Additionally, I have in my files the exact copy of “City” that was submitted to the Writers Guild for consideration in judging that year’s awards, and it is exactly like the script in this book. There are no changes (with the exception of a few infelicities of grammar introduced into this edition) from the original version. It is a copy of my best draft of “City.” I never ever in any way “altered” or “polished up” my teleplay before submitting it. As I say, I have the very one that was entered, with the WGAw cover sheet still on it.

So why does Don Ingalls say this, a story that is patently bullshit, untrue, made up? Well, it’s been thirty years, and they just cannot let me have the credit for my own work. Even good guys like Bobby and Herb had to accept this unsubstantiated story from Ingalls—who was a very close buddy of Roddenberry’s, I’ve been told they were both cops together, but I don’t know Ingalls well enough to call him and ask him, and frankly, I ain’t gonna bother, he probably believes that crap by this time, he’s been dining out on it for three decades.

Don’t ask me why Ingalls has to make himself look as if I stole an award from him, this many years after the fact of his losing and my winning, but maybe Ingalls wasn’t happy that I copped the award (my second in as many years), and maybe he has altered memory to suit his saving face. I don’t know.

What I do know is that this anecdote never happened.

Not any part of it.

Not a bar, not me being drunk, not hoisting a few with a guy I barely knew, not doctoring up my teleplay so I could enrich my chances to win. It’s all bilge and rat-puke.

Ask anyone who knows anything about me.

So I called Herb, and I got very testy with him, particularly when I asked him why he verified so many other things in the book, but never sought to solicit any response from me, though he’d certainly had the opportunity in all the times we’d talked. And Herb got defensive and said well, we just heard it from Don, and we believed it, and blah blah blah.

So I told Herb that I don’t drink. That I never drank, not from the time I was born. I even told him that the one time someone had forced some alcohol on me had been maybe twenty years ago, at some dumb party somewhere, and some clown made a big thing about what a “party pooper” I was because I wasn’t bagged like everyone else, and he gave me maybe an inch of beer in a glass, and to shut him up I swigged it, and got instantly, totally falling-down sick to my stomach.