The Happiest Days of Our Lives

by Wil Wheaton

  “Well,” I said, “let’s start in this cabinet, and work our way up. I mean, I haven’t even opened some of those in almost twenty years.”

  Goddammit, I feel old.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “But if you ever feel interested in reading one of these,” I pointed to a shelf that was filled with stories that mattered to me, stories that I hoped to gently pass along to Ryan, “you have my permission to come up and read any of them you like.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Just be careful with them.”

  He grinned at me. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “Because if you’re having second thoughts…”

  “No. No. I said I’m sure.”

  “Because you look a little nervous, is all.”

  Oh, my kid is giving me shit and busting my balls.

  I laughed, and he joined me.

  “Ryan, I trust you with my comic books. There, I said it.”

  “Wow. That’s hardcore, Wil.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Michael Stipe sang, “Take a picture here, take a souvenir.”

  I told this story to my wife before I wrote it, while we were driving to the store. When I got to the end, and dramatically revealed that I’d given Ryan permission to read my comic books, and he appreciated the magnitude of the whole thing, all I got in return was a blank look.

  “It’s a big deal,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “A really big deal.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “This is one of those times when I totally geek out and you politely humor me, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  blue light special

  This story is dedicated with tremendous affection and gratitude to Jean Shepherd.

  If someone asked you what toy defined your childhood, what would you say? My kids would probably say Game Boy if you asked Ryan, and Micro Machines if you asked Nolan. My brother would probably say NES. My sister would probably say Cabbage Patch Kids. My dad would probably say baseball cards.

  My answer comes without a moment’s thought or second-guessing: Star Wars figures.

  They were affordable, easily obtainable at Kmart, and allowed me to create my nine-year-old version of fan fiction, re-enacting scenes from “my most bestest movie ever” or making up my own. My core cast was Han Solo (in Hoth and regular outfits), Luke Skywalker (X-wing fighter or Bespin version), Greedo (shoots second, goddammit, version), Obi-Wan Kenobi (I lost the plastic robe and broke the tip off the light saber version), Princess Leia (pre-slave girl “man I wish I could hit that” version), C-3PO (tarnished version), and R2D2 (head stopped clicking a long time ago version). They spent a lot of time fighting on Tatooine (torn cardboard backdrop version), flying around while crammed into a TIE fighter (one wing really wants to fall off version), or rolling around the kitchen floor in my LaNdSPEEdR (kEpP YOU hANdS OFF OF It OR ELSE!! version.*

  Yeah, I loved my Star Wars figures, and I took them everywhere with me. I never owned one of those official carrying cases that looked like C-3PO or anything, but they traveled with me in a Vans shoebox that could double as a Rebel base whenever the need arose.

  Last night, Nolan and I ate dinner at Islands. Right after we put our order in, I saw a kid sitting in a booth at the end of our aisle, playing with Star Wars figures on his table. It was like looking through a wormhole into 1981, seeing myself in Bob’s Big Boy with my parents.

  The kid was eight or nine years old, with a mop of shaggy long hair that was probably cut by his mom with the coupon scissors in a chair in the kitchen. He wore a dirty blue Hot Wheels T-shirt, maroon nylon shorts, and Velcro tennis shoes. On the seat next to him, there was an open shoebox. His Star Wars figures were lined up in front of him, and he was making two of them fight.

  I fell into the wormhole and landed at the Sunland Kmart in 1981. It was back-to-school season for my brother and me, and we were there to buy clothes and school supplies. My parents never let us feel how poor or white trash we really were back then, so I didn’t know that shopping at Kmart and getting an ICEE and a pretzel was a real luxury for us; like all kids, I just took it for granted that we got to have new clothes and treats, because, well, they were there, you know?

  After we piled our corduroy pants and collared shirts and Trapper Keepers and economy packs of pencils and wide-ruled paper in our cart, Mom took our three-year-old sister with her to the makeup department to get shampoo and whatever moms buy in the makeup department. My brother and I were allowed to go to the toy department.

  “Can I spend my allowance?” I asked.

  “If that’s what you want to do,” my mom said, another in a long string of unsuccessful passive/aggressive attempts to encourage me to save my money for…things you save money for, I guess. It was a concept that was entirely alien to me at nine years old.

  “Keep an eye on Jeremy,” she said. “And don’t run in the aisles.”

  “Okay.”

  As long as Jeremy stood right at my side and didn’t bother me while I shopped, and as long as he didn’t want to look at anything of his own, it wouldn’t be a problem.

  I held my brother’s hand as we walked carefully, for about three steps, and then started running across the store—past a flashing blue light special—to the toy department. Once there, we dodged past the bicycles and ignored the shelves of board games until we got to the best aisle in the world: the one with the Star Wars figures.

  Row after row of glorious Star Wars figures in blister packs hung from pegs in a wall that stretched up to the sky. Every one of them had a bright orange price tag, cut into a jagged sunburst marked “$1.99!”

  The smell of slightly burnt popcorn, kind of like the smell in the Rainbow Theater (where I’d go on countless eighth-grade not-really-but-we-called-them-that-anyway “dates” and watch Ghostbusters over and over again in 1984) hung heavy in the air. I stood there, experiencing what Douglas Coupland would eventually describe as “Optional Paralysis,” pondering one of the most difficult and important decisions I would ever make: Which Star Wars figure would I purchase?

  They didn’t have the Chewbacca that I really wanted—no, needed—to fill a gaping hole in my cast of characters. They had lots of droids, but I already had the only two that mattered. They had some cool snow troopers, but they could only fight Han Solo in his Hoth outfit, and I didn’t even have a Hoth playset. (It made sense at the time.) They had IG-88, who was kind of cool and had an awesome gun, but it was only in one scene in The Empire Strikes Back and didn’t even talk. I stood at the wall of toys and wished, as I always did, that I could just get them all and sort them out at home while my jealous friends watched.

  My brother said, “Come on, Wil. I want to go look at the Legos.”

  “In a minute,” I said. I flipped through the ones I could reach, hoping that maybe Chewbacca was in the back behind one of the lame figures up front. (That’s how I’d found Luke Skywalker in the Bespin outfit, which came with a really cool light saber that you could take out of his hand and lose in the back yard the first time you played with it.)

  “Come onnnnnnn, Wil…” my brother said, tugging on my hand.

  “Quit!” I said. “This is important!”

  Lando Calrissian? He was a dick in the movie. There’s no way I’m getting him. That bald guy with the light-up headphone thing around his head? What is this, the Bespin Cloud City store? I thought.

  “Willlllll,” my brother whined. Just then, my mom came around the corner.

  “Willow, look what I found for you!” She held up a package of Luke Skywalker X-wing pilot Underoos.

  “Oh cool!” I said. “Thanks!”

  “And I have Batman for you, Jer Bear,” she said to my brother.

  “Wow! I’m Batman!” he said. “Thanks!”

  “Did you find something?” my mom asked, and then pointedly added, “Or are you saving this week?”

  “Mom, I want
to look at Legos,” Jeremy said.

  “Okay, Jer, I’ll take you,” she said.

  She started down the aisle and added, “You need to be ready to go when I come back, Wil.”

  Left alone in the aisle, I could focus and make an informed decision. Suddenly, as if they’d materialized out of thin air, I saw several vehicles and playsets. The playsets were well beyond my budget, squarely in the realm of birthday gifts from relatives. A Death Star playset among them silently mocked me and my LaNdSPEEdR. However, the sunburst stickers on the vehicles were much more reasonable. I did some math in my head. If I saved, I could have my own Millennium Falcon in just a couple of months. If I could convince my mom and dad to let me do extra chores around the house, or if I got a commercial or something, I could even get it sooner!

  Wow. The Millennium Falcon. It was so big, it took two hands to fly it. My friend Darryl let me watch as he put his together, and it had two sheets of stickers! It had this place where you could hide your figures, and you could recreate that cool chess game and Luke’s fight with the training droid thingy!

  Could I do it? Could I save my allowance until I had enough to buy it? What if they didn’t have it when I was all saved up, though? Then what would I do? Mom would make me put my money in the bank, and I just knew I’d never see it again, while it earned something stupid called “interest.”

  My brother came running down the aisle, nearly losing his ever-present blue baseball cap in the process.

  “Wil! Look! I got an airplane!” He held up one of those balsa wood planes that always broke on the second flight, provided you didn’t break them during assembly.

  Oh no, I thought, Mom will be right behind him! I could hear my sister fussing in the cart as it turned the corner and squeaked up behind me.

  “What did you decide, Wil?” my mom said. “Amy’s getting fussy and we need to leave.”

  I hadn’t had nearly enough time to make up my mind. This was all a plot by my mom to get me to save my money! I had to stall, so I pretended I didn’t hear her.

  “Oh, that’s uh, neat,” I said to my brother. “What’s it do?”

  It’s a plane, you dolt. It flies.

  “Wil?” my mom said, a bit of an edge in her voice.

  “It’s got a propeller, and that means it can fly for a long long long long time!”

  “Uh-huh.” My eyes darted from the vehicles to the figures to the playsets and back. “That’s cool.” A stream of numbers and calendar pages flew through my head, accompanied by John Williams’ famous theme.

  “Wil, I’m going to count to ten, and then we’re leaving,” my mom said.

  Oh no! She was counting! This was serious.

  “…three…four…five…”

  Three? What happened to one and two?

  “…eight…nine…” Why couldn’t I just make a decision? All the figures sucked. This should have been easy. But there were so many right there, and how could I walk out of the toy department without buying something?! Jeremy had an airplane!

  “Ten. What are you doing?”

  As if commanded by some unseen puppet master, my hand shot out and grabbed the nearest figure from the rack.

  “I’m getting this one,” I said. “This one is awesome.”

  Ha! Take that, Mom! Nobody is going to trick me into responsibly saving my money!

  “Okay, put it in the cart and let’s go.”

  I looked down at the package in my hands, and saw my triumphant purchase: Lando Calrissian.

  In my head, I thought of the worst curse word I could muster the courage to think.

  “Wait. Mom!”

  “What?”

  She stood there, hand on her hip, patience wearing thin. My brother flew his airplane—which, in the package, didn’t look anything like an airplane at all—around in little circles. My sister’s fussiness was turning to tears. This was my last chance to back out, admit defeat, and tell my mom that I was…I was going to save my money.

  I took a deep breath, and said, “I, uhm…”

  My sister scowled and started to cry.

  “What?”

  The urge to walk out of the store with something in my hand and some stupid sense of victory overwhelmed the more rational thoughts of saving my money for something I really wanted.

  “I, uhm, I want to carry it myself,” I said.

  “Okay, that’s fine. Let’s just go,” she said. I thought of looking back wistfully over my shoulder at the Millennium Falcon, but I was so ashamed of myself, I was certain that I’d be turned into a pillar of carbonite. Instead, I trailed behind my airplane-zooming brother and nap-needing sister while my mother pushed the cart up to the checkout.

  “Wil?” said a voice that didn’t belong at Kmart in 1981.

  I blinked, as the sounds of my infant sister crying were replaced with The Killers and the smell of burnt popcorn was replaced with the smell of a fryer.

  “Are you okay?” Nolan asked.

  “…Yeah,” I said.

  “Where did you go just now?” It’s a rather mature concept for a 15-year-old, but I vanish into memory so frequently that he knows it when he sees it.

  I told him about the kid over his shoulder, with all the Star Wars figures lined up on the table. “It’s like looking at myself twenty-five years ago,” I said, as John Williams’ score began a reprise in my head.

  He turned around and back. “You had Jar-Jar twenty-five years ago?”

  “What?”

  I looked at the line of figures: Han Solo, Chewbacca, Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and way down on the end, there was Jar-Jar Binks.

  A needle scratched across the imagined record. In my head, I thought of the worst curse word I could, and directed it at George Lucas.

  _______________

  * This story of th LaNdSPEEdR is call “The Trade” and can be found in Just A Geek.

  exactly what i wanted

  My kids were 14 and 16 when this happened, which makes the fact that they were amused, rather than embarrassed, much more astonishing to me.

  After dinner, I was hit with a craving for some sort of frozen fruit, so I told Anne that I was going to run to the store and get myself some nice sorbet or something.

  “I have a coupon for Cold Stone,” she said. “Why don’t you take the kids and go there?”

  The nearest Cold Stone is in the mall, and it’s a bit of an ordeal to get there, park the car, walk across the whole place, deal with the inevitable mob of teenagers, blah blah blah get off my lawn, but when I was a kid and my dad took me for unannounced ice cream, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.

  I walked into the living room and made the offer.

  The kids raced to the back of the house in a blur of tennis shoes and falling Wii remotes.

  “So that’s a ‘yes,’ I take it?” I said to the empty room.

  Several mini-ordeals later, we were at the counter. A teenage girl with a stud in her nose smiled at me and asked if I was ready.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’d like the raspberry sorbet.” I stopped myself before I could add the kind you’d buy in a secondhand store.

  “What size?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said, “I’d like you to pretend that I’m three years old, and give me an appropriately sized scoop.”

  Ryan, standing next to me, slowly shook his head. Nolan said nothing, but I saw his shoulders shake a bit as he suppressed a giggle.

  She scooped me a tiny little bit of sorbet, and held it up in a cup.

  “Is that good? Or would you like more?”

  It was a perfectly tiny scoop, exactly what I wanted.

  “That’s perfect,” I said. “Thank you!”

  She handed it to me, and I took a bite.

  “You’d better slow down there, Turbo,” Ryan said.

  “Yeah,” Nolan added. “You don’t want to race through your sorbet too fast.”

  I put my spoon back into my perfectly tiny scoop of baby-sized sorbet.

  “What?
”

  Ryan burst out laughing.

  “Dude,” he said, “you drove all the way up here, parked all the way over on the other side of the mall so it’d be easier to find a space…”

  “…walked all the way through the mall,” Nolan added.

  “All so you could get, like, three bites of ice cream.” Ryan said.

  “Not ice cream,” I said. “Sorbet. Ice cream is too sweet.”

  Now it was Nolan’s turn to laugh. “Oh, I’m sorry. Sorbet.”

  I looked at the girl behind the counter. She was trying not to giggle, too.

  “Yes,” I said, “three bites of sorbet, and it’s exactly what I wanted.” I made a show of taking a tiny bite and dramatically savoring it. “Now are you going to order, or what?”

  Someday, when they’re parents, they may understand that it’s not about the ice cream, or the sorbet, or how much of it there is, or where we parked to find a space, as much as it’s all about taking my kids out on a Sunday night so we can all have a good-natured laugh at my expense.

  It was, in fact, exactly what I wanted.

  close your eyes and then it’s past

  This essay is a collection of images, almost like flipping through a photo album, and though I thought it worked very well on my blog, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep it in the book. Every time we made a round of cuts, though, I’d look at this story and say, “Well, good night. Close your eyes…I shall have to kill you in the morning.” I did that all the way until the final edit and, well, here it is.

  Ryan had a martial arts class in the town where I spent my elementary-school years, and one afternoon when Anne and I took him there it sparked a flood of surprisingly lucid memory flashes:

  Racing down the sidewalk, lying headfirst on my skateboard. Yes, I cracked my chin, and yes, I have the scar.

  Getting a drink from the hose. Why does that chemical, vinyl, rubbery water taste so good? And is it really that cold? To this day, I love a drink from the hose when I’m working in the yard, even though it’s just as easy to walk into the kitchen and fill up a cup.