Shatner Rules Read online

  And our health care system covers the splinters.

  I’m proud of our Rocky Mountains, our glaciers, our loons!

  (NOTE: If you say “loon” in front of sixty thousand Canadians, sixty thousand Canadians will then impersonate the loon’s call. They love doing that, too.)

  And that, to Canadians, minus thirty degrees is just another sign of global warming.

  It’s a big country. We dream big, you have to, in a land that is the Final Frontier.

  (NOTE: When making a speech to a billion people, it’s best not to go too esoteric with the references.)

  And, damnit, I’m proud of the fact that Canadians, after four beers, in front of worldwide television, can successfully pronounce “the Strait of Juan de Fuca” without being censored.

  FUN FACTNER: The Strait of Juan de Fuca is a one-hundred-mile-long body of water that serves as the principal outlet for the Georgia Strait and Puget Sound, which then empties into Lake Smuttyjoke.

  For I am William Shatner, one of 35 million Canadians, and we dream big!

  My speech, my love letter to the nation I adore, was a beautiful, big dream. Amid the cheers, my platform lowered. Triumphantly.

  I looked down at the teleprompter, the mother’s teat ready for my suckle of safety, flickering lightly.

  I never needed it.

  I was so thrilled, I almost jumped for joy. But . . . I’m Canadian. We don’t do that sort of thing.

  CHAPTER 18

  RULE: If You Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth, You Might Find More Gifts!

  Can a negotiation ever go too far? Sometimes. Sometimes, you can push too far and drive the deal off a cliff.

  But, if you manage to stop just short of driving off a cliff, you’ll have a pretty nice view. Or at least really good seats to a very important event.

  Performing at the closing ceremony of the Vancouver Olympics certainly had its perks. Team Shatner runs thirteen deep—me, my wife Elizabeth, my three beloved daughters, my three beloved sons-in-law, and my assorted and beloved grandkids. The organizers of the ceremony were good enough to fly all of us up to enjoy the event. It was a real celebration of family togetherness, and one I will cherish forever.

  The scenery in Vancouver is amazing, especially if you also have a great view of the people you love.

  Seriously, you can’t put a price on such things. So let’s talk freebies!

  We were offered hockey tickets—rinkside! To watch the United States take on Canada. It was the hottest ticket of the entire Olympics. No one is crazier about hockey than Canadians. It’s the one place where we can be aggressive without shame or guilt or fear of being too showy.

  This was a matchup against America! Our neighbors to the south, who don’t know we exist. What better way to get the attention of Americans than to beat their team at hockey!

  RULE: If You Are a Canadian and Want America’s Attention—Beat Them at Hockey. Or, If You Can’t Do That, Offer Them a Canadian Beer. Our Beer Is Good. Americans Like Beer.

  What a thrill. What an honor. What a conundrum for me.

  They were offering four tickets. There are thirteen of us, more than a few of whom are rabid hockey fans.

  As the patriarch of the clan, and the man whose face would be needed to gain entry to the event, I had to reserve one ticket for myself. Elizabeth, being my wife, is traditionally my plus one, so she would be going, too. Doling out the others would be a bit of a challenge.

  We were all gathered at a dinner table in a restaurant. I explained that I had these free tickets, and I could see my sons-in-law Joel and Andrew sit bolt upright with anticipation. The two of them are huge hockey fans. I know they’re hockey fans, they know I know they’re hockey fans. Who else could I possibly take along for this historic sporting event?

  “I thought I would take along Joel and Andrew, since they are such huge fans. They are the biggest hockey fans in the family, correct?”

  Everyone nodded, and Joel and Andrew did everything in their power not to stand up, high-five one another, and shout “In your face!” at their respective wives and children. But they conducted themselves with quiet dignity and grace.

  I had begun to dig in to dinner when my daughter Leslie piped up and said, “You know, Dad, Eric and Grant really like hockey.”

  Eric and Grant are two of my teenaged grandkids, who were both eagerly wolfing down their dinners. Joel and Andrew swallowed hard and stared at their plates, drumming their fingers nervously.

  “Oh, really?” I said. “I didn’t know that. Well . . .”

  It was time to negotiate. My first move?

  I excused myself.

  RULE: When You Need to Stall, Hit the Stall

  I went to the restroom, and paced back and forth. Joel and Andrew love hockey more than anything! Eric and Grant? Well, they liked hockey okay, but did they like it as much as Joel and Andrew? Probably not. For one thing, Joel and Andrew had about fifty years’ worth of fandom between them over my grandkids. Eric and Grant needed a few more years to develop their own typically unhealthy adult relationship with the sport.

  I splashed some water on my face and looked in the mirror. What was the negotiation endgame? Would I be a bad dad to my sons-in-law, or a bad grandpa to Eric and Grant? I needed a solution.

  I returned to the table and tucked my napkin under my chin, armed with the weapon that solves everything.

  Bribery.

  “Eric, Grant, instead of going to the hockey game, what do you say I put a little money in your accounts? The value of the tickets, maybe?”

  If my daughter’s eyes had made a sound when they rolled, I would have been knocked over by the sonic shockwave. Leslie was used to this—all my daughters are used to this. Dinner with Dad rarely went without a debate or negotiation of some sort.

  Negotiation aids the digestion! It warms you up for the eventual argument with the waiter over the check.

  My grandsons pondered this monetary offer between them for a second.

  “Nah,” said Eric. “We’ll take the tickets.”

  Grant agreed, in between mouthfuls. These grandkids of mine were tough negotiators. I was proud. They retained a unified front, wouldn’t negotiate without the other, stayed strong, showed that it wasn’t about money, it was about principle. And about watching grown men punch each other in the head on ice skates.

  They got the tickets.

  The grandkids won. It would be me, Elizabeth, and the two boys rinkside. It was then that I realized that good negotiating skills might not only be in the genetics of my blood relatives, because Joel played the ultimate trump card in any back and forth negotiation.

  His eyes filled with tears.

  Bravo, I thought to myself, while taking a big swig of sparkling water. Well played, young Joel! Crying always works!

  FUN FACTNER: William Shatner’s son-in-law Joel Gretsch is a busy actor on both the small and big screens. And like all good actors, he can cry on cue.

  I was very impressed, and waited to see which one of his nephews, seeing his uncle tear up, would be the first to fold and hand over a ticket. My other son-in-law, Andrew, is a special-effects artist. If he could have, he would have run away from the restaurant to fashion some sort of crying apparatus from latex and wire, but Joel beat him to the moist, sobby punch.

  But neither boy noticed. Elizabeth did.

  “Joel,” she said with great empathy, “you can have my ticket.”

  Lovely Elizabeth. She stood by her man by agreeing not to sit with him.

  There was much celebration as Joel danced on the table, and much relief for me. My wonderful Elizabeth had taken the heat off me. I was a great grandpa and a great father-in-law. And I was proud of my brood of negotiators.

  (NOTE: Later I found out that the tickets were going for $40,000 a pop on the street. Those little grandki
ds of mine were kicking themselves. They lost eighty grand! The Negotiator had triumphed! )

  Until the next day, when I got a call on the phone from one of the Olympic organizers.

  “Sorry, Mr. Shatner,” he quavered, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but your four tickets are gone.”

  “What?!?” I yelled. “You have to be joking.”

  “I wish I were, sir,” he apologized. “We think someone stole them. Did you know they were going for forty grand a pop? That’s $41,939 American.”

  They had lost my tickets. My $160,000 ($167,756 American) worth of hockey enjoyment. And family togetherness, and family harmony.

  There is one negotiation tool that should be used sparingly, only in case of an emergency. This was an emergency. I had to take a metaphorical hammer, smash some symbolic glass, and pull a real diva fit. Or, since I’m male, a divo fit.

  FUN FACTNER: In Canada, even diva fits are punctuated with “pleases,” “thank yous,” and “whatever is okays.”

  “You promised me, I’m here, I’m your star, you’re shafting me. I won’t go on!!!”

  I hung up the phone, the foul stench of my bluff hanging in the air. There was no way in heck I would bail on my native land over a few hockey tickets. But in a tough negotiation, you must be willing to at least sound tough.

  The Olympic official called back a few hours later. “Mr. Shatner, I got three tickets.”

  Was this good enough? Maybe. Joel and the grandsons could go. I’d be the best father-in-law, and best grandfather. I could win a gold medal in patriarchal love!

  I was about to say yes when the Evil Negotiator appeared. I could feel my sinister Vandyke beard growing on my face. Three tickets were not enough. The original four were not enough. I had to bring the hammer down!

  “I need six tickets!” I yelled, “I’ll take the three, but . . . I need six tickets. You must make this happen.”

  I almost said “please,” but then remembered my evil facial hair. Two hundred forty thousand dollars’ worth of tickets. To watch a hockey game.

  Would the full-on eruption of Mount Shatner be enough to close this deal?

  Joel and Andrew, Eric and Grant, and Elizabeth and I loved the hockey game. So did the man seated next to us, who was weeping and biting on his Canadian flag when our team won in overtime against the USA. I had perhaps forever made an enemy of a Canadian Olympic official—and if he is reading this, I apologize—but I had negotiated myself the title of World’s Greatest Dad/Granddad/Husband/Hockey Fan.

  Am I proud of what I did? I’m prouder of other things I’ve done. But I do wish I had held out for more money with the whole kidney stones thing.

  By the way, at the eleventh hour, my grandkids tried to see if there was any possibility of revisiting my “money in their bank accounts” offer instead of the tickets.

  Let me tell you—those two will not soon forget the day they first encountered the Evil Negotiator.

  CHAPTER 19

  RULE: Know Which Conversations Require a Bullet-Proof Vest

  “The greatest love in my life was my first squirrel.”

  Did I say this? No, although I have formed very strong bonds with several horses, many Dobermans, and the occasional orca.

  Is this the title of some self-help book, à la Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? Nope. This above statement was made on the set of my television show Aftermath, by one Mr. Bernhard Goetz.

  The greatest love of his life was a squirrel.

  With this statement, I learned that New York City’s “Subway Vigilante” had turned into New York’s foremost squirrel enthusiast. He lives with several of the creatures in his small apartment, and he has the scratches up and down his arms to prove it.

  I imagine squirrels are the only one of God’s creatures who are perfectly comfortable asking Bernhard Goetz for five dollars.

  Aftermath is a show I host and executive produce for the Biography Channel, the same channel that airs my other talk show, Raw Nerve, which I also executive produce.

  (This means there’s another 22.5 hours of daily programming on Bio that I need to start filling. Thank goodness I’m a multi-tasker. For instance, I am typing this while on the set of Aftermath. Mary Kay Letourneau and her husband, Vili Fualaau, are staring at me. Might need to pick this chapter up later.)

  Okay, it’s later. Had a very nice conversation with the Fualaaus. Check your local listings.

  Aftermath is an hour-long program that takes an in-depth look at what happens to people who are yanked from their anonymous, everyday lives and then dropped down hard onto the front pages of newspapers and tabloids. I sit down with these people, some forgotten, some not, and discuss with them how their lives have changed since their fifteen minutes of fame, or infamy.

  It is an amazing experience for me—professionally and personally. In my years on Earth, I have met presidents, the occasional religious leader, a spare royal or two. And in 2010, I found myself sitting within two feet of a man most famous for shooting four teenagers he thought were out to rob him.

  Bill and Bernhard Goetz discuss squirrels and guns on Aftermath in 2010. (Courtesy of Paul Camuso)

  Goetz’s life has certainly changed since that day on a crowded subway train in 1984. He’s no longer the cause célèbre of the citizens of a dangerous and crime-ridden New York. He’s not front-page news anymore. He buys and sells electronics on the Internet, and flies below the radar financially, so to speak, because of the massive civil judgment brought upon him by his brain-damaged victim, Darrell Cabey. But he’s still pretty quick with a gun.

  How do I know this? He pulled one on me.

  Halfway through our interview, Goetz was explaining how—after a brutal mugging in the early 1980s—he got hold of an illegal handgun and started practicing his quick draw. He would practice with the loaded weapon in his home, in his office, even in the elevators of his apartment building.

  I imagine many of his neighbors—when the doors of the elevators would open revealing an armed Bernhard Goetz—would stay put and say, “I’ll wait for the next one.”

  It was during the course of this discussion that one of my producers got the idea to give Goetz a gun and let him show me his quick-draw technique. While the producer hid somewhere behind the cameras, I imagine.

  We made certain the gun was empty, and after many, many hours of checking and rechecking the gun, Goetz made me stand up, not three feet away, and demonstrate what he did on the subway that day.

  Quick draw. Bang. Quick draw. Bang. Bang and bang.

  It’s a strange thing to stare into the eyes of such a figure, one who really hasn’t aged much since his time in the spotlight, and have him draw a gun on you and pull the trigger. And he’s a man who has no remorse about what he did.

  And he kept doing it, whipping it out of his waistband, pulling the trigger, aiming the gun at me, the cameramen, people standing around. It was almost childlike. I said to him, “People kid around with pistols like that, do that fast draw, like we did as kids. But you fast drew, and actually fired a bullet.”

  “Yeah . . . so?”

  And that “so” is the difference between people like Bernie Goetz and you and me. (I’ll assume you’re a pretty together person based on the wisdom of your Shatner Rules purchase.)

  That’s not much of a difference when you get right down to it. But Bernhard Goetz was, and is, living in his truth. And the truth is amorphous; it is what it is to the person who is living it. And with Aftermath, I want people to share their truth, unfiltered, without judgment. I am a man of some opinions, but I keep them to myself on Aftermath.

  That being said . . . after the taping, another producer came up to me and asked if I was scared of Goetz. I said, “No.” He said, “Well, you looked scared.” And I replied, “Well, I’ve never been that close to an
yone that crazy before.”

  Keep in mind, I’ve signed autographs at hundreds of science fiction conventions.

  Aftermath has allowed me to meet fascinating characters: the aforementioned Fualaaus came on to discuss their scandalous May-September (of the following year) romance; I spoke to survivors of the 1992 anti-government standoff at Ruby Ridge; I also chatted with New York’s notorious society girl–turned–Mayflower Madam Sydney Biddle Barrows; Iraq War hostage Jessica Lynch; and Unabomber brother Dave Kaczynski.

  I even did a prison interview with Lee Boyd Malvo, the teenager who—along with John Allen Muhammad—murdered at least ten people in 2002 in the DC Sniper spree.

  At the end of our conversation, I asked him, “Will God forgive you?”

  He said, “If I can forgive myself.”

  Was I talking to a murderer? Yes, but mostly I was also talking to a young guy who was horribly manipulated by a man he trusted and is now serving a life sentence. He has written letters to many of the survivors, and to the families of the murdered, apologizing for his actions.

  That interview with the sniper took weeks to happen. I would sit in my office between 4 and 6 P.M. every day, with the entire crew, waiting for the phone to ring. It finally went down when Malvo got access to the prison pay phone.

  While Aftermath has its share of the infamous, I’ve also had the opportunity to meet two men I deeply admire: tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, and Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst turned peace activist who released the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971.

  Ellsberg copied three thousand top secret pages of analysis and four thousand pages of government documents in forty-seven volumes, all of which showed that the Johnson administration had lied to the public and Congress about the war in Vietnam. It’s hard to realize the significance of this action, and the effort that it took, in this era of technological ease, when I can tell half a million people what I had for breakfast in the blink of an eye via Twitter.