The Happiest Days of Our Lives (10 page)

It wasn’t the first time I’d been to Paramount since Wesley Crusher turned into a magic ball of light and floated out into the galaxy to fight crime and save amusement parks from evil developers with The Traveler. In
Just A Geek
, I wrote:

I found myself at the Melrose Avenue guard shack, half an hour early for my 8:30 a.m. call time.

“ID, please,” the guard said.

I pulled my driver’s license out of my wallet and gave it to him.

“And where are you going today…” he looked at my license, “Wil?”

“I’m working on
Star Trek
,” I said.

“
Enterprise
or
Nemesis
?”

The Next Generation
, I thought.

“
Nemesis
,” I said. “I play Wesley Crusher.”

He looked up at me. “Oh my god. You
are
Wesley Crusher! You look so…”

Washed up?

“…grown up.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”

“Do you know where to park?”

“Yeah. But I don’t know where our dressing rooms are.”

But I do! I do know where our dressing rooms are! They’re trailers on the street in front of stages 8 and 9. Mine is filled with Warhammer 40K figures and GURPS books. It’s right next to Brent’s trailer. It’s 1989, and I’m back. I’m back home.

When I worked on
Nemesis
several years ago, returning to Paramount to put on the uniform and immerse myself—if only for a day—in Wesley Crusher’s goofy grin and wide-eyed excitement (I wrote at the time that I couldn’t tell where Wesley ended and I began), it was an emotional experience. I felt genuine regret for not appreciating
Star Trek
more when I was on the series every day, which morphed into a general regret that when I was a teenager, I acted like…a teenager. Some of
Just A Geek
is about this, and the catharsis that came from writing it is a large reason why I was able to accept and embrace my small role in the
Star Trek
universe.

I went to Paramount last week to go onto our old stages and walk a camera crew through the Guardian of Forever into 1987. I didn’t expect to be particularly emotional. I was wrong.

I live in a different part of town now, and while it’s faster to go through Silverlake and across Beverly, I wanted to put myself in a place where I’d be most receptive to emotional sense memories, so I added twenty minutes to my drive and went down the 2, up the 5, across Los Feliz and down Western before cutting across Sunset to Van Ness. I took this route every single day, once I got my driver’s license (and a license plate frame on my Prelude, the one that was just a little better than Patrick’s, that said “My other car is the Enterprise”—awesome), and at one time could probably do it with my eyes closed. I told my iPod to shuffle my ’80s Alternative playlist, and after an hour of Boingo, Depeche Mode, OMD, Squeeze, and The Smiths, I was, as they say, really feeling it when I pulled up to the guard gate on Melrose.

I turned down
Only a Lad
and rolled down my window. “Hi,” I said, “I’m Wil Wheaton, and I’m going to Stage 24 for the
Star Trek
documentary.”

The guard, who was probably in elementary school when I was piloting the Enterprise, nodded.

“May I see your ID, sir?”

Though I’m “sir” to a lot of people these days, it was bizarre to hear it in a place where I was used to being “The Kid” or “The Boy.” I pulled it out of my wallet and handed it to him.

“Okay, you’re all set, Mr. Wheaton,” he said. “Just pull up to the valet there. I’m sure you know your way around here?”

I smiled. “Yeah, I do.”

He handed me back my ID and leaned down toward me.

“We’re not supposed to do this, but I’m a big fan,” he said, conspiratorially. With anyone who really was a big deal in Hollywood, he was probably risking his job.

“Really?” I said. “You seem a little young for TNG.”

He grinned. “Not
Star Trek
, your blog.”

This took me completely by surprise. I have been so busy with other writing projects that I haven’t been able to give my blog the attention I want. I’ve frequently considered putting it on hiatus for a few months.

“That,” I said, “is totally awesome. Thank you.”

He smiled and then looked over his shoulder at the other guards. He turned back to me, nodded tersely, and waved me onto the lot.

I traded my car for an orange ticket with some numbers on it and headed toward stage 24. A few minutes later, I walked past the Hart building, where TNG’s writers and our fearless leader Gene Roddenberry lived while I was on the series. I stopped for a minute and looked at what had been Gene’s first-story office window. I was hit by a machine-gun montage of all the times when I walked past that window and he called me in for a visit. I looked at the empty spot on the sidewalk where Gene’s golf cart used to be—the same one that I frequently got into trouble for racing around the backlot. I felt the first of many tugs at my heart.

Oh boy. This is going to be one of those days
, I thought, as I pulled myself back into the present and walked to stage 24 to meet the crew.

“Glad you could make it, Wil,” the producer said, as my eyes adjusted from the brilliance of the day to the darkness of the empty stage.

“Me too,” I said.

I looked around for a moment. Something about this place was incredibly familiar.

“Hey, you know what I just realized? I shot
Family Ties
here right before I started
Star Trek
.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I was cast as Tina Yothers’ boyfriend. I only did one episode before I booked TNG, but the word on the street at the time was that Gary David Goldberg was going to write me in as a recurring character before I went into outer space,” I said. “And, uh, the future.”

The stage was completely empty, except for a couple of work lights and the bleachers where audiences once sat. This stage, once filled with laughter and the energy of filming “live, before a studio audience,” was now little more than an empty room. My whole life, I’ve been in love with the magic that goes into creating the suspended disbelief of movies and television, but it wasn’t until I stood in that empty stage that I fully appreciated the effort that went into transforming 12,000 square feet of soundstage into the Keatons’ lives for eight years.

“So I thought we’d head over toward stage 9,” the producer said to me, “and we’ll shoot our host wraps in there.”

“Wait.” I said. “You mean we get to walk
into
stage 9?”

“Don’t get too excited,” he said. “There’s nothing left from
Trek
in there.”

Though I knew that there was no way they’d preserve our sets for twenty years, and though I knew that someone else would eventually move into our stages, just as we’d moved into the original series’ stages, I still felt a little sad.

“Nothing at all?” I asked. It was a stupid question. Of
course
there wouldn’t be anything there. But like a kid who just learned that Darth Vader was just a guy in a suit, or that KITT didn’t really talk, I had to ask again, just to be sure I hadn’t somehow misunderstood the cold hard reality.

“They’re building sets for some reshoots on a Farrelly Brothers movie,” he said, “so we’ll just shoot outside.” I was struck by how blasé he was, which shouldn’t have surprised me. How could I expect anyone else in the world to have the same emotional attachment to those stages as I did?

“Well…okay,” I said.

The crew got the camera and sound equipment together and loaded it on a cart that looked heavy and awkward.

“Do you know a fast—and preferably easy—way to get over there from here?” the camera man asked me.

I didn’t fight the smile. “Yeah. I do.”

We headed out of the stage and back past the Hart building.

“See that window?” I said. “That used to be Gene’s office.”

“Mmmm,” came the reply.

Nobody is going to care about these things like you do
, I thought.
Just keep it to yourself.

I looked at the window just a little bit longer. I recalled watching Shatner’s infamous “Get a Life” sketch on ¾-inch video tape in Gene’s office with some of my friends who worked there during the second season.

A few Trekkie VIPs were there on a tour, and they watched it with us. (In the pre-Internet days, it was not very easy to watch that sketch on demand.) At one point in the sketch, Shatner says, “That was the evil Captain Kirk from episode 37, ‘The Enemy Within’…” and all of the Trekkies derisively snorted, in unison, “YOU MEAN EPISODE FOUR!” I looked at my friend, who very subtly shook his head. These were Big Deal Trekkies; pointing out that they’d just brought the sketch into the real world would have created some problems.

Back in the present, I laughed out loud, and a couple of the crew looked at me. “Memories,” I said.

I led them across the lot, on a route that would appear circuitous to anyone who didn’t work there for the better part of four years. On the way to the stage, I passed the same familiar and significant landmarks from my youth that I wrote about in
Just A Geek
:

That’s where I met Eddie Murphy when I was sixteen…Hey! I crashed a golf cart there when I was fifteen…There’s the mail room…There’s stage six, where the bridge set started out…I almost got up the courage to kiss that girl at the Christmas party on that stage in…there’s the stage where Shatner told me, “I’d never let a kid come onto
my
bridge.”

The next line in
Just A Geek
is, “…this street feels exactly the way it did when I worked here…here’s where my trailer used to be…”

Though I stood in that same place, it didn’t feel the same at all. Different trailers were there, filled with different actors working on different shows, but that wasn’t why I just couldn’t deny that twenty years had passed since I started working here. Maybe it was the knowledge that
Star Trek
is really gone for good, at least the way I knew it. Maybe it was the pain in my hip…or the responsibility on my shoulders. Maybe it was the fact that I have two sons who are older, and more mature, than I was when I started working on the series. Most likely, it was a combination of all those things.

I walked a bit farther, to the entrance to stages 8 and 9. In the hallway between them, where our security guard stopped tourists and Trekkies from coming onto the sets, where our bulletin board for callsheets, shooting schedules, and my brief foray into editorial cartoons used to be, there was now some sort of big, loud…something, with a fan and a bunch of pipes running out of it. As much as that behemoth should have prepared me, I was just gutted when I opened the stage 9 door. Instead of seeing the back of a turbolift and a corridor leading to the transporter room and engineering, I saw a bunch of sets under construction: sets that were quite clearly houses and other rooms squarely from the 21
^st
—not the 24
^th
—century.