Adult Children of Alien Beings Read Free

finally get an opening, maybe give him a little too much to process all at once.
    â€œAliens,” he says. “Stan, I think you need help, professional help.”
    â€œDr. Deetermeyer is a professional, Ollie.”
    I can feel the phone grow cold in my hand. “I told you not to call me that,” he says in his gruff Clint Eastwood voice. He thinks it’s intimidating. It just makes him sound old.
    â€œIt’s your name . It’s what Mom and Dad always called you. It’s what I called you until you got a pole up your ass about it. I can’t remember. Was it Kristi or June who put the idea in your head there was something wrong with it? It’s on your birth certificate, Ollie, the first real document in our parents’ lives on Earth!”
    â€œOur parents named us after a couple of buffoons, Stan!”
    â€œThey didn’t know any better. They were aliens! Don’t you see? They loved Laurel and Hardy, so why not name their sons after them? It’s so typical for the elder son of aliens to resent their peculiarities and crystalize his rage in some trivial wrong like a naming that merely expresses the parents’ true alien nature. They knew how to laugh, Ollie. Something you could stand to work on. Compassion. Understanding.” Aliens love slapstick too, but I don’t go into all that. Ollie’s at war with that side of his nature.
    There’s a long silence. I know my brother. He’s struggling with his better self. He wants to tell me to fuck off and hang up, but he wants to rise above it and be the only rational member of his crazy family. You’d think after all these years he’d give that one up. He’s just not that good at it. “I prefer Oliver ,” he says icily.
    Oh please. This is typical firstborn alien brother behavior, to feel betrayed rather than blessed by his alien heritage. They invest minutiae, such as a mere name on a birth certificate, with great significance. They’re into vows, lines in the sand, all the rest of it. They have no control, the victims of their own symbolism. It’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull. I’ll demonstrate: “Ollie, Ollie, Ollie.”
    He hangs up. It’s just as well. There’s no way I can convince him Mom and Dad were aliens without further proof. I email him all my evidence, direct him to the ACAB website. Maybe he’ll read it, and maybe he won’t, but most likely he’s absolutely certain I’m just crazy. Nothing new under that sun.
    *   *   *
    As you might imagine, paranoia runs high in the ACAB community, so there’s not a lot of face to face, but some of us aren’t so comfy with the online thing either. Am I really chatting with a fellow ACAB member in Santa Monica, or is it some FBI guy in Quantico taking a little time off from pretending to be a thirteen-year-old girl entrapping sleazeballs to infiltrate a fringe group for a change of weirdness? How’s that for a career choice? And I’m the crazy one? Anyway, the local ACAB group’s fairly tiny. We meet at the dog park second and fourth Tuesdays at dawn. (Fifth Tuesdays, we take the dogs to the river in all weather). We’re all early risers, and so are our dogs. We have the place mostly to ourselves. We watch the dogs play while we discuss alien issues, sitting in a row on top of one of the long picnic tables, our feet on the bench. Summer mornings, we’ve had as many as seven or eight, winter months it’s usually just the four diehards.
    Today it’s Katyana and Bill and me. She’s in the middle, I’m on her right, and Bill’s on her left. Dave is on his fourth honeymoon. Most of the regulars are my age, fifties, sixties, born from the late nineteen-forties into the sixties. Katyana’s thirty maybe. She mentions her ex now and then but never gives out any details.
    She believes the aliens didn’t all vanish one way or