Lullabies for Little Criminals

Baby tries to readjust to life with Jules. Being back with him makes her clingier than ever before. She thinks, “You get very religious about the idea of parents in a foster home. They seem as fragile as a glass horse on a shelf” (52). However, since being back, Jules has been acting stranger than ever. He’s still using heroin and is demonstrating strange behaviors, like stealing shoes from the Salvation Army and buying a cheap gun illegally.

Jules gets a tattoo of a swallow on his chest, and he walks around the street with his jacket open and no shirt on to show it off. The cops start questioning him, and they find “a point of heroin in the pocket of his jeans” (56). While they’re frisking him, one of the officers gets stuck in the finger with Jules’s heroin needle, and he gets arrested. Baby runs across the street and gets hit by a car.

Baby thinks it’s “inevitable that he would be arrested” (57), since he’s been using heroin, selling weed, and stealing things. Baby goes to stay with her neighbor, Mary.

Mary has two sons: “The older son, Johnny, was eighteen, so he didn’t have much to do with me. Felix was my age” (60). She and Felix quickly become friends, but Johnny, who is mean-spirited, often picks on her.

Everyone at Baby’s school thinks Johnny is a heartthrob; even though “[he’d] graduated the year before [he] still managed to be the most popular boy in school” (62). Although Johnny is attractive, he is malicious. Baby describes how Johnny treats her much like her father does: “Once Johnny stormed into the living room, where I was reading a book, turned the radio on and snatched me off the couch” (64). He makes Baby dance with him, but he squeezes her too tight and bangs her head against his chin, knocking out her last baby tooth.

Mary takes Baby to visit Jules. Things are awkward at first between the two of them. Jules gives her a homemade gift: “He had decorated a pot by gluing felt circles on it and had planted a tropical plant inside it” (66). She tries to give him a cassette tape of a singer he used to like, but he won’t take it because “[it’ll] remind me too much of old times” (67). Baby and Jules don’t have much to talk about together, although she desperately wants to connect with him. Suddenly, a young man named Oliver sits down next to Jules, and the two begin talking as if Baby isn’t there. When she leaves, she wishes “that I was on drugs too. Oliver was a junkie and had more in common with my dad than I did” (71). 

Baby decides to become a drug addict to connect with her dad. She thinks about how heroin addicts “made me laugh so much. I thought they were the coolest group of humans that ever lived” (72). Her affinity for heroin users is tied into her love for Jules and the fact that junkies are the only people she’s ever been around.

She’s on a mission to get drugs. One day, she’s in the bathroom when Johnny comes in. He tells her that one day she’ll be beautiful, and then “[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” (76). She asks him if he can get her some magic mushrooms, but he says she’s just a kid.

Mary begins dating Jean-Michel, “a tall black guy who smelled like Noxzema” (77). Baby finds out that he’s probably homeless, or at least a beggar, and this makes her feel at home around him. One day, she sees him loitering by a liquor store, and she asks him if he can get her magic mushrooms. She gives him five dollars, and he gets her some mushrooms from a dealer at the park.

One night, Baby and Felix are home alone together. They are both feeling sad, and she brings out the small bag of mushrooms. They don’t know how to eat them, so Felix suggests they cook them in spaghetti sauce to eat them. After ingesting them, nothing seems to happen, so Felix goes to his room. Baby decides to follow him, and as she’s walking it looks like it’s snowing inside. When looking closer, she realizes it’s not snow but instead “thousands of tiny origami cranes that had taken flight” (86). Baby and Felix lie in bed together until the hallucinations stop, and she decides that she doesn’t like the disconnected feeling of drugs. Jules uses drugs to cope with life, but she decides drugs aren’t for her.