Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  After the Elders gave the relationship their blessings, we talked about getting married after college. Once I had my degree in psychology I could work as a counselor while pursuing my writing and she could continue studying for her master’s in social work. I saw us sharing a small house with a corner office where I would work after dinner on science fiction novels and short stories. We would have cats, teaching positions at a respectable college, and ride the years out together.

  And maybe that’s how my life would have turned out had things gone differently.

  When my father’s job at ITT ended with the usual allegations of drinking and abusive behavior, I was afraid that this would trigger another move, but by now even he was tired of the constant back-and-forthing. He used his severance pay to build the microextruder I’d mentioned back in Texas—which was now suddenly his idea—and set up shop in a grimy storage area, manufacturing dental supplies under the most unsanitary conditions imaginable. In the months that followed he used the excuse of having his own business to travel around the country and “consult” with buyers. We all knew what was really going on. Taking a page from Kazimier’s book, my father had a number of women on the hook in various parts of the country, none of whom knew he was married with a family.

  To help pay for my college tuition and expenses, I took part-time work at the Chula Vista Public Library, stacking books and shushing. On school nights the library was a hangout for jocks trying to pick up girls. If they started getting loud or making trouble, my job was to shush them and, if necessary, boot them out. Yeah, I was a bouncer at a library. I’m bad that way.

  I was six foot three but pencil thin, so playing security to football jocks was ridiculous on any number of levels. Every time I tossed them out there were threats—“You better watch your back when you leave tonight, asshole!”—but nothing came of it until the night I bounced four guys out for smoking grass in the back while trying to get the attention of several young women who wanted to be left alone.

  After the library closed, I walked to an all-night diner to wait for the bus home. As I ordered coffee at the counter I noticed the same four guys sitting in a booth at the back, eye-fucking me and making remarks. I ignored them and kept an eye on my watch, intent on timing my departure to the arrival of the bus to minimize the possibility of trouble. When the bus was ten minutes away, I went to the restroom; when I came out they were gone. I checked the street in case they were waiting for me outside, but the coast was clear. Relieved, I chugged down the last of the coffee.

  As I put down the cup I saw a tiny square piece of blotter paper at the bottom, where it had obviously been dropped by the guys in the back on their way out.

  By now I had enough friends in the counterculture to recognize windowpane acid when I saw it.

  Windowpane was LSD applied to small pieces of gelatin-sealed blotter paper. One of the cheapest but strongest forms of acid, it was often laced with strychnine to increase the physical effect. I’d done grass a dozen times but had never touched anything stronger, and I had no way to know how much LSD was on the blotter; this could be a mild trip or something that would blow the back of my head off. The latter was the most likely since the user’s mood affects the trip and I was as terrified as I’d ever been. If I asked for help, the police would be called, and I was pretty sure they wouldn’t believe my story since the guys were gone and I didn’t have their names. Lacking proof of my innocence, the cops would arrest me for drug use and that was definitely not on my agenda.

  I figured I had maybe twenty minutes before the acid kicked in. The bus was due in five. I would be home in fifteen. My sisters would be asleep, my father was away, and my mother had begun using sleeping pills to get through the night; she wouldn’t hear an F-16 landing on the roof. I was pretty sure I’d be okay if I could just get home in one piece.

  As I walked into the apartment I noticed that my arms were several times longer than they should have been. Everything was brighter, the colors more intense. Suddenly there were four me’s in my head, each trying to have a conversation at the same time: a logical voice, a scared voice, a “whoa, look at that” voice, and a very dark, very cold “you’re going to die” voice that was really making things tough for everybody else. Thanks to the strychnine every muscle in my body was tensing up and spasming, further adding to my panic.

  I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, but that only made matters worse. Thousands of paranoid thoughts began ping-ponging back and forth inside my head like coherent light trying to build up enough strength to fire out of my eyes as a laser. I couldn’t sit still. I wanted to tear my skin off except I wasn’t sure what I might find inside.

  Drawn by the sound of my distress, Theresa emerged to see what was going on. “The hallucination you were having that sent you into extreme panic was that your eyelids were wrapping around your eyes,” she said much later. “You were screaming that you couldn’t open your eyes, but they were wide open and staring into space. It was pretty scary to watch.”

  Terrified but not wanting to involve Sandy, I called Cathi and explained the situation as best I could. She couldn’t come over but offered to send someone ASAP. Meanwhile, she said it might calm me to read from the Bible. It fell open to 2 Samuel 12:31, describing the massacre by torture of the men, women, and children of Ammon.

  “And he brought forth the people that were therein,” I said, reading aloud, “and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick kiln—”

  “New Testament!” Cathi yelled over the phone as my voice spiraled up several octaves into hysteria. “New Testament, New Testament, don’t go into the Old Testament!”

  Every word had a hundred meanings. To read the word blue was to know it’s a color but also to feel the intensity of blue, the context of a clear blue sky, the emotion of a blue day or a blue mood. I would be struck by the richness and varied meanings of one word only to be blindsided by the next as it exploded into my head and changed the meaning of the first word, which ricocheted right back again to alter the intent of the second word. Every sentence was a kaleidoscope illuminating constructs of context and metaphor so elaborate that I had to stop after each word to absorb it all before moving on to the next.

  When Cathi’s friend arrived, he used music and questions like “hey, so what does that look like to you?” to distract me from what was happening. This was important because if I started to think I’m on an acid trip, I’d panic; but if I could be induced into thinking What actually is the inside versus the outside, I’ve never thought about that before, then I was okay for a while.

  Gray light was coming in the window by the time I felt sufficiently back in my own body to say I could take it from there and collapsed into bed for twelve hours straight. A few days later I was studying in the Southwestern College library when everything started to go all twisty-turny. Realizing that I was having a flashback, I waited it out behind the bookshelves in the advanced physics section on the assumption that few students at a junior college would venture into that area except at gunpoint.

  As awful as the experience was, it helped me understand how the mind can turn on itself during a psychotic break or schizophrenic episode. Just one acid trip permanently alters the way the brain works, which is why some artists seek it out to enhance their perception and their work. I cannot say with certainty that my writing improved thereafter because the mechanism I would use to make that determination has also been altered, but I could sense a difference. In the past I’d written superficially, but now I began drilling down into ideas and theoretical concepts more deeply, discovering new and unexpected layers of meaning.

  That part of it was fascinating.

  The rest, frankly, sucked.

  I’d hoped that having a successful business would mitigate my father’s rage, but every time he returned home from his cross-country perambulations, the drunken violence was worse than ever. I think he was mentally comparing my mother to the other w
omen he was seeing, and the beatings became a way to reinforce her alleged stupidity and make him feel better about the affairs.

  It was during one of those visits that I realized I had to get out.

  From the moment he walked in the door he was ready to backhand her for the wrong word. He said she was useless and better off dead, that he deserved more than a stinking cow like her. He ordered her to make dinner, but as she started cutting up vegetables he slammed her face into the counter hard enough to draw blood, then knocked her to the floor and began kicking her in the ribs. She screamed, sucking back tears and blood and snot as he grabbed her by the neck and slammed her head into the kitchen table, leaving her dazed and semiconscious.

  I was convinced he was going to kill her.

  And I snapped.

  I’d had as much as I could take. I had to try and stop it, stop him, once and for all.

  There was only one way to do that. I had to kill him. Right then, right there. Not metaphorically, not by negation, literally. Given the extent of his drunken rage there was no question that if I tried to stop him by any means other than killing him, he would kill both of us.

  I walked toward the bedroom closet where he still kept the rifle he had purchased in Newark, fully aware that after this my life would be different from what I had imagined. A very cold part of my brain was already laying out what to tell the police: I would argue self-defense, or at least her defense. But even with ample proof of violence to back up my statement, they would still file charges of manslaughter or second-degree homicide; either way it would end any hope of having a career as a writer. But in the fury of the moment I was committed. I was going to walk into the kitchen, shoot him as many times as needed to stop him from hitting her anymore, and take the consequences.

  I found the long box at the back of the closet, yanked out the rifle, then reached to the top shelf where he kept the cartridge and bullets. They were gone. I tore the closet apart, desperate to find the clip that should have been there. Nothing.

  Then I heard the front door open and slam shut again as he went out. Having worked up an appetite brutalizing my mother, he left to get dinner and booze it up for a while. He wouldn’t come home again until dawn, just long enough to grab some clothes and leave for the airport and his next “consulting” job.

  I have no doubt that I would have killed him if I’d found the clip. I know it now, I knew it then, and I knew it was insane. I had to get the hell out of there. If I didn’t, sooner or later I would find that clip, and that would be the end of him and me.

  I put my case before the Elders, telling them just enough to explain why I needed to leave home without revealing just how much of a dangerous nutjob my father was, since that might make them hesitate to take me in. A week later they gave their blessings and assigned me to a household on Mitscher Street in Chula Vista. It wasn’t my first choice. Often referred to as the Island of Broken Toys, Mitscher was home to disciplinary cases and guys who had been in trouble with cults or drugs, or were otherwise damaged goods in need of therapy. But by this time most of the Community households were becoming known for blurring the lines between counseling and Christianity.

  “Through the last half of the seventies, the ministry kind of took a wrong turn,” Tim Pagaard said later. “My dad became connected with a man named Frank Lake, who was a British psychiatrist and minister, who had developed this theory—and this sounds almost obscene—called clinical theology, where he applied Christian ministry to psychotherapy. Our church, and Community in particular, began to more and more address people who had really serious emotional and psychological problems. You basically had people who needed professional help who were getting amateurish help, for all the best motivations.”

  Ken dubbed this process inner healing.

  A charismatic leader with full control over the lives of his followers, using barely understood psychoanalytic techniques to drill down into their deepest secrets and insecurities . . . how could this possibly go wrong?

  Previously, I’d only seen how the communes worked from the outside, but now I was living with nearly a dozen people under the biblical authority of the head of the household, Elder Larry Clark, and his wife, Joyce. Whatever money we earned from outside work was turned over to the household in exchange for an allowance of five dollars per week. Those in college could remain there as long as Larry deemed it appropriate, but that could change in a heartbeat.

  One of the first things we learned about each other was that I had zero skills for living with actual human beings. I rarely spoke at meals, and after school would go straight to the corner room I shared with two other residents to study or write, only emerging when summoned. Despite the safety of the house, I jumped at the slightest noise and was constantly on alert, sure that something bad was about to happen. The survival instincts I’d developed to cope with my father were now working against me. Over the course of several late-night conversations they slowly drew me out about just how bad things had been. It was the first time I’d talked to anyone about it, and from their reactions I began to think that maybe I did belong on the Island of Broken Toys.

  My father had been out of town the day I moved into Community, and none of us had any idea when he might return. But I knew that if he heard about my departure over the phone, he would return and take out his anger on my mother, so I told her not to say anything. I wanted to tell him myself, in person; that way whatever he did in response would be done to me and no one else. But she told him on the phone anyway, and when I heard he was racing back in white-hot fury, I told Larry that I had to be there to face him. He and another member of the household volunteered to come along. They felt that their presence might keep the situation from turning violent, and I was in no position to decline their offer.

  My father entered in a screaming rage. I’d committed the most unpardonable offense imaginable, removing myself from his control, and that could not be permitted. When he started to get violent, Larry said that if he touched anyone, the police would be called. The warning slowed my father but didn’t lessen his fury. He refused to listen to anything we had to say, shouting profanities and declaring that if I walked out the door, I was dead to him.

  With nothing left to say, I walked out the door.

  What happened next I did not know until 2016, when my sister Theresa sent me an email after reading this section for fact-checking purposes. It took nearly forty years for her to break our family’s code of silence to tell me what happened on the other side of the door after I left.

  I had imagined there was nothing about my father that could still shock me.

  I was wrong.

  “Before Charles got there, I was in full-on panic mode,” she wrote, “nearly hysterical, because I knew it was going to be really, really bad. Mom’s solution was to give me 3 pills, it may have been 4, but I’m not sure. They were probably sleeping pills or heavy duty sedatives. Now as amped up as I was, the pills probably weren’t going to knock me out, but as she’s giving me those pills, she is telling me that when I wake up in the morning she will probably be dead, she was probably going to have to kill herself. Once she told me about her plan, there was no way I was going to let them knock me out, but they made me very groggy. So I don’t recall all that went on while you were there. But after you left all hell broke loose. He dragged Mom into Lorraine’s and my bedroom by the hair, she was on her hands and knees. He was definitely going to have an audience. He proceeded to pummel and kick and choke her. Now no doubt, my perspective was tainted from being so groggy, but it had to have been one of the worst, if not the worst beating she ever had and it seemed to go on for hours.

  “Now I don’t remember if this next part is a memory because I saw it or because she told me about it later, but at some point she broke free and ran to her bedroom and grabbed the rifle from the closet and stuck the dangerous end in her mouth. He told her to go ahead. She did. No ammo.* He grabbed the rifle and proceeded to beat her with the butt of the rifle, in the stomach an
d sides and back. Later, I demanded that she show me the bruises from the rifle butt beating. The whole of her midsection, front sides and back, was a horrible mass of bruises.

  “At some point, I retreated back to my room with the sound of her beating still going on, the pills or exhaustion or mental self-preservation had kicked in. I fell asleep. When I woke it was dead silent, the sun was just coming up. I crept down the hallway from my room to see if Mom was still alive. I heard some noise coming from their bedroom. The door was open a crack and I peeked in. He was raping her and whispering sweet nothings to her, like ‘you cocksucker, whore, how could you do this to me?’”

  I had naively assumed that by moving out I would become the focus of his rage since I was the one defying him, not my mother or sisters. I thought that knowing he could not keep us in a box forever might even serve as a shot across his bow, moderating his behavior.

  Had I known what happened that night I would have come back and killed the son of a bitch, regardless of the consequences.

  Chapter 16

  Blood in the Street

  Larry Clark, the head of the Mitscher household, wasn’t sold on my dream of becoming a science-fiction writer. Like many evangelicals he considered the genre just a few inches shy of being demonically inspired, the work of C. S. Lewis being the obvious and oft-cited exception. When he suggested that I reconsider my career choices and throw out the SF books I’d brought with me, I argued that I needed them for school. After much discussion he finally relented, but not before reminding me that I was only being allowed to attend college because it served the household’s interests to have college graduates, permission that could be revoked at any time. Meanwhile, I was not to write any stories without submitting the ideas to him first to ensure that I didn’t write anything of a non-Christian nature.