I CONFESS TO BEING AN ALIEN

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

They say you can’t go home again. I would try to go home if I could, but I have no recollection of ever being at home.

All I remember, and vaguely at that, of the beginning of my sojourn on earth, is that the mother ship, called Zero Base, was forced to land on this planet, and then there was a blinding light, and there I was, a human being.

My gracious host on Earth, my mother, Charlotte, died a few months later. I remember feeling unwanted in my grandmother’s home, and then being left at a foster home, where I was treated well enough to dream of being back there for many years, but I was taken away unexpectedly by my father, who had remarried, to another state, where I heard my stepmother, on the night I arrived, screaming at him to get rid of me. Since then she did everything to convince him and me that I was a bad boy. She liked to beat me occasionally, to the extent that my father came home to find me knocked out on the floor.

So I was sent far away to military school for a year, much to my relief. Upon my return, my father informed me he could no longer afford military school, much to my dismay. He went off to work one day, and my stepmother, angered that he had bought me football shoes instead of a dress for her, fixed me breakfast, and, no sooner than I had sat down, she started hitting me on the back of the head with something, so I jumped up and left for good, less than two weeks after my thirteenth birthday. She found Christ and all was forgiven.

It was cold outside. I had no coat. I hitchhiked to Chicago. The fellow who gave me a ride in a car he had stolen to transport illegal fireworks for New Year’s celebrations gave me a quarter for the elevated, and I wound up downtown, in the Loop.

This is not an ‘Oh, woe is me’ story, but is simply offered as evidence that once an alien always an alien. Yeah, it was rough going, but what does an alienated kid really know? I had a few things going for me. I was relatively intelligent. I had read The Three Musketeers, the Wizard of Oz, had seen Blackboard Jungle at the movie house, and had watched the Untouchables on TV. I was six-feet tall, and I could drink beer until I passed out.

Many of my runaway colleagues wound up in morgues and prisons. I may be the only one still alive. I wanted to work, not rob and kill people, burglarize homes and shoot heroin, pimp prostitutes and so on. Most of all, I wanted a home, and I tried my damndest to have one. I would look into the windows at families and wish I had a family. I suppose bad training is no excuse for my failure to realize my dream, which resembled the Ozzie and Harriet show. The failure is not absolute, fortunately, for there have been successful consequences despite my shortcomings.

There was no Course in Happy Homemaking for me. My destiny is homelessness. By that I do not mean I have no shelter, that I am houseless. I mean I have never felt at home on this Earth, and it seems impossible for me to be at home. I am an alien. I often feel like I am hovering in a flying saucer, and do not dare to land. Aliens are unloved. I have done my fair share of loving, yet my love is flawed by alienation. Earthlings do not love me. It is too late. Nobody is going to adopt me as I used to wish. I have nothing to offer but stories.

No, I am not miserable except when I think long about what Buddha said about everyone suffering, and I perceive the fear behind the smiles. One thing I have learned is how to be content alone, and not to hate people. Why suffer needlessly? I cannot help liking even bad people to the extent I am human.

I used to retreat into a corner of a room and read to avoid Hell when I was a kid. Books were my best friends. My heroes were the authors who created the people and circumstances in them. Authors were gods for me.  I identified with them, especially the ones who rode the rails in leather jackets and stole typewriters to write with.

I ran away from things, got into the world, lived in several cities, and threw away success several times when on its verge, and then I retreated into a smaller and smaller corner, a studio near the beach. 

I shall not cry poor. I could be rich. I’ve helped people become rich, but that is not for me, because, you see, I am an alien to the things of this world. The first thing I want to do with a nice thing is give it away. Furthermore, much of what we call poverty is a cultural artifact: I live below the so-called poverty line. A cop responding to criminal activity in my building said millions of people would die to live like me, and she was correct although I do not want to be stabbed to death by the man who stabbed his wife seventeen times in the building next door while his friend watched and is wanted for two murders in Guatemala.

Now that I am approaching The End, I have an urge to run away again, at least to take a vacation from my alienation. I have lived most of my intellectual life in Europe although I have not set foot there. France is one of my favorite countries. I entertained the notion of vacationing there. Now I hear that I would be alienated there as an American because “American liberalism has ruined France.”

Well, then, since I apparently suffer from what the French call dépaysement, I might take a French vacation, I could, as they say, "go to Tataouine." Or maybe I could go to Timbuktu.

Since those places actually exist, I might just read Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, or write my own book about Nowhere. After all, I am an alien if not a cosmopolitan everywhere I go, and, everywhere I go, there I am, so why go anywhere at all when I cannot get away from myself?

Still I would to see France. I have pleasantly dreamed of riding a train there. That was before the strikes. Maybe people there would like me if they knew I am not merely an American, that I am an alien.    

xYx