Chapter 1

My Best Friend is a Wookiee

Chapter One: Saga Genesis

It was the perfect day to get socked in the face with clumps of wet dirt. The ambush ended as quickly as it started, a flashflood of dirty projectiles and savage war cries from my hidden assailants. Slowly, with my head down and my tail between my legs, I walked home, picking clumps of mud out of my hair and wiping tears from my cheeks. What little selfesteem I’d had was shattered on the corner of my street like shards of a broken mirror, reflecting the laughing, loose-tooth faces of the jerks who had pelted me with filth. I was seven years old, living in a new house in a new town, and had just been introduced to the rest of the guys in my neighborhood by way of elementary-school guerilla tactics. The friends I had were a half-hour car ride away. Given our inability to see each other and the fickle minds of seven-year-olds, they felt as tangible as imaginary friends.

I have always worn my emotions on my sleeve, and that day was no exception. I may as well have been wearing a T-shirt with a picture of me getting kicked in the nuts while simultaneously getting a wedgie, having my lunch money stolen, and having my heart ripped out through my mouth. Mom knew that no “Things will get better” talk, no matter how inspirational the accompanying music, was going to fix what had happened that afternoon. Her boy needed some real cheering up.

In the bathroom, while she helped clean the crud off my face with a towel fresh out of the dryer, she looked at me with eyes that always seemed to smile and asked the question: “Have you seen Star Wars yet?”

My love affair with the galaxy far, far away was to begin with the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back. Mom dug a videotape out of a box jammed full of tapes with movies and cartoons that had been recorded from TV. According to the peeling, orange Kodak label on the spine of the tape, this one was a sci-fi double feature my Dad had bootlegged from HBO, with Empire playing second to David Lynch’s Dune. As Mom fast-forwarded to the spot where she thought Empire should start, she cracked open the ironing board, looking to kill a couple of birds with one stone while she watched the movie with me.

The tape was snowy and the sound a bit warbled at the tail end of Dune’s credits, where it segued less than gracefully into the HBO logo from the late 1980s.

“The following film is rated PG,” the tape declared in a generic male American voice. The rating didn’t mean anything to me, but as the required bits of boilerplate legalese—rating, content, closed captioning—were rattled off, I became very eager about what I was about to see. I knew Star Wars by reputation only and couldn’t tell you a thing about it at the time. All I knew was that in a moment I was going to experience something monumental. Something very important. It was just a feeling I had, something deep in my gut.

When that epic Twentieth Century Fox drumroll began, it snapped me to attention. The machine-gun drumming of sticks and mallets hammered away the shame I was feeling about that afternoon’s ambush and demanded that I turn myself over completely to what was about to play out on the television. One screen faded to another, from the Fox logo to a black title card with Slimer green letters that read “Lucasfilm, Ltd.” The screen faded again, taking the sound with it, and for the first time in my life I was conscious of seeing the words “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. . . .” It was a moment that felt like several lifetimes.

I hung on that moment, soaking in the image of those words and permanently burning them into my retinas. When I blink, those blue letters still flash against the darkness on the back of my eyelids. When the lights go out, those words are plastered over the void. They chilled me down to the marrow and had me leaning off the couch cushion, begging for more after getting so little. Those few words were perfect in my seven-year-old eyes. They promised so much. Hinted at amazing feats. Such good. Such evil. With so little, an entire galaxy was opened up for me to explore. Star Wars had me at “hello.”

Suddenly that brief yet seemingly infinite silence was devastated by a blazing sonic assault. The opening fanfare from the London Symphony Orchestra hit me square in the face, shoving me hard into my seat. If seeing the words “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . .” was a first kiss, then hearing that first chord of the Star Wars theme was my cherry getting popped. Scratch that—this was bigger, more important than a sex metaphor could ever possibly illustrate. My life was beginning again that day. It was a rebirth.

As the trumpets roared across space and the words “Star Wars” rocketed into view, I felt like I was exploding out of the womb and into a world that I had always sensed around me as I’d gestated for seven years. The title, The Empire Strikes Back, soared up into view, followed by a text scroll that alluded to things that were intimidating and foreign yet strangely familiar. Death Star. Freedom fighters. Luke Skywalker. Darth Vader. These words stood out to me like masked doctors looking down at my squirming, goo-coated newborn body. Darth Vader was the only name that rang any sort of bell. When I read it, an image flashed into my head of a toothbrush my aunt had given me with an evil-looking, black-clad space man on it. It was a toothbrush I had once kept at my grandparents’ house. “Dark Radar,” I had called him, the words Darth and Vader having no meaning at that time in my young lexicon. Maybe that toothbrush had been a sign, a marker on a road that was meant to lead me to this point. I would go into the bathroom just to take that toothbrush out of its holder and look at him. Vader’s evil image, looming like death itself, stared back at me through those darkened helmet lenses.

“Brush your teeth or else!” Or else what?

For two hours I sat fixated on the TV. My parents were Trekkies, so I had grown up watching a new episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation every Sunday and syndicated reruns most afternoons. Sci-fi techno-babble was plentiful, but the action was limited. No matter what the stakes were, no matter how perfect the Romulan or Borg plot seemed to be, the crew of the Enterprise always came out on top, thanks to Hollywood science and some good ol’ moral fiber.

Empire was something else altogether. This was a world where science and magic came head to head. There were no illusions of peace or any safe havens aboard glamorous starships. There were no glamorous starships. X-Wings and the Millennium Falcon were the sci-fi versions of old hot rods and beat-around trucks. In this place, hope and annihilation were spoken within the same breath. Trust couldn’t be taken for granted. Nothing was a sure thing. Heroes were always on the run, scraping by on anything they could get their hands on, while the bad guys had limitless resources to find them and smoke them out. This, kids, was a whole new ballgame.

Before he could even do anything in the movie, this Luke guy, whom I was meeting for the first time, was mauled by some nasty-looking space yeti. I couldn’t have been more scared. This was the Luke the text scroll was talking about, and he was down for the count just two minutes in! Then Han told everyone he was leaving, and Leia started yelling at him. So far all the good guys were either unconscious or pissed off at each other. This was the antithesis of anything I had ever seen on Star Trek and went against what I had come to understand as basic movie logic. There was conflict, real human struggle, going on here. And robots! And that big hairy guy who looked like a real alien and not just a guy with latex skull-ridges slapped onto his forehead and some prop snaggleteeth in his mouth.

Starting with the second in a three-movie series, I felt overwhelmed by a history I knew nothing about. The characters’ relationships were already established, the villains’ motives were unclear, and I was bombarded with images I struggled to understand. When the Rebel snowspeeders were systematically blown out of the sky by the Empire’s awesome, mechanical quadrupeds, I panicked. Why, I asked myself, are the good guys losing so soon? I looked over to my mom for a sign, some sort of indication as to why this was happening. She was locked onto the action on the screen, her focus daring me to keep watching. Her ironing never faltered.

Things didn’t let up. This was just the first act, and as the movie moved on from the Battle of Hoth, the momentum built and the stakes kept rising. As the Millennium Falcon ducked and weaved its way through asteroids, narrowly avoiding certain destruction at the hands of space rocks, with the Empire in hot pursuit, I gnawed my nails to the bone. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was cooler than seeing that hunk of junk outclass those TIE fighters, luring them face first into asteroid after asteroid, or Han deducing that they were parked in the belly of a giant space slug. I sat there in my living room, watching this tiny ship fly up out of a crater, only to have this giant thing pop out and try to snap its jaws down on it. It was clearly a case of, “Well, our heroes dodged that bullet, how can we shake things up and put them back into the Empire’s crosshairs? A space slug, that’s how!” And it worked! It was just one item on a newly formed, rapidly growing grocery list of the coolest things I’d ever seen.

Yoda brought with him a much-needed sense of levity to the harrowing spectacle that had preceded Luke’s arrival on Dagobah. The film so far had been a montage of pushing the good guys down and kicking them while they were there. A little green man with a funny voice and a Dennis the Menace sort of knack for irritating people was a nice break. Man, I thought, I bet Yoda’s gonna be like a kung fu master and this is totally the goofy, comic relief sidekick. Wrong. They were one and the same, and like Luke, I bought into Yoda’s cover— hook, line, and sinker. When Yoda switched from goofball to guru, I couldn’t believe it. Everything that movie threw at me was a curveball, and I kept swinging. The challenge to get a hit was addictive, but I’d never connect with a pitch. Even a sure thing like Han’s friend Lando proved to be just one of countless twists in the exhausting, curving road of The Empire Strikes Back.

But none of the twists compared to the climax of Luke and Vader’s epic confrontation. Lightsabers clashed with that classic electric nails-on-a-chalkboard screech. Vader fought dirty, using his mastery of the Force to throw anything in his sight at Luke, knocking him off his guard, off his feet, and through plate glass. Here was a villain who threw the rule book out the window. He was evil incarnate, and nothing would stop him from completing his wicked crusade. Though Luke seemed outmatched, he never gave up. Maybe this was it. Maybe after all of that struggling the movie would remember that good will always triumph over evil. I knew that that’s what would happen. Then Luke’s hand got hacked off, and we both made the painful discovery that Darth Vader, yes Dark Radar himself, was his father. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry out just like Luke did.

After a relentless two hours, the heroes, minus Han, managed to escape with their tails between their legs. For the first time since the movie had started, I took pause to think about my own defeat earlier that afternoon. Like the Rebels, I’d found myself outnumbered by a larger group of jerks who seemed to have all the resources necessary to make my life a hell for no particular reason. I didn’t ask them to throw dirt at me. I didn’t even know who they were. They were a faceless enemy. They didn’t even have the decency to send their Darth Vader out to intimidate me first.

As the movie ended, I felt drained. Watching Luke and Leia stare out the medical ship’s window as the Falcon flew away, with that sad music playing as the defeated Rebel fleet floated solemnly through space, was almost too much to handle. Nothing good happened to the people it normally happened to. Nothing. It was the first instance I could recall of a movie ending on such a real, sour note, and I absolutely loved it.

Without knowing it, I had become a participant in the lives of these characters, a soldier for the Rebel Alliance. They were as real to me as they were fantasy. Han was a bastard— sarcastic, cocky, shortsighted—but there was a hero under all those scoundrelly layers. He was flawed, which was something I had never noticed or wanted from my movie heroes before. Leia was as far from a damsel in distress as she could possibly be, but ultimately—and despite her best efforts to the contrary—she fell victim to her own love for a pirate. Luke Skywalker, true-blue hero of the day that he was, was in the middle of a crisis of faith. These three characters were faced with the most daunting challenges of their lives, and many of those challenges came from within. I came for the lasers and the spaceships, but I stayed for the deep, personal struggle that these characters were dealing with. But don’t get me wrong, the lasers and spaceships have always been a plus.

What really hit the movie home for me was that, despite all they’d gone through, they still clung to hope. Though one of them was gone, he could still be saved if his friends played their cards right. The rest of them, bloodied, bruised, and scared, lived to fight another day. That meant something to me. I know now that they would come out on top in the next one, but at the time their futures felt completely up in the air. In all the movies I had ever seen, the hero would hit that point somewhere in the middle of the film, when there was still time for him to save the day. But in Empire there was no time left. The three of us—Luke, Leia, and I—had to wait for the sequel to take up arms one more time against the forces of evil. But they had not given up; you see it when they look out into space. You hear it in Lando’s voice when he leaves with Chewbacca to track down Han. They all have hope.

So there I was, a seven-year-old boy in a new house in a new town, being terrorized by the older kids in the neighborhood and fearing to death the mere thought of a new school. I didn’t know any of the rules that any of the people in this strange new place lived by. I had no Obi-Wan or Yoda to lead me through it. I was flying blind, having a crisis of faith in myself that would last for the next decade and change. All I had was this new house to hide in and this new movie full of wonderful things to keep me company. To give me hope.

I don’t know how many times I watched that worn-out tape over the course of the next few months, but it never got much of a rest. At one point, I thought I could smell the film sizzling in the plastic shell. I wished I had a giant Wookiee for a best friend to keep the bullies at bay. I’d go to the grocery store with my mom and wave my hand in front of the automatic doors, opening them hands-free like a real Jedi. Driving with my dad, I’d pretend that the cars in front of us on 95 North were asteroids, the ones behind us were TIE fighters, and that his beat-up, funky-smelling ’87 Ford Ranger was a beat-up, funky-smelling YT-1300 light freighter called the Millennium Falcon. John Williams’s music filled my head throughout the day, and if you asked me at any point between that fateful day and the end of the sixth grade, I’d tell you that the person I most wanted to be when I grew up was the man who had just given me this glorious gift of wonder and adventure: George Lucas.