I wanted to pick up my pen and start writing immediately, but I knew I wasn’t ready. If this was really what I wanted to do with my life, then I would have to learn everything I could about writing. That meant no longer thinking of school as something to survive but rather as a launching pad for my ambitions. I didn’t know how long it would take before I was ready to start writing, but given the mushroom cloud that was still expanding in my head I was pretty damned sure I’d recognize it when it happened.
Chapter 7
The Face Behind the Mask
I spent most of the following summer with my aunt Theresa and uncle Ted, a skilled roofer who sometimes took me with him to work. This was a new experience; I’d never seen where my father worked because he was rarely ever working. Ted would roust me off the living room sofa before dawn and we’d drive to one of the houses he was building or fixing. I’d fetch and carry things he could have easily fetched and carried himself but it gave us something to do together, and at the end of the day I felt I’d actually accomplished something. He was trying to instill in me the same work ethic that he and his brother Frank had honed to a fine art.
One afternoon he had me on ladder duty to hand up tools and other supplies. When some of the shingles proved difficult to remove, he asked me to come up and give him a hand. I zipped up the ladder and stepped onto the roof. It was the first time I’d been on a roof since my mother tried to hurl me off one just a few years earlier, and when I made the mistake of looking over the edge, that moment came back with the force of a physical blow. Once again I felt myself being picked up, then falling. The roof tilted beneath me.
Look at the birds!
Ted saw me starting to fall and grabbed my arm, dragging me to the middle of the roof. I sat shaking for several minutes, unable to talk. My eyes were open but the world had vanished. All I could see was that moment playing over and over in my head.
Ted held on to me until my brain returned from wherever it had retreated. “Are you okay?”
I nodded.
“What happened?”
I didn’t know how to tell him about the incident with my mother, so I told him I just got dizzy for a second. I don’t think he entirely believed me, but he let it go and started leading me toward the ladder. I pulled away, determined to continue the task that had brought me up there in the first place. On some level I knew that if I didn’t finish what I’d started I would always be trapped by the fear of that memory. He let me stay but kept close watch the whole time. I was okay as long as I kept away from the edge and didn’t look down.
When we were done, he offered to help me down the ladder, but I declined and made it on my own. Later, as we drove back to Ted’s house, where my father was to pick me up, he said I’d done a good day’s work and deserved a good day’s pay, then handed me a five-dollar bill. It was more money than I’d ever seen, enough to buy forty comic books and have enough left over for a candy bar! I’d never been as excited about anything as I was for that five-dollar bill. Best of all, it wasn’t a gift, it wasn’t charity, there were no strings attached, I’d earned it. I’d worked and I’d been paid and the money was clean.
This is incredible, I thought. I can do this again next time and get another five dollars! Holy smokes! Does the rest of the world know about this?
When my father arrived, I showed him the fiver, expecting him to be proud of my accomplishment. Instead he became furious, yelling at Ted and demanding to know what the hell he was thinking. He said I shouldn’t expect to be paid for doing things for the family, even if it constituted actual work. The real problem was that he didn’t want to worry about paying me if he started putting me to work, as would eventually happen.
At my father’s insistence I handed Ted back the money, then we got in the car and headed home. I refused to cry or show that I was upset. I’d learned never to show my emotions to anyone, especially my father, who always found some way to turn them against me. That was his pattern, one of many I was starting to understand.
If dinner wasn’t ready when he got home, he’d beat my mother for her laziness, creating an excuse to go out drinking. If dinner was ready, he’d announce that it wasn’t to his liking and smash the plates of food against the wall then blame her for the mess, threatening that if it wasn’t cleaned up by the time he got back, there would be more of the same. If my mother complained or looked like she might complain, he’d punch her. I don’t mean he’d slap, backhand, or shove her. He would punch her, repeatedly and at full strength, in the face, head, shoulders, chest, and back, driving her to the floor then kicking her. If there was anything at hand that he could use as a weapon—a pan or his shoe—he’d hit her with it as hard as he could. If she wept, he’d declare that he would give her “something to cry about” and then proceed to do exactly that.
The point wasn’t just about getting off on violence, it was about inflicting humiliation. If there was spoiled meat in the refrigerator, he’d smear her face with it; if the milk had turned sour, he’d pour it over her head as punishment for trying to give him food that could make him sick, even though the food was often bad because he sometimes waited weeks before taking her shopping. Nor could she go on her own if the store was too far because he refused to let her drive, effectively imprisoning her.
Most nights he came back from drinking well after midnight, and would drag us out of bed to make us watch as he beat her. He wanted us to see the grief she was causing him, so we’d understand that she was a despicable human being, that the beatings were her fault, that she deserved to be treated this way. I was now ten. My sisters were four and three. We had spent almost the entirety of our lives being forced to watch him beat and brutalize her, exposing us to the worst kind of violence on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. Knowing what she had tried to do to me on that long-ago roof, I had no love for my mother. There was no love anywhere in our family, for each other or for ourselves. But for what he did every week, for the blood, the screaming, and the drunken violence, I hated my father.
The only break in the routine came when he returned home in a drunken soft focus, bearing cold pizza that had been sitting in the car for hours. We had to eat it or risk giving offense, which would start the violence all over again. When he was in this state he was manageable but sloppy, and would try to win us over with wild, extravagant promises about forthcoming vacations, trips, and presents. His promises were always forgotten by the next day, and if we were foolhardy enough to bring them up, he would deny having said anything of the kind, then start yelling about how we were draining him dry. He said we should be grateful just for having food on the table rather than being out on the street, and blamed the cost of feeding and clothing us as the reason we had to keep moving. In truth we had few clothes, mostly from secondhand stores, that would only be replaced when they fell apart.
By contrast my father’s closet was stuffed with expensive suits, ties, and shirts. Preserving the illusion that he was successful and that we were a happy family was the only thing he ever really cared about. So we were trained to never tell anyone what really went on inside the house, not to teachers, relatives, or each other. As my sister Theresa would say later, “It seems like there was some unspoken code from back then that kept us from discussing, even amongst ourselves, what we were experiencing.”
If asked, we were to say that everything was great; if a camera appeared, we were to smile and look happy. Doing otherwise invited dire consequences. But for all his efforts there is not a single photograph across three generations of Straczynskis that shows even a hint of genuine affection. No hugging, no kissing, no spontaneity, only frozen smiles and distant eyes. We stood beside each other, but not with each other, backs straight, at attention, like a police lineup. For one of us to say to the other, I love you, or to offer a hug was unthinkable. It would have seemed weird and unnatural.
To convince us that our life of violence and brutality was normal, he kept us isolated from the outside world so that we would have nothing to compare it
against. We never went on vacations and were discouraged from attending neighborhood parties or social events that might lead us to discover that most people led lives very different from our own. Like most alcoholics my father was all about control, and our constant moves tightened his control while creating a state of conditioned helplessness among the rest of us. Had we stayed in one place for a prolonged period we would have developed relationships with friends or teachers we could confide in, or who might figure out what was happening on their own. Skipping town every six months removed that threat. We were trapped inside the bubble of my father’s control, with no one we could turn to for help.
If I was Superman, I could just fly away, I thought more than once. That was the part of the comics and the TV shows I loved the most: seeing him fly. But the appeal was about more than just escaping my surroundings. Everything on the ground died sooner or later: people, animals, trees, whole civilizations. But the stars went on; the sun and the moon went on. They lived forever because they were up there, like Superman.
If I wanted to escape, if I wanted to Be Somebody, if I wanted to live forever, then I had to find a way off the planet.
I would have to learn to fly.
A sickness ran deep in my family’s DNA, and it sometimes popped up in unexpected places.
It was one of those humid, superheated New Jersey scorchers that make you want to peel off your skin and put it on the line to dry. I’d been sent to stay with my grandmother for the weekend and rather than remain inside, where the hot air was stifling, I went into the backyard to sit in the shade and read. As the shadows lengthened, Sophia called out to say that my parents would be arriving in a few hours to pick me up, and I should take a shower so I didn’t “smell like a bum.”
I must now make an embarrassing admission. Having been raised like feral animals, my sisters and I were never given much instruction on hygiene. We were told to wash our hands before dinner and brush our teeth before bed, but that’s all. Our clothes were only occasionally washed, my first visit to a dentist was still years off, and the three of us rarely bathed, partly because we didn’t know any better, but mainly because where we lived there was usually just one bathtub or shower, and that was the exclusive domain of my father.
So I was a little puzzled by my grandmother’s insistence that I take a shower—it was the first time I could remember her suggesting it—but dutifully went to the second-floor bathroom, stripped down, turned on the water, and got into the shower.
A moment later, I heard the bathroom door open and close.
Then the plastic shower door slid open and my grandmother got into the shower with me.
Naked.
I didn’t understand what was going on, but it freaked me out and I shrank back. She tried to calm me down by acting very casual, as if this sort of thing happened every day, and why was I making such a big deal of it? Her tone was friendly and conciliatory and not at all like she was the rest of the time, which only made things weirder. On the pretext of helping me wash she began running her hands up and down my body and between my legs. Then she suggested I do the same for her and put my hand on one of her breasts.
When I turned away, she wrapped her arms around me from behind, the back of my head jammed between her breasts as she groped my genitals. “Turn around,” she said and put her mouth on places it was never meant to go.
What she didn’t know was that my parents had arrived early. When they came upstairs to look for us, my father saw what was happening and went completely out of his mind. He screamed at her in a mix of languages, his voice high pitched and hysterical as she scrambled out of the shower and pulled on a robe. She tried to explain that she was just making sure I was properly clean, but her words only drove him further over the edge.
Red-faced and furious, he turned to my mother as she led me out, screaming “She’s trying to do to him what she did to me!”
I didn’t understand what had happened, and as I hurried to get dressed I thought maybe I’d done something wrong. But by the time we got home nobody wanted to talk about it, so I considered the matter closed. Over the next few months the storm died down, tempers cooled, and relations between Sophia and my parents returned to something approaching normal.
But they never let me stay at her house alone again.
It was only much later that I began to assemble the pieces into another pattern. At sixteen, Sophia had married her blood uncle, with my father, Charles, and my aunt Theresa born out of that incestuous relationship.* Having developed an appreciation for such things, at some point she apparently seduced and molested her son Charles.
And then she came after me.
“She’s trying to do to him what she did to me!”
It’s amazing how much data, how much horror, how deep and revealing a secret can be contained in a single sentence. Eleven words that explain much, but forgive absolutely fucking nothing.
Chapter 8
The Wind Took Away His Name
On September 25, 1964, my grandfather Kazimier Straczynski passed away at the age of seventy-seven in Vallejo, California. He’d been out drinking and fell off the sidewalk, cracking his skull on the curb hard enough to cause a stroke. The man who had come to America pursuing dreams of riches literally died in the gutter.
My grandmother was unmoved by his passing. He’d been dead to her for years, and if the facts had finally caught up with her feelings, well, that was just fine. My father grabbed the first plane to California in hopes of claiming anything of value in his estate, but returned with just some Russian currency, a few photographs, and the fifteen dollars Kazimier had in his possession when he went curb-diving.
Other than through his children, Kazimier Straczynski left nothing behind to show that he had been here; it was as if the wind had taken away his name. His death reinforced my determination to leave behind a mark that would say I was here, I lived, and before dying I tried to do something of value with my life.
The wind would not take away my name.
The following summer my father was fired from his latest job as a machinist at a plastic extrusion factory in Paterson. With all the local shops staffed to capacity, our only option was Newark, where several plastics factories had recently opened. We moved into a tenement in the Central Ward, a slum area also known as the Projects, anonymous buildings of concrete and despair.
The halls echoed day and night with the sound of raised voices, and the buildings were so close together that even with the windows open there was no moving air. Below lay a narrow no-man’s-land of dry, dead weeds, broken glass, rusted shopping carts, and piles of garbage. Drunks and druggies used it as a latrine. The smell was beyond description. If you were lucky enough to have a fire escape, you climbed out onto the hard metal at night to try and escape the heat, the wail of police sirens punctuated by street fights, and the car-horn symphony that never seemed capable of finding a concluding note, even at four in the morning.
As awful as the place was, it took nearly all our remaining money to move in, leaving little for food. We were hungry all the time. Bread dipped in milk constituted breakfast, and in the evening catsup mixed with hot water was offered as tomato soup. The eggs and bacon in the fridge were reserved for my father, who needed to be fortified before going to work, and he was rarely there for dinner, preferring to eat at bars with cheap happy-hour food.
There was a palpable tension in the streets of Newark as African Americans fought for their civil rights against a runaway police force determined to put down anything that might turn into organized resistance. The previous summer, our neighborhood in Los Angeles had erupted into violence during the Watts riots, resulting in thirty-four deaths, thousands of arrests, and $40 million in property damage. The incident sparked fears that more violence could ripple out across the country, and the Newark police were determined to do whatever was necessary to stop that from happening.
An avowed racist, my father openly professed hatred for all minorities, from Asians to Hispanics
, African Americans, and Jews in particular. Now that we were one of only a few white families in a neighborhood that was otherwise black and really pissed off, my father’s racism spiraled straight up into the mesosphere with no stops in between. When we came home from school, we weren’t permitted to go farther than the front stoop. My father was convinced that at any moment we were all going to be murdered in our sleep, and he bought a semiautomatic rifle that he kept in the bedroom closet beside a loaded clip ready to be slapped in at the first sign of enhanced melanin at midnight.
I had been told by teachers and comic books that the police were to be respected, that they were on the side of all that was right, that they were our friends. But now I began to understand that while that might be true in other places and times, it was not true in Newark, where every night brought new evidence that the police were out of control. I had been operating in a world of absolutes: good guys on this side, bad guys on the other, and the uniforms made it easy to tell who was who. But the shelf life of that status quo was expiring fast.
There was a vast gap between the world I was seeing in the streets and the one portrayed on television. The country was tearing itself apart over escalation in Vietnam, civil rights marches were being met with horrific police brutality, but the most popular shows on television were Bonanza, The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Bewitched, and Gomer Pyle. Films like My Fair Lady, That Darn Cat!, and The Sound of Music were the darlings of a film industry that denounced the Beatles’ Help! as vulgar trash. The media celebrated Julie Andrews singing “Chim Chim Cher-ee” while rivers of blood and fire roared through Selma, Watts, and Montgomery.
In less than a year, Newark would join that list, further traumatizing a nation that had no business being shocked when the fruits of its racism came home armed and angry.
Becoming Superman Page 7