Cold War Babies
They say that all babies look like Churchill, but that’s not really true. Some babies look like Churchill, some look like Stalin. There are Khrushchev babies out there, and Kissinger babies. Castro babies, with wispy baby beards, and Nixon babies with premature perpetual five o’clock shadow.
Once when I was out at night in the French Quarter, I saw a Beria baby. Swear to God. She had her fingers wrapped around a little baby-sized toy handgun pointed at her mother, who was carrying her very gently through the crowd. Swear to God.
You were a Churchill baby, I bet. I was a Churchill baby, and so was everyone I know. I’ve seen pictures. It’s a thing I’ve started doing, is I look at baby pictures. Everyone’s baby pictures I’ve seen, they show Churchill babies.
So what happens to the other ones? The babies who look like LBJ, with big ears and wrinkled cheeks, and the babies who look like Brezhnev, with big bushy black baby eyebrows. Where do the babies that look like Chairman Mao end up? I don’t mean Chinese babies. Everyone I know that’s Chinese, they looked like little Chinese versions of Churchill once upon a time.
I used to know a woman who swept the floors at the hospital, and she told me once about the maternity wing. They’ve got two big sections, there: the one that you go into from the front, with signs pointing to it, and painted Disney cartoon characters, and everything. That’s where the Churchill babies go. But there’s another section, that you can’t get to from the front. It’s not marked, and it definitely doesn’t have Disney cartoon characters painted anywhere. The walls in the non-Churchill baby maternity ward are the color of avocados that you left out too long. There’s bad drainage, and when it rains there are puddles that collect in low spots on the floor. The other babies don’t seem to mind it, she said. They never cry, they just look at you.
The week after she told me that, she was hit by a car. Drunk driver.
There aren’t any Cold War children. I mean, there are children that used to be Churchill babies. But not the Stalin babies, not the Mao babies, not the Ho Chi Minh babies. Where do they go?
Do they resent us? Do they resent our apple cheeks and sober scowls? Do they envy us? The way we band together and push them out into the cold? Or is it them that reject us? Churchill was a drunk, wasn’t he?