Still Just a Geek, page 25
“Suit yourself,” he said, which I think is a thing only Boomers say when they’re working as the starter at a par 3 golf course and a couple of dorks show up in obnoxious golf gear, declaring how bad they are at the game.*
We headed to the first tee. The course was a little backed up, but neither of us was in a hurry, and the whole point of the thing was to spend the time together, so we enjoyed the view, the birds, the squirrels, and the fact that we had not yet lost any of our golf balls.
It was my turn to step up to the tee. I put my ball on the mat, and addressed it, which is golf-talk for preparing to swing the club.
I shuffled my feet, relaxed my shoulders, exhaled, and swung the club. There was the smack of the club against the mat, the crack of the club against the ball, and a few seconds later, the thunk of the ball against a tree. It landed behind that tree, in some thick grass.
“I’ve left myself in good position,” I said.
“Nice work,” Ryan agreed.
He sliced his first shot onto the eighteenth green. After he retrieved it, he put it back on the tee, whacked the hell out of it, and we both watched in amazement as it spun along the grass for about eighty-five of the ninety-two yards to the hole.
“I see the Scottish method is working out for you,” I said.*
“Thank you,” he said. We walked to our balls, and took our second shots. Mine went over the green, rolled up a small embankment, then back down that same embankment back onto the green.*
“That’s one green in regulation out of one,” I said.
“Truly a masterful stroke,” he said.
“Truly,” I replied. We were very fancy, as the situation clearly demanded it.
Ryan hit his second shot up onto the green. He four-putted, I three-putted, and we walked up to the second tee.
“We’re really bad at this,” I said.
“Spectacularly bad at this,” Ryan agreed.
On my next tee shot, I lost my ball into the LA River. Ryan’s hit a tree and bounced into the center of the fairway. My mulligan tried its best to go into the river, but got caught by some thick bushes. My third shot went mostly straight, ending short of the green.
“I can’t believe nobody sponsors us,” I said, as we walked down toward the green.*
I scored a 7 on the hole. Ryan scored a 5. And so it went for the rest of the round. I eventually lost all my balls, and finished with a ball that I found in the rough, which none of the other golfers wanted to claim.
Ryan made par on one hole, which was the required condition we had decided upon for victory. On that same hole, I recorded my score as a frowny face.* We will never speak of it again.
At the end of the round, we tallied our score. Ryan was the victor with 45 strokes. I was in second place with 50 sad faces.
Around this time, Nolan got in touch, and we met up at Golden Road for brunch.* After our food arrived, I told them, “I don’t care about holidays, and I really don’t care about made-up holidays like Father’s Day . . . but it means a lot to me that you wanted to spend this time with me today. I understood why I didn’t get to when you were kids, and I respected that, but it makes me really, really happy that you both wanted to do this today.”
“I don’t care about holidays, either,” Ryan said, “but this is a great excuse to spend time together, and spending time together is really what’s important to me.”
“Yeah,” Nolan said, “and that’s why it’s bullshit that you didn’t wake me up to go with you this morning!”*
“Awww, man,” I said, “we both thought you wanted to sleep in!”
“It’s okay,” he said. “This is still cool.”
“I love you guys,” I said.
Being a parent is never easy—if it’s easy, you’re doing it wrong—but it’s especially difficult to be a stepparent, especially when a bioparent is a jerk.* But it’s so worth all the pain and hurt and frustration when the day comes and you realize that they may not carry your DNA, but you’ve raised them so well, they are your children in every way that actually matters.
Happy Father’s Day, dads, and a very special secret handshake to my fellow stepparents.
We Have Returned to Castle Wheaton. Here’s a Story About a Different Castle.
Driving on the left side of the road was nerve-racking as hell. The roads in Scotland seem to be much narrower than the roads I’m used to, and Anne kept telling me I was veering close to the left shoulder, almost letting the wheels go off the road.
It took me nearly two full days of driving, but I did get used to it, and I even figured out the proper way to navigate a roundabout, which was not the victory it may sound like, because it was the final roundabout I used before we returned the rental car.*
Scotland was the most beautiful place I’ve been that wasn’t in the South Pacific. The Highlands were just breathtaking, and for some reason we got perfectly clear skies and sunshine the whole time we were there. The thing I wasn’t prepared for at all, though, was how dark it got at night. There weren’t any streetlights. Now, Americans, let me be clear: I don’t mean there weren’t a lot of streetlights, or that the streetlights were dim. I mean that there were literally zero streetlights. When we drove back to the house we were staying in after dinner in Portree one night, I could only see as far as my car’s headlights, which wasn’t even thirty feet, before the darkness swallowed up the light.*
“I keep imagining what it must have been like to live here a thousand years ago,” I told Anne, as we drove slowly through the absolute pitch black of the moonless night, “like to be a spy, or to be a bandit, and to be just moving across these fields and trying to not get lost.”
“It was probably the same as it was a hundred years ago, or ten years ago . . . or like right now,” she said.*
We had GPS on the car, which is the only way I was able to drive around without feeling massively* stressed out and constantly in fear of getting lost.
We got back to the house and got ready for bed. The house is like eight hundred years old and allegedly haunted (there’s no such thing as ghosts, people)* so walking through it in the dark was fun for my imagination.
In fact, just being in Scotland was fun for my imagination, but that’s not what this is about.
This is about how Anne woke me up in the middle of the night and said, “I just looked outside and there are a billion stars!”
I got out of bed and we walked outside, stepping as lightly as we could on the sharp stones that made up the driveway. I looked up, and saw, as promised, a billion stars. The Milky Way ran straight over our heads, and the air was so clear and still I felt like I could reach out and grab a handful of stars to take home with me.
“This is unreal,” I said.
“It’s like we’re on another planet,” she said.
“Except the stars are exactly the same as they are on Earth because if we were on another planet the stars would be in a different position,” I said.
Then: “Sorry. Pedantic. It’s a nerd thing.”
“I know.”*
We stayed outside for several minutes, then went back to bed.
The next day, we went to look for the ruins of a castle our friend had told us about. The ruins aren’t on a map, he told us, so we were to go to a house, introduce ourselves to the owner as friends of his, and ask for directions.*
So we drove down tiny, winding roads that made their way across low, rolling hills, dividing sheep pastures, stopping for the occasional herd of cows to make its way across. Around the time I was certain we’d gotten lost, we saw the little house he’d told us to find. There was a dog in front, and a man standing on his porch, drinking out of a mug.
I parked the car, and as I opened the door, congratulated myself on getting as far out of my comfort zone as I’d ever gotten. That part of my imagination that Scotland woke up? It was busy telling me that this guy had a cellar full of ancient spirits who demanded the souls of tourists in exchange for the life force they’d been giving him for two centuries.*
We got out of the car and introduced ourselves. “I’m Wil,” I said.
“I’m also Will!” he said with a smile. We shook hands. His was huge and soft where it wasn’t callused.*
“May I say hello to your dog?” I asked.
“Aye,” he said, “she’s a good dog.”*
I reached down and let her smell my hand, avoiding eye contact so she knew I wasn’t a threat. She sniffed me and then began wagging her entire body before she licked my hand and crashed her head into my leg, just like Marlowe does when I come home.
“I think she likes you,” he said. It came out: Ah tank she lakes ye.
“We were hoping to walk up to the castle ruins?” Anne said.*
“Ah, ’tis nothin’ but four walls,” he said. “It’s just a wee thing.” Et’s jest ah wee tang.
“We’re easily impressed,” I said. “Being from America, and the young part of America, at that.”
He laughed. “Okay. Go to that road and follow it for about twenty minutes. You’ll see it. But it’s just four walls.”
“Thank you,” I said. I realized I’d been speaking as slowly as I could, and wondered if my accent sounded as thick and inscrutable to him as he sounded to me.
“Yeah, thank you,” Anne said.
I pet his dog again, and she looked at me like she was going to go with us on a walk. That would have been fine by me, but the other Will called her into the house. When he got to the door, he said something to us, but the distance and the thickness of his accent made it impossible for me to understand. But he said it with a smile and a wave, so I imagined that it wasn’t, “When the spirits rise from the bog to eat your souls, try to face north so it goes quickly.”*
Anne and I walked up the road, and followed it across and around and over some small hills. There were sheep everywhere, and these short, stone walls that could have been hundreds of years old. We were close to the sea, and the smell of the salt was heavy in the air.
After about twenty minutes, we came up the castle. It was, as described, just four walls, a small square not even twenty feet tall, sort of like something you’d build to survive your first night in Minecraft. It was across a field, about two hundred yards, from where we were.
“Do you want to walk over to see it up close?” I asked Anne.
“Yeah,” she said. “It seems a little dumb to come all the way here and stop this close to it.”
So we started across the field . . . and that’s when my foot sank into the bog.
It happened slowly, then all at once, as the saying goes. My foot came down on some grass, it squished underneath me, and then in a sporp* of mud and a splash of water, it sank.
“AHH!” I shouted, convinced that I was going to sink into the bog and drown.* I planted my other foot and yanked my foot out of the mud, jumping back in one motion that I’d like to describe as fluid, but was anything but.
Around this time, Anne was sinking into the bog a few feet away from me.
“Shit, shit, shitshitshit!” she shouted, dancing her way out of the mud in a manner that I am confident was more graceful and elegant than mine.*
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Yeah. My shoe is soaked, though.”
We looked at each other. Each of us had one mud-soaked shoe, and we were out in the middle of this field that, in my imagination, was the dead marshes from Lord of the Rings.* The sheep all around us were laughing at us.
“What do we do?” Anne said.
“Well, we can go back the way we came,” I said.
“No, let’s just find a way across that’s dry.”
“And watch out for the ROUSes,” I said.*
We looked around and saw that maybe we weren’t in the middle of a bog, but were on the edge of some soft ground that was covered with slowly running water. We saw that there was a fence to our right, and we could walk along it, as it was in ground that was slightly raised and at least looked dry. So we did, and in short time got to the castle ruins, which—to reiterate—was just four stone walls, each not more than twenty feet to a side. It didn’t look like a castle as much as it looked like a small fort, probably to look out onto the sea, but it was older than the oldest thing in my entire country, and I could put my hands on it, and that made it worth the whole muddy bog thing.
We walked around it, took a bunch of pictures,* and then noticed that there was an entirely dry field, full of sheep,* that we could walk through to go back to the road.
“I can’t believe we didn’t see this on the way here,” Anne said, as we walked through it.
“Counterpoint,” I offered, “we did get to walk through a bog to see the ruins of a castle, and that’s a story we get to tell for the rest of our lives.”*
“I don’t know if stepping into mud actually qualifies as walking through a bog,” she said.
“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” I said.*
CAREER AND FAME
I’ve been a working actor since I was seven and I’ve been famous almost as long. Does that sound weird? It should. It’s really fucking weird, and I had no say in any of it.
As you’ve seen in Just a Geek, there were moments when I thought about giving up completely on my acting career. But I never lost my love of acting itself. Whether it’s on a movie set or around a table playing D&D, leaving your reality behind and becoming someone else, even just for a moment, is one of the most exciting and important things you can do with your brain.
So, acting—great! Fame and the stuff that surrounds being an actor, on the other hand—they’ve always been difficult for me. Don’t get me wrong, being well known provides opportunities (I mean, I got to play myself in a TV show . . .), but those have to be balanced against online abuse, paparazzi, and other assorted weirdness from strangers. Fame really does weigh heavily on everyone who has it and for some people it’s unbearable. It certainly was for me as a kid.
The next few posts are about being an actor. About some incredibly happy and fortunate moments—my time on Big Bang, chances to hang out with talented people before they were famous and listen to incredible music before it was released—and some dark and crazy moments, too.
One Small Part of a Pretty Great Life
“My point is, there was a time when I thought I would never get out of Wesley Crusher’s shadow, but now that’s just a small part of a pretty great life, and it’s a part that I’m glad is there.”*
The interstate highways in Texas go on forever, it seems, between major cities. For hundreds of miles, there’s not much to see but other cars, the occasional water tower, a few cows, and a ribbon of concrete that cuts across the vast, flat landscape.*
A few months ago, I was in a van with Paul and Storm and Anne as we drove between Houston and Dallas down one of those endless highways. Anne was asleep in the chair next to me, as Paul drove and Storm navigated. I played Carcassonne* on my iPad as we left Houston behind us and never seemed to get any closer to Dallas.
As I was losing yet another game (it turns out that it’s much easier to win in a three-player game than it is in a four-player game, regardless of your opponents’ skill level, due to the additional randomness inherent in the draw) my cell phone played the original Star Trek communicator sound in my pocket.* I pulled it out and read a text message from my friend Steve Molaro, who is the showrunner on The Big Bang Theory.* “Do you have a few minutes to talk?” he asked.
“I have all the time in the world,” I replied, “because I’m in a van on a highway in Texas, and I think I’m going to be on this road for another decade before we get to Dallas.”
“I’ll call you in a little while,” he replied. I went back to losing my game.
A little while later, the Doctor Who theme came out of my pocket.*
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s Steve.”
“Hey! How are you?”
“Really good. Listen, we’re writing a scene for you and I wanted your input on it.”
I was taken aback. It’s such an honor and a privilege to work on The Big Bang Theory at all, but to be asked to provide some input into how my scenes are written, especially when the writers there are so goddamned good at what they do, was pretty amazing.*
“Sure,” I said. “I am at your service.”
Steve told me about the story arc they were doing with Sheldon accidentally discovering a new element, and how Sheldon was unhappy about it. “We thought it would be nice for Amy to bring you in, to try and cheer him up,” he said, “so I wondered if there was ever anything in your life that you regretted or felt bad about at the time, but you came to accept as a good part of your life.”
Oh, you mean my entire teenage years and my early twenties? I thought.
“Yeah,” I said. “When I was younger, people gave me such a hard time about Wesley Crusher that there was a time in my late teens and early twenties when I resented Star Trek. It felt so unfair that people who had never met me were so cruel and hateful toward me as a person because they didn’t like a character I played on a TV show. I just wanted to put Star Trek behind me and forget that it was ever part of my life.
“But as I got older and started to meet more people who were also kids when Next Generation was in its first run, I started to hear these stories from people, about how they had nothing in common with their parents except for Star Trek, and they wouldn’t have watched Star Trek together if Wesley hadn’t been on the show. I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve met who are now doctors and engineers and scientists because they were inspired by Wesley and Gordie the way our parents’ generation was inspired by Scotty.”
“That’s wonderful,” Steve said.*
“Yeah, it’s really great. You know, my favorite episode of Next Generation is ‘Tapestry,’ because I fully believe that our lives are a complex tapestry, woven from all our experiences—positive and negative—we have in our lives. There was a time when I really resented Wesley Crusher, but I just love my life now, and instead of feeling like I had to get out of his shadow, I feel like I’m standing proudly on his shoulders.”
