Lullabies for Little Criminals

by Heather O'Neill

He was always telling people that he was color-blind because he thought it made him sound original. He also didn’t look too much like a parent. He was boyish and had blue eyes with dirty blond hair that stuck up all over the place. It sometimes had the shape of a hat he’d been wearing earlier. I thought of him as my best friend, as if we were almost the same age.

As I was walking home, I spotted Jules on the street corner. He was craning his neck all over the place, looking around for someone. He started gesticulating in a way that made it seem as if he was having an imaginary argument in his head. He kept putting his hand, palm up, in front of him, as if he was asking the universe,

“Far out!” he yelled. “I told you I was a genius. An undervalued genius.”

Jules and Lester were lounging on the couch, laughing their heads off. I was lying on my belly on the floor, and I’d start laughing whenever they did because their laughs were so contagious. We were having a good time.

Jules and his friends had been calling heroin chocolate milk for years. They did it so they could at least pretend I didn’t know what was going on. I don’t know exactly how I knew, but I just did.

As he shouted out all my favorite things, they seemed so cheap to me. They paled in comparison to my desire to be with him.

I couldn’t believe that anyone else in the world could manage to feel as lonely as I did.

We were broke in a way that only kids can be broke. Our toes were black with dye from wearing boots that weren’t waterproof. We had infected earlobes and green rings around our fingers from cheap jewelry. No one ever even had a chocolate bar. We’d steal containers of cottage cheese and eat them together in the park.

Home was something that you could fit into a suitcase and move in a taxi for ten dollars. Home was wherever Jules and I were together.

Once you smiled on heroin, your smile could last a whole hour.

He assured me that we’d be back together again in a month. I knew that Jules would be gone for more than a month; he was always gone longer than he said he would be. Even when he went out to the store for bread and said he would be back in five minutes, he would be gone for an hour. Linus had warned me at the foster home that when a parent splits on you once, they are guaranteed to do it again.

If you want to get a child to love you, then you should just go and hide in the closet for three or four hours. They get down on their knees and pray for you to return. That child will turn you into God. Lonely children probably wrote the Bible.

I preferred being in the foster home. There, we had all been lost and we all had to wear castoffs. I was the only one who was lost and dispossessed in this house. The contrast was unforgiving.

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 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.

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.

Some people wanted to feel this way, but I didn’t. This separation from feeling was Jules’s remedy to life. But I was going to have to find other things to make me feel good and confident in life. I was just going to have to start being my own person.

His eyes had gotten bluer. They were that shade of intense blue that only crazy people seem to have.

But Jules had somehow knocked off loving me in a certain way that he had when he was a junky. I wished that they had told him at rehab that hanging out with me and dancing and eating sundaes and drinking Coke out of green-and-yellow teacups were all okay. I wish that they had told him that all that was not part of the junk addiction.

But then I saw something even worse. There, lying on the floor, was my rag doll, its arms and legs ripped off. I dropped to my knees and picked her pieces up. I’d never get another one. Jules never thought to buy me pretty things like that. That doll had been like a miracle to me. It had reminded me that I’d been loved by a mother. Now I was a nothing, a real nobody.

She was one of the worst breed of parents going, the ones who are really mean but then don’t even give you the satisfaction of being able to hate them. They just break your heart. They were able to do whatever they pleased and then still have you love them.

She thought of me differently once I’d confessed my affection toward Theo. Maybe there was something wrong with me. I wondered if I was one of those people who were doomed to always love the losers and the ridiculous.

That whole weekend I missed waking up to Jules screaming at the radio. “Play another song, motherfucker,” he would scream at the announcer. “Come on! I can’t stand all the commercials!”

I decided that I was sick to death of being twelve.

she talks to the cat. I get confused as fuck when I’m over there. She liked the stupid name so much that it wasn’t enough to call me Alphonse, she’s got to start naming every animal Alphonse. We used to have a dog named Alphonse too. I was embarrassed to have any

want to go to his house, so we smoked

Now the mess on the table looked as if he’d taken apart a robot looking for its heart. I started to cry. Now our love would always be injured in a way.

Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you’re young enough, you don’t know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your parent was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs

to you when you are very young to need something other that what your parents have to offer to you.

There were a lot of things that I had done that I felt funny about. I had let someone give me a homemade tattoo of a tiny moon on my knee with a bottle of India ink and a needle. I’d screamed my head off, but I’d let them do it. I had worn an undershirt in summer, thinking it was a regular T-shirt. I had lain down on a mattress that had been put in the trash and contemplated the clouds. I had drawn a face on an eraser and had named him Marc and had carried him around. I had fed the stray cat that everybody said had rabies. I’d been bitten by dogs twice. I had collected beer bottles in the park and had harassed the corner store owners to cash them in.

pictures. A lot of kids get the privilege of looking at themselves through their mothers’ eyes. I could only see myself through my own eyes, and sometimes I could barely stand to look.

Lots of times when children draw a person on a blank piece of paper, they don’t draw any background at all, just a person standing there without any context. That was me.

If I sat and dredged up any good memories of myself and Jules, I would feel absolutely horrible afterward. It was like I was rotting inside. Nostalgia could kill you there. So I stopped myself from having those memories of Jules.

You could not make a child with bad memories into a kid with good memories.

Someone would swear they had seen a sparrow, but everyone would have become a liar.

She said that someone is always given a copy of L’avalée des avalés by someone else and that you can’t buy it. It was the story of a young girl who was at once enraptured and furious with the world.

turned to the page on decorated buttons and tried to ponder their beauty instead of my own loneliness, trying to will myself into being a sociopath.

Jules was kind of a fuckup. He had to take care of me when he was fifteen instead of going to school or traveling the world or finding a career. Maybe it was me who dragged him down and not the other way around.

Jules looked at me one morning, shortly after I’d returned, and his face trembled and turned red as tears rolled down it. There was part of me that thought he was faking. He kept on crying and I started to feel deeply crummy. I felt bad for Jules and wanted him to be happy. “It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t worry about it, Dad.”

Having a budget might turn that problem around.” I

didn’t bother explaining that I’d been on the honor roll at my last school. That I had to go to a program for kids who had learning disabilities just made me sad beyond words. When I got sad like that, I was struck dumb. It felt as if I’d never be able to speak. She kept asking me questions, but at this point, I couldn’t say a single word.

them used it as a disguise. He had an empty plastic bag in his hand. They leaned against each other, supporting each other so that they didn’t fall over. One of his friend’s sneakers dangled from the tip of his toes like a slipper. Jules’s mouth was opened halfway, as if he was pronouncing a syllable. His friend’s eyebrows were raised as if he was very interested in a new idea that Jules was putting forth. What could Jules do for me now? 5

I LIKED BEING IN THE GIFTED CLASS because the work was actually challenging and enabled me to get my mind off of life for the afternoon.

She had made being down-and-out into a religion.

He must have thought that I was so mature. He must have thought that I was sad and sweet and vulnerable. But he had chosen wrong. I wasn’t like that at all. There was a part of me that was smart and original and nerdy too.

I wanted to be able to go home like Xavier did at the end of the day.

I never thought I would end up doing heroin. I don’t think I did it because of Jules. I think we both did it for the same reason, though: because we were both fools who were too fragile to be sad, and because no one was prepared to give us a good enough reason not to do it.

In any case, I never thought of heroin as a terrible, frightening thing. I remembered how Jules loved me best when he was stoned. That was still my main idea about junk somehow. If there was an alphabet book for little street kids, on the page where it said H is for heroin, there would be a picture of Jules smiling.

It made me sick to my stomach with guilt to think about Jules. I missed him, but I was too afraid to go and see him. I couldn’t handle the idea of him being angry with me. I couldn’t even imagine how mad he could get at me for something like this. Each day made me feel a little worse because it was another day that I had gone without seeing him. It seemed more and more impossible to ever go home. I wished that he hadn’t laughed the last time I’d seen him. I would think about him laughing, and it would make me want to die. That day, I hadn’t thought about him for a straight eight or nine hours. I could have strangled Aileen.

All street kids wanted babies. It’s a terrible kick. You should never start talking about it because once you started, you wanted that baby so bad you could almost faint. I couldn’t resist, though.