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Baby Bum — A Thesis I don’t tend to be a negative person. Sure I fear death as I fear spiders1: with a profound sense that the edge is near and someone’s tied my shoelaces together.2 But I don’t carry that cynicism on my shoulder. My mother may have called me a Negative Nancy from time to time but who’s to say Nancy didn’t have a damn fine reason to be so negative. Who’s to say her family and beloved dog weren’t all kidnapped and sold as sex slaves in some former Soviet Union warehouse.3 Maybe Nancy’s got a bit more to worry about than a nickname that doesn’t exactly tell the whole story. Perhaps moms across the country should be called Insensitive Irmas. I tend to have an optimistic outlook on the world. I tend to see glasses as half full rather than sewage-treated,4 murky and bottomlessly empty. Sure I won’t ever invest for the future5 because I fear there’ll be no future but that’s just the tied shoelaces speaking. One day I’m going to kick the kid’s ass that keeps tying them together every time I sleep, fly, drive or see bums kissing. Kissing leads to many things. Holding hands leads to many things. In fact, most things lead to many things. It’s inevitable and terrifying and no amount of self-actualization meditation6 can help me get through this. I see lots of kissing and lots of handholding and therefore I see lots of babies—lots.7 Surely I’ve not actually seen a little baby bum but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I can picture the little guy standing at the top of the stairs to the subway at 7th and Hope. He’s fighting for this high traffic spot with a teen that looks sixty and carries around a well-nourished cat. The baby bum is decked out in a tattered, dirt blue suit jacket and reeks of Play-Doh and cabbage. He has little red mittens on his little filthy hands with little bitty holes in the palms. When it’s too hot he lets them hang from the clips on his suit cuffs. The little guy’s baby teeth are nearly gone and the adult teeth that have come in have already been ravaged by cavities. His “$ help a veteran $” is touching and I hand him a dollar. After all, my godfather is a Vietnam vet. I move down the stairs with conviction that he won’t use it to buy meth and cheap vodka. If only he’d stayed in preschool. His jeans fit the trend of his hobo brethren—three sizes too big. And though his toddler Air Jordans8 have no holes, they’re tied with orange twine taken from a construction site sign that had once told him to use the opposite sidewalk. But seeing as the world has handed him a shit hand—not a goddamn Ace or King or any member of the royal court in the bunch9—he walks anywhere he damn well pleases. All thirty-two inches of him will walk right into traffic without a second thought. To hell with your crosswalks and colored lights, he mumbles. He pushes a mini shopping cart in front of him. He took it from the Toys-R-Us. It has a tall plastic flag with Geoffrey the Giraffe10 at the top. He’s tried his best to rip the flag off but so far he’s only succeeded in bending it slightly. It hits trees and signs and light poles if he walks too close. Though each occurrence seems more infuriating than the last, he’s just too damn young to be using a saw.11 His cart is full of empty cans and bottles and old rattles he hasn’t brought himself to throw out. Nostalgia is all I got left. His Binky and formula bottles feed his addiction for pasty vitamins. He keeps a few blankets for cold nights and a couple of old Highlights magazines he found in the garbage at St. Vincent DePaul. Though they’re not circled, he’s found every comb and horn and tennis racket in the searches. He saves the crayons for connect-the-dots.12 Bandana, his stuffed teddy bear,13 sits atop the home on plastic wheels. He faces his master and companion to keep a lookout for any cops or vagrants looking to get the jump on him. Safe so far, Bandy, the little bum says and pushes further out into traffic. The baby bum is a boy in my vision but a girl is equally plausible. However, the repercussions of telling that heartbreaking tale, what with the inevitable prostitution, are too controversial and you’ll have to imagine it for yourself.14 I don’t feel like getting a post card from Dateline. I’m thankful I’ve never seen these baby bums. Though I can picture them, I’m an optimist and don’t actually believe they exist.15 The babies I do see are carried around in extravagant strollers. They wouldn’t have a clue what to do with a shopping cart of twine. And that’s not because the Los Angeles public transit system is strictly for the well-off and with child, but because no matter the income level, every stroller is a rolling luxury automobile. These mini-carriages cost as much as a weekend in Paris. They are financed rather than paid for. Depending on your down payment and APR16 one could be paying off the stroller while paying for the college tuition of the kids who rode in it. Little Mexican grandmothers push around strollers as tall as they are. Tall white women push around the same strollers and every child being carried is the first of many or last of a line. There are the middle children too. But the middle ones never ride. The middle ones always walk.17 There’s never just one. Two or three or five hold fast to the grandmother and mother’s legs or run off and nearly kill themselves by tripping while the trains approach. Their shoelaces don’t seem tied together but perhaps they’ve imagined the baby bum too. Waiting for a train to arrive leads one to believe we’re still a nation of frontiersmen—that the majority of us are farmers’ sons and farmers’ daughters. We take the Red Line from city center, where we get our groceries and entertainment, to our family’s modest potato farm. Babies are born in tubs, and not because of a new-age trend, but because that’s what Doc Hooper18 says you should do. One in every fifth child dies at birth and two of nine die of smallpox or polio, or get kicked in the head by a mule19 before they become teenagers. Babies are made in abundance to make sure there are enough hands to work the fields, milk the cows and mend the garments. The only issue with this logic is, from what I can tell, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority’s rail map, the big color-coded diagram that brings me nowhere near my family, or anybody’s family, farm. Sure it can bring me to some city farm where people pay a premium for a ten by ten square foot plot, where celebrities tie themselves to trees, but there are few mules to fear or leg chopping combines to steer clear of. No one is dying or being crippled. Harvests are novelty-like. Enough, say, for a “dish” at the Cohen’s next potluck. Where’d you get the baby bib lettuce from? Bristol Farms? No, I grew it in my garden. How wonderful.20 I’m rich. I have no kids and therefore I’m rich. Anyone without kids is a gazzillionaire. There are destitute people out there like the little baby bum but he and his community are the exception. The rest of the population without kids is rich—rich beyond our wildest imaginations. Sure I only have seventy dollars in my bank account and I’m hoping the landlady doesn’t cash my rent check before Friday when I get paid but I’m still rich.21 I’m rich because even if she did, it wouldn’t matter. It would only affect me. Not having funds only affects me. It will not affect another human, another child. It will not affect their diet, their wellbeing, their ability to ride in a plush carriage more expensive than several months’ rent or their college savings fund.22 The money I have, as little as it might be, is more than enough and therefore I’m well off. I have no stock or car or real estate but none of that truly matters for rich people like myself. Rich people like myself don’t need anything at all—that is until they have a baby. At which time they become just as poor as the rest of the world. Fearing the death of another, rather than the death of themselves, and wondering every moment of the day, will this paycheck last? As I wait for the subway, looking at the designer decadence of the rolling plastic child suites, I wonder, If only they’d bought a less extravagant stroller. Perhaps they’d be able to put a little more in their kids’ college fund or throw a couple bones to the bum wearing the Air Jordans and wondering how he got there.23 1 Arachnophobia is defined as an inordinate fear of spiders. It’s also an Amblin Entertainment movie staring John Goodman released in 1990 that scared the living shit out of me. I believe my nonchalant attitude towards, if not dislike of, the movie E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, also released by Amblin, is likely based on this commonality. It might also be prudent to mention that I have no inordinate fear of aliens—glowing or otherwise. It might also also be prudent to mention I lost a bet to Mary Sipula, my friend Joe’s mom, while tailgating before a football game, on whether or not the song “Turn On Your Heart Light,” by Neil Diamond was in fact inspired by E.T. and his glowing heart. After questioning many and researching much, it was concluded that Mary was in fact right and as such, I must now name my firstborn child either Mary or, as we decided was its male counterpart, Marty. Which coincidently enough is the name of the main character in Amblin’s hugely popular trilogy, Back to the Future. [back] 2 The crude death rate, the total number of deaths per year, per 1,000 people, for the whole world, is currently about 8.23 according to the current CIA World Factbook. Though how many of them are actually from falling off a cliff or any high-enough-to-get-killed-from height because of shoelaces tied together is, as far as I know, undetermined. [back] 3 It’s prudent to note (part 2), for fear of appraisal or lawsuit, that Negative Nancy is not based, at least not in the classical sense, on any actual person, negative or otherwise. She is simply, by means of her unfortunate name and in this case, heritage, perfect for the part. The fact that she, that is to say “Nancy,” is supposedly from the Soviet Union where names like Yaroslava, Fedosia, and Klavdiya are vogue, should make this point obvious and therefore unnecessary, but one can never be to careful with others’ sensitivities—even if said sensitivities are highly oversensitized. [back] 4 Though scientists have declared effluent water, once treated, is in fact drinkable, I still would rather quit on water all together and drink only Gatorade and Sunkist. [back] 5 In researching who coined the term “invest for the future” I instead discovered the terms: “idiot switching,” “helicopter economics,” and “irrational exuberance.” I shall now pass some of that knowledge on to you. From passionsaving.com: The fair-value P/E10 value is 15. If you lower your stock allocation when the P/E10 value goes above 20 and increase your stock allocation when the P/E10 value goes below 10, you’ll earn greater long-term returns from your stock investments and will attain financial freedom years sooner. Considering this might as well have been written in Yiddish,5a I guess I’m an intelligent person currently switching to an idiot.
6 Which, upon completion, allows you to breathe underwater. [back] 7 “The Eng-lash arh tooo mehny,” said the breathless sissy from Braveheart who wanted to run away like a coward until Wallace got all up on his horse with blue face being like, “run and you shall live, fight and you may die, but many years from now you’ll be all dead in your bed and shit so fuck that because right now you can get all naked and be all like, you can take our lives but you’ll never take our freedom.” And the coward was all like, “well fuck man, if you put it that way.” [back] 8 I used to get annoyed knowing that more bums have owned my favorite shoes of all time and I’ve never had a pair. But there’s consolation in the fact that peeing in toilets, though not as good as in a forest, is better than in front of the Rite-Aid entrance. [back] 9 With the rise in popularity of televised Texas Hold-’Em tournaments, most notably ESPN 2’s twenty-four hour a day broadcast of its World Series of Poker, it’s unlikely the Baby Bum isn’t aware of this comparison. It’s equally unlikely for him not to have considered buying a Michael Graves designed poker set—two sets of card, chips, and fold out green felt table cloth—the last time he was at Target. [back] 10 Is he a gay giraffe or are all giraffes gay? Does having a flag of said gay giraffe make the Baby Bum gay? Or if not entirely gay, more gay? [back] 11 One can’t help but assume the Baby Bum would own some form of metal like saw object since babies both like shiny objects and have baby teeth. However the likelihood of him having an Allen Wrench set to change out the corresponding wood, metal or concrete blade is discernibly low. [back] 12 Theoretically he’ll hate crossword puzzles because they mock his intelligence and presumably, since he’s lucky enough to have never had a six-hour layover in Dallas/Ft. Worth International Airport, doesn’t Sudoku. [back] 13 When purchasing Bandy he probably wanted to get a tiger but chose a bear instead because he didn’t want to feel like he was ripping off Calvin and Hobbes. [back] 14 One must also accept though only in footnote form the inevitability of boys turning pro as well. [back] 15 That is to say, exist the way potato salad exists. [back] 16 Depending on your last name, skin tone, health records and whether or not you regularly watch late night talk shows and a keep tennis ball hanging from the roof of your garage to let you know when to stop, this rate could fluctuate quite a bit. No matter the case, your purchasing power will most likely be dictated by how often you color you hair. [back] 17 In most circumstances the brown woman will not be speaking to the white, even if common carriage is obvious. In even more cases the white woman will be smiling naively. The brown will look exhausted. [back] 18 We assume his name to be Hooper because Mr. Hooper of Sesame Street immediately recalls nostalgic feelings of what scientists commonly refer to as “the good ol’ days.” [back] 19 Though considered lucky in some Andean cultures, in this instance it is not a desired outcome of the childhood–livestock relationship. [back] 20 Documentation of said conversation is available at the Library of Congress under, “We couldn’t possibly have our smug ass faces higher in the clouds nor our bank accounts and mansion reflect our robust sense of self satisfaction more perfectly.” Not surprisingly there are currently over seven hundred thousand submissions claiming this same entry. [back] 21 Please don’t cash the check. Please don’t cash the check. Please don’t cash the check. [back] 22 These don’t actually exist in the real world of: grocery store gallon milk, Kraft Mac and Cheese with cut up hot dogs, Dr. Thunder, and enriched white bread. [back] 23 I fear I didn’t use the term “prudent” enough. [back]
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