Lullabies for Little Criminals

by Heather O'Neill

  Greg was sitting next to the window smoking probably his fiftieth cigarette of the night. The tips of his fingers were so yellow that you would imagine he colored them in with a marker or something. Cigarette burns speckled the front of the black sweater he was wearing under his black leather jacket. He had the word “Hell-raiser” written in ballpoint pen on his hand and a big ring with keys on it hanging on the belt loop of his jeans. I wasn’t sure exactly how that was supposed to be cool.

  Greg wore his black hair so long in the front that you couldn’t see his face. His brother had given him a pair of hand-me-down combat boots that were three sizes too big, but he desperately wanted a pair, so he wore them anyway. When he walked, it seemed as if he was walking on the moon, or stepping over puddles. It got so that he started walking like that even when he wasn’t wearing them. I saw him walking on the moon at the swimming pool in his bare feet once.

  Everybody in the bobo stream used to talk about how good-looking he was. He was considered the intellectual in our group.

  “He’s mysterious. I would sleep with him in a heartbeat if I liked guys,” Zoë had said to me. “He’d be perfect for you because he’s super smart. He’s like a genius, but he still hangs out with us. That’s so cool.”

  He had a motorcycle magazine with a section that had drawings of the devil on it. He always carried it around in his back pocket so he could pull it out and comment on the artistic merits of the drawings.

  “This one is really quite good because of the details on the wings. You see that? This one is very sloppy because the face has really bad proportions. Look at how small his hands are. These were probably done in watercolor and not airbrush. Only real slobs and people who haven’t even been painting very long don’t use airbrush.”

  Zoë thought he was on the straight and narrow and that he was going to grow up to be a lawyer or something, but she just didn’t know anyone who was straight to be able to compare him to. There were many oddball things he did that kids from straight families didn’t do. For one thing, he hung around with this old guy named Bertrand who drove a limousine. Bertrand would pass by his house, pick him up, and just drive him places. They would go grocery shopping together in the limousine or drive over to stare at the river. And he had a huge scab on his arm that he used to pick at with a knife. This really grossed me out. Zoë told me just to not think about it when I was with him. Greg pulled up his sleeve on the arm that didn’t have the scab on it as a conversation starter. He peeled off a Band-Aid to reveal a tattoo of a laughing skull with a top hat on it.

  “I didn’t know when I got it that it was a Hell’s Angels tattoo. If the Hells see me with this tattoo…,” Greg said while staring at me expressionlessly, “they’re going to take a knife and cut it right off.”

  He put the Band-Aid back down. He had to rub it to try and make it stay on, but there didn’t seem to be much glue left. He must have been peeling it up all night to show people how he was hiding it.

  I wasn’t drinking, but everybody else was. I wasn’t in the mood, and I wanted to be able to do my homework later. Zoë parked the car on a dark little street by the river. They were all getting louder the more they drank. Inspired by Greg’s revelation about the Hell’s Angels, they started telling stories of their own.

  “There’s this guy named Pierrot. He was selling laundry detergent instead of cocaine to the Hells. So as a punishment his left hand was chopped off, and then he was rammed into a washing machine.”

  “I heard there was this Hell’s Angel and he used to go to the river fishing every day. So one day, I went up to him and said, like, shit, don’t you know that the fish are so polluted in this river that you can’t eat them. Then he tells me that he only catches big ones so that they can give him blow jobs. He said it was like the best head ever. They suck you off as they die.”

  Everyone started screaming and convulsing with disgust at that last tale. I knew a few Hell’s Angels who fished down at the river because my dad and I used to go down there every Sunday to fish. We mostly only caught tiny little fish that bit kernels of corn if you put them on the end of your hook. There’s no way any of those fish could fit anything bigger than a pencil in their mouths. Some of the guys brought their fishes home to eat. But anyway, the fish were long dead before they would be able to get them home and take them to bed. That Hell’s Angel must have been pulling his leg.

  “Baby, you’re so quiet,” Greg said suddenly.

  “She’s shy. Leave her alone!” Cherie screamed from up front.

  “I didn’t say there was anything wrong with being quiet,” Greg said. “I like it. She’s thoughtful. I like people who think a lot. And then when they talk to you, you feel much more special.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t particularly quiet anyhow; I just didn’t really feel like making an effort to say anything. I had a bad habit of wanting people I didn’t like to like me. Tonight I just didn’t care. Since the car had parked, everyone was depressing me.

  “Are you seeing someone?” Cherie asked.

  “Of course she’s seeing someone!” Greg interjected. “If you’re that cute and you don’t have a boyfriend, it means you’re a real bitch. So personally I think it’s a good thing when I meet a girl and she tells me that she has a boyfriend. It means that she’s tested and true.”

  “She’s dating Xavier,” Zoë said.

  I felt myself go all red when she said that.

  “Who’s Xavier?” Greg asked, turning to me, again without any expression on his face.

  “That kid who rides the bicycle with the lobster heads on the handlebars and wears a lab coat,” Zoë said, her voice dripping with disdain.

  “I’ve seen that kid!” Cherie shrieked. “Oh, my God! He is so weird.”

  “He’s always having garage sales outside his house in the summer,” one of the other boys in the back said.

  “That guy is not your boyfriend!” Cherie bellowed. “I thought he was nine years old. I really thought he was. Isn’t he too young for you?”

  “Baby looks older than she is,” Zoë said.

  “How old are you, Baby?” Greg asked.

  “Thirteen,” I said.

  All of a sudden, without saying where I was going or good-bye or anything like that, I climbed over Greg and out of the car at a red light. I heard Cherie laughing hysterically as I sloshed down the slushy street. Zoë got out of the car and called after me.

  “Fuck you, Baby. Don’t you come crawling back to me. You’re no friend of mine. You’re a stuck-up bitch!”

  “Fuck you back!” I screamed. I didn’t know what the hell was up with me. I thought I was having some sort of personality crisis. I used to love riding around with kids, and now it didn’t do anything for me. That was pretty confusing. I just wanted to be a good kid. I didn’t want to sit drinking beer in a car with a bunch of teenagers who were going to be in grade seven for the next four years, who talked about stuff you would see on the cover of the tabloid newspapers. I wanted to be able to go home like Xavier did at the end of the day.

  I walked down the street, a broken lonely East End street. The air smelled like the river. Night always seemed darker the farther east you went. I realized that in the course of the day I had told everyone to fuck off. The only friend I had left was Xavier.

  I went home, but the front door was locked. I banged on the door, but Jules didn’t answer. I put my ear up against the door for ten minutes before I was satisfied that he wasn’t there. There were two locks on the door: one that I had the key for and one that I didn’t. Sometimes when Jules was mad at me, he locked the second lock. If I didn’t come home by midnight, he locked it. If I was out past midnight, it meant that I was whoring around and I could do it on someone else’s time. He said that if he locked me out, no one could accuse him of having made me a delinquent. It was only ten thirty, and my curfew wasn’t until eleven. I didn’t know what I’d done this time. Just lately, he’d started locking it more and more. Sometimes he locked it i
f he was going out of town and didn’t want the social worker to show up and find me there alone. Whenever he locked me out, I’d go spend the night at Zoë’s. Her mother was always in a daze and let anybody sleep over. Zoë had a big double bed. It was where all the kids went when they were having arguments with their parents or they’d been kicked out. Sometimes I was happy when he locked me out because I liked sleeping at her house.

  Lying next to other kids, sleeping in their T-shirts and underwear, was so comfortable. Everybody’s legs were cozy and warm. If you were having trouble falling asleep, all you had to do was turn your head to the side and talk to the person lying next to you until you drifted off. It was nice to be woken up unintentionally. We all started having the same breathing pattern as we slept. That’s how we were meant to sleep: a bunch of children all jumbled together in a softly breathing heap. I had such nice dreams there some nights that when I woke up I thought I must have borrowed the dream from some other child in the bed. Once I dreamed I was standing on a pier at a lake. The wood under my feet was warm and soggy, and the air was blue and filled with gnats and dragonflies. I had a butterfly net and I was dipping it in the water, trying to catch fish. I’d never been to such a pier. It must have been some other kid’s dream for sure.

  I stood leaning against the door for twenty minutes, kicking myself for having cursed at Zoë. Why had I done that! Everyone in the car was probably going to sleep heavenly over at her house, and here I was, stuck in a stinking hallway. I started banging on the door, hoping that I could kick it in. I thought that I would sleep in the hallway, but the landlord came out in his gold-colored crumpled pajamas and told me that I couldn’t do that, for some stupid reason.

  “Can you get the key and let me in?” I asked him.

  “I don’t have the key for that top lock. If I did, in a week you’d say that I stole your television.”

  8

  “YOU LOOK GOOD TONIGHT!” someone called to me from their car.

  Fooling around with Xavier was so much different from being with tricks. Xavier and I climbed all over each other like we were on the monkey bars. He’d start singing a Led Zeppelin song while we were making out. He’d sing ba dad ba dum while pulling his sweatshirt off, then swing it around his fingers as if he were in a strip show. It was quicker too, and I liked that, how it never seemed long enough. I pretended that my plane was leaving to Russia and I had to kiss him good-bye quickly before the KGB burst in. We were always laughing.

  When I had sex with a trick, everything seemed as if it was happening in slow motion. Each movement seemed more tedious and distasteful than the one before. Each time it seemed to last for three hours or something, even when it was only half an hour. It felt as if my life was passing me right by while I was hanging out with them.

  I had been determined to never see him again, but still the only person I could think of going to right then was Alphonse. So much for my resolution, only a few hours earlier, to be free of him. Unfortunately, he was the most dependable person in my life.

  I walked quickly to his apartment building. The cold was being sneaky and disgusting. It was getting down into my ankles and my neck. I wished it would leave me alone. I decided to run down the street, to keep warmer. I wasn’t sure what reaction I was going to get once I got to Alphonse’s, or how I was going to act toward him. I knew it was going to be bad, but knowing this made me feel as if I was magnetically drawn to his place. I ran up the stairs, almost curious to see what would happen to me now. Our hearts are never ready for these types of confrontations. I started feeling hyper because my own was beating so hard. The sound of my shoes on the steps seemed to make terrible and tremendous noises, as if I were an angel coming up the stairs. I looked down at my feet standing on the black tiles with golden specks. I was struck by the feeling that if I jumped up and down and just didn’t stop, the building would just come apart.

  When he opened the door, I saw right away that Alphonse was positively stoned. He looked as if he had just been drowning himself in the bathtub and had achieved a higher consciousness. As he stood there staring, I started to laugh. I decided that I was the one who was going to do the reacting.

  “Look who it is!” I screamed. I flung my arms around him. “Look who it is, buddy! It’s me.”

  “Baby, chill out,” he said, backing up. “I hate when you get all crazy. What are you doing here, showing up like this? You don’t have much fuckin’ pride, do you?”

  “I need a place to stay.”

  “Get inside, then. Come on. I can’t lie. It’s good to see you again.”

  I followed him into the living room. He walked slowly and at one point stumbled sideways against the wall. The radio was on, so I took off my fur coat and started to do all kinds of modern dance moves. He tried to get out of the room to walk down the hall, but I blocked his way by doing some martial arts stuff. Alphonse fell back onto the living room couch. He sat there looking up at me.

  “We’re going to go through this again?” he asked. “I hate this side of you.”

  Alphonse couldn’t stand when I was excited and crazy. Once I pretended I was an android who had run low on batteries. It took us half an hour to walk three blocks. Another time I pretended that I was speaking Russian. I liked the sound of my accent so much that I kept going on and on even though he begged me not to.

  “Who’s your daddy?” I yelled, slamming my hand down on the shelf. A glass vase fell off and smashed onto the ground.

  “You’re destroying shit, Baby! Look what the fuck you just did!”

  “I’m sorry! I told you I was sorry.”

  “You didn’t say you were sorry. I can’t even think properly.”

  “I’m sorry, but I just wanted to know who’s your daddy.”

  “So how come you need a place to stay?”

  “I’m the one who’s going to be asking the questions tonight, mister. You had better answer my question before I answer any of yours.”

  “What the hell is your question?”

  “I want to know who is your daddy?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Who’s your daddy?”

  “Baby, you’re…”

  “Who’s your daddy!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Who’s your daddy!”

  Alphonse jumped up, grabbed my arm, and started pulling me down the hall. It surprised me how easy it was for him to move me. For a minute, I’d forgotten that Alphonse was literally the size of two of me. He pushed me into an opened closet in the hall and slammed the door shut. I stumbled over the boots and boxes on the floor and fell down.

  “Now count to fucking five hundred and come out when you’re ready to act like a normal human being. Jesus! Let’s both get ourselves collected.”

  As soon as he closed the door and I was left in the dark, I felt extinguished, as though I was a fairy and a child had stopped believing in me. One of the worst things in juvie was that when you had broken a rule, they made you go into “backup.” You had to sit in a tiny white room for up to two days. One boy had been in there for yelling too loudly that someone had stolen his motherfucking Pepsi. I’d gone in there once for threatening to murder a girl named Michelle in her sleep. I tried to explain that it was just an expression, but nonetheless, I had to spend twenty-four hours in there. I’d developed a nervous tic in backup, where I’d put my head down on my shoulder three or four times in a row, and I was still working on kicking it. It came out when I felt anxious. One of the reasons I wanted to stay out of detention was to avoid backup. Now, here I was on the outside, locked up again. The injustice of my lot in life hit me hard all of a sudden.

  “I don’t know what the hell to do,” I whispered to myself. “I don’t even have a home.”

  I figured that I’d come to the realization that Alphonse had wanted me to. I knocked gently on the door, but there was no response. I squeezed my mouth in the crack under the door and begged him to let me out, but he didn’t come near. I started kicking the closet door w
ith my running shoes furiously, but it was futile. I could have banged on the floor to get help, but there was only a pet store downstairs and it was closed. Besides, what help would I get in the end? If the police came and found me in this predicament, I would be punished severely. I’d be in detention until I was fifteen, at the very least. I sat right down on a pair of boots as though I was sitting on a curb waiting for a school bus.

  A social worker told me that the point of backup was that we were supposed to reflect on our situation and how to improve it. But I never thought about my actual life while I was in backup. I would think about anything else. Adults reflect on ugly things and come out of jails more brutal than they went in. A child’s mind is like a bird trapped in an attic, looking for any crack of light to fly out of. Children are given vivid imaginations as defense mechanisms, as they usually don’t have much means for escape. The minute I heard them lock the door, I’d lean against the wall and start daydreaming. Once you started daydreaming, it was like being hypnotized.

  The closet was different than backup because there was no light in there. It was completely dark. I didn’t want to imagine anything because I would confuse it with reality. If I fantasized about owning a pigeon coop, the whole closet might suddenly be filled with pigeons. It seemed entirely possible.

  I tried not to think or imagine anything, to just keep my mind a blank, but the dark started imagining things for me. It started imagining there was a hole underneath my feet. It started imagining there was a man sitting right next to me, looking at me with terrible zombie eyes. I didn’t dare move because I might touch something very scary that the dark had imagined, like the face of a wolf.

  I don’t know how long I’d been in there when Alphonse opened the closet door suddenly. I just sat there with my hands over my face, shielding my eyes from the light. I wished he had warned me or knocked on the door. Jules used to do the same thing, turning on the light in the middle of the night when he had something to say. After a few seconds, I squinted and lowered my hands and took a look at Alphonse. He was wearing a big bulky sweater over some underwear and had a spatula in his hand. He looked really stoned.