Falling Man and Other Monologues

Alien Boy

Souza march blares as the lights fade. Lights up on a boy in a sailor suit.

ALIEN BOY:

Today I am thirteen.

(Sound: A nuclear bomb exploding.)

I don’t want to be thirteen. I have always yearned to be older than my years. Therefore I have been described as a precocious child. I drink coffee. I smoke cigarettes. I use the words: masturbatory, ennui, and existential—liberally in conversation. But today I am thirteen. I am wearing my sailor suit. I come down here often in my sailor suit, to the Howard Johnson’s in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and I wait. I wait for a man to come and take me away, away from this childhood that I do not belong in. A blonde man who is muscular and bold, I have seen him on T.V. He will teach me how to be athletic and brave. He will give structure and meaning to my life. He will hold me in the dark. Just we two. I wait and wait. But he never seems to come.

(Boy lights a cigarette.)

I was supposed to be Bar Mitzvahed today. But I told my mother I wouldn’t go. I told her I had decided I didn’t want to be Jewish anymore. My mother was distraught. “You can’t just decide you don’t want to be Jewish anymore,” she said. I told her again, “I don’t want to be Jewish.” “Why don’t you want to be Jewish?” she asked me. “In the street, children throw pennies at me, they call me Jew Bagel; in an age when it is possible for us to choose our destiny, I have decided I don’t want to go through life with the particular disadvantage of being a Jew. I want to be Blonde and Handsome like the men on T.V. I want to drive a Volkswagen.” “Over my dead body, you’ll drive a Volkswagen. This wouldn’t be happening if your father were alive.” “He’s not alive,” I said, “he’s dead!” My mother took a valium and locked herself in her bedroom.

(Sound: A door slamming.)

My father was a Jew.

(Boy lights another cigarette.)

He came to America during World War Two. He was—an Alien.

(Music: “Psycho.”)

He left behind his mother, sister, his first wife, and a son. They died at Auschwitz. I have here their names, as listed by the Red Cross. Rebecca, Betsy, Rachel, and the son, Wolf, who was shoveled into an oven on the day of his thirteenth birthday in 1943.

(Sound: Fire. Combustion. He burns the names of his relatives with flash paper.)

I never got along with my father. He spoke with a heavy foreign accent. He was thin and pale and European, not at all like the men on T.V. One day I was walking around the house in my mother’s high heels and my father caught me. He slapped me and told me: “I never want you to walk in high heels again. Soon you will be thirteen, you will be Bar Mitzvahed, soon you will be a man.” “I don’t want to be a man,” I told him. “You’re a man, I wish you were dead.” The next year he died of lung cancer. Now I wear my mother’s high heels whenever she’s not home.

(He puts on high heels. “I Feel Pretty,” from West Side Story plays as the Alien Boy twirls.)

I turn up the music from West Side Story and I twirl my baton.

(When the lyrics reach: “I Feel Pretty, and Witty, and GAY . . .” the music stops with a screech and horror music fades in.)

Last night after my mother had cooked me a Swanson’s frozen T.V. dinner, I was reading Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask by David Reuben, M.D., and I quote:

VOICEOVER:

“Male Homosexuality is a condition in which men have a driving emotional and sexual interest in other men. Because of the anatomical and physiological limitations involved...