Where no-one knows your nam...

It was a good life. You woke up under some bushes near the road, or under a highway overpass if it was raining. Each day was a seven-course meal of the unexpected; and the seasoning was the realization that you were utterly unknown to everyone you would meet. To the trucker that picked you up in western Iowa and paid you to help unload meat scraps at the Alpo plant in Lincoln Nebraska, you were a new penny -- maybe that's why he took you home to his family in Salinas, Kansas for a week of fattening up. Every day you were a new being, without the crushing pressure of your intimates' preconceptions; the need to conform to an image of yourself that had become an amalgam of truth, the expectations of others, and a masque to hide what you fear you really are.

Ah, the joy of being unknown! It afforded not only the opportunity to be someone better than others knew you, but someone more "dangerous" as well. When I was in the county jail in Prescot, AZ, and first introduced to the other residents of the cellblock, they had no way of knowing whether this 118 lb stripling in front of them was just gentle -- or truly mad. That night, when some of the inmates started a fire by throwing lit wads of toilet paper under the long, green-painted wooden tables and benches, I huddled in my cell, my face against the porcelain toilet, a wet towel over my mouth, my buttcheeks reddening from the flames a few feet away. I said not a word, just waiting for the guards to unlock us, which they graciously did once a few had passed out from smoke inhalation. My stoicism was misinterpreted by my cell-mate, who had howled in fear, as bravery, thus according me some slight honor in the ranks. "Even a fool is wise in his silence."

Years later, I still enjoy the anonymity that travel provides, now with a good hotel room thrown in. In trips to Tainan or HsinChu, Taiwan, I would sometimes walk the busy streets in areas where I was the only (faux)Anglo. The waves of humanity would be surging around me and I would feel their wonderful force washing me clean; for I was no part of their lives and, though perhaps for a moment I represented an object of interest, they neither knew me nor attempted to assay me.

Must I travel to be thus reborn? No, if I am honest to myself, and wash away what I believe to be the image others have of me, I can be renewed every day. It is not easy, it can be quite comfortable to make yourself in the image you think you project; but it is a chimera, a fable. Start with nothing every day and you are, I believe, most honest to yourself and others.

©Reed F. Curry 2006