There's this great xkcd that illustrates how you can start reading about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge at Wikipedia, and three hours later find yourself with William Howard Taft and Wet T-Shirt Contest open in two tabs. It's funny, the saying goes, because it's true.

I mention this as an introduction to how I came across this rather embarrassing but hilarious photo earlier this week, while looking for "zombie wil wheaton" on google images. (The entire story behind that little affair is in my blog, if you're interested.)



I had completely forgotten about it, but the photo is from 1987 or 1988, when I made my very first official Star Trek convention appearance at a little indie con in Florida (Tampa, I think it was.) I was just about fifteen at the time, and such a nerd.

In addition to the normal convention things, they asked me to play Star Trek Jeopardy. Being fifteen, and a total nerd, I couldn't just stand up there like a normal person. Oh no. I had to walk into the dealer's room, and pester (I would have insisted that I just asked, but if I recall anything about myself at fifteen it's that I had two settings: annoy and sulk) the hapless dealers for the various bits of costume and makeup to turn myself into "Mr. Schlock," who you see pictured here.

Overcome by nerves and a lack of hardcore Star Trek trivia knowledge (I was just a kid, after all,) I did very poorly at the game, but I think the audience was entertained, even when I got the class of the Enterprise-D – that's my Enterprise, for those of you keeping score at home – wrong. I believe I said, in my most serious and Mr. Spock-like voice, "What is 'Superhyperreallyfast Constitution Awesome Class, Vince?"

The funny thing is, until I typed those words, I didn't remember that the promoter's name was Vince, but when the sound of my fifteen year-old voice spoke to me across twenty years of memory, it sort of opened a flood of memories about my years on the convention circuit . . .

If you're unfamiliar with Star Trek conventions, this primer from my book Just A Geek may be helpful:

The first time I was on stage at a convention was in Anaheim, right around the time Next Generation started. I wasn't there "officially," but my friend and I had gone to check it out, so if I was asked to attend cons in the future, I'd know what I was getting into.

The promoter found out I was wandering around the show – I'd paid to get in and everything, so it would be on the down low – and offered me the glorious sum of one hundred bucks – in cash! – to speak for an hour. To a 14 year-old, a hundred bucks sounds an awful lot like a million, and without knowing how badly I was being ripped off (the average person who speaks at a convention earns between five and ten thousand dollars for their time,) I gleefully accepted the "generous" offer and did my best to answer questions for an hour.

If you think it went well, you haven't spent any quality time around a fourteen year-old (geek or otherwise) recently . . . but I had my one hundred bucks, which I spent on books and props in the dealer's room. If this sounds an awful lot like my short story The Trade, it's because I apparently learned nothing about negotiation and money management between the ages of eight and fourteen.

Things were really different back then, long before Creation pretty much forced everyone else out of the market and eliminated a lot of the individuality of regional conventions. Back then, there were as many convention promoters as there were Holiday Inns around the country willing to host a few hundred Trekkies for a weekend, and every single con had its own unique feeling.

I remember going to a convention with my mom in Philadelphia, where she got food poisoning. I don't remember a thing about the convention, but I can still see and feel the waiting area in the emergency room ,dark wood on the walls, old magazines on the tables and chairs, ugly white and yellow linoleum tiles on the floor, where I spent the entire night playing Tetris on my Gameboy and listening to The Final Cut on my Walkman, trying not to be too freaked out that my mom was in the hospital and we were a million miles from home. ("A million" was the default value for "a lot" when I was a kid.)

When I was 18 or 19, I learned that even if the microphone really looks like a Magic Wand massager, it's probably not the smartest thing to tell the audience, "Wow! I'm talking into some sort of marital aid!" when you're in the middle of the Bible Belt.

I remember flying to New Jersey to do a convention with Marina Sirtis, and playing head to head Tetris on our Gameboys the entire flight. I had a massive crush on her back then, and though the thought crossed my mind for most of the trip, I didn't have the courage or the nerve to suggest strip head-to-head Tetris when we arrived. In my sixteen year-old mind, it totally would have happened if I had.

Once, in Oklahoma, I was a guest at a dinner where I sat with a few other Trek actors while some Boy Scouts served us. The menu had barbecued chicken, beef, and bologna.

"Wait," I remember telling the kid, who was about the same age as me, "barbecued bologna?"

"Yeah," he said, "it's center-cut."

Neither one of us knew what that meant, but I'd grown up white trash enough to know that bologna was not something I wanted to eat, even – no, especially – if it was barbecued. The problem, however, is that barbecued bologna was a local delicacy, and I was seated at the head table.

I ate it, pretended to like it, and until today, nobody was the wiser.

At LosCon in Pasadena, right after I'd gotten my driver's license and first car (1989 Honda Prelude si 4WS, which was unintentionally one step better than Patrick Stewart's and the subject of much backstage teasing) I met my first Science Fiction idol, Larry Niven.

The meeting went something like this:

Me: Oh my god, you're Larry Niven!

Him: Oh my god, you're Wesley on Star Trek!

Both: What?

Both: Can I have your autograph?!

Both: Yes!

Both: COOL!

I still have my copies of Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers that he signed for me.

They weren't all good times, of course; while most of the cons were fantastic, and run by guys like Vince who really cared about fans and wanted them to have a good time, others were pretty awful, run by complete con artists who just wanted to take their money and get out of town before anyone figured out what they were up to, like a couple of guys who still owe a lot of fans and actors money that we'll never see.

I remember one of those guys (in the pre-internet days) convincing 16 year-old me that it was a "short drive" from Amarillo to Denton, and not having the good sense to look on a map for myself, I agreed to do two different cities in two different days. As the drive across Texas entered its third hour, I learned an important lesson about not ever trusting anyone.

On countless occasions, someone would tell fans one of us was coming to a show, take their money, and then claim that we'd canceled at the last minute. Of course, the only time any of us had heard about the show was when an irate fan wanted to know why we'd backed out of it.

For you damn kids today who have always had e-mail and the Internets and cell phones, it may be hard to picture a world where a Gameboy was high tech, but it's where I came of age. That world seemed bigger than it does today, and from time to time, I miss driving straight from Paramount to LAX on Friday after work, and falling asleep on the red eye somewhere over New Mexico while still wearing Wesley's helmet hair.

It was a lot of work to travel the country every weekend, and over the years the Holiday Inns all bled together like a smear of Sharpie ink across the heel of my hand after a marathon autograph session, but there were many more good times than bad. It was fun to see so many different places and people, all united by their love of this thing that I was lucky enough to be part of – at least until the alt.wesley.die.die.die thing really got rolling.

There are still a few regional gaming cons and comic cons and Linux cons and cavecons every year, but not a lot of purely Star Trek conventions exist any more, as far as I can tell. Part of it has to be economics, and how hard it is to compete with Creation, but I also I blame The Powers That Be for making several years of sucktastic Trek that wasn't worth watching, much less traveling to a Holiday Inn to celebrate.

Over the last couple of years, I've begun attending conventions again, but now I go as a fan. I'm glad that I stopped going to cons for work, because I don't think I would have ever been able to appreciate how fun they are when you're just there to geek out. Those of us who will cram thirteen of our friends into a hotel room for a weekend to geek out together have a place to go where not only will we not be laughed at for dressing up but encouraged to do it (except the furries; those weirdos are on their own.) We can invade a hotel for a weekend, pretend it's like the cereal convention in Sandman, and recover enough hit points to survive our real lives until the next one.

The world has changed a lot in twenty years. Star Trek has been taken off the air as a first run series and, as Ron Moore said, "returned to the care of the fans," who kept it alive with conventions and the like from its cancellation in 1969 until the movies started in 1979. Gameboys and Walkmans have been replaced by PSPs and iPods, and indie cons which were once scattered across the country have been replaced by a handful of bigger cons in major cities, run by Creation.

The last few shows I attended as a guest felt more like marketplaces for completists and collectors than real parties for the fans, but now that Trek has been given back to them, I suspect that will slowly change. And with that in mind, one thing remains unchanged in twenty years: as a speaker and as a fan, taking that Friday red eye sounds like a pretty cool thing to do.

Wil Wheaton won no awards for his portrayal of Mr. Schlock, and the role was quietly replaced by Poochie in 1989.