Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  Since nobody ever talked about her, I didn’t even know I had a maternal grandmother until the day she arrived on a bus from California. It was as if the casting department suddenly realized they’d forgotten to hire an actress for the role and shoved someone out at the last minute in the hope that no one would notice she hadn’t been there earlier.

  One of five children from itinerant, dust-bowl roots, Grace and her daughter had drifted through mining towns in Wyoming and worked on farms in Texarkana and Arkansas before moving to Vallejo and the beat-up trailer that became their home. From the first day she walked into our lives to the last time I saw her, Grace looked to be about two hundred and forty-seven years old, but was probably no more than two hundred and nine. Her skin was the texture of aged parchment, a tracery of fine wrinkles that were always turned in the opposite direction to whichever way she was leaning, as if looking for an opportunity to run off and leave her behind. Her face showed the consequences of too much sun and far too many cigarettes. Every morning she would grab a cup of coffee, plant herself in a corner of the living room, pull out her crocheting kit and a pack of Camel cigarettes, then proceed to chain-smoke the room into a perpetual haze. My father also smoked, but he was an amateur next to Grace. Charles smoked for punctuation; Grace smoked in an attempt to modify Earth’s atmosphere into something more suited to her species.

  Grace and my father despised each other, and kept their distance as much as possible, circling one another like scorpions trapped in a bottle. Her presence forced my father to dial back the nightly beatings because he knew that if he tried it, she’d wait until he was asleep then jab her crocheting needles in his eyes.

  Whenever Charles was out of the house, Grace lobbied my mother to come back with her to Vallejo and get another restraining order. She wasn’t married, so why not leave?

  “Once Charlie finds a job, he’ll be okay,” she’d say, then add, “Besides, where would I go? What would I do? It’s better here.”

  It’s better here. It was her mantra, and a source of profound anger for me. I heard it as Doing nothing is better than risking change. Inertia was the path of least resistance. Seeing her refuse to take even a single forward step inculcated in me a horror at the idea of settling for what is rather than taking a chance on what might be. I swore to never settle for It’s better here, it’s safer here. I would take chances, and if my world burned down as a consequence, then it had it coming.

  Television provided the only escape from my family, and I fell in love with science shows about space or dinosaurs, and made friends with Bugs Bunny, Soupy Sales, and Captain Kangaroo, Planet Patrol and Colonel Bleep. For those brief moments I was somewhere else, far from Paterson. But when the TV was switched off, I was right back where I started. None of it stuck. None of it mattered.

  Then I found it.

  Found him.

  Superman.

  Faster than a speeding bullet . . .

  More powerful than a locomotive . . .

  Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

  I was oblivious to the fact that behind Superman stood actor George Reeves, or that the Adventures of Superman was just a TV show. Superman was real, and unlike my father he was kind and honest and fair, and he never hit anybody who didn’t hit him first.

  The episode that broke me in half was “The Birthday Letter,” in which Superman agrees to take a crippled young girl to the county fair for her birthday. Before he can get her there, he’s attacked by mobsters. But no matter what they threw at him, you knew that he would protect her, that he would never, ever back off until he took her to the fair.

  I couldn’t stop crying. If Superman was my father, he’d never let anyone or anything hurt me. But he wasn’t my father. I was alone and powerless, and nothing would ever change that.

  Then I stumbled upon Max and Dave Fleischer’s Superman cartoons. They were beautiful, even on a small black-and-white TV. The scene that lit up my brain like a Christmas tree showed Superman using his cape to protect Lois Lane from a cascade of molten metal. Rather than being angry at her for getting in trouble, he was gentle and brave and saved her. I imprinted on that moment like a baby duck, and my child’s mind folded around a sudden understanding.

  No, Superman was never going to be my father, but if I worked at it really hard, maybe one day I could become Superman. The idea didn’t seem improbable given an Adventures of Superman episode about a guy who found Superman’s impenetrable costume; putting it on made him nearly as invulnerable as Superman. No, I didn’t have a Superman costume (though a kid down the street did have one, and it annoyed me greatly that he failed to understand the power of the thing), but if I closed my eyes, I could see myself wearing it, and that’s the next best thing, right?

  If I was Superman, nobody could hurt me, I thought, and I could protect my mom and she wouldn’t get mad at me and try to throw me off the roof again. But even if she did, it wouldn’t matter because if I was Superman, I’d just keep on going, right up into the sky.

  That fall, once Evelyn’s depression had diminished enough for her to function, Grace returned to Vallejo and I entered Blessed Sacrament School to begin my training as a Catholic. For the first time I was surrounded by kids my own age, a rite of passage that included an introduction to bullies. The nuns rarely policed the playground since in this part of town their youthful charges were almost certainly destined for lives of crime, so why bother? They probably saw it as a form of vocational training. I would spend most of my free time sitting quietly in a corner of the schoolyard while everyone else played, so the bullies ignored me until the day three of the older ones started punching one of the girls. The more they hit her, reflecting what I saw at home, the angrier I got. Finally, remembering how Superman stood with his cape over Lois Lane, I planted myself like a tree between them, fists on hips, legs slightly spread in his classic pose, imagining myself in his costume, cape rippling in the wind. The bullies were twice my size, but I was sure they would be so intimidated by the ferocity in my eyes and my heroic stance that they would turn tail and flee.

  They pounded me into the pavement.

  Now that they had my measure, they continued to beat me up over the next several weeks, until I finally lost my mind.

  They were waiting for me on the playground at lunch, and as soon as the nuns went inside to eat, the biggest bully tackled me. As I fought back I saw another kid’s lunchbox nearby: hard, bright metal with sharp edges and corners. I grabbed it and swung as hard as I could, catching the bully squarely across the forehead and opening a long gash. He fell to the ground screaming. As the nuns raced out, I looked at the blood gushing like a bright red geyser—

  —and for all intents and purposes blacked out.

  The next thing I remember is being in Mother Superior’s office, crying and scared. I tried to explain what happened, but the words kept disappearing into sobs. All I could remember was the blood. Desperate to calm me down, she picked up the nearest random object, a stapler on her desk, and gave it to me as a gift so I’d understand that I wasn’t about to be murdered. She said that the kid I’d hit had been taken to the hospital and would have to get stitches. I didn’t know what stitches were, but I figured it wasn’t good.

  When my mother and aunt showed up, Mother Superior said that since I hadn’t started it, I wouldn’t be tossed out of school provided it never happened again. But that night my father lit into me. He said some part of me was sick the way my mother was sick, that my head was screwed up. But I knew he was wrong because at that moment it wasn’t my head being stitched up across town.

  When the bully came back to school a few days later, he cried out in terror when he saw me and hunched against a wall, afraid I was going to hurt him again. Remembering the gift Mother Superior used to calm me down, I dug into my pocket for a dinosaur trading card I’d gotten earlier that week. A stegosaurus. I’d torn through bubblegum packets for weeks looking for that card, but I wanted to show him that he was safe. He took it and calmed d
own, but for the rest of my time at that school, which wasn’t long, he never came near me again.

  It was my first lesson that at their core, all bullies are cowards. But that didn’t diminish my shame at hurting someone, and I vowed never to do anything like it again. I was sickened by the incident and couldn’t understand why my father actually liked hitting people.

  Chapter 4

  Death as a Lifestyle

  In addition to being hooked on every form of alcohol known to modern science, the Straczynski family was addicted to death. Whenever anyone we knew died, the gory details would be dissected and embellished upon for days, especially if the deceased was on my family’s rather lengthy shit list. Sophia, a death junkie par excellence, was obsessed with funerals. She not only attended ceremonies for people she knew, she often went to funerals for total strangers. She would wail along with the other mourners, then go to the reception and take home as much of the catered food as could fit in her huge purse. She said she liked funeral food because it contained only the freshest ingredients—nobody wanted to add to a grieving family’s sorrow by using cheap substitutes—but I think she liked the idea of sneaking food off Death’s plate.

  My introduction to funerals came when my father took me to the service for a kid my age who had been playing in a gravel pit and suffocated when it collapsed. He didn’t know the kid or his family, but that didn’t stop him from driving around until he found the right address from an article in the newspaper. He wanted me to see a dead kid in his casket as a warning not to play in gravel pits.

  Not that I had any plans to play in gravel pits.

  Not that there were any gravel pits within a ten-mile radius of where we were living.

  But just in case I might think about traveling across town to play in a gravel pit, it was important that I see the result: caskets, flowers, and a church filled with mourners, none of whom were my grandmother, who I can only assume had her eye on a better-catered reception. But seeing my first dead body—stiff as a mannequin, pale cheeks warmed by obvious makeup—had little impact because I didn’t know the kid in the box, and I was still too young to understand what death was.

  That knowledge came a few months later, when Victor Rafael Rachwalski passed away unexpectedly at the age of fifty-three.

  The funeral service was packed with people who had known and loved him. This time my grandmother’s cries of grief were real: no pretense, no drama for the sake of attention and a platter of take-home pierogi. At one point, out of her mind with sorrow, she tore at her clothes then collapsed to the floor.

  While everyone was distracted with Sophia, and still being unclear on the whole death thing, I approached the open coffin. I couldn’t understand why my friend Pan Rafael was just lying around. There were canvases to be painted, and ice cream waiting at the other end of a journey in the blue pedal car. I reached into his coffin and tugged at his sleeve.

  “Come on, Pan Rafael,” I said, “wake up. We have to go.”

  Someone behind me cried out. My father ripped me away from the coffin, mortified by my actions. My grandmother fainted.

  And Pan Rafael remained resolutely in his coffin.

  Later, I stood in the back of the room and watched as they closed the lid and loaded him into a hearse for the long ride to the cemetery. I waved as they drove off.

  As the days passed, I began to understand that I would never see him again. My friend was gone. Now only the monsters remained.

  The Year of Death was not quite finished with me.

  On a cool, blustery afternoon, Sophia took my mother and me along on her annual pilgrimage to the grave of her firstborn son. Carrying a white Styrofoam cross with red and blue flowers, she walked with practiced familiarity to where the grass was broken by a rectangle of marble. She crossed herself, knelt, and laid the wreath on the hard ground.

  She finished her prayer, crossed herself again, then pulled me over and pointed to the headstone. “Do you know what that says?” she asked.

  Of course I knew what it said. I had just turned six, and like most kids the first thing I’d learned to write was my own name.

  The words engraved in marble read Joseph Straczynski.

  “That’s your name,” she said. “That’s you.”

  I don’t remember any of what happened after that until we walked back into our apartment. I can only assume that a part of my brain slammed shut all the doors of perception to keep my mind from going too far down the path of That’s you under the ground there. But from that day on I had a profound sense of my own mortality. I knew that I would only be here for a brief flicker of time and had to make the best of it. I had to do something with my life.

  A few mornings later, I got up to find my parents waiting for me in the front room. My father had just been fired from his latest job. This in itself was not unusual. What was surprising was what he said next.

  “We’re moving to California.”

  Chapter 5

  Pigeon Dinner with a Slice of Watermelon

  Without telling Sophia, my father had reestablished contact with my grandfather, who had been regaling Charles with stories of his success. There was serious money to be made in California, Kazimier explained, land that could be bought cheap and turned into vineyards or housing tracts. My father responded with equally wild tales of the vast resources and business acumen he could bring to bear in such an environment. It was an echo chamber built of lies and desperation since both men were actually flat broke. My father wanted to weasel his way into my grandfather’s confidence to extract his alleged fortune, and Kazimier hoped that his successful, long-lost son would take care of him in style during his declining years. When Kazimier offered to fund whatever ventures my father wanted to pursue, Charles agreed to move to Los Angeles, where they would build an empire together.

  We never owned much furniture, just a handful of pieces that could be folded quickly and thrown into a trailer when creditors came calling, so we were ready to go the next morning. I was allowed two cardboard boxes: one for clothes, the other for toys. If something didn’t fit, I had to give it away or see it tossed out, which is why I possess nothing I owned as a child. Everything was ditched at roadsides and trash bins across America, sacrificed to expediency when there was no more room in the box.

  The drive to California in my father’s old Studebaker turned into a grueling campaign to see how many miles we could rack up before exhaustion set in. We ate in the car, slept in the car, used restrooms at gas stations, and made it to Los Angeles within a week. We lived in the car for several more days while my father tried vainly to meet up with my grandfather. Kazimier had promised we could stay at his house upon arrival, but now he was unexpectedly busy with meetings and suggested we get a place on our own, just for a little while of course, until his schedule calmed down.

  We moved into what can best be described as a collection of shanties on South Clarence Street a few blocks off Skid Row: one- or two-room clapboard and cinder block structures that were perpetually covered by a fine, white dust. The area was surrounded by abandoned industrial buildings, heavily barred liquor stores, open lots where transients lived out of cardboard boxes, and SRO (single-room occupancy) hotels that could be rented by the hour and were mainly used by prostitutes.

  When my father and Kazimier finally connected, the lies on both sides were revealed in the bright daylight of mutual inconvenience. Charles threatened to go back to New Jersey, but even I knew he was bluffing since that would mean admitting he’d made a mistake. So for the next few months we lived in the shanty, eating once a day at charity kitchens run by the Salvation Army and the Volunteers of America Service Center. Stomach distended from lack of food, I slept on a mat on a concrete floor infested with roaches and bedbugs. Constantly covered in bug bites, I would frantically comb the lice out of my hair every morning only to have them move back in again that night. I became nearly pathological in my attempts to get rid of them and could feel them squirming around on my scalp even after the las
t one had been found and squished.

  Kazimier’s command of English was slightly better than Sophia’s, but he rarely spoke more than a few sentences before lapsing into silence, quiet in the way of someone whose present thoughts kept crashing against the unrealized hopes of his past. Melancholy and distant, the cuffs of his suit frayed, he would sip from a bottle of vodka inside a paper bag, eyes fixed at a spot deep inside his memories: a sad, small island of a man adrift in a world beyond his comprehension. He rarely said much to me, so I was surprised when he offered to take me out for the afternoon. We rode the bus to a nearby park, where he set an open paper bag on the ground, then pulled a slice of dry bread out of his pocket and laid a trail of crumbs into the sack. He said we were going to play a game. My part was to wait for a pigeon to wander inside the sack then grab it before the pigeon could escape.

  I thought it was a strange game, but this was California, and I’d come with an open mind.

  After a few failed attempts, I finally caught one of the pigeons. “Now what?” I asked.

  “We take it with us,” he said, “but we can’t let the bus driver know or he’ll throw us off.”

  Once we were on the bus the pigeon started pecking at the bag, trying to tear its way free. To keep the other passengers from figuring out what was going on, Kazimier chided me as if it was my fault. “Sit quiet, you’re bothering the nice people. Stop rustling that bag.”

  We arrived at an ancient, four-story walk-up hotel, then climbed up a narrow stairwell past transients sleeping on the bowed wooden steps. The acrid smell of urine, vomit, and booze hung thick in the air. The second floor was unusually dark. Sheets covered the windows at either end of the hall, and most of the lights had been removed. Those that remained cast soft pools of light on women standing alone or talking in small groups. I thought it was strange that they were all in their underwear and wondered if they’d just gotten out of bed.