Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  I enrolled at the recently opened Kankakee Community College. Much of it was still under construction, the handful of finished buildings outnumbered by trailers housing classrooms and labs. There were no theater or journalism departments, no on-campus radio or TV stations, and only one rudimentary class in creative writing. Since most students who majored in writing ended up as teachers rather than writers, I decided to major in psychology in the belief that it would help me get into the heads of my characters. Naturally my father declined to help pay for my education, so I took out loans, grants, and hardship assistance, and worked part-time in the Adult Education office, typing forms and filing papers.

  Desperate to break the monotony, I looked for anything that might resemble the House of Abba, but the Jesus Movement had not yet penetrated into Kankakee. A lively contingent had taken root in Chicago, but for a nondriver that was impossibly out of range, so I decided to try and create a coffeehouse on my own. I’d barely started discussing the idea with pastors at local churches and youth centers when I was contacted by members of the Chicago Jesus Movement. They explained that the areas south of the Windy City were under the jurisdiction of one of the group’s leaders (his name long since forgotten) and nothing could be done without his blessings. This felt more like a McDonald’s franchise than a religious one, but I didn’t want to cause trouble so I made the pilgrimage by bus to meet with him.

  The leader was a large man with a long, thick beard who spoke slowly and sonorously, as though trying to give each word importance by how he said it. He asked about my beliefs, and where I had found Christ. I answered politely, then described what I had in mind. He seemed perturbed that I was bringing a California vibe to Chicago.

  “What’s the name you want to give to the coffeehouse?” he asked.

  I leaned forward, very proud of the name I’d chosen. “The House of the Risen Son.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not it.”

  “That’s not what?”

  “The Lord revealed to me the name of the coffeehouse that is to rise down there, and that’s not the name.”

  “Okay, so what is the name? I can always change it.”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the Lord told me not to tell anyone the name. That way I would know when someone else said it that this was the right coffeehouse to support.”

  I’d seen my father con enough people to recognize one when I heard it. Since the information was only in his head, he could say no, that’s not it forever and there was no way to prove he was lying. But I decided to play it out anyway. Let’s see where this goes.

  “Did you write the name down anywhere so this could be confirmed?” I asked.

  “The Lord told me not to write it down, because faith does not require proof, and if it was written down, the Devil could get it and use it.”

  “To form a Christian coffeehouse.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he do that very often?”

  “The Devil comes in familiar clothes.”

  “What if I said the Lord told me that he didn’t give you the right name, that he gave me the right name?”

  “That isn’t the Lord.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the Lord told me it’s not him.”

  “Just now?”

  “Yes.”

  “But isn’t my hearing the Lord as valid as you hearing the Lord?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the Lord told me first.”

  Cornered by his ineluctable logic, I took the bus home and let the idea slide.

  During the long and lonely months that followed, I stayed sane through a series of letters and, later, phone calls with Cathi in Chula Vista. But when my father saw the phone bill, he flew into a rage, even though I was giving my mother money to cover the charges. The cost wasn’t the issue; it was that I was calling anyone without his permission. He demanded I stop at once.

  I refused. I was in college, earning my own money, and there was no way I was going to stop calling Cathi.

  Enraged at my defiance, he punched me in the face hard enough to hurl my glasses across the room and put a vertical fracture in my right lateral incisor, next to the tooth he’d damaged earlier. (It would later break lengthwise, leaving me with two-thirds of a tooth for many years because I couldn’t afford to fix it.)

  As I walked across the room to pick up my badly bent glasses I didn’t yell back at him. Instead I got very quiet. Everything inside me grew cold. When I turned to face him, my voice was low and deadly serious.

  “I want you to understand that if you ever hit me again, I’m going to kill you.” It wasn’t a threat. It wasn’t anger. It was a statement of fact, and he could see it in my eyes.

  “You can’t talk to me like that! I’m your father!”

  “Maybe you are, and maybe you’re not, according to you. But I’m telling you again, straight up: if you hit me one more time, between now and forever, I will kill you.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Then try me, right now,” I said, my anger coming out in every syllable. “Maybe I won’t kill you this second. Maybe I’ll wait until you’re asleep or passed out. You sleep ten feet from my door. Wouldn’t take much to put a pillow over your face and say you choked to death on your own vomit. Today, tomorrow, a week from now. I don’t even care if I go to jail. I’ll kill you.”

  I meant it. I meant every inch of it.

  And he knew it.

  “Try me,” I said again, getting right up in his face. “Try me!”

  He backed away, yelling and cursing and throwing things around the room.

  But he didn’t hit me. He didn’t fucking dare.

  That was the last time he ever hit me.

  Under other conditions I would have left home and found some way to earn a living while going to school, but for years I’d been the only thing standing between my father and my sisters and, to a degree, my mother, taking whatever came when he was drunk and violent. Though I’d given him cause to hold back on hitting me again, he would still come home each night full of rage, profanity, and psychological abuse. If I walked away, my sisters would inherit the brunt of his behavior which would sooner or later turn to violence, and that I could not allow. So I stayed.

  By the end of the semester my father announced that we were moving to Texas, where several new plastics companies were starting up that might need experienced workers. There was nothing to hold me to Illinois, so for once I was actually okay with the move.

  Our apartment on West Spring Valley Road in Richardson, Texas, was right at the town’s border: cross the street and you’re in Dallas, cross back and you’re in Richardson. This is what passes for a good time in Richardson.

  I was delighted to discover that Richland Junior College crackled with an energy and creativity that KCC lacked. Twice a week beat poetry was performed in the common area just abaft the cafeteria, and the experience of hearing words slammed together in ways that emphasized the sound as much as the content led me to fall in love with the works of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, e. e. cummings, and Allen Ginsberg. Poetry helped me understand the power and the precision of language because it allowed for no margin of error: you had only a few lines to make your point, so every word had to be the right word in the right place.

  Since I was still paying my own way through college I began hitchhiking to school to save money. The hardest part was standing in the blistering Texas heat, thumb out, waiting for a car to bleed out of the distance. I was matchstick thin and clearly not a threat to anyone, so most of my rides came from elderly women concerned for my safety.

  Then I saw an ad on the campus bulletin board from a young woman who wanted someone to drive to school with, not even a paying carpooler, just someone to share the ride.

  “My name’s Donna,” she said when I called, “and I drive a gunmetal-gray Toyota with a black top that looks like a stolen car. I drive f
ast, so if you’re not there when I pull up, I’m gone.”

  I liked her instantly, and over the next few months we became friends, logging miles and confidences. One afternoon she said, “So, you ever do grass?”

  I shook my head. The tactics used by government and teachers had done a good job of scaring me, especially in Texas where being caught with a single joint was a felony charge that would get you sent to prison.

  “You want to try some?” she asked.

  I demurred. She let it go, then asked again a few days later, suggesting that it would make me more creative. Since every writer has to be open to new experiences, and I was always looking for new ways to explore my creative side, I finally said sure, why not?

  That night we drove up into the hills above Richardson. The throaty engine of the souped-up Toyota roared through the darkness as we cut down dusty switchback roads barely wider than the car. To make sure we weren’t being followed she killed the lights and drove by instinct down a dirt path to a cutout that overlooked the city. She switched on the radio, reached under the dashboard, and came up with a joint; she lit up, took a long drag, and handed it to me. I studied it, hesitated, then took a puff. It seared my throat and I coughed most of it out before trying again. As we passed it back and forth I gazed out at the city, and a soft, fuzzy calm descended over me. The music on the radio sounded clearer than usual, and the warm air held the scent of night-blooming jasmine. It was a really terrific view, and “I just noticed that the streetlights down below seem to float if you look at them the right way, green, red . . . and man, it’s taking them a looooong time to change . . .”

  Donna laughed up smoke. “You’re stoned,” she said.

  “I am?”

  She nodded. “First time lucky.” This was when weed was still fairly gentle, before the arrival of later strains strong enough to blind a police dog at thirty paces. I turned my attention back out the window. It was a beautiful view, and if that’s what being stoned meant, taking the ordinary and making it beautiful, well, what’s wrong with that?

  She handed back the joint as Gregg Allman’s “Midnight Rider” drifted up from the speakers. There is no more perfect song to hear the first time one does grass in a car overlooking the moonlit Texas hills than “Midnight Rider.” That song was stoned before we got there.

  None of this reconciled with what I’d learned about religion in Chula Vista, but this wasn’t Chula Vista, I was learning to take chances as a writer, and frankly, what the hell had Chula Vista done for me lately?

  The only nagging question I couldn’t avoid was: What would Superman think about this?

  I don’t know, I thought, staring out at the night. I’m lost. I don’t know where I am or where I’m going or much of anything anymore. I’m in the Phantom Zone. And if grass exists anywhere in the Superman universe, it’s definitely in the Phantom Zone.

  I emerged from the apartment one morning to find my father slumped over the steering wheel where he’d passed out the night before. I tapped on the window. He looked up, too drunk to register it was me, then passed out again.

  As I walked off, I fantasized about dragging him into the trunk and leaving him there to suffocate, and an idea hit me: rather than shoving my father into the trunk, what if the job he was looking for could be shoved into something the size of a car trunk?

  An extruder is a massive piece of machinery: six feet tall for the heater and grinder, plus another three feet for the bin holding the plastic pellets that were melted then pushed into a four-foot-long heated metal barrel. Add the cooling troughs and the whole thing was about nine feet tall and twenty feet long, necessary for producing golf tubes, landscaping pipes, and other heavy-duty plastics products. But you wouldn’t need a machine that big to make something small, like dental rings for braces. If the machine could be scaled down small enough to be carried in the trunk of a car, my father could work anywhere he wanted, which for my purposes was Chula Vista.

  When I suggested the idea, he did a few sketches and decided that, yes, in theory it would work and he could have his own company. But machining something this precise was expensive and he could never afford to hire the guys who did that kind of work in Dallas.

  I’d been lying in wait for this exact argument, and reminded him that in Chula Vista he’d worked with several good machinists at ITT who were out of work and could do the work cheap.

  He shook his head. Better to stick with his plan to find local work, which had so far resulted in absolutely nothing.

  I was furious. I’d come thisclose. In my head I told the universe that if it wanted me back in California, then it had goddamned better get moving.

  Apparently the universe heard me, because a few days later he received a letter from personnel manager Paul Komara at ITT in National City to say that they had finally begun rehiring. He offered my father the position of production superintendent, and how soon could we be back in Chula Vista?

  Chapter 15

  The God Thing, Redux

  The Villa Seville Apartments at 555 Naples Street marked our twenty-first move in nineteen years, for a total of eleven schools, including four high schools, and as of the most current move, three community colleges. Two decades spent taking off in the middle of the night and roaring cross-country in an alcohol-fueled haze of drunken violence. If there is anything remarkable about my life, it is that I did not come out the other side a serial killer.

  I picked up where I’d left off with my friends at the House of Abba, including Cathi, who as I’d hoped had ditched her boyfriend (yay!) only to replace him with the youth minister at First Baptist, who she eventually married (nuts). By now Cathi and most of my other friends were living in the church’s communal households, and suggested that I consider doing the same. I’d pursued the idea earlier out of desperation, but over time the idea of me living in a commune became increasingly improbable. Besides, I still wasn’t sure what I did or didn’t believe when it came to the God Thing.

  There was much to commend Sunday services—everyone was friendly, the music was great, and Ken was a terrific speaker—but it troubled me that the congregation was willing to accept the most outlandish statements when offered up as testimony or witnessing. One guest speaker allegedly from a small Polynesian island whose talk was entitled “Like a Mighty Wind,” told those assembled that his prayers had brought a man back from the dead. Not a single person in that audience questioned it.

  So I cornered the guy in the foyer afterward and asked for the name of the deceased.

  “Why do you want to know?” he asked, already offended.

  “Well, if he was dead then there has to be a death certificate. If you have that and you have the guy walking around, then that’s bona fide proof of a miracle.”

  “I don’t have a death certificate,” he said. By now he was getting visibly angry and speaking in italics, which I hadn’t seen anyone pull off successfully since Sister Mary Psychosis at St. Stephen’s. “It’s a small island and we don’t do death certificates and God doesn’t require proof, or provide proof, and if you’re demanding proof of God’s works then you’re not of God! You have to believe!”

  It was High Priest logic: it’s true because I say it’s true so just accept it.

  I was troubled by his response, but didn’t pursue the subject further in case he might resort to boldface, because in a room that small someone was bound to get hurt.

  I was also concerned that the group seemed to be taking on the trappings of an authoritarian cult. Members of Community were expected to submit every aspect of their lives to men whose authority was absolute. Pastor Ken Pagaard and the Elders could never be wrong because they spoke for God; to disagree was to risk being labeled a “Rebellious Spirit.” I liked the idea of being part of something that resembled an actual family, but the rest of it gave me the willies. Besides, I was still needed at home as a buffer until my sisters were old enough to leave.

  As I started classes at Southwestern I doubled down on my writing efforts
, setting a minimum of ten pages per day, finishing a short story every week. Eager to shovel out the bad stuff as quickly as possible, I would write until two or three A.M., collapse for a few hours, go to school, write in the library or the cafeteria between classes, come home, eat, and keep writing.

  Having attended college in three different states, my credits were literally all over the map. To make up the difference I began taking twice as many classes as those around me, twenty-one units the first semester alone. I also took full advantage of the other opportunities available at SWC. The drama department under creative director William Virchis staged free one-act plays every Wednesday for students who then critiqued the performance. Most of these were written by professional playwrights, but they were also open to works by local authors, so I wrote a one-act play and dropped it off at the department. Virchis liked it and gave it to his students to perform. It went over well enough for them to stage four more of my one-acts. Rather than focus on the applause at the end, I made a point to note the audience’s reaction to every failed characterization or false line, learning where I’d screwed up or was being lazy in the writing.

  It was at Southwestern that I met Sandy Richardson, who was also a member of First Baptist. Thin, with dark blond hair above an angular face, she had a laugh that sounded like she’d just heard the best dirty joke ever. When we realized we lived within a few blocks of each other, we began carpooling together. This led to having lunch every day, going to the park for free concerts, stopping by her parents’ place to hang out . . . and I slowly realized that we were dating. Sort of. I’d never dated anyone before so I had no idea of the protocol involved or what was required to create a functional relationship. I didn’t reach out to hug her unless she did it first, and even after we started formally going out, I never tried to kiss her. Not for lack of desire, I just didn’t know how to make that move. So one night she planted herself in front of me and said, “Look, Joe, it’s real simple: either you kiss me or I’m going to scream.”*