Several dozen severed body parts were stacked neatly on a shelf behind the table where my son was seated, wearing a garbage bag. Atop the table was a pillow, covered in a towel, upon which Jacob had been asked to lean his head so that the potato salad container covering his right ear could lie flat. Into this plastic container, its bottom sliced off, a hip-looking Asian woman and a man with a Mohawk were spooning a goopy, white substance with a Popsicle stick, completely covering my son’s ear. If you’re having trouble picturing this, I have photos.
The goop would harden into a mold, which would then be used to create pointy ear extensions made out of the same fleshlike rubber as the other disembodied appendages on the shelf, some recognizable: Keanu Reeves’s head; the red-horned devil from the mock rock movie classic Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny; Philip Seymour Hoffman’s face, its eyes gouged out; seven increasingly receding iterations of Tom Cruise’s hair. “Is that where Jacob’s ears are going to go when you’re done with them?” I asked, pointing to the shelf.
“Nah,” said Barney, owner of both the grisly parts and of the special effects company that created them. He was checking out the texture of a disembodied arm into which another one of his technicians was poking human hairs, one by one. “We’ll probably hide ’em somewhere else. Those Trekkies are hard-core. Somebody tried to steal the trash out of our dumpster the other day.” Pleased with the arm’s hirsuteness, Barney now turned his attention to the work of another of his employees, a woman in her sixties who was doing something that looked vaguely S&M-like to a headless torso.
“Really? I thought they were just being paranoid,” I said, referring to the producers of the new Star Trek film, who’d just hired my son to play Adolescent Spock. Not only had we yet to read a word of the script, save a few pages of Jacob’s lines (known in industry parlance as “sides”)—which he wasn’t even allowed to see prior to the audition until both of us had signed nondisclosure agreements—but also every piece of communication between the film company and us, including those sides, Jacob’s contract, and the many e-mails, faxes, and phone calls suddenly flooding my various electronic devices, all stated that Jacob would be playing the part of “Young Gil” in a film called Corporate Headquarters. As in, “Hi, this is Heather from Corporate Headquarters. Am I speaking with Mrs. Kogan?” An opener that, when I first heard it, had me asking to be placed on a do-not-call list.
“Paranoid?” said Barney of the grisly parts. “Hardly.” People were starting to show up in his parking lot, he said, snooping around for either sentimental memorabilia or stuff to sell on eBay. I noticed that the shades of the studio’s windows, which looked out over the parking lot, were completely drawn. “You don’t understand. Star Trek is…huge.”
The day Jacob was asked to join the crew of the Enterprise, you would have thought from my husband’s reaction that his son had been anointed the next Dalai Lama. Star Trek, to a shy, geeky, nine-year-old Soviet émigré growing up on welfare in Washington Heights in the mid-1970s, as my husband had once been, was more than just a TV show. It was an escape hatch from the daily rigors of trying to assimilate into a new culture; it was a mirror held up to Paul’s own hard-to-articulate alienation; it was both the best English lessons a native Russian-speaking Yeshiva bocher could ever hope for and the only entertainment he could afford. “You don’t understand,” he’d said, when he heard the news. “Star Trek is…huge.”
“Live long and prosper, dude,” I’d responded, holding my hand up in the Vulcan salute, the priestly blessing of the Kohanim (aka Jews named Cohen), which Leonard Nimoy had witnessed as a young boy in synagogue with his grandfather and one day appropriated for his character. Ironically, for those who care about such things, my son is actually a member of the Kohanim. Kogan is the Russian form of Cohen—the Cyrillic alphabet substitutes gs for hs, as in Gamlet, Gawaii, and, speaking of Kohanim, Gitler—although, following the exact theological letter of the law, since Paul’s late mother, Rachel Kogan, was actually a single parent who passed down her name matrilinearly, Jacob would not officially be allowed to perform the Vulcan salute in an orthodox shul, should he ever be so inclined.
“Don’t make fun of me,” said Paul. “I’m serious, this is a big deal.”
“No,” I said. “One of our kids winning the Nobel? That would be a big deal. This is just…a film. Spock is just a part.”
Our friends Michael and Jonathan, both science fiction buffs, were equally dumbfounded when they heard the news. “Nooooooooo waaaaaayyyyyyy,” I could hear Michael saying in the background as his wife, whom I’d called to chat about other things, told him the news. “Noooooooooooooooo waaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy!” This is a man who won a Pulitzer for his perspicacity with words. Jonathan, a MacArthur Fellow, pulled me aside at a work event we were both attending to try to get me to understand the significance of Jacob’s ascension to Star Trek lore. “You do realize your son will now be the answer to a trivia question for the rest of his life,” he said, without irony. “You do understand what this means?”
“Not really,” I said. To me, Star Trek was that show my grandfather watched, instead of watching me. And Spock was the pediatrician whose book I consulted whenever one of my babies got sick. Trekkies (or Trekkers, as the real enthusiasts prefer to be called) were those guys lampooned in Galaxy Quest. And my son’s minor role in the canon—his part was only a few pages long, we were told—would nevertheless mean I’d have to spend ten days on set in Los Angeles, at a time when my family could ill afford my absence. The book you now hold in your hands was due imminently. And my daughter, following the whole sex-with-a-lemming debacle, was having a rough go of it at school.
“Everyone thinks I’m bad!” she kept saying.
“No they don’t,” I kept reminding her. No one goes from goody-good to baddy-bad overnight, I said. The kids and the administration and the parents who’d been called, as well as those who’d simply heard about the incident via gossip, all knew that. But even I could see the way some of the mothers in the yard would look at us whenever I picked up my daughter from school on Fridays, our appointed afternoon of bonding. Crazy mother, I could almost hear them thinking as Sasha would hop onto the back of my Vespa. No wonder the kid got into trouble. Then, clutching the keys to their SUVs, they’d say something artificially benign like, “Is that thing safe?,” and I’d picture the family of five plus a chicken I’d seen in Malaysia, balancing on a single scooter, or the chic woman in Rome, wearing her infant in a sling as she zoomed around the streets of Trastevere, or the father on his Vespa in Paris, carting his two kids home from school—one in front, one behind, none of them wearing helmets—and I would sigh in defeat and say something appropriately cheerful and idiotic like, “Well, I haven’t crashed yet!”
When some of the parents push me on it, as they inevitably do, I tell them I’ve been riding scooters on and off for twenty years, ever since I moved to Paris after college, and I know no better or cheaper means of navigating a city, with or without a kid in tow. Unlike many cities around the globe, where safe urban bike paths have been established—we’re getting there here in the United States, but we’re not there yet—our cities are far more dangerous to bicyclists than they are to scooterists, who use normal traffic lanes and go the same speed limit as cars instead of having to ride between the parked cars and the traffic. Yes, I’m burning fossil fuels, and I feel appropriately guilty about that, but I’ve never owned a car, and a single gallon of gasoline—the entire capacity of my gas tank—lasts me a whole week. I can make it from Leo’s day care uptown to my office downtown in fifteen minutes or less. Crosstown journeys, where public transportation in my city is at its weakest, are a breeze. As an added bonus, every mundane trip to fetch a kid from a play-date or to go to the grocery store or to meet with an editor or to take Jacob back and forth to his Star Trek audition turns into an exhilarating moment of transcendence and beauty.
Next stop after the ear fitting was a costume fitting on the studio lot, which because we’d arrived in LA on the first day of the Writers Guild strike, was tricky. Jacob’s driver, a Teamsters union member, refused to cross the picket line in his vehicle, so we parked just outside a lesser-known entrance and crossed it on foot. This was merely a symbolic gesture from one union member to another, as we were on a tight schedule with little room for Socratic debate. “We’re just going for a costume fitting,” I said, by way of apology to the team of two picketers handing out leaflets at the lesser-known entrance, and the writers said no problem, it was cool, so long as neither of us were writers.
“But, Mom,” said my son, “you’re a—”
I squeezed his hand, hard.
“Ow! Jesus, Mom. What the hell?”
When we were safely inside, I explained that the kind of writing I do—books, magazine articles, essays—doesn’t count as writing in Hollywood.
“What does it count as?” said Jacob.
I thought about it for a second: my books take years to write, and I get paid very little; a TV script can be dashed off in a few weeks, and its author gets paid a bundle. Lunacy, I thought.
Michael, the costume designer, was unhappy with the thickness of Jacob’s Vulcan costume. I would describe the costume, but I can’t. Or I could, as long as you wouldn’t mind a Vulcan nerve pinch to the neck immediately afterward. As I write this, Star Trek is still months away from hitting the theaters, and I am still bound by the terms of my nondisclosure agreement. So I’ll just speak in general terms and say that the costume was, well, there’s no other way of saying it: it was a dress. My son was wearing a dress.
This would not be the first time Jacob had worn a dress, nor would it be even the second or third. When he was two, he found a floral Ralph Lauren dress, size 2T, that had been given to his little sister as a baby present, and he put it on and twirled around in it to the theme from Titanic. He appropriated Sasha’s tutu soon thereafter, which he paired with a birthday hat (and not much of anything else), and then about a year later he borrowed his friend Emma’s sequined Little Mermaid gown, which he would slip on after his bath.
He made no distinction, however, between a dress and a pirate suit or a coat of armor or a firefighter’s hat. He appropriated them all with equal abandon, standing up on coffee tables and chairs and any other raised platforms he could find. There he would sing and act and perform until he was either hoarse or it was time for bed. Meanwhile, Sasha would stand underneath him in her football jersey—she’d only shop in the boys’ department—quietly observing her brother’s id writ large before shaking her head and slinking back into her room to draw “I want a dog!” next to a girl in a football jersey, which she would then tape to our front door. She’s the real Vulcan of the family—quiet, contemplative, logical—and has been since birth, just as Jacob’s always been the Kirk. The jury’s still out on Baby Leo, but judging by his attachment to his ukulele and Nirvana Unplugged, it’s only a matter of time before he’s skipping baths and shooting smack.
“Can we stiffen it up right in here?” Michael was asking his assistant, fingering the dramatic neck of the dress. “It shouldn’t droop.” Michael, who’s done costumes for dozens of films, is blessed not only with a talent for design and great bone structure—think Mikhail Baryshnikov with a full head of dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses—but with an aura of eerie calm and poise that belied the enormity of the task at hand. Behind him, on a bulletin board, were dozens of fabric swatches and photographs torn from magazines to serve as inspiration for a complicated alien sequence with many extras that was scheduled to shoot soon: Afghanis in burkas, a Tu-areg man in traditional dress, a Cambodian woman sitting on the floor next to a loom, Western models walking down catwalks, alien babies, and a man, of indistinct origins, clutching what looked like Yorick’s skull under his arm.
“No problem,” said the assistant, one of three hovering around Jacob. “We’ll have to tear it apart and build it back up from scratch, but we’ll get it done tonight.” The film was scheduled to start shooting imminently, and the costume production rooms were overflowing with yards of fabric demanding attention. None of the seamstresses, one sensed, would be getting much sleep, perhaps for months to come, but still, you could tell: it was a well-oiled machine. Then again, that’s the kind of grease a big-budget Hollywood production buys you: Michael’s calm, a roomful of assistants, and the ability to completely tear apart and restructure a young boy’s dress overnight.
This stood in stark contrast to the atmosphere on the indie film Jacob had shot three months earlier, the one with exactly. 1 percent of the budget of Star Trek. One particularly chaotic day, along with my regular duties as Jacob’s on-set guardian, I served as Wardrobe (they literally took the sweater off my back and put it on Jacob), on-set photographer (they had none), hairstylist (ditto), continuity (“Um, hello? I’m pretty sure he wasn’t wearing the sweatshirt in that last shot…”), extra (to replace the “Woman walking her dog at night” who missed the train down from Penn Station), animal wrangler (“Oh, man. Anyone have a plastic bag?”), props (“Yes, I have a ten-dollar bill for Jacob to pay the taxi driver in the shot, hold on a sec”), catering (if you count the two cheesecakes I bought, when the crew was threatening mutiny for lack of dessert), and grip (someone had to help them move furniture at 2:00 A.M., or we would have never gotten out of there).
That shoot had spoiled our annual family vacation with the grandparents, cutting our normal two weeks together to four days. My parents took Sasha for the full two weeks while Paul and I took turns dealing with Jacob on set in New Jersey and with Baby Leo back in New York; still, no one was happy about it, least of all Sasha, whose name, in the middle of the costume fitting, was now flashing across my cell phone.
I excused myself to pick it up and heard the squealing chaos of school pickup on the other end. “Mom,” she said, “can I go over to Skylar’s after school?”
“Sure,” I said, pleased that Sasha had recently found a coterie of new friends, two boys and a girl whom she seemed to genuinely like and with whom she made spontaneous plans without my intervention. “Call Daddy. See if he can pick you up on his way home from work.”
“I did. He never answers his cell phone.”
When Jacob was tapped to play Adolescent Spock, we rented a bunch of early Star Trek episodes to show him. What was fascinating—to me, not to Jacob, who was barely three years old when our family purchased its first cell phone—was the way in which mobile phones, tablet PCs, PDAs, video conferencing, and even MRIs were all predicted by the creators of the show. In fact, some say the Star Trek franchise actually motivated the design for many of the new gadgets and doohickeys we now either take for granted or, in my husband’s case, ignore. “Sasha, look, I’m sorry, sweetie. I know Daddy doesn’t always pick up his cell phone, but I’m busy right now. Try to work it out with him, okay?”
You’d think they could have figured out the teleporter by now. Our family could really use one. Or five.
“But, Mom!”
“Sasha, please.” I turned to Michael. “I’m sorry. I’m just dealing with stuff back at the mother ship.”
“No worries,” said Michael, who looked as if he never worried.
In “The Cage,” the pilot episode of Star Trek we rented for Jacob, the Enterprise was captained by a man named Pike. (William Shatner as Captain Kirk didn’t appear until the following episode.) At one point in the story, another character, Boyce, notes that Captain Pike looks tired. “You bet I’m tired!” says Pike. “I’m tired of being responsible for two hundred and three lives, and…I’m tired of deciding which mission is too risky and which isn’t, and who’s going on the landing party and who doesn’t…and who lives…and who dies.”
Now, granted, I’m in charge of three children rubbing up against the realities of modern-day Earth instead of 203 shipmates rubbing up against futuristic aliens in deep space, and my responsibilities don’t usually involve life and death—although we have had our share of family outings in ambulances—but let’s just say that in my own small way, I understood where Pike was coming from. It’s hard being the captain of a ship, no matter its mission, star date, or battlefronts. Especially when your first officer doesn’t pick up his communicator. “I’ll e-mail Daddy from my phone,” I told my daughter. “He always reads his e-mail.”
The film’s first day of shooting was also our first day on set, at a power plant an hour south of Los Angeles, where Ja-cob would begin a week of martial arts and combat training. Security that day—and every day thereafter—was extremely tight: every car had to have a pass; every Teamster had to be facially recognized by one of the many security guards manning the fenced-off entrance; every actor, when not shooting inside the power plant or sitting inside his trailer, had to wear a full-length black raincoat, with hood, over his costume to cover it from prying eyes. Even so, the paparazzi must have been lurking somewhere in the shadows, because photos of Zach Quinto, the new Spock, would appear on several film and Star Trek blogs the next day, his costume partially visible underneath his raincoat. “We’ve had a security breach!” one of the crew members announced, without irony, the morning this happened. “Make sure you keep Jacob out of sight.”
While I understood the motivation for such high levels of security—to keep the Trekkies out, to keep the material fresh, to surprise audiences with stuff they haven’t already been seeing on the Web for over a year—on some level it seemed excessive. When I was a young journalist covering the Soviet coup, and Yeltsin was holed up in the Russian parliament building, I was able, even with a suddenly obsolete Soviet press pass, to sneak onto the premises, past security detail much less rigorous than Star Trek’s, though then it was the future Russian president’s life that was at stake, not his media freshness.
Jacob would be spending most of his time either in the school trailer, completing his requisite four hours of schoolwork a day, or in the gym tent set up on the outskirts of base camp to train him and Chris Pine, the new Kirk, one of the most arrestingly beautiful humans in our solar system.
I’d sit on a folding chair in that tent with my laptop and noise-canceling headphones, trying to work while Jacob mastered the basics of movie combat—how to fall forward on his forearms, to avoid damage to his face and chin; how to throw a fake punch so the camera doesn’t see it; how to maneuver out of an attack with a backward somersault—when suddenly, in would stride Pine, all six feet of him, wearing nothing but a pair of gym shorts. He’d jump rope. He’d run laps around the tent. He’d spar with a trainer, his hairless chest glistening with beads of sweat. I tried to ignore this young man, in the prime of his beauty, just as thoroughly as he ignored over-the-hill, dumpy, big-nosed me, but—here’s to you, Mrs. Koganson!—my powers of concentration were no match for such pheromones. Not a single word I managed to eke out in that gym ever made it into this book.
One afternoon, just as we were sitting down to lunch in the craft services tent, a PA came to fetch us. “Can we borrow Jacob for a minute?” he said. “J.J. needs him.” J.J. is the director of Star Trek.
Jacob, who’d spent the whole morning fighting fake battles and getting bruised, eyed his uneaten food hungrily. “Can I eat my chicken first?”
“No,” said the PA. “J.J. needs you now.”
Jacob put down his fork and stood up. “Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”
J.J. is also cocreator of the TV show Lost. J.J.’s casting director, April, had once called, several months earlier, to ask if Jacob wanted to play a minor role on that show, but it would have conflicted with a family plan, so I’d said no.
Jacob had been upset with me when he’d realized the role I’d turned down on his behalf—the chance to play Ben’s younger self, omg, in Hawaii!—so when J.J.’s casting director called again, asking him to play Adolescent Spock, he happily accepted, not because of any innate love for Star Trek, which he’d never seen, but for the chance to work with his generation’s Gene Roddenberry. Meaning, not much can keep my son from a savory chicken lunch, but the chance to quiz J.J. himself on the future plotlines of his favorite show could.
The PA accompanied us to the parking lot, where J.J. was walking in and around the perimeters of two giant circles marked with tape on the ground, his eye flush up against his viewfinder, while a group of his colleagues stood by. J.J. shares the same black-framed, cool-nerd taste in eyewear as his costume designer, but he wears them unironically: one senses in the man the dutiful bar mitzvah boy he must have once been. His smile, as much a part of his signature look as his eyewear, is genuine, inviting, and he addresses everyone on set with an intoxicating insouciance, as if we were all just hanging out backstage at the high school theater instead of congregating on multimillion-dollar sets.
“Oh, good, Jacob,” he said, when he spotted my son, “glad you’re here. Did you know the second J in my name stands for Jacob? Jeffrey Jacob. Isn’t that cool?” He held the viewfinder up to his eye and directed my son to stand between the two circles on the ground. “Yup,” he said to the large coterie around him, “I knew it. The shot’s not going to work. I need a third bowl.”
An architect holding his rendering, in three-dimensional miniature, of the two giant “bowls” marked on the macadam, nodded his head and stared down at his model, turning it this way and that. The bowls—around eight to ten feet in diameter, if I had to guess—were to be constructed on the Paramount lot and used in a scene that would be shot a month hence, when Jacob would return to LA with my father for another eleven days of combat training and shooting.
The man standing next to the architect, presumably the producer, said, “We can’t do it, J.J. We don’t have the budget for it.”
J.J. turned to me, a woman he’d barely met, as if confiding in a close friend. “Can you believe it? They’re making me beg.” This instant rapport he has with others is hardly fake. Nine months later, when my father would be told he had only two to six months left to live—meaning he would not live long enough to see Star Trek released—J.J. would personally arrange for Dad and Jacob to fly out to Los Angeles for a private early screening.
Now he turned back to the producer. “Come on! What’ll it cost? Thirty-five grand?”
“Twenty-five,” said the producer.
“Even better. What’s another twenty-five grand? We need the shot.”
No wonder Jacob was getting paid scale, and Kirk and Spock would be played by relative unknowns. All that money was going into visual richness, into the filmmaking itself. Which—I had to hand it to J.J. and the producers—was admirable.
“We’re already over budget as it is,” said the producer.
“Okay, so now we’re going to be over by slightly more, and it’ll be fine, trust me.”
The producer smiled warily and shook his head in defeat. How could you say no to the bar mitzvah boy? “Fine. You can have your third bowl.”
“Excellent,” said J.J. Then he addressed my son. “Thanks, Jacob. Really appreciate it. You’re having fun? Everyone being nice to you? Are you getting excited to shoot your scene?”
Jacob nodded and said a clipped “uh-huh” to each question, bursting, I could tell, with his own questions but not wanting to interrupt. Finally, as J.J. turned to head back to the set, my son could take it no longer. “Can I ask you something?” he called out. “About Lost?”
J.J. stopped in his tracks and checked his watch. Then he turned around. “Sure, go ahead,” he said. “But you have to understand I might not be able to answer.”
“I know.” I could see Jacob weighing the various unresolved plot issues in his head, trying to decide which was worth holding up a shoot. “Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking: Is Ben keeping Jacob prisoner?”
A huge smile crept over J.J.’s face as he put his hand on my son’s shoulder. “Interesting theory,” he said. “But of course I can’t tell you. You understand why, right?”
“Yeah, I understand,” said my son, “it wouldn’t be fair,” and I could see by his defeated expression that this, above all, was why he had made the pilgrimage to LA, to ask the prophet himself about the mysteries of the island, and now he would have to leave as unsatisfied as when he arrived. This was as good a training for life, I thought, as anything else: to learn to accept a world of ambiguity, where mysteries refuse to reveal themselves, reality doesn’t live up to expectation, and hopes are often dashed. When Jacob’s lunch was handed to him in a Styrofoam container, as the meal was now officially over, he allowed himself to finally own his disappointment. “It’s cold,” he said sadly. “The chicken’s cold.”
“Okay, you can come read the script now,” said a PA named Sean, who’d come to fetch us one morning as we made our way from the set.
Jacob and I were wearing our regulation hard hats and safety goggles, each one numbered to correspond to our names, which we were required to put on whenever visiting the set inside the power plant. It was hard at first to figure out where the power plant ended and the set began, although every once in a while you’d turn a dark corner or climb a rickety staircase and run into a Starfleet crew member or an alien, and then you’d know.
We’d both just taken a short break from our work to watch several takes of a scene involving a fiery explosion and lots of people running down hallways, but we had no idea who the characters were or how the scene fit into the story or why that enormous man was dressed up in the green, hairy, alien outfit that had him sweating so profusely.
Sean escorted us to the on-set headquarters of Corporate Headquarters, a trailer in which a few rare copies of the script were kept locked and under twenty-four-hour surveillance in a metal safe. Handing us each a copy, after having us sign on a dotted line as proof of temporary receipt, Sean reminded us of the rules: no leaving the trailer with the script; no talking about the plot, characters, or details with anyone; no taking notes. Once we’d finished reading, we were to hand the scripts back to Sean, immediately, for re-interment.
I don’t think I’m breaking any of those rules or the nondisclosure agreement by saying that I found the script entertaining, even if I didn’t catch all the references a true Trekkie would have. Unfortunately, the real world got in the way of my enjoyment of the fictional one when, halfway through reading the script, I got a phone call from the assistant principal at my daughter’s school, who was calling to tell me that she’d received word from another parent, who preferred to remain anonymous, that the new clique of friends my daughter had joined was too alpha.
“Too alpha?” I said, wondering who the other parent could be and what event had motivated her call. “But what specifically has Sasha done? Was she mean to someone?”
“No.”
“Did she hurt someone?”
“No.”
“So wait,” I said, growing confused. “How would you like me to address this with her? What exactly should I say?”
“You should tell her she has to be friends with everyone. She can’t have just three good friends.”
Really? I thought. When I was growing up, I was the kind of kid who tried to be friends with everyone, which later in life I realized meant I was actually friends with no one. Sasha, on the other hand, has always had intensely close friendships with one or two children at a time. It is who she is and always has been—the unflappable Spock to her friends’ Kirk and McCoy—and it has largely served her well. I explained this, as best I could, to the assistant principal, as well as pointing out that this might not be the best time to stigmatize Sasha any further.
“But the girl whose mother called feels left out of the group,” she said. I wondered whether the girl in question was Jane.3 After the lemming incident but before Sasha found her three new friends, Jane’s mother and I had tried to engineer a friendship between Sasha and Jane. But it hadn’t really taken, at least not from Sasha’s end. “How’s it going with Jane?” I’d said hopefully one time, and Sasha had just shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Sometimes we run out of stuff to talk about.”
Sasha had recently had a sleepover with three new friends, and a few days later Jane’s mother, who’d invited Sasha to come to the theater with the two of them, had suddenly e-mailed to rescind the invitation.
“Well, I feel bad for the girl, whoever she is,” I said—having more than once been that girl myself, I could feel her pain—“but I can’t force my daughter to be friends with anyone or everyone. Besides, not to get too philosophical here or anything, but isn’t that just the human condition? To feel a part of some groups and left out from others?” You were either alien or human, a survivor of Oceanic Flight 815 or an Other, a Montague or a Capulet, and sure, you could cross over from one group to the other or have pieces of both—Vulcan and human, say—within you, but at some point you had to choose your friends and your place in the universe, and no amount of outside meddling, however well intentioned, could change that. “Look,” I continued, “the fact that my daughter has any friends at all, after last year’s debacle, is a huge leap.” I told the assistant principal about our thwarted vacation the previous summer, how I’d told Sasha she could bring along any girl she wanted to keep her company, but she hadn’t been able to come up with a single name.
“Just tell her she has to be friends with everyone,” the assistant principal repeated, and I started wondering if it was even possible for every child in the fifth grade to be friends with every other child in the class. I’ve never known a fifth grade in which this was true, but then again, civilization is advancing: when I was a child, it was inconceivable for the Soviet Union to ever befriend the United States, but then Yeltsin stood on a tank, and I married a Russian.
I made one last-ditch effort to procure a name, because Sasha, though herself quite Vulcan, does actually have empathy for those more human. When she “broke up” with her “boyfriend”—I put quotes around these terms because I’m not sure one can actually call two ten-year-olds text messaging each other dating—the boy’s father called two weeks later, appropriately apologetic, to explain that his son was in a bad way, and could Sasha please find it in her heart to sit with him at lunch just one more time? My daughter, uncharacteristically, wept with guilt and dutifully joined the boy at his lunch table the next day.
But the reunion, imposed as it was from above, was short-lived. A day later, she was back at her table, he was back at his, and today they no longer share bags of potato chips let alone shorthand intimacies (wassup? idk, u?) over their handheld communicators. This makes me sad—I adore that boy and his poet’s raw heart—but just because I love him and admired the sensitive way his father handled the situation, parent to parent, instead of anonymous parent to school administrator, I could no more force my daughter to love him than Capulet could force Paris upon Juliet.
“Okay, Jacob, it’s time to get Vulcanized!” said the PA who came to fetch him from the school trailer. It was two days before Jacob was set to shoot his scene, and J.J. wanted to see how he looked in full makeup.
“I just wanted you to know they’re saying they have to shave off half of Jacob’s eyebrows to make him look like Spock,” Jacob’s agent, Mara, had warned us, before we’d agreed to take the part. She was concerned that this would hurt his chances of future employment.
“That’s okay,” I’d said. “He just won’t go out on any auditions for a while, that’s all.” I was actually relieved at the thought of a little shaved-eyebrow-induced hiatus. Jacob had just started going to and from auditions on his own, but all the administrative work—reading the scripts, printing out sides, running his lines, poring over the fine print of his contracts—still fell squarely on my shoulders. And with my own work now in overdrive, a newly bipedal baby, a real adolescent Vulcan and a fake one, I relished the idea of a break from at least one of my captain’s duties.
When I told Jacob about the eyebrows, however, he lost it. “That’s it,” he said. “Forget it. I’m not shaving my eyebrows.”
“Half your eyebrows,” I reminded him.
“Whatever. I’ll look like a freak!” Try to remember, if you will, what it felt like to be in seventh grade, with all the bodies around you suddenly mutating before your eyes. Now try to imagine walking into class with half an eyebrow.
“Fine, I’ll tell Mara you’ll pass on the part.”
But a few hours later, just as I was getting ready to call Ja-cob’s agent to turn down the role, he changed his mind. “It is J.J. Abrams, so I guess I can deal with the eyebrow thing,” he said, as if he were Abraham accepting his duty to bind Isaac. Which was another reason why not getting an answer to his Lost question must have been a bit of a blow. Here he was, ready to slay his firstborn son—or at least shave off his eyebrows—to show his devotion to the Almighty, and He couldn’t give Jacob a crumb.
The bar mitzvah boy in J.J. must have sensed this, because a few weeks later a package showed up at our apartment, containing a huge box of Lost action figures signed by both him and Damon Lindelof. It wasn’t insider knowledge about the motivations of Others, but it was definitely something Jacob could share with his friends.
“You sure you’re ready for this?” I said to him as the PA led us to the hair and makeup trailer for the final transformation from seventh-grade kid to Vulcan messiah.
“No,” said Jacob, “but let’s get it over with before I chicken out.”
Four hours later, his honey-brown hair had been dyed a deep black and pruned into a severe helmet. His outer eyebrows were shaved off and restructured, one spirit-gummed follicle at a time, to rise up at the temples. His ears were augmented with the Vulcan points that had just arrived from the fx studio. “How do you feel?” said J.J.
Jacob stared at his new face in the mirror, raising his new eyebrows up and down, turning his neck back and forth to get a better view of his ears. “Like Spock,” he said, smiling.
The day of the shoot itself, at a church on the outskirts of town, the producers weren’t taking any chances. No one in costume was allowed outside, where paparazzi lenses were harder to protect against because of the church’s perch amid rolling hills, providing clear vantage points from nearly 360 degrees. Every time Jacob had to be brought to the set or taken to one of the food and snack tables, a “pope mobile”—a golf cart with black curtains blocking each side—showed up to escort him. Even the path from the pope mobile to the church was carefully hidden from view by white tenting constructed over it.
The church itself, however, was enclosed almost entirely in glass, so photos of Zach Quinto in full costume appeared on the Web the next day, but it was a minor victory for Paramount that not a single paparazzi image of either Jacob or Winona Ryder, who played his mother, or Ben Cross, who played Spock’s father, showed up on a blog.
The scene they were shooting that day was the one immediately following a fight scene Jacob would shoot in a month’s time, in those aforementioned bowls, when my father would return with him to LA. Because films are often shot out of sequence, the events of that future/past scene meant that Jacob, the day I was there, had to be made up to look as if his eyes and lips were bruised and bloodied from a school yard brawl.
It’s a pivotal scene, both in the film and in the young Spock’s life, when the half-Vulcan, half-human boy has to decide who he is and where he belongs. I can’t tell you which identity he ultimately chooses—though any half-serious Trekkie could—but I can say I remembered thinking at the time, when I saw the green Vulcan blood caked around my son’s lips, that Hollywood sure loves to paint school yard scuffles in dramatic brushstrokes. I’d never actually seen a kid come home bloodied and bruised from an altercation on the playground, despite the film industry’s frequent use of the trope.
The next morning I received another call from my daughter’s school. There’d been a fight on the playground. Sasha’s nose was bleeding. Profusely.
“What?” I said. Never mind the odd synchronicity between fiction and reality. This was a girl who had always hated the idea of violence, who’d never once hit anyone, including her brother.
According to what I could piece together over the phone, Sasha had been defending the honor of one of the girls outside her clique, someone she knew well enough but not well, whom one of the boys—a member of Sasha’s clique—had threatened to unmask as having a crush on another boy. Before the boy could reveal this information to the crush, Sasha urged him not to. When he decided to run off and tell the crush anyway, the girl in question told Sasha to slap him. Which stupidly she did. The boy retaliated with either a punch to the nose or a dodgeball to the face, accounts differ. The school retaliated by taking away recess privileges for a week from both Sasha and the slapped boy, but not from the girl who instigated the fight.
“It’s one thing to tell someone to slap a kid,” said the assistant principal, “and another to actually do it.” Fair enough, I thought, even though the real world doesn’t work that way. Telling someone else to shoot your husband for, say, neglecting to answer his cell phone will still get you forty years to life. Plus if Sasha had been the one to tell the girl to slap the boy, she would have been punished along with the other two, no question. That’s the risk she runs, I’ve told her many times, by choosing to be a part of a group: the group’s reputation, whether deserved or not, will always reflect positively or negatively upon her individually.
I would decide to ground Sasha for the month, to express my displeasure with her actions, but part of me couldn’t help sympathizing with her. She’d been warned, by the assistant principal, that she had to be friends with everyone. Being friends with everyone meant being ready to defend everyone’s honor. Which was impossible, since somebody’s honor was always being challenged, a priori, by someone else’s. Didn’t you have to, at some point, like Adolescent Spock, choose sides? Isn’t that what growing up meant, to figure out who you were and what you believed in, who your allies were and where you felt most at home?
There are times when even a Vulcan is forced to use his nerve pinch, and lacking such an option, Sasha had chosen a less-than-optimal substitute. Slapping a kid was wrong, no doubt, but the revelation of a secret crush would be like breaking the Prime Directive, the guiding principle of the United Federation of Planets, which states that there can be no interference within the narrative arc of a civilization. And if thwarting the possible love between two fifth graders—or, for that matter, trying to socially engineer the lives of one’s offspring—does not count as interfering in the narrative arc of a civilization, I don’t know what does.
I asked the assistant principal to put my daughter on the phone. “Come home,” she said, plaintively, her Vulcan cool completely shattered. “I need you.”
A captain can only stay away for so long, I realized, before the ship starts to implode. Her crew needs her if they are to boldly go not only where no man has gone before, but to go where every man, woman, and child has gone before and lived to tell. Life on Earth can be hard for an adolescent Vulcan. Especially for one who’s half-human. “I know, sweetie,” I said. “I’m coming home.”