Lullabies for Little Criminals

by Heather O'Neill

  Felix knocked on the door. “Go away,” I yelled. My voice was all choked up so that anyone in the world could tell that I had been crying. I don’t know how long I was in there. There’s hardly such a thing as time in a dark space like that. As I mentioned before, once I started crying, it was difficult for me to stop. Finally, Mary opened up the door. I squinted at the light from the hallway. I probably looked like a wreck. The light gave me that same shocked sensation you get after having been slapped in the face.

  “Oh, my dear Lord,” Mary cried when she caught sight of me. “You poor, poor little thing. What did those beasts do to you? Those awful, awful beasts. Monsters! My sons are monsters!”

  She pulled me out of the closet and patted me on the head. She was probably contemplating looking through my hair for lice just to cheer me up. That wasn’t at all what I wanted, though. For some reason I was surprised myself when I said, “I miss my dad a lot.”

  6

  MARY DROVE FELIX AND ME OUT to the rehabilitation center to visit Jules. The two of them were going to go for a walk through the forest that surrounded the center while I went inside. Mary insisted that Felix needed exercise and some fresh air. Felix had wrapped a sleeping bag around himself; although, it wasn’t even cold out. He was just trying to prove a point. A worker took me by the hand and led me alone down a long corridor, into a wilderness of posters and bulletin boards.

  I felt nervous in the big communal room. Jules and I were sitting in folding chairs on opposite sides of a plastic table. We hadn’t had too many occasions when we had to look directly at each other like this. Jules was always moving around. Even when he was eating, he was always wandering over to the window with his plate in his hand. It seemed like we should be saying important things to each other. Since I was feeling a serious bout of low self-esteem, I felt incapable of coming up with anything important. So we sat there quietly for a bit. I looked at Jules without looking into his eyes.

  Jules had managed to lose more weight and he looked skinny like a girl. His legs were crossed politely as if we were meeting on a blind date. He was wearing a T-shirt over his pajamas. He had a Ziploc bag filled with cigarettes laid out in front of him. I noticed that he was chain-smoking them. He was wearing a pair of socks, and his big toe stuck out of one of them.

  “They don’t let certain patients here have shoes,” Jules said when he saw me staring at his toe. “It’s a matter of principle. It makes the possibility of escape less possible.”

  Then he remembered that he had gifts for me. He went and got them from the other room. He had decorated a pot by gluing felt circles on it and had planted a tropical plant inside it. It seemed as if they must have put a gun up to his head for him to make something like this. He had never had the concentration for crafts at home. He had also apparently learned the art of origami, as he had a plastic bag filled with a dozen paper cranes. He said that he’d made them in some sort of workshop, and he held them out for me to see.

  “You can take them home with you if you like.”

  I nodded. I had also brought him a gift. I reached into the pocket of my coat that was slung over the back of my chair to get it. I handed him a copy of our Charles Aznavour cassette. He nodded a thanks back but said that he couldn’t take it.

  “It’ll remind me too much of the old times.”

  I was silent and confused as I put the tape back in my pocket. One thing I thought I really knew about Jules was that he liked Charles Aznavour. It was my favorite too. I had tried to get some friends of mine into that tape. They looked at me with a pity and disgust that was way above their age and maturity. I guess you had to be a child with some tragedy to understand that music. You had to have your mother die to enjoy Aznavour, who had a voice like someone reading handwritten Valentine cards. I imagined Aznavour sleeping in a tuxedo and owning a cat named Mustache.

  I was wearing my T-shirt with a baby duck on it. Jules loved when I wore that T-shirt; he found it so cute. That’s why I’d put it on today, even though it was getting a little tight on me. But Jules hadn’t said anything about the T-shirt. In fact, he avoided even looking at it. I realized that part of his therapy was probably to give up his personality bit by bit. I hoped that part of his therapy wasn’t to give up his interest in me.

  “What do you do here all day?” I asked, to change my own train of thought.

  “We have discussions. Now I know what it’s like to be a rock-and-roll star and to always be on talk shows. Tell us about yourself. What do you think you’ll be doing next year? What motivates you? It’s not really conversation.”

  “Do you have to exercise?”

  He looked startled a little by this question. It was as if I knew something that he didn’t think I knew. I’d only asked this because Mary had told me that at her hospital they made patients do lots of exercise and eat plenty of healthy food as a means to recovering. This information had really upset me because I knew that Jules despised both exercising and eating. The thought of him being forced to do sit-ups had upset me greatly.

  “When I first got here, they tried to get me to go jog a lap around the yard,” he answered finally. “I’m a goddamn infirm, I told them. They had a doctor come by and check out my lungs, and he said, What in God’s name are you doing? This man doesn’t need to jog. He needs a coffin with some feathered pillows. If he makes it for three more nights in this joint, he’ll be lucky. Touching his toes is probably enough to kill him.”

  “Is it difficult to stay off drugs?”

  “It’s really hard. There’s a drug dealer named Norman who comes by the gate and sells dope.”

  “Do you buy any?”

  “I haven’t got a cent.”

  We were about to start being silent again when a young guy sauntered into the room. He sat down next to Jules and handed him a coffee. Once he sat down, Jules began to look more comfortable all of a sudden. The guy introduced himself as Oliver. Unlike my dad, Oliver was fully dressed and not in pajamas. He was barefoot, though, so I figured he must be in the same category as Jules was: the ones who were too risky to be given shoes. His hair was dyed different colors in different places, kind of like a dusting brush. He looked about sixteen years old. I noticed that his fingers were all chewed up. I had never seen anybody’s fingers bitten down so much. He had a huge scab on his hand that he must have spent a lot of time picking at. Oliver smiled as if he were having his picture taken in elementary school. That was his trademark smile, I guess. I hated people who had trademark anything.

  I was able to stare at Oliver and take note of all this because he wasn’t paying attention to me. He was staring at Jules mostly. He was sitting there as if he were Jules’s interpreter. I don’t know why he got to be on Jules’s side of the table. They were both smiling as if they had something to smile about.

  “I was just telling Baby what it’s like here,” Jules told Oliver.

  “When I first got here,” Oliver said to Jules and not to me, “I kept thinking that my clothes were shrinking. I was afraid they were putting them in the dryer.”

  Jules laughed at that. Oliver started brushing his hair up from the back with both hands. This was something that Jules did all the time. It was disconcerting to see Oliver do it in exactly the same way. That’s what happened in rehab: people were always trying to rip off someone else’s personality. People used to say that Jules and I had the same laugh. They also said that we had a similar walk. If Oliver was stealing Jules’s personality, then he was also stealing my personality. I wished that Jules would be more careful and see through this guy.

  “I kept thinking that everything that had happened had been a dream,” Oliver continued. “Like the nurse came up to me and said, I told you yesterday that you had an appointment with me at two o’clock. Oh, I said, I thought that conversation was a dream.”

  They started to laugh at this. I tried to smile, but I couldn’t.

  “Have you started to see angels yet?” Oliver asked Jules excitedly. “Martin, you know Martin, rig
ht? He says that after you’re here for about three weeks, because of all the Haldol and whatnot in your system, you start to see angels.”

  “I’m going to start going to church once I get out, though, that’s for sure,” Jules said.

  “I don’t believe in God,” Oliver said. “You believe in Jesus, man? I didn’t know that about you.”

  I wanted to interrupt at this moment. I wanted to say that the reason we didn’t like Jesus was because there used to be a guy on our block named Greg who talked about Jesus all the time. We couldn’t stand Greg and now we couldn’t help associating Jesus with him. But I couldn’t find a way to interject my thoughts. This conversation didn’t really include me.

  “Trust me,” Jules said. “I’d like to believe in Jesus as much as the next guy, but I don’t. Who says that you have to believe in God to go to church? I need to join a choir. It’ll make my lungs open up. I like singing.”

  “You have a really great voice. Super deep and good. You should really record it, man. You’re like a genius at that. I can’t do it. I’m all nerves. There’s like all this compressed energy in me.”

  “Come on,” Jules said, smiling. “I could never be a real singer.”

  “This is what Suzanne was talking to us about in the meeting this morning. You have to reinvent yourself. As if you have a blank page and you’re writing your own story on it. I think that we should start our own band.”

  I sighed loudly, which managed to get Jules’s attention. I hated people who wanted to be famous. There was nothing so depressing as people with ridiculous plans. Most of Jules’s friends who came out of rehab wanted to be famous. Now that they weren’t heroin addicts, they wanted to be something marvelous. They wanted careers as rock stars or bestselling novelists.

  “What’s new with you, Baby?” he asked me.

  “I had a fever a week ago. I went and woke up Mary in the middle of the night and told her that there was a big dog in my room. She almost had a heart attack. I was just sleepwalking, though. I didn’t remember any of it the next day.”

  Neither of them seemed to react to this story. I felt stupid for having told them. What was I, two years old? I should be telling him fun stories that impress. I wondered if I should tell him about the autograph book that Felix and I had made. We had signed a bunch of celebrities’ names in it. We showed it to other kids and most of them believed us. I decided against bringing it up since Jules didn’t know any actors anyway. The only actor he seemed to have ever heard of was Jack Nicholson, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest seemed to be the only movie he’d ever seen.

  I didn’t like that Oliver had a million things to say to Jules. He was acting as if he knew my dad better than I did. I wasn’t used to this; Jules and I had always been best friends. When he was broke, I was broke. When you considered his situation, you also had to consider mine. I had somehow stepped out of his world.

  When he was walking me to the door, Jules gave me some news that really upset me. He told me that he was going to volunteer to stay at the rehabilitation center an extra month. He said that his supervisor strongly recommended it. I stood there, unable to move, just staring helplessly at Jules. He seemed uncomfortable meeting my gaze. He spun around, making as if he suddenly needed to read a pamphlet that was stapled on the bulletin board right behind his head. Then he spun around again, probably hoping that I had stopped looking so sad.

  As I walked to the car where Mary and Felix waited, I turned and looked back. Jules was looking out the window and waving to me. The building was made out of brown bricks and reminded me of an elementary school. All the window frames had been painted yellow to make the building look more homelike. Jules obviously didn’t want to have much to do with the outside regular world. Of his own accord, he was going to stay locked up there making his cranes. That’s what he and Oliver were smiling at. They both knew that it was better on the inside than on the outside. As I walked out into the evening, I wished that I was on drugs too. Oliver was a junkie and so he had more in common with my dad than I did. They would be eating dinner together in their stockinged feet. Just like they had known each other from the day they were born.

  AFTER MUCH INSISTENCE, Mary let Felix sit on her lap and steer the wheel. I hoped that he would crash the car. I sat in the back of the car not saying anything. I couldn’t beg for a turn at the steering wheel too. I couldn’t plead for any rights because I didn’t have any.

  It was dark by now. I hated riding in cars in the country at night. In the temporary illumination of the headlights, the insects were scribbling out messages from God that we couldn’t get. You couldn’t see what was up ahead. How did you know that the universe still existed a few feet in front of the car? How could you know that God was continuing to imagine it all? How could you be sure that he hadn’t forgotten about the road and that you wouldn’t soon be driving into nothingness?

  7

  I WAS VERY FIRM on the idea that I would become a drug addict too now. I didn’t care what drug I was going to be addicted to. A fool like Oliver could hang out with my dad just because he was a stoner.

  When Jules did junk, all the other heroin addicts came around and they weren’t so bad. They made me laugh so much. I thought they were the coolest group of humans that ever lived. I really did. They were the only ones who had the habit of making a fuss over me. They touched my hair and said that I could be a fashion model. When I sang along with a song on the radio, there was always someone screaming that I had to get an agent and get a recording contract. When I danced to a TV commercial, they said I had natural rhythm and had to take ballet lessons to bring out my talent. Naturally my friends at school didn’t speak to me like that. They didn’t think there was anything special about me at all.

  Jules had a friend named Frederic who used to bum for change. Jules would keep him company while he was out panhandling. Frederic used to carry around a suitcase and pretend he was a stranded traveler who needed money to get home. It was a gimmick that only really worked at the bus terminal, but he and my dad had been banned from the terminal a couple years before. Frederic had been on our street corner every day for the past year with his suitcase. Everyone knew his face and nobody believed he was a lost tourist. Jules made him a cardboard sign that said he was a Vietnam vet. We all laughed so hard when Frederic came over and Jules gave him that sign. I fell right off the kitchen chair.

  He had another friend named Jimmy who came from California and wore a blue leather jacket.

  “What was it like in California?” I asked Jimmy one night.

  “Oh, I’m not really from California. That’s just a cover.”

  “So where are you from?”

  “Well, actually, I’m not from this planet. I moved here to Earth when I was seventeen.”

  I asked him what the planet he was from looked like; he said the same as the one on Blade Runner. I’d seen that movie and it took place on planet Earth, but I didn’t mention that. He said that there were so many people on his planet that it took about half an hour to walk down a block. He said that he never drank milk because there was no such thing as cows.

  “What did you do for a living on your planet?” I asked.

  “It’s a job that you wouldn’t understand. It would have no application whatsoever in this world.”

  On his planet voices could travel long distances through the air. You could hear someone whispering to you in bed from all the way across town. That was one of my favorite things about his planet.

  I had been polluted with the ridiculous dreams of junkies. I had gotten the ridiculous ego that comes with a heroin high by proxy.

  USUALLY YOU GET DRUGS from the crowd that you hang around with. But I was twelve and none of the people I hung around were into drugs. There were simply no cool kids my age. Maybe coolness was intending to entirely skip a generation. It seemed possible. Felix was in his room singing into a tape recorder then playing it back and exclaiming, “My God. Do I actually sound like this? All this time I thought that
I was a great singer, but I don’t have any talent whatsoever!”

  I made it a point to really observe the kids in my grade the next day. I wanted to see if any of them also had the potential to be drug addicts. There was going to be a 3-D movie on television so the supermarket at the corner had been giving out 3-D glasses for free. Everybody showed up at school wearing a pair. They wore them like sunglasses, like they were really cool. One boy was making himself sneeze by looking up at the sun, and a group of children had gathered around to watch him. A boy named Eddie tied his head in a plastic bag and made everyone count how long he could stay like that without breathing. The girl who sat next to me in English class put the mimeographed handout up to her nose, exclaiming how good it smelled. I knocked that off in grade three. A boy named Sherwin showed me how he was writing the lyrics of songs from the radio out in his notebook. “It’s the first step to being a rock star,” he said.

  Drug dealers wouldn’t want to have anything to do with these pathetic specimens. You had to be relaxed and professional to associate with drug dealers.

  I WAS HANGING AROUND in Felix’s bathroom a few days later, washing my hands with a soap that smelled like cocoa butter. I thought that if I washed my hands a few times in a row with it, my hands would smell like cocoa butter all day. That seemed like an interesting idea to me at the time. I opened the cabinet and took a stick of Mary’s lipstick off the shelf and painted my lips. I stood there staring in the mirror with my brand-new red lips pursed for a long time, I guess.

  Suddenly, I heard the front door open and Johnny’s voice booming. He walked into the bathroom without knocking and leaned over the sink next to me to stare in the mirror. He stuck the tip of his finger under the faucet. He’d cut it open and the cold water turned red for a moment, just like the tail of a fancy goldfish.

  I usually split any time Johnny was around. That day I just sat down on the toilet seat and observed him. I remained very still. I was surprised he hadn’t attacked me yet. He opened the cabinet door to an angle that allowed him to see my reflection.