Growing Up Trekkie
In 1996, Gabriel Koerner's geekdom was caught on tape. Now he tells his side of the story.
      by Gabriel C. Koerner

As the years went by, social problems in school began to take their toll on me. I generally did not have many friends and those that I did have were not greatly eager to run to my defense. It hurt me and I never understood quite why it was happening. I became very physically confrontational, and before I knew it, my temper, anger, and behavior were flying out of control.

Between the ages of eight and nine I managed to get myself kicked out of three schools because of my aggressive behavior. I don't understand why I used to snap like I did... it's like looking back at a mountain you drove past an hour ago; you can see its basic form but the details are growing ever distant.

This eventually manifested itself in manic depression and suicidal tendencies. Children and school were scared of me as though I was some sort of horrid monster, and I would hear teachers whispering amongst themselves that I was not "normal" and there were things "wrong" with me. A problem that took years to overcome as a result of this was the need to try far too hard to impress. That resulted in some downright strange and very regretful behavior on my part as a child.

Therapists and psychiatrists all proved their complete ineptitude when all failed to even remotely help. In a moment of weak vulnerability that haunts me and angers me to this day, my mother listened to the advice of one... dreadful advice that has scarred me to this day. At the age of nine my mother had me placed in an in-patient mental care facility.

The nearly eight months I spent there as a child were a dark eternity. It is as though, say, there was a mass radiation fallout. You had developed a skin condition that, while only slightly visible, was potentially life threatening. As a result you are placed in a medical circus so hideous that the world cannot stand to look at it... a place filled with all of the most horrible ways a human being could be crippled and deformed. This was the feeling that prevailed over me. To be amongst misfits that despite all the rehabilitation in the world may never be suited to live in the normal world made me believe that I too was so seriously damaged and horrifyingly strange that I would never be able to function outside of those walls. It only made my desire to not see the rest of my life even stronger, because at that time, it seemed as though that was all the rest of my life held for me. Sad as it sounds, do you know what kept me alive? The fact that if I had ceased my life, I would not get to see next week's all new Star Trek: The Next Generation. The gallant crew of the Enterprise truly were my friends every Saturday night.

And in the midst of all this, a dark turning point came. Proclaiming I was only getting worse, the state opted to take the easy way out with me and order my parents to drug me with antidepressants. They had no choice in the matter, they had to sign or else I would be taken away by the state and placed in foster care by parents who would be more than inclined to drug me.

My mother was about to give in. My father, in an act that I feel saved my life, refused. He researched the drug, which was experimental at the time, and found it to have had very harmful side effects on those it was tested on. Rather than sign for it, he made secret plans with his brother in Bakersfield, California for my mother and I to secretly flee the state of Connecticut to California.

My mother and I packed up in November of 1991, our funds permitting the Greyhound bus as our only viable means of transportation. It was a four-day cross-country bus trip.

My father joined us two years later in 1993. He remained in Connecticut to continue his job as a freelance carpenter there and supply us with as much money as possible. However, he broke his heel and could not work for nearly a year, crippling him in more ways than one. When my father joined us, the two-year gap seemed to have done more harm than I had realized. Since then, the relationship we had as a child has never rebounded. We just evolved into two entirely different human beings who tried our best to create the illusion of family closeness in Trekkies.

Koerner with his model of the Enterprise.

After the move to California, my relationship with the public school systems had ended. In one of the things I give my mother a lot of credit for, she home schooled me from the latter half of fourth grade all the way through my senior year of high school just this last year.

Friends were few and far between in the early days, but those that were there remained strongly by my side and are my closest friends to this day. Bakersfield is an obnoxious, pretentious little oil and agricultural town that likes to believe it's more. It's got a cozy suburbia going on. My social difficulties in my latter childhood were somewhat understandable... my need for Star Trek as a refuge had gotten somewhat out of hand. It was something I was obsessive about, almost as though I was too wrapped up in it to see the world around me. I was drowned in fantasy. The bulk of my social interaction came from church Sunday School, as my devoutly religious mother used to make me attend. Given my indulgence in fantasy, Star Trek, and the creative arts and given the cozy suburban upbringings of those children, coupled with the overall obsessively right wing and hypercritically judgmental habits of the Assemblies of God Protestant church denomination, it wasn't a good combination. A lot of parents publicly referred to me with nice terms of endearment like "bad influence" and "the kind of kid that'll send you to HELL!". I look back on it with amusement.

Then Trekkies came about.

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