“I thought you knew.”*
I immediately began writing reviews of movies, books, and plays. Access to every theater in San Diego proved particularly helpful to my own writing. I learned about dramatic structure from the Old Globe’s Shakespeare festival; understood the value of silence via Harold Pinter; and developed a passion for nonlinear, modernist theater from Ibsen and Beckett.
With no one to stop me, and dozens of column inches in need of filling, I expanded my reach into editorials and feature articles, as well as profiles of local actors and other celebrities. Writing so much so quickly helped me burn through the crap in my system and taught me how to produce on demand. I’d roll into the Daily Aztec offices around noon, find out what holes needed filling, grab a typewriter, shut out the noise, and just fly. I learned how to write anywhere under any conditions. Some weeks I had an article or column in every issue of the Daily Aztec, prompting some to nickname it The Daily Joe.
This exposure allowed me to experience what it was like to be popular, or at least visible, as students and professors recognized me on campus or wrote letters to the editor to praise (or roundly condemn) something I’d written. Then there was the afternoon a stunningly beautiful red-haired woman named Liz entered the male-dominated, sweaty, testosterone-filled offices of the Daily Aztec. All work stopped as she said, “I’m trying to find someone.”
Every male in that room prayed to whatever deity he worshipped that she was looking for him.
“J. Michael Stra—Icantpronounceit.”
The receptionist pointed to my desk and the woman walked toward me, oblivious to the staffers staring daggers in my direction. Without introduction or preamble, she asked, “Have you ever seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show?”
I allowed as how I hadn’t.
“Good,” she said, “because I love your work, I love the way you think, and I’m taking you on a date. There’s a midnight showing Friday night at the Strand Theatre in Ocean Beach. Meet me there at eleven thirty.”
Oddly enough, this was how most of my dates happened since I was usually far too shy to ask women out. I justified it as being chivalrous and respectful to avoid admitting that I was still bricked up behind the wall of my inability to form normal relationships. I didn’t know how to ask a woman out without looking ridiculous, and on those rare occasions when I managed to gird up my loins enough to make the attempt, instead of just saying hey, you want to go out sometime? I’d spend twenty minutes laying out all the practical, logical, non-emotional reasons why someone should go out with me before getting to the actual question, as if I was in a job interview. For some women this was justifiably off-putting; others found it charming or, even more horrifically, thought it was cute.
The issues that made it hard for me to seek out a relationship also made it difficult to sustain one. When they wanted things to go deeper, I couldn’t get there. I was desperate to find those deep emotions and share them with someone else, but they weren’t anyplace where I could reach. One of Zeno’s paradoxes suggests that there’s an infinite number of points between you and your destination, and since you can’t transverse infinity, you can never actually get anywhere.* No matter how fast or how long I ran toward them, my emotions were always just on the other side of an infinite horizon.
So I went where and when invited, and the night I showed up for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Liz was already in line, wearing a heavy fringed coat over a dress. It was a balmy evening, so the coat seemed an odd choice, but this was my first introduction to the fetish-and-stockings world of Rocky Horror fans, so it took me a while to cycle through several levels of social anxiety before I thought to ask her about it.
“Oh, this?” she said. “I like to wear it because I cut out the bottoms of the pockets, see?” She pushed her hands through the coat pockets to show them coming through to the inside. “This way I can diddle myself during the movie.”
During the on-and-off-again relationship that followed, Liz took great pleasure in my shyness, naiveté, and lack of experience. One night we were sharing a banana split at a Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour when a woman walked past our table to the restroom. After she was out of earshot, Liz nodded in her direction and said, “Nice tits.”
“I didn’t know women noticed that about other women,” I said.
She smiled. “I also like women.”
“That’s good,” I said as the meaning flew past me, “I mean, that you don’t feel competitive with other women and—”
She leaned across the table, her eyes saying Idiot before she even got to the words. “No, I’m saying I like women, too.”
And it still took thirty seconds before I got there. “Oh . . . OH!”
On another night she invited me to a party with some of her friends in Imperial Beach. When we arrived, I noticed that there were mattresses on the floor of all five bedrooms. Must be still moving in, I thought.
Later, as we were chatting in the living room, I noticed something amiss out of the corner of my eye and leaned in to whisper to Liz. “Okay, don’t panic, but that little guy in the corner just took off all his clothes.”
“Of course he did,” she said. “Oh darling, don’t you know? This is an orgy.”
My social anxiety skyrocketed up through the middle of my head in a display of fireworks that could be seen from space. She laughed at the look of unbridled terror in my eyes and took me by the arm. “It’s okay, we don’t have to stay,” she said.
And what I thought she whispered into my ear on the way out was, “I want to get you home as fast as I can so I can radish you.”
I ran that sentence through my head over and over as we drove back to her place. Radish me? Radish? What the hell did that mean? Maybe it didn’t mean anything, but then I hadn’t known about the orgy either.
“You okay?” she asked.
And in a tumble of words: “You told me you wanted to get me home and radish me and I don’t know what that means and maybe that means shoving a radish up my ass or it’s code for something else and I don’t know the code because I don’t hang out in the same crowd as you and I just wanna know what you’re gonna do to me when we get back and—”
By now she was laughing so hard that she nearly drove off the road and had to pull over. Barely able to speak, tears of laughter rolling down her cheeks, she said, “Not radish, ravish! Ravish!”
A few weeks later she left to visit relatives out of state, and we lost track of each other for several months, both busy with our own lives. Then one afternoon as I was leaving campus, heading to the bus stop, I heard a car honk at me. I turned as she roared up to the curb and waved. “Hi, how are you?” she asked.
“Good,” I said.
“What’re you doing?”
“Heading home. Gotta get some writing done.”
“No, no, no,” she said, “you’re supposed to say you’ve just run into a friend you haven’t seen in far too long and you’re going to get in the car, drive to my place, and spend the rest of the day making love to a beautiful redhead who thinks you’re terribly sexy.”
I looked up to see the bus approaching, then back at Liz. I could either spend the day frolicking with a beautiful redhead, or go home and pound on a typewriter.
Redhead or typewriter. Frolicking or writing.
That was the moment I knew I had to be a writer, because otherwise I was out of my goddamned mind.
“I wish I could,” I said, shaking my head. “Can’t, gotta write.”*
“Okay, sweetie, love you!” Then she put the car in gear and roared off down College Avenue.
I never saw her again.
Today we’re friends on Facebook.
Go figure.
On August 19, 1977, I received my bachelor of arts in sociology, which, added to my BA in psychology, qualified me to be unemployed in two directions at the same time. But by now I’d written scores of articles for the Daily Aztec and felt I was at last ready to leave school to try writing full-time for local newspapers and magazine
s. Besides, I’d technically fulfilled my part of the bargain with my father by getting a second degree. It was time to go.
When I told him my decision, he bristled angrily. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” he yelled. “You’re nobody. Nobodies don’t become writers. You think you’re special or something? Bullshit. You’re just too goddamn big for your britches. All this writing shit and what’ve you got to show for it? A dollar here, a dollar there. You think you’re gonna make a living at this? Horseshit. I don’t care if you get a master’s in psychology, sociology, or any other goddamn thing, but you’re gonna get one. Any loser can get a bachelor’s. I want to make sure everybody knows that I pushed you to get a master’s.”
It was my high school graduation all over again. It didn’t matter what I wanted, or if the degree would actually be of assistance. He just wanted to be able to tell everyone that he made this happen, this was his accomplishment.
“You’re going to get a master’s,” he said, “because if you don’t, then I have to ask why I should support your sisters going to college, since they’re even stupider than you are. And if your mother can’t convince you to do what I tell you, well, then she’s gonna have to pay the price.”
Success by proxy wasn’t his only reason for trying to force me to get a master’s. I was twenty-three and living on my own, and he was determined to keep me from breaking away from his influence any further. Forcing me to stick around for a useless degree was his last shot at keeping me answerable to him; we both knew he wouldn’t contribute a dime to my education, so I’d have to take out more loans, going further into debt, a weakness he would exploit later. You want help to pay off those loans? Then do what I say.
I wanted to tell him to fuck off, but I couldn’t risk hurting my sisters’ chance to go to college, so I enrolled in the master’s program in mass communications and wrote freelance articles when I had the time, which wasn’t often.
Though I’d made an art form of concealing my emotions, there was still a very dark and dangerous rage in me left over from the God Thing, the Losing All My Friends Thing, and the Nearly Getting Beaten to Death Thing; the added prospect of having the next two years of my life taken hostage was more than I could bear. I tried to exorcise the anger while I was writing but failed miserably. When journalists finish an article, they type -30- at the bottom of the page to signify the end of the copy. I might as well have substituted That’ll show you at the end because every article I wrote was a punch in the face of one of the people who had hurt me. Rather than taking pleasure by seeing my work in print, it was all subsumed by anger.
I was savvy enough to know this was poisoning the work, but too lost to figure out how to stop it. Since I was stuck at SDSU for the foreseeable future, I looked for classes that would feed the writing part of my brain and keep me from going insane, and found two scriptwriting courses being taught that semester by distinguished visiting lecturer Norman Corwin. Considered a writer’s writer, Norman was the most respected radio drama writer of the 1940s, bigger than Orson Welles and Arch Oboler combined. The press proclaimed him “the poet laureate of radio,” and actors like Humphrey Bogart, Rita Hayworth, Elsa Lanchester, Walter Huston, Groucho Marx, and Charles Laughton lined up to be in his radio plays. When he was commissioned to write a radio drama to celebrate the German surrender on V-E Day, the program was broadcast on all three networks, the first and only time this happened.
I was frantic to take his classes, but they were restricted to students majoring in telecommunications and film (TCF). Registering for restricted classes meant physically walking into the department office where the receptionist would check your name against their list of majors. If you were on the list, they’d give you the corresponding computer control card; once you had your cards, you had your classes. In Norman’s case, not only were his classes restricted to TCF majors, even they could take only one of his classes, not both, and students had to submit a writing sample for his review. I had a good sample—a one-act play called Death in Stasis—but there was no way to get the cards during registration.
Unless I showed up early. Real early.
Like the night before registration, when the cleaning crews had the department door open. In theory, one could slip inside, find the packets of control cards, remove two, put everything back, and get the hell out before being discovered by campus security. The writing sample could then be dropped off at Corwin’s office along with the rest of the submissions because nobody would be checking the pile against the list of majors.
Not that I would ever actually do such a thing, of course.
I have no idea how those cards found their way into my hands.
I was foolish to think I could get away with it, but I convinced myself that the university bureaucracy was so screwed up that no one in authority would notice a name on the roster that shouldn’t be there. On the first day of class I took a seat in the back of the room, trying not to draw attention.
Then a tall, elegant figure with leonine gray hair appeared in the door.
“Is there a Joe Straczynski here?” he said.
Crap, I thought. Crap, crap, crap, crap!
I held up my hand.
“Can I see you in the hall for a moment?”
Crap!
I stepped outside and he closed the door, regarding me with serene, curious eyes. “I understand from the TCF Department that you’re not actually supposed to be here,” he said.
“Technically, yes, that’s correct.”
“I further understand that not only are you not supposed to be in this class, you somehow managed to get into both classes, even though not even TCF majors are allowed to do that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How?”
As I described my nighttime raid on the TCF office I could see him fighting a smile. He seemed pleased and a little flattered that I’d gone through so much effort.
“Breaking and entering, well, that’s quite an achievement,” he said. “May I inquire why you would do all this?”
“I know who you are, sir. I’ve read your work. I want to learn from you.”
He gazed absently at the floor for a moment then folded his arms and looked up at me. “You should know, they want you gone. Today. Right now.”
“I understand.”
“I’m not just talking about this class. They would very much like to kick you out of the university.”
I nodded but said nothing.
“Here’s the thing, though,” he said. “I read your play, and it’s really quite good. Far better than the samples provided by the other students. So I was wondering if you could stay on, not specifically as a teacher’s assistant, just to help me out a bit. Perhaps the others can learn from you while you’re learning from me.”
It took a second before I realized what he was saying. “So . . . I can stay?”
He smiled and nodded. “Yes.”
“In both classes?”
The smile broadened. “Both classes. I imagine the head of the department will be a bit miffed with me, but I think it would be best for everyone if you remained here.”
After class, Norman walked me to the office of the department head—a gruff, garrulous, blustery sort of fellow—who argued loudly against letting me stay. Norman simply nodded and kept saying, very softly, but very firmly, “I understand, but I want him to stay so he’s staying.”
Over the next five months Norman taught me more about writing than I had learned in the previous decade. He could do things with words that I’m still trying to figure out. In the past I’d fired wildly at the dictionary rather than taking the time to pick my targets; Norman taught me how to gauge sound, meaning, and rhythm for maximum effect. He showed me the supple elegance of language, how to think carefully and strike with precision.
It was in one of his classes that I met Kathryn Drennan, a talented writer and one of the top students in the TCF department. She was tall, slender, and ramrod-straight, with long dark hair and a brilliant, steel-
trap mind. I wanted to ask her out on several occasions but ran into my usual shortcomings. It didn’t help that at the end of each class she would jet out the door, striding across campus with surprising speed.
I never mentioned my attraction to Norman, but he apparently figured it out and decided it was time to start moving things along.
I’ll let Kathryn tell this part of it.
“When Norman arrived at the classroom [one day], he called me up to his desk, said he had forgotten a film canister in his car, handed me his car keys, and asked me if I would go get the film so he could show it in class that day. I worked part-time in the TCF office and one of my jobs was to assist distinguished visiting lecturers with small errands like this. Norman then called you up to the desk and asked you to accompany me and carry the heavy film canister. I didn’t think anything of this other than if Norman thinks this is a two-person job, then that’s fine with me, and off we went.
“So I was rather puzzled when you spent the whole trip to Norman’s car, and back again, basically reciting your résumé to me.* It took me a while to realize you might be working up to eventually asking me out. I thought it was all rather charming.† Later on, when Norman made an obvious point of speaking well of you to me while I was helping him with paperwork in his TCF office, I thought, ‘Okay, if Joe does ask me out I will say yes.’ But though we talked many times before and after class you didn’t actually ask me out until near the end of the semester,‡ and it was to some evening event, a play, as I remember. This was a problem, because you assumed I had a car, I assumed you had a car, and neither of us did.§ Hilarity ensued, but not a date, and as I was about to leave for a summer visit home there was no time to make plans for a non-car-related date. So you gave me your phone number and suggested maybe I could call you when I returned for the fall semester. I did, and we finally went on that first date: lunch, at one of the campus restaurants.”
Kathryn shared my love of science fiction, did volunteer work with KPBS-FM, SDSU’s affiliated radio station, and would later host her own show, Science Fiction Omnibus, on the station’s subchannel for the blind, KPBS-FM/SCA. This, along with Norman’s work, led me to consider writing radio drama. The subchannel was eager for original material so I submitted a half-hour radio play about a warrior losing his sight on the eve of his last battle. The station assigned it to a producer/director who was, himself, totally blind. He ran the audio board by touch and never commented on the subject of the drama until the last day of mixing. As we listened to the part where the character describes how it felt and what he saw as his sight finally failed, the producer said, quietly, “That’s exactly what it was like for me.”
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