Extended Interview:

Greetings to you and yours. My name is David Allen Welsh, aka Homeless Mozart.

I play music, and I’ve been unhoused since 1964. I got my nickname a while ago when I went into a thrift shop on the 13th here in Vancouver, Washington. I saw a piano and asked if it was okay to play. There was someone there and he basically said, “Oh great, somebody else is going to bang on the piano.” I said, “I’ve never banged on the piano in my life.”

He heard what I was sharing and decided to call KATU. I didn’t know they were there, I usually close my eyes when I play piano. Anyway, KATU showed up and asked if I’d like to do an interview. My first response was, “Well, what did I do? Am I in trouble?” Because sometimes when people hear music, they either like it or don’t like it, and so you get reprisals. It went around the world. They put it on the news in Canada, they thought it was Vancouver, Canada, and they said I moved the world by music from Belize to Bolivia. I’d never heard those names, so I Googled them to find out where they were. Then I emailed the Huffington Post, which is like the New York Times, and said, “It’s Vancouver, Washington, not Vancouver, Canada.” They said, “Oh, you’re one of those people,” and I said, “I didn’t want to do an international incident, but since you lob that over, let me lob this back.” So I said, “Vancouver is the very first Vancouver, and we’ve got the fort here to prove it.” They replied, “Okay, you win.”

I share the music I have with people and humanity. It’s my way of helping where I can.

Unlike most people, I did not have the American dream, it was ripped away from me when I was five years old. I didn’t know the government had passed a law called eminent domain that gave them the right to take anything above the earth and anything below.

Anyway, they showed up to my mom’s mom’s mom’s farm, three generations, and said, “You got three days to vacate the premises.” Three days later, they showed up with a bunch of people. They shot all the cows. They shot all the chickens. They burned the beehives that we had for candles. My mom found me in the outhouse, and all the people that were there were standing in a horseshoe around us, pointing their guns at us. The guy said, “I told you, you got three days to vacate the property. You didn’t go, so now you’re getting gone.” And he told them, “Snatch that kid up and put him in the paddy wagon”, which is a truck with a box on the back, and no windows, just bars.

They dropped me into a meat grinder called foster care. When I was six years old, I asked one question: “When’s my mom gonna come visit me?” I got a backhand. They broke my nose. They broke my rib. I was coughing up blood, gasping for air, and I said, “These are not my people. If I’m a color crayon, color me gone.”

So I hobbled away. Three days, three nights, no water, no food. I came to a set of railroad tracks. Two trains were going, and one stopped to let the other one pass. The freight train has a coupling and an air hose. I got into the grain car hole, and when the train started to move, it was like dominoes, it jerked forward and smashed my face into the metal inside the grain car hole. The darkness took me.

When I woke up, I was going down the road. I could see the cars, and the plates on the back said Dakota. I said, “I’m not in Iowa anymore.” That’s how my life started. I’ve been coast to coast 137 times before I was 13 years old.

To get food, most people go to groceries but it didn’t take me long to figure out, if you just watch the critters, you can find out what’s edible. It doesn’t taste all that great, but a lot of it comes out of dumpsters, and a portion of it comes out of farmers' fields. Most people think dandelions are just weeds, but you can make some tea. Some of the weeds on the ground aren’t really weeds. The nettles, you put them into a coffee can, and once they’re brewing, you can make up a stew.

One time, I woke up when the train had stopped. I looked out the grain car hole and saw a farm, a field full of baby corn. I said, “That’s food!” I huddled out of the grain cart hole, went out to the field, grabbed up about three ears of corn, and climbed back on. I gave grace and basically said, “Much obliged, Dad.” Unlike most people, I’ve never misplaced my manners. I can say definitively, the day I ate those three ears of baby corn, they were the sweetest, most exquisite substance I had ever known. That day, going forward, I realized my Dad had prepared the way for me.

In my travels, I got off a grain railcar because I needed to get some more water for my canteen. I went to a building that apparently used to be a depot. They were having a silent auction. Inside, I found the water spicket, there was coffee, doughnuts, and people were showing up. I asked, “What’s going on? What’s he doing?” They told me it was a silent auction. I didn’t really know what they meant. They said, “If you like something on the tables, get a piece of paper and put what you think you want to pay for it, then go up there and put it in this mason jar.” I was sitting there watching stuff, and something caught my attention. It wasn’t something normal, it was a map of a railroad that goes across the whole country. I literally had to get up and walk over to see what I was actually looking at.

As soon as I realized what it was, I just kind of went, “Wow.” I checked all my pockets and I managed to come up with $37.50. For me, that’s an extensive amount of money. Someone once said, “Homeless people waste money,” and I said, “Where is it written in stone that homeless people aren’t supposed to have nice things?” I wrote down the amount I had on a piece of paper, put the coin in an envelope, and dropped it in the jar.

There were four tables of stuff, and the room had a lot of people. When they drew my bid on the map, they were perplexed. They said, “What map?” and asked, “Which one put map?” I raised my hand. They looked at the tables and said, “What map?” I pointed and said, “That one!” They looked up, they didn’t even realize it was there. They had no clue; they were only focused on what was on the tables. I was the only one who bid on the map.

So I won.

I know it’s kind of cheesy for a houseless person to want something. I just couldn’t get it out of my crawl, I really wanted that map. They took my $37.50 and gave me the map after taking it down off the wall. I rolled it up, found some parchment paper and four big garbage bags, and I traveled with that map for years. 

In the past, every time somebody said, “Oh yeah, we can help,” I never qualified, because I didn’t fit into the boxes they wanted people to be in. I didn’t go to prison, I didn’t have a wife, I didn’t have children, I don’t do drinking, I don’t do drugs. So they’d basically say, “Come back when your life is screwed up and we can fix you.”

I just fell through the cracks because I didn’t qualify.

Over a half-century later, there’s no crack, but the one thing that keeps certainty in my head space is that the cracks are how the light gets in.

I always thought that if people actually helped me get into a place, it would be because I died. Like, they’d finally say, “He’s dead, let’s bury him. There he goes. See, we found a place.” That’s what I was looking at, because that’s what was. There was nothing there or I never qualified. I just thought they would all come together when I died and said, “Look, we finally got him into a place.”

But to my astonishment, half a century old, I’m not in the graveyard. I’m in a shanty. It has electricity, a bathroom, and a place to shut down. It has a refrigerator. It has peanut butter. It has bread. It has grace. It has the equivalent of love, which for me is like music. It has a place where I can take a deep breath and realize that I can only do what I can do until I can do better.

Without you and others helping, I would still be with me, taking me everywhere I go, sleeping on cardboard and concrete, shivering like a leaf, just muddling through, trying to make it from one dry place to another. Here, I have clean socks with no holes in them now. You don’t understand, the cleanest socks I ever had were the ones I turned inside out.

Outsiders Inn’s invitation changed my journey. Behind the scenes, it’s a little different, but in contrast to the world I live in, the experience with the tiny houses, 415, and the volunteers. If somebody’s hearing, listening, or watching, and you take a moment out of your busy schedule to be here and coherent, I think you plant the scenes where you want to be. And if you have a conscience, and you can do something, I think it would behoove you to make a difference. Because without people, it’s just a wish sandwich.

I’ve been outside since 1964. I didn’t go to school and out of these 26 letters of this thing called an alphabet, by mere vote of one, we ended up with English. This is my commercial. This is what I share with people.

The hours are long, the pay is not that great, they hardly pay attention. But when they do, the benefits far exceed any expectations that we had for them, or they have for themselves. But how do we know this? The proof is in the pudding.

That’s my commercial. Being more than the sum of your programming, it didn’t matter what the people tried to integrate into your brain. It didn’t matter what choices were available. It mattered what you did with what choices you chose. That’s me and since I take me everywhere I go, there’s no reset button.