Lullabies for Little Criminals

by Heather O'Neill

  “What in the world are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, since I didn’t really know myself.

  “You see this,” he said, turning and holding up his finger. “I cut my finger with a knife. I was using it as a screwdriver. I was too lazy to go and get an actual screwdriver. What do you think about that?”

  “You should disinfect it with some iodine.”

  “Someone told me that iodine was just a myth.”

  I shrugged. He kept staring at me. I couldn’t begin to guess what insult was going to come out of his mouth. Instead, I was surprised by what he said next.

  “I’m sorry I’ve given you a hard time. That’s how I treat everyone, though. I just want you to feel at home. You know that, right?”

  “Right,” I lied.

  “So if you need me to get you anything, just let me know.”

  I was always moved when mean people were suddenly nice to me. It was a weakness that would lead me into some bad relationships later in life. At that moment I believed Johnny might be the only person in the world who could understand me. So I popped the question.

  “Can you get me some magic mushrooms?”

  “What!”

  I felt myself get all red. I stood up to leave, but Johnny pushed me back down onto the toilet lid.

  “What did I just hear you say?!” he sputtered in mock outrage. “What is the world coming to! Are you not just out of diapers? Are you not just out of elementary school! My Lord. The shock of it all!”

  Again I tried to leave, but he easily held me down.

  “You’re not old enough to be asking that question. You have to start dressing differently if you’re going to use ’shrooms.”

  He squatted down and looked into my face as I sat on the toilet.

  “You know, you’re not going to be bad-looking. Of course, you might try behaving more like a girl. You can comb your hair, for instance.”

  He made his fingers like two little legs and walked them all the way up my leg. They pushed up my skirt as they walked along. When they touched the elastic of my underwear, it was as if I had peed a tiny butterfly. He leaned over and kissed me and his tongue opened up my mouth. And then he grabbed me and started tickling.

  “Oh, my God, the girl’s in love with me!!!”

  “No, I’m not!” I whispered.

  “She wants to marry me. No, I’m not going to mess around with my brother’s girlfriend. I’m a stand-up guy. You’ll get over it, though. Just don’t go and kill yourself over me now. I don’t need another one of those.”

  He took the rest of his clothes off and got into the shower. “Turn on the radio on your way out, Baby,” he called to me. I slinked out, still without any connections and deeply humiliated. I had been turned away at the door of the adult world.

  I couldn’t think straight as I walked down the hall. I had run into my friend Sherwin earlier in the day wearing a motorcycle helmet that he’d found in the trash. I was just as childish as he was.

  I don’t know why I was upset about not being an adult. It was right around the corner. Becoming a child again is what is impossible. That’s what you have legitimate reason to be upset over. Childhood is the most valuable thing that’s taken away from you in life, if you think about it.

  AFTER I’D BEEN LIVING at Mary’s for about a month, she started dating a guy named Jean-Michel, a tall black guy who smelled like Noxzema. She met him one night when she went to get some milk at the corner store.

  I knew Jean-Michel before he hooked up with Mary. He was one of those guys who liked to stand in front of a particular store that had a neon pot of gold in the window and a big sign advertising that they sold bus tickets. The store put a sign up that said NO LOITERING OR WE’LL CALL THE POLICE, just because of him, I think. He walked with a cane even though he wasn’t lame or sophisticated; he just pointed it at people when they passed through the store. He had a friend who pushed a shopping cart around, scavenging, and Jean-Michel would riffle through the contents of his friend’s cart and say, “Nothing. This ain’t nothing but garbage.”

  I had seen him a million times all over the place before I had seen him at Mary’s place making a quick-mix box of cookies. He was famous in that kind of way. He liked this bench that was right next to a pay phone. They were so close together, you could sit on the bench and talk on the phone at the same time. He was always talking to someone he had borrowed twenty dollars from. This guy kept on charging interest on the twenty dollars and now Jean-Michel supposedly owed him six hundred dollars.

  Jean-Michel’s face was flat and almost sort of one-dimensional and had gray pricks all over his forehead. I have to admit he did have a nice smile, even though he talked as if he had just shoved a spoonful of burning hot macaroni in his mouth. He was clumsy and he always stepped on Felix and me while we were lying on the floor watching TV. He was always trying to guess what people were going to say on TV shows, but he wasn’t even good at it. He’d predict the girl on the TV show was about to say, “How about breakfast?” and she would say something like, “I’m leaving you.” But Mary said he brought some light into her life.

  I had always liked watching him from afar, just because he was so odd. It’s not that there was anything wrong with Jean-Michel; it’s just that I’d always identified him as a bum. I mean, if he wasn’t, then who the hell was? But Mary treated him as if there was nothing unusual about walking around in flip-flops at the end of September with sores all over your feet. I decided Mary was right about him, because if she was wrong about him, then she might be wrong about me. Her compliments made me feel so good about myself. For instance, she always said that I naturally smelled good. She said that I naturally smelled like soap and that she should rub me in her hair before going out on a date. I sat on my bed and decided to change my opinion about Jean-Michel. I just took the words “bum,” “hobo,” and “street person” out of my vocabulary. You could never really get to know anyone when you associated them with those words. Afterward, I thought of him as being very gentle and very optimistic.

  “The white dress! The white dress! The tight one! I like that! Hallelujah. You look great.” Jean-Michel applauded and banged the walls whenever she put on anything other than a sweat suit. On the first night that he came over, he gave her earrings that made her earlobes turn green and get infected. But she was desperate to wear them. She froze her earlobes with ice cubes so that she could stick them in. She yelped every time he tried to nibble on one and threatened to murder him with the ashtray.

  FELIX HAD NO IDEA what to make of Jean-Michel. He was all that Felix wanted to talk about. His presence in the house day after day made Felix nervous.

  “I don’t understand why he spends all his time here,” Felix whined. “He’s always here. Why? I don’t understand why! Can you tell me why!”

  “He just doesn’t have anyplace else to go,” I said and shrugged. “Trust me, I wouldn’t worry about Jean-Michel. He’s harmless.”

  “How would you know?” Felix demanded.

  One night, Jean-Michel made us all a huge pot of spaghetti. He dumped everything in the fridge into the sauce, and it actually wasn’t that bad. When we were all in the middle of dinner, he told Mary that he had to hide out in her apartment on account of the whole loan problem.

  “I told him yesterday, I’ll give you twenty dollars…loan-sharking is illegal, don’t you know, Mr. Shark? It’s immoral and it’s bad. What are you going to do? Break my fingers. What do I care? What do I need fingers for? All I need are my eyes so that I can look at Mary. You are just sensational, Mary. Did you know that? Did he actually come and kill me already when I wasn’t looking? I think I’m in heaven because there’s a beautiful angel right here in the room with me. But seriously, the man is out to get me. I think he has my place staked out. I think it would be better if I stayed here with you. What do you think of that, Mary? You ever been on a honeymoon?”

  He moved in the next day with only a plastic bag that ha
d a few things in it, like a brown sweater and a sticky-looking yellow telephone. These things made me think that he didn’t have a house at all.

  “Where do you live?” I asked as he was washing his T-shirt out in the sink with some dish detergent.

  “I live in a palace. Thank you very much for asking.”

  “No. Really.”

  “I live in that big white building downtown.”

  “Isn’t that a Holiday Inn?”

  “Well, the building right next to it.”

  “Can we go there and pick up some things for you?”

  “My mother lives there. If she sees a stranger in the house, she’ll think she’s being mugged. She’ll have a heart attack.”

  “What’s it like inside?”

  “Yeah. It’s a nice place. We use a pinball table for like a real table.”

  That shut me up for a bit. It was hard to figure out if it was a lie or not, or even if he was bragging. Although that little detail threw me off, I felt safe coming to the conclusion that he was a liar. I was glad of it, because I liked liars. I especially liked what were referred to as senseless liars. Jules used to tell senseless lies to people on long bus rides. One of Jules’s favorite lies was that he was a professor who lectured at universities all over the continent on the benefits of street wisdom. I felt somehow relaxed talking to Jean-Michel, knowing that everything that came out of his mouth probably had nothing to do with the mundane world around me.

  After that, I found that I was always trying to initiate discussions with him. He was the closest thing to Jules in the house. He was part of the world that I’d grown up with. It was as though we spoke the same language.

  “Were you ever in rehab?” I asked Jean-Michel another time.

  “I’ve been all over the place in all kinds of living situations. Due to the fact that my mind is my own worst enemy. In a way I am perpetually and permanently in a state of rehabilitation. In an attempt to rehabilitate from the shock of being born. Some people are too sensitive to withstand that.”

  People often nod their heads at this kind of assertion. It’s no different to them than having someone shake a foam cup in their face and ask for change. It is the speech of a homeless person. It is a sermon to no one in particular. I was feeling homeless and I in turn felt the need for that kind of spirituality. I wanted to be a mixed-up and pitiful soul too. His voice had this chalklike quality, like it was writing out words on the blackboard. That was the mark of a voice that had been stylized by smoking weed and other illegal substances. I knew that Jean-Michel could get me some.

  I WAS WALKING HOME from school by myself when I spotted Jean-Michel leaning up against the wall of the liquor store and talking to a panhandler. I went up to him.

  “Hey, Baby,” Jean-Michel said, nice and casual, which I liked. “What’s up with you?”

  His friend walked off right away. Most homeless people were afraid of people that weren’t. They didn’t like to be addressed directly by them. They didn’t mind children, but I was getting older now. I was glad that he’d left right away so that I could ask my favor of Jean-Michel.

  “Can you get me some magic mushrooms?”

  “You got some money?” he said, completely unfazed. “I’m broke.”

  “I have five bucks. I just want a couple. You can keep the rest for yourself.”

  “All right, sure. Joey has some, and he’s in the park now. You got the money on you?”

  I handed Jean-Michel five dollars, which was all the money I had in the world. He gestured for me to wait for him and headed across the street, waving to someone in the park. There was a white guy on a bicycle. Jean-Michel walked past him and dropped the money. The guy picked it up and placed a baggie delicately on the ground. It was all very efficient and professional.

  Being judged by society makes you disregard it altogether after a while. Jean-Michel didn’t know that he shouldn’t get a twelve-year-old drugs. He didn’t even really know what a twelve-year-old was.

  He took some mushrooms out of the bag and put them in his pocket. He gave me the bag and indicated by jerking his head back that maybe I should get lost now, just in case any cop got suspicious about us standing together. I skipped down the road, feeling like I’d accomplished something. I put the baggie under my bed and waited for the right moment.

  8

  AT DUSK, MARY WENT OUT with Jean-Michel and left Felix and me alone in the house. We carried the space heater from Johnny’s room into Felix’s even though it wasn’t that cold outside. Johnny had bought the heater a week before but had never let anyone touch it, so we were curious about it. We had turned it way up and now we were boiling hot and uncomfortable. We also had Mary’s tape recorder, so we turned it on, hoping it would put us to sleep, but the singer’s voice on the tape gave me the creeps. It felt like the kind of song that people who weren’t in love would make love to.

  “My mother named me after Peter Pan,” Felix told me.

  “But then shouldn’t your name be Peter?”

  “I don’t know. She said she named me after him. That’s all I know.”

  Then we were quiet. There’s no use talking to someone who’s being nostalgic.

  “I wish my real dad was here,” Felix said as he lay sweating beside me.

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. He used to be a good dancer. He used to play in a band, I think.”

  “What instrument did he play?”

  “I don’t know. Look, I don’t know the names of all the instruments. I got to make a telephone call,” he said, rolling out of bed.

  “Who are you going to call?” I asked.

  He picked up the receiver and pointed to a sticker with a phone number on the side of the phone. There was a white flower on the sticker and it had the words “Teenage Help Hotline” written on it. Someone on the other end picked up right away, I guess because if someone had swallowed enough pills, they might already be dead by the third ring. I could only hear Felix’s side of the conversation.

  “I’m feeling down,” he said. “My brother, he’s going to move out soon. And my mother didn’t come home from the bar. I feel terrible. I’m always worried now that she’s going to go away with her boyfriend. I’m twelve years old. Well, she didn’t leave me alone in the house because my friend’s here. She’s twelve…Baby, did you have your birthday, yeah, you did. She’s twelve, same as me. Ever since she met this guy, she likes to go out and have good times. He says she deserves it. I worry not that something bad will happen, they just wander around, and neither of them have a car. I’m worried that they’ll have a really, really good time and never come back.”

  Man, I thought, what an open book.

  He sat in his pajama bottoms with his legs crossed, listening to whatever it was the stranger on the other end of the line was saying. He grabbed a notebook and started jotting things down. I peeked over at the notebook. He’d written, “You are a special person and no one can take your place.”

  “How come you feel so comfortable talking to that woman?” I asked him after he got off the phone.

  “A friend of my mom’s at the hospital set it up. My mom calls there all the time. She makes Johnny and me call there if we’re getting out of line. She thinks all kinds of things are signs that people are going to commit suicide. The first time I was sitting on the balcony railing, the neighbor saw me and told my mom. She thought I was attempting suicide so she made me call. Johnny drank all the beer one night and she said it was a cry for help and made him call. It’s like free therapy.”

  “Is it the same woman every time?”

  “No, but after you talk to her for like ten minutes, it feels as if you’ve known her all your life.”

  “So she’s kind of like your sort of girlfriend?”

  We both giggled at this. Then we rolled on the floor, laughing at the top of our lungs. Then, of course, Felix started to worry again.

  “He probably takes her to that Boom Boom club with the drawings of palm trees o
n the windows.”

  The Boom Boom was a poolroom down the street that people liked to go and drink at. It was like a bar except the lights were always on and there were plastic plants hanging from the ceiling. Kids never went in there because it made them feel sad.

  “Every time I pass by there, they’re playing that song about scooping the girl up. Do you know that song?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

  “He’s going to make her forget about me. He’ll tell her she needs a vacation.”

  “Where’s he going to take her?”

  “He’ll tell her there’s a place where there are real palm trees. He’ll tell her she deserves it.”

  “You can’t drive to palm trees. You have to take a plane and go over water to get to palm trees,” I said.

  “No, you don’t. You can drive to Florida. I think I hate that Jean-Michel.”

  “I got something that will take our troubles away,” I said.

  I went into my room and came back with the mushrooms. Since this was a night for opening up and talking about our feelings, it was a time for drugs. I took out the bag and showed it to Felix.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked.

  “Magic mushrooms.”

  “I’ve always wanted to try those,” he exclaimed. “They sound so cute.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “A friend of mine. I don’t know how to use it, though. Do you eat them raw?”

  “Let’s cook them up!” Felix suggested.

  He grabbed the bag and headed to the kitchen.

  I WAS ALREADY FEELING LIGHT-HEADED and delirious from the space heater being cranked up. I’d rolled the pajama legs right up to my butt. Felix took his pajamas all the way off and was in just his underwear. We got to work making ourselves some spaghetti. We were singing that Polish cook’s song from The Muppet Show. Felix whipped a wooden spoon in the air and almost took out one of my eyes. We mixed up the mushrooms with a jar of spaghetti sauce and served it on the spaghetti. We ate it, happily, and laughed as we awaited our hallucinations, waiting to be anointed cool and troubled people.