Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  With one exception: Why would my father upload the story to websites created for victims of the Holocaust, where his lies might be exposed?

  It’s possible that he had grown overconfident. Having told his version of the massacre for so long without challenge he may have believed he could keep doing so indefinitely. Maybe it never occurred to him that there were people still alive who’d been there that day and would give close scrutiny to his story. Too close, given how quickly he rabbited when awkward questions arose about where he’d been standing when the killing started.

  But there’s another explanation for my father’s choice of websites that goes straight to the heart of his twisted pathology. His posts made it abundantly clear that he uploaded the story to elicit sympathy from other users of the system. This was the terrible thing I endured was the subtext of his messages, feel sorry for me.

  Whenever he beat my mother or inflicted damage on the rest of us, he would try to evoke sympathy from us afterward. He wanted us to believe that it wasn’t his fault, it was our mother, it was how he was raised, it was our fault. He would pluck at every string he could find to get us to feel sorry for him, because in his mind, receiving sympathy from those he harmed equaled forgiveness.

  So it’s altogether possible that he chose those sites because if he could get sympathy from the survivors of Vishnevo, from the very people he harmed, it would be tantamount to expiation. A part of him must have craved forgiveness as he grew older and the imminence of death loomed larger. Following that line of thought, one might assume he revisited the Jewish cemetery in his later years because he was compelled by guilt to confront his actions, and was seeking forgiveness from God before passing on to the other side. But it’s far more likely that he returned to the cemetery to relive the happiest moment of his young life: the day he had been given permission to kill men, women, and children without repercussion. I think he felt nostalgia for an opportunity that had never come again.

  At least I assume it never came again, barring whatever the hell else my aunt knew about him.

  Theresa Straczynski-Skibicki passed away January 28, 2009, at the age of seventy-seven, taking with her whatever secrets still remained about my family. I spent months afterward trying to find more information to conclusively prove what my father had done, desperate to expose him to the world. But he was not an official part of the extermination unit, so there was nothing to be found in the public record. Then my father’s health went into a sharp decline as years of drunken excess finally caught up with him. Rather than go to top-flight hospitals, he checked in and out of various bargain-basement facilities, fearing that if he withdrew any of the money he’d hidden away in various bank accounts, my mother’s attorneys would seize it all.

  Had he simply been willing to look after her from the beginning, he would have had access to that money and better care for himself. By going out of his way to harm her, he ended up hurting himself just as badly, if not worse.

  I rather like the symmetry of that.

  The degree to which my father never came to grips with his actions is borne out by his own words, as reported by my sister Lorraine. Lying in a hospital bed, dying and riddled with disease, he kept saying, over and over, “What did I ever do to deserve this?”

  I was having a late-night cup of coffee and a hazelnut-and-banana crepe at a restaurant on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica when my phone dinged with an email notifying me that my father had died. The cause of death was ventilatory-dependent respiratory failure that led to aspiration pneumonia, septic shock, and full-blown cardiorespiratory arrest. It had apparently been a long, slow, agonizing death.

  I finished reading the email and ordered a side of ice cream to celebrate.

  Charles Straczynski, wife beater and alcoholic, the monster of my childhood and last alleged participant in the Vishnevo Massacre, died at the age of eighty-one at 5:00 A.M. on January 28, 2011, two years to the day after my aunt’s death. Free at last from his threats, I can imagine her clawing at him from the other side, dragging him to a place where those he had harmed eagerly awaited his arrival.

  As word got out that my father had died, friends and acquaintances reached out to comfort me. When I told them that I didn’t need to be consoled, they asked how I could have any kind of closure since I’d never tried to talk to him before he died.

  My father was all about control, and he was willing to say or do whatever was necessary to make sure you were never outside his power, so he could do to you whatever he wanted and your only option was to take it. The very worst thing I could ever do to him was to take away that control and punch him in the face with twenty-five years of silence.

  And that is some serious fucking closure.

  Courtesy of a military amnesty program offered years earlier, my father had turned his general discharge into an honorable discharge, which entitled him to a military burial at the Southern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Boulder City, Nevada. It’s appropriate that my father, a deadbeat who sponged off others, got the US military to spring for a hero’s burial that provided the last brushstroke in his twisted self-portrait as a good and honorable man.

  Though no family members attended the funeral, he didn’t go into the ground alone. Four people were present, three of whom had been hired to work with my father in the days leading up to his death and knew very little about him. Among them was Jerry Samplawski, a Las Vegas resident who introduced himself to me in an email after the funeral. He’d met Charles while doing volunteer work with various hospitals and noted that right up to the end my father was talking about how he “hated all Jews,” thus pretty much negating the seeking forgiveness idea.

  In the months that followed, attorneys for my mother and sister tried to untangle Charles’s finances to seize what they could to assist in my mother’s care, but the Cayman Island banks refused to acknowledge their authority to access the funds. When we learned there was a will setting out what should be done with his $3 million in assets, I said I wanted no part of an inheritance. Better it should go to my sisters or to a battered women’s shelter.

  As it turned out, the gesture was unnecessary.

  Correspondence discovered between Charles and his estate planners at the Royal Bank of Canada’s Cayman Trust Planning in October 2008 laid out the details of his will and made sure that they could not be challenged by any of us. The document allocated a few personal bequests to people who had worked for my father in his last days, or who he had known years earlier, then stipulated that my sisters and I would receive a check for one hundred dollars each, a deliberate insult launched from the other side of the grave.

  The remaining funds, nearly $2.5 million, were donated to the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine, in Davis, California.

  Why a veterinary hospital?

  Because whenever someone my father hated would come to him for financial assistance he would decline, saying with a sneer, “I’d rather give it to the dogs.”

  That’s why a veterinary hospital.

  He gave it to the dogs.

  On October 27, 2012, my mother died at the age of seventy-seven. The lawyers handling my father’s estate tried to use a provision in his will to have her buried beside Charles, who wanted his control over her to literally extend beyond life itself. My sister Theresa and I vowed to stop this. I had no affection for my mother, but if we could deny my father’s last wishes, then I was totally fine with going to war. The battle lasted several weeks, during which her body was moved from one mortuary to the next. At one point we even discussed literally stealing the body.

  When one of the attorneys asked if there was any scenario under which I would allow my mother to be buried beside Charles, I said, “Yes, absolutely. I will go along with this if we can carve an arrow on her headstone, pointing to his headstone, saying I’m with stupid.”

  In the end, my sister got custody of the body, which was subsequently cremated.

  A year later, after nearly thre
e decades of separation, I met with Theresa in the lobby of the Harbor Marriott hotel in San Diego. One might think that after being apart for so long we would have volumes of things to discuss, but the hour was filled with the kind of awkward, pause-riddled small talk you make at parties with people you don’t know and will likely never see again. Other than being born into the same gene pool, we had nothing in common; we were strangers who had been warehoused together. But she was well, and happy, and that was all that mattered.

  Not long thereafter, I received six large boxes from the Las Vegas attorney who had been handling the disposition of my father’s physical property: his computer, binders filled with documents, the Cayman Island correspondence, souvenirs, the original manuscript I’d written decades earlier, and letters he’d sent to the American and German governments in an attempt to get reparations for the trauma of being exposed to the events of World War II. Right up until the end he was running scams, trying to profit by playing the victim when he was the aggressor.

  More significant was what wasn’t in those boxes: no Christmas cards or letters to or from relatives expressing affection, and no photos of Evelyn, me, or my sisters. There were only letters threatening lawsuits against those who had crossed him, business correspondence, boilerplate legal forms, and photos of his factory in Chula Vista. There was nothing in his computer that was not angry at someone for something. The documents painted the picture of a bitter man who had nothing to live for beyond the prospect of inflicting pain on others.

  I didn’t want to touch any of it, but since there might be more family secrets lurking inside, or information that might conclusively link him to the incident at Vishnevo, I went carefully through each box until only one remained, the kind of thin, flat container used to transport framed paintings. With no expectations of finding anything useful, I cut one end of the box and felt around inside until I found the edge of a picture frame. It refused to budge. I asked my assistant, Stephanie Walters, to grab the other end of the box while I pulled.

  With one last tug the frame popped out of the box and I fell backward onto the floor. I sat up to find myself staring at my father’s shrine to all things Nazi, the one I had seen every day for most of my young life. With it was another framed selection of photos that I hadn’t seen before, featuring German soldiers from the train station where he had lived, identified in captions as kameraden, friends and comrades.

  As I studied the photos I realized that I’d been wrong about something. My father’s possessions had included photos of his family. But his family wasn’t me, or my sisters, or my mother. We had never been his family. His family were the SS and German soldiers who gave him the opportunity to exhibit cruelty without conscience and kill without consequence.

  It was then that I realized there was one more task ahead of me. Yes, my father was dead, but he wasn’t quite dead enough to suit me.

  As a kid I’d watched all the Universal Pictures horror movies—Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man—and in the last of those I had seen my father. During the day, he seemed to others a respectable businessman and father. At night, the monster came out. In The Wolf Man the world only discovered what Lawrence Talbot really was after the monster’s skin was penetrated by silver, exposing the truth. As a teenager seeing my father beating my mother one time too many, I’d reached for the gun and the clip to put down the monster, but the bullets were nowhere to be found. Now, decades later, I had the power to kill the creature and reveal his true face to the world, but the task would require a very particular kind of bullet. A silver bullet to kill the monster of the drunken midnights; the monster of blood and hatred and violence; the monster that had brutalized me, my sisters, my mother, and countless others, and who I believe committed acts far more terrible than anything I could have imagined.

  And I realized what that silver bullet would be.

  You are holding it in your hands.

  Chapter 34

  Selah

  A brief pause before the end; the deep breath before the plunge.

  Selah.

  Lines from earlier in this book.

  Funny what a difference the truth can make.

  I wanted to show that those who love us can carry the burden of our secrets and accept the truth of who we truly are.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take this secret to my grave.”

  I come from a family of secrets, but we do not have a monopoly on the unspoken.

  And secrets often come at considerable cost.

  When Jeff Conaway joined the cast of Babylon 5, we knew that he’d had prior issues with drug abuse. It was only after his actions led to him being fired off Taxi that he came clean about his problems and addressed them. By the time he showed up at our door he was strong in every sense of that word. He was solid, he was clear-eyed, he was Jeff.

  Around the start of season five, some of us began to notice a difference in him. He often seemed groggy and disconnected; he stumbled over lines that earlier would have posed no difficulty. Whispers came to my office from the set: We think he’s backsliding.

  I began visiting Jeff in his trailer when he wasn’t needed on-set. Is everything okay? How are you doing? We’re kind of worried about you.*

  Each time he brushed aside my concerns. I’m fine, Joe, just tired . . . I’m staying up late working on my music, and there’s a lot going on in my life right now, but I’m good . . . better than good, I’m great.

  Except he wasn’t.

  When we reached episode one hundred, a milestone for any series, the cast and crew assembled for a group photo to commemorate the occasion. But there was a face missing from the roster. While everyone else gathered on-set, Jeff was in his trailer, too drugged to come out. Production assistants sent to drag him out if necessary were rebuffed and booted out, the door slammed and locked behind them. We waited as long as we could, then took the photo.

  Hours later, Jeff staggered out of his trailer, angry and upset. He said that he’d just been taking a nap and nobody had bothered to wake him up for the shoot.

  “Step into my office,” I said, and closed the door.

  I told him he wasn’t fooling anyone; he needed to face up to the fact that his bad habits had returned, and get back into treatment.

  At first he refused to admit that there was a problem, but as the conversation sanded him down he reluctantly allowed that he’d slipped up. “I can’t go back into treatment, if I do it’ll get around and my career’s dead. In this business if you fall down once, people can accept it; fall down twice and you’re done.”

  I thought he was wrong, and said so. It just bounced off.

  Jeff’s downward slide accelerated after Babylon 5. He took bit parts, worked in shorts and reality TV, anything that didn’t require him to remember lots of lines. By this time we had fallen out of contact—I think he didn’t want to see me again after our conversation—but others in the cast urged him to admit his problems and seek help. He refused, insisting that he could, and would, get through it alone and nobody would ever need to know.

  Had he sought treatment, which, yes, carried some risk of exposure, he might have been able to hold on and escape what came later. Instead, his determination to keep anyone from knowing his secret ended up with the whole world finding out about it during a full-blown meltdown during a taping of the reality series Celebrity Fit Club. Out of control, nearly incoherent, and barely able to walk in a straight line, he pulled off his shoes and shirt, yelled profanities, and threatened members of the cast.

  And the cameras caught it all.

  Over the next several years, Jeff battled multiple addictions to cocaine, alcohol, and painkillers. Unable to get scripted work, he was only able to pay bills by making more appearances on reality shows. Networks, studios, and producers profited from the spectacle of a man in free fall, slowly and agonizingly self-destructing on national television. By the time he hit Celebrity Rehab in 2008 Jeff was virtually unrecognizable: gaunt and hollow-eyed, wracked by self-pity, depression, and fits
of screaming rage.

  Those of us who had worked with Jeff watched the footage, horrified and grief-stricken, and found nowhere there the man we had known.

  The spiral continued until May 26, 2011, when Jeff, his body twisted and weakened by years of addiction, passed away from complications of pneumonia and encephalopathy caused by multiple drug overdoses. Determination to keep his condition secret and refusing to ask for help when it might’ve made a difference could also have been added to the death certificate.

  Jerry Doyle was better than Jeff at hiding his alcoholism, but the cost was no less substantial. He was slick, and funny, and could function on-set as if nothing was amiss. “I don’t have an alcohol problem,” he’d say. “As long as there’s alcohol, I don’t have a problem.”

  But I’d grown up with an alcoholic, and knew the signs very well. The few times we touched upon the topic in private he’d change subjects, reluctant to discuss it. So I began putting the words I wanted him to hear into the mouth of his character, Michael Garibaldi, who was also and not coincidentally a recovering alcoholic.

  “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,” Jerry said as he passed my office one afternoon, after the latest script dealing with Garibaldi’s alcoholism had been distributed. I kept hoping the words would get through, but they never did. During the finale of Babylon 5, when everyone leaves the station for the last time, Jerry paused beside the elevator and, in an unscripted moment, picked up a shot glass off the bar and carried it away with him. It was his way of telling me I’m not gonna change, I am what I am.

  After putting in five years as a lead on a TV series, Jerry was confident that there would be plenty of work waiting for him after Babylon 5 came to an end. Instead he drifted from one small part to the next without ever managing to land another recurring role. After his run for Congress in 2000 ended in a humiliating defeat, and his conservative radio show The Jerry Doyle Show began tapering off, he entered 2015 hemorrhaging sponsors and money, and drinking heavily.