Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  Determined to understand the social changes whirling around me, but lacking teachers or family who could explain it, I turned to the smartest voices I could find: science fiction writers. I figured that somewhere in all those books predicting shifts in future societies somebody must’ve had something brilliant to say about this one. I wanted stories with meat and heft and social relevance, but the school library only stocked titles they deemed safe for young minds, the public library refused to let me check out books that were considered inappropriate for my age, and I didn’t have the money to buy them.

  So I turned to a life of crime.

  Several stores in our neighborhood sold paperback books in spinner racks at the back; mostly romance and crime novels, along with an assortment of adult science fiction novels and anthologies. So I carefully scoped out each store to figure out what could be seen in the security mirrors from behind the cash register, looking for blind spots. If the mirrors covered the place too thoroughly, I’d wait until the owner was ringing up a purchase then climb onto a box, tilt the mirror to create a gap, and hope the adjustment wouldn’t be noticed.

  I could then step into the blind spot, slide a book into my jacket, and walk out. To throw off suspicion I’d sometimes buy a nickel candy bar on my way out, and I never hit the same place twice in a row. These stores became my personal libraries, offering books by such cutting-edge writers as J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazny, and Philip K. Dick. It was the dawn of New Wave Science Fiction, which turned its attention from starships to social issues and pushed the envelope of what was considered acceptable by the literary establishment. They were exactly the stories I needed to read.

  The only problem was my conscience. I could reconcile myself to taking the books since that was the only way to read them, but the idea of keeping them was more than I could bear. Certainly Superman wouldn’t go around stealing paperbacks. Unless of course Red Kryptonite was involved, but then he’d put them back as soon as he recovered.

  So that’s what I decided to do.

  I would read each book gently, careful not to break the spine, then press them flat under my schoolbooks until it was impossible to tell they’d been opened, return them to the store using the same blind spots, and exchange them for new books. My greatest fear was that I’d be caught, not while taking a book, but while returning it. Who in his right mind would believe I was putting it back?

  Given the risk involved, every book I “borrowed” had to be worth the risk of getting turned over to the cops. The only thing worse than the prospect of being sent to Juvenile Hall for stealing books was being sent up the river for stealing shitty books. But I was unfamiliar with the history of the genre, and most of the writers’ names were new to me, so I didn’t know where to begin. After a while I noticed that the books I liked best were marked Hugo Award Winner. A little digging revealed that the Hugo was science fiction’s highest honor, given annually at the World Science Fiction Convention. It said Pay attention, this is important.

  To avoid being caught with the merchandise, I would stash the books under the living room couch that was my bed, and read them at night after everyone else was asleep. The stories were edgy and sophisticated, shifting the emphasis of science fiction away from wars in space to what William Faulkner described as “the human heart in conflict with itself.” I was awestruck by the depth of what I was reading, and hoped that one day I might write something worthy of a Hugo.

  Among the writers I discovered during this time was Harlan Ellison. Reading Paingod and Other Delusions and Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation was like having molten steel poured directly into my brain. I would read them over and over, trying to figure out how he did what he did. The writing was hard-edged, the language precise and evocative. Where other books offered introductions written in an aloof, antiseptic fashion, Ellison’s intros let you feel what it was to live with a twelve-story brain clicking along at ten thousand revolutions per second.

  Eager to read more of his work, and having exhausted the liquor store inventories, I scrounged through used bookstores until I found his anthology Ellison Wonderland, which I bought for fifteen cents. Leaving aside the TAB books, which were written for kids, this was the first grown-up book I owned outright and it became one of my prized possessions.

  Prior to encountering Ellison’s work, I believed that writing was an Ivory Tower profession practiced by artists with rarified sensibilities from good schools and supportive families in Boston or New York. They wore elegant smoking jackets and wrote while reclining on Macassar fainting couches. That world didn’t touch my world at any two contiguous points. Kids like me didn’t become writers, we became mechanics or gas station attendants or ended up dead or in prison. But Ellison came from humble beginnings in Painesville, Ohio, ran with street gangs and had done time in the infamous New York Tombs.

  If a guy from the streets like Ellison can make it as a writer, I thought, maybe I can, too.

  It gave me hope, and there wasn’t much of it going around Newark that year.

  When my grandmother came to visit that Christmas, she was accompanied by Walter Androsik, a quiet, introspective man from the Old Country who kept his hand on Sophia’s arm to make it clear that they were an item.* As the evening wore on and the drinking got heavier, Walter waved me over to where he was sitting, a gift-wrapped box in one hand, a glass of vodka in the other. Looking at me through booze-softened eyes, he said, “I buy this for you,” his accent thick and blurred. “I buy this for you because he was great man, so you be great man too one day.”

  Inside the box was a chalk bust of John F. Kennedy that had been painted a flat gold.

  Let me revise that sentence: it was a chalk bust of JFK that also functioned as a bank.

  To revise further: it was a JFK bank that had been made prior to the assassination, and the way it worked was that you dropped coins through a slot in the back of his head right where Oswald popped him. Worse still, there wasn’t a coin door at the bottom of the bank; once it was filled the only way to get the money out was by smashing his head into a million pieces.

  Walter pulled out a nickel, dropped it in the slot at the back of JFK’s head, and shook it. The nickel rattled back and forth inside his throat.

  Later, when the sea of vodka reached high tide, I found Walter sitting with the bust in his lap, right hand folded into the shape of a gun. He put his finger to the coin slot in the back of JFK’s head and pulled the trigger, making a puffffft! sound.

  “Puffffft, gone,” he said, then did it again. “Puffffft . . . gone.”

  We were living in a tenement in one of the most dangerous cities in America, I was engaged in a life of crime, and the man who was on a fast track to becoming my step-grandfather was repeatedly assassinating the bust of a dead president.

  There was absolutely nothing about my life that made any kind of goddamned sense.

  Chapter 9

  Being Invisible

  One aspect of Superman that I related to deeply was his position as an outsider, an alien who had to learn what it was to be a human boy. Sort of a Kryptonian Pinocchio. To survive our constant moves I employed a similar tactic. In addition to memorizing the geography of each new location I would study the local kids, their mannerisms, slang, attitudes, and the things they talked about. The more I could successfully mimic them, the more invisible I became; when they looked at me, they saw only their own reflection. Over time I accumulated a catalog of behaviors copied from other people that I could slide in and out of as needed. This was a great resource for a writer, but that pattern of concealment may explain why I’ve always felt less like an actual person than a Lego set in human form.

  What I couldn’t adapt to as easily were the class curriculums that often varied wildly between schools. By the time I finally caught up, we would move somewhere else and I’d have to start the process all over again. This was further complicated by my inability to see the blackboard. For as long as I could r
emember, blackboards had been a distant, blurry mystery, especially since I usually ended up stuck in the back of the room. I was dreadfully nearsighted but didn’t know it because I had nothing to compare it against. I assumed everyone saw the same as I did, and that the smarter students were seated up front to give them a better view. At the end of each class I’d run up to the blackboard to try and copy down the Secrets of the Universe only to see them erased in preparation for the next class.

  I’d been working doubly hard to catch up at school and was pretty sure I could make up the grades when one of my teachers sent home a letter saying that if my work didn’t improve soon, there was a chance I might be held back a year. When my father saw the letter, he went into full rage mode.

  And out came the belt.

  I haven’t mentioned the belt previously because I didn’t want to talk about it. I’m mentioning it now, just once, because something different happened this time.

  Most parents in the ’60s considered corporal punishment a last resort, not the first. My father did it whenever the opportunity presented itself because he liked doing it. Any infraction, no matter how small—coming home late, not finishing dinner, complaining there wasn’t enough food, even an impertinent look—was grounds to pull out the belt. The lashings were neither brief nor moderate. As early as age three he would whip me as hard as he could across my back, butt, and legs with a heavy leather belt, producing welts, bruises, and, on occasion, cuts. My sisters got the belt rarely and never as hard because he already had a female to beat in my mother. I provided variation to the menu.

  Sometimes when I was just sitting on the floor watching television he’d loop the belt then yank it at both ends so it made a loud snap! He wanted me to know the belt was there and could be used at any moment. I would be reading, doing homework, and in the background:

  Snap.

  Snap!

  Snap!

  After reading the letter, he looped the belt and swung it at me, hard. The first lash caught me up along the rib cage. I instinctively turned away, and the next blow hit square against the small of my back. My eyes stung with tears but I refused to cry out because he liked it when I yelled, and I would rather die than give him that satisfaction. The belt struck again. My sisters hid in their bedroom as my mother stood in the kitchen, head down, eyes averted. Silent.

  He wound up for another blow. Swung the belt—

  —and I snagged it. Grabbed it and wouldn’t let go.

  His eyes went wide and wild with fury. How dare I try to stop him from beating me?

  He pulled back. I wrapped my arm through the loop and held on tight.

  He yanked harder, hurling me across the room.

  I held on. This time, this one time, I wasn’t going to let him do it to me.

  He spun me around and cocked back a fist.

  I cannot say definitively that he knocked me out. All I remember is a blur of motion, his fist coming at me, then looking up a moment later from the floor.

  “Think you’re too big for the belt, you little prick?” he yelled. “You don’t want the belt anymore? Fine. You just remember that next time. Remember that.”

  And he stormed out to get drunk.

  I learned later what he meant by the next time. Henceforth my reward for impertinence would be the fist, not the belt. But in that moment, I’d won. I’d beaten the belt.

  When he returned that night, he went to the sofa where I was pretending to be asleep and dragged me into the kitchen. There was a mean smile on his face that I’d seen before, a self-satisfied, dangerous smirk that was equal parts booze and malice.

  “I know what your problem is,” he said, a slyness in his voice. “I know why your grades stink. Why you think you’re a man all of a sudden. Bad influences. I’m going to fix that.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about until I glanced into the living room and saw that the Box had been opened. The Box was a small, cheap, pot-metal cabinet I’d found in a trash bin. The Box was where I kept my comics. To make sure it wasn’t inadvertently thrown out I drew a circle on one side and wrote JOE’S COMICS in the middle with a black Sharpie. The books were in pristine condition, kept from sunlight, stacked alternately so the stapled ends wouldn’t curl. They looked as if they had come out of the store that day. It never occurred to me that they might have value one day, I was just really anal about my comics. And I would never have left the door open.

  My father reached under his chair, pulled out the comics, and set them on the table. He said comics were responsible for my falling grades and bad behavior. It wasn’t his fault—it couldn’t be him, or the nights of drunken excess or cold midnight pizzas or changing schools every six months or the fact that I couldn’t see the freaking blackboard—it had to be the comics. True, they had a bad reputation in some circles, but that wasn’t the point. He just knew I loved my comics and wanted to hurt me in the soft places where the belt and the fist couldn’t reach.

  Before I could move, he grabbed a handful of comics and ripped them in half. Then another. I cried out despite myself, because this wasn’t about me; it was about watching him turn full runs of The Amazing Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, The Flash, Green Lantern, and Superman into confetti. He kept going until the last comic lay on the floor in multicolored shards.*

  “This is for your own good,” he said, without meaning a word of it, “because you’ll never make a living with that crap.

  “Now clean up this mess,” he said, then walked into the bedroom and slammed the door shut behind him.

  I’d refused to cry when he was beating me, but now I was hysterical with grief as I sifted through the mountain of shredded paper, eyes stinging at the sight of familiar faces and insignias. A fragment of Reed Richards’s uniform. Part of the key to the Fortress of Solitude. Krypto. I piled them into two grocery bags, walked down the hall, dropped them into the slot marked TRASH, and went back to the sofa. As I lay there crying, I tried to push down the rage and the pain in my heart because it was a school night; there was a test waiting for me in the morning, and I needed to sleep.

  I failed at both.

  When Walter Androsik married my grandmother, the reception at her house was more than a little awkward. Walter had a large party of well-wishers, but all of Sophia’s relatives were in Europe and most of her neighbors wouldn’t show up for anything less celebratory than her funeral. The rest attended out of fear of retaliation or the lure of a free dinner.

  Later that night, after the last of the guests had departed, Sophia and Walter went upstairs to change while my father and Aunt Theresa sat at the kitchen table speaking in a mix of Polish and Russian. I was settled in at the far end of the table, trying to look disinterested while actively trying to follow the conversation. One of the few ways I could learn anything interesting about my family was by listening in on discussions I wasn’t supposed to hear or understand. By now I had acquired a smattering of both languages, and sometimes my aunt would lapse into English when there wasn’t a foreign corollary, so while I couldn’t always catch the subtleties I usually got the gist of what was being discussed.

  Hunkered over his vodka, drunk and sullen, my father suggested that if Walter really knew what he was marrying, he would run out the door and never come back.

  Theresa slammed her palm on the table. Who the hell was he to talk about her that way?

  My father’s mood got darker as he fired another salvo at my absent grandmother. I recognized one of his words from the way he talked about the women he saw on the streets in Newark: kurwa. Or in English, whore.

  Theresa jabbed a finger at him, yelling angrily. She’d had enough to drink, and enough of him, that she didn’t care what she said or what he thought of it. Besides, Ted was in the other room; if Charles lifted a finger against her, Ted would nail his head to the table.*

  “You don’t talk about her like that!” Theresa said. “She did everything for you, for us!”

  “I ought to go up there, tel
l him who she is, what she did—”

  My aunt leaned in, eyes drilling into his skull, her voice low and cold. “You’re not the only one here who can talk about things that someone has done.”

  And her words came back to me from years earlier: There are things I know about your father that I can only tell to a dog.

  He lit a cigarette and waved away her comment. “What’re you talking about?”

  She said just one word. It sounded like Vishnevo.

  Before this night I’d seen my father exhibit every kind of emotion, but this was the first time I ever saw him afraid. The blood rushed from his face as he started to stammer out a protest. She cut him off with a look, then stood, spat on the floor, and stormed out, throwing back that word again: Vishnevo!

  Visibly shaken, my father walked out to the backyard and stood there for a very long time, his Lucky Strike cigarette glowing red in the night.

  I wondered what Vishnevo meant. I assumed it was a curse word but couldn’t figure out why it had such a sobering effect on my father. I mentally filed the word away in case it ever came up again in context so I could add it to my growing collection of Russian and Polish profanity.

  Without realizing it I had glimpsed the tip of an iceberg that contained my family’s most horrific secret. At the time, I just figured that she had called him a dick.

  Which I could totally support.

  With each passing month the violence and despair in our Newark apartment grew worse. As my sister Theresa would write much later, “The earliest memory I have from Newark was walking out of the bedroom to find Mom with her head in the oven. Of course I was too young to know what she was doing. She yelled at me to go back to my room and then we heard Charles come home and he beat her up.”

  Then my father convinced a businessman he met at the plastics factory where he worked to fund an extrusion business that they would own together, purchasing the machinery and collecting the profits while my father ran the physical operation. If things went well, in time my father could buy him out. Charles’s partner offered to set up the business in Matawan, a small town in central New Jersey, and pay for our relocation.