Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  Norman was very proud of the program, and earning his regard meant a great deal to me. In one of his essays, Harlan Ellison declared that “writing is a holy chore,” but it wasn’t until meeting Norman that I encountered one of the high priests of this particular religion. Harlan and Rod Serling excited me, but Norman humbled me, and that’s exactly what I needed at that moment. He also fixed me, not by instruction or cajoling but by example.

  At the height of the 1950s red scare, a fascist little rag called Red Channels, published by the owner of a supermarket chain, decided that Norman was a little pink based on a series of radio dramas he’d written during World War II designed to strengthen our alliance with the Soviet Union against the Nazis. The publisher decided that Norman had done too good a job and was therefore almost certainly a Communist, despite the fact that the Soviets were our allies at the time and that the dramas had been commissioned in part by our own government.

  Norman was never formally blacklisted or asked to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, but being named by Red Channels killed his career in radio. At the exact moment when his writing was at its greatest strength, every door was suddenly closed. When he spoke of those days, which was rare, he said, “Radio had been like this great horse that had carried me very far, very fast, and was suddenly shot out from under me.”

  If I’d been in his position, I never would’ve gotten over the rage. But Norman never showed a flicker of bitterness, anger, or resentment over what happened. There was simply no acrimony to be found in him, and that shamed me. I realized that if he could go through so much and come out the other side with that degree of gentleness and equanimity of spirit, what right did I have to complain about anydamnthing?

  He showed me that words can do more than tell stories, they can heal, and that as long as you live inside the dignity of what you write, no one can take away that which matters most. Those who hate you can kill you, but they cannot destroy you or the ideals that matter to you. To be a decent writer you had to give yourself over to the power of words and a love of storytelling. To be a Norman Corwin–level writer you couldn’t look at it as a career or a way to get famous; you were entering a monastery to dedicate yourself to a lifetime of writing as prayer.

  Having lost my religion, I needed something to believe in, and Norman provided it. I walked out of his classes not just a better writer but a better person, calmer and stronger, an eager novitiate in a church made up of words in place of stone and stained glass. The anger was gone, and I could hear more clearly than ever the voice at the back of my head that told stories. No longer would the right words be drowned out by the background noise of my unsettled heart.

  In later years, Norman and I became friends, though I could never quite bring myself to call him by his first name. He was Mr. Corwin, period. He didn’t correct it. I think he wanted to see how far I would carry this. Finally, after ten years of “Mr. Corwin,” he pulled me aside and said, “It’s okay, Joe, you can call me Norman.”

  Norman passed away in November 2011 at the age of 101, and he had been writing right up to the end. There will never be another like him, and there is not a day that I don’t think of him and miss him.

  I’ve always known I didn’t want to have children. Given my upbringing it’s pretty obvious that my parenting skills are zero. But conventional birth control methods are never 100 percent effective 100 percent of the time, and I couldn’t justify rolling the dice now that I was in an ongoing relationship with Kathryn. Taking responsibility for my choices meant that vasectomy was the only option that made permanent sense.

  Since I was still in my early twenties the Planned Parenthood staff urged me to reconsider my decision. Unlike contemporary procedures, which leave room for reconsideration, vasectomies at that time were irreversible. Doctors didn’t just cut the vas deferens, they took out a chunk to ensure it could never grow back together, so most men only underwent the procedure late in life, after having all the kids they wanted. But I was determined to see it through. It was the responsible, ethical choice. And there was one ancillary benefit. If my sisters had kids, those children would bear the father’s last name. It was only through me that any kids in our branch of the family would bear the Straczynski name. Taking steps to prevent that from happening meant killing my father’s name and, in a way, killing him.

  “Just a heads-up,” the doctor said as he prepped for the surgery, “after the incision we pull the vas deferens out so we can cut it. That’s the hardest part. Just remember: it’s not pain, it just feels like pain.”

  Last stand for the Last Son of Krypton.

  Up yours, Dad, I thought as the cutting began. I win.

  It’s not pain, it just feels like pain.

  Chapter 18

  The Big Con

  In May 1978 my step-grandfather Walter Androsik abruptly died at the age of seventy. My father muttered something about natural causes but turned vague when pressed for details. My aunt implied that he had taken his own life, but again there were no details. The wagons had circled; something was going on.

  My uncle Ted’s brother Frank said later that “Walter’s death was rather quick. I was just told that he died. He was fine one week, then gone.”

  It was not until after Sophia died many years later that my mother finally told me what my grandmother had told her about what happened the day Walter passed away.* After spending the day grocery shopping for the least-green meat available, she returned home to find Walter standing precariously on a chair, a rope around his neck. Sophia said he revealed for the first time that during World War II he had collaborated with the Nazis, and that recent events had led him to believe that his past was about to catch up with him, and he might soon be arrested.

  “I can’t go through this alone,” he allegedly said. “So I’m going to kill myself unless you’re willing to stand with me. If so, then I’ll come down and we can face this together.”

  My grandmother considered this gravely for a moment, then told him that yes, she would stand by him; they would see this troubled time through as man and wife. She talked to him for fifteen minutes, giving him every reason not to kill himself. She gave him hope.

  Grateful for her words, cheeks wet with tears, Walter reached for the rope—

  —and she kicked the chair out from under him.

  Sophia then poured a drink and waited twenty minutes before calling the police to make sure he was dead. She went on to say that she convinced the attending physician to change the cause of death from suicide to natural causes to avoid a scandal that would needlessly upset the rest of the family. After all, Walter was seventy and in poor health so it wasn’t like anybody was going to ask for an inquest.

  No one in my family ever really knew for sure if she was telling the truth, but all of them were absolutely willing to believe she had done it because it was absolutely in keeping with her personality. If she’d simply wanted to spare herself the grief of a trial, all she had to say was “I won’t stand by you” and let him step off the chair into a newer and better incarnation.

  But leaving that step to him meant there was a chance that he might change his mind at the last moment and not kill himself. If that happened, she’d have to deal with the messiness of an investigation and public trial. The simplest way to keep him from backing out would’ve been to say nothing and just kick the chair out from under him. But that wasn’t her style. Better to give him a reason to live, to give him hope, then kick the chair out from under him as a sign of her displeasure at being ambushed by this crucial piece of information.

  If the story is true, Sophia’s actions might have been motivated by more urgent reasons than simply avoiding a scandal, like making sure no one looking for Nazi collaborators started poking around the rest of the family.

  But if the story was false, if she hadn’t ushered Walter to the other side, why would she say that she had? Given information that came along later, it’s altogether possible that she wanted to scare the rest o
f the family into greater vigilance about the risk of any such revelations striking close to home.

  Either way, the strategy worked. In the years that followed, not even Frank was safe from scrutiny.

  “One time Theresa asked me a question about my father,” he said later. “‘Are you sure he wasn’t working with the Germans?’ I said I was absolutely sure, there’s no record, nothing to indicate he was even remotely connected. I was curious why she would ask about my father. It really got me wondering, why such a question?”

  Why indeed?

  That fall, the SDSU Telecommunications and Film Department decided to stage my play Death in Stasis as part of their TV production program, the first time anything of mine had been committed to videotape. A few weeks later one of those involved asked me to write a half-hour sitcom pilot that would be produced by the department and KPBS-TV Channel 15. After I agreed to do the job, without payment of course, he said that he needed the finished script in twenty-four hours. They were up against a hard deadline because the writer he’d originally chosen to write the script flaked out at the last minute, reinforcing the lesson learned at the Daily Aztec: get the damned thing done. I would be starting from scratch, the only stipulations being that it had to be about an advertising agency, and that the main character should be named Marty Sprinkle, the producer having come to the conclusion, against all evidence to the contrary, that this would be a swell title for a TV show.

  Despite knowing nothing about television writing, advertising agencies, or anyone who had the bad taste to name their son Marty Sprinkle, I got to work and turned the script in the next day. After some last-minute tweaks the pilot for Marty Sprinkle went before the cameras and was subsequently aired by KPBS to a resounding and well-deserved silence.

  It. Was. Awful.

  The direction was painful, the acting self-indulgent, and the dialogue that had seemed reasonable while safely on the page was revealed as amateurish and heavy-handed when spoken aloud. In a weird bit of synchronicity the SDSU liaison assigned to the pilot was Robert McKee, who would later write one of publishing’s bestselling (and in my view least useful) books on screenplay writing. In the middle of the taping, and against my wishes, he revised the only joke in the entire half hour that actually worked and utterly destroyed it.

  I’m still not over it.

  I deeply resented every hour I spent in class pursuing a master’s degree that I didn’t want, time that could have been better spent working on my craft, and began to subconsciously sabotage myself. I would go into the college library to study then fall asleep at a desk, waking hours later to discover I’d missed another class or forgotten to take a test. It got so bad that an academic counselor pulled me in to say that if my grades didn’t improve soon “we’ll have to let you go, because our computer system isn’t set up to handle a GPA in negative numbers.”

  Leaving aside the fact that this was probably the funniest thing ever said by an academic adviser, I knew there was no way to get my grades high enough by the end of the semester to avoid being kicked out, and my sisters would suffer the consequences. But what else could I do? It wasn’t like I could fake it.

  Or could I?

  My father had no idea about the level of work that was involved in getting a master’s degree. He didn’t know from thesis papers or GPAs. He only cared about graduation photos and a piece of paper that would give him bragging rights over the rest of the family.

  So the solution was to give him exactly what he wanted.

  Step one was to forge a master’s degree.

  I made a copy of my bachelor’s degree in psychology, whited out the major and the date, used matching Old Gothic press-on letters to lay in the new information by hand, recopied the document using a machine that produced versions with raised letters, and finished by coloring in the seal for the state of California. The work was painstaking and slow, but the final product was good enough to survive any but the very closest of inspections.

  Step two involved getting my name into the computer program used to print the graduation booklets. This was tricky because in order to be added to the program you had to file forms with the administration office that were checked against the lists of graduating students. Only after the information was verified would your name be added to the roster. There was no other way to do it . . . unless one just happened to find oneself in the administration office when there was no one else around and entered the data directly into the system.

  Beyond that, on advice of counsel, deponent sayeth not.

  That left step three: renting a cap and gown and hoping for the best.

  My parents reacted with awe at my dedication when I told them I’d completed my work and was going to graduate a year early. “Now aren’t you glad I pushed you?” my father asked.

  I smiled and said nothing.

  I arrived early on graduation day, clad in cap, gown, and the appropriate tassel, to check the booklets in case someone in administration had noticed there was one entry too many. But my name and degree were right where they should have been. Soon afterward my family showed up, a caravan that included Sophia, flown in at my father’s expense not out of familial affection but to show her what he had achieved. Photos were taken, and I joined my classmates on the greensward. Due to the size of the ceremony, diplomas were not handed out individually; as each major was called, the students would stand up as a group, wave, then sit down again.

  My category was called. I stood. Waved. Sat back down. Then scurried away as quickly as discretion would allow, unspeakably proud of myself.

  Later that day, for one of the very few times in my life, I asked my mother for a favor, something to note the occasion. “Everything I did as a kid and everywhere we lived is a blur because there’s no sense of continuity, there’s nothing to connect the dots,” I said. “So give me one thing. Give me my past: dates, addresses, whatever you’ve got.”

  She agreed, and went through copies of old bills, letters, and other bits of paperwork to put together a rough chronology of all the places where we’d lived since I was born, a document that became essential to creating this book. Even with those resources she was a little fuzzy on some of the dates, but when she was done, I finally had my past in my hand.

  Now we stop looking backward, I thought. Now we build the future.

  A Brief Authorial Intrusion

  I have dwelled at length on this section because most creative people flare into existence when they hit college. The artist you are now, you became when you were the most excited about your newfound abilities, and the most vulnerable about your prospects; caught in the nexus between Everything I write is great and Everything I write is shit, between I know I can make this work and I’ll never make this work.

  That’s why it’s desperately important for those still in college to use every resource at their disposal to learn their craft: you’ll find college newspapers, magazines, theaters, audio labs, websites, and radio and TV stations eager for material. This will allow you to burn through the crap in your system at light speed, see your words produced or in print, and have the quality of your work challenged at a time when the consequences won’t hurt you. I started out as a writer of short stories who never even considered that I might one day make a living writing articles. That’s what college is for: to experiment, try new things, fail and fall and laugh and get back up again, to be dangerous, to be glorious, to take risks and push yourself, to have fun and go on absurd adventures that will provide years of stories and decades of material.

  For those reading this who have just received your degrees in creative writing or film studies, you will soon find relatives and friends asking why you aren’t making a living at it, questions fueled by media-hyped expectations of overnight success. When that doesn’t happen, as is almost always the case, it’s easy to become discouraged. But there are no portents to be drawn, no deeper meanings to be derived from the time required to find your footing.

  Writing is an art more than a craft, an
d failing to understand that distinction is pernicious. Once you’ve learned how to make a dovetailed joint in carpentry* class, you’re done with that part of it. You may make bigger or smaller dovetailed joints, using different materials, but the math is the same. By contrast, no two sentences are alike. Getting a degree in art or music does not guarantee an instantaneous Rembrandt or a Mozart, so why put that expectation on writers? The degree marks the beginning of the process, not the end, so all parties must understand that the goal of earning a living at writing will come slowly and with ridiculous amounts of pain.

  Be patient with yourselves, and with each other.

  End of Authorial Intrusion

  Now that I was free to write full-time, I put everything I had into selling reviews and feature articles to every publication in town, including San Diego City Lights, Tuned In, the Daily Californian, and the San Diego Reader. But such short pieces only brought in twenty or thirty bucks apiece; even if I managed to sell two per week that barely covered rent on my small apartment. So I branched out into news stories and longer investigative pieces that would generate more money, greater recognition, and on occasion, a fair degree of controversy. When I went undercover at a recruitment camp run by the Moonies cult to do a cover story for the Reader, members of the group responded by trying to confiscate all copies of the issue the day it came out, only to find themselves confronted by editors and staffers who showed up at key newsstands armed with baseball bats.