Character Guest Post by Steve Starger of Misfits and Supermen

For today’s blog post, I’ve asked Steve Starger, narrator/protaganist of his book, Misfits and Supermen to tell us more about himself. Without further ado, take it away Steve…

Hello out there. Steve Starger here. I’m the narrator/protagonist of Steve Starger’s memoir, MISFITS AND SUPERMEN. It’s interesting how we have the same name, right? Well, since MISFITS is a personal memoir (is there another kind??), I’ve picked myself as a character for this post. When you read the book you’ll see why I was the logical choice! I have already revealed much about myself and my relationship to my brother, Melvyn, over the course of our lives and my confronting (or not) the fact of his many psychiatric disabilities. So, I think the best thing to do here is focus on an anecdote from my psychedelic days in New York City with my band, NGC 4594.  This was during the summer of 1967, the Summer of Love. The band had taken up communal quarters in a loft on St. Marks Place, in the East Village. One night, my friend Buzz and I decided to talk a walk to Tompkins Square Park, a few blocks south of the loft. We were in a pleasant altered state of mind. The night was warm, and the streets were crowded with interesting people – locals, tourists, weekend hippies, police, musicians, artists, and some folks who were there just because it was St. Marks Place and it was the hip and groovy place to be that summer. When we got to the park, we took perches on the back of one of the many benches and watched the passing parade. The variety of humanity strolling by never failed to amaze and entertain us on these sojourns. On this night, literally, in the blink of an eye, a young woman appeared before us. She sat on the pavement in front of us and fixed her eyes on both of us, her gaze moving from one to the other. She didn’t speak, and neither did we, for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, either Buzz or I asked her name and where she came from. She didn’t give a name, but she told us she had come from a remote region in northern Canada. She said – nonchalantly and without irony -- that she had been raised by wolves and had left the pack when she came of human age. Her subsequent wanderings eventually brought her to the park, and to us. We listened with fascination to her tale. We began to notice that her eyes, indeed, were wolf-like – icy blue and piercing. Her eyes contained unfathomable depths and we dove right in to her welcoming pupils. She then told us that she possessed certain extra-human powers of a telepathic nature. Intrigued, we asked her to demonstrate. She told us to close our eyes and she would enter our connected consciousness.  “How will we know?” we asked. “You’ll know,” she answered. Who were we to argue? Some time passed. Suddenly, we both felt a surge of energy pass between us, as if a switch had been thrown in our neuro-electrical grid. Our eyes were forced open. We gaped at each other in both disbelief and belief! And to top it off – the wolf girl had vanished, not in a puff of smoke or with an ALAKAZAM!, but subtly, quietly. Just gone. We still talk about her to this day. The wolf girl, our name for her. You may call the whole thing a hallucination, just one of many that presented themselves that summer. But we felt the charge, the shock, the transfer of electricity from one brain to another. We know what happened, and the fact of it hasn’t changed in more than fifty years!

Inside the Book

Title: MISFITS AND SUPERMEN: TWO BROTHERS’ JOURNEY ALONG THE SPECTRUM.
Author: Steve Starger
Publisher: Friesen Press
Pages: 178
Genre: Memoir

BOOK BLURB:

The bond of brotherhood is hard to break, but a lifetime of dealing with familial expectation, bitterness, and psychological disorders can bend and warp it into something nearly unrecognizable. This story tells the tale of two brothers: Melvyn, the elder, whose amalgamation of disorders leave him completely unable to function within society; and Stephen, the younger, whose own emotional and psychological issues are overshadowed to the point where he becomes little more than a pale and twisted reflection of his brother.
On different ends of the same spectrum, Melvyn is blissfully unaware of their troubling connection (or so his brother can only assume), but for Stephen, it is undeniable. He lives with it every day, sensing his own otherness in every twitch, outburst, and inability of his brother to overcome his inner demons. Left largely on his own to deal with his peculiarities-while carrying the burden of being “the normal one,” of whom much is expected- Stephen begins a complicated and unpredictable journey, one which will take him as far from his brother as he can manage to get, even as it brings them inexorably closer.
A portion of proceeds from this book will go toward the Camp Cuheca Scholarship – Melvyn D. Starger fund at Waterford Country School, Quaker Hill, CT., to help fund a two-week summer residency at the camp. For more information about Waterford Country School, please email development@waterforddcs.org.
“A finely crafted, affecting memoir of two brothers.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“If you want an honest book about life with mental illness in the family, this is it. Great writing. Brutally honest. Hard to put it down. Great stories about CT, NY and CA from the 1940s to 2000.”
–Amazon Reviewer

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Meet the Author

Steve Starger is a journalist, author, and musician. His 2006 book, “Wally’s World: The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Wally Wood, the World’s Second-Best Comic-Book Artist,” was short-listed for the Will Eisner Industry Award for Best Comics Related Book of 2006.
His latest book is a memoir titled MISFITS AND SUPERMEN: TWO BROTHERS’ JOURNEY ALONG THE SPECTRUM.
Website: www.misfitsandsupermen.com.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Steve-Starger-2222670174658438/