Shatner Rules (9 page)

FUN FACTNER:
If you want to know what William Shatner just said, go to WilliamShatner.com.

After being lost for many years, a print of
Incubus
was found in France (of course) in 1999. The SyFy Channel restored it and released it on DVD. Mo Rocca of
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
on Comedy Central interviewed me at the time, heralding me as a “great foreign film actor” and “the top Esperanto box office draw.”

(NOTE TO SELF: Update business cards.)

Rocca also had a focus group of Esperanto speakers watch the film, who had unkind things to say about my Esperantan pronunciations.

Well, to them I say, “Kiss my butt.”

(That's actually the same in Esperanto as it is in English. We are all of us, in the world, united by certain commonalities.)

QUIZ

Which celebrity did not attended the premiere of
Incubus
at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1966?

A. Roman Polanski

B. Sharon Tate

C. William Shatner

M
y wife and I were in New York to attend a black-tie charity gala a few years ago. We were both dressed to kill, but a sudden, sharp pain in my side felt as if someone were killing me.

So I wound up in the hospital, in my tuxedo, on a weekend evening. Have you ever been inside an emergency room? In New York City? On a weekend? I don't remember the name of said hospital, but from the looks of things that night, it was somewhere in the outer borough of Despair.

The emergency room was so crowded, in fact, that I was not admitted to a proper room with a proper bed, but stuck on a gurney in a dark hallway. The gurney had stirrups, and in my sufferings, I stuck my feet in them to take some of the weight off my nether regions. My eyes were closed tight with the blinding pain, but I remember distinctly at one point a female passing me and saying, “Look, Captain Kirk is having a baby!”

Yep, the doctor said I had a kidney stone, and there was nothing to do but wait for it to pass. And take morphine. One, two, three shots of exquisite relief. Feeling no pain, I was now ready to go and hit the gala, but the wife wisely suggested that we stay in, and await the glorious arrival of my tiny bundle of uric acid and/or calcium buildup.

All things must pass, and my stone was no exception. It left fairly painlessly, we headed back home to Los Angeles, and for a few years my kidneys dutifully sorted waste products from my blood without incident.

Then, in 2006 . . .

Denny Crane was bent over Candice Bergen's desk, in a swirling maelstrom of physical agony.

(NOTE: This is not a passage from some kind of depraved
Boston Legal
fan fiction one would find on the Internet. Characters I've played, for some reason or other, always wind up in the most licentious fantasies of fan fiction authors. For years now, Kirk and Spock have heated up the pages of the fan fiction subgenre known as slash fiction, which deals primarily in gay relationships. Neither of us is homosexual, but if I were to dabble, I would surely avoid any encounter with a creature famed for its Vulcan death grip.)

(ADDITIONAL NOTE: I have also been informed that there is more than one webpage out there dedicated to Denny Crane/Alan Shore slash fiction. It must have been all the cigar smoking we did. Either way, the fair-haired dazzlement that is James Spader is a bit more appealing than Spock. Sorry, Leonard.)

(FINAL NOTE: And it has come to my attention that some enterprising web scribes have also published
T.J. Hooker
slash fiction. I guess I had a way with a nightstick.)

(ADDENDUM TO FINAL NOTE: Please, slash fiction writers, don't ever write any
Twilight Zone
“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” stories. (I'd hate to picture myself making love to a gremlin.)

 

Let us return to a subject slightly more savory: my agony. I was there on the set, collapsed on my costar's desk, bellowing, writhing, and flailing my arms about. For some, such histrionics are the universal signal that “Shatner's acting again,” but eventually I was able to convince the crew and the producers that I was in pain and needed medical attention. I was carted off from the set in an ambulance.

(Keep in mind, in the four seasons of
Boston Legal,
more than twenty different actors were hired to play recurring characters on the show, and many were fired after a season as David E. Kelly tinkered with the program's formula. Dramatic exits on that set were the norm, but since I didn't have a cardboard box of my belongings on my belly as I lay on the stretcher, people assumed I would be coming back.)

My body had manufactured more kidney stones. I was taken to a hospital in Burbank, where I was refused painkillers until the doctor examined me. I was desperate for them, and I pleaded for a doctor, any doctor—Dr. Scholl, Dr. Pepper, anyone—to hit me with that morphine syringe.

No dice—I had to wait in an agony akin to the kind experienced by the crew of the Starship
Enterprise
when they were forced to wear the collars of obedience in the episode “The Gamesters of Triskelion.”

Eventually, it became clear that this latest stone had no intention of going peacefully like its predecessor. It was not going to walk out of me with its hardened, crystallized hands in the air. The doctors were going to have to go in.

We were going to go . . . where no man . . . should go . . . at all.

The probe went up my urethra like Marlow trekking up the Congo to retrieve Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
. (By the way, high school students, feel free to use this analogy in any paper you might be required to write on Conrad's seminal work.
A
for originality!)

And they produced from my insides a little black crystal, a diabolic diamond, an onyx of agony. Forged in the heat of my body, compressed in my mighty urethra.

I could now put my kidney stone behind me, and return to a normal life.

Oh, did I mention I'm William Shatner? A “normal life” is sometimes just out of my grasp, which I was reminded of when I got the phone call from GoldenPalace.com.

Golden Palace is an online casino, run out of the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory near my beloved Montreal. When they aren't separating Internet gambling addicts from their hard-earned money with online blackjack, the people at Golden Palace engage in all sorts of bizarre publicity stunts. They once purchased a ten-year-old grilled cheese sandwich with an image of the Virgin Mary burned into the toast for $28,000. Did they eat it? I mean, talk about Immaculate Indigestion.

Golden Palace is the company that had their logo painted on Danny Bonaduce's back when he participated in the reality show
Celebrity Boxing
. They are the company that sponsored the work of professional streaker Mark Roberts. (How much overhead does a streaker need to cover?) They even paid a woman $15,000 to get their logo tattooed on her forehead.

They obviously wanted to class up their image a bit by getting into the business of William Shatner's urethra. Golden Palace reached out to me with an offer of $25,000 for my kidney stone.

The whole thing struck me as rather distasteful. And insulting.

Only $25,000? I won't get out of bed for that kind of money, and I certainly won't lie down in a gurney with my feet in stirrups for it. My kidney stone was a precious and pure calcification of magic publicity. It was time to do what I do best:

Negotiate!

My counteroffer was $100,000. This was a genuine William Shatner kidney stone. It conceivably could have been the most famous kidney stone extracted in the world; $25,000 was a pittance for my pain and suffering. If I were to settle for such a paltry amount—forget
GOLDEN PALACE
; they could tattoo
SUCKER
on my forehead.

And not just
my
pain and suffering—there was Elizabeth's suffering, the suffering of the
Boston Legal
crew, and the suffering of Candice Bergen to think about.

FUN FACTNER:
One of Candice Bergen's first films was
The Sand Pebbles
, which was also my nickname for my kidney stones.

Perhaps it was the mental duress imposed upon this five-time Emmy-winning actress that touched the hearts of the folks at Golden Palace, because they came around to offering $75,000 for my kidney stone. And since I had no plans to save the stone and press it into the pages of a scrapbook, or mount it onto a ring for my wife, I accepted the offer, and pledged to give the money to charity.

And Golden Palace could do with the stone what they wanted. I'm sure it tasted better than a ten-year-old grilled cheese Virgin Mary relic.

The
Boston Legal
family also kicked in an additional $25,000, and I donated the money to Habitat for Humanity. Such is the power of saying “yes!” (Seriously, remember that rule the next time an online casino wants to pay you for your kidney stones. You'll thank me.)

Habitat for Humanity is an international nonprofit organization devoted to building homes for the people without the means to buy one. They are located in Atlanta, Georgia, and in 2006, they were busy helping rebuild after the carnage of Katrina. Our $100,000 was used to build a home in Louisiana for a family who had been displaced by the storm. My kidney stone, more viable than Freddie Mac or Countrywide, built a wonderful, lovely home. It was worth all that pain and humiliation.

I was later blessed with a photo of the house that my kidney stone built, and the smiling Louisiana family out front. I have never spoken to them, but perhaps this is a good time to explain to them some of the . . .

RULES FOR LIVING IN THE HOUSE THAT SHATNER'S KIDNEYS BUILT

 

1. If Shatner ever comes by, he gets to use the bathroom.

2. As a sign of tribute, please rename your home Billstone Manor. I can provide you with my measurements for the statue out front. (They won't be exactly accurate—the statue might be made a little taller and more ripped—but this is a
tribute
.)

3. If Shatner does come by, please provide fresh water and foods that are not high in oxalate. I know you like your home, but I never want to get kidney stones again.