Up Till Now: The Autobiography

midst, as it definitely would be bad for business.
The same thing is true for the camps. We spent the nights in tents or thatched huts. These are only temporary structures. But we were reminded over and over, do not leave your hut at night. These animals are wild and they will eat you. One night I thought there was a lion outside my door and I thought, if I die I’m at least part of the natural cycle. I just hope it doesn’t hurt too much. There were no locks on the door and apparently the animals don’t know how to open doors. Nevertheless, I thought this will be the one that finally figures it out. The one thing I was really afraid of was bugs, because the bugs are not ordinary American-sized bugs. They were size of cockroaches and...
    Thank you Lisbeth, I’ll take it from here. Sorry, I was away from the page for a while. I was just looking at a book someone sent me, The Encyclopedia Shatnerica . It’s an encyclopedia of my life until 1998. Full of information about me that I can’t imagine people find interesting. For example, because of Rescue 911 I appeared on the cover of the National Safety Council’s First Aid Handbook . It includes my grandmother’s recipe for matzo kneidlach , about which I’m quoted: “To prevent rising beyond your station, my grandmother puta kneidel in your stomach. It made it very difficult to rise at all.” I don’t remember saying that, but I can’t imagine I would be mis-quoted about matzo kneidlach . It also has an entire entry entitled Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park and the fact that one of my favorite dogs, a Doberman pinscher named China, is buried there.
    Actually there have been several books chronicling my life and my career. I don’t read them, I was there for most of it. But it certainly is flattering. All of the attention and the affection I receive is unbelievably flattering. There is something quite... quite... satisfying about hearing actor Ed Norton say in the movie Fight Club that of all the celebrities in history, of all the people who have ever lived, if he could fight just one of them, it would be “Shatner. I’d fight William Shatner.” I can’t really explain the reasons for it. Apparently I once said, “Possibly there are aspects to me which people see that I’m not aware of,” and that’s true. But I do appreciate it, and I enjoy it, and whatever it is I’m doing that engenders it I’m trying to do more of it.
    Where were we? In Africa, Botswana, with Nerine and my daughters. So the guides emphasize not to go out of our huts at night because if you do the animals might kill you and eat you. As one of my daughters may have said, that’s a whole new way of having a movie star for dinner. Now, on the night Lisbeth was writing about, the night she thought she heard a lion, we had all settled into our flimsy wooden huts with thatched roofs. At some point during the night I was awakened by an overpowering stench. And then I felt our hut move and heard a rustling on the thatched roof. I looked out the one window but it was completely black outside, there wasn’t a star in the sky. And then I realized there was something standing in front of that window that blocked it, something very big. I think it was about then that I figured out an elephant was standing there eating the roof of our hut. None of the guides had told us what to do when an elephant ate your roof, so I began frantically looking for the safety manual we’d been given hoping there might be something in there under “roof, elephants eating.”
    Just then Nerine woke up. I whispered some extremely importantinstructions to her, somehow imagining that elephants, who have the biggest ears of any living thing, wouldn’t hear me say, “Don’t go to the bathroom.”
    And then that thing about myself that I fear most kicked in: my ability to completely lose sight of the consequences of my actions. I suspect others might call it a complete lack of good sense or perhaps, for short, nuts. It’s the thing that makes me want to ski hills beyond my ability. Or get behind the wheel of a race car and drive 160 mph. Or skydive. Or do a stunt on top of a train. I thought, wow, a wild elephant, you certainly don’t get to see a wild elephant up close very often.
    I opened the door of the hut just in time to see the tail of the elephant disappearing into the bush. I thought, what a great adventure. Truthfully, I probably wouldn’t have even considered following that elephant into the bush if