Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  “You didn’t take a chocolate box,” she said, so furious she was shaking.

  The previous Friday, crates of World’s Finest Chocolate had arrived, the sales of which helped raise money for orphans and pagan babies. I never understood why pagan babies were so important to the Catholic Church, but we were constantly being encouraged by Sister Mary Fisticuffs to think about the pagan babies, to pray for the pagan babies, to be glad we weren’t pagan babies (which seemed odd since apparently pagan babies were always first in line for everygoddamnthing), and if possible, to buy a pagan baby.

  In 1962, admittedly a more robust economy, you could buy a pagan baby for five bucks.* This entitled you to a certificate of ownership as your “souvenir of the Ransom and Baptism of an Adopted Pagan Baby.” You could name your pagan baby whatever you wanted, regardless of the local language, and rest secure in the knowledge that you had saved your pagan baby from whatever pagan babies were being chased by that day. Given my own impoverished conditions, as far as I was concerned if a pagan baby needed five bucks that badly, he could try to steal it off my father’s dresser like the rest of us.

  Not to put too fine a point on it, fuck the pagan babies.†

  The chocolate bars were narrow slabs of brown awfulness wrapped in white-and-gold foil, sent by the truckload to be sold by children to friends, neighbors, family members, and anyone else you held a grudge against. You could only consider them to be the World’s Finest Chocolate if you were, in fact, a pagan baby, and a 1960s pagan baby at that, because even the most isolated twenty-first-century pagan baby—a pagan baby that had never even tasted chocolate before—would take one bite, throw up, then use the box to beat you to death.

  Since no one I knew had even seen a pagan baby, it was pretty obvious that this was just another scam. But I wasn’t about to say that to Sister Mary Cthulhu as she stood before me red-faced and wide-eyed, her expression prophesying imminent murder or a myocardial infarction.

  “You didn’t take any of the boxes,” Sister Mary Thrombosis said again, so angry that she bit off the words in a staccato rhythm. “You were supposed to take them home and sell them over the weekend and bring the money back.”

  I told her that I’d been under the impression that the fund-raiser was voluntary.

  “Do you think the orphans have a choice in their lives? Do you think the pagan babies have a choice in their lives?”

  Since I was screwed no matter what I said, I decided for the first time to mouth off to a nun. I started to say “I don’t know, why don’t we call some pagan babies and ask them?” but halfway through call some she slapped me hard enough to ping-pong my head against the cloakroom wall. Then she grabbed my coat and hat, shoved a box of World’s Finest Chocolate into my hand, propelled me down the stairs and out onto the snow-lashed sidewalk.

  “You will stay out here and sell these and you will not come back inside until you’ve sold all of them,” she said, then stalked back inside, slamming the door behind her.

  The snow was so thick I could barely see to the end of the block. There was no one else around, not a shopper, not a passerby on his way to work, no one. I considered walking down the street in search of other life-forms, then abandoned the idea, afraid of what might happen if Sister Mary Botulism discovered that I had deserted my post. I was soon covered in so much snow that the only thing you could see from a distance was a kid-shaped pile of snow topped by a red cap. I looked like a decapitated snowman. An hour passed. Then another. I couldn’t feel my face, feet, or fingers.

  Finally, an old man dressed in the fashion of the Hassidim appeared through the snow like an apparition. He tottered down the street carrying a bag of groceries, black coat snapping at his legs, head bent low against the wind. When he was within range, I staggered forward to ask if he wanted to buy some chocolate bars, though what came out of my frozen lips sounded more like “Wanna buh suhchoklutburrs?”

  He raised his face to look at me, glanced up at the school rising above us, then back at me again. “They shoved you out here to sell those?” he asked.

  I nodded. Shivering.

  “Terrible people,” he said, then sighed and pointed to the box. “I guess I can take one. You got any plain? I don’t like almonds, they’re not good for my teeth.”

  I glanced at the box. Almonds.

  He sighed again. “I suppose I can eat around them.” He handed over the money, shoved the bar in his pocket, and continued away, vanishing into the cloud of snow.

  After another hour, the door opened behind me and Sister Mary Goebbels reappeared. “How many?” she asked.

  I held up one frozen finger, hoping it wouldn’t snap off.

  Her face tightened, and for a moment I thought she might hold to her threat to keep me outside until they were all gone. But as she looked up and down the empty street even she was forced to accept that there were simply no customers to be found, and stepped aside to let me in.

  “Useless,” she said as she followed me upstairs. “You are a useless, useless child.”

  I bet you wouldn’t say that to a pagan baby, I thought but, wisely this time, did not say.

  Our sketchy living conditions and zero preventive care made me easy prey for viruses, so as the blizzard dragged on I kept getting sick. Making matters worse, the two bedrooms of our unheated apartment had been allocated to my parents and my sisters, leaving me to sleep on the living room couch under a window that offered little resistance to the cold air.

  “It’s not that bad,” my father said as the freezing wind seeping in through the seams rattled the blinds above me. “He’s just exaggerating.”

  This was my father’s modus operandi: whenever difficulty arose, it was never his fault; the real problem was people trying to make him look bad.

  When a recurring flu turned into bronchitis then blossomed into pneumonia, my father opted against taking me to a hospital because he had outstanding bills at most of them, forcing me to try and tough it out. Too sick to go to school, I received occasional house calls by doctors (paid for by my aunt) who would end their examination by saying, He really needs to be in a hospital. Sunlight helped during the day, as did ambient heat from the kitchen when my mother used the stove to cook dinner, but with each cold night I got progressively sicker.

  One evening, feverish and shivering beneath a thin blanket, I decided I’d had enough. I crawled into the kitchen, turned on the oven, and lay in front of the open door for warmth. To make sure my father didn’t catch me I stayed awake until I could see daylight coming through the window, then turned off the oven, crawled back to the sofa, and passed out.

  I did this every night for a week, sleeping during the day when the sun warmed the room. Gradually I began to feel stronger. But there was one unexpected side effect. Prior to this I’d been a morning person, getting up early to read or watch cartoons. Staying awake every night in front of the warm stove, rewarding myself in an almost Pavlovian way for not sleeping, flipped my day/night cycle upside down. I became a night person, and have been ever since, rarely getting to bed before three or four A.M.

  When the fever broke, my father said this was proof that I hadn’t really been that sick in the first place. It was one of the earliest moments when I realized how lovely it would be to stand on a sidewalk beside him on a warm, sunny day and knock him into the path of an oncoming truck.

  In 1964 my father found work in a plastic extrusion factory that paid enough for us to move out of the unheated apartment into something a tick nicer on Butler Street. By now we were changing addresses almost every six months, so I was constantly worried about getting lost. To compensate I would walk each new neighborhood as soon as we unpacked to memorize the surrounding streets. But this time we didn’t unpack until late in the evening, so there was no time for my usual reconnaissance.

  The next morning my father dropped me off at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School, my fifth school in four years. I entered through an open side door and trotted down the hall to wait outside Mother S
uperior’s office, where I would be briefed about the school and my classes. After a few minutes I looked up to see her striding briskly down the freshly waxed hall, eyes down, lost in thought. When she hit a slick patch of floor her legs shot out from under her and she exploded into human shrapnel, her feet, hands, robe, and rosaries flying in four different directions at the same time. I’d seen people fall before, but this was an unparalleled, five-star acrobatic performance so breathtaking that under other circumstances I would have stood and applauded, weeping openly and without shame.

  After the ground stopped shaking, she sat up in the tent of her habit, stunned but unhurt, and caught me staring at her. I didn’t know what to do. Part of me was horrified on her behalf, another was astounded by the sheer spectacle of it all, and the rest of me knew that if this had happened back at St. Stephen’s, I’d be clobbered if I allowed even a smile.

  She looked past the cowl of her headpiece, which was tilted at a rather rakish angle, and said, “It’s okay to laugh.”

  The craftiness of her statement told me that this school was going to be a very different experience than I was used to. By giving me permission to laugh she removed the desire to laugh. It’s no fun to laugh at someone who says it’s okay to laugh at them.

  These were clever nuns and had to be regarded with respect and wariness.

  At the end of the school day the tide of escaping kids carried me downstairs and out the main entrance, a different way than I’d come in. I looked around, thought I recognized the street that led to our new apartment, and started walking. I’ve always been a daydreamer, and since I thought I was on the right street I didn’t pay attention to where I was going as the maze of streets merged then angled away from each other. After a while I looked up and realized that I had no idea where I was. Absent the landmarks I would’ve familiarized myself with the day before, I was utterly lost.

  I forced myself to calm down. If I could just make my way back to the school, I was sure I could find my way home from there.

  But which way was the school?

  I asked passing adults if they could point me in the right direction, but they either didn’t know or were too busy to stop. (A lost boy in 2019 would attract far more attention than in 1964, when kids were expected to be more self-reliant.) One adult pointed down an intersecting street and said it was overthere somewhere. It wasn’t much to go on but it was more than I had, so I started off in the suggested direction.

  Twenty minutes of walking brought me to an abandoned area nothing at all like the residential neighborhood that bordered the school. I didn’t know where I was or my new address because my parents hadn’t thought to mention this crucial piece of information. I walked faster, fighting panic, desperately searching for an adult or a landmark that would lead me home. But the streets were deserted, industrial and ominous. I’d go halfway down one block to see what was past it, then back up and try the next street, hoping to eventually stumble onto the right path. I started crying.

  Then I heard someone call to me.

  A car pulled up to the curb on the otherwise empty street. A man sat behind the wheel, a woman in the passenger seat beside him, with another man in the back. The woman had dirty-blond hair. I couldn’t make out much about the men.

  “There you are,” she said.

  I hesitated, not sure what was going on.

  “Your mom sent us to find you,” she said. “She’s worried sick about you.”

  The guy behind the wheel nodded. “Your dad’s been in an accident, they told us to find you and bring you to the hospital.”

  “Get in the car, sweetie,” she said. The man in the backseat popped open the door.

  I didn’t like the look of them and backed up a pace.

  She leaned out of the window, waving at me to come forward. “Hurry up,” she said.

  “What’s my mom’s name?” I asked.

  “This isn’t a time to play games,” she said firmly.

  “What’s my mom’s name?”

  The man in the back leaned out the door. “Look, your dad’s hurt, now stop screwing around and get in the damned car!”

  I didn’t.

  He started to climb out of the car. “I said come here, goddamnit!”

  I took off.

  I ran as fast as I could, jetting down alleys and between dumpsters, his footsteps pounding the sidewalk as he chased after me. When I reached a street crowded with traffic, I dashed into the river of cars without waiting for the light, terrified he’d get me if I stopped. Horns roared and drivers yelled as they swerved around me. I hit the other side and didn’t slow down for three more blocks. Breathing hard, legs throbbing, I risked a look back to see if he was still behind me. The street seemed empty, but I didn’t want to take any chances so I hid between two parked cars and waited until I was sure he was gone.

  It was getting dark when I finally stepped back out into the street. I had to find my way home before nightfall, but how? What would Superman do if he couldn’t see to find his way home?

  He’d use his super-hearing, I thought, and went to the corner, closed my eyes, and listened. I couldn’t hear much traffic coming from the way I thought I should go, so I took a chance and struck off toward the area where I could hear the most cars. After a few blocks I spotted a police officer directing traffic, ran across the street and told him I was lost. I didn’t tell him about the car or the blond-haired woman, afraid that somehow I’d get in trouble. With his help I was able to retrace my steps and return to the apartment.

  That night, when my father learned what had happened, he was furious that the police had brought me home. Rule Number One was that we should never do anything to attract the attention of anyone with a badge, and how stupid does a kid have to be not to know his way home?

  Later, as I tried to fall asleep on the living room sofa, the memory of the car and its ominous passengers kept going through my head. To this day, I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d started running just a second later?*

  Our Lady of Lourdes was more than just a welcome relief from the slap-happy antics of the Sisterhood of the Closed Fist at St. Stephen’s; it changed the trajectory of my life through their participation in the Scholastic TAB book program. Written expressly for children, the books were often about kids who were worse off than any of us but persevered and made good in the end. They included such titles as Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars, The Janitor’s Girl, The Plain Girl, and What’s for Lunch, Charley?

  To keep prices down, the books were produced using coarse, brittle paper, cardboard covers with the barest of illustrations, and were written under an assortment of house names. Ironically, the methods used to make cheap, expendable literature for children were the same as those used by publishers of pornographic novels: coarse paper, house names, cardboard covers, and simple illustrations. If not for the presence of lingerie on the cover, you would be hard-pressed to tell a TAB book from Rubber Dolly, The Family That Eats Together, or Twilight Girls. One could even migrate the TAB titles (The Janitor’s Girl, The Plain Girl) to the adult line. To make What’s for Lunch, Charley? work you’d only have to move the question mark up by one word.

  TAB books cost between twenty-five and thirty-five cents each, and had to be paid for up front in cash because there’s no such thing as a line of credit in the Catholic Church. I wouldn’t start getting an allowance for another year or so (ten cents per week until I turned thirteen), so I continued my habit of pilfering spare change from my father’s dresser when he was too drunk to notice: seventy cents exactly, just enough for two TAB books. I studied each month’s catalog with an intensity normally reserved for jury rooms because these were my choices, books I wanted to read rather than the ones forced on me by teachers.

  It was while reading one of these TAB books that something magical happened.

  At one point in the story, a young boy with only five cents enters an ice cream parlor on a supremely hot day, planning to spend that money on a chocolate ice cream cone. But as he ste
ps back outside someone bumps his arm and the ice cream falls to the hot sidewalk.

  Reading this, I started to cry. As a kid with no money I understood what that felt like, how awful it was, how—

  Waitasecond, I told myself. Why are you crying? This didn’t actually happen, it’s not real. It’s just a story somebody made up. There’s no reason for tears.

  I shook it off. Closed the book. Of course it’s not real. It’s just a story.

  I opened the book and reread the passage.

  And started crying again.

  I was stunned to realize that it was possible to make up things that had never happened but which felt as if they’d happened. The church had tried to convince me that there was only truth and falsehood and nothing in between, but the nuns and priests were wrong; the story in front of me was false, but in the reading of it my heart accepted it as true. I turned over the book to reveal the writer’s name. I hadn’t previously paid much attention to the names on book covers, but by god somebody sat down and wrote that story.

  Wouldn’t it be amazing if I could do that? I thought.

  And with an electric thrill I felt a key turn deep inside me.

  Ever since learning to read I’d been instinctively studying the storytelling process because some part of my brain knew this was important. Only now did it finally possess the information needed to explain itself to the rest of me. In that moment I knew with absolute, rock-solid certainty that I wanted to tell stories. Nobody in my family thought I had anything of value to say because I was too young or too stupid. Telling stories would give me the voice I lacked at home, allowing me to talk about things I cared about.

  Clark Kent could have been anything he wanted. He could’ve been the best athlete or the best scientist in history. But he joined the Daily Planet because he knew that the ability to write, to tell stories that could touch people, was a way for him to change the world, not just save it. And if that was good enough for him, then it was good enough for me.