Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  On September 1, 1939, they boarded a train in Lodz, Poland, that would take them to the port of Gdynia and, from there, back to America. Inconveniently, this was also the date set by the German air force for the blitzkrieg and invasion of Poland. Sophia and her children had just taken their seats when the Luftwaffe began bombing the station and strafing passenger cars in the opening salvo of what would shortly become World War II.

  Barely escaping the attack, they made their way to the United States consulate only to be turned away because the suitcase containing the papers needed to prove their US citizenship had been destroyed in the attack.

  We were told that as German troops and tanks poured into Poland, Sophia and her children somehow made their way unimpeded across seven hundred kilometers of war-torn countryside to a train station in Bogdanov in the Minsk region of Belarus, where they were put to work as little more than slaves by the German railway officers who now commanded the station.

  The truth is that Sophia turned for help to her lover, who had made his loyalties known to the Germans and switched sides. Despite his newly won connections it was obvious that in the heat of the invasion anyone with missing papers would be subject to arrest, so he put them on a train that would take them far into the countryside and gave Sophia a letter of introduction to the head of the local Bahnschutzpolizei, the German railway police. Upon arriving at the Bogdanov train station they were given food and a comfortable place to live above the station, where Sophia would work as live-in housekeeper, cook, and assistant for the ranking officers.

  When her lover was killed in the sporadic fighting that was still going on in Poland, Sophia pivoted into having affairs with some of the German officers. On weekends she traveled with them to Valozhyn, a part of Belarus controlled by the German army, where they bought her gifts and expensive clothes. It would have been an altogether comfortable arrangement except for the fact that the station and the German soldiers living there were often targeted by the Resistance, who were apparently really good shots. Fearing that she might eventually be caught in the cross fire, she convinced some of the soldiers to smuggle out letters to Kazimier in hopes of securing safe passage home. Her letters went unanswered for six years. Given the vicissitudes of wartime correspondence it’s possible that Kazimier never received her letters and in that vast silence concluded that she had been killed in the blitzkrieg, a sign from God that his marital suffering was at an end. It’s also possible that the letters were received but ignored in the fevered hope that she might catch a stray bullet while stuck behind enemy lines. But the most likely scenario is that the letters reached their destination only to be lost in the course of Kazimier’s inebriated battles with the forces of gravity.

  We were told that while they lived at the railway station, some of the soldiers looked kindly upon her son, Charles, and helped guide him toward manhood.

  The truth is that Charles quickly developed a fierce appreciation for all things Nazi. With his mother’s temper, his father’s sense of entitlement, and their mutual inability to take responsibility for their actions, the Nazi philosophy gave him a focus for his anger, and he embraced a strong anti-Semitic ideology that would stay with him the rest of his life. He read Mein Kampf, took photos of the soldiers, smoked German cigarettes, and cherished a small collection of SS daggers.

  The soldiers approved of his increasingly pro-Nazi sentiments, and began treating him as one of their own, even presenting him with a German uniform replete with swastika armband that became his proudest possession. According to comments made by his sister, Theresa, shortly before her death in 2009, he often tagged along with German soldiers and members of the SS on “hunting expeditions” to nearby Jewish ghettos and villages under German jurisdiction.

  “They’d go out looking for Jews caught outside after curfew and beat them with rubber pipes like it was some kind of game,” she said. “He’d come back covered in blood then spend hours the next day washing his shirt and shining his boots so he could go out and do it all over again.”

  Then, in 1942, an incident occurred so terrible that no one in the family would speak of it for decades. In a family based on the withholding of information, the truth of what happened the day Charles embraced the most horrific aspects of Nazi ideology became their Mount Everest of secrets.

  The details of what happened that day, and how many died as a result, will have to wait, because this is also a murder mystery, and one never reveals the details of the crime in chapter one.

  After Germany surrendered in 1945, the soldiers who had been Sophia’s protectors were now on the run from partisans eager to settle scores. With their help she and her children escaped to Valozhyn, where many Nazi loyalists still remained, but they were soon forced to keep moving or risk being identified by other refugees fleeing east. With railroad lines destroyed, cities flattened, and most lines of communication cut off, they made their way to Moscow and took refuge in a Red Cross shelter while their identities were confirmed. Finally, in June 1946 they were cleared to travel to Odessa and booked passage home on the American Merchant Marine ship Norman J. Coleman.

  During the voyage they learned that reporters in America were eager to interview them about the seven years they had spent behind enemy lines. There were even whispers of book and movie deals. For years Sophia had dreamed of being the center of attention, a star surrounded by people hanging on her every word; now, for the most unexpected of reasons, she was about to get her wish. They spent weeks posing for photos and being interviewed for radio broadcasts and newspapers about their adventures during the war, carefully skewing the events to show them in a sympathetic light. Confident that at any moment producers would show up bearing contracts and vast sums of money, they argued over dinner about who should play them in the movie. Sophia, of course, would play herself. In her interviews she encouraged people to send her money, most of which she spent on clothes, confident that the flow of cash would never stop. But the war-weary public soon lost interest in their story, and by 1947 the phone stopped ringing. Her dreams of stardom dashed once more, Sophia reluctantly reunited with Kazimier. Pooling their funds, they bought a small apartment building on Graham Avenue in Paterson, living in one apartment with the other set aside as a refuge where Charles could live rent-free. Sophia also leased the River Street bar from its ailing owner with an option to buy.

  Once they were settled, Charles entered St. Mary’s College seminary, the only institution that would accept him without a high school diploma or a clearly defined moral center. He often said that the best thing in the world was to be a crooked priest; there was easy access to church funds, and plenty of women eager to have affairs with dashing young priests with dramatic wartime stories. But by the end of the first term he was booted out for drunkenness, leaving him with no choice but to work for Sophia at her bar. The humiliation and debasement reflected in this turn of events almost certainly proves the existence of God, which to be fair is a pretty solid achievement for a first-year seminarian.

  Like Sophia, Charles treated the bar as his own personal fiefdom, holding court late into the night, dispensing free booze to his friends, and sneaking money out of the cash register to pay for expensive aftershave, clothes, and prostitutes. Despite these shenanigans, the bar brought in enough money for Sophia to make a down payment on a house at 275 Dakota Street with a backyard big enough to plant sunflowers, vegetables, and raspberry bushes, the latter of which she fermented with potatoes into a uniquely lethal brand of vodka.

  Kazimier took little joy in their new home. Disillusioned and homesick, he hired local artist Victor Rafael Rachwalski to paint two murals in the living room, one depicting his overly romanticized memories of Russia, the other a montage of the day he arrived in the United States, optimistic and full of dreams. Victor was two years younger than Sophia, soft-spoken and gentle, with an artist’s sensibility that Sophia found attractive. Given her freewheeling notions about fidelity it was inevitable that they would begin having an affair. It was arguabl
y the best thing that ever happened to her. Victor softened Sophia’s worst qualities, and she enjoyed having someone creative and sensitive in her life.

  When Victor’s landlord raised the rent beyond his means, she convinced Kazimier to let him move into the basement as a boarder. This made the affair simpler to conduct but more difficult to conceal, and when Kazimier discovered the truth he packed up and moved to Los Angeles, determined to put as much distance between them as possible. This left Sophia and Victor free to live together full-time, though for the sake of appearances he kept the basement flat, which also functioned as his studio.

  Having failed to master any useful skills, Charles joined the Air Force in 1948 and began training as a military police officer at Camp Gordon, Georgia. He liked the authority of being able to tell people what to do, and the freedom to rough them up when they didn’t do it, but mainly I think he just really liked the armband. He rotated through several bases as part of the Fifth Military Police before ending up at Fairfield-Suison Army Air Base in California, where he became a regular customer at several brothels in nearby Vallejo and Benicia. Some of the brothels used underage prostitutes, including Evelyn Dolores Pate, who was fourteen when Charles began seeing her in and out of the brothel. Evelyn always looked older than she was, with frizzy, home-permed hair above a round face that never quite lost its baby fat, and brown eyes set too closely together, as if she was always squinting at something. Their relationship was built on exploitation, power, and his penchant for inflicting pain on someone who could not legally retaliate.

  Whenever his drunken violence became too much to bear, Evelyn took shelter in the Vallejo trailer home of her mother, Grace Ross, only to be lured back by promises of money, gifts, and good behavior, none of which materialized. When Evelyn became pregnant, Grace told Charles that if he didn’t do the right thing she would expose his activities to the base commander. Rather than face court-martial, Charles married Evelyn on March 15, 1951, in Reno, Nevada. She was fifteen.

  Six months later, Charles learned that he was going to be shipped off to the front lines of the Korean War, and decided that this would be a good time to get the hell out of the air force. There are several stories concerning how he made that happen—in one version he let himself be caught cross-dressing; in another he began firing at possible Martians while guarding a definite atomic bomb—but since Charles was an inveterate liar, there is no way to know what actually happened. Either way, on October 17, 1951, the air force kicked Charles out with a general discharge, given in cases of misconduct not quite egregious enough to merit a dishonorable discharge.

  He returned to Paterson with Evelyn and moved into the Graham Avenue apartment while he looked for work. These searches usually ended at various bars, where he would get drunk then come home to beat and sexually assault Evelyn, incidents that almost certainly contributed to her miscarriage. Once she recovered, she tried on several occasions to run away, only to be caught and dragged back. To preclude further attempts Charles imprisoned her in the apartment, padlocking her in the bedroom and nailing the windows shut. One night, after being badly beaten and raped, she slipped the phone into the bedroom before being locked in for the evening, hiding the long cord behind the dresser and praying he wouldn’t discover what she’d done. That morning, after he left for work, she called her mother and said that he’d threatened to kill her when he came home. Frantic with worry, Grace convinced the police to enter the apartment and escort Evelyn off the premises and onto the first train to California. The events surrounding her escape are best described in documents filed in the Superior Court of the State of California on September 30, 1952.

  . . . after said marriage and prior to said infant’s* attaining the age of sixteen (16) years, and more specifically in the months of April and May of 1951, said infant suffered abuse at the hands of defendant and attempted to separate herself from defendant with the intention of having said marriage relation terminated. That defendant threatened to injure and harm said infant and even to kill her if she left him. That on many occasions defendant beat and struck the said infant and kept her constantly in fear of her life. That said force prevented said infant from separating herself from said defendant and said infant was forced to continue against her will the relationship of husband and wife with defendant. That on or about August 11, 1952, defendant released said infant and she did then and there absent and separate herself from defendant and has not lived with defendant as his wife since. That defendant has continuously and is still threatening to do said infant and plaintiff great grievous bodily harm.

  After reviewing photos of her injuries, the court ordered the marriage annulled and issued a restraining order against Charles that would prevent him from entering California to try and retrieve her. Believing herself safe, Evelyn returned to her previous place of employment at the Vallejo brothel. But as far as Charles was concerned, she was his property, and he always got back what was his. When he learned that Evelyn had rotated to a brothel in Seattle, Washington—and was thus outside the jurisdiction of the California restraining order—he paid another prostitute to lure her to what was supposed to be a meeting with a wealthy client. When Evelyn arrived, he beat and kidnapped her back to New Jersey, saying that if she ever tried to leave again he would kill her and her mother.

  To cap off his carefully planned humiliation, Charles did not remarry her, believing that this would deny her any legal standing in court. She would have no access to his bank accounts, no claim to anything he owned, and any property he forced her to put under the name Evelyn Straczynski could be held over her as evidence of fraud, further tightening his grip.

  Shortly afterward, Evelyn discovered that she was pregnant, and gave birth to a son on July 17, 1954. Given the timing, Charles wasn’t sure if the baby had been conceived during the period when Evelyn was working as a prostitute or later.

  “I don’t even know if you’re my son,” Charles often said in the years that followed, an allegation that culminated in two letters he sent in 2003. The first demanded that his son take a DNA test because he had been “conceived in a whore house your mother was employed in Seattle Washington either by the pimp she slept with or one of the pimp’s clients. She forgot the pimp’s last name and for sure did not know the name of the clientele.” He argued that under the circumstances his son “could have been born a black. After (your mother) viewed your pictures on the internet she agreed that there is no resemblance to me, and who should know better than the mother.” His goal was to ensure that his alleged son “cannot inherit any of the estate because I am not your father.”

  The second letter, from Evelyn, elaborated on the situation. “When I was 17 I was in Seattle Washington and unfortunately I wound up in a house of prostitution . . . I am not sure if you were born 8 or 9 months later.”

  You were conceived in a whorehouse.

  That would be me.

  Chapter 2

  Strange Relations

  Rather than deal with the needs of a newborn, my father spent most of his time “queer baiting,” luring gays to private areas and beating them up. Left alone with Sophia, who regarded her with open disdain, Evelyn soon fell into a severe postpartum depression exacerbated by her isolation and her almost total lack of experience when it came to taking care of an infant.

  I was told by Evelyn that because my nose was rather flat at birth, she was worried that my father would accuse her of having had me through sex with a black man, so she began pinching my nose as hard as she could in an attempt to re-form it without understanding that noses don’t work that way. This seemed curious to me, even as a child, but I accepted the story since I lacked any other explanation as to why I constantly sniff and snorfle.

  The truth, which came later courtesy of Sophia and my aunt Theresa, is that the foregoing story was the alibi Evelyn gave when my aunt found her pinching my nose closed with one hand, the other pressed tightly over my mouth. She used so much pressure to cut off the flow of air that she damaged the stil
l-malleable structure of my nasal passages, causing lifelong problems.

  Option One is that my mother honestly believed she could pinch my nose into a different configuration.

  Option Two is that she was trying to suffocate me to death.

  Option Two might seem fanciful except for what happened later.

  When Evelyn became pregnant again, her depression roared back, punctuated by dangerous mood swings. Crying, furious, she said repeatedly that she didn’t want to go through with the pregnancy, that she didn’t want any children. Concerned that she might try to harm me or terminate the pregnancy herself, my aunt and grandmother left her alone as little as possible. Sophia would even take us along when she had to work at the bar, propping me up on the pool table or the cold bar, where I would slide around, nearly naked, in puddles of alcohol.

  After giving birth to a daughter, Vicky, Evelyn’s depression spiraled into violent outbursts and fits of rage. Then, just weeks after her birth, Vicky abruptly passed away. Years later, when I asked my father what happened, he would say only, “Crib death. Suffocation.”

  No one in my family ever said to me, point-blank, Your mother was responsible for Vicky’s death. I know only the whispers that followed Evelyn the rest of her life about what she tried to do to me and what she might have succeeded in doing with Vicky. On several occasions I heard Sophia say that Charles threatened to turn her over to the police for what happened if she ever tried to run away again. Since by now Evelyn knew exactly what my father was capable of doing to her, and what he would continue to do, I can’t imagine any reason that would compel her to remain in Paterson as his personal, lifelong punching bag other than raw, naked fear over such an accusation. That terror gave my father a level of control over Evelyn that he probably considered a fair trade for Vicky’s death, since he never really cared for or about any of his children; like his suits and his car, we were simply props whose purpose was to show that he was a successful family man.