His real name is Alissandru Francesco Caldiero, born into the old world on the island of Sicily, he came to the U.S. on a boat when he was nine years old, sailing past the Statue of Liberty. When I first met him, nearly 30 years later, he was screaming a Dada poem at a sandstone wall in southern Utah—repeating the same line, “This is not it,” over and over, faster and faster in a near epileptic seizure. In that moment our lives became intertwined.
I think of this story as a song, a lament for not fitting in and feeling like you can’t make sense of the world around you, which is how I’ve been feeling lately. The story was originally broadcast on NPR’s Day to Day in 2003, right around the time we went to war in Iraq.
