Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  And after all, she could always make more children.

  Unable to escape my father’s increasingly sadistic violence in any conventional way, Evelyn made her first attempt at suicide. To punish her for this act of rebellion my father had her committed to an institution and continued to recommit her for nearly a year.* Let someone else worry about her moods, he said. It was the best of all possible worlds: Evelyn would remain in the asylum as long as he wanted, and he would be free to see other women. Her absence would let him present himself as a successful, unencumbered candidate, thus improving his chances of scoring. By contrast, having a kid around would crimp his style, so I was sent off to live with my grandmother.

  Most of what happened to my mother while she was institutionalized was kept from me. If I asked where she was, Sophia would ignore the question; if I inquired a second time, she’d lock me in an upstairs bedroom until I stopped asking. One day, tired of my constant questions, she ordered Charles to drive me to where I would finally be able to see my mother.

  My father was careful to always present the appearance of success, and rarely left the house without wearing a suit, tie, and a starched white shirt. At five foot eight he weighed over two hundred pounds, and often used his girth to intimidate people who might not be impressed by his height. After taking the time to dress appropriately and slick his black hair into a pompadour, we drove across town, the smell of his cologne stinging my eyes as I peered through the windshield.

  When we arrived, he pointed across the street to a wire-mesh window on an upper floor of a plain, whitewashed building. “She’s up there,” he said. I could just make out the silhouette of someone waving at me through the smeared glass. I asked why we couldn’t go in to see her.

  “They won’t let you in,” he said.

  “Why? What is that place?”

  He shrugged. “A nuthouse. She’s crazy.”

  Living with my grandmother was preferable to being with my father, but there were definite drawbacks. Having been reared in rural Eastern Europe, Sophia preferred the parts of chickens, cows, sheep, and lambs that no American would touch on a bet: feet, knuckles, gristle, intestines, udders, and head cheese. Tripe was a particular favorite since it could be purchased by the acre. Her proudest accomplishment, the centerpiece at every meal, was a thick jelly the size and shape of a birthday cake in which pigs’ feet, back fat, and other unidentifiable bits of meat floated in a translucent, gelatinous gray mass. It tasted like the gristled end of a chicken leg left out in bad weather for several weeks, and was served alongside horseradish strong enough to kill your taste buds so you wouldn’t throw up whatever the hell you just ate.

  Though Sophia was living in America, amid grocery stores laden with fresh food, she still hewed to the Old World belief that if meat looked too fresh, it probably came from a diseased animal. So she bargained with butchers for whatever was about to be thrown out as unfit for human consumption. If the green on the meat could be scraped off, then it was good enough to eat. If it was especially dubious looking, or the green wouldn’t entirely come off, she’d grind it into sausage.

  Sausage was her solution to everything. She’d sit at a meat grinder bolted to the kitchen table, smoking and drinking as she shoved in whatever bits of meat were too horrific to be used in the rest of her cooking, cigarette ash drifting unnoticed into the grinder. The finished sausages would then be boiled for at least an hour, killing whatever germs might remain and ensuring that the flavor was gone. Her logic was airtight: If you were comfortable with the history of the meat, you would want to experience its flavor. But if its origins were uncertain, the less you could taste it the better, because by this point any piece of meat that could still provide flavor would almost certainly kill you on the spot.

  Whenever my grandmother got tired of having me underfoot she sent me to stay with my aunt Theresa and her husband, Ted Skibicki. Theresa was a slender woman with short permed dark hair, sharply defined features, thick glasses, an even thicker New Jersey accent, and a habit of constantly clearing her throat when she was nervous, a tendency I somehow inherited. She was also the only marginally normal member of the Straczynski clan, despite her sincere claim that her dog could talk.* She enjoyed drinking but never to extremes, and where Sophia and Charles were shouters, Theresa would lie back until the right moment then slip in a sly and lethally accurate observation.

  Ted was a freelance contractor, a genuinely nice guy who seemed baffled by the violent, psychopathic behavior of Theresa’s side of the family, and he always made me feel welcome in the home he had built on Haledon Avenue. He was utterly in love with Theresa, and in defiance of the absence of affection practiced by our family often put her on his lap, snuggling and showing attention. Another frequent guest was Ted’s younger brother Frank, who had lost a leg at age five during an Allied bombing of Frankfurt. With matching ducktail haircuts, Ted and Frank stood foursquare for stability and the value of hard work, a stark contrast to the Straczynski tendencies toward lying, larceny, and laziness.

  As the date of my mother’s release from care approached, my father’s escapades became bolder, and on several occasions he brought prostitutes back to the Graham Avenue apartment. One night, when Sophia confronted him about his behavior, he made the mistake of hitting her. Her eyes wide with anger, she punched him in the face hard enough to draw blood then threw him out into the street, followed immediately by his clothes and personal belongings. The next day he borrowed money from Ted to rent a small apartment on Van Houten Street, just a few blocks away. Despite all the fighting and multiple moves, most of our family’s drama took place within a two-mile radius.

  After Evelyn was discharged, her doctors suggested a waiting period before bringing me home, but Theresa would quietly slip me in for occasional visits while my father was out. I would find my mother sitting by the front window, heavily medicated, blinking absently against the sunlight, brow furrowed as if trying to remember something she wanted to say, but which had just that moment slipped away. Though she was nearly oblivious to my presence, I discovered that if I brought in the neighborhood cat and held it out, her face would soften and she would pet it.

  Once when she was petting the cat, her hand accidentally brushed mine. It’s the only time I can remember her touching me with affection. So at every visit I would hold out the Decoy Cat for as long as I could, even when it started clawing deep welts into my skin, turning it one way then the other so my mother’s hand would continue to touch my own.

  It was not lost on me that her affection wasn’t actually directed at me.

  But for those moments, I was okay with that.

  I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but at some point I realized there was a man living in my grandmother’s basement: Victor Rafael Rachwalski (I called him Pan Rafael, pronounced pahn, a term of respect, like mister), the artist with whom Sophia had begun an affair years earlier. Despite being told not to bother him, I would sneak down to his studio and watch him paint. He mostly did commissions: nature scenes and the occasional portrait. I’d sit silently on the basement steps then run upstairs whenever he glanced in my direction, afraid that I’d get in trouble. Finally, he offered a deal: if I’d pretend not to be there, he would pretend not to see me. Our contract sealed, I would spend hours watching him work while a phonograph in the corner played big band music on carefully tended 78s.

  At the end of each day he’d wash up, put away the strong-smelling paints, and we’d walk up into the backyard to the blue pedal car he’d given me for Christmas. Using a rope tied to the front bumper, he’d pull the car to the corner store for ice cream, stopping along the way to talk with people who always seemed genuinely pleased to see him. You could troll a child in a pedal car up and down Dakota Street for days without finding anyone willing to say a kind word about the Straczynskis, but everyone liked Pan Rafael.

  Two incidents give the true measure of the man.

  Every Easter a rogues’ gallery of family, friends, and hangers-on g
athered at Sophia’s house for dinner. The menu consisted of turkey, ham, roast beef, pierogi, stuffed cabbage rolls, sauerkraut, whiskey, wine, beer, four kinds of bread, a canning jar containing freshly fermented raspberry vodka, Sophia’s trademark sausages, and other, even less savory items Frankenstein’d from leftover parts of dead livestock.

  Alcoholism started early in my family, so even though I was only four, vodka was constantly being put in front of me. Whenever someone made a toast, a small amount of vodka was put in a shot glass and I was told to drink, drawing laughter as I screwed up my face and coughed at the fire racing down my throat. I couldn’t refuse because it was considered rude not to drink when everyone else did; my only recourse was to try and ditch the vodka when no one was looking. It wasn’t a moral decision; I was too young for such opinions. I just didn’t care for the taste of it. But this particular Easter my father caught me ditching the booze and blew his stack. He said I was wasting good vodka, and trying to show that I was too good for the rest of the family. So he made another toast and this time goddamnit I was going to drink with the rest of them.

  As I reluctantly reached for the glass, Pan Rafael raised his camera and took a picture of the group. I can’t say that I was intentionally looking to him for help, but his artist’s eye must have caught the truth of that moment, because when the next toast came he made it a point to pour in my vodka himself, then handed the shot glass across with such great flourishes and grand, sweeping gestures that by the time it got to me the glass was virtually empty. Rather than ratting me out, he joined the conspiracy. At last, I had an ally.

  That winter Pan Rafael received the biggest commission of his career: a painting based on photographs of the client’s ancestral home in Poland, destroyed during the war. He worked for over a month on that canvas, painstakingly rendering every leaf, branch, and brick. From my perch on the stairs I hardly breathed as I watched him work. I’d never seen him as proud as when he finished the last stroke. Eager to show Sophia the result, he trotted past me up the stairs.

  I approached the canvas. It was beautiful, the best he’d ever done. He was rightfully proud.

  Then, on closer review, it occurred to me that it lacked something.

  A cat. That’s what it needed.

  So I picked up his brush, dipped it in black paint, and drew a big ol’ black cat right in the middle of the canvas. I’d barely finished when I heard Pan Rafael and Sophia coming down the stairs. I turned and stood proudly before my work. When my grandmother saw what I’d done, her face turned a shade of white usually only seen in coroner’s offices before spiraling into bright red. She let fly with a thundercloud of obscenities in three languages then started to lunge for me, murder in her eyes.

  Pan Rafael put out a hand to stop her. Without saying a word he approached the canvas and studied it, angling it one way then the other to catch the light. “It’s good,” he said. “Obviously he thought it needed a cat, and you know, he’s right.”

  He set the painting on the floor. “This one is mine,” he said, “because the work is now much too fine to give to anyone else. I will hang it on the wall where I can see it every day.”

  He turned and patted me on the head. “For the client, I will make another.”

  Then he pulled out a blank canvas, put it on the easel, and began again.

  Later, as though nothing had happened, he pulled me and the blue pedal car to the corner store and we had ice cream.

  Those moments have stayed with me as the most perfect examples of what it is to be a human being. In his actions I could sense, if only on a cellular level, that this was the way grown-ups were supposed to treat children; that there should be compassion, affection, and patience; that every day shouldn’t be a recurring nightmare of blood and horror and a perpetual sense of You’re not wanted here. But in my case, it was too little, too late.

  During the first few years of a child’s life, it’s important to form normal emotional attachments with adult family members and other children. But during that crucial period I was constantly being shuttled between a distant grandmother, a dangerous father, and a clinically depressed mother from whom I had also been separated for a year. There was no room for me to just be a kid, no place where I felt safe. My early memories are highly detailed because my environment was constantly changing, forcing me to become hypervigilant and self-reliant, meticulously logging everything around me in order to learn the rules that would let me adapt to wherever I was being dumped that week.

  Under normal circumstances, when a child falls or hurts himself, he knows there’s at least one person he can run to for help and comfort. By contrast, I would not cry out when in pain because at best those pleas would be ignored; at worst, they would summon more trouble. I learned to assess the situation and do what I could to fix it without asking for help. Saying or doing the wrong thing while living in a violent, neglectful environment invariably led to abuse or confinement, so inch by inch I withdrew into silence. I would sit for hours without talking, to the point where people would forget I was in the room. When I did talk, I spoke more like an adult than a child, emotionally at arm’s length from everyone around me.

  The contemporary term for this is the inhibited version of reactive attachment disorder (RAD). Add in post-traumatic stress disorder caused by these and later incidents, plus a dollop of Asperger’s syndrome, and the result was a lifelong inability to create stable attachments, express my feelings, or connect with people on the most basic, emotional level. The hardest part of that equation is that I’ve always been very much aware of those limitations. Many with these disorders are so deep inside their own perception that they don’t really understand what they’re missing. But I could always feel the distance between myself and other people, as if I was peering through the bars of a cage that only I could see. As I grew up and watched other people holding hands, hugging, laughing, or playing without reserve, I desperately wished I could experience that freedom for even a single moment.

  But that moment never came.

  It didn’t help that I was kept away from kids my own age. My grandmother hated having children in her home, and I couldn’t seek them out on my own because she was constantly feuding with her neighbors and I wasn’t allowed behind enemy lines. So whenever I did find myself in the presence of other kids I felt as though I was looking at alien beings, and they probably felt the same about me.

  The one incident that most firmly locked me into a lifetime of emotional isolation, the shibboleth that denotes the moment when I realized there was absolutely no one I could trust, came when my mother became pregnant again in 1960. As before, she fell into a deep depression and spent whole days in bed, sleeping, crying, or staring angrily at nothing. Her mood became darker still after my sister Theresa was born, leading Sophia and my aunt to keep close watch on the infant to make sure nothing went wrong. Unfortunately, this left nobody to keep an eye on me. Having made it this far, the rest of my family assumed I was safe. So when our washing machine broke down, no one was overly concerned when Evelyn took me along as she carried a bag of diapers to an adjacent apartment building with a working machine.

  Once the clothes were washed, my mother and I climbed the stairs to the third-story roof, where a clothesline was stretched across to a nearby telephone pole. Nervous, agitated, crying one moment, angry the next, she pinned up the diapers then shoved them down the line as if slapping an unseen face, moving faster and faster, almost manic as she attacked the symbols of her captivity. Then suddenly she stopped and grew very quiet, looking off into the distance as if coming to a decision.

  She pointed past me to some trees behind the house. “Look at the birds,” she said.

  I turned to look but didn’t see any birds. Then I felt her hands lifting me from behind. For a moment I thought she was helping me see the birds, or that she might turn me around and hug me for the first time. My heart leapt at the prospect.

  She dropped me over the edge of the roof.

  I shrieked as
I tumbled into a tangle of electrical and TV antenna wires that kept me from falling to the concrete below. As I screamed in terror Evelyn paced frantically back and forth, looking around nervously and telling me to be quiet. Finally, afraid that people would be drawn by my cries, she yanked me back onto the roof and shook me hard. She told me that what happened was an accident and that I was not to mention it to my father, ever, or he’d be angry at me, and did I understand? I nodded, crying and scared, snot running down my face.

  That night, as my father raged drunkenly around the apartment, my mother wailed, and my grandmother yelled obscenities, I sat on the bathroom floor using a nail clipper to pick splinters from the roof out of my legs. Every time I thought about what happened I would start to cry, only to force it back down again; if I let myself cry, I wouldn’t be able to see the splinters. I let the tears come only after the last one was out, not from pain but from the knowledge that there was no place in my life where I was safe, and no one I could trust or talk to about it.

  Chapter 3

  Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

  Worn out by constant vigilance over my sister, Sophia and my aunt insisted that Charles bring in Evelyn’s mother to help out, believing this might also have a mitigating effect on her depression. My father hated the idea, having crossed swords with Grace over the annulment and restraining order, but he was no match for the two of them. Bitterly unhappy, he called Grace and asked her to come to New Jersey.

  This was an extraordinary development, because until now my mother’s side of the family had always been something of a mystery. As far as Charles was concerned, only his side of the family mattered, and he often belittled Evelyn’s relatives as little more than hillbillies. Charles was so adamant about erasing any connection to Evelyn’s side of the family that he ordered her to destroy all her personal photos. She tore up a few in front of him, then secretly sent the rest to my aunt for safekeeping.