Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  “What a pretty boy,” the nearest of them said, ruffling my hair. “Did you bring me a present, sweetie?”

  Kazimier muttered something rude under his breath and kept climbing.

  “Come back when you’re a little older,” she called, laughing as I raced up the stairs.

  When we reached his room on the next floor, he took the bag and went in alone while I waited in the hall. A few minutes later he reappeared, gave me a nickel for the bus, and sent me off to make the ride home alone. The women on the second floor laughed and waved good-bye as I ran past the perfumed shadows and faux silk.

  The game became our weekly ritual. I never understood why he wanted the pigeons or what he did with them, but assumed they were eventually set loose. This changed the day we reached his apartment and I asked to use the bathroom. He reluctantly opened the door, revealing a one-room flat with a bed, a single chair, and a dresser bearing a hot plate.

  Emerging from the bathroom, I glanced behind the dresser and saw what at first appeared to be a jumble of small sticks. Looking more closely, I realized that they were bones.

  Pigeon bones.

  I don’t know if they’d fallen there earlier, or if he had brushed them aside so I wouldn’t see them, but it was at this moment that I began to understand just how poor my family and I really were.

  A few weeks later, after catching a pigeon at another park (we changed hunting areas regularly to avoid scrutiny), he remembered that he had left his glasses at the shanty, and we had to swing by to get them. I was worried that the extra trip would be too much for the paper sack to bear but he waved away my concerns, anxious to get in and out before Charles returned from his daily perambulations between possible jobs and definite bars. When we got off the bus half a block down, he saw my father’s car parked outside.

  “Wait here,” Kazimier said and went inside.

  I tried to stay out of sight, but my father saw me lingering around the corner and ordered me inside. As I stepped through the door the frayed bag ripped and the pigeon escaped. It spiraled around the room, slamming into walls and windows until Evelyn herded it out the door with a broom. When my father realized what was going on, he began screaming at Kazimier, not for sending a seven-year-old home on the bus alone through Skid Row, or because the pigeons were being abused, but because he was embarrassed. Then he grabbed Kazimier by the scruff of his neck and propelled him out the door, delivering a kick for good measure. Denied both his dignity and his small portion of meat for the day, Kazimier picked up his hat, glanced back to where my father was still yelling at him from the doorway, and limped out of sight.

  That was the end of the pigeon game.

  While I was attending the nearby Utah Street School, some of the kids discovered that we were living in what was essentially a homeless shelter and declared me trash. To reinforce my status, they would wait for me by a row of refuse bins near the shanty and throw garbage at me as I ran past. Watermelon rinds were a particular favorite since they could be thrown a long distance and had a good heft when they hit. They were also cheap and could thus be found in abundance, making it easy to load up. Upon arriving home covered in dirt, stickiness, and black seeds, I tried to explain to my mother that I’d been pounded by watermelon rinds, but she didn’t believe me. She thought I was just being careless.

  So one day I told some of the kids that my folks were gone for the afternoon and that I’d been locked out and would have to wait on the front porch until they got back. News of this quickly reached the Goon Squad, and as soon as the school bell rang they ran ahead of me to the trash bins to load up. I walked to where I knew they’d see me, then started running. They took off after me, throwing the watermelon rinds then picking up the fallen, dirt-encrusted pieces to reload. When I reached the shanty, I jumped inside and slammed the door, waited for a second, then cracked it open to peek outside. Watermelon rinds pelted the door. I slammed it shut again.

  As hoped, my mother heard the commotion and ran over to me. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Look outside.”

  When she opened the door, she was pelted by enough watermelon rinds to fill a five-gallon garbage drum, which was where they’d been found in the first place. They nailed her head to toe before realizing they’d hit a grown-up, then ran like hell, my mother in hot pursuit, cursing loudly.

  All things considered, it was a fine day.

  When my father found a job working sheet metal in a garage, we were finally able to move out of Clarence Street, but the new location wasn’t much better: Grape Street in the Watts District, one of the most dangerous parts of the city. I attended St. Aloysius Catholic School on East Nadeau Street, my third school in as many years.

  After the birth of my youngest sister, Evelyn Lorraine, in February 1961, my mother fell into another depression, her mood swings punctuated by outbursts of incoherent rage. Trapped in a perfect postpartum storm, in a city and a life she’d never wanted, she made another suicide attempt, chugging half a bottle of sleeping pills before being rushed to the hospital where her stomach was pumped.

  After her release, we moved upstate to a small house on Pine Street in Napa, half an hour south of Vallejo, close enough for Grace to help out but far enough for comfort when Charles didn’t want her around. The house had been only partially completed; the shell was there, but the walls and ceilings were unfinished, showing nails and exposed wires. The owner had run out of money to finish the job, so Charles offered to fix up the place in exchange for free rent. Naturally he never did any of the promised work, and I spent the next two months sleeping on raw floors and playing in a yard strewn with debris and broken glass.

  As the days passed, Evelyn’s depression grew darker and more violent. When my father was gone she would rage around the house, screaming at nothing and throwing clothes around. She would walk out to the street as if determined to leave, pace back and forth, then come back in again, red-faced and talking fast under her breath. It became increasingly apparent that not even Grace’s presence would be enough to turn her around this time.

  I still don’t know what happened the day everything blew up. I know only what I saw.

  I’d spent the afternoon out in the dry woods behind our house playing with a cat I’d adopted. By this point, it was my tradition to rescue an abandoned cat every time we moved because we could be loving and playful with each other, emotions I could not safely express anywhere else. I could probably connect my appreciation for cats with the only time my mother’s hand touched mine with affection. One could stretch that connection even further to suggest that I liked saving cats because I was incapable of saving my mother.

  And maybe I like cats because they’re cats. Sometimes a tabby is just a tabby.

  I returned to the house to find a scene of total chaos. Dinner plates were shattered on the floor beside an upturned table. One of the window shades had been torn off during a struggle, and blood dotted the walls. Charles sat on the sofa, shirt torn, forehead cut just below the hairline, carefully pulling apart cigarette stubs from an ashtray and tapping the leftover tobacco onto a piece of paper torn out of the phone book. It took him a moment to register my presence, and when he finally glanced up, it was as though he was looking past me rather than at me.

  My mother was nowhere to be seen.

  The hypervigilant part of my brain started screaming at me. He’s killed her. He’s killed her and you need to run away, as fast as you can, right now!

  I pushed down the thought and edged closer, careful not to get more than a few feet from the door. “What happened?” I asked.

  He shook his head, rolled the piece of paper into a makeshift cigarette, and lit it. “I don’t know,” he said, and repeated it several times. “I did something bad, and she did something bad, and now she’s back in the hospital.”

  “When’s she coming back?”

  He took a long drag on the cigarette. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if she is coming back.”


  That night he drove me and my sisters to Grace’s trailer, where we stayed while my mother was again institutionalized. When we returned home several weeks later, Evelyn was heavily medicated and in considerable discomfort, moving only when necessary. My father said she’d had an operation, but wouldn’t elaborate. One night I pretended to be asleep while he was talking to Grace and heard him give a name to the procedure: hysterectomy.

  There would be no more children.

  That summer, out of work and facing eviction, my father had no choice other than to return to Paterson, so we began loading up a small trailer for the long drive east. My father had always promised that I could bring along whatever cat I’d adopted if it was there when we moved, but they never seemed to be around when needed and I was forced to leave them behind. I didn’t think about the practicalities of bringing a cat on a cross-country road trip because you don’t think about those things when you’re eight. I knew only that I liked my cat, so as we finished packing I reminded my father about his promise. He said we could make it work.

  But when I went into the backyard to get the cat, it was nowhere to be seen.

  I was about to start searching the woods when my father came to find me. He said that the cat had gone to sleep behind one of the car’s rear tires and had been run over when he backed up. I ran to the car to find most of the cat’s body undamaged; only the head had been crushed. Wiping away tears, I carried his remains to the backyard and buried him in the shallow, dry ground. Still crying, I climbed into the car and we drove off.

  As Napa melted away behind us, I wondered why the cat hadn’t been startled away from the tire when my father started the car. Stranger still, I’d never even seen the cat sleeping there before; she had always been afraid of the car and would run from the noise it made. Why would she pick this day to decide that she liked the car?

  And why had only the head been crushed?

  I would eventually discover that the Pine Street cat was not the first to be sacrificed to my father’s convenience, nor would it be the last.

  Chapter 6

  The First One’s Always Free

  It was furnace-hot as we passed through Oklahoma crammed into a car whose windows were designed more for appearance than the free passage of anything as frivolous as air. We sat as far as possible from the un-upholstered doors, the bare metal sheeting and handles too hot to touch. When my father stopped at a gas station we piled outside, desperate to catch a breath of air that wasn’t superheated beyond the limits of human endurance. We must’ve been a pretty grim-looking bunch, because when the attendant learned we were driving cross-country with nothing more to occupy ourselves than thoughts of suicide, he took pity on us.

  “Wait here,” he said and hurried into the station as the gas pump counted gallons. He emerged moments later with a two-foot-high stack of comic books. “These’re my nephew’s. He was here visiting last month, then left ’em behind when he went back east. I was gonna throw ’em out, but if you want ’em, they’re yours.”

  This was my first exposure to comics, and while most of the books were of the silly sort—Archie and Jughead, Sad Sack, Mighty Mouse, Donald Duck, and Casper the Friendly Ghost—salted in among them were proper comics: Classics Illustrated, Batman, Combat, Rip Hunter, and best of all, Superman. I carefully stacked the books, straightened the bent corners, organized them from least interesting to most interesting based on the cover art, and began reading.

  By the time we reached New Jersey my appreciation for all things Superman had extended to a love of comic books in general, less for the action and flashy costumes than their sense of morality. The books emphasized the importance of standing up for others, even if doing so meant putting yourself at risk. That ethical core meant everything to a young kid trapped in a family that operated without any sort of moral compass.

  Sophia took great pleasure in pointing out to Charles that he had traveled cross-country twice, duped by Kazimier’s lies, only to return with his tail between his legs to ask for money while he looked for work. Any pleasure I might have taken from my father’s distress was erased when I discovered that he had thrown away the comics. They’d kept me occupied during the drive, and as far as he was concerned they had no greater value. I dug out the few books not totally spoiled by garbage and snuck them into the house. In the months that followed I traded comics with other kids and used whatever small change I could safely liberate from my father’s dresser to buy my own. Collecting comics became an act of rebellion against my father, and a means of defining who I was as a person.

  Funnily enough, that’s still how I see them.

  Charles had made an art of lying his way into apartments, but that fall pickings were slim in Paterson; few landlords were willing to take a chance on a new tenant with anything larger than a one-bedroom apartment. That wasn’t much room for five of us, so I was once again routinely sent off to live with my grandmother or my aunt, the latter of whom realized that the best way to keep me quiet was to have a stack of comics waiting on the hallway table when I arrived. I’d settle in on the couch beneath the living room window and read straight through to bedtime, which was also on the couch. Sometimes she’d sit and talk with me about the stories in the comics, and her comments were often surprisingly specific.

  “We always suspected she was reading them herself,” her brother-in-law Frank Skibicki said much later. “She’d never admit that of course, because at that time it wasn’t something a grown-up should be doing, but I think she liked the stories.”

  With her help I acquired a healthy collection, including the first appearances of Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy #15 and Thor in Journey into Mystery #83, and a full run, starting from issue one, of The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, as well as Silver Age titles from DC: Superman, The Flash, Blackhawk, Atom, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and Metal Men.

  But Superman remained my chief focus, and his depiction by Curt Swan became the true, iconic image against which all later versions would be measured. Other comics of the time featured a relatively small cast of characters, but the Superman comics had a large cast of bad guys, friends, and allies, supported by extensive world-building and elaborate histories. It was my first exposure to the process of creating a consistent universe. I loved reading about the Phantom Zone, the Jewel Mountains, the Scarlet Jungle, and the Fire Falls. Krypton was as real to me as Paterson. More real, in some ways. I worried for Clark’s safety whenever Brainiac or Lex Luthor appeared on the cover, learned the names and properties of all the various forms of Kryptonite (green, red, gold, jewel, blue, and white), and embraced even the dopiest supporting characters of the Superman universe except for Beppo the Super-Monkey because honestly, who would?

  I would read the issues through once as just a fan, to enjoy the story, then over and over again to study how the action and dialogue had been laid out across the pages to tell that story. It never occurred to me that I might one day want to write comics for a living, I just wanted to peek under the hood and figure out how the engine worked.

  My own story took an unexpected turn when my father announced that we now had another last name: Stark. He said it was common for people to have a real name and a business name, and I believed him, not knowing anything about aliases at the time. Henceforth, when answering the phone or talking to people who might come to the door, I was to ask who the person wanted to speak with before identifying myself, and under no circumstances should I answer to the wrong name. This would make it more difficult for bill collectors, police, lawyers, and landlords to find him when he skipped out on his obligations.

  Our latest ill-gotten refuge was a small two-bedroom apartment nobody else wanted because the oil heater didn’t work and we were in the midst of one of the worst winters in New Jersey’s long history. The snow drifts were taller than I was. It was so bad that my mother stole a few dollars out of my father’s wallet to buy me a bright red cap. That way even if the rest of me was buried in the snow, they could still find me. Or th
ey could at least find the cap.

  My latest school, St. Stephen’s, was home to the angriest, most dysfunctional nuns I’d ever encountered. In a system where corporal punishment was not only permitted but encouraged, St. Stephen’s was the ne plus ultra of student abuse. We were routinely slapped, pushed, punched, and struck with whatever objects were nearest at hand. One afternoon, during a test, I realized that my fountain pen—ballpoints were strictly forbidden—was out of ink, and I didn’t have a spare cartridge.

  I raised my hand, approached the dragon at the front of the room, and stammered out my dilemma. She looked up from her papers, met my gaze levelly, and backhanded me across the head so hard my ear rang for an hour. She then ordered me back to my desk where I was to wait until one of the other boys (classes were segregated by gender) was finished with his test so I could borrow his pen to finish my work.

  The first offered pen came shortly before the end of class, so I was only able to scribble down a few answers before the bell rang. I received an F.

  When they weren’t teaching Catechism and Introduction to Blunt Force Trauma, the nuns at St. Stephen’s worked tirelessly to extract money from the families of their students. Everything had to be purchased from the church or from stores endorsed by the school: uniforms, books, pens (blue fountain pens were preferred, green was acceptable, but only blue or black ink), composition notebooks, and pictures of saints and popes. It was no secret that the stores kicked some of the money back to the church. I may have been just a kid, but even I knew a racket when I saw one. Nice immortal soul your son’s got there, be a real shame if he burned in hell for all eternity ’cause you didn’t buy this here sweater. You get what I’m sayin’, or do I gotta make a call to Mother Superior?

  Then there was the Pagan Baby Incident.

  As the worst blizzard in years roared across Paterson, I arrived at school on a Monday morning grateful to be inside anything that offered four walls and warmth. I hurried into the cloakroom, shucked off my wet coat, then turned to see the homeroom nun approaching on an attack vector, her face an angry red.