Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  Since I had no idea what the town’s Weird Shit Index might be, I kept my usual distance in case the locals turned into flesh-eating zombies and came after me. The teachers knew me as a name on a roll sheet, my test scores generated neither praise nor alarm, and in time I knew a handful of students well enough to nod to in the hall or sit beside at lunch.

  I took advantage of the town’s well-stocked library to broaden my reading habits beyond science fiction and fantasy to include historical texts, biographies, and college-level textbooks on writing, history, science, psychology, and political affairs. It was as if there was a black hole in the middle of my head: the more I fed it, the more it wanted. There was an eagerness stirring inside me, like a coiled spring ready to . . . what? To write? Was I nearly there? I couldn’t tell if the writing impulse was making itself known or if the rest of my hormones had finally kicked in.

  Every time I thought I might be ready to start writing I ran afoul of my inability to distinguish between a writer’s style and his voice. I could feel the difference but couldn’t quantify it in any useful way. A Ray Bradbury story felt soft and warm, like a pile of leaves on a fall lawn; a Robert Heinlein story was as hard-edged and unforgiving as steel gears. That’s who those writers were, that was their style.

  But wasn’t that the same thing as their voice?

  The breakthrough came the summer after the end of my junior year, while reading The Colour Out of Space, a collection of short stories by H. P. Lovecraft. There are many laudatory things one can say about Lovecraft’s fiction—that it’s imaginative, colorful, surrealistic, and high-flown—but what it’s not is subtle. He comes at you with adverbs and adjectives blazing, little caring who might get caught in the cross fire, tossing off one overburdened phrase after another, describing alien cities as cyclopean constructs of an eldritch race, using words like squamous and noisome and others that sent me dictionary-diving for relief. His stories took place in ancient, sleeping cities of bronze and gold, where gibbous (there goes the dictionary again) creatures caparisoned (and again) on great beasts far beneath the sea under the watchful gaze of vast, space-borne entities whose true magnitude could only be glimpsed through the lens of madness.

  He was so over the top that suddenly I got it: style was the pacing and flow of one word to another to create a melody that would carry the images, characters, and narrative straight into the brain, a specific, practiced rhythm that could be slowed or quickened depending on the mood or purpose of the story. Voice was who the writer actually was beneath it all: their attitude, point of view, and personality. A writer might move between a variety of styles—hard-boiled noir, gothic, baroque—but the same intelligence informed the story at every step. Literary styles can pass in and out of favor, or be shared by different writers at the same time (as Lovecraft borrowed stylistic tools from Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen), but a writer’s voice is distinctly his or her own; it’s a one-off.

  Style was the clothes; voice was the body.

  The instant I hit that realization I felt a circuit close inside me, switching on an engine in my brain. Suddenly all the little unrelated things I knew about writing (or brashly thought I knew) arranged themselves into a pattern so clear and precise that it knocked the breath out of me.

  I threw down the Lovecraft book, picked up a notepad, and frantically began writing a short story. The words rushed out in a jackstraw tumble faster than I could scribble them down. A few hours later, breathless and excited, I had finished my first (very) short story.

  But the machine wasn’t done. Another! it said.

  I started a second story and finished it shortly after midnight.

  More! it said.

  I couldn’t stop. The words were just there. I could choose to write them down or let them go past me to find another writer, but they would keep coming regardless. I wasn’t able to shake loose of its teeth until dawn, when I collapsed into bed and slept for almost twelve hours.

  My first thought when I woke up was What the hell was THAT? I felt as though I’d been mugged. But the truth was something infinitely more profound.

  For the first time in my life, I was awake.

  I spent the rest of that summer experimenting. I’d write stories in Lovecraft’s style because it was the easiest to see. Besides, he was a professional writer, so that must be how a writer writes. Then I’d read a Harlan Ellison story, and decide, No, wait, that’s how a writer writes, and write a story in that style. Studying Bradbury or Hunter Thompson, I shifted gears again. Yes, that’s it, that must be what a writer sounds like.

  What I wouldn’t fully understand for many years is that writing is nothing more or less than speaking on the page in your own natural voice. Writers write the way they talk and talk the way they write. You have to get out of your own way enough to say only and exactly what you mean to say without second-guessing yourself. Like most neophyte writers I was prettying up the language to make it sound “literary,” which was exactly the wrong thing to do.

  By summer’s end I’d written eleven short stories. I held off rereading them until a few weeks before school was to begin, then settled back for what I expected to be an evening of greatness. But the stories were absolute crap. Total, unmitigated awfulness.

  I couldn’t understand it. Had the brilliant, Earth-shattering, Nobel Prize–worthy stories I’d written earlier been stolen and replaced with the wretched, malformed creatures before me? The answer, of course, was that the stories had been written as well as could be expected given the tools I had when I wrote them. Every writer starts with the same toolbox, which at most might contain a screwdriver and a pair of rusty pliers, and there’s not much you can make with that. Each finished story adds a new tool to the box that assists in the construction of better stories going forward, and reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the prior work.

  Absent the occasional annoying prodigy, all writers, artists, and musicians suck at the beginning of their careers, which is why so many of them fall early and easily by the wayside. You’re not very good at this, the naysayers declare, and the awful thing is that they’re not wrong, and we know they’re not wrong. But that’s not the same thing as a lack of talent; that particular speed limit hasn’t yet been established. The flaws in one’s early work reflect nothing more than the artist’s lack of experience. The struggle is to keep going, incrementally acquiring more tools until the work begins to improve, as it inevitably will.

  The horrific part is that well-meaning friends and family will often say Fine, give this writing/acting/music thing two years, and if you don’t make it big by then, drop it and do something else. Art is progressive; the more you do it, the better you get. I defy anyone to write fifteen short stories and not have story #15 be at least marginally better than story #1. It’s simply not possible. Setting a date-certain for surrender often results in giving up just as you’re starting to get good at your craft.

  Of the eleven stories I had written, eight through eleven had given me just enough tools to know that stories one to seven were shit, but not enough to know how to fix the damned things. Similarly, writing stories twelve to sixteen would make eight to eleven also look like crap. The flaws in my work were so painfully obvious that I wondered if my stories might be better suited for lining litter boxes than literary magazines. Only the slight improvements in the last few stories gave me any hope. I began to understand that learning to write is like drilling for oil: before getting to the good stuff, you first have to pump out vast quantities of mud, water, dinosaur bones, and general, garden-variety ick. So I set out to write as much as I could, as quickly as possible, to drill past the ohmygodthisiscrap stage. In a burst of ego I thought it might take a year, maybe two, before I had this whole writing thing figured out.

  As I write these words I am sixty-four, and still waiting for that day to come.

  As I began my senior year, I signed up for two classes that would alter the trajectory of my life in profound and unexpected ways. One was a class in satire ta
ught by Rochelle Terry; the other was my first creative writing class, led by Jo Ann Massie. When I confided to them my ambition to be a writer, I assumed they’d respond with the same ridicule as every other adult. Instead they went out of their way to encourage me, and I began flooding them with short stories. Where other students struggled to turn in assignments of four or five handwritten pages, I’d turn in twenty or more typed pages at a shot. Mrs. Massie included one of my short stories in that year’s senior magazine, and Mrs. Terry encouraged me to write short satirical plays that we produced for other classes. Yes, I was a wretched writer, but they saw promise in my work, and with their guidance I hoped in time to become slightly less wretched.

  It has become a cliché that the right teacher, in the right place, at the right moment can change someone’s life. But in this case the truth behind that cliché cannot be overstated. They invested time, effort, and belief into me at a time when nobody else even had me on their radar. They went through my stories line by line, word by word, and comma by comma, showing a very defensive young writer that it was possible to be critical of the work while still supporting the effort behind it. Everything I’ve ever achieved as a writer can all be traced back to the moment these two teachers entered my orbit.

  Every year the local high schools held a joint Career Day that brought together their best writers, artists, musicians, and actors in a showcase that the teachers hoped would encourage them to pursue those passions into college. Noting my shyness, and eager to get my work out into the world, Massie and Terry invited me to the event, which would take place in the spring. Based on their recommendation, a teacher from one of the other schools invited me to an earlier, smaller, and more informal gathering in November 1971 at nearby Southwestern Community College.

  On the appointed day, I took the bus to Southwestern and made my way to where the other invitees were gathered at a clutch of tables near the cafeteria. Painted canvases had been set out for viewing while other students played guitar or sang in the shade of nearby trees. It was festive and friendly, but also very ad hoc; other than a few flyers tacked to bulletin boards there had been no publicity, so most of the students and faculty walking by had no idea what we were doing or why we were there. Some paused to glance at the artwork or listen to the music, but there was no way to sample the written work without actually stopping to read, and few felt so inclined.

  As the shadows lengthened, most of the participants packed up and left. Since the bus home wasn’t due for another hour, I was one of the few still at my table when a man approached out of the twilight. His face was tanned and weathered beneath a shock of salt-and-pepper hair that was combed in a pompadour several times higher than seemed possible. He looked familiar but I couldn’t place him out of context. He scanned the remaining manuscripts on display until he reached where I was sitting, then picked up one of my science fiction stories and, without a word, sat on a nearby lawn chair, reading in the light spilling out of the cafeteria. When he was finished, he came back, got another, read it, and returned to the table, studying me from beneath heavy eyebrows.

  “You have a substantial talent for someone of your age,” he said. His voice was strangely familiar, but I still couldn’t place it. “Let me give you two pieces of advice. First, cut every third adjective.* Second, never let them stop you from telling the story you want to tell.”

  Then he checked his watch, wished me a good day, and left.

  A microsecond later one of the teachers raced over to ask what he’d said.

  When I repeated his words, she beamed proudly. “Don’t you know who that was?”

  “No,” I said. “I figured he was a teacher. I mean, he looked familiar, but—”

  “That was Rod Serling! He’s here to give a talk tonight at the college. He must’ve gotten here early and decided to take a walk around the campus before—”

  I have no idea what she said after that because I ran off to try and catch him, but he was already gone, vanished like an apparition from one of his stories. I couldn’t even afford to buy a ticket to his speech that night about working on The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery. But that didn’t matter. A writer—a real writer, hell, one of the Gods of Writing—said I had talent! It was a transformative moment that would sustain me for a long time to come.

  Years later, I had the opportunity to work with Rod’s widow, Carol Serling, on an attempted revival of Night Gallery. We spoke more than once about this chance encounter and agreed that sometimes the world is smaller and weirder than even Rod could have imagined.

  Chapter 13

  The God Thing

  During the early ’70s, Charismatic Christianity exploded into mainstream churches. Its adherents practiced prophecy, ecstatic singing, ritual healing, spoke in tongues, and in some cases engaged in the kind of ascetic communal living described in the Book of Acts. The Jesus People Movement proved extremely popular with high school and college students searching for meaning. Christian coffeehouses and youth centers used folk music to bring biblical messages to listeners used to hearing Bob Dylan or Joan Baez sing about their hopes for a better world. Sporting linen pants or jeans, denim or tie-dyed shirts, leather sandals and Christ-length hair, they could be found singing and praying in parks, or gathered on street corners handing out leaflets inviting young people to social gatherings and religious concerts. The most popular venues were coffeehouses like the Living Room in San Francisco, the Way Word in Greenwich Village, the Catacombs in Seattle, I Am in Spokane, and His Place, on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.

  The ecclesiastical epicenter for Jesus People activity in Chula Vista was the First Baptist Church at the corner of Fifth and E Streets, where Pastor Ken Pagaard operated a Christian coffeehouse* called the House of Abba out of a small utility building adjacent to the church. Every Friday night scores of young people crowded into a space not much bigger than a three-car garage. The only furniture consisted of a few chairs on a stage reserved for the musicians, so everyone else had to sit cross-legged on the floor, prompting calls of “If you can see carpet in front of you, you’re a sinner, move up!” Members prayed, read from the Bible, and listened to Christian folk music performed by various groups, of which Hebron was the primary band in residence.

  Speaking of the House of Abba years later, Tim Pagaard, Ken’s son and a member of Hebron, said, “We were kind of the only gig in town, so for all the kids that wanted some kind of a way-hip thing, there was nothing else going on in Chula Vista.”

  Even so, he was astonished by how quickly the group expanded. “Here we’ve got this place where there are some kids playing guitars on Friday and Saturday night, and one week there’s fifty kids (in the audience), the next week there’s a hundred and fifty, and the next week there’s five hundred, and you’re just going, really?”

  The music was a delivery mechanism for soft-sell conversion. Floaters patrolled the parking lot or worked the coffeehouse in search of prospects. Those who found Jesus were invited to join the congregation, where they would be instructed in the Christian faith by Ken Pagaard and members of the church hierarchy known as the Elders. From his modest appearance and soft-spoken manner, Ken could easily be mistaken for a simple businessman, but behind the pulpit he was a charismatic speaker who inculcated a fierce loyalty among his followers. The church also operated several religious communes, collectively referred to as Community, each housing twelve or more full-time residents who turned their possessions over to the church and submitted their lives to the authority of Ken and the Elders.

  The House of Abba’s reach extended into Chula Vista High School, where members gathered on the lawn at lunch to talk and pray and witness to others. Several of these students were in my classes, including another senior named Cathi Williams. She was smart and creative, with a sly sense of humor that crept up behind you, playfully smacked you on the back of the head then ran off laughing. She was bigger than life. She was trouble. She was glorious.

  My schedule put me in the same classroom twice in a
row. Due to the quirks of alphabetized seating, in Class One I sat at the same desk that Cathi occupied during Class Two, while I sat one row over. Like any bored student I sometimes tuned out whatever was being discussed and doodled on a sheet of paper or on the desktop. One day, I was sufficiently bored in Class One that I affixed a sticker bearing a pentagram to the rear of the seat facing me. (My writing was still in its Lovecraftian supernatural period and I thought stuff like that was cool. I was an idiot.)

  When I was back in the same desk the next day for Class One, I noticed that she had written Jesus Saves next to the pentagram. She had no idea who had put it there, she just needed to respond. So I wrote a rather rude and highly anti-Christian response next to her comment to see if I could provoke a reaction.

  She replied. I did the same. She countered. It amused me that we were having a theological discussion via the back of a desk seat, and that she had no idea who I was. After we ran out of room on the wooden backrest, we began leaving lengthy notes hidden under the desk. The more she tried to pull me in, the harder I pushed back, my position becoming more extreme with each new letter; some were real fire-breathers. In Class Two I would watch her unfold the latest salvo and laugh with her friends about this jerk she was trying to convert.

  Though I was still too shy to talk easily to girls, I could apparently write to them without problem, with Satan as my Cyrano.

  This went on for about a month before I decided to end the charade and left a note extending an invitation to meet after school. As she waited for her unknown correspondent, ready to do spiritual battle, I approached and said hello. She nodded distractedly, searching for the dark and terrible figure who had sent her those awful notes and would be there at any moment, cloaked in shadows and smoke. I waited. After a moment she turned to me and the light of realization went on in her eyes. She reddened in embarrassment then hauled back and slugged me.