Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  Not long after we moved out, large swaths of the city went up in flames during the Newark uprising, one of the largest riots in the nation’s history. When the fighting finally bled to an end, the country went back to watching Lassie, Gentle Ben, Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, and Bonanza as though nothing had happened. Certainly very little changed, and less still was learned. Each side seemed incapable of understanding the other.

  And I thought, Someday I want to write about people forced to experience how others live, and think, and act, so they’ll understand that we’re not really that different. We all want the same things: to be happy, to find love, to have our lives mean something. There has to be a story in there somewhere.

  There was, but it would take several decades before it was written—and titled Sense8.

  Chapter 10

  Targets of Opportunity

  By now I had formulated the Weird Shit hypothesis, which held that in every town there were usually only one or two really Weird Shit things going on, because it’s hard to support more than that. To illustrate by the opposite: in the Collinsport of Dark Shadows, the Weird Shit Index would be off the scale because it would include vampires and werewolves and witches and ghosts and time travel and the Frankenstein monster and and and and and.

  The average kid growing up in an average part of the average town might get Killer Nuns from Space, or Catching Pigeons for Dinner, or Skid Row Freaks, but he wouldn’t get all of them. Moving so often to so many vastly different places, each with their own Weird Shit, meant that I was being exposed to a cumulative WSI many times the normal range. It didn’t help that we could only afford to live in the sketchiest parts of town, where Weird Shit tended to settle, putting us dead center for whatever local nuttiness was looking for someone to eat. So I couldn’t wait to see what lay in store for me next.

  A small rural town with a population approximately 90 percent white, Matawan, New Jersey, was a considerable culture shock after Newark. It was the embodiment of middle-class suburbia, with broad lawns fronting single-family houses and newly constructed garden apartments that catered to young families; a tight-knit community where girls joined the Brownies, boys joined the Boy Scouts, the town emptied out for Little League softball games, fireworks, and church, and everybody knew everyone else.

  Our apartment on Sutton Drive was at the end of a tree-lined driveway that led past flower beds and a carefully manicured lawn to a white columned entry. It had air-conditioning and electric heat, and for the first time I had a bedroom of my own. Having spent years living in shanties, tenements, and houses without heating, we looked at it with the kind of awe usually reserved for Soviet refugees newly escaped to the West. It was nice. Too nice. I kept waiting for the local Weird Shit to leap out of the shadows at me.

  “You should be happy,” my mother said, noting my concern. “Why aren’t you smiling?”

  I didn’t answer. She wouldn’t understand.

  I might have been just twelve, but even I knew a Venus flytrap when I saw one.

  During the day, as my father and his partner set up their factory at the edge of town, I went on extended walks through the thick woods and gullies that bordered Matawan. Church Street and Aberdeen Road led to a small cluster of downtown businesses: a hamburger stand and a pizza parlor and, best of all, a store that sold records, comic books, and secondhand science fiction books for a dime apiece! Unfortunately, my father had finally figured out that his loose change had a way of disappearing off the nightstand, so to feed my book habit I began scavenging around town for used soda bottles I could return for the two-cent-apiece refund. I didn’t care that people might see me digging through garbage cans or searching for castoffs beside the road. All that mattered was that for every five bottles I could buy access to the stories of Heinlein, Ellison, Bradbury, or Asimov; a dime for every new world, every universe.

  I also began rebuilding my comic collection, covertly at first, then more openly when I realized my father no longer cared about it. But the most amazing day of all was when a manila envelope arrived with the membership material I’d purchased for the Supermen of America Fan Club. After years spent watching and reading about Superman, I now had a certificate with my name beneath his picture, and an official badge. Since Clark Kent wore his Superman uniform under his regular clothes, I pinned the badge to the inside of my jacket, where no one could see it, steal it, or give me a hard time about my nascent secret identity. No, I hadn’t yet achieved my goal of becoming Superman, but now I was one of the Supermen of America, which put me just thismuch closer to my goal.

  Out of a sense of fairness I also joined the Merry Marvel Marching Society and received a similar packet filled with character posters. Our frequent moves had denied me the chance to make lasting friends, but as I covered the walls with posters of Superman, Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, Spider-Man, and the Hulk, everywhere I turned, the face of a friend looked back at me.

  Nineteen sixty-six was also an amazing year for genre television: Lost in Space then Star Trek took me to distant worlds, Batman slugged it out with bad guys to the on-screen accompaniment of BLATT! and POW!, and courtesy of The Avengers and Emma Peel I finally began to get a rough idea of what testosterone was all about. The inspiration was dizzying, and since my goal was to become a writer, and writers often worked for television, I wondered if one day it might be possible to have my own TV show, maybe even a science fiction show. True, I hadn’t written anything yet, but that was a deliberate choice. There was a lot of work ahead of me before I’d be good enough to commit anything to paper, so I kept the stories in my head, mentally editing them while in bed or at my school desk, sanding them down until they were smooth. I looked forward to the day when those stories would finally say Okay, now we’re ready for you to write us down.

  Keep the lid on, I thought. Let the water come to a boil.

  In the hope that we might actually stay put for a while, I risked getting to know some of the neighborhood kids, including a Jewish girl my own age who lived in the same apartment complex. I knew nothing about Judaism, so she offered to teach me some of the rituals and songs, a little Yiddish, and even some Hebrew. Her religion seemed friendlier and gentler than the one I’d been born into, so I asked if it was possible to switch sides. She checked with her mom, who said Judaism didn’t go out of its way to convert people, unlike a certain other religion, and that I should wait until I was older to think about such things. Meanwhile, she said that under no circumstances should I mention this to my father.

  At first we met only at her parents’ apartment under their eagle-eyed supervision, but eventually I won their trust enough to invite her to our apartment while my father was working and my mother was out with my sisters. Being a nerd I had nothing salacious in mind, I just wanted to show her my room and my comics. But she never got that far once she saw my father’s framed collection of Nazi paraphernalia proudly displayed in the living room.

  Did I not mention the Nazi paraphernalia before now? Oh.

  It’s important to remember that my father wasn’t a historian, a World War II buff, or a soldier who brought back German artifacts as trophies. These were his personal mementos from his time with German soldiers who taught him the value of Nazism and took him along to beat Jews. The display included his swastika armband, Nazi cigarette coupons, photos of the soldiers who were his friends, and a German military hat proudly set on the bar. It wasn’t just Nazi stuff, it was his Nazi stuff, cherished and revisited as one might page through a high school yearbook, with nostalgia and something very close to reverence.

  And in his bedroom closet, safe in a plastic dry-cleaning bag, was the German uniform jacket made for him by his pals in the unit, which he had secretly held on to in defiance of orders from Sophia to destroy any incriminating evidence from that time. Quoting my uncle Ted’s brother Frank years later, “I was told by Theresa that Charles buried it after he saw that partisans annihilated totally a family suspected of collaborating with the Germans.”
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  My father would take it out of the plastic, slip the swastika onto the arm, hang it on the closet door, and just look at it for a long time before resignedly putting it back in the closet again.

  Had I been smarter, I would have figured out that there was more going on under the surface when it came to my father and Nazis, but it was just His Stuff from the War that I walked past on my way to another room. But when my friend saw the display, she paled visibly and ran out of the apartment. After she told her parents about my father’s altar to all things Nazi, they didn’t let her hang out with me anymore.

  “They told me to tell you it’s not because of you,” she said, “they say you’re okay. It’s your dad. They think there’s something not right about him.”

  They knew. From just her ten-second glimpse into my father’s dark heart, they knew there was something wrong with him. But it would be many years before I figured out just how wrong.

  The veneer of paradise began to crack when my father’s business partner realized that not only was Charles clueless about how to set up a company, he had a tendency to show up drunk or hungover, hiding bottles of vodka around the shop so he could imbibe during work hours. As his days grew more tense, he spent his nights prowling the bars of neighboring towns, ranging farther afield in search of whatever the hell he was searching for. His increasingly tenuous position at work made him even more determined to convince the rest of the family that we were happy and that everything was fine, just fine goddamnit.

  The most disturbing aspect of this pathology was the Dance.

  Using an eight-millimeter film camera he had obtained,* my father began documenting family dinners and gatherings. We had already been trained to look happy whenever photos were taken, but movies added another dimension. Like everything else in my father’s life, the film camera was a propaganda device whose purpose was to reinforce his image as a good father, and he decided that the best way to convey this was to show his kids dancing. Didn’t matter where we were. Didn’t matter if dancing was appropriate. Didn’t matter if the people looking on shook their heads at the weirdness, or that there wasn’t even any music. The order came: dance.

  By now I was starting to exhibit a stubborn streak so I refused to take part. But my sisters, younger and more vulnerable, had no choice, nor did they understand the fiction they were being asked to create. So they danced. Silently. Pretending for the camera, inside the house, on the front yard, outside Sophia’s house or a local park. The same moves. The same silent dance.

  For years afterward, Charles would play those films at family gatherings as his personal, paternal validation, his eight-millimeter Potemkin village. His alibi.

  Look how happy everyone is . . . look . . . you’re dancing . . .

  And those movies did record the truth . . . just not the one he wanted. A snapshot requires only a second of pretense, but film catches wary glances, fractured smiles, and haunted eyes that might elude single images. I began to understand that movies could be a gateway to Revealed Truth.

  If God were to write the Bible today, He would write it on film.

  When my grades fell again due to my father’s drunken mayhem, I was given a choice: attend summer school and continue on to high school in the fall, or be held back a year. If I were held back, my comic collection would be back on the chopping block, so I opted for summer school.

  When I told my father the news, he hauled back and punched me in the mouth hard enough to send me to the floor. He said I was lazy and stupid and I’d goddamned better finish summer school without giving him any more problems or there’d be more of that in store. Tasting blood, I felt grit in my mouth and spit out a bit of white enamel. I ran to the mirror and saw that my front right tooth was chipped and felt loose. Panicked, I asked if it could be fixed—even at this late date none of us had been taken to a dentist—but he said that if my tooth was broken, it was my fault; it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t provoked him and he was goddamned if he’d spend his good money to get it fixed.

  The damaged front tooth gradually turned a mottled gray and was always slightly loose, a defect that left me extremely self-conscious. I was ashamed of how I looked, and from then on avoided smiling or laughing openmouthed.

  A few weeks later I returned from summer school to find Charles nursing a bump on his head, his mood black and angry. He said that a worker at the factory had hit him with a claw hammer for no reason. Knowing my father, the employee had probably struck back in self-defense against his drunken aggression. Either way it was the breaking point for his investor, who dissolved the partnership; my father could run the factory by himself, provided he paid back the initial investment. That meant moving the factory to a cheaper location and firing the employees, who he could no longer afford.

  He made up the difference by forcing me to work without pay each day after school and on weekends at the new location in an industrial warehouse, producing tubes that would be inserted into golf bags to protect the clubs. The manufacturing process began with plastic pellets that were melted in a big bin and extruded into a long tube before being pulled through water troughs and hardened so another machine could cut it to the proper length. My job was to grab the tubes as they came off the cutter and slide one end up a drill bit that was spinning fast enough for the friction to melt the end outward, forming a lip. It was important to hold the tube really hard because if it slipped or there wasn’t enough oil on the bit, it would smack you across the head hard enough to send you to the floor.

  Suffice to say this happened a lot.

  The warehouse had been designed to keep crates of merchandise safe from weather, so there were few windows. To avoid having to heat the place in winter my father sealed all of them except for the one in his office, saying that the equipment would provide plenty of warmth. That was technically true, but sealing the windows also kept the plastic fumes from venting, so by the time I was done each night I was dizzy and barely able to stand.

  To further cut back on expenses we gave up the Sutton Drive apartment with its central heating and lush lawns and moved into a drafty, broken-down old house on the other side of town. My father continued his boycott against high-priced heating oil, so we slept in double layers of clothes in freezing cold rooms. When morning came, we’d rush downstairs to dress in front of the open stove for warmth. The house didn’t have a refrigerator, and my father didn’t want to buy one, so he stored our food on the back porch, which was left open to the wind and snow outside.

  “That’s how we kept meat cold in Russia,” he said.

  But New Jersey was not Russia; the temperatures often rose above what was safe to store meat and milk so we were constantly coming down with food poisoning. Rather than admit his mistake my father blamed my mother’s cooking, which had the added benefit of giving him another excuse to beat her then go out to eat with his drinking buddies, leaving us to pick through whatever looked least spoiled on the porch.

  For a brief moment, we had lived just like other people.

  Now it was gone.

  Stephen King once wrote, “There’s little good in sedentary small towns. Mostly indifference spiced with an occasional vapid evil—or worse, a conscious one.”

  For me, the nexus for that evil was Matawan Regional High School. With a population of eighteen hundred students, MRHS was an insular, narrow-minded world hostile to newcomers or anyone who seemed strange, and I was both.

  High school is all about cliques, about who you know and who you don’t, who you sit with and who you most emphatically don’t sit with, who’s at the top of the food chain and who’s at the bottom. Once you’re locked into that hierarchy there’s nothing you can do to change it. The kids at Matawan Regional had grown up together, with parents who had good jobs and could afford decent clothes for their offspring. I wasn’t just the new kid, I was the poor kid: skinny, physically awkward, and painfully shy; the snaggle-toothed loner who owned one pair of beat-up old shoes and wore secondhand shirts and cheap gray work pants th
at I had long ago outgrown.

  I was the perfect target.

  It started when two seniors said I dressed like a retard and jumped me on the way home. I managed to get away without being pounded too badly, but when I saw some of the other kids cheering on the ambush I knew this was just going to get worse.

  Here’s how it would happen.

  A collection of jocks and bullies, thick-necked and towheaded, cheeks flushed with free-floating testosterone in need of expression, would wait outside the school and follow me to the Little Street Bridge that led across Lake Matawan. It was a choke point, the only way to get home without going miles out of my way on foot. First came the names. “Hey, Cosmo!” they’d yell. (Cosmo, short for Cosmonaut, since I had a Russian last name.) “Hey, Shitski!” Then they’d start throwing rocks, small ones at first, then bigger, followed by whatever they could find on the road: lug nuts, chunks of brick, anything that could be thrown a good distance and land hard. Sometimes a rock would hit my head hard enough to send me to my knees.

  I’d get up and keep walking.

  The bigger kids would run up behind me, shoving and punching me in the back, then stick their feet between my legs to trip me. When I went down, that was the signal for the rest to swarm in, kicking and punching me while I was on the ground. Sometimes they’d dangle me off the side of the bridge, trying to throw me into the dark waters below. I didn’t know how to swim so I hung on to the railing as hard as I could while they pummeled me. They’d leave only after they decided they’d done enough damage, laughing and tossing around whatever was left of my stuff as I picked myself up.

  They did this every day.

  For months.

  Telling the teachers was pointless because the incidents happened off school property and thus weren’t their problem. Besides, if it got back to the bullies that I’d talked, they’d beat me twice as bad. So I learned to be patient, to absorb the pain, get back up, and keep going. I have no memory of my classes or teachers during that time. I made a couple of casual friends—guys who, like me, were at the bottom of the totem pole—but remember almost nothing of what we did or where we went.