The Happiest Days of Our Lives (2 page)

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

S
hortly 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.

The first time I was on stage at a
Star Trek
convention was in Anaheim, right around the time
Next Generation
started. I wasn’t there “officially,” but my friend and I had gone to check it out, so that if (when) I was asked (told) to attend cons in the future, I’d know what I was getting into.
Star Trek
conventions, he informed me, were very different from the comic book and horror movie conventions I was used to.

The promoter found out I was wandering around the show (after I paid my own admission, of course) and offered me the glorious sum of one hundred bucks—in cash!—to speak for an hour. To a 14-year-old who thought an eight-dollar admission refund was a jackpot, a hundred bucks sounded an awful lot like a million. Without knowing how badly I was being ripped off (the average person who speaks at a convention earns between five and ten thousand dollars for their time, with captains commanding sums in excess of twenty-five thousand), I gleefully accepted the “generous” offer and did my best to answer questions for an hour.

If you think it went well, you haven’t spent any quality time recently around a 14-year-old (geek or otherwise)…but I got a hundred bucks, which I spent on books and props in the dealer’s room. If you read my short story “The Trade,” you now know that I learned nothing about negotiation and money management between the ages of eight and fourteen.

When I went to work the following Monday, some of the
Star Trek
veterans who had originally asked us about cons let me know how badly I’d been had. They put me in touch with people who could arrange for me to travel all over the country—to a different city each weekend if I wanted—to promote
Next Generation
, meet fans, and tuck a little money away for college, or maybe even a house one day.

Conventions were different in the late ’80s. One company called Creation used licensing agreements with Viacom and exclusivity agreements with actors to force just about all of the regional promoters out of the market. Back then, there were as many convention promoters as there were Holiday Inns around the country that were willing to host a few hundred Trekkies for a weekend, and every single con had its own unique feeling and fanbase.

I remember going to a convention in Philadelphia with my mom. She got food poisoning. I don’t remember a thing about the convention, but I can still see and feel the waiting area in the emergency room: dark wood on the walls, old magazines on the tables and chairs, ugly white and yellow linoleum tiles on the floor. I spent the entire night playing Tetris on my Game Boy and listening to
The Final Cut
on my Walkman, trying not to be too freaked out that my mom was in the hospital and we were a million miles from home. (“A million” was the default value for “a lot” when I was a kid.)

When I was 18 or 19, I learned that even if the microphone really looks like a Magic Wand massager, it’s probably not the smartest thing to tell the audience, “Wow! I’m talking into some sort of marital aid!”…especially in the middle of the Bible Belt.

I remember flying to New Jersey to do a convention with Marina Sirtis and playing head-to-head Tetris on our Game Boys the entire flight. I had a massive crush on her back then, and though the thought crossed my mind for most of the trip, I didn’t have the courage or the nerve to suggest strip head-to-head Tetris when we arrived. In my 16-year-old mind, it totally would have happened if I had just asked.

Once, in Oklahoma, I was a guest at a dinner where I sat with a few other
Trek
actors while some Boy Scouts served us. The menu had barbecued chicken, beef, and bologna.

“Wait,” I remember asking the kid, who was about the same age as me, “barbecued bologna?”

“Yeah,” he said, “it’s center-cut.”

Neither one of us knew what that meant, but I’d grown up poor enough to know that bologna was not something I wanted to eat, even—no,
especially
—if it was barbecued. The problem, however, was that barbecued bologna was a local delicacy, and I was seated at the head table. It seemed like every bologna-loving eye in the hall was watching to see what I did.

I ate it, pretended to like it, and until I wrote this paragraph, nobody was the wiser.

At LosCon in Pasadena, right after I’d gotten my driver’s license and my first car (a totally bitchin’ 1989 Honda Prelude Si 4WS, which was one step better than Patrick Stewart’s and, therefore, the subject of much backstage teasing) I met my first science fiction idol, Larry Niven. The meeting went something like this:

Me:
Oh my god, you’re Larry Niven!

Him:
Oh my god, you’re Wesley on
Star Trek!

Both:
What?

Both:
Can I have your autograph?!

Both:
Yes!

Both:
COOL!

I still have the copies of
Ringworld
and
Ringworld Engineers
that he signed for me.

They weren’t all good times, of course. While most of the cons were fantastic, run by guys who really cared about fans and wanted them to have a good time, others were pretty awful, run by complete crooks who wanted to take the fans’ money and get out of town before anyone figured out what they were up to. There are a couple of guys who still owe a lot of fans and actors money that we’ll never see.

One of those guys (in the pre-Internet days) convinced 15-year-old me that it was a “short drive” from Amarillo to Denton, Texas. Not having the good sense to look on a map for myself, I agreed to do two different cities in two different days. As the drive across Texas entered its third hour without a single recognizable sign of civilization other than Dairy Queen and Stuckey’s, I learned an important lesson about not ever trusting anyone.

On countless occasions, a promoter would tell fans one of us was coming to a show, take their money, and then claim that we’d canceled at the last minute. Of course, the only time any of us ever heard about the show was when irate fans wanted to know why we’d backed out of it.

For you damn kids today who have always had e-mail and the Internets and cell phones, it may be hard to picture a world where a Game Boy was high tech, but it’s where I came of age. The world seemed bigger then than it does today, and from time to time, I miss driving straight from Paramount to LAX on Friday after work and falling asleep on the red-eye somewhere over New Mexico, still wearing Wesley’s helmet hair.

It was a lot of work to travel the country every weekend, and over the years the Holiday Inns all bled together like a smear of Sharpie ink across the heel of my left hand after a marathon autograph session, but there were many more good times than bad. It was fun to see so many different places and people, all united by their love of this thing that I was lucky enough to be part of…at least until the
alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die
thing really got rolling.

There are still a few regional gaming cons and comic cons and Linux cons and cavecons every year, but not many purely
Star Trek
conventions anymore, as far as I can tell. Part of it has to be economics and how hard it is to compete with Creation, but I also blame The Powers That Be for making several years of sucktastic
Trek
that wasn’t worth watching, much less traveling to a Holiday Inn to celebrate.*

Over the last couple of years, I’ve begun attending conventions again, but now I go as a fan. I’m glad that I stopped going to cons exclusively for work, because otherwise I don’t think I would have ever remembered how much fun they are when you’re just there to geek out. Those of us who will cram thirteen of our friends into a hotel room for a weekend to tell awful puns and watch anime have a place to go where we will not only not be laughed at for dressing up but encouraged to do it (except the furries; those weirdos are on their own). We can invade a hotel for a weekend, pretend it’s like the cereal convention in
Sandman
, and recover enough hit points to go back and endure our real lives until the next one.

In fact, when the annual Grand Slam convention was held in Pasadena—practically my back yard—in 2006, I only spent one day there as a guest, signing autographs and posing for pictures. It was Sunday, typically a slow day for any convention, and I just didn’t feel like sitting at my little table when there was so much cool stuff going on all around me. So I packed up my stuff, trucked it back to my car, grabbed my camera, and did something I haven’t done for years: I walked around the Grand Slam convention purely as a fan.