Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  The realization that I didn’t have to become my father was electrifying. Kazimier, Sophia, and Charles all believed that they were the inevitable product of their circumstances, that they had no choice other than to become what they were. But negating my father would allow me to decide what I wanted to do with my life. Suddenly I had a superpower so great that my father could never destroy it because it was outside his reach.

  I had the power to choose, and the will to back it up.

  And one can go far on that.

  The most important aspect to negate was my family’s sense of victimization. Given my circumstances it would have been easy to feel like a victim, but that was the first step on the road to becoming what they had become. They believed that since they had been mistreated, they were entitled to do the same to others without being questioned or criticized. It’s not my fault that I’m like this, I am what I was made, I’m the victim here, so you have to put up with me.

  To be a victim is to be forever frozen in amber by that person’s actions at that moment. Victimization only looks backward, never forward, which is why my family was incapable of moving on or redefining themselves. If I allowed myself to be defined by what my father did to me, it would put him at the center of my identity. He would have control over me for the rest of my life, even once he was gone. Yes, I was stuck in a box with a monster, but wallowing in indulgent self-pity wasn’t the solution; the task before me was to survive the monster without becoming the monster.

  In a way, I was lucky that my father was as awful as he was. He had no good qualities to negate. Had he been a better human being, I would have become a worse one.

  When I was fifteen, we again moved across town to a worn-down, ill-kept house on Main Street whose most charming feature was a broken septic tank that leaked into the backyard. You could locate the house by the smell if you couldn’t find the address. It was here that my long-delayed growth spurt started. As if trying to make up for lost time, I would grow from five foot three to six foot three in less than a year. Whenever I reached for something, it wasn’t where my body-memory said it was supposed to be, so I was constantly breaking things and tripping. My clumsiness gave my father something new to mock, and the thugs at school one more reason to come after me.

  But growing tall enough to loom over the bullies began to have a psychological effect on them. For the first time I saw hesitation in their eyes. It was as if Nature said, We better give this guy some protective coloration or he’s going to get killed. Let’s make him taller. No, six inches isn’t nearly enough. Ten? Still not enough. Let’s give him an extra foot. No, not that kind, he already has two left feet, let’s not complicate things.

  My anchor through these moves was Midnight, a black cat I’d found under a bush shortly after moving to Matawan, very sick and waiting to die. I nursed her back to health and we became inseparable. She’d lie on my bed as I did my homework, or sit with me at night, just watching. Had I been smarter, had I been able to see a bit further down the road, I would have tried to find another home for her, but I was too caught up with the joy of having her around.

  That’s no excuse. I should’ve seen what was coming. Maybe I could’ve saved her.

  In June 1970 my father’s factory went under after months of poor management and overdue bills. The equipment was repossessed, creditors were calling nonstop, and this time they were asking for Stark and Straczynski. Having worn out his welcome in New Jersey, he told us to be ready to leave the next night under cover of darkness, our destination: Los Angeles, the only place he knew well enough to make a fresh start.

  As usual, my sisters and I were allocated only two boxes each. But with my comics, records, toys, and clothes, I had four. I asked my father if the extra load was okay, and he said yes. I then reminded him of his promise that if Midnight was around on moving day, she could come along.

  “Not a problem,” he said.

  He was being reasonable. I should’ve suspected something.

  To make sure Midnight didn’t stray, I kept her in my room all night as I packed, only taking her out the next morning to use the backyard. As I watched her play, my father called over from the garage to say he couldn’t fit all four of my boxes into the U-Haul and told me to narrow it down to three. I raced upstairs and divvied up the comics, putting some in with my clothes and others in a box with my books, then dumped my few toys, most of which no longer had any appeal to a fifteen-year-old.

  As I finished repacking, I became aware of Midnight behind me in the door to my room. She always liked to sit and watch me, but this felt different. She was looking at me with a strange intensity, as though trying to burn the image into her head. When I called her name, she turned and headed downstairs, moving slowly and with difficulty. I followed her outside, and within moments she began spasming, pushing her face into the cool grass for comfort. I ran to her, petting her and calling her name. She was shaking, muscles tense, eyes focused at a point somewhere past me. Strangely, she was purring, as if self-medicating against the pain. I was sobbing into her fur as she fixed on my face.

  Then the light went out of her eyes, and she was gone.

  I turned to see my father standing on the back porch, where he had watched the whole thing. His eyes were dull, his voice flat. “I was moving boxes out of the garage and found some rat poison,” he said. “I put it off to the side so I could throw it out. She must’ve found it.” Then he went back inside.

  I sat on the grass, crying and rocking Midnight back and forth in my lap. As the daylight faded I backhanded the tears, got a screwdriver, and tore at the hard ground to make a grave. When it was deep enough, I wrapped her in one of my T-shirts so she could have my smell with her, covered her with soil, and returned to the house.

  As I went upstairs to get my three boxes, the tears were replaced by cold rage.

  This was not the first time a cat I’d adopted had disappeared or unexpectedly died on moving day. That was not, could not be a coincidence. Midnight was a finicky eater, she never would have eaten rat poison out of a box. She would only have eaten it if someone put it inside a piece of meat or fish while I was upstairs.

  Correction: while my father sent me upstairs. It was the only time I’d left her unguarded.

  And in that moment, he’d poisoned her.

  I cursed myself for my stupidity. I should’ve given her to someone else, should’ve known better than to try to hold on to her. But I’d been selfish, and she paid the price.*

  A few hours later we hit the road, heading west. After an hour of driving, my father told me that he had to leave one of my boxes behind, since there wasn’t room for it in the truck with all of his stuff.

  I asked him which box he’d ditched beside the road.

  “The heavy one,” he said.

  It was the one with most of my comics and other books.

  Thinking of Midnight and my lost comics, I turned my face to the passing night, determined not to let him see me cry.

  Chapter 12

  Discovering Words, Worlds, and Estrogen

  When we hit Los Angeles, we lived in the car for several days until Charles found a cheap apartment in Inglewood. It wasn’t until we moved in that we learned the reason for the low rent: the apartment was at the ass end of one of the main runways to Los Angeles International Airport. Planes roared overhead all day and most of the night, drowning out conversation.

  But it beat sleeping in the car, and we never had much to talk about anyway.

  The only thing I knew for sure about the writing profession was that there was a lot of typing involved, so when I started at Lennox High School as a junior, I signed up for introductory and intermediate typing classes concurrently and discovered in the latter case that I was the only boy in the joint. Even in the ’70s girls were still expected to take typing classes to prepare for career paths as secretaries to powerful men, while boys took physical education courses that would somehow qualify them to give dictation. Girls were a mystery to me, as alien and
unknowable as the surface of Mars. I’d never been on a date and was painfully shy. The idea of walking up to a girl and starting a conversation was more frightening than anything Lovecraft had ever written. So I was understandably terrified when some of these life-forms crowded around me on the first day of class and actually started talking to me, asking where I was from and what was I doing on their planet? Was I hoping to become a male secretary?

  Encircled and outgunned by miniskirts, perfume, and pheromones, I inadvertently defaulted to the truth and stammered out that I was training to become a writer. Rather than ending the conversation, my explanation only piqued their interest further and now there were more of them and they kept talking to me!

  “What have you written so far?” they asked, leaning in, over, and around me.

  Cheeks flushed, I looked down at the typewriter keys and muttered something noncommittal. Would the spiral of madness never end?

  They asked if I could show them something I’d written.

  “No!” I said, louder than intended in a voice that had not yet changed from falsetto into something more manly. When I tried to explain that I hadn’t yet committed anything to paper because I wasn’t ready, the circle of girls lost interest. Deciding that I was either faking it or just weird, they returned to their planet and left me to my keystroking.

  I’d been saying for years that I wanted to become a writer, but my father always ridiculed the idea, saying that I was speaking above my station and trying to be a big shot. He hadn’t changed his opinion, but when he found out I was taking typing, he saw a skill that he could use.

  “You want to be a writer?” he said. “Good. I’ve got something for you to write. You’re going to write the story about how I was stuck in Russia during the war.”

  Swell.

  Decades had passed since his return from Europe, but my father was still convinced that he could have sold his story for untold riches had the press simply delved more deeply. Now that there was a writer in the house—or at least a damned fast typist—he had another chance. So every day after school I was pressed into writing my father’s story, using an old 1930s Royal American typewriter he’d purchased from a local tavern for ten bucks. It had been sitting on a mantel over the bar for years, more a prop than a working machine, and had not been cleaned or fixed in all that time. The keys stuck, the lines were ragged, the tab worked only intermittently, and the platen was badly dented. I had to push down on each key with all my might to convince it to strike the page, after which it would slowly float down to rejoin its brethren for a well-deserved rest.

  His awful title for the story—which I wrote under his name, even though I was doing all the actual work*—was “The Vacation I Am Trying to Forget.” I would take detailed notes as he described each step of his journey, then retire to my room to start writing, adding what I thought were writerly touches but which made the text feel desperately overwrought. I didn’t understand the difference between drama and melodrama, between succinct description and purple prose, and the work too often fell into the latter categories.

  This is how the story started, reprinted verbatim, with footnoted color commentary:

  When mother told us that we were going to Europe, my sister and I were in a maze of excitement† for several days. Finally the day of departure arrived. Although it was only going to be a three-month trip, we packed enough clothes to last us a year.*

  I was a boy of ten† and since my eight-year-old sister was suffering from polio, our doctor suggested that the trip abroad might help our spirits.

  It was on the evening of June 6, 1939 that a small group of friends gathered on the pier in Hoboken, NJ to see us off as we boarded the Polish liner Batory that was to take us to Poland to visit our relatives.

  For us, life aboard the ship was one of constant delights journey.‡ Most of the time we sat on the deck enjoying the ocean breeze, and on the fifth day out we encountered the liner Batory’s twin sister ship, Pilsudski. The ship was returning from Poland. Both ships greeted each other with a handful of hoots from the foghorns and as the ships passed by we noticed a crowd of people waving to us,§ so we waved back.

  The voyage lasted ten days and on June 16, 1939, we arrived in Gdynia, Poland. The entrance of the ship to the port¶ was greeted with bands playing, people singing and dancing. It made us all feel very welcome.

  Today when I think of it, I realize that we were very blissful and excited on that day. We had no inkling of what horror was soon to beset us.*

  The writing was awful. One can almost hear the musical sting at the end of the last sentence: da-da-da-dummm! My only defense is that I was sixteen and working with inferior material from a dubious source on a badly wounded typewriter.

  The more he talked, the more loquacious he became, delving deeper into the details. Then a curious thing happened.† We’d reached the point in the story where he, Theresa, and Sophia were living at the Bogdanova train station occupied by German soldiers. Then he paused for a moment, as if trying to decide how to say something without giving too much away.

  “This is the part about Vishnevo,” he said at last.

  I sat up straighter. Vishnevo was the word my aunt had used to put him in his place. Finally, I was going to discover what it meant.

  He said that toward the end of August 1942, SS soldiers arrived by railcar at the train station. After joining up with elements of the Gestapo, they moved into the countryside, heading for the village of Vishnevo.

  The pertinent excerpt from the document, transcribed from his own words:

  I followed behind at a distance. They marched past the Orthodox Church then made a right turn on the road where the Jewish cemetery was located. I cut across the field and hid in an old first world war bunker across from the cemetery and waited. When the Jews arrived a few minutes later the Gestapo and police prodded the Jews towards the hole that had been dug previously. There were shouts, I could not hear very well what was being said, but I assume that they were ordered to line up in front of the holes. Some moved very slowly and reluctantly. Others were shoved towards the hole. A signal was given. The guns fired loudly piercing the still air. The prisoners slowly slumped and fell into the open holes. It looked like some tried to escape, but I don’t know if any made it. From the bunker where I was hiding I could plainly see that some were still alive but already they had a crew ready to cover them up with dirt to smother and die.

  My father then described another incident at Vishnevo that took place soon afterward:

  In August of 1942 my mother’s helpers* reported for work very early in the morning. Edmund Lang† confided to my mother that he had information that something was going to happen in Vishnevo. My mother was telling my uncle who was visiting us of what she heard; I overheard this and the next thing that happened I was on my way to Vishnevo. I got there about an hour later and found that a lot of commotion was going on near and at the square. There were trucks and some gunfire and a German truck that was blocking the road would not let anyone pass through.

  I asked a man standing nearby what was going on and he replied that they are taking the Jews out of the ghetto and moving them up the street where the ghetto ended. They were taking them there by foot and the ones that were too old, sick or too slow were driven by truck. I got as close as I could. I heard terrifying screams above the gunfire. I knew that someone was being hurt, but I did not go to find out. I remembered what had happened at the cemetery and I didn’t want to see something like that again. Instead I decided to leave and return to the station.

  The story raised more questions than it answered. How did Charles end up at both events, which by his own account were half an hour’s drive from the station on bad roads?

  I followed behind at a distance.

  On foot? Pacing trucks and soldiers on a forced march? For five miles?

  I overheard this and the next thing that happened I was on my way to Vishnevo.

  The next thing that happened?

  Happened how?
Did he sneak onto a truck? Dematerialize and rematerialize outside the village? He refused to explain. He happened to be there and that was as far as he’d go. It was the sort of evasiveness my father resorted to when he wanted to avoid specificity for his own protection, which under the circumstances seemed odd.

  I also thought it strange that a German soldier would give Sophia, supposedly little more than a housekeeper, tactical information about a coming attack; and stranger still that after the second incident, another German officer would tell her to get out of the area or be branded a collaborator because they worked at the train station. Lots of people worked at the station, many against their will, so why would they be singled out?

  He refused to elaborate. “Just write it up,” he said.

  Later, as I passed my parents’ bedroom, I saw that my father had laid the German jacket out on the bed and was looking at it with an expression that was wistful, almost nostalgic. When he saw me, his expression hardened and for a moment it wasn’t him looking at me; there was something darker peering out through his eyes as he closed and locked the door. For just a moment I felt a flicker of sympathy for my father. Witnessing such a crime must have been traumatic for him. Scores were murdered. This was important. He had been a witness to history. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to the story. He’d chosen his words too carefully for me to think otherwise.

  There was something he didn’t want me to know.

  In February 1971 one of my father’s job applications bore unexpected fruit. International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) was looking for people with experience in plastic manufacturing for their Cable Hydrospace facility in National City, just south of San Diego.* After selling them a bill of goods about how successful his plastics company in Matawan had been, they hired him and paid all expenses to relocate our family to San Diego.

  We moved into an apartment at 1250 Fifth Avenue in Chula Vista, a bedroom community south of San Diego. I would complete the last half of my junior year at Chula Vista High School, my twelfth school and our eighteenth move in just under seventeen years.