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Get a Life! - Hardcover

Shatner, William

 
9780671021313: Get a Life!
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0671021311 ISBN 13: 9780671021313
Verlag: Atria, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

In a candid, insightful look at the world of Star Trek fans, the show's Captain Kirk pays tribute to the enthusiasm, good humor, and love that he has encountered at Star Trek conventions, drawing on interviews with fans, dealers, fellow cast members, and promoters to examine the meaning of the Star Trek cult.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William Shatner has written numerous novels, including Star Trek: Ashes of Eden, Star Trek: The Return, Star Trek: Avenger, Star Trek: Dark Victory and Star Trek: Spectre. He lives in Los Angeles.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

April 1999 -- Somewhere over the Midwest
A lot of people really love to fly. Go to any airport, in any city, on any day, and you can't help but spot them, skipping playfully along the moving sidewalks, whistling as they check their bags, always making sure they arrive at least two hours before their scheduled departure. Kids, adults, old people, these happy passengers come in all shapes and sizes. Inside the flight cabin, you'll invariably find them sitting in their assigned seats, buckled securely, smiling, sipping slowly at their little plastic cups full of 7-Up. They are courteous, well-behaved, and cheerful at all times. They keep their tray tables in the upright and locked position, and they'd never dream of causing a moment's trouble for their flight attendants. They're the lively, life-of-the-party people who'll brighten your flight by yelling "He-e-e-e-e-ere we go-o-o-o" as you take off, and later, launch into an appreciative round of applause as you land.
These people make me sick, and I'd like to personally smack every one of them in the head.
I hate flying; flat-out hate its guts. The boredom, the irrational fatigue, the god-awful food, the stupid little air-conditioning jets that blast you from sweltering to freezing in under five seconds, the midget pillows, the paper-towel blankets, the mile-high Porta Pottis, the flatulent fat guy who always seems to sit next to me, the fifty-fifty chance of plummeting to the ground in a massive screaming fireball...you name it, I hate it. In real life, I am by no means "starship captain" material.
Still, despite wobbly knees and intestines, I'm up in the wild blue horror all the time. With homes on both sides of the continent, conventions to attend, film and television locations to visit, air travel is an absolutely necessary evil for me, but it never gets any easier. In fact, anyone who's ever seen the old Twilight Zone gremlin episode, where I got to wreak havoc as an impossibly freaked out coach-class crazy, has witnessed a pretty close approximation of what I'm like every time I leave LAX.
Without fail, on virtually every aircraft unlucky enough to welcome me aboard, I find myself gradually succumbing to fear, monotony, claustrophobia, and a sort of "pressurized cabin fever." In plainer terms, I go nuts. I can't sit still. I fidget, I wander, I whimper, I doodle, I hum along with those tinny airline headphones, I count how many peanuts are packed into my complimentary foil bag (It's almost always 39.), I play my Game Boy like a crazed eleven-year-old...and then the plane takes off and it gets even weirder. Let's put it this way: I may be the only passenger in the history of the airlines stir-crazy enough to sit through Home Alone 3...twice. Further, were it not for that legendary drink-cart-squatting, poop-flinging, drunk-out-of-his-mind businessman who made all the papers a while back, I believe I might very well qualify as single worst passenger in the history of global aviation. I believe you get the picture.
But here I sit, at it again, clumsily poking at my laptop Mac and cursing the fates as today's 747 wobbles down through a layer of smoggy turbulence toward the tarmac and yet another Star Trek convention. Ears pop, babies cry, landing gear kathunks, and we're down -- at which point we taxi toward our gate for just under nineteen weeks.
Finally, in a scene reminiscent of feeding time at the monkey cage, the hatch cracks open, and I immediately lunge, quite gleefully, past the faux-sincere smiles and "buh-bye now" chattering of today's flight crew, sprinting down through the gate chute and out into the fluorescent faux-sunshine of the airport. The chrome, the glass, the indestructible "industrial beige" carpeting -- never before has any place this tacky looked this good. I'm on the ground, I'm still in one piece, the FAA has made no attempt whatsoever to incarcerate me...my flight's been an unqualified success. I take a deep breath now, and smile.
Ever notice how every airport smells exactly the same? As far as I can tell, it's an endlessly recirculated mix of old coffee, fast-food french fries, newspaper pulp, and a huge collective cloud of cologne, parfum, and other upscale stinkwaters. Disgusting, yes, but I swear to you, I absolutely love it. Somehow, over the past thirty years, and countless white-knuckle plane flights, I believe my subconscious gray matter has come to equate that distinctively funky airport aroma with official notification that my airborne torture session's now over, and the terra-firma fun is about to begin.
It doesn't matter what town I'm in, or what gathering I'm headed toward, William Shatner's "Star Trek Convention Experience" always begins right here, with a happy, heaping lungful of airport funk. It then proceeds pretty much like this.
"SHATNER" will be black-magic-markered onto a clipboard sign somewhere within my line of vision. Behind that clipboard, my driver du jour will be smiling broadly. If I'm attending a large, well-organized convention, that smile will more than likely be plastered all over the face of a formally uniformed professional chauffeur. If I'm heading toward a smaller, fan-run gathering, that same smile might come attached to a fan, a gofer, or whatever convention volunteer owns the cleanest car. It doesn't matter. I'm always glad to see them, they're always glad to see me, and together, we're almost always late.
For years, I'd scour the commercial flight schedules in an effort to time my convention travel flawlessly. Calculator in hand, I'd figure the airport-to-airport time and distance, factoring in an estimated drive time from arrival airport to convention, before finally settling upon whatever flight plan would get me into town exactly two hours before I'd be due onstage. That way I could enjoy a leisurely drive from airport to venue, arriving relaxed, happy, and comfortably ahead of schedule. These were the best-laid plans of mice and men, but they were also pitifully unrealistic. After suffering the ubiquitous slings and arrows of unannounced gate changes, airport stack-ups, weather woes, and perennially sadistic jet-stream hissy fits, my perfect little travel schedules almost inevitably turned to mush. I'd estimate that over the years my late arrivals outnumbered the "ontimes" by at least three to one. Punctuality is a bitch.
That's why, once back on Earth, after kissing the ground and slapping a quick "handshake and hello" on my assigned driver, we've generally gotta run...literally. My sole and trusty travel bag is already at my side, but with navigating the airport, finding the car, and battling the inevitable traffic back toward the gathering, there's precious little margin for error. For all of those reasons, with my head down, my eyes lowered, and using my driver as a sort of moving pick, we're off, combining to plow through the airport at about warp factor six.
Past the airport bookstores that seem to sell only the paperback works of Stephen King and John Grisham, past the gift shops where you can buy six aspirin tablets for $7.75, as well as the finest in shrink-wrapped, low-rent "men's magazines" and last-minute "whoops" souvenirs ("Whoops, I forgot to buy my kid a T-shirt"). Picking up speed now, we double-time it down escalators, through corridors, past the duty-free shop, the metal detectors, and the luggage carousels. Finally, we whoosh through one last pair of oversized revolving doors, before breaking out into the April-fresh bus fumes of the parking lot.
At this point, at more than half the conventions I attend, there's one last momentary pause, as the driver tries to remember where the hell he parked the car. Not to worry; ten seconds, maybe twenty, it always hits them. The lightbulb goes on, the driver points, the two of us jog, and seconds later we're both diving...

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Verlag
Atria
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0671021311
ISBN 13 
9780671021313
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
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Verantwortliche Person
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