Still Just a Geek, page 44
He had the career I wanted, and was poised to be a once-in-a-generation talent when he died. For as much as I struggled and for as much as I felt like a failure, I was alive and River was gone. I’m still not sure what I was trying to say by including this factoid in the text.
* Remember these?
* Asia Carrera was an incredibly popular adult film star, a member of MENSA, an outspoken nerd, and a webmaster, just like I was. This was a big deal for me.
* It’s pretty amazing how newsletters have come back, only this time via e-mail. It’s like we’re somehow going back to simpler times. Maybe my HTML will come in handy again!
* I think this was meant as a compliment, like “Wow, I didn’t expect this!” but it felt oddly negative at the time.
* And that this had value in our society. Remember, this is a decade before the Marvel movies. This is even before Sorcerer’s Stone and Fellowship of the Ring.
This was when you could go to Comic-Con on Friday morning, buy your three-day pass, and then pick from your choice of hotels, because none of them were sold out.
This was before geek culture was a widely accepted and recognized culture. Back then we were just weird nerds who frightened and confused the muggles in our lives.
Just like today, only a little more underground.
* Welcome to the Internet, Wil.
* These were also the polite ones.
* Especially when your father’s voice is inside your head, constantly criticizing you.
* And they shouldn’t matter to you, or anyone, but they still do. If anyone knows the one secret trick to not giving a fuck, I’ll buy it from you for ten dollars.
* Prove to Everyone was a piña colada man. I would have preferred a beer. It’s just another way—in hindsight—I should have known not to listen to him.
* It was so unprofessional and inappropriate to name these projects in public. I didn’t think about it at the time, but it had the potential to put the producers and the casting agents in awkward and uncomfortable positions. For those of you who are aspiring actors with blogs, don’t do what I did.
* In fairness to 2001 me, it’s just way more likely I wasn’t right for the part, which is fine and something I shouldn’t have taken so personally.
I was so obsessed with being the best, and I kept coming in second or third for jobs, which is another way of saying I didn’t get the job, ever. I allowed myself to believe, and acted as if that meant the thing that tipped the role from me to the other guy was always some version of “he was a bigger star than me,” which implied that I actually deserved the job, only to have it taken from me unfairly. That’s just childish and immature privileged white guy thinking.
* The guy they cast was Ryan Reynolds. Yes, I also recognize how outrageous and ludicrous it was to believe that I could ever compete with him for anything.
Seriously, have you seen his abs? Or literally anything he’s ever done? He’s perfect.
* The American Psycho guy to some, the Less Than Zero guy to others, and “Who?” to everyone else.
* 100 percent this, and it was totally appropriate.
* I mean, I have bills and a mortgage and a family to support, but the PS2 is what I’m focused on. Very mature.
* Sometimes Prove to Everyone was actually Voldemort.
* I still find this request a bit creepy. What I ate for breakfast? What can you possibly do with that information?
Also, I had oatmeal and coffee. Do your worst.
* Adjusted for inflation, I could retire twice.
* Again, I’m not going to name names. To, as the kids say, “spill the tea.” But imagine the early aughts, and think about roles where you go, “You know who might have been good in this? Wil Wheaton.”
Those are the roles I kept losing.
* Not to be confused with Michael Douglas’s jaw, and the reason he claimed for his illness.
* I’m not sure that this is accurate. Back then, I worked as hard as I had ever worked, to deliver the best audition I could. Casting consistently told me that my performance was great, but there was some other thing, never defined, that always prevented me from getting the job.
Today, I’m not sure I still believe that. I think there’s a real good chance I was trying to convince myself that there was SOMETHING else I could have done to close the deal. Keeping this possibility open gave me something to strive for, in the face of obstacle after obstacle, and I needed that coping mechanism, especially because I still believed that revitalizing my acting career was the key to having a loving relationship with my parents.
* No I’m not—it’s my blog, and I’ll digress if I want to. You’d digress, too, if this were happening to you.
* The other guy was Fred Savage, and he’s perfect in the role.
Roger eventually told me that, when we worked on Mr. Stitch, I was aggressively anti–recreational drug use. That’s true. There was a creepy dude who knew someone on the crew, and he was little more than a drug dealer who was always hanging around. This guy was constantly pushing drugs on me and, after about two weeks of this, I told the producers, “He leaves the set and never comes back, or I do.”
I’m not a recreational drug user. It’s never appealed to me. But this guy made me so uncomfortable, and refused to respect my boundaries so consistently, I used the only weapon I had to protect myself.
That made an impression on Roger, because he believed (and probably wasn’t wrong) that I couldn’t faithfully play a character who was a junkie. He told me he was embarrassed and regretful when he realized this, and instead of telling me, he ghosted me because he felt awkward.
Not that it matters now, but I don’t blame him at all or have any ill feelings toward him. Of course, at the time, when I was convinced that every job was THE ONE that would save my career, I wasn’t capable of being as sanguine about it as I am now.
* Cringe.
* Come on, Wil. Let’s talk for a quick second about how fucking terrible this whole thing is. This is objectifying women as sex objects that (not who, that) are meant to please men, and it’s so gross. Past Me, did you think for a moment that, like, maybe this wasn’t okay? I mean, obviously not, because you wrote it and published it. That was a rhetorical bit to give me some time to be less disgusted with myself that did not work. In a universe filled with similes, I picked one of the worst ones off the shelf. I just . . . I really, really regret this.
* Nice and childish. Perfect.
* This film didn’t do well at the box office, though it was well-received by audiences, and it took a lot of Roger’s career with it. That’s the life of an artist (as I’m sure you can tell by my own story). So I will say this:
Roger encouraged me to be an artist without fear. I will always admire and respect him as a writer and director, who wasn’t afraid to make the movie he wanted to make. He was always kind to me, and he seemed to just expect my best self, which was wonderful. I think, as much as I wanted Rules of Attraction to break my career wide open, I wanted to recapture some of the magic and joy I felt when we were making Mr. Stitch together.
* This picture was never going to do anything for the career. The script was terrible, and like too many things I hated, I took the job because I felt like I had no choice. The film never came out, which is a blessing when I look back on how incompetent the director and producers were. I’ve seen part of it, and I’m terrible in it. It’s just terrible, all the way down.
And like Forrest Gump said, “That’s all I have to say about that.”
* That’s J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, to those of you out there who must have Slack.
* I was really ranting here. The complete lack of transitions . . . it was basically just “stream of consciousness, publish!” that night.
* Famous actors, who are more of an industry than a person, do this. I was not and never will be one of those actors, and I can’t believe I ever wanted to be.
* I did not know at the time that I had clinical generalized depression and chronic anxiety. My mother gaslighted me about my mental health my whole life, dismissing my anxiety, refusing to acknowledge my depression.
When I wrote about a “cloud of depression” I didn’t really know what I was talking about. I conflated “sadness,” or maybe “situational depression,” with “clinically diagnosed depression,” which is something that hurts people like me who live with mental illness. We are frequently told to just stop being sad, to cheer up, or some other unhelpful platitude that minimizes the seriousness of our suffering.
* I think she believed all of this. My whole life, my mother has been an unreliable narrator. She frequently talked about things the way she wanted them to be, rather than as they were. She gaslighted me about every single instance of abuse and bullying I experienced at the hands of her husband. And she gaslighted me about the decision she made for me when I was a child. I think she believes it, too. I think she believes it really was my idea to start working when I was seven years old. I think she has to believe it, because to admit the truth is to admit she always put her needs and dreams ahead of my own, at a tremendous cost to me.
It feels tragic to me she clearly believed all these things, when the evidence that contradicted all of it was right in front of her face: Your son was writing about it in his blog, because he couldn’t have an honest and vulnerable conversation with you, his parents.
I think she genuinely wanted me to be happy and fulfilled. She just wasn’t willing to do any of the hard work necessary to help me get there.
* Or like a twenty-nine-year-old man. Which is totally okay—that’s the point!
* I was never as close to my brother as I wanted to be. I didn’t even realize it until we were adults, but he was the Golden Child and I was the Scapegoat in our family. Our parents adore him, and he can do no wrong. From the day he was born, they modeled that behavior dynamic, and I don’t blame him for being swept up in it. Being the Golden Child must feel pretty great. He’s four years younger than I am, but I never felt like I was his Big Brother. I always wanted to be, but for as long as I can remember, I honestly felt like nothing I ever did was enough for him. When I look back on our lives together, I see a lot of the dysfunctional dynamics with him that I had with both of my parents. Much in the same way that I tried to mend the relationship with our father, when I was in my twenties, I tried to mend a relationship with him. He and our parents convinced me that I had been a lousy Big Brother. I was selfish. I was arrogant. I was, in their specific words that still hurt, “too big for my britches,” when he and I were teenagers. When I originally wrote this, I sincerely believed that every issue I had with either of my parents, or with my brother, was entirely my fault. And they were very happy to encourage and support that belief. When I wrote about picking on my little brother, I was specifically thinking of a time my cousins and I ganged up on my brother and made him cry. I was probably nine or ten when it happened, and I went along with their bullying of him because it meant they weren’t bullying me. As soon as it was over, I felt terrible about it. Right now, in 2021, I feel terrible about it. But let’s be reasonable: I was a kid, and kids make mistakes. I learned from it, and never did anything like that to him again. My brother never forgave me for it, and our parents never let me forget it. Around 2017, he called me and demanded I do a thing for him. I’m not going to go into the details, but I just couldn’t do it. I told him that, and then I gently mentioned that I felt like the only time he and our parents called me was when they wanted something from me, and it hurt. That set him off, and he declared that I was dead to him. We’ve had no contact since.
Reflecting on this moment now, I don’t think I was crying because I picked on him, as much as I was crying for the lack of meaningful closeness between us. I always wanted to be close to my brother, but he always seemed to have all this resentment toward me, even when we were in middle and elementary school. He and our father would gang up on me all the time, a pair of bullies attacking someone who was no threat at all.
When he declared that I was dead to him, I wasn’t too surprised that my first emotion wasn’t shock or sadness, but relief. He’s our father’s Mini Me, at least where I am concerned, and it took me a long time to accept that, just like our father, I cannot change him. Good lord these annotations are heavy. I’ll get back to the fart jokes in a minute.
* This is vestigial HTML. In the original blog, this linked to some random guy who said “I spent the morning in Hell” and then linked to my blog, which was “hell.”
I was so raw, all of this reads as manic and rambling to me now, which is honestly how I was feeling then.
* Here’s a long alt to consider for this note:
It’s March 2021 as I write this. My wife and I are several weeks behind on this season of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Last night, in episode . . . four? . . . Kahmora Hall was eliminated. While she was listening to the judges, it was VERY clear she was upset with herself.
RuPaul stopped speaking, looked at Kahmora, and gently, kindly, with no judgment, asked, “What’s going on with you, baby?”
Boy did that hit me in my heart. Tears began to spill out of my eyes. I was overwhelmed by her kindness and how she was sincerely asking how this beautiful queen, who was clearly having a difficult moment, was doing.
Ru’s kindness and the gentle care she showed Kahmora’s vulnerability, drove home how much I’d needed and wanted someone—anyone—to reach out to me in the same way.
It’s such a simple question, but it’s one that was NEVER asked of me when I was growing up, and in so much pain, all the time. I never felt like HOW I was doing was anywhere near as important to my parents as WHAT I was doing. I wasn’t a person, I was a commodity, and holy shit did that hurt. (I’m sure it’s obvious that it still does.)
Kahmora talked about her own fears and insecurities and how she knew they were holding her back. I remember that Ru told her something profound and wonderful, but I was openly weeping by that point and I don’t recall what it was.
When I was a kid and a teenager, I was afraid of everything, all the time. I was constantly afraid of taking creative risks, because I was certain someone would mock me the way the man who was my father did. I constantly second-guessed myself. I was treated so badly by him, and manipulated so much by my mother, I just had horrible self-esteem, a negative self-image, and no confidence. Thank god I had my Star Trek family to be there for me.
And yet! I covered up my pain, and protected my abusers like a good member of the family, and not even my Star Trek family saw what was going on with me. The people who would have been there for me didn’t even know I needed them. That’s a big part of how abusers control us.
I’ve said this before, but I’ll repeat it again: We never know what’s going on in someone else’s life, and it’s important to remember that everybody is going through SOMETHING.
If just one person had ever asked me, “What’s going on with you, baby?” and meant it, it would have made such a difference.
* More like “looking for any validation at all, but especially from his parents.” Also, if you identified this sentence as the one that give my book its title, give yourself a high five.
* I think this was more the sentiment I was trying to go for.
* Or the girl who looks different. Or the man with the accent. Or the person trying to figure out their gender identity. Or . . . or . . . or.
Bullying hurts everyone.
* We moved from Sunland to La Crescenta (about fifteen miles apart) between first and second semester of my ninth-grade year. I had never been in public school before because the schools I would have attended were too integrated, due to bussing, for my parents to handle (wrap your head around THAT in the late twentieth century), and everything I knew about public school I’d learned from TV and movies.
I had no idea what to do when I was there on my first day. I was terrified. I was small. I was shy. I was awkward. I was instantly recognizable to nearly the entire student body. The way it happens in high school, before that first day was over, my shyness and real fear had been translated by the tastemakers in the hallways. They had concluded I was arrogant and I thought I was too good to even be there.
I never had a chance. That narrative took root, and it never changed for the entire time I was there. It was only a few months before I booked Star Trek and got to leave, but those months were unbearable.
I know we were all just dumb kids and those kids who were so cruel to me had no idea what I was going through at home. I’ve done my best to forgive all of them, even the anonymous kid who put the classified ad in the school paper that said “Don’t Stand by Me, Will Wheaton. You stink.” Okay first of all, they spelled my name wrong. Second of all, surely they had an academic adviser who should have stopped this cruelty from happening, right? I’ve done my best, but it’s pretty clear to me that, over thirty years later, I haven’t been able to completely let go of it.
