or maybe I was just looking in the wrong direction, and the names of the actors in Stand by Me never made it into my head. So I found out about Wil when I came to live in the U.S., a dozen years ago, and was told that I needed to sign up for GEnie (an online bulletin board) because that was where all the writers I knew hung out and conversed.
So I went to GEnie, and I noticed, in passing, that the Sandman discussion there had been started by one WIL WHEATON under, I believe, the alias of “Roq Lobster,” but I could be wrong. It was long, long ago after all, back in the days when we knew how much faster a 14,400 modem was than the 300 down, 75 up ones we’d been using a few years earlier, back in the days when Spam was only a noxious pinkish-gray lunch meat, back when you could lose an entire afternoon tinkering with your config.sys file in a desperate attempt to make your computer do something the manual was convinced it already did.
Time passed, as it has a habit of doing. In early 2001, I st
arted an online journal, ostensibly because I had a book releasing and I liked the idea of taking people backstage and showing them what happens between an author finishing a book and the book coming out. I’d keep the journal for a few months. That was the plan. Three years later, I’m still keeping it, pretty much daily, and I’m damned if I can tell you why.
I learned about Wil’s journal back then, when I started: he began his around the same time, and he made the mistake of mentioning online that he’d always wanted to play Morpheus in a Sandman movie. Several dozen people helpfully sent me the link.
I started reading Wil’s journal, checking up and checking in every month or so to see what he was doing and how he was doing. Not because he was famous, or semi-famous, or whatever, but because he was interesting, and what he was writing was interesting. The Internet is cruel and harshly Darwinian in that regard. People read what you write if they want to. If you don’t interest them, they go away. Wil’s life is interesting, and he communicates that well. Also, he’s really likable. He’s having too much fun.
Which is, I suppose, why I said yes to writing this introduction. How could I refuse? I’ve never met him, and I like him. I worry about him—or at least, his career—too, a bit. You can’t help it.
This is a book, as you’ll discover, about honesty, about the erasure of image. In an era of people blogging as pseudo-celebrities, this is the story of a celebrity blogging as a person. In Just a Geek, Wil uses his online journal as a place to begin to tell his story—diaries as performance art. This is his account of himself and of growing up (at least partly) in public.
It’s a lot of work, keeping a journal, inviting the world into your head. Sometimes you stay up much too late writing it, and you always reveal more than you planned. That’s the way of it. (Although Just a Geek is a lot more than a fix-up or a “best-of” wilwheaton.net. The journal entries punctuate it, but the story he tells is bigger than that.)
As you read this you’ll learn about life in the shadow of Star Trek; you’ll learn about being an actor, and the jobs that come and the jobs that don’t; you’ll cheer and you’ll care.