Alien Superstar

by Henry Winkler

  I heard the braking system engage and felt the landing legs descend from the belly of my spaceship. The pull of Earth’s gravity and the drag from its atmosphere slowed us down enough for a gentle approach. Looking out the window, I saw a crowd of humanoids looking up at the sky—real, live, actual human beings that I had only seen in movies or television. But these humans were wearing big hats and flowered shirts of all different colors. On my planet, you could go to prison for wearing clothes like that.

  As my ship hovered above the crowd, the heat and downdraft sent the people running for cover, scattering like colossal red sand beetles do when asteroids collide. You know how that is.

  At first, the humans looked frightened, and I couldn’t blame them. It’s probably not every day that you see a spaceship land right in front of your eyes, even during tours at Universal Studios, where people come to see movie magic like fake shark attacks and wizard castles and giant mechanical apes with banana breath.

  The ship shuddered and touched down with a thud. I looked out the window and stared at the crowd of people. What I saw was them staring back at me. Not one eye was blinking. Not one mouth was moving. Not one hand was waving.

  Would these people welcome an alien? Or would I be attacked and have to lock myself inside this capsule for the rest of my life?

  I unbuckled my seat belt, filled my three lungs with air, and reached for the door handle.

  There was no turning back.

  3

  As I pushed open the door, the first thing that struck me was the sun. I mean it literally struck me, shooting bright yellow beams into every one of my eyes. Living on a red dwarf planet, the light is always dim. The bright light of Earth was unbearable.

  I quickly retreated back into my vehicle and reached into the drawer where Grandma Wrinkle had placed emergency supplies like ointments, lotions, and a nail clipper. We have to clip our fingernails twice a day unless we’re planning to use them as a personal back scratcher. I shuffled the contents of the drawer until I found what I was looking for.

  Sunglasses.

  Well, you might not call them sunglasses. They’re actually tinted monocles, single lenses that clip on to each eye. As I snapped them into place, which by the way does not hurt, I realized that one was missing. I rummaged around the drawer some more, until I was interrupted by a loud pounding on the exit hatch.

  “Come out!” the muffled voices called. I looked out the window and saw a crowd of humans gathering around me. “We want to take selfies!”

  Selfies? What was that? I thought I knew English. I’ve been taught seventy-two languages, and I’m fluent in seventy-one. Hungarian still gives me problems. But I had never heard the word “selfie” before. My brain ran through my Earth dictionary searching for the word, but it came up empty. The closest I got was “self”: that which distinguishes us from another person. I did have a self, but I wasn’t about to give that away.

  The pounding on the hatch was becoming more urgent.

  “We don’t have all day,” yelled a man with a colorful fire-breathing dragon on his arm. “We have to get to Harry Potter World before lunch. Open the door!”

  No wonder he’s in such a rush, I thought. I would be too if I had a fire-breathing dragon burning my upper arm. I still couldn’t find the missing monocle, so my only choice was to shut my sixth eye and move it to the back of my head. Even though I was toothless, I plastered the biggest smile I could muster on my face, hoping that my bright red gums would not freak the humans out. I opened the hatch to meet these creatures I only knew from movies and television.

  As soon as the door swung open and I stuck my head out, the whole crowd burst into applause.

  “That’s one heck of a costume!” a large man with hairy arms said. Then he grabbed me around the shoulders and shoved his face in close to mine.

  “Smile for Auntie Bertha back in Minnesota,” he said, holding me so hard I thought my neck was going to get a permanent crick in it.

  Then he snapped a picture with his cell phone. I had seen one of those phones in a museum on my planet, from when they were used eons ago. Now, of course, they’re obsolete, because we can take a picture out of any of our six eyes.

  The man held up the phone and showed the picture to everyone.

  “Aunt Bertha’s false teeth are going to drop right out of her mouth when she sees me with googly-eyes here.”

  No one had ever called my eyes googly before. I felt a twinge of sadness. I really was far from home. A few tears formed in eyes three, four, and five, which are the ones with the biggest tear ducts. The tears made it hard to see, especially because my sixth eye was still closed against the searing California sunlight.

  I searched the crowd. The first thing I saw was a small child with a bright blue tongue wearing a shirt that said LIFE IS BETTER WITH MAC & CHEESE. She was drinking an icy blue substance through a straw that stuck out from a round plastic lid.

  “Can I borrow that lid?” I asked her. “I really need it.”

  “Watch, everybody!” she giggled, handing me the lid. “That alien’s probably going to eat this plastic lid for lunch.”

  I swiveled my sixth eye around to the front, took the lid from the girl’s hand, and popped it onto my eyeball. It blocked out almost all the sun, and my eye felt so much better. What didn’t feel better was my sensory enhancer. I could feel it coming to life, and I had no idea which of all the sights and sounds and smells in front of me was stimulating it. I didn’t have to wait long to find out. Suddenly, it shot straight up in the air and started to sniff and search. It seemed to be focusing on the blue substance in the cup the girl was holding.

  “Oh no!” I said to it. “Don’t you dare!”

  But as you know by now, sensory enhancers have a mind of their own, and the aroma of the icy substance was irresistible to its smell receptors. Making a wild snuffling sound, it dove into the blue slushie, splashing it all over the girl’s mac & cheese tee shirt.

  “Whoa, will you look at that thing attached to the alien’s back,” a boy with metal on his teeth yelled. “That’s the best special effect I’ve ever seen!”

  That took a lot of nerve, coming from a kid whose metal teeth flashed in the sun like a blinking lightbulb.

  People starting snapping pictures as my sensory enhancer continued to twirl wildly in the air, inhaling the blue slushie and spraying it across the whole crowd. I thought that would make them angry, but they all laughed and cheered. These humans have a great sense of humor.

  “He likes the blue raspberry flavor just like me,” a little boy sitting on his father’s shoulders shouted. “I love you, creature!”

  A word of advice to you earthlings. You should never talk to a sensory enhancer when it’s on a sniffing binge. Mine turned to the little boy and squirted a big glob of blue slush right at him. The boy laughed uncontrollably and my sensory enhancer joined in, squealing with a pitch so high my ears started to vibrate. Then it flopped on top of the boy’s head and nuzzled his forehead, just as the boy’s mother captured it all on her phone.

  “Look at that!” the kid with the shiny teeth shouted. “That thing just photobombed the lady’s video.”

  “Who ever thought you’d be the star of the show today, Leo?” the boy’s mother said. “I’ll bet this video gets tons of views. You’ll be our family’s first movie star.”

  The crowd moved in so close and so intensely that even with my third lung it was hard to breathe. I couldn’t get away from them—there was nowhere for me to go. I couldn’t push through the crowd, and the hatch behind me was closed. I was stuck, and I started to feel the same terror I felt when the Squadron was chasing me.

  From out of nowhere, a large rubbery green hand grabbed my wrist. I tried to escape its strong grasp and climb up the side of my vehicle, but I couldn’t move because it was holding me so tightly. I looked up to see that my wrist was being held by a tall monster towering above the crowd. His horrible green head was attached to his neck with metal bolts. He lurched
forward at me and snarled.

  Oh, this is great, I thought. I’ve only been on Earth for three minutes and already I’m going to die.

  “Come with me, buddy,” the monster said. That kind voice did not sound like it should come from that face.

  “Over here, Frankenstein,” the man with the hairy arms shouted, holding his phone in the air. “Give me one of your monster smiles.”

  “Not now, dude,” the monster said. “Spaceman and I are going on lunch break. We’ll be back at two.”

  “We will?” I squeaked.

  “Let’s blow this pop stand,” Frankenstein answered. “I got a meatloaf sandwich waiting in the break room.”

  Frankenstein tugged on my arm, but once again, I couldn’t move, this time because the suction cups on the bottom of my feet were stuck solidly to the ground. The pavement was hot and the heat must have made the suction even stronger.

  “You coming or what?” Frankenstein asked.

  “I’d like to, but I seem to have a suction cup problem.”

  He reached out and put his green hands under each of my armpits and lifted me straight up in the air. I could hear the suction cups pop as they let go of the pavement. He pointed to my sensory enhancer.

  “You taking that thing with you?” he asked.

  “Yes I am. It’s attached.”

  “Wow, these costumes are getting better every day,” he said.

  Carrying me under his arm like a bag of asteroid fragments, he edged his way through the crowd, saying, “Coming through, folks. Lunch break.”

  Even though they continued to snap pictures, people cleared a path for us and we were able to make our way to a road where a tram full of tourists was rolling by. A tour guide spoke into a microphone.

  “Over there is the pond where the famous mechanical shark from Jaws lives,” the tour guide droned. “Keep your hands in the vehicle, folks. That fish loves to nibble on tourists from the Midwest. And, whoa, look at that. We’re in luck. There’s Frankenstein, the iconic film monster first made famous by Boris Karloff in 1931. Not to gross you out, but Frankenstein was created from body parts of deceased people.”

  “You’re deceased, as in dead?” I said to the monster. “Funny, you don’t smell like you’re rotting.”

  “What’s with you, buddy? We both know this is a rubber suit. Now smile, the park guests are taking pictures.”

  I looked up at the tram and everyone was standing, holding up their phones. I flashed them my smile.

  “Cool!” someone yelled. “The alien has red gums. What’s his name?”

  “Actually, I’ve never seen him before,” the tour guide said. “Maybe he’s a character in a new show. That’s Hollywood for you, folks . . . Something new every day.”

  The tram pulled away.

  “The break room is right over there by the dinosaur ride.” Frankenstein pointed a large green finger to a bungalow that was hidden behind a jungle landscape. “Think you can manage if I put you down?”

  “I think so.”

  “Okay, just watch out for dinosaur dung.”

  “You still have dinosaurs here?”

  “Nah. I’m just pulling your suction cup.”

  He put me down, and I started walking on my tiptoes, which seemed to keep the suction cups from sticking to the ground. We headed toward the bungalow, passing a stand that sold a twisted brown thing covered in what looked like little crystals of sodium chloride. The sign above the stand said PRETZELS.

  “Those are interesting,” I said. “Do you wear them as decoration?”

  “Yeah, a lot of people wear them as bracelets,” Frankenstein said with a chuckle. “Works out great, because if they get hungry, they got a snack right there on their wrist. And when you slather one of those puppies in mustard, can’t beat it.”

  “I slathered myself in mustard once,” I said, trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about. “It kept me really cool.”

  “You are definitely strange, buddy.”

  “Oh, you have no idea.”

  “By the way, I don’t think I caught your name,” Frankenstein said. “Mine’s Luis Rivera.”

  “But I thought your name was Frankenstein.”

  “Listen, buddy, you can drop the act now. You don’t have to be an alien twenty-four seven. Cut the act and just tell me your name.”

  “On my planet, they call me Citizen Short Nose.”

  “Man, you are really into this,” Luis sighed.

  “My birth name is XR 23 Zeta 5466.”

  “This is getting annoying,” Luis said, “so let me be clear. I’m asking what your Earth name is, because that happens to be the planet we’re living on.”

  Grandma Wrinkle and I hadn’t completely thought this through. In our haste to get me off my home planet, we didn’t have time to pick an Earth name for me, and I needed it now. The big green guy had stopped walking and was just staring at me. My mind was spinning.

  “It’s not a hard question, buddy,” Luis said.

  Buddy. There it was.

  “That’s my name. Buddy.”

  “And do you happen to have a last name, or is that also too hard a question?”

  Actually, it was a hard question. I glanced around in desperation, using all six eyes to survey my surroundings for an idea.

  “Awesome,” Luis said. “Your costume’s automated. You have a remote control for your eyes?”

  Two of my eyes had stopped at a particularly busy food stand. The sign above it said CHEESEBURGERS—THE BEST ON THE BACK LOT.

  “Cheeseburger,” I said to Luis. “My last name is Cheeseburger.”

  “What kind of nutty family do you have, naming you after a fast food?”

  Obviously, I had put my foot in my mouth, suction cups and all.

  “Well, cheese is actually my middle name,” I backtracked. “Mostly I just use the initial C. Buddy C. Burger.”

  “Okay, that’s slightly less nutty,” Luis said. “One day, I’d like to meet your parents and have a conversation. But now I’m starving. So come on, Buddy C. Burger, let’s get us some meatloaf.”

  He threw his big green arm around my shoulder and we headed to the break room. Just like that, I had a name and my first Earth friend.

  4

  When we walked into the employee break room, I couldn’t believe any of my eyes. Everyone there was half-human, half-creature. There was a man with the body of a raptor but a humanoid face. A woman with blond hair had the furry body of an orange-and-black tiger. And there were two huge ogres, a male and a female, both enjoying green salads with no tomatoes while laughing with their mouths full.

  “These are some very unusual humans,” I whispered to Luis.

  “It’s a good crew,” he said. “Everyone in here is a wannabe actor and we’re just doing this, strolling around in costumes posing for pictures, while we’re waiting for our big break.”

  “Does anyone doing this ever become a star?”

  “Sometimes. My best friend, Paul, went from being Puddles Panda Bear to hosting Covered in Slime, the messiest game show on TV.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Here I was on Earth, hanging out with real live actors and messy game show hosts.

  “Hey, everyone, meet the new kid on the block,” Luis said as we walked in. “This is Buddy C. Burger. Buddy, this is everyone.”

  “What’s up, Buddy?” one of the ogres said to me.

  “Well, the ceiling is up,” I answered. “And if you go farther, you’ve got the sky, and beyond that is the Milky Way, followed by the entire intergalactic system.”

  “I wasn’t asking for a science lesson,” the ogre said. “I was just curious about how you’re feeling.”

  “Ohhhhh. I’m happy to be here.”

  “I got to get this head off,” Luis told me. “It feels like a sauna in here.”

  To my utter surprise, Luis reached up and pulled off his entire Frankenstein head. Underneath, he was human, just like everyone else in the room. I let out a shriek.

&nbs
p; “Why don’t you take your costume off too, Buddy?” Luis asked. “Relax. We’re on break.”

  “Um . . . Thanks anyway,” I stammered, “but I think I’ll just leave it on. This costume is really hard to get back into. You know, it’s so skintight I almost feel like it’s a part of me.”

  “Yeah, I like to keep my costume on too,” the man dressed as a raptor said. “Comes in handy. I can open a soda can with my big-toe claw.”

  “Speaking of which,” Luis said, “I’m getting a cold drink. Want one, Buddy?”

  I suddenly became aware of a tremendous thirst that had overtaken my body, making me feel weak and shaky.

  “I could really use something to drink,” I answered.

  Luis went over to a machine and dropped in some silver coins and a can of liquid rolled out. I had seen a vending machine in the movies, but it was exciting to see one right in front of me.

  “Here, let me open that for you,” the man in the raptor suit said. He took the can from Luis, popped the top with his toe claw, and handed it over to me. When I took a swig, my whole face felt like it was being attacked by bubbles. I rubbed my nose as hard as I could to get rid of the fizzy sensation, but when I opened my mouth, out came a long, loud burp. I knew what that was because I had seen people burp in the movies. Once, I even saw an actor who could say a whole sentence while burping.

  Everyone in the break room laughed at my burp.

  “Nice one,” the tiger woman commented.

  “Why thank you.” I smiled.

  Luis went to his locker and came back carrying a metal lunch box with a picture of a guy in a leather jacket sitting on a motorcycle.

  “Hey, I know that guy,” I said. “I saw him on a show called Happy Days.”

  “Dude, you weren’t even born when that show was on,” Luis said.

  “Grandma Wrinkle showed me the videos. It was her favorite show.”

  “Wait a minute,” Luis said as he pulled up a chair and sat down at the table. “You call your grandmother Wrinkle? That’s rude, dude. That would be like me calling my grandmother Grandma Bunion.”