Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  To his credit, Jerry reached out a little, to a few friends who he felt could help with his problem, but still refused to seek formal treatment, fearing it would jeopardize his career. His decision not to let anyone know he was suffering meant that there was no one to help him on July 27, 2016, eleven days after his sixtieth birthday. With his financial resources nearly tapped out, confronted by the fact that his career had flamed out, Jerry consumed so much alcohol so quickly that he essentially drank himself to death. The coroner ruled his death as technically accidental but also ascribed it to complications from chronic alcoholism.

  Anyone who knew Jerry would tell you that he could talk nonstop for hours on any subject.

  But he was incapable of seeking help at the one moment when he needed it most.

  “I’ll take this secret to my grave.” It was the promise I made to Michael O’Hare.

  “I have a better idea: take it to my grave. If anything happens to me, I want you to talk about it publicly. If people know this can happen to a lead actor in a TV show, the commander of a space station, they’ll know it can happen to anybody. Maybe that knowledge can help somebody else down the road.”

  After his last appearance on Babylon 5, Michael’s condition continued to improve for the next few years. But there were some around him who, perhaps embarrassed by his need to stay on constant medications, suggested that he didn’t need them, that they were just getting in the way of his career. Whether he stopped taking his meds at their behest, or if he did so on his own, the fall was precipitous and frightening. For months I made calls and posted online messages asking if anyone knew where he was before finally receiving an email from a relative saying that Michael was in a halfway house, paid for by the family and the state.

  Sandra Bruckner, Kathryn, and I tried to reach out, but the door was shut. I was told he didn’t want to see anyone from his past, then that he might be open to it; that he was better, and that he was worse. As one of his family members noted in an email, the Michael O’Hare that I had known was pretty much gone. “He’s on his meds again and the clinic is making sure of that, but the thing is, each time it’s been like less Michael comes back. Even on meds his delusions are a permanent fixture now, he’s just better able to seem normal to people who don’t know him well. His parents talk to him regularly and they can tell, from odd things he says and doesn’t say. They have offered to get him a phone but he doesn’t want one, I don’t think he wants anyone to be able to call him, he calls them from a pay phone.”

  The strain of his condition eventually led to a heart attack followed by a coma, where he remained until his passing on September 28, 2012, at the age of sixty.

  Seven months later, during a celebration hosted by Phoenix Comic Con to commemorate Babylon 5’s twentieth anniversary, I kept my promise to Michael and spoke for the first time about what he had endured. He wanted people to know that showing vulnerability is not the same as being weak; that there is no shame in asking for or receiving help to get past the nightmares and difficulties of the present moment; that those who love us are capable of bearing our secrets, our failings, and our truest, most flawed selves.

  Sometimes we keep secrets because we are afraid of what will happen to us.

  And sometimes we keep them because we are afraid of what someone will do to us.

  My mother failed to ask for help out of fear of exposure or retribution, while my sisters and I had been trained into a state of conditioned helplessness, believing that no one could help us and that Terrible Things Would Happen if we talked about what was really going on inside our family. We failed to understand that abusers carefully create a sense of terror that is far out of proportion to what they can actually do. Abusers use that vague, unspecified, free-floating-fear to keep their targets within range long after they’ve reached a point where they could simply walk away.

  I call this Elephant Rope Syndrome.

  In the days of traveling circuses, elephants were kept from escaping by slender ropes that were tied around their ankles and anchored to small stakes in the ground, restraints they could have easily shaken off, but didn’t. Why? Because when the elephants were still young, they were kept in place with thick chains around their ankles that led to long stakes set so deep into the ground that they couldn’t be pulled out. This gradually conditioned the elephants to believe that as long as there was something on their ankle, they couldn’t escape.

  If you talk to anybody about this, you’re in trouble . . . you’ll do what I tell you or else . . . if you leave I’ll come after you and then you’ll get what’s coming to you . . . those are the chains and stakes that keep us immobilized as children, preventing us from asking for help or telling people what’s going on behind closed doors.

  By the time we become adults, those chains of possible consequence have given way to the limits of what can actually be done to us, becoming ropes that we can pull out at any time by telling the truth, asking for help, or simply walking away. The trick is to shake off those years of conditioning to see the situation for what it really is. Had my mother or I walked into a doctor’s office and shown them the bruises and the cuts, if I had told teachers or counselors about the violence inside our home, we would have been plucked out immediately, just as when Grace convinced the police to escort Evelyn to safety during the first years of their marriage. Would the aftermath have been easy? No, of course not. Would it have been worse than the world we were living in daily? Almost certainly not.

  If you are in pain, or know someone who is; if you feel there is no one who can relate to what you’re going through; if you have been frightened into immobility by secrets you believe you have to maintain to protect yourself, your family, or your career, understand that you are only as alone as you choose to be. One phone call, one email, one text to the right person or agency can make the very literal difference between life and death.

  You just have to decide to do it.

  Selah.

  Epilogue

  In 2014, after an eleven-year break, I decided that it was time to get back into television and teamed up with Lana Wachowski, for whom I’d rewritten the movie Ninja Assassin. During three days spent at the home she shares in San Francisco with her wife, Karin Winslow, we talked politics, religion, philosophy, the internet, and evolution. The overriding theme to emerge was connectivity. I’ve always believed that as a species we are better together than we are apart, that despite our divergent cultures we are alike in more ways, and in more important ways, than we are different. As a kid in Newark I was sure that if one of those cops could authentically walk around inside the mind of an African American protestor, once the shock wore off he’d find that the man he considered his enemy wasn’t nearly as alien as he’d imagined.

  Having always had difficulty in expressing my emotions there was a lot of wish fulfillment in this idea. It would be so much easier if someone could just peek inside my head to see what’s there, and I suspect that feeling is not uncommon. Despite being factionalized, tribalized, and marginalized to within an inch of our lives, there is something in the human spirit that longs for connection, for community. On any given day, internet-friends who have never actually met in person will go online, cue up a movie or a TV show, and hit play at the same time, commenting on it in texts and chats, sharing an experience in real time despite being separated by thousands of miles.

  This led me to wonder if it would be possible to tell a story about connectivity that could be produced on a planetary scale, bigger than anything previously attempted for television. Not an American story set against international backdrops, but one big saga told through eight stories taking place simultaneously around the world; not just a shared story, but a shared experience as each character drifts in and out of the others’ minds. Rather than exploring someone’s point of view of a story, we would be using point of view as story.

  Linked telepathically, our characters would be able to experience one another’s memories, skills, and most importantly, their s
ecrets, because we are often defined by the things we choose not to express. The concept was too complex to pitch verbally, so we (now including the other half of the Wachowski duology) decided to write the pilot script. The process was fun, so we wrote another. Then a third.

  Once these were done, we scheduled appointments to pitch the show to every major cable and streaming service in Los Angeles during a weeklong period. Prior to the meetings, we gave them the scripts to help them understand what we were trying to do. Our first appointment was at Netflix at eleven A.M. on a Tuesday. Rather than the usual “here’s the plot, the action, and the bad guys” pitch, we spent most of our time talking about identity, gender, privacy, and empathy. It was more of a dialectic than a pitch, and after the meeting we went to lunch thinking we had probably been just a tad too obscure for our own good, demonstrating once again the dangers of a liberal arts education.

  But at one o’clock the Netflix executives called to make a preemptive offer to buy the show, taking it off the market before we could go to the rest of our meetings. They gave us a straight-to-series commitment, and how fast could we start shooting this thing?

  We decided early on that there would be no stage work; the series would be shot entirely on location. The average television episode is shot in eight or ten days, most of which are spent on a stage where you can control your environment. Shooting everything on location meant we’d be working without a safety net in nine cities on three continents. If there were issues with weather or if we lost a location at the last minute, we’d be screwed. The scope of the production, the scale of the storytelling, and the international cast made Sense8 the biggest and most complex production any of us had ever been involved with.

  In the end, we wanted Sense8 to be about hope, about the idea that while humanity has advanced technologically through conflict, it’s only through the social-evolutionary engines of compassion, understanding, and empathy that we will be able to attain a better and nobler future. We believed viewers were hungry for a story in which kindness trumps cruelty, and the common coin of our shared humanity is stronger than whatever would try to drive us apart.

  Sense8 debuted on Netflix June 15, 2015, where it ran for two seasons, and I am desperately proud of the work we did on that series.

  For years my comics output had been steadily diminishing due to eye problems that made it difficult to meet deadlines. After a series of surgeries and transplants in 2015 that were still considered fairly experimental, I emerged with 20/25 vision. Now that I was finally back up to speed, there was nothing to stop me from writing as many comics as before.

  Except for the return of the familiar, intimate voice in the back of my head that had been whispering stories since I was seventeen. The same voice I heard when I knew it was time to leave San Diego for Los Angeles, when I walked away from journalism and, later, animation. For years that voice, representing some part of my psyche eager for new challenges, had forced me to walk away from what I knew I could do in order to start over with something less certain.

  You’ve been writing comics long enough that you’ve become comfortable. You’re done. Move on. Let’s find a new challenge, where we can start all over at the bottom.

  The weight of that decision felt like a fist closing around my heart.

  I don’t want to move on. This isn’t fair. I love comics.

  Tough. You’ve done this too long. It’s time to step outside your comfort zone and try something else, where there’s a good chance you’ll fail, something that will force you to take chances.

  Like what?

  Go back to novels and plays. Those are the two areas where you never really established yourself. Maybe you’ll succeed, and maybe you won’t. But it’s time to try.

  So on July 22, 2016, I announced at San Diego Comic-Con that I was taking a sabbatical from the comics business. As of this writing I am still on hiatus, but if the right project, with the right degree of creative freedom came along, I might be enticed to return. If not, it’s been a hell of a run: sixteen years of work resulting in the sale of thirteen million issues.

  Meanwhile, the time I would normally spend writing comics for companies eager to publish them is being spent writing novels that publishers may never buy and plays that may never get produced. Once again I’m starting over from scratch, from absolute zero.

  It’s terrifying.

  It’s exhilarating.

  It’s life, you know?

  In recent years I reached out to my uncle Ted’s brother, Frank Skibicki, the only remaining member of my extended family who had been there during my family’s early years in Paterson. We exchanged letters and Christmas gift baskets, and when I told him I was writing my autobiography, I asked if he’d be willing to give it a look. I emphasized that the book had to be as accurate as possible, so if there were any discrepancies between the text and his own memory I would lean into the latter. He graciously agreed.

  Several months later, I traveled to Paterson for the first time in forty-five years, excited about the reunion and nervous about the coming critique. I’d spent years piecing together my family’s history from scraps and the slow, steady unraveling of secrets, and was worried that somewhere along the way I might’ve gotten something wrong.

  After a warm welcome, we moved to his kitchen for tea and conversation. Turning to the manuscript, he said he’d found only two small mistakes, both of which were corrected prior to publication. As far as he could tell, everything else concerning my family’s history was accurate down to the smallest detail. You got it right, he said. All of it.

  As we continued talking, audio recorder whirring, it became clear that despite my aunt’s decision not to tell him about my father’s involvement in the atrocity at Vishnevo, he’d always known something significant had happened given how often she referred to that village as a way of shutting down my father when he got out of hand.

  “Theresa would allude to it whenever Charles would start talking about that time,” he said.

  “She would remind him, ‘How about that little village?’ and that sort of did it. Why did she keep mentioning this village? Because atrocities were done there. Charlie wouldn’t admit his particular involvement in them, he just said, ‘I happened to be in the area.’ He was always squashing it a bit. He didn’t want to talk about it. Certainly he never spoke to me about the war.

  “He was always a bit evasive about some of his actions or things that were going on while he was at the railway station. Theresa would fill in some of the details when she chose to. She only mentioned that Charlie always tried to please those who were around him, and that she and her mother were worried that he was going to get them into some serious trouble.”

  I asked if he was surprised by Theresa’s revelation that my father had taken part in the massacre, or if it simply confirmed his own suspicions. He looked down thoughtfully, composing his thoughts before replying.

  “No, I wasn’t surprised,” he said at last. “He was touched by that evil Nazism and it stayed with him the rest of his life.”

  He was also very cognizant of my father’s fear of being arrested as a collaborator. “One time he was visiting and he showed me this pouch he wore around his neck all the time. He kept a cashier’s check for a quarter million dollars inside in case he ever needed to get out of the country fast.”

  Then he said, “Do you remember Tscherin Soobzokov?”

  The name didn’t ring a bell, but when I checked Wikipedia I recognized the photo as a friend of my father who we knew as Tom, an Americanized version of Tscherin. My father would often invite him to our home, saying that Tom had been a very important man during the war.

  “When I was living with Ted and Theresa,” Frank said, “I was going to school and working for a corporation about a block away from the house, the Seale Corporation. Charlie worked there for a while, and he got to know Soobzokov, who was accused by the Jewish Defense League of New York City of collaborating during the war. He was a Gestapo lieutenant as part of
the resettlement program for Polish people. The JDL bombed his home. He and Charlie were friends. Why were they friends? Probably because they shared similar experiences during the war, especially with the Gestapo.”

  After returning to Los Angeles I looked more deeply into Soobzokov’s story, and one of the last remaining mysteries about my father’s past finally became clear.

  During World War II Soobzokov, then an officer in the Waffen-SS, was assigned to an execution operation in the Circassia region. The New York Times identified his Wehrmacht unit as being responsible for “the deaths of a million Jews on the Russian front.” Those who survived his campaign dubbed him “the Führer of the North Caucasus.”

  After the war, Soobzokov fled to the United States and settled in Paterson, where he tried to pass himself off as a respectable businessman, much as my father did. But his role in the war caught up with him when his abandoned first wife began telling people about his past. Other survivors who immigrated to Paterson brought similar stories, which led to attempts by Jewish authorities to extradite him for trial. When he fought those efforts to a standstill, an individual who identified himself as being with the JDL detonated a pipe bomb beneath his porch. He died from his wounds on September 6, 1985.

  It was just a few weeks later that my father instructed his attorneys to draft a prenuptial agreement for my mother to sign, creating a non-disclosure clause as a prerequisite to their confidential marriage. There’s little that can motivate a change in lifestyle faster than seeing your friend get bombed into tiny bits because of loose talk by a first wife.

  I returned home from meetings one afternoon to find a package from Harlan Ellison waiting for me. A year earlier he had asked me to write an introduction to the new prestige edition of his anthology Ellison Wonderland, one of the first books I ever owned outright. At last the book was here, signed and personalized by Harlan. I quote the beginning of that introduction.