Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  After that I became Cathi’s special project. Her tireless efforts to convert me turned into a group effort as other members of the House of Abba joined in. If one of them saw me walking across town, they’d offer a lift. Every day at lunch they invited me to sit with them, to talk or to say nothing at all, if that’s what I chose.

  And then there were the gang hugs.

  To this point in my life, no one—not my parents, my siblings, my other relatives, nobody—had ever told me I love you. Nor can I remember ever being hugged or embraced; physical affection was alien to me. So for a group of my peers to hug me and say they loved me was overwhelming. The first time it happened I excused myself, found a place behind the gym where I couldn’t be seen, and just cried. Is this what affection is like? I wondered. I’d grown up like a tree in the desert, twisted and bent from lack of water, and suddenly found myself being love-bombed several times a week.

  I refused to yield, convinced that they were living in a fantasy world. I needed that conviction to keep from shattering under the weight of what seemed like genuine affection to someone who was in no position to know better.

  One afternoon I was pulled out of class to meet with CVHS principal Raymond O’Donnell. “Mrs. Terry and Mrs. Massie tell me you’re a writer. They say you’re really good.”

  I nodded but said nothing. Could be a trap.

  “Here’s the thing,” he continued. “We want to institute a new tradition where a senior is chosen to write a satirical play about the school and its teachers. Nothing too extreme, mind you, all in good fun. The play will be staged in the gym in front of the entire student body. If it works, it’ll become a yearly tradition.

  “Based on your teachers’ endorsement, I want you to write the play. You’ll have two weeks to write it, pull together other students to act in it, and rehearse. It needs to be funny, but if you go too far in making fun of the staff, we won’t do it again and you’ll have destroyed the student body’s only chance to fire back at their teachers. So don’t screw it up.”

  I walked back across campus utterly at sea. I’d worked for years to become invisible. Taking on this task would thrust me into the spotlight before the entire student body. If my writing was safe but not funny, they’d eat me alive. If it was funny but too truthful, the school would never do this again and the other students would still eat me alive. I’d be putting my neck on the line in exactly the way I’d been fighting so long to avoid.

  On the other hand . . .

  Mrs. Terry and Mrs. Massie tell me you’re a writer. They say you’re really good.

  It was a challenge, but instead of coming from someone eager to fight me, this time it came from people who believed in me.

  It was as though the universe was saying time to stop hiding.

  I spent the next week writing the play, which included some sharp jabs at the Jesus People, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few Christians. I enlisted the aid of several students to help out, one or two of whom added their own material, and we got in a few rehearsals.

  On the day of the production the gymnasium was packed with eighteen hundred students. The lights dimmed, the show began . . . and the humor was every bit as awful as could be expected: juvenile, forced, crude, and derivative. It was a baseball bat swung wildly by someone who had never held one before in the hope of connecting with anything that might accidentally wander over the plate. But the shock factor saved us; the students roared as the same snide comments they made among themselves were echoed in front of the very teachers being lampooned. For the finale, a student playing Principal O’Donnell stepped onto the stage and demanded to know who had written this nonsense.

  This was the moment I had chosen to literally and figuratively step out of the shadows, in full view of the jocks who had ignored me, the cheerleaders for whom I didn’t exist, the class officers, the Jesus People, all of them.

  My name is Kal-El, I come from Krypton, take me to your leader.

  “I wrote this!” I said defiantly.

  He pulled out a gun. We’d only been given permission to use a cap gun, but a starter’s pistol from the gym class lockup had somehow managed to find its way onto the stage.

  I ran. He fired. I went down in a spray of fake blood.

  The place went nuts. They applauded, shouted, and stamped their feet on the bleachers, shaking the gymnasium so hard that it rattled the rafters and vibrated up through the floor.

  It wasn’t the opening of a Broadway play or a TV program beamed to a million homes; it wasn’t much of anything, really, it was a high school assembly for chrissakes. But it was the first time I got applause for something I’d written, the first time I felt genuinely appreciated, and it solidified my conviction that I was meant to be a writer. Over the following days, whenever I walked across campus, students who still didn’t even know my name would see me and yell out, “Hey, writer, way to go, good job!”

  Yeah, I was hooked, all right.

  With graduation looming, Cathi knew she might lose her last chance to convert me, and prevailed upon me to come with her to the House of Abba. She said that I’d taken some pretty substantial shots at the Jesus People in my play so it was only fair that they have their turn. She was right, of course, and being also rather smitten with her I agreed to attend that Friday night. Normally it would have been difficult to get out of the apartment, but my father was spending increasing amounts of time out of town on business. I didn’t know what those trips entailed and was too relieved by his absence to give it much thought.

  The coffeehouse was packed. Cathi and I sat cross-legged on the floor, squinching forward as more people arrived until everyone was locked in knee to knee. Definitely not the place for someone with an uncertain bladder. The air inside was so hot that a regular procession of the fainthearted made their way to the parking lot. The house group, Abba’s Children, played gospel songs in contemporary folk arrangements, preached, led the audience in song, and told personal stories punctuated by jokes.

  It was unlike anything I’d seen in formal Catholicism.

  At a pause in the music, they asked if anyone wanted to offer testimony describing acts of God that had occurred in their personal lives. A young woman raised her hand and I noticed that she was sitting with one of the students who had taken part in my play.

  “You know that show they did at school that made fun of us?” she asked.

  “Sure do,” some of them called back.

  “Well, I brought one of the guys who played us, he’s right here!” Rather than booing or giving him a hard time, the crowd applauded, welcoming their visitor.

  When the noise died down, Cathi straightened. “I can beat that,” she said proudly, wrapping an arm around me. “I brought the guy who wrote the thing!”

  The place erupted in laughter and gentle barbs aimed in my direction. If I could’ve found a weak spot in the carpeting—if I could’ve found carpeting—I would have burrowed through the floor and disappeared into the earth. Instead I muttered something about it being nothing personal, then sank back, hoping not to draw further attention.

  There was more testimony, witnessing, and singing. Then someone behind me started chanting in a way that sounded like singing but wasn’t. Her voice rose and fell in a hypnotic rhythm, the sound unrecognizable as any language. Others joined in, a rush of voices crying out. I recognized the sound as something I’d read about in a magazine article: glossolalia, speaking in tongues. But it’s one thing to read about the phenomenon and quite another to be inundated by it. I could feel myself being caught up in the tide of ecstatic joy that filled the room. I didn’t have to believe in the religion to be mesmerized by the moment.

  Then Cathi was talking to me, asking me to pledge myself to God. Others around us lifted one hand in prayer and pressed the other to my back, encouraging conversion. The logical part of my brain wasn’t buying it. You’re being manipulated, don’t fall for it.

  But the emotion and peer pressure was ferocious. It wasn’t a
quiet conversion moment, it was an ecclesiastical mugging.

  “Do you feel Jesus inside you? Do you believe he wants to save you?” she asked, her face inches from my own. “Do you?”

  I closed my eyes. I wasn’t sure what I thought. In the heat of the moment it’s possible that a part of me did believe, or at least wanted to believe. As the voices of the faithful washed over me, I opened my eyes and looked at Cathi, her face flushed, beautiful, the first girl who ever gave me the slightest attention, eager for my response . . . and my heart overwhelmed my head.

  Even now I can’t say with certainty whether I believed or didn’t believe, if I felt God or if I felt nothing. I knew only that after a lifetime of misery I wanted to be part of something joyful. I wanted to be happy.

  And I wanted her to be happy.

  So I told her I believed.

  And she hugged me.

  They all hugged me.

  I was doomed.

  The graduation ceremony for Chula Vista High School took place Thursday, June 15, 1972; its theme was “Perhaps It Is Because He Hears a Different Drummer.” (It was the ’70s and we were apparently incapable of embarrassment.) Ken Pagaard gave the commencement speech, a controversial choice for some who were concerned about the communes Ken operated around town. Afterward, Cathi and everyone else went to parties to celebrate with friends. I had no such option. My father said he had something special in mind to mark the occasion. I hoped it might entail a trip to Disneyland or dinner someplace nice followed by an envelope containing cash. It was neither.

  There was to be a party at our apartment, with only two guests, both friends of my father. The first was a drinking buddy from a local tavern; the other was Irene (not her real name), a hairstylist who was pushing fifty but dressing thirty. One of my father’s “bar friends” from Paterson who had recently come to California with his assistance, her trademark was a black beehive wig so old and ratty that it never sat properly on her head. It looked like a beat-up cat with one eye forever on the lookout for stray dogs. Whether she was an outright hooker (as some speculated) or simply my father’s convenient go-to source for casual sex (as most believed) I cannot say. But she spent many late nights out on the town with Charles and often came to the apartment to see him. If my mother had any feelings on the subject, self-preservation obliged her to remain silent.

  The three of them proceeded to get as drunk as I’ve ever seen three humans get and not die.

  With growing anger I realized that this was my father’s party, not mine, as if he was the one who had graduated.

  His friends.

  His achievement.

  His drunken celebration.

  “You never woulda got this far if I hadn’t been pushing you,” he said repeatedly, oblivious to the fact that I’d managed to graduate despite his drunkenness and the difficulty of constantly changing schools. “You’d be out on the street starving if it wasn’t for me!”

  As bottles of whiskey and vodka disappeared I tried several times to retreat to my room only to be dragged back, a prop in my father’s big day. Around midnight he turned to Irene and, with dramatic flourishes of his empty glass, said, “We need more booze. Go get us more booze.”

  He looked at me. “Go with her. Make sure she doesn’t plow into anything.”

  I wanted to say no, but he was at that sloppy drunk stage that could turn dark in a second, so it was easier to do as instructed. As we headed out she leaned on me for support, wobbly and knock-kneed, reeking of alcohol, cheap perfume, and stale body powder, her beehive wig tilted at an angle that defied the laws of gravity. In the stark glow of the parking lot lights, I fixated on the fact that her black dress, torn more than once, had been stitched with the wrong color thread.

  I helped her into the car then got in on the passenger side. She fumbled with her keys, trying several times to figure out which end went into the little slot before getting it right. Then she leaned over me, very close, revealing smeared red lipstick on thin lips. Her makeup, two shades too pale and Kabuki thick, failed to conceal the heavy lines beneath, the skin’s signature from a lifetime of drinking.

  She put her right arm around my shoulder. “I want you to know we’re all very proud of you, Joey,” she slurred.

  “Thank you,” I said, thinking, Can we just go now?

  “And I want you to know that I’m here for you.”

  Then I noticed her left hand moving up my leg.

  “If there’s anything you want,” she said, her hand continuing its journey up my thigh, “anything I can do for you, anything at all, just let me know.”

  Oh, shit.

  Trying to act casual I folded my hands across my lap, creating a wall between her hand and the good china. “We better get going or the store’s going to close,” I said.

  “Liquor stores are open late, baby.”

  “Yeah, but I think this one closes early.”

  She peered out at me from under heavy lids, her eyes darkening as she realized this wasn’t going anywhere. “Okay,” she said resignedly and we drove off.

  When we returned with fresh supplies, I was debating whether to say anything about the incident when I saw my father give her a quizzical look, a raised eyebrow. So?

  She shook her head. No.

  He looked away with an expression of disgust.

  With a horror I cannot begin to describe I realized that this was what he had intended as his big “surprise” for my graduation. In his controlling way he wanted to make sure that the first time I had sex it was with his bounce-buddy, this (and I recognize the meanness of this, but it’s how I felt at the time) worn-out, dried-up, overly made-up refugee from a twelve-step program.

  As she sat heavily on the sofa beside him, he leaned in, one hand over his mouth in a stage whisper he knew full well I could hear, that he wanted me to hear, and nodded in my direction. “Faggot,” he said.

  I went to my room, pushed my small fiberboard desk against the door to preclude any further surprises for the night, and went to bed.

  I emerged shortly after dawn to find the three of them passed out. Irene was on the living room floor, dress hiked up around her hips, while my father’s bar friend was unconscious on the sofa in a stew of his own vomit. I found Charles face-down on the kitchen table. I called his name. No response.

  I thought about how easy it would be to get a meat cleaver from the kitchen and bring it down on his neck from behind, severing his spine and killing him instantly. I could then put the bloody knife in his friend’s unconscious hand to soak up the appropriate fingerprints, wash my hands, and go back to bed until my mother emerged and screamed at the sight.

  I stared at that exposed neck for a very long time before finally going back to my room.

  With my father spending increasing amounts of time out of town, I had no trouble slipping off to the House of Abba every Friday night, then attending Sunday services at the First Baptist Church. When Cathi invited me to a beach party, it was a first for me. I’d never gone to the beach with friends my own age, or watched a log burn in a fire pit, talking about life as the sun dipped beneath the horizon. But a few hours later there I was, sitting with my back against a seawall as they laughed and sang and chased each other along the beach. Is this how normal people live? I wondered. Is this what I’ve been missing all this time? I fought back a wave of resentment. Yes, I’d lost the first eighteen years of my life to living in a cage, but better to have found such small joys now than never to have known they existed.

  At the end of the evening we crammed into the back of an open pickup truck for the drive home, good-naturedly jostling each other and exaggerating the car’s every turn, bodies slamming bodies. I realized I was grinning like an idiot. By now I’d been in Chula Vista for almost a year and a half. I had friends, stability, and a place where I could experience the kind of affection that had always been denied me. I’d even started making inroads as a writer, and while I couldn’t afford to attend San Diego State University, the journalism, writing
, and theater departments at Southwestern College were well regarded. Besides, most everyone I knew planned to attend SWC, so I’d have friends there.

  That was the most amazing part. I had actual friends! I felt exhilarated, excited to be alive.

  At last, I was happy.

  As I entered the apartment my father was waiting for me, a half-empty bottle of vodka on the table in front of him.

  “You better get packed,” he said. “We’re moving to Illinois.”

  Chapter 14

  The Weed of Evil Bears Strange Fruit

  This time it wasn’t my father’s drinking that was forcing us to move. ITT had slowed their plans for a new hydrocable division, resulting in layoffs and vague promises of being rehired once things geared back up. The company had given everyone notice of what was coming, and my father had used that time to scope out other opportunities. This explained his prolonged trips out of town. His search led to a company in Kankakee, Illinois, and now that the layoffs had begun, he was ready to go.

  I wasn’t. I wanted desperately to stay in Chula Vista. This was my home now, and there was a part of me that believed, foolishly in retrospect, that I might actually have a chance with Cathi if she ever ditched her boyfriend. I asked the Elders if they could take me into Community but the households were restricted to members who had belonged to the church for a while. There was nothing left but final farewells, and as we drove off I was sure that I would never see Chula Vista again.

  We’d barely unpacked into a small rental house at 310 North Convent Street in Bourbonnais, north of Kankakee and south of Chicago, when the new job evaporated after a follow-up call to ITT by his prospective employers revealed that my father had been less than straightforward about the extent of his training. I was furious. If there wasn’t a job to be had in Illinois, then we should go back to San Diego. But he’d invested too much time and money in getting there to turn back, so for the next several months he worked during the day as a consultant for various plastics companies, and at night dissolved into his usual pattern of drunken violence.