Dedication
Dedicated with thanks and reverence to the Four Horsemen (or Horsepeople) in my life without whom very little good would have happened.
KATHRYN DRENNAN, who believed in the man she thought I could be;
HARLAN ELLISON, who through his work taught me what it was to be a writer;
NORMAN CORWIN, who through his life showed me what it was to be a human;
and MARTIN SPENCER, Paradigm agent provocateur, whose belief in my work led me to this place.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction by Neil Gaiman
Chapter 1: We Were Told
Chapter 2: Strange Relations
Chapter 3: Faster Than a Speeding Bullet
Chapter 4: Death as a Lifestyle
Chapter 5: Pigeon Dinner with a Slice of Watermelon
Chapter 6: The First One’s Always Free
Chapter 7: The Face Behind the Mask
Chapter 8: The Wind Took Away His Name
Chapter 9: Being Invisible
Chapter 10: Targets of Opportunity
Chapter 11: Patricide by Proxy
Chapter 12: Discovering Words, Worlds, and Estrogen
Chapter 13: The God Thing
Chapter 14: The Weed of Evil Bears Strange Fruit
Chapter 15: The God Thing, Redux
Chapter 16: Blood in the Street
Chapter 17: When the Light at the End of the Tunnel Isn’t a Train (For a Change)
Chapter 18: The Big Con
Chapter 19: God, Death, and Harlan Ellison
Chapter 20: An Unexpected Journey to Toon-Town
Chapter 21: Who Ya Gonna Call?
Chapter 22: Captain, My Captain
Chapter 23: Into the Zone
Chapter 24: Blowing Up the World
Chapter 25: Things I Learned Dancing with the Fatman
Chapter 26: Paging Jessica Fletcher
Chapter 27: Boarding Babylon
Chapter 28: The Christmas Ambush
Chapter 29: Swingin’ with Spider-Man
Chapter 30: Lost in the Tall Grass with Jeremiah
Chapter 31: What Was I Thinking?
Chapter 32: Being Superman
Chapter 33: The Truth Unearthed
Chapter 34: Selah
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
I properly met Joe Straczynski in, I believe, January of 1991. He was hosting the Hour 25 radio show on KPFK-FM Los Angeles, and Terry Pratchett and I were on the show that night, to talk about our book Good Omens. Before Joe arrived, the station boss came and warned Terry and me that she knew how we British people liked to swear on the radio, and that no swearing on our parts would be tolerated. (We asked if it was all right to mention a fictional book in Good Omens called the Buggre Alle This Bible, and she went away and checked with the Authorities and said it was.) We’d neither of us ever sworn during any radio interview before, but were now terrified that we would, and we did our interview convinced that at any moment a fit of something resembling Tourette’s syndrome might overtake us. I remember that it was late at night in a dim-dark studio, and when Joe went over from talking to us to taking questions from callers, at least one of the voices at the other end of the line made no sense at all, the words were random and confused, and Joe cut him off, but kindly, and we carried on talking.
I say properly met, because I think I had already met Joe before that, at dinner with Harlan Ellison, but maybe all those dinners with Harlan were afterward. And that’s the hell of memoirs and autobiographies: you are dealing with what you remember, and what you remember is fallible and it’s unreliable and sometimes it’s simply wrong, and yet it’s still all you have to go on.
We’ve worked together once: Joe asked if I would write a script for Babylon 5 for him before the show began, and each season I would apologize because my plate was filled with Sandman and with the original Neverwhere TV series, and then Joe got to his final season, and I said yes, because Sandman and Neverwhere were done and I had the time, and in 1998 I wrote an episode called “The Day of the Dead” for him. Joe was, for the record, the easiest and sanest television executive I’ve ever written for: he was writing the entire show himself (except for my episode), and overseeing it, and doing all this without giving any indication of breaking a sweat.
So I’ve known Joe for almost thirty years. His hair has changed in that time (long ago it was darker and there was significantly more of it), but from the hairline down he’s still very much the same man I met in that voice-haunted radio studio late one night. He’s decent, and he’s good-hearted; he works harder than anyone I’ve met in film and TV; he’s sane and he’s sensible, accessible and wise. Which, you would think, would mean that the autobiographical volume you are reading would be as dull as insurance policy small print: people are as interesting as they are flawed, their stories as fascinating as the obstacles they encounter on the way.
In Joe’s case, as you read his story you also start to realize the pressure and the force that created the ferociously hardworking and ethical entity that he is: you understand not only what he was reacting against, but the pressure that he was under. Superman, one of Joe’s inspirations, could squeeze coal into diamonds. I was never convinced that it would work in real life, the whole coal-to-diamonds thing, suspecting that if you weren’t Superman and you squeezed a lump of coal really hard, you’d get coal dust; but the pressures of Joe’s life and childhood, the people who surrounded him, gave him something and someone not to be, gave him something to transcend, something to survive. Most people would have become coal dust. He didn’t.
The childhood we read about here is like an iron key winding up the clockwork that might so easily have destroyed Joe or turned him into a monster: instead it gave him power and a place to stand, and, most of all, a willingness to learn.
We follow him through several careers, and in each career he learns how to do it, how to set out and make something happen that ought, by any stretch of the imagination, to have been impossible. It’s his willingness to learn, his quiet persistence, and his willingness to do the work that are his superpowers. He has become a diamond.
And now he is finally willing to share.
Neil Gaiman
London
June 2017
Chapter 1
We Were Told
Iceland. March 14, 2014.
An hour earlier and a thousand feet nearer the ground we had been on a narrow strip of road bordered on both sides by a seemingly endless expanse of black volcanic rock and green moss, the air crisp but not cold. Then we started the long climb up a steep mountain, and within minutes the sky was swallowed by snow. The road turned from black to the brittle white of hard packed ice, then disappeared altogether. The world had no edges, the sky no shape, the sun no particular direction. We were inside a snow globe, with nothing before, behind, or beside us.
We climbed out to better experience the whiteout: location managers, production coordinators, directors, producers, and writers, myself among the latter two categories. We were warned to stay close: anyone walking more than twenty feet from the caravan would be lost to sight.
Iceland was the first stop in our round-the-world tour to scout locations for Sense8, a Netflix series I had written, created, and was producing with the Wachowskis. From here the show would travel to Mexico City, San Francisco, Seoul, Chicago, Berlin, Nairobi, and London.
The story that brought us here concerned a young woman who gives birth in the middle of the frozen tundra miles from civilization. Stranded after a car wreck
, alone and on foot, the odds of her or her infant surviving the intense cold are nearly zero, but she keeps walking anyway, refusing to go down without a fight. Desperation and tears in the cruel bitter wind. Blood on snow.
We’d come to determine if this particular mountain would suffice, but someone had apparently backed up a U-Haul and taken it away before we arrived, leaving only a curtain of white void that stretched to infinity.
“We should get off the mountain before it gets dark,” the location manager said, “while we can still see the road.”
“Road, hell,” someone said in reply. “We should go while we can still see the mountain.”
As I climbed back into the van I paused to look out at the white void, two thousand seven hundred miles from where I began my journey in Paterson, New Jersey. And it occurred to me that the only thing more improbable than being on this road was the longer and considerably darker road that brought me there: the mistakes and wrong turns, the tragedies and lies, the wise and poor decisions . . . and the secrets I’d kept about myself, my family, and my past, afraid of what the world would think.
The whisper of things left long unsaid echoed out at me from the void. We know who you are. Who you really are. You may be able to fool everybody else, but you can’t fool us. And as long as we’re out here, where you can’t reach us, you will never be truly free.
Writers tell stories. It’s what we do. It’s what I’ve done my whole life. But there’s one story I’ve never told, trained into silence by people who wanted to make sure that my family’s secrets remained secret.
And there’s only one appropriate response when you discover you’re afraid of something.
You get up and you do it.
That was the moment I decided to write this book and reveal my secret origin story to the world. The writing process took four years because there were still mysteries about my family to be unraveled and little to work with. Just as no one told Clark Kent he was an alien until he was ready to handle it, I was told as little as possible about our past because nobody was entirely sure when the statute of limitations ran out on some of this stuff. Records were systematically destroyed to expedite hasty departures and eliminate three generations’ worth of incriminating evidence. It was only with great effort that the Clark Kent reporter-for-a-great-metropolitan-newspaper inside me was able to push past decades of convenient fiction to discover the fiercely guarded truth.
We were told that of four Straczynski brothers born in 1880s Vilnius (then a province of Russia, now the capital of Lithuania), Kazimier traveled throughout Europe representing the family’s business interests before moving to America to make his fortune.
The truth, acquired much later, is that Kazimier was a drunk and a womanizer who spent his early twenties on an alcohol-fueled binge across four countries, at each stop luring young women into bed with stories of wealth and promises of marriage. It was only when the relationships turned serious and his lies were in danger of running into one another that he took off across the Atlantic, citing pressing family business.
America was the land of wealthy widows and trust-fund debutantes, and Kazimier was determined to land as many of those as possible. Armed with money the family wanted him to invest on their behalf, two good suits, Old World charm, and elaborate fictions about vast tracts of land owned by his family in Russia, he set out like a sexual Vasco da Gama sailing the seas of high society in search of a woman with sufficient means to give him the lifestyle he believed he deserved.
Then, just as he was in sight of his goal—a woman from a wealthy family who liked the idea of merging fortunes—he burned through the last of the family funds he had appropriated for his own purposes. With arrangements still to be made and proofs given to confirm his status as one of the elite before the deal could be closed, Kazimier returned to siphon off what little was left of the family fortune after the Russian Revolution. He explained that he’d made tons of money with their initial investment, but financial regulations in the United States were slowing down the process of moving that money overseas. He was confident those issues would be resolved soon, but in the interim he’d received a hot lead on an investment that would make them rich beyond the dreams of avarice. With their funds tied up in the banking system, he would need the rest of the family money to buy in before it was too late.
They said they would need time to think it over, and more time still to sneak the money in from accounts they had set up in Prussia when the Bolsheviks came to town.
We were told that while he awaited their decision, Kazimier met a young woman named Sophia, fell in love, and got married.
The truth is that Kazimier began a clandestine affair with his niece Sophia, daughter of his brother Jan and eighteen years his junior. Sophia had long dreamed of becoming an actress in America, where her many qualities—invisible to everyone else, but perfectly obvious to her—would at last be recognized. But not only did her father refuse to let her immigrate alone, she discovered that he intended to marry her off to a local merchant. Her only way out was through Kazimier, who she believed had the connections and the money to make her dreams real. So one night, fueled by desperation, greed, and enough vodka to liquefy the brain cells in charge of good judgment, she revealed the incestuous relationship to the family and announced (falsely, it turned out) that she was pregnant.
As staunch Catholics, her family couldn’t allow Sophia to be an unwed mother, but none of them wanted to live with the scandal of her marrying her blood uncle. Their solution was Solomonic in its wisdom: Get married then get the hell out.*
We were told that Kazimier’s blushing bride returned with him to make a life of marital bliss together.
The truth is that after the wedding, Kazimier returned to the United States ahead of her, allegedly to make preparations for her arrival, and promised to send money for her passage when all was ready. Instead he went radio-silent the moment he was safely back on American soil, hoping she lacked the resolve needed to undertake such an arduous voyage alone. But Sophia refused to be deterred and borrowed money for a ticket to America. Her white-hot fury upon discovering that the riches Kazimier had laid claim to were utter fabrications was matched by his own anger when she revealed that her claim to pregnancy had been simply a means to secure their marriage.
Snared by their mutual lies, in a family that would never countenance divorce, they moved into a small apartment in Paterson, New Jersey, a haven for Polish and Russian immigrants. In July 1927 Sophia gave birth to a son, Joseph, who passed away of pneumonia three months later. She never recovered from the loss and each year on the anniversary of Joseph’s death made a grim pilgrimage to leave flowers on his grave.
Determined not to let tragedy derail her dreams of stardom, Sophia began bedding down directors, photographers, producers, and anyone else she thought could help her career. But her efforts were hindered by her thick, muscular silhouette, typical of Russian stock, and a face hardened by mood and circumstance into a look of perpetual disapproval. When her efforts hit the wall of her talent and her cervix, she became deeply embittered, and would sit for hours on the front stoop of their apartment, drinking and shouting curses at neighbors. If the name of someone she didn’t like was mentioned, she would spit on the sidewalk and grind it under her heel. She was not, in short, a people-person.
By contrast, Kazimier grew into a soft, sullen echo of a man. Whenever Sophia flew into one of her rages he would seek refuge at local bars, then tiptoe back into the apartment only after she was asleep. Having come within inches of marrying into a rich family and achieving the successful future that he believed was his rightful destiny, he spent his days and nights in the boozy, soft-focus intersection between his overly romanticized memories of a past he had been forced to flee and the paralysis of a present that seemed utterly beyond his control.
On October 2, 1929, Sophia, then twenty-five, gave birth to another son, unimaginatively named Kazimier after his father and subsequently Americanized to Charles. To make e
nds meet, she took part-time work bartending at a tavern on River Street. The job was more than an escape from being a wife and mother: it was her stage and she was a star, performing for an audience eager to applaud anything if it meant getting a free drink out of the bargain.
A second child, Theresa, was born July 11, 1931. Rather than objects of affection, Sophia’s children were a constant reminder that her life had not turned out the way she’d planned. Her pride prevented her from admitting any of this to her family in Eastern Europe, however, so her letters home were filled with wild tales of wealth and success, each more outrageous than the last, until finally her relatives began to question the veracity of her accounts. Puffed up with indignation like a pouter pigeon, Sophia announced that she was taking the children for a three-month visit to Poland and Russia to prove that she was successful, happy, and living in America, only one of which was actually true. She then ransacked Kazimier’s bank account to buy expensive clothes that would impress her relatives, many of whom were suffering under Soviet rule. She wanted to provoke them into asking her for money just so she could tell them to go to hell. Say what you like about Sophia, the woman knew how to plan ahead.
When everything was ready, she and her children embarked upon their goodwill tour of Eastern Europe, from Hoboken, New Jersey, on the liner Batory.
We were told that after arriving at the port of Gdynia, Poland, Sophia took the children to museums and monuments from the Great War, eating at fine restaurants and generally having a wholesome, good time.
The truth is that within days of arriving she began having an affair with a member of the Polish national police, an officer who was sympathetic to the Third Reich, which had just annexed Czechoslovakia and was eager to flex its muscles farther east. Sophia believed that as the Nazis grew more powerful, her lover’s fortunes would prosper, and thus her own. To clear the decks for this new relationship, she planned to return to the United States, hand off the children, say nothing of the affair, grab whatever was left in the bank, then return to Poland.
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