To Gain the Whole World

I
A Nice Little Bastard

 His mother did Baudelaire no favors when she named him, but doing favors wasn’t her thing. A drug-abuser, a whore, a poet, and a rebel without a pause, she didn’t have a thing, she had many, and she carried them all out to their illogical extremes. Perhaps, she foresaw that three decades hence he’d run for high office and that having a single name, and an odd one at that, would be a perverse sort of political asset. Or perhaps she never shook the spell of Les Fleurs du Mal.
 At a young age, Baudelaire adjusted to being left alone overnight or even for several days on end. The more his mother ignored him, the more intensely he loved her. Once he started talking and displaying preternatural intelligence, inquisitiveness, and wit, she began to find him amusing. She’d speak to him as if he were an adult, baring her shrunken soul, sharing amusing stories about her customers’ quirks, and extemporizing on her alienation, angst, and ennui.
 “Mommy, why don’t I have a daddy?”
 He’d been asking the same question in different ways for several years, but by the time he reached first grade, she’d tired of deflecting his inquiries. 
 “You do have a daddy. We just don’t know who he is.”
 Little Baudelaire screwed up his face.
 “Why?”
 “What do I tell you about that question?”
 “I ask it too often. It’s tedious and annoying,” he said, in the sing-song tone he used for reciting. “But I want to know.”
 “Okay, you asked for it.” She lit the joint in the ashtray, took a deep hit, and after holding it in for almost a full minute, exhaled. “You know how I tell you it’s good to experience new things? Well, one day I decided it would be cool to be a mom.”
 “Why don’t I have a daddy, grandparents, or cousins, like my friends?”
  “That’s a long story.”
 He cuddled into her on the couch.
 “I love it when you tell me long stories.”
 She smiled. His smile back looked so much like one she’d been practicing in the mirror that she wanted to laugh.
 “You won’t love this one,” she said.
 “Please, Mommy.”
 “Well, let’s see… where to start?” She squinched up her face and stroked her chin, making him giggle—he was an easy audience. “My parents were very strict and very religious and they sent me to an all-girls Hassidic high school, in Brooklyn. Obviously, I got sick of that shit.” 
 “Why is that obvious? What is Assidic? Isn’t shit a bad word?”
 “You want to ask or listen?”
 “Listen, but one day will you tell me about Assidic?”
 “Of course.”
 She picked up the joint, then put it back in the ashtray. He smiled and she shot him a short but intense dirty look, so he’d know her recent relative abstinence was his fault.
 “So, to liven things up, I brought a homeless black man home for Passover,” she said. “That’s a holiday that celebrates freedom from slavery, so it seemed…sort of appropriate. Because he was dirty and smelly, I took a shower with him. Then at the Seder—that’s a family dinner where men and women aren’t even allowed to touch—the guy and I started kissing and feeling each other up. My parents totally lost it and threw us out. The next day, they sat shiva for me. That means they acted as if I were dead, and they never relented, not that I ever asked them to.”
 His upper lip quivered.
 “Will you ever do that to me?”
 “No, of course not.”
 She tickled his tummy just enough to draw a single giggle.
 “But didn’t you give me away once?” His face turned serious, making him look several years older.
 “That was a long time ago, when you were a little baby. You were really boring then, and you had a depressing effect on my business. Probably wasn’t your fault, the market for lactating whores had dried up. But also, your crying sapped my poetic creativity, interfered with my sleep, and screwed up my drug buzz.”
 “I don’t cry much anymore.”
 “Yes, you’re a wonderful little boy. Almost makes me think I’ve discovered a whole new parenting technique. Maybe I should write a book, The Stoned Whore’s Guide to No Sweat Mothering.”
 “I could draw the pictures.”
 She ran her fingers through his hair.
 “I’d thought I had an elegant solution when I traded you for a pre-owned BMW. But the best laid schemes Gang aft agley, An’ leae us nought but grief an pain, For promised joy. That’s Bobby Burns, a poet I’ll read to you sometime. You’ll enjoy his rhythms and his funny Scottish words. Anyway, when you were taken away from me, I found out you were crying more than ever. You didn’t realize you were better off, and the car turned out to be a lemon. So I reversed the trade.”
 His eyes teared up.
 “I told you you wouldn’t like the story.”
 “I do like it.” He crossed his arms and put on his tight-lipped defiant face.
 “I dropped some primo LSD and read Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy with one eye and the Bhagavad-Gita with the other. Struck by the similarities between the Hindu cycle of birth-death-rebirth and capitalism’s creative destruction, I had an epiphany: accepting the responsibility of parenthood would be cool. Having rebelled against every convention, I now had to rebel against rebelling and thus begin the cycle anew.”
 “That’s…good,” he said, even though he hadn’t understood. “It is good, right?”
 “Sure.”
 She again picked up the joint and again was about to put it down. Instead, she took a long slow hit, pleased that rebelling against the tiny tyranny of a six-year-old didn’t make her feel ridiculously childish.
 “Actually, I liked the car very much but I liked you better.”
 “But you didn’t answer my question about why I don’t have a daddy.”
 “Getting there. You want a break, maybe some milk and Cheerios?”
 “I just want to be here with you and listen.”
 She got him some milk in a sippy cup—he had an unfortunate tendency to cry over spilled milk.